She’s almost ninety years old and sitting on her favorite couch, your look inspires peace. A peace from those who know everything is fine. As the days go by, he talks about his family, enjoys life year after year and everyone sits at a table. She’s my grandmother, and she also says she’s also a psychologist.
There is no diploma on the walls of her house, of which she is very proud, but these walls are decorated with pictures of children or paintings of uncertain origin, accompanied by a photograph of the city that saw her grow. She and many others, including who writes.
- As she keeps her eyes fixed on the novel.
- I begin to think about psychology and her reasons for thinking that she also knows and applies the knowledge of this science.
- I picture her when I was young in college and smile.
- She’s a psychologist.
There are a lot of people who think she’s a bit of a psychologist without having gone through college, she’s good, or she thinks she’s good, listens, supports, and gives advice.
They are not being treated for depression, but rather encouraging someone who has experienced a strong emotional shock and is going through a grieving process. It reassures a person who is going through a moment of anxiety.
They accumulate experiences, successfully resolved dilemmas, tips that have worked for them on other occasions, and also believe they know the emotions because they also feel them, have had to negotiate with them many times and have done so successfully.
In one way or another, they believe that they can universalize these kinds of recipes, the conclusions they have drawn from their collections of individual experiences, look at and observe well-known, transited, abandoned and cultivated lands.
In other words, we’re talking about people who may have the characteristics or potential that would make them good psychologists, but pieces are missing to complete the professional puzzle.
This is an important idea because the error is not trivial, in the case of my grandmother, who thinks she is a psychologist, it may be like that, because there is no intention of winning it, but in many other cases it is not.
In fact, if you look at the professional world, we will quickly discover different labels that hide, as in a mask dance, people without training who try to take care of the ourselves or show the ourselves as a valid alternative to the professional.
Soul healers, lost heart counselors or life and love coaches. To specify all pseudopsychological shapes or messages, you would need a complete article.
Why aren’t these people psychologists?First, because they did not have a comprehensive and structured training that was based on a series of studies carried out on the basis of what we now call a scientific methodology.
That is, should a psychologist, at least on paper, submit an intervention tailored to each case and to each person?Based on the general standards that best suit your situation, maximizing the chances of success and taking into account the relationship between investment of resources and results.
To do this, it is necessary to have the knowledge, as well as the channels to update them, in this way the research would be useless if the professionals who must design and develop interventions were not sensitive and trained to go beyond the daily professional practice with their conclusions.
On the other hand, you must have experience. That is, a person becomes a psychologist, but also a psychologist, is this the moment of activity that, in many cases, ends up sharpening intuition and shape this unconscious clinical practice, whose potentialities we talked about earlier?make decisions, listen, put yourself in the place of others, etc.
Saying that a person is a psychologist outside of this context is like thinking someone is a little medical because they have had a severe flu and taken steps that have helped them recover. Psychology, like medicine, goes far beyond these simple or natural solution problems that time itself would solve.
So, among other reasons, my dear grandmother is not a psychologist, experienced, endowed with a wisdom that leaves on the skin the memory of the right solutions and proposals, the change of context, but fragile or needy in the face of what research on disorders says. , such as generalized stress or depression.