"Is it wise to present advice in the form of assessments and recommendations for therapy in a way that confidently and tacitly regards them as true and correct?" Simply put, I think of two models of therapy. One says that the therapist takes the role of a guide, and the best they can do is to lead people to their own answers, because they themselves have the best information about what is going on. The other says that the therapist takes a role akin to a doctor, and needs to provide information about the nature and course of the problem that the client is unaware of or unwilling to consider or accept. Too much of the first leads to passive therapy of the type that goes on for years without accomplishing anything that an ethical person would feel comfortable charging for. Too much of the second leads to arrogance and oversimplification in the face of complex situations. A middle road is to be judicious with advice, but provide real and detailed information when it is available, and let clients make their own decisions after becoming better informed. Consider as a specific example Gottman's work with couples, where he would use physiological measures and close observation of nonverbal responses to help inform couples about their relationship. This could inform them at a level that neither they nor the therapist could pick up through direct observation or inference without exceptional intuition and experience, and perhaps not reliably even then. Counselling needn't mean ignoring what we know of behavioral science, and neither need it mean tacitly and confidently assuming that we have a correct prognosis upon which specific advice a la "Dear Abby" can be given. _If_ we can reasonably predict that a woman's physical and emotional health is being destroyed by the demands of childbearing, _and_ _if_ we can determine that she feels under unremitting pressure to bear children, it isn't stepping over the bounds of common sense and ethical behavior to present to the couple the likely scenario of the future. One where she will feel increasingly alone and desperate and may consider measures that we would all like to prevent but which always amaze us for some reason when we read about them. If therapists aren't capable of even this degree of extrapolation and aren't willing to present contingencies of this sort to their clients to ponder, their usefulness seems very limited to me.
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