A Further Note to Nonprofessionals

Occasionally I receive a note from a non-professional who is offended that this forum is for mental health professionals only. The notes sometimes imply that by doing this we professionals are holding ourselves out as superior or that we have a professionals-only forum because we think that non-professionals are ignorant. This is not the case at all. The individuals and couples I work with in my clinical practice are full partners in the process of overcoming their problems and I learn quite a bit from them.

We have a professionals-only forum because it is useful for mental health professionals to have a place where they can keep up on new developments, ask questions, discuss issues, and learn more so that we can be more helpful to the people who consult us. For the forum to fulfil that function it needs to be a professionals-only forum that maintains a clear focus on Cognitive Therapy.

This does not mean that a professionals-only discussion of Cognitive Therapy is the only discussion worth having. A forum where non-professionals ask questions about Cognitive Therapy or a forum where professionals and non-professionals engage in a dialog about Cognitive Therapy would also be valuable. However, those discussions would be quite different from this one and would need to take place in a different forum.

If you as a non-professional decide to read through the forum anyway, please remember that the items posted here usually presume that the reader has a basic understanding of psychotherapy in general and of Cognitive Therapy in particular. Much is left unsaid because it is assumed to be common knowledge. If anything you read is unclear, seems absurd, or is upsetting, please discuss it with a knowledgeable professional. You may well have misunderstood it because of some of the things that were left unsaid.

In particular, some of the emails I've received have commented that many of the items posted in this forum fail to show empathy for the pain experienced by the individuals with whom we work. When you stop to think about it, I'm sure it is obvious that therapists feel a great deal of empathy for the suffering our clients go through. Most of us chose this field in order to help alleviate that suffering. If we were talking with you in person, we'd be expressing that empathy. Within this forum we focus on figuring out how to understand the problems people encounter and how to go about alleviating the suffering.

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