I am tempted to write about magical thinking every time I see it in action. I postpone doing so, waiting for better times, when I am less reactive, so that my thoughts about this issue are clearer and less contaminated by the momentary surprise, enthusiasm or outrage. Although I am calmer, my thoughts are not automatically smarter. To think that calm people are also right is a far-fetched conclusion with a “magical thinking” core.
In opposition to magical thinking we can place realistic thinking – which can be defined as the evidence-based and collaborative critical analysis of a situation. Magical thinking is not based on evidence, but on personal cognitive-emotional patterns that motivate us to seek comfort and pleasure as well as to avoid suffering and pain and even effort or discomfort. These personal patterns of emotionally contaminated thinking make us very selective with evidence and clingy to what serves the confirmation of our own familiar theories, to the detriment of evidence data that contradicts our worldview – and that is because opposing evidence that makes us doubt what we know can generate momentary confusion, lack of certainty, hesitation and worry or even fear.
Magical thinking has an interesting psychological role in our soothing, as opposed to the critical thinking that provokes our inner sophist and leads us to realize the impressive dimension of our own ignorance. There are numerous examples of magical thinking – a very widespread one is the belief that if we are good children, Santa Clause will bring us gifts. No, it is not just something that some children believe. Variants of this sort of thinking can be found in people of all ages: if I tell my wife that she is right, I will have a peaceful day. If I satisfy all demands from me, then I will be loved. If I am smart, I will not be hurt. If I rely on myself alone, I will not be disappointed. If I try hard and exhaust myself in the process, the result will not matter - I will be appreciated even if I fail. If I work faster I will get everything done by sunset.
All of these hardships we put ourselves through are promises made to ourselves in early childhood, when our cognitive development was still at a stage where we believed in magic, our knowledge of how the world works was not comprehensive enough, we lacked life experience and we made causal links between events that are not causally related – they just appeared so to our childhood mentality. We have got our childhood ages in the form of mental schemas situated at the foundation of everything we have learned in life afterwards. We may have reviewed a lot of our early assumptions by formal education and some by psychotherapy, but our early conditioning is still a part of us and when a certain bell rings we salivate with anticipation. We nowadays call that bell a trigger. We set up our lives to trigger the emotional states we are after and we tend to despise and avoid whatever triggers our unpleasant or painful emotional states of then and there, when we were vulnerable and hurt.
Realising our magical thinking patterns we are going to be to a larger extent freer to think and to connect with the present reality, rather than flee into our old frames of reference. We will look at two examples: for free subscribers, we will look into how people use magical thinking to choose their counsellors, therapists, friends or life partners, while for our paid subscribers we will add another example – how magical thinking is likely involved in the scapegoating phenomenon.
Many therapists have social media presence nowadays, since their services too have to be promoted, so that potential clients know about their existence and can access them. In opposition with many businesses nowadays, the therapy business is not meant to please the client, but to provide the care and treatment they require for mental and relational health. At times the treatment is uncomfortable or painful and it takes skill, time and strategy to approach the issues strategically, in stages as well as personalised. When clients follow their therapists on social media an unavoidable clash happens between the business role and the professional role of the therapist. Among the consequences is that the therapeutic process can be contaminated with complex parallel interpersonal phenomena or infused with unnecessary confusion. It is therefore better that while the therapy process unfolds our clients do not follow us (their therapists) on social media. It is also important that we are chosen arbitrarily, rather than based on what potential clients might like about our social media presentation. None of those cues can predict the outcome of the therapy process — they only provide an initial rather weak ground for trust that sometimes people hang on to in order to encourage themselves to finally reach out for a consultation.
Clients seek therapists according to their public profiles because of clients’ magical thinking and biases. We also choose life partners according to an initial attraction and assigned trustworthiness based on our liking of them and so we end up being with the same kind of people who confirm our life scripts. Choosing the therapist according to interpersonal chemistry, that is rejecting certain therapists and being attracted to certain others, we are basically making choices through a so-called transferential mechanism. We choose from the same mentality that’s generated the problems we’ve got in our lives and the same mentality that we experience as unfit to handle these problems effectively, leading us to seek therapeutic help. Reference literature supports the idea that we should choose our therapists randomly and that therapists choose their clients randomly – for instance in the order of their arrival, or by spatial proximity so that they can easily get to the clinic from work or from home, to reduce the temptation and the risk of missing sessions due to traffic and distance and so forth.
Every therapist is ok, realistically speaking, not wonderful, nor completely bogus (although we may need to take some precaution against charlatans, by checking their background and their license) because they have at least a basic professional training and knows specific procedures, has contact with fellow colleagues, trainers and supervisors to aid in the constant improvement of their skill, they are evaluated and licensed to practice after graduating from years of self-examination and learning to do what they need to do as part of their professional role. As in any other profession, we are more or less skilled at what we have to do, more or less beginners, more or less advanced, more or less rested or exhausted, more or less predisposed to be challenge or challenging in relation with certain people and to at least a minimal extent ready to deal with such arising challenges when they do. Realistically, no therapist can guarantee the result of therapy, not even those who practice by the manual, that is in conformity with evidence-based guidelines. We can only be involved in the process according to the professional role expectations we have learned and developed in training and the standards we keep updating by keeping in touch with the most recent scientific literature in our field.
So the wish to find a therapist that one likes expresses rather the client’s aspirations and worries, which provoke them to self-protect and to self-satisfy: we seek therapists that do not touch our vulnerable points, therapists that agree with us, therapists that match our ideals at least apparently, therapists that do not seem capable of hurting us, etc. To choose a therapist according to what they present on social media is to fall into the trap of magical thinking: “oh if she’s like that, she will not hurt me – she will provide me with what i need”. Realistically, any therapist can hurt you and any therapist can be limited in his capacity to help you. With realistic thinking, you start the therapeutic process in a deeper connection with the person in front of you, by discussing needs, expectations and fears regarding your interlocutors in general and those worries and concerns about your new therapist in particular. With apparently familiar ones, we do not get worried enough to take such measures, we tend to have the impression we agree on many levels on which we do not and we are set up to get disappointed in the same ways we have been before.
There is also a popular magical expectation that our therapist will not make mistakes. This part of the essay is for paid subscribers only. Please join the paid subscribers list to support the initiatives I present in the About section of this platform and to enjoy the rest of the reflection stimulus about the link between magical thinking and one’s relation with the idea of mistaking.
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