I am a very optimistic psychologist, but with reason. For 25 years I’ve been working with people who have had psychological problems in every conceivable area. Many psychologists have problems with burnout, especially early in their careers. For me, this has been very different. By using the treatment techniques that I do, I feel anti-burned out. It is so gratifying to see people get out of their serious problems, that I look forward to every day of clinical work.

The reason why many in the mental health field get burned out may be that they are not able to make changes in people’s lives as they had hoped.

I often get frustrated when patients come to me after a treatment career with four or five previous psychologists. The clients have been very close to giving up, but they often give it a last try, especially in the anxiety clinic where I work. Having failed in many therapies, having been made very pessimistic, I really admire them for not giving up completely.

Usually these patients have been to psychologists who are very concerned with childhood experiences. For years they have been talking to the psychologists about all kinds of bad things that have happened to them, in an attempt to find out what may have caused their psychological problems.

The problem is that even if we could reliably find exactly what caused the problems, this does not give us any direction about how to help cure the problem. The sad fact is that we cannot change people’s childhoods.

Another sad effect, is that doing psychotherapy that is not working may be very demotivating and give people the feeling that there is no hope for their condition.

What makes more sense, especially to clients, is to look at their everyday situation, and find out what problems they have within their daily lives. In technical terms, this is called formulation.Many British psychologists see this as a very useful alternative to diagnosis. The formulation would describe in everyday language what triggers your  problems, how you react, what  makes the problem worse or better, and eventually what may be done with this in the here and now.