No one is looking over the therapist’s shoulder in the intimacy of the consulting room, eager to pounce if he or she does something wrong. Yet the inherent privacy of the interaction means that therapists who lack training in science and skepticism have no internal corrections to the self-protecting cognitive biases that afflict us all. What these therapists see confirms what they believe, and what they believe shapes what they see. It’s a closed loop. Did my client improve? Excellent; what I did was effective. Did my client remain unchanged or get worse? That’s unfortunate, but she is
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