The Difference Between a Therapist and a Friend

"Apart from payment, what is the difference between a therapist and a friend?"

This question came up in a conversation recently. In some respects, a therapist feels rather like a paid friend who has some training. Friends listen to your problems, they offer advice, etc. And if you include making lunch or buying a few beers as a sort of payment, then even the money difference seems not to be particularly germane.

Of course there are a few good answers to the question, depending on context. One answer is that there are legal implications to being a therapist that don't really apply to friends. If you tell a friend your troubles and decide to bone afterward, there's no risk of your friend losing his license. Or at least, there shouldn't be.

The answer we settled on, for our purposes, is that you don't need your friends to be right, but you do need your therapist to be right, or at least to be moving generally in the correct direction. They have a responsibility to do so, in fact.

Friends really only need to be there for you. They are supportive and encouraging, hopefully, but sometimes the advice they give is lousy. That's fine, whatever. I've had close friends give me what was actually pretty bad advice, and I am still close friends with those people. They have lots of other good traits to recommend them. Hiding bodies or such.

Unlike a friend, a therapist's job is to help you work through your problems, if not to fix them then at least to manage them. When a therapist accepts your money, they are accepting responsibility for helping you, i.e. providing actual help. They don't need to come up with all the answers or fix every problem, but they need to be able to move toward real solutions.

This distinction does a few things. For some people, it reminds them to take friendly advice with a grain or two of salt. For example, when I sometimes grumble about friction with my family back in the old town, the guy who hasn't spoken with his mother for 10 years sometimes chimes in about how to deal with the situation. And I listen, but I don't exactly give his advice a lot of weight.

The distinction also reminds us that we, as friends, are not therapists. We can try to help our friends figure out their troubles, just like we can try to help them find the answer to legal questions, or identify the noise coming from the engine of their car. But there is, for most of us, a serious gap between our abilities, and the abilities of a trained psychologist, lawyer, or car mechanic. We ignore that gap at our peril, and at the peril of our friends.(1)

Finally, the distinction reminds us that therapists have a very real responsibility. And this may sound harsh, but if you're seeing someone who's not doing their job, see someone else. William Styron, in his book Darkness Visible, talks about seeing someone who had been trained at Yale and who came very highly recommended. Based on those recommendations, and the name "Yale," Styron continued to see him in spite of serious misgivings. The results were less than positive, and Styron is pretty candid about the fact that he'd have been better off firing the guy.

Granted, it can sometimes be hard to tell the difference between moving slowly toward a solution because it's difficult, versus someone who is just not really competent. That's fine. But I know more than one person, including teenaged me, who had a session with a trained professional who was at the very least a bad fit. Don't be afraid to say "This here is a really bad fit. I can find someone else."

My own story may be helpful. As a teen, I was the unpopular kid at school, with all the attendant unhappiness. My parents wanted to help however they could, and decided that maybe having someone professional for me to see would be a good idea.

The first lady I talked with asked me a pile of questions. One of the questions she asked was whether I heard voices. Even then, I had a pretty robust internal dialogue, so I said yes. That's just how I understood the question, at the age of 14 or whatever.

She promptly recommended to my parents that I go on a course of anti-psychotic medications. That would have been very bad. Thankfully my parents knew it, and they demurred, both with respect to the medication and to her continued services.

The second lady I talked with also asked a pile of questions, but I don't recall anything about voices. Afterward, she told my parents basically that there was nothing really wrong with their son. That I was reacting the way healthy kids react to really unhappy environments, which is to be really unhappy. She said she could be an outlet for some of that unhappiness, to give me some tools to help deal better with the situation, and to let my parents know if anything seemed to get really bad all of a sudden. And that approach was a pretty good way to go.

Notes:

(1) I'm leaving aside the question of whether you would want a good friend who is also a trained psychologist, attorney, or car mechanic to do their respective work for you. In order I would say no, no, and it depends how expensive the car is.

Pictures Are My Script

Here I'm talking about using a lot of slides in a presentation as a replacement for a written script. There was a call for resources that could be useful to Odd Salon speakers, and at the same time a bit of frowning because the stuff that's online about giving presentations tends to be either not applicable, or just plain bad. So in the spirit of rolling one's sleeves up and doing it yerself, here's what I've got.

Using a script has the big benefit that it's there, and it's all written up. It doesn't matter how nervous or terrified you are, if you can still read then you can make it to the end of your talk. Using a script also has disadvantages, and there's a bit more about those below, but if you want something other than a script I invite you to try the crutch than I lean on when I present. I call it

Too Many Goddamn Slides

For a 10 minute presentation, I average about 65 slides, or a slide every 9 or 10 seconds, which is a lot. It turns out this is a really good crutch. For my first ever Odd Salon presentation I was still brand new, knew almost nobody, and wanted to make sure I said hello and introduced myself. Here are the first two slides from that presentation:

 

Needed to remember to say this. I was pretty nervous.

Needed to remember to say this, too.

I generally have a new slide for everything that I want to talk about. For example, at the TREASURE talk I said that the Empress Sisi had three real loves: horseback riding, travel, and beautiful attire. I talked about each one just a little bit, and each of them had their own slide, plus a slide with the horse saying "Aww HELL yeah" for comedy. The pictures were my script.

Sisi's three loves, plus one joke, is four things to talk about briefly, so four slides.

As another example from the same talk, prior to his big heist Gerald Blanchard (1) took pictures of the motion detectors in the room with the Sisi Star, (2) took pictures of the sign that said "No Pictures Please," (3) used his keys to loosen the screws on the display case, and (4) cracked open the window leading to the outside. There is a slide for each of these, and there is basically no way that I can forget to mention them, because they are right there. Again, the pictures are the script.

I think I like the 'keys & window' slides better than the 'detector & no pictures please' slides.

I do use text on slides pretty regularly, for a couple of things. The first is names. Even names that I know, like George Washington and King George III, go on the slide so that I don't forget. Sometimes when I'm nervous I just forget names, and this way that's never a problem. Safety third and all that.

If I did not label them, there is a real chance I would forget these names mid-presentation.

The other thing I tend to use text for is lists, particularly when I'm not going to talk about each item and so it's not worth having a new slide for each one. Here is Aristotle (with name) and a list of topics that he wrote about. If I was actually going to talk about each one, then each would get its own slide. It is also possible to tuck these kinds of lists into the Presenter's Notes bit of the presentation, which are visible to the presenter but not the audience. I admit I do not use those, though maybe I should.

Also Harvey, there in the upper right.

Using lots of pictures as a script has a number of advantages. When Keynote is in presenter mode, you can see not only your current slide but also the slide that's going to come next. You know at a glance not only where you are, but also where you are going. Pictures are very good memory triggers, and the bit about a picture being worth 1,000 words isn't all wrong, here.

Pictures-as-script can also mitigate some of the things that cause nerves, like having to relocate one's place in a written text. Having an actual script is nice when you're nervous, but losing your place and then trying to find it again while you're nervous can be its own special kind of torture.

When I get sidetracked, which always happens, I just look at the computer screen to remember where I was. And when I get sidetracked, the audience gets sidetracked with me. In fact, they're often the ones responsible. When the pictures are the script, it's easier for us all to get back to the same spot. We're all using the same point of reference.

Even if you've never seen this presentation before, you can probably guess what text is about to go under the picture to the right.

The total number of slides will vary, and some people who use pictures as their script do really well with fewer than 6 or 7 slides per minute, but this works for me. Also note this is for a dry run, sans audience. With audience obviously the talk gets longer, but that happens whether you're using a whole lot of slides or not. And you rehearse this the same way you'd rehearse if you had a written script, except instead of reading from the script you hit the forward arrow, basically.

Anyway, I hope you'll excuse me doing a bit of a sell job, and this isn't all to say that anybody can't or shouldn't present from a script. Reading from a script is familiar, and sometimes that familiarity is just the thing. But if you're looking to make the jump, or just wanted a kind of peek under the hood, then I hope this helps.

Cheers,

Arthur.