The "emotional guru" who teaches you how to win back your ex actually just started working last week

When Chu Chu saw that the "teaching materials" sent by the consultant turned out to be a dating variety show, she realized that this emotional consulting company was not reliable at all.

It was too late to regret. She had already signed a three-month contract with a fee of nearly 10,000 yuan . According to the terms, it would be difficult for her to get the money back, not to mention that she and the contracted company were not in the same city, and she had only communicated with the "emotional mentor" online.

Chuchu wrote her lesson on Xiaohongshu, tagging it with "emotional consultation". The content under this entry is polarized, one category is emotional agencies using perfectly packaged cases to advertise, and the other category is fierce complaints from users who have suffered losses. The latter's experience is mostly similar to Chuchu's, and they all found out after paying that the emotional consultants gave them simple and crude "routines" that are difficult to apply to their specific problems.

How do emotional counseling agencies serve their clients?

Chuchu's "Cheat" Story

In 2020, Chuchu has a boy she likes, but the two of them have made no progress. She is worried that they will not be able to take the next step, but she doesn't know how to change the status quo.

At this time, she saw a video on Douyin, where a "relationship expert" analyzed " how to capture his heart " in a clear and logical way. Chuchu clicked on the expert's homepage, which was full of practical content that could solve her troubles, such as " several habits that make you more charming " and " a few tricks to make him change his mind ." There was also a contact WeChat below the account, where she could consult on relationship issues.

Emotional Counseling Examples

She wanted to seek professional help, so she added WeChat. After listening to her story, the WeChat receptionist said: " You have big problems in this relationship. If you keep the status quo, you will lose him soon ."

Chuchu panicked, and when she asked for help on what to do, the other party enthusiastically recommended the institution's "gold medal tutor". The "gold medal tutor" also seriously told Chuchu that her way of dealing with feelings was problematic and she needed to adjust her strategy as soon as possible.

In panic of losing her lover, Chuchu quickly chose a three-month package that included 12 one-on-one, 1-hour telephone consultations with a "gold medal mentor".

But after the one-on-one guidance began, Chu Chu discovered that the instructor's "teaching materials" were nothing more than popular dating variety shows and emotional chicken soup books . He also sent her a lot of "exquisite copywriting" that could be found on the Internet, and asked her to post on her Moments that only the other party could see, to show off her lifestyle, which he called "secondary attraction."

An example of copywriting guidance for Moments

Chuchu was disappointed. "The variety show is someone else's, the book is someone else's, the copywriting is someone else's, so what belongs to you as a mentor?" But when Chuchu raised her doubts, the mentor would always repeat what he had said when he first induced her to buy the service package: "If you don't work harder and do what he says, this is the only way you and him will end up like this."

What's even more outrageous is that during the three-month service period, Chuchu was forced to change three mentors . When each mentor left, he said that he was going to "return to his hometown to develop" and "recommend a better mentor to you."

She had a vague impression of the three "gold medal mentors". They all used photos of themselves in suits and ties as their WeChat profile pictures, used the same teaching materials, and used the same rhetoric to undermine her confidence. Their Moments were also the same, regularly posting the same success stories and forwarding inspirational articles such as "You can tell if a man loves you by looking at these three points". Sometimes Chuchu didn't even know if the person who sent her a message was really the person in the profile picture .

Chuchu soon stopped renewing her contract with the agency. She chose to make her experience public on Xiaohongshu to help other users avoid misfortunes, but she found that many people had similar experiences.

Sociologists' field surveys have found that behind this kind of "wide-ranging" emotional counseling routine is a factory-style assembly line .

"Emotional experts" who quickly took up their posts

In April this year, Liu Haiping from Shenzhen University of Technology published "Emotional Experts on the Assembly Line and Dream-Chasing Workers - Taking the Training of Guangzhou Marriage and Love Consulting Company as an Example". This research was based on her experience of participating in the emotional counseling trainer program at a marriage and love consulting company in Guangzhou when she was studying for a doctorate at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2016.

Over the past year, Liu Haiping conducted in-depth interviews with eight senior consultants and eight trainee consultants. Among the eight senior consultants, only two were from psychology majors , and the other six had a variety of backgrounds, including real estate sales, vocational school teachers, Taobao freelancers, etc. They all passed the marriage and family counselor certificate after a one-and-a-half-month crash course in the company . The application conditions for this certificate only require "having a college degree or above in other majors, participating in formal training for the required hours, and passing the final examination."

The textbooks used to obtain the marriage and family counselor certificate are not very valuable.

The key to the rapid success of counselors is to "assembly line" emotional counseling. Here, "assembly line" means dividing the production process into multiple "standardized" steps . Even workers who have never received training can produce products that meet the requirements as long as they follow the "standard" operation.

The consultants interviewed told Liu Haiping that the "universal model summarized by the company based on thousands of real consulting cases" is the core of the training and is also the "standard" on this assembly line. For example, when faced with the problem of how to get out of being single, it is a process of "self-awareness-expanding social circles-improving communication skills-dating skills-building connections-upgrading relationships"; maintaining a marriage is "finding the focus of the problem/repelling the mistress → secondary attraction"; and winning back an ex is "cutting off contact-self-improvement-restoring contact-secondary attraction-strengthening the relationship."

All counselors need to learn is to quickly categorize a variety of emotional issues when answering emotional counseling calls, and use universal templates to persuade clients to purchase services .

The company's founder calls it the " industrialization of intimate relationship counseling " and he firmly believes that "everything is an assembly line. Customer consultation is a set of processes, and training counselors also has a set of processes. You just need to face the computer and read this standard process to the visitor."

What is the difference between emotional counseling and psychological counseling?

Also known as "consultation", emotional counseling easily makes people think of more mature and standardized psychological counseling.

Psychological counseling covers a wide range of areas, and some counselors specialize in the field of intimate relationships. Although the clients' confusion is similar, psychological counseling work is very different from emotional counseling in many ways .

Psychological counselor Guo Lanxin believes that the most significant difference between the two is how counselors respond to the needs of clients .

Taking the "reconciliation service" common in emotional counseling agencies as an example, when a psychological counselor faces a client's urgent request for reconciliation, in addition to comforting and relieving the client, he or she will first step back with the client to evaluate why they want to reconcile .

"We may need to break some idealized areas and let the client think about why he or she desires to establish a relationship with this person and why he or she develops the current interpersonal style ? Is there any support from other interpersonal relationships in life? Is he or she the same in other interpersonal relationships?"

"Emotional counseling is about finding common problems from many cases and then proposing quick solutions. It may indeed meet current needs, but it is more like a temporary solution to a problem ," said Guo Lanxin.

For emotional counselors, reconciliation between two people is the ultimate goal of their service . To achieve this result, emotional counselors may directly intervene in the relationship between the two people, such as chatting on their behalf. However, in psychological counseling, except for crisis and couple counseling, psychological counselors will not intervene in the client's relationship with others.

Psychological counselor Feng Haoran believes that once a one-on-one consultation involves a third party, it may involve ethical issues, break the confidentiality of psychological counseling, and may also reduce the sense of trust in the consultation . "For example, if A in a couple entrusts an agency to contact B, then whether B is willing to be contacted and whether B is willing to communicate involves the issue of possible disrespect for personal wishes."

In addition, the fees and consultation models for psychological counseling and emotional counseling are also different . Psychological counseling usually tries to conduct consultations in an offline face-to-face manner, with a fixed meeting frequency and strict fee collection, unlike online classes or fitness, which are "pre-sold".

Emotional counseling is mostly an online service, such as the WeChat chat and phone calls Chuchu experienced. The counselors are on call like sales staff and respond to customers' questions immediately during all working hours. The charging model is also a monthly or quarterly package, and the corresponding services are provided to customers during the validity period of the package.

The package seems to provide a kind of reassuring service, but Guo Lanxin believes that "no matter how much money I spend to get my partner back, it is a very idealistic idea in itself. Once a problem occurs, it is impossible to go back to the time before the problem occurred." Command-directive emotional counseling will cause the client to avoid the cause of the problem even more, and only think that everything will be fine if the current crisis is solved.

In such a situation, the emotional counseling model has a biggest problem - although love has many different faces and the clients' situations are varied, in pursuit of efficiency and sales results, emotional counselors provide simple, crude and stereotyped guidance that cannot accommodate the different personal concerns of each client .

Emotional counseling is not reliable, so why is it so popular?

Compared with psychological counseling, which has already formed certain industry norms, emotional counseling is still in a state of wild growth. Not only is there a lack of industry standards, there is almost no unified ethical consensus .

Liu Haiping mentioned in his paper that in 2017, the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League, the Ministry of Civil Affairs, and the National Health and Family Planning Commission jointly issued the "Guiding Opinions on Further Improving Youth Marriage and Love Work", but several years have passed and the chaos in the industry has not improved much.

However, even with so many doubts and criticisms, why can't it stop the establishment and explosion of emotional counseling companies? Why do confused visitors turn to emotional counseling instead of psychological counseling?

One reason is the dramatic changes in contemporary society. Young people are in a state of flux, and traditional marriage and love concepts are increasingly difficult to match this state. Young people are abandoning traditions, but breaking the old has not led to the creation of the new. What is the best way to do this? Young people have no answer .

Anyway, I'm very confused.

British sociologist Anthony Giddens believes that young people in Chinese cities are becoming "mobile, restless and open" when it comes to love . With the rapid advancement of urbanization, we can no longer live in a certain area for generations like our ancestors did. People are increasingly scattered in modern metropolises to make a living. It seems easier to meet people of different identities and backgrounds, and have more opportunities to encounter romance, but it also means that it is easier to separate.

Giddens believes that when young people can no longer rely on the guidance of their predecessors’ experience, the search for love is like sailing in an “uncharted territory” full of “new dangers.”

During this journey, the advice given by psychological counseling is the counterintuitive "detour" of "to go north, you must go south", but emotional counseling can provide a practical solution that seems certain and can directly work on the problem .

Liu Haiping has a friend who graduated from a top university. She is usually cool and capable, but after a setback in her relationship, she turned to Ayawawa. Liu Haiping was deeply impressed by a sentence her friend said, "She said, ' We are so good at studying, why can't love be like studying, where I can get rewards as long as I work hard? '".

Ayawawa is very similar to emotional counseling. Their theories are certain. At least when promoting, they will make the audience believe that " if you make changes and efforts, you will be able to gain love ."

One fact that must be faced is that the relationship between emotional counselors and clients is that of "mentor" and "student", which is very different from psychological counseling that emphasizes companionship and advocates equality . For example, the company that Liu Haiping surveyed required counselors to call themselves "Teacher X" . Counselors often use condescending imperatives and rhetorical questions , and frequently use words such as "must" and "should" . However, it is precisely this relationship setting that makes users who are eager to solve problems quickly believe that emotional counselors are experts, and thus prefer emotional counseling.

Zhang Li, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, has studied the "incompatibility" of psychological counseling in China. She mentioned that a key challenge facing Chinese psychotherapists is how to make Western psychological and psychiatric knowledge and treatment models "fit" with Chinese social norms, cultural values ​​and desires .

“While therapists strive to create an open environment, they find it difficult to change clients’ overriding expectations for guidance from authority.”

This is related to cultural psychology. Qian Mingyi, a psychology professor at Peking University, and others believe that in the process of socialization, Chinese people are always required to obey the instructions of elders, authorities and professionals, and their trust and reliance on experts are deeply rooted in their subconscious.

Experts represent "authority" and "certainty", which are exactly the life-saving straw that people want to grasp in uncertainty . "When they are desperate and looking for medical advice, if an expert can come out and give them this certainty, even if he is a pseudo-expert, it will be fine," Liu Haiping said.

You have to be a down-to-earth expert, otherwise it’s better not to give any advice.

Trust and reliance indicate a greater expectation for the effectiveness of counseling. Zhang Li found that clients of psychological counseling often expect straightforward diagnoses and guidance that can quickly solve problems .

For therapists, the main task of the first visit is to calm the client's emotions and collect basic information, but clients may expect to know what to do after the first chat . Some clients may think, "If my therapist can't give me effective guidance, why should I waste money and time? I want real results so that I can believe in the other person's ability. Respect, warmth and sympathy alone can't solve my problems."

When people are desperate, they will inevitably have a desire to solve the problem quickly. Feng Haoran understands this, "The client is not willing to slow down, but I don't think it's the client's problem. When they are anxiously facing real problems, what they want most is not to explore their inner organizational structure first."

The needs that cannot be met by psychological counseling have become a hotbed for the flourishing of emotional counseling . Regardless of their actual effectiveness, topics such as "how to chase the boy you like", "how to stop your husband from cheating", and "how to quickly get girls" seem to be more relevant to the emotional anxiety of contemporary people. People seek solutions, but not too much understanding. As long as the current problem can be solved quickly, they can breathe a sigh of relief.

How to localize emotional mutual assistance

The "pitfalls" of many emotional consulting companies have shown that using templates and assembly line methods to solve complex and confusing emotional relationships is likely to be "only a temporary solution rather than a fundamental solution."

Guo Lanxin has met clients who feel that psychological counseling cannot quickly solve their current problems. Some of them ended psychological counseling and turned to emotional counseling, but returned to psychological counseling after suffering "secondary harm."

Guo Lanxin believes that if the problem is temporarily covered up by emotional counseling skills, the problem in the interpersonal model is likely to resurface . "Once it reappears, or even when new problems arise, the client will no longer be able to cope with it, and may even suffer greater harm."

Liu Haiping has also communicated with relationship counselors with a background in psychology and found that they are well aware of the low success rate of relationship counseling. "Some clients expect to solve 30-year-old problems in three months of consultation, which is obviously unrealistic." A counselor who specializes in recovery told her that even if the recovery is successful, there is a 70% chance of breaking up again.

After questioning the boss of the company about the fact that emotional counseling only treats the symptoms but not the root cause, the boss replied: "You academics criticize us every day. These clients come to you, but can you solve this problem? For example, if a female client divorces her husband, she will lose her source of income and cannot survive. In this case, even if her husband cheats on her, she must maintain the marriage."

Mediation programs such as "Love Defenders", "Golden Mediation", and "Peacemaker"

Similar to emotional counseling, mentors are here to guide parents in their daily lives

This also made Liu Haiping start to think, when people criticize emotional counseling for "treating symptoms but not the root cause", what exactly is the "root cause"? Is emotional counseling really useless?

Liu Haiping has seen many silk banners sent by clients in the companies he conducted field research, many of which were from clients who did not succeed in getting their partners back . "Many people give up halfway through trying to get their partners back, realizing that their demands for recovery are unreasonable, but they feel that the service is worth it because you accompanied me through the most painful time when I wanted to get my partner back the most, so I sent you a silk banner." This is a side that is not shown on social media, which is full of posts about avoiding and complaining about emotional counseling.

A set of "universal templates" for emotional counseling can routinely and flatten all kinds of strange emotional problems. These methods may indeed be able to solve the real confusion of some people, just as some people have indeed tasted the sweetness from Ayawawa's theory.

In any case, one thing that needs to be determined is that there is currently a considerable industry vacuum in the field of pan-mental health. The marriage and love consulting industry is a mixed bag, and scammers under the banner of consulting are still muddying the waters .

But in every field, there are people who make efforts to make the industry more standardized and help more people. In psychological counseling, the Chinese Psychological Association is trying to launch a registration system for professional institutions and professionals in psychological counseling. Some emotional counseling companies also envision turning counseling services into an open sharing community, "If you encounter a problem, you can search and immediately find some case methods we have compiled."

I hope that one day, the Chinese people’s emotional problems can find the most suitable answer.

References

[1] Liu Haiping. (2019). “Emotional experts” on the assembly line and workers pursuing their dreams: A case study of training at a Guangzhou marriage and love consulting company. Chinese Youth Research, (4), 48-54.

[2] Haiping, Liu.(2020). Successology for Women: Relationship Experts and Sociobiological Discourses. In: Love Stories in China. London and New York: Routledge.pp.43-61.

[3]Li, Zhang.(2014). Bentuhua: Culturing Psychotherapy in Postsocialist China. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry,38,283-305.

[4]Giddens, Anthony. (1991). Modernity and Self-identity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

[5]Qian, Mingyi, Craig W Smith, Zhonggeng Chen, and Guohua Xia.(2002). Psychotherapy in China: A Review of Its History and Contemporary Directions. Journal of Mental Health, 30(4),49-68.

Author: Xizhou

Editors: Emeria, You Shiyou, Odette

Title image: Adapted from the real experience of Xiaoliuer, a user of Xiaohongshu

Guokr (ID: Guokr42)

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