why your therapist shouldn t give you advice

Why your therapist shouldn't give you advice

There are countless questions therapists get asked every day: "Is this the right relationship for me?", "What should my college major be?", "Should I take this promotion at work?" What you are likely to hear in response is some iteration of the question, "What do you think you should do?"

Here are five common reasons why therapists don't give advice, and even why they shouldn't give advice.

It can reduce the client's autonomy

Why are you in therapy? What happens in therapy should help facilitate a process by which you are working through challenges and moving towards living your life through your values. When someone asks a therapist's advice, the therapist is increasing the client's reliance on them as opposed to facilitating their own agency to engage their choices. It can serve to remove their sense of autonomy and independence in navigating their lives. If we conceptualize therapy as being a process through which the client is creating an "internal therapist", the little voice in their mind that coaches them through different struggles or challenges, the therapy should focus on increasing the client's engagement with this process, not stunt it.

It can interfere with the therapeutic process

Giving advice might interfere with the therapeutic process by feeding into the very thing that is the cause for their distress. If due to depression, anxiety, OCD, or some other source of pain, an individual is having difficulty with making decisions, their asking advice is effectively a strategy to sidestep their indecisiveness. Experiential avoidance, or the efforts to avoid internal distress, which is seen as a central etiological factor in the development and maintenance of psychic distress, can actually be reinforced by a therapist giving advice to a client.

You and your therapist are not the same people

When a client asks her therapist what she should do in a given situation, what she is, in effect, asking is, "What would you do in this situation?" The problem with this is that you and your therapist are not the same people. Your therapist has different life experiences, thoughts, emotions, temperament, personality traits, etc. Even if you share many lived experiences, even if the therapist has been in this situation before, the therapist and client are still different people. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what the therapist would do in this situation, it matters what you would do in this situation.

It's not the therapist's decision to make, and they don't have to deal with the consequences

If a therapist encourages a client to take a riskier job and this does not pan out well, the therapist is not the one who bears the consequence of that decision. The impact of that choice is felt exclusively by the person who makes the choice. While a therapist can certainly explore the impact of a decision, identify the values involved, and examine the associated thoughts or feelings, unless the therapist will bear the consequences of the decision as well, advice giving should not be a part of the equation.

Advice giving can activate psychological reactance

Psychological reactance is a process that occurs when an individual feels their choices are being limited or removed. When someone feels like they are being "told what to do", psychological reactance can result in a stronger feeling about the alternative. If a therapist gives advice to a client, it might actually result in the client clinging, even tighter, to the alternative, perhaps even pushing them towards a decision they might not want to make.

Therapy can be a valuable resource to explore the dreams, goals, and values an individual may have. A therapist can play an important role in facilitating the open and nonjudgmental exploration that can allow a client to increase their sense of agency and autonomy to live their lives in a manner most consistent with how they'd envision it. Advice giving, while seemingly helpful and direct, may actually impede an individual's growth and development process in this journey.

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