On life experts

Humanity's second-oldest profession

Life is hard. It involves suffering, loss, failure, adversity and death, which in turn often inspire anxiety, sadness, insecurity and feelings of helplessness. Hence we turn to others for advice - on physical health, but also, even more, on our emotional health and our general meaning and direction in life.  

Usually we turn to friends and family, but sometimes we turn to professional ‘life experts’. Throughout human history there has been a parade of different sorts of life expert - shamans, priests, philosophers, doctors, therapists, psychiatrists, and now wellness influencers.

Why are people so keen to be life experts?

Often, like me, they have been through a mental health crisis, found some healing, and now want to help others. This can mean that ‘life experts’ are sometimes a little cracked (or ‘wounded healers’ if you prefer) and they can be prone to saviour complexes.

People are also drawn to the life expert role because of power. It’s deeply gratifying if someone turns to you for advice on their emotions, meaning and direction in life. It gives the life expert tremendous power to steer a person in a particular direction.

But that power also means you could seriously harm someone either consciously and intentionally, or unconsciously and unintentionally.  You could offer them bad advice. Or you could end up serving your own needs rather than theirs.

When someone says ‘tell me what to do’, it is very tempting to say ‘what you really need to do is keep giving me money’.  Or worse: ‘Go to bed with me.’

For all the problems with asking strangers for life advice, humans will keep doing it. We need life advice, even if almost all life advice is not supported by firm scientific evidence.

If we’re in the business of selling life advice, we can try very hard not to become intoxicated with our authority.  We can remember that no one knows much for sure, and ask ourselves ‘am I sometimes causing harm?’

For all the charisma and mystique of ‘life experts’, I would suggest almost all good life advice can be boiled down to four basic, obvious points.

1)        You are not your thoughts and emotions. You can observe them and change them, and this can change your life.

This is the useful idea at the heart of Stoicism, Buddhism, New Thought, the Law of Attraction, Landmark Forum, Scientology and 99% of self-help.

2)        ‘That sounds really tough, I feel for you. You’re not alone. You’re not a bad person. Keep going.’

99% of therapy can be boiled down to this sympathetic sentiment. It is remarkably therapeutic to hear it, and can ease the pain of isolation, shame, self-criticism and despair.

3)        Things change.

Most people recover from dips in their life simply because of time. Time is, as they say, the great healer. Everything changes. People suffer because they make the ‘fortune teller’s error’ - they think it will always be this bad, but nothing lasts forever.

4)        The placebo effect

Humans sometimes recover from dips in their life because they go through some experience which makes them feel they have turned a page and are somehow reborn. This experience could be through prayer or hypnosis or psychedelics or a pilgrimage or a magician banging a drum and saying ‘abracadabra’ over you. This is the famous ‘placebo effect’ - a poor name for something that is actually quite mysterious and wonderful, ie the innate healing power in our mind.

Now, for almost all wellness techniques, there is a proportion (maybe 10%) who will be miraculously helped, a proportion (maybe 10%) who will be harmed, and a large majority who will be not much helped or harmed.

Some interventions clearly harm more than they heal (like lobotomies), some probably heal more than they harm (like going for walks in nature). But just about everything harms some people – meditation, cold baths, SSRIs, psychedelics, talking therapy, Christianity…

Psychotherapists became the new life experts during the last century. Their authority partly rested on the fact therapy appeared scientific, although it generally wasn’t.  

It’s only in the last few decades that therapists have started to try and gather proper evidence for their methods. And it’s only in the last ten years or so that psychotherapy started measuring harms and adverse effects.

That’s partly thanks to the internet, which has shifted the power of clients relative to therapists, and helped clients crowd-share their stories of ‘bad therapy’. There’s a hair-raising page of such stories on Reddit. Here are some examples:

• I went to an appointment and the door was locked. I waited 15 minutes and called him. No response. He texted me back a few minutes later and said he had the flu and was in bed and sorry he didn’t call to cancel. I went to the grocery store instead. I saw him shopping. He ducked when he saw me. I never went back to him and he never called to ask why.

• I was 13. The therapist was an older woman who, upon first meeting me, insisted to my mother that I was on drugs (I wasn't) and that "clearly" my father and/or brother were molesting me. My father and brother have never, ever touched me inappropriately. This was one sick bi**h who needed help herself.

• We sat there in silence for a few moments and then he said, “I’ve been doing coffee enemas”. Dude what. That was the last time I saw him.

• The one I went to after my suicide attempt at 16 had some not-so-compassionate opinions. My very first session, one thing I told her was that I was bullied a lot at school. Her response was, "well, suicide attempts are usually done in order to manipulate others. So since you were capable of that, did you ever consider maybe you were the bully?" I never spoke to her again.

As you have no doubt guessed, I am suspicious of ‘life experts’, but still, we will always look to them for advice. And they can genuinely help us. But most of that will come down to one of the four points listed above, especially the placebo response.

So many things are placebo-triggers and that’s fine, humans need rituals, but we should try to remember the healing is in our minds, it’s not the shaman, not the church, not the life-expert, and (sometimes) it’s not the drug either. It’s your mind, and that ‘inner healer’ doesn’t cost a thing, doesn’t need FDA approval, and doesn’t require you to surrender to some rapey shaman.

After the paywall, a big feature on psychedelics in Oprah Daily, a new study on Trans Cranial Stimulation and hypnosis, ketamine use triples in 18-25-year-olds in the UK, and the FT and WaPo raise doubts about Lykos’ FDA application.