Inna Shukshina

Sometimes indignant people write to me (usually theoretician psychologists) and say that therapy must be long, hard and cheap. Whereas what I do in coaching is fast, easy and expensive, and this is simply outrageous! My clients’ results are very alarming — how can it be that they feel good! How can it be that I promote myself! I ought to sit quietly and wait for someone to find me on their own 🙂 That is — not to show myself at all. The conclusion: in their opinion therapy must be ineffective. And if it is effective, that is suspicious. My husband asked me to write an article on this topic — I am being obedient, so I am writing :))

I will say honestly that from time to time I myself envy those who have crowds of enthusiastic reviews, who are rich, successful, happy with life, and who at the same time do things I want to argue with. How can it be that he does it wrong and enjoys life — that is unfair! For example, the fashionable topic of developing femininity: personally I am afraid it can lead people away from their own self, and it is simply my duty to save everyone and shield them from danger! 🙂 Right? Or not?

An alarm goes off in people: SOS, someone is raking in money and harming people! everyone must be saved! (and I am fond of fighting against something myself — for example, junk food, low-grade films, useless medicines or wrong ideas).

Then people start digging into how many hours of personal therapy you have had. And do you have such-and-such a licence? And you do this, but that is not allowed! And people are not reassured by the fact that you have a diploma with a stamp on it, and experienced teachers with whom you constantly work through your own problems and whom you can turn to for advice about a client. You can always find something to find fault with. And if no one is finding fault with you, maybe it is just that no one notices you? ) I am already afraid of the words supervision, diploma and personal therapy! In actual fact I have all of these, but if someone says these words, expect trouble ) in the form of criticism.

Let me explain why people ask such questions. They are asked not by real clients, but by those who have big problems in life, who find things difficult and painful and do not know how to help themselves, who want a guarantee of a result, that at least something will help them. No thousands of hours of therapy and no 10 diplomas guarantee you that a person will help you. Who knows how well the person studied, whether they paid bribes for exams, what stayed in their head and what did not? Did they open up in personal therapy, were they able to solve their own problems? How good was their supervisor? Only a private detective could help here! Practitioners with experience, though, understand that the hardest thing is to sort out your own life, and if you have done that, then, armed with a proven method and the support of your teachers, you can easily teach it to others!

There are a great many schools in psychology. How do you choose; who will guarantee that one of the methods is better than another?
I very much like the school for consultants that I graduated from (and continue to study at) in addition to my psychology degree. People come there with dozens of completed trainings and a pile of certificates, experienced psychologists, and yet they discover this approach — the one I work by — and begin to work by exactly this approach.

My dear indignant people, at any institute you will be told that the main instrument of counselling is the personality of the counsellor. Their capacity for empathy does not appear automatically after a diploma. Their effective work on themselves and their growth are not guaranteed after therapy. Only personal contact, clients’ reviews, whether you like the counsellor as a person and like the results their own method gives them, whether they heard you — that will give you the highest possible guarantee of a result. And even then you may simply not be right for each other.

Personally I believe that the best thing a psychologist can do for their clients is to be a successful, happy person themselves, to improve their own life first of all. To be able to cope effectively with their own difficulties, to grow and develop. To put their relationships with those close to them in order: to build a strong family, to raise children, to speak respectfully with their parents. To have their own interests, to live the way they want, to have wise teachers. Some “bugs” will always show up; the whole of life is therapy 🙂 And without this you can go to supervision and therapy all the time and still bring people no benefit at all. What makes us dangerous and harmful to clients is a sense of our own unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life, working only for money, a broken balance between giving and restoring yourself, chasing results at any cost, taking on ourselves alone the responsibility for everything happening in the client’s life, striving to change and improve a person without hearing their requests, and diagnosing everyone around us.

The thing is, life is many-sided, and it is impossible to find something crystal clear and perfectly right. “Every man is a liar.” There are people to whom I am useful, who hear me, who improve their life and become happier. There are those who are not ready for inner change and who need to choose an ineffective but “correct” method for themselves. There are those who think you should not “have” more than 2 children, and that those who do are irresponsible. Are they right? For themselves, yes, but I do not care how right they are, since personally I am glad that I have three children 🙂 Everything we want to argue with, to disagree with, is simply not right for us, while for someone else it is something needed and important.

When we want to save people, we experience a lot of pain. We allow neither them nor ourselves to live and express ourselves 100%. We hold ourselves back all the time, we substitute illusory values for the true ones — love, a person’s freedom of choice, respect, acceptance — considering ourselves the only ones who are right, giving force and meaning only to papers and figures. Figures matter to me when it comes to practice. The more of it, the better! Only by observing your own life every day, improving it, communicating with dozens of clients, writing dozens of articles, spending as much time as possible together with more experienced colleagues and teachers, can you become better and better, grow, develop and be of benefit to people!

Inna Shukshina, inspiring coach, psychologist