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psychology Dr. Michael Hurd on Effective Therapy Part I - Interview by Joseph Kellard [ObjectiveScience.com] Dr. Michael Hurd is a psychologist in private practice in Chevy Chase, MD. He offers in-person therapy, phone consultation, and e-mail consultation. Dr. Hurd is the author of "Effective Therapy" (New York: Dunhill, 1997). He also publishes "The Living Resources Newsletter," which covers psychology, education, and politics. This interview was conducted by Joseph Kellard, a freelance writer living in New York. Objective Science:What primarily inspired you to write your book "Effective Therapy," and how did it evolve? Dr. Hurd: I was frustrated by the lack of coherent methods in the field of psychotherapy. I kept hearing complaints from new clients that their prior therapists either did not give them any feedback, or that they tried to force them into a particular theoretical mold (usually the Freudian idea that they were forever trapped in childhood). If *I* didn't have a clue what most therapists meant by helping clients "work through" vaguely defined issues for indeterminate periods of time, then how could the layman be expected to understand? I saw that the field of therapy desperately needed some objective principles and standards. Both for myself and for my clients, I wanted to "start from scratch" and figure out exactly what therapy is and discover what are the basic principles every good therapist should follow. I wanted to answer these questions: "What is therapy?" "Why should someone want to participate in therapy?" and: "How can an individual know if his therapy is working or not?" I had to answer these questions for myself if I were to enjoy being a therapist and experience a sense that I knew what I was doing. The available literature on the subject simply did not satisfy me. Nor had years of graduate school. Objective Science: In your book you write: "Contrary to popular impressions, good therapists do not give their clients good advice." What then does a good therapist fundamentally do for his clients? Dr. Hurd: Cite the rest of this passage for the answer: "Good therapists help their clients learn how to form their own opinions and then act on them. Good therapists communicate the following message implicitly, through their actions and statements: 'Maybe you should do such-and-such *because*...' Advice-giving therapists, however, operate under a very different implicit framework: 'Do such-and-such because I say so. Trust me. It's good for you.'" Fundamentally, good therapists want to teach their clients to be individualists. They want their clients to develop more confidence in their abilities to make judgments about objective reality and acting in their own best interests. A good therapist seeks to teach you proper principles for making your own decisions, rather than trying to make these decisions for you. For example, if you ask your therapist, "Should I leave my husband?" you are surrendering your responsibility about making judgments in your own life to another person. No good therapist wants to take this responsibility away from you. The therapist's job is to help you identify the correct principles for romantic happiness so that you can decide for yourself if you have a realistic chance of being happy in your marriage. Objective Science:You emphasize that a distinctive feature of a psychologically healthy individual is their ability to introspectively distinguish between feelings and facts -- that is, that feelings are not necessarily facts. Can you elaborate on this by using the examples of a person who fundamentally always needs to be "right" as compared to a person who is fundamentally committed to adhering to reality's facts? Dr. Hurd: Psychologically, there's a huge difference between a need to be "right" versus a need to know reality. The person who needs to be "right" is primarily concerned with his relationship to other people. The question, "What do you think of me?" summarizes the essence of his personality. If other people see him as knowledgeable and competent, then he feels better about himself. If others think poorly of him, he thinks poorly of himself. The person who wants to know and understand the facts of reality, as opposed to being "right," is primarily concerned with being competent, happy, and efficacious -- not for the sake of others but for his *own* sake. For an example, think of the difference between an Olympic athlete and a politician who makes indiscriminate promises in order to get elected. The athlete is concerned solely with striving for excellence, objectively defined, and becoming better and better at what he does. If you watch him at work, it's clear that the opinions of others do not concern him (or at least are pushed to the background). His primary focus is on doing what he does at the highest possible level of performance. The indiscriminate politician, on the other hand, is desperately dependent on other people to validate the worth of his efforts. First of all, he can't fund his pet projects without tax money, which means other people's money (taken forcibly from them). Secondly, it usually matters less to him that his pet projects actually succeed at their intended goals than it does that large numbers of voters like the projects. He shuns objective standards, and in the end he's most concerned about leaving the perception he's doing something worthwhile, even if the perception is out of tune with reality. "Do the voters like me?" is his driving motive, not "Am I making a good product?" Whether one's primary concern is with reality or the approval of others leads to fundamentally different psychological, emotional states. The extent to which one is concerned with knowing reality is the extent to which one will feel calm, benevolent, and thoughtful. He will be strong but not defensive; confident but not pretentious. The extent to which one is concerned with looking good and looking "right" is the extent to which one will feel defensive, guarded, and even hostile. He is a weak man continuously trying to look strong. He will raise his voice, emotionally intimidate people, or even resort to physical force. Since he does not have reality on his side -- or, more accurately, does not *know* if he has reality on his side -- then he will never feel the confidence a reality- oriented person will feel. Objective Science:Since your book strongly emphasizes the need for introspection, with you providing exercises on how people can properly introspect to make distinctions between feelings and facts, is there then a method by which an individual can make automatic *the decision* to introspect before acting on their unexamined feelings? Dr. Hurd: Yes. The way to make this decision automatic is simply to practice the habit of introspection over and over again. Like any other mental or behavioral habit, you will become more conscious of the need to do it once you do it regularly and consistently. After brushing your teeth every day for years and years, you're not even conscious about it any longer. The perceived need to brush your teeth arises instantaneously when you wake up in the morning. The same principle applies to introspection. If you develop the habit of asking yourself what you feel, why you feel it, and what the facts are, then you will instantaneously see the need to do so each time a difficult -- or even moderately difficult -- situation or emotional conflict arises. Objective Science:You hold that since our feelings are based on our fundamental philosophic premises, a rational philosophy is therefore indispensable to a healthy psychology. What are among the more dominant, corrupt philosophical premises that lead people to troubled psychologies, and what premises need to replace them? Dr. Hurd: The worst philosophy today is metaphysical relativism, which I also refer to as "subjectivism." Subjectivism is the idea that there are no objective facts, that reality is fundamentally different for different people, and consequently that emotions (and emotions alone) can be a sufficient guide for knowing the world around you and coping with it. The premises of subjectivism are to be found in today's educational system and throughout our cultural institutions: universities, courts, government and increasingly even business and science. We're not supposed to judge, we're told -- to even attempt to do so is "judgmental" and therefore bad. (Somehow, it's OK to make the judgment that all judgments are bad!) We're not supposed to let children have their feelings hurt, even if it's a necessary part of reality (such as losing a ball game or failing a math test). You can be sued simply for inflicting "emotional pain" on somebody. We're supposed to pretend that street talk or broken English is no less valid a language than any other. All of these trends are made possible by the idea that there really is no objective reality in the first place. If there is no objective reality, then all we have are our feelings and consequently everyone's feelings must rule those around them. The methods in my book stand in philosophical opposition to subjectivism. I encourage people to examine their feelings and *also* determine whether those feelings correspond to objective reality. I tell people that they must not merely feel -- they also have to think. Objective Science: So, in relation to your first answer of this interview, what would you tell the subjective therapist who says that there are no "basic principles" to therapy and that principles which are basic for you to follow may not be basic for others? Dr. Hurd: I would respond that to argue, on principle, that there are no principles is itself a contradiction. You can't have your principles and eat them too. You can't insist on the principle that there are no principles. You can't assert that you're absolutely certain that certainty is impossible. When a person goes to a therapist, one of three things will happen: his life will improve, his life will become worse, or nothing will change. We have to look at what's working (or not working) in therapy, and why. Generalized principles, grounded in facts, help us do this. Even if a therapist claims he's not operating on any principles, you can better believe he's relying on some, implicitly, whether he knows it or not. Most likely, in such cases, he's operating on some variation of the Freudian view, since the Freudian view (or at least a watered down version of it) is still the dominant influence on therapists today. Psychologists also have to rely upon a theory of human nature and human psychology to determine what a therapy client needs. If you view man as basically an instinctual beast waiting to explode at any moment, as Freudians do, then the client will need some kind of prolonged attachment to a therapist to help him through his malevolent helplessness. If you view man as a thinking, conceptual animal with free will and capable of improving his life, then you will take a more solution-focused, cognitive approach as I argue for in my book. Objective Science:You note that when you teach your clients how to introspect so they will distinguish between feelings and facts, they frequently accuse you of teaching them how to rationalize, i.e., evade facts. What distinction(s) do these people evade (or are unaware of) most when they equate rational introspection with rationalization. Dr. Hurd: Rationalization means that you don't start your reasoning with facts. Instead, you start with a feeling or some idea taken purely on faith -- and you reason from there. For example, a religious figure claims that abortion is wrong. Imagine that you have faith that this religious figure "speaks" directly to God. So you parrot the arguments you hear the religious figure espouse -- that abortion is killing an innocent child, for example -- without any attempt to look into the facts and identify possible errors in this argument. Another example is of the employee who steals from his boss. "He makes plenty of money," the employee rationalizes. "He won't find out that I stole it, because he's got so much he won't even miss it. I need this extra money to help my child through college." The rationalizer is using "reason" to justify his feeling. But he's ignoring the fact that his feeling wipes out the principle of property rights, including his own property rights to the possessions that he purchased with legitimate earnings. Anyone who claims that rationalization and reason are basically the same thing fails to see that reasoning from facts is different from reasoning from faith or feelings. In my work, I have learned that this is a widespread error made by people irrespective of educational background or economic standing. What distinguishes a truly rational person from a less rational individual is not that he has no feelings -- but rather, that he's in the habit of asking himself, "What facts support or fail to support these feelings? On what premises are my feelings based? Do the premises make sense? Are they consistent with reality?" Objective Science:How then does a person who is largely influenced by his unexamined feelings come to discover what the facts of reality actually are, so that he may clearly distinguish between feelings and reality? Dr. Hurd: By first grasping, and accepting, the premise that objective reality exists and that all conclusions should come from facts. Next, he works on thinking about this premise and applying it every single day of his life. If a man becomes angry with his wife, for example, he will not simply feel the anger and tell her about it or act on it. He will first ask himself, "What facts, if any, support my anger? What facts, if any, contradict, it?" He gets in touch with his feelings -- but he also gets in touch with the facts of reality and learns not to jump to conclusions or make other errors in thinking. Sometimes, of course, he will discover that his feelings are absolutely and objectively correct. But often he will find errors in them. Until an individual accepts that not all feelings are necessarily objective facts, he cannot become truly mentally healthy. Once he accepts this premise, then he can begin working on the mistaken thinking patterns and mistaken, self-defeating behaviors, which are making his life more difficult than it has to be. This may seem like common sense, but common sense does not always happen very easily on the emotional level. And common sense is the last thing, quite frankly, that most traditional psychotherapies will offer you. As a client of mine recently told me, "When I left sessions with other therapists, I was always angry, upset, and stirred up. When I leave sessions with you, I have feelings but I also have a sense of perspective." This client spent years working with traditional therapists who taught the importance of "getting in touch with your feelings" but little else. Good therapy teaches you not just how to feel, but also how to think. Edited by www.ObjectiveScience.com Copyright Joseph Kellard/Objective Science. All rights reserved. Permission granted to link to this article only; but, permission is not granted to republish it. |
