There's a neat thing in attempts to "do psychology stuff", which reminds me of developmental stages.
Stage 1
At the most crude, you act as if your locus of control extends through other people. The way you influence other people is the way you influence yourself: you just expect people to do what you want automatically. I'm hungry, so mommy is going to feed me. Right?
This actually works sometimes. Mothers generally care to feed their baby. Sometimes they fail to predict when their baby needs to eat though, and so "I'm hungry so mommy will feed me" gets falsified. At this stage, when we're wrong at things, it feels like the world is wrong. When a cute little baby does this, usually mom will right the world again. If you do it as a grown ass man, you'll get a lot of "Grow the fuck up" and the world failing to meet your expectations. The tantrums no longer work so well, and even best case things won't become what they could be.
But it's still not always immature, and it's not always selfish.
For example, in the Raynaud's case I wrote about, what did I actually do to that caused her blood vessels to dilate? I just expected her to do the thing she wanted, when she could. That expectation was correct, so she didn't even ask for help because her blood vessels just dilated. The only reason I know my expectation did anything here is that she had the silly idea that she couldn't just dilate her blood vessels when appropriate, felt that change when she bumped into my expectation, and told me.
Similarly, you probably expect your spouse to not cheat on you, and that's probably actually working. If you expect your kid to be a good kid and not fall into drugs and the wrong crowd, that might actually work too. And might be good for your kid. Or it might not. "You can't do drugs!" "But I am doing drugs. Doesn't that make you wrong, mom?". If you try to directly will the kid to not do drugs, then when this begins to fail it will feel like pressure. By the time there's pressure, this stage 1 approach is starting to show its limitations. By the time you're having a tantrum about it, it's failing completely.
At this stage, no matter how stupid you recognize this perspective to be, in your perspective you are other people. You choose their actions directly. The problem is that you don't. Not really.
Stage 2
Eventually, you start to realize that what other people will do is not literally the same thing as your will. Willing at them doesn't work well enough, you get sick of tantrums not giving you what you want, so you begin to draw this distinction and use more advanced strategies.
Now, we're smart enough to realize we have to actually convince people to do the right thing, so we start trying to manipulate people into doing what we want. I mean, into doing the right thing. What's the difference, at this stage? Again, this isn't necessarily selfish or immature. "Manipulation" just means "moving the pieces around in order to get a result", and the pieces do need to be moved. Besides, people often ask for it, like when they go to therapy for help getting over their own irrational fears.
So maybe we bribe our kid to get good grades with candy, we talk down to educate people on why they're wrong and we're right, we learn "psychological techniques" to cause people to do the right thing instead of the wrong thing. Some of them even Science and Evidence Based.
And this sorta works. Kids happily do things for candy. Sometimes we're actually right and people see it when we explain. Scientific Evidence Based techniques get their evidence from somewhere.
But it also sorta doesn't. Because the kid doing the thing for candy is subject to Goodhart's law. Sometimes we're not so right, and at stage 2 we have no way of orienting to the problems that come up when our condescension explanations are missing something important and fail. Even our best most Scientific and Evidence Based techniques can struggle. In fact, it can't even work on its own terms; if you fully accept the stage 2 framing the technique will fail.
Change is just learning. "Resolution of irrational fear" is the process of learning "I'm safe, actually". So long as you know "My fear is irrational, I already know that I'm safe, so I'm gonna do this thing to teach my brain what I already know", there is no way to ask "Am I safe?" because there's no room for a new answer — you already know you're safe... or so you think. The technique can only work to the extent that the justification "Doing this stuff does Science on irrational fears and makes them go away" is successful at distracting you from your own belief that "I know this fear is irrational", and you don't notice the contradiction. This move of placing one's faith in Science, and doing it "Because Science shows it works" rather than following the logical implications of your own beliefs is necessary, because the seductive but false belief that "our fear is irrational, so we need to do Science at it" is what we use to distract us from our other false belief "I already know that I'm safe" for long enough for the technique to work. It's literally faith based medicine, using faith as the second wrong that makes a right. Joel Kleinman makes very similar criticisms from a different angle in his white paper on his "What Do You Want?" technique, which served as my introduction to the stage 2 to 3 transition.
And so stage 2 has its drawbacks. Pick Up Artists are generally looked down on for their attempts to manipulate, and people have similar views on hypnotists. "Manipulation" gets its connotations for a reason, and even if you're benevolent with it, the drawbacks persist. I give an example in my Beneath Psychology post of a woman who got a lot of mileage out of CBT failing to make it work on her irrational fear of heights.
In this stage, no matter how much you think "manipulation" is wrong, you see the world through a lens of manipulation. You know the right answer, and all you have are hammers to complete the link between your soft hands and the nail that needs hammering into place.
You might even hear about Coherence Therapy and think "Wow, not controlling people at all gets even better results? I should do that in order to get better results!". And so you pick up a different hammer, and get back to trying to whack at things that don't look right to you.
The problem is that you don't always know what is right. In particular, you haven't yet noticed that you could be wrong about the fear being irrational, or drugs being bad.
Stage 3
Eventually, you might get to the point where you notice that other people's perspectives might be meaningful. Or your own, when you don't like them. You start to ask strangely counterintuitive questions of people who ask for your help eliminating their irrational fears. Questions like "What makes you so sure it's irrational?" and "How do you know that you're safe?". Not as slick "reverse psychology technique", but like actually finding that to be uncertain and worth understanding.
As you complete this stage transition, you realize that it was never your job to enforce "no more irrational fear". You let go of the pre-specified outcome, because any coherent outcome is good. The problem isn't that they're afraid, it's they're afraid and know they shouldn't be. Those two don't fit. If the fear dissolves, great; that fits. If the fear doesn't dissolve, but the idea that it was irrational falls apart? Like, "Oh shit, I'm actually in real danger that I hadn't recognized!"? Great! That's an important thing to notice! Manipulating them into fearlessness would have been bad!
So far as I can tell, this is the state of the art. Here, we get stuff like legitimate Coherence Therapy, Internal Family Systems, Parts Work, etc, which is all good stuff — relative to the stage 2 baseline. Now that we've stopped writing the bottom line first, we can start asking honest questions. We can now point people at "Are you safe?" directly without faith based magic tricks, and results will be better — even by stage 2 metrics of "did the irrational fear go away".
Big insight, big improvement, yay. We should totally choose to do coherence type therapies.
Yet there's still a problem here.
The other person might insist on a stage 2 intervention because they know they just need amnesia for the embarrassing event, or whatever. And now as a Coherence Therapist, wtf do you do about that? They're coherent in that, so you can't apply CT at this meta problem until they fall in line — which would be a stage 2 move anyway. And you can't do a stage 2 intervention as they ask for, because that's definitely a stage 2 move. So what to do?
What happens if your daughter goes through CT and coherently wants to do a shit ton of heroin? Maaaaaaybe you're not that cool with watching your daughter throw her life away just because she's not aware of how bad an idea this might be, or whatever. The moment you actually care about the person you're purportedly helping, while having some wisdom of your own that they lack, you realize real quick that "coherence" isn't the actual thing. At this point, it gets hard to control yourself to "do CT" because you're recognizing that it doesn't actually work to get the right outcome.
Stage 4
Just like with the other stage transitions, we're recognizing aspects of reality that lay outside our previously constrained field of worldview.
From 1 to 2, it was "Oh, other people aren't me". From 2 to 3 it was "Oh, people might actually be doing things for reasons".
This time, it's "Oh. I'm doing things for reasons too".
We are not outside the system. We have our own desires, and our own perspectives, and using "my job is just to cohere them!" is a cop out to avoid having to deal with the additional complexities this brings. And I don't see a lot of people talking about the importance of this stage transition. It's a huge part of what Beneath Psychology is about.
I think part of the problem is that the people who take this stuff seriously typically do this for a living. The goal is "client wants problem fixed, I want to make them happy so I get paid". If the client leaves happy to go do heroin, it's not on you when they piss their life away and die. If the amnesia-demanding guy doesn't want to do your type of therapy, fine. You'll see other clients, and it's not your problem he suffers unnecessarily. This "I'm just here to help you with your problems so I get paid" thing pretty cleanly places you outside the system, which really saps incentive to develop further. This incentive structure doesn't protect you from the failures, but it does make it very easy to look away from them — until they blindside you.
The stage 4 realization is that your job isn't just to "cohere the other person, from outside the system". Your job, by definition, is to get what you want. How does that fit in? When you want to help other people, is it really that you want to help them coherently run off a cliff that they didn't see? When you did?
We've learned by now that we have no privileged access to truth about what is best for the other person. We've learned that their conscious narratives aren't privileged truth either. Maybe we're both wrong about the fear being out of place.
In this transition, we're learning that the entire them does not either. They can be coherently wrong, and we might know. Or think we know, and realize that their reasoning is more sound than we thought. We can't know what our collective best guess is, and they can't know, until we all cohere as a system and find out what we cohere on. The question is now "What is most likely to be true, in the union of all of our perspectives?"
Once you are able to operate at this stage, you have a principled way of handling the things that blindside stage 3. When a client is resistant to a stage 3 strategy, you recognize this as part of the work. You recognize that your job is not just to cohere them, on this object level thing, but to cohere you+them on the question of what therapeutic modality to use — so you both agree on what the right way forward is. And to cohere yourself on wtf you want to do about someone coherently wanting something that is going to hurt them — so you don't leave your daughter to do heroin unless it's actually a good thing for her, so far as you can tell. Perhaps most importantly, you aren't left without your supposed expertise when your daughter's desire for you to "not do therapy at her" bypasses all the skills you've worked so hard to develop. Or so your coworkers don't tell you that you need to try being less confident, leaving you unsure what to do with that because from your place of confidence that sounds dumb, and in order to consider that maybe there's something to it you're already granting the bid before it's earned.
Stage 4 is what's needed for your skills to transfer where they matter most, to you. Because it is only at stage 4 that you can explicitly account for your own desires in a way that is not blind to what you are likely missing. The times when you care the most are the times when your care is least cleanly separable in a way that makes the stage 3 fiction work.
Wife? Kids? Friends? Yourself? You can't cohere yourself without cohering the part of yourself that imagines itself to be outside of you, trying and struggling to enforce coherence.
Stage 4 is also what you need in order to actually work for the best interest of your clients, and this will ease success even by stage 3 standards. People can tell what is motivating you.
The sneaky thing about developmental stages is that you can't see from the inside when a missing stage is constraining you. At stage 1 it feels like the world is wrong. At stage 2 it feels like you "just need a better technique hammer, then they will realize your rightness!". At stage 3, it feels like "I've done everything I can. This is just what they want" — but that still doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel right. It feels like something is missing because something is missing.
The tell is in the "wrongness". If you're feeling wrongness, the wrongness is in you.
If you can find out why the irksome facet of reality is what it is, you have a trailhead to a new developmental stage.