How to Make Psychological Advice Work for You
Psychological advice abounds in the media, blogs, books, magazines and of course from friends and family. Much of this is contradictory. Some advice misleadingly claims scientific validity. Some are genuinely beneficial for emotional growth and well-being.
More influential than any truth contained in psychological advice, psychologists call it Focused Illusion. What we focus on becomes more important than what we don’t focus on, regardless of the inherent importance. The focus illusion creates a compromise in psychological counseling. Although you could win something following the advice, you might as well lose something.
For example, it becomes more important to focus on your partner leaving crumbs on the counter than on the value and meaning your partner brings to your life. Advice on how to get your partner to cooperate without emphasizing the value and importance of the relationship can do more harm than good.
Advice that emphasizes autonomy—self-management, making one’s own decisions about thoughts, feelings, and behavior—risks damaging the intimate connection, and vice versa. The urge for autonomy and connection pulls us in opposite directions. Advice that emphasizes one or the other causes more problems than it solves. Good counseling is about maintaining a balance between the two – not selling the self for the relationship or the relationship for itself. The essence of good psychological counseling is a balance between gain and loss.
We are vulnerable to poor psychological counseling because:
- The enormous complexity of human experience makes us uncertain about “appropriate” ways of looking at things and behaving.
- We tend to seek validation rather than empowerment.
The amount and variety of information creates uncertainty
Social media platforms get this. They don’t want their subscribers to feel uncomfortable on their platforms, so their algorithms severely limit the variety of information, offering as much amount as users say they can handle based on their clicks.
Our uncertainty about “appropriateness” increases as we read or hear more advice. Because there’s so much of it out there, guides try to differentiate themselves by reporting something new or different. “New” and “different” are of course not meant better. Rather, they emphasize one aspect of the complex human condition that takes away another aspect, that is, they sin against it balance.
We seek emotional validation more than empowerment
We like to have our feelings and prejudices confirmed by others. Some psychologists have identified emotional validation as a “universal human need.” Confusing likes with needs is a common mistake, especially today.
My need and right to be validated exceeds your need and right not to validate me.
Children need validation because they lack development (myelination) of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is reflective, analytical, and self-affirming.
Test the hypothesis: When you feel validated by someone, note how long the good feeling lasts. Without self-validation, it will be short-lived. Notice whether the validation you receive from others drives you to learn more or makes you afraid to learn more.
Adults who have not given up their ability to self-validate because of flimsy psychological advice about the “need” (and entitlement) to be validated are curious about other perspectives and opinions. They recognize that learning and growth are dialectical processes that synthesize evidence to the and versus beliefs.
authorization gives yourself (or others) the confidence and ability to make life better. Validation is the starting point for learning and growth, not the goal. Affirming what you are feeling without the empowerment to do better will lead you to repeat the same mistakes.
Here is a more polished version of the above:
“authorization is a universal human need.”
The inherent bias of psychological counseling
Much advice is a product of selectively perception, whereby consultants only see what they want to see. The most difficult mental operation of those who give psychological counseling is to separate what is good for them and what is good for the counselee. In other words, we tend to advise others based on what we would do in their circumstances.
Psychological counseling is autobiographical and conveys more information about the counselor than about the person being counselled. Those who use the term “appropriate” describe what you think you should do based on what you would do without regard to your different temperaments, metabolism, life experiences, hormone levels, contexts, and cultural influences.
Psychological counseling on the Internet typically reinforces this availability heuristic—the tendency to over-rely on information that we can easily access. The sheer number of articles and posts about narcissism, manipulation, gaslighting, and various subtle and overt ways we are victims makes us mistakenly think that most people are narcissistic or out to get us.
Even psychological counseling that has some scientific support is limited by the representative validity of the samples studied and always refers to group averages rather than individuals. At best, the advice may be helpful to more than half of the people surveyed, but not necessarily to you.
I have never seen advice changed on the basis of “a new study” when that study’s findings have been watered down, when not contradicted by a representative sample, or after attempts to replicate the study have failed, like most do. Guides who claim scientific validity tend to ignore their previous mistakes as they move on to the next new study.
How to get good advice
Actionable advice focuses on what you want to achieve, how you think, what you do, and how you want to be in life. It shows how you can improve your situation (or if you can’t improve the situation, improve how you experience it and what it means to you), how to appreciate more, connect with others and protect and care for what is important to you .
Advice should:
- Compensate for the illusion of focus
- Appreciate that whatever you think and do repeatedly, you will do on autopilot
- Consider the evidence for the advice and the evidence against it
How to make advice work for you
Select information that you think might be helpful to your growth and well-being. Form hypotheses from the advice and test them based on your own experience.