Let me give you a word of advice...

In one of life’s more pungent ironies, the moment when you feel old enough to offer sage advice to the younger generation is the one when a young person will tell you, to your face, that you are too old to understand his life.

Unless your name is Brett Favre, you can’t possibly know what it’s like to conduct your love life through social media. I mean, you don’t even know the difference between an app and an algorithm.

Is today’s high tech generation less apt to take advice than prior generations? Is a generation that spent its formative years hooked up to a self-esteem drip less apt to respect the wisdom that comes with age? Is a generation that has been taught to rebel against authority less apt to follow the guidance of those older and wiser?

 Of course, it’s much too easy to shift the blame to the young. Let’s start by asking whether the boomer generation, the parents and even grandparents of today’s youth, even knows how to give advice.

 Before you indulge in an extended bout of teeth-gnashing over the failings of youth, remember that today’s boomers grew up thinking that they should never trust anyone over 30.

 Boomers made a fetish of autonomy and independence.

If I were trying to teach someone how to give advice, not a  far-out possibility since that is what I do for a living, I would start by explaining that the best way to learn how to give advice is to learn how to take advice.

Boomers made a fetish of autonomy and independence. They rebelled against the tired truisms of their parents. The last thing they wanted to do was to “take advice.”

In one way, it is a good thing to know what to do when you make your own decision and get it wrong. It is a good thing to learn from experience. As long as they are not egregious or irreparable, you can learn from making your own mistakes.

And yet, the boomers took it too far.

People who suffer from excessive filial piety can be crippled by fear of offending the spirits of their ancestors. Yet, people who embrace filial impiety waste too much of their time and energy reinventing the wheel.

Psychotherapy and the culture it spawned.

To modify Isaac‘s Newton’s adage, you see further standing on the shoulders of giants than you do burying your head in the sand.

Of course, all of this talk about autonomy and independence did not just appear, as if by magic, one day. It was bequeathed to us by psychotherapy and the culture it spawned. 

In my younger days I practiced psychoanalysis. As everyone knows by now, analysts were not allowed to give advice. It was so well known that psychoanalytic patients did not ask for or expect to receive advice.

Psychoanalysts tried to help their patients to have blinding epiphanies and mind-numbing insights. They were not offering treatment or cure, but access to the Empyrean, the world of philosopher kings and the morally superior.

Psychoanalysts wanted their patients to ignore practical, everyday problems in order to get in touch with their feelings, those deep, dark creepy feelings they had spent a lifetime repressing.

Strangely, no one ever asked the salient question: When you want to get in touch with your feelings, where do you put your hands?

Be that as it may, psychoanalytic patients were not lying on the couch talking to the walls in order to learn about writing thank-you notes and enhancing their negotiation skills.

Psychoanalysis is in eclipse and psychotherapy

has taken a sharp turn toward the practical.

If it happened that an analyst, in a lapse, had tried to direct his patient toward practical realities, the patient would have reacted negatively, as though he were being denied entry into the circle of the anointed.

Today, psychoanalysis is in eclipse and psychotherapy has taken a sharp turn toward the practical. In time of trouble, self-exploration feels just a bit self-indulgent.

Thus, problem solving has become more important than insight. And finding solutions is more important than dredging up the past.

The shift has just begun to change in the culture, but I have been seeing it with my clients ever since I stopped being a therapist and started my practice as a consultant and life coach.

When people come to see me now, they expect me to show them a new way to analyze their real-life dilemmas, and they expect that I will offer guidance and advice.

They may not always follow the advice to the letter. But they do consider it, factor in what they find valuable, and draw up their own plans for dealing with their problems.

Telling someone that “These are your options” is a lot better than saying: “You must do as I say.” And both are far superior to: “Let’s wait until we understand why your mother didn’t love you enough.”