Therapy the new religion

Heading down the professional therapy highway invariably means discarding the habit of confiding in family or a good friend — something Lauren was prepared to do to attain unbiased, “more valuable” relationship advice.

Fortunately, by taking the new route, she discovered her “possessive nature” and other insecurities that were driving away her boyfriend.

Yet Lauren’s increasing self-awareness during each therapy session was paralleled by an intensifying dependence on her psychologist — the man with the roadmap to her “happiness”.

“He’s my God,” the 32-year-old says of her psychologist. “And you turn to God when you’re desperate. You turn to him because you believe he has all the answers for you.”

Surely Freud can be held partly accountable for such inflated views about therapists. After all, his pioneering work in psychotherapy in the early 1900s purported to offer most — if not all — the answers to the mysteries of human behaviour. But it’s unfortunate he didn’t live to witness psychotherapy’s transformation into a 21st century “religion”.

Those recognising psychotherapy’s extraordinary spiritual status include Sydney-based psychoanalyst, Neville Symington. His recently published book, The Blind Man Sees, explores similarities between religion and psychoanalysis by “drawing examples” from Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, according to his website.

Religion and psychoanalysis “open people to compassion”, says Symington, by helping them transcend the limitations of “self-centredness” — the origin of various mental illnesses.

“Compassion is (fundamental) in all the great religions,” he says. “And in psychoanalysis, if you can get . . . someone (to) start communicating in a healthy (compassionate) way, then their mental disorders begin to dissolve.”

Admittedly, such disorders are keeping therapists in a profession that yields, on average, $140 per 55-minute emotional tune-up.

There are more than 40 different therapy “traditions” spawning hundreds of specialties that address anything from marriage and weight loss issues, to multiple-personality disorders and pathological gambling, says Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia (PACFA) president Ron Perry.

Unsurprisingly, the past two decades have seen the number of registered psychologists in Victoria multiply more than threefold to 4793, according to the Psychologists Registration Board of Victoria. However, psychologists merely represent a fraction of the Australian therapy industry, which includes an unknown number of psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, counsellors, and social workers.

According to the PACFA and the Australian Psychological Society, there are no solid figures on the annual financials of this multi-million dollar industry. But Perry notes people’s growing preparedness to seek professional guidance.

“People are frequently seeking counselling or therapy in crises, much more than they used to,” he says.

Blame this therapy rush on the ’60s for transforming society’s “mental models”, says associate professor David Tacey from La Trobe’s University’s school of critical inquiry. As individualisation and other revolutions of that era encouraged “individual searching”, therapy attendance became an attractive option — one that now supersedes the idea of turning to family and friends for “direction and guidance”.

“Australia used to be a stable society up until the 1960s,” Tacey says. “And a stable society is one in which most citizens understand who they are, what they’re about, and where they’re going in life.

“But after the ’60s, we had enormous social disruption (and) a series of social revolutions . . . which have totally turned upside down the stability of society. And so the point of a therapist to many people is to try and recover a sense of stability.”

Don Burnard, a Coburg-based clinical psychologist with more than 25 years’ experience in relationships and marriage counselling, agrees. He says the charge to therapy reflects society’s “greater” expectations. “It also reflects that people want more out of life . . . (and) are under increasing stress in their day to day living.”

In a way, this personal therapy boom is reflective of what has become a norm in Europe and North America since the 1930s, says Tacey. “So, yes, the movement to therapy is a revolution for Australia, but we’re more than 50 years behind the times,” he says.

Is therapy a personal development journey to greater self-awareness, or a scientific religion with its own gospel and secular priests indicating directions to a more meaningful existence?

Is it more focused towards resolving our dilemmas or helping us accept them? And in what way can emotionally vulnerable clients be exploited during a therapeutic intervention?

Therapy is neither a religion nor a guiding light to happiness, says Perry.

“Therapy doesn’t provide the guiding lights in life, it provides the opportunity to search them out a little (by helping) people rediscover their own strengths and solve their own problems,” he says.

According to an American study entitled Current findings regarding the effectiveness of counselling: Implications for practice — published in the Journal of Counselling and Development in 1996 — people who undergo therapy can achieve positive results, yet there is “no reason to believe that counselling will safeguard a person forever from psychological disturbances”.

People suffering from “entrenched” mental illnesses such as schizophrenia must learn to “adapt” with them as they are difficult, if not impossible, to overcome, says Melbourne workplace psychologist Dr Peter Cotton.

“However, there are some problems that may, for all practical purposes, be cured, such as anxiety disorders, depressive disorders and so on,” he says.

Cotton also says that many grief and trauma therapists are abusing their profession for financial gain by “creating” rather than curing people’s problems. People independently and “effectively” coping with a traumatic experience, or the loss of a loved one, are being told they’re living in denial, he says.

“There’s a whole grief and trauma industry . . . suggesting that if you don’t feel this grief after an event, then something is wrong, you’re suppressing it,” he says. “But we now know that for a lot of people that (advice) is completely wrong and it can actually make them a lot worse.”

Such therapeutic misconduct is inevitable in the therapy industry as there is no legislation preventing untrained people, or even “the local butcher boy”, from offering advice at a price, says the president of the Australian Association of Group Psychotherapists, Christine Hill. Unlike psychiatrists and psychologists who must fulfil training requirements and become registered before going into business.

Client exploitation is largely determined by a therapist’s ethical leaning.

It’s the therapist’s responsibility to discontinue therapy when they judge that the “client is no longer gaining benefit”, says psychology lecturer Dr Janette Simmonds from Monash University.

Exploitation eventuates when therapists become greedy, or clients become too reliant, says Hill. “You get some clients who become very dependent on you,” she says.

“Sometimes it gets to the stage where they want to invade your boundaries (and) ring you outside of therapy session . . . it can happen and does happen regularly in therapeutic relationships.”