I hope you've enjoyed these episode on Common Therapist Errors, and I apologize in advance if any of the ideas I'm proposing in today's podcast seem "over the top" or simply off base. I teach with great passion, but I'm not always right! Fortunately, my esteemed host, Dr. Fabrice Nye, challenges me quite a bit, and he is almost always right. Hopefully, you will enjoy our dialogue and the chance to think a bit more critically about psychotherapy.  And when you find I've made an error, or said something offensive to you, I hope you will put it in perspective. I'm kind of a mixed bag, to be honest. I believe I have a lot to offer, but I've got tons of flaws, too! I fight my flaws, but not always with success. For better or worse, here are today's therapist errors!  1. Confusing psychoeducation with psychotherapy. Pyschoeducation can be helpful, but it's rarely curative. Effective psychotherapy requires much more. Here are some examples of helpful psychoeducation: Teaching people about the list of ten common cognitive distortions from David's book, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy Teaching people how to pinpoint their negative feelings at any moment in time using David's Daily Mood Log Teaching people that your thoughts, and not external events, create all of your positive and negative feelings Explaining the Five Secrets of Effective Communication etc. etc. etc. Psychotherapy means helping people CHANGE the way they think and feel, or helping people develop more loving and satisfying personal relationships. That requires a great deal of therapeutic skill and hard work on the part of the patient--during sessions and between sessions. it also requires a warm and trusting therapeutic alliance. 2. Belief in Gurus. Believing that the individuals who start schools of therapy are nice and well-balanced individuals! David describes conversations with the late Albert Ellis, PhD, who argued that many, and arguably most, are incredibly narcissistic and manipulative. Sometimes, individuals who appear incredibly charming and brilliant and inspiring have a dark underbellies they are keeping hidden! David argues that it might be more desirable to have a science-based, data driven, systematic approach to psychotherapy, as opposed to a field dominated by therapeutic schools, which sometimes function almost like competing cults. 3. Reverse / “backward” statistical reasoning. Most therapists who work with patients with Borderline Personality Disorder as well as Multiple Personality Disorder, as well as patients who are prone to violence, believe that childhood trauma, deprivation, or abuse is the main cause of these problems. They believe this because patients with those diagnoses frequently describe traumatic experiences in their past, so they assume those experiences caused the patient's disorder.  This is a statistical and conceptual error, because most individuals who experienced traumas when growing up never developed Borderline Personality Disorder or Multiple Personality Disorder. This is not to say that traumas are unimportant—traumatic experiences at any phase of life can be very damaging. What this DOES mean is that most psychiatric problems have other causes.  What are those other causes? They are not known, for the most part. This information is not easy for many people to accept. For example, I just found this statement on WebMd: “As many as 99% of individuals who develop dissociative disorders have recognized personal histories of recurring, overpowering, and often life-threatening disturbances at a sensitive developmental stage of childhood (usually before age 9)." Here’s another web comment: “Several studies have shown that a diagnosis of BPD is associated with child abuse and neglect more than any other personality disorders [7, 8], with a range between 30 and 90% in BPD patients [7, 9].” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5472954/ The same source also stated that: “. . . Widom and collaborators [12] followed 500 chil