In most health-related fields, we take it for granted that more information is better information. A doctor who's trying to treat your cancer probably wouldn't turn down any data about your past or present lifestyle. And a social worker who's got to find housing for a homeless client probably wants all the information she can gather from family members who can potentially house her.
But things tend to be different in psychotherapy. Here, we ardently protect the privacy or sealed interaction between a therapist and her client. In therapy, it's often thought that an outside voice (a mom sitting in for the occasional session, an ex-boyfriend giving his take on things) would disrupt the trust or balance in the therapist-client relationship. One reason a therapist doesn't routinely invite a mom or ex-lover in to give a new perspective on a client is that the therapist wants to create a safe space that welcomes spontaneity without immediate repercussion. Individual therapy rides on trust: A therapist isn't pursuing an immediate intervention on the client's outside relationships but helping a client make changes if he wants to.
That said, I think we sometimes cling too closely to the idea of secrecy in therapy, or we worry that any outside input would corrupt the narrative that's built in the therapy office. Couldn't it be useful to more frequently invite outsiders in for their take on the client's habits or life events? We already know that people act differently depending on where they are and whom they're with. For instance, some people are quieter in groups than with individuals. Some are shy with bosses but arrogant with friends. And one obvious fallout from that truth is that no matter how intuitive your therapist is, she's only human--so she naturally comes to know and name a limited part of you.
With that limitation in mind these days, I've been daydreaming about a sadistic tool for therapy. It wouldn't be a replacement for therapy but a radical ax for getting outside the box of the office.
Imagine a website called Show-me-all-of-Me.com, which would be a data-gathering tool for a therapist and client who have robust defenses and are not in crisis. A client would present with some pressing question, like "Why do people think I'm uptight?" The therapist has done work helping him understand his style, but the therapist's perspective is limited, because she's human and because of the limited context in which she sees this client.
They sign up for the website Show-me-all-of-Me.com. The client posts his question: "What makes you think I'm uptight?" He then asks about 10 former colleagues and bosses, 10 family members, 10 friends, 10 near-acquaintances, 10 superficial routine interactors (mailman, deli cashier), and 10 former romantic partners to sign up for the site. Each participant has about a month to post her response anonymously. Then the client logs on. The result would be very painful: like one of Picasso's cubist paintings showering an information-onslaught from multiple perspectives. But we'd know something about how strangers and lovers and family and others see this guy.
Of course this idea is already widely used in our professional lives. Most teachers are obliged to use feedback forms filled out by multiple sources-- students, bosses, and coworkers-in order to better understand and then perhaps adjust their own teaching styles. Most office professionals also undergo a yearly review, to which various others in the office contribute. Check out this site: http://www.getfeedback.net/products/detail/leadership360. There, office managers can get information about their style from people who work for them. I imagine the feedback is both useful and painful.
I'll say the obvious now: There are huge differences between the self-knowledge we gain through job reviews and through therapy. In a job review, bosses are supposed to be critiquing just our professional selves. In therapy, we're focusing on the public and private self; and in therapy, we're not necessarily shooting for some well-defined "betterment." One goal of therapy is just to grow comfortable with ourselves, and getting more information about ourselves more quickly is not necessarily helpful in achieving self-love. The trust and intimacy between the therapist and client is also crucial for good therapy. So that relationship might need to be nurtured above and beyond the more objective truth we'd get from polling various sources about how a person exists in the world.
Still, I'm arguing that we sometimes err by thinking of the therapist-client relationship as utterly, categorically different from other relationships. I wonder if allowing for the occasional outside opinion or voice wouldn't deepen what a therapist and client know about the truth. In realms like medicine, we have no problem admitting that working with false information is harmful to the work. At the same time, we deal with skewed information in therapy all the time. Sometimes that's a loving, useful sort of mutual blindness; sometimes it is harmful. It would probably be enlightening to get a cubist portrait of ourselves: 100 people offering their hard, honest take on us. The problem is, the pain of that lesson might be nearly murderous.
