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How helpful is psychology as a therapy?

Mainstream psychology especially behavioural psychology is usually seen as some kind of mind reading, skill or ability. Generally, people expect it to explain the reasons and causes for human behaviour and predict actions along with exposing and revealing a person’s hidden intentions or defects. But in reality, the truth is simpler. As highly useful as psychology is, it is not a perfect system for helping individuals like other therapy interventions are.

At its very core, psychology is the study of people, or the study of patterns in people. Behaviour, the inner mind activity before you see the external movements and behaviour. Early behavioural psychology focused on what can be actually observed, the observable actions, reactions, habits and learned repeated responses. And this approach gave psychology as a science valuable tools to understand why human beings repeat certain behaviours over and over, especially when the outcome is painful and negative. It also helped alter current modern day therapy approaches that are being used today.

Understanding people in actual real time

Psychology is better at probabilities more than it is in certainties. To give you an example about certain readable behavioural cues in operation. Ongoing free-floating anxiety, discomfort, or aversion and avoidance in a person. But these same cues could also mean something else, such as fatigue, cultural differences, personality style, or someone just doesn’t like a certain smell or look of another and it can be as simple as that, and so easy to jump to faulty conclusions.

Limits of psychology

And this is why, in my opinion, psychology, although brilliant has its limits. It can be great for guiding interpretation, but it cannot fully replace human judgement and direct therapy intervention when working with symptoms.

Mainstream modern psychology incorporates cognitive science, neuroscience and social psychology. And this has helped to improve the accuracy in understanding people’s mental health conditions such as severe depression, anxiety disorders, panic attacks, and ongoing PTSD and trauma like responses including other personality disorders that people struggle with on a day-to-day basis. Therefore, in clinical settings, structured essential assessments and certain frameworks help professionals in related fields identify patterns more reliably than just casual observation.

Therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapy also known as CBT are actually evidence based and deeply researched by research psychologists and behavioural psychologists. And it’s because of these psychologist’s work, it helps to tweak and improve therapies such as CBT in the helping of people, breaking unhelpful cycles of disturbed thinking and other emotional driven behaviours rather than trying to decipher or decode a person for no other reason.

So, is psychology accurate?

Psychology is very accurate, but it does have its limits. It’s very accurate in identifying patterns, especially repetitive patterns that go on in people for decades, including tendencies and common psychological mechanisms that run the show behind the surface.

Behavioural psychology is less accurate when people try to use it as a tool for absolute certainty about individuals in complex real-life situations. And when I see skilful people making skilful assumptions and interpretations, I see the real machinery running behind, which is subconscious ego. And yes, there are psychologists who have very powerful mind reading egos, and they want you to know it as well.

If you strip away a person’s skilful psychology, understanding and ability to interpret or read a person’s mind, then I would say psychology is definitely 70% accurate if you had to put a percentage on it. But it’s certainly not 100% as everyone is unique and no matter how good you are you can never fully see into the mind of everybody, like you think you can.

Psychology is best used as a supportive framework for therapists. It can help families and individuals understand behaviour, and suffering, and help individuals or groups make sense of their pain and symptoms. Along with guiding professionals in better treatment planning and should be applied with respect and humility and not showing off mind reading skills.

Disclaimer
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