"May your therapist always believe your explanations of why you're unhappy"

I just made up a fake old curse. You can easily turn it into a fake old blessing by inserting "not" before "always," if you're feeling nice.

What do I mean by this curse? I mean that, as a therapist, you might be performing a disservice by accepting your clients' explanations for why they feel the way they do. This seems obvious to anyone thinking in terms of psychological defenses (though I'd suspect that a lot of therapists, myself included, might take it too far, and are more likely to attribute something to defensiveness than to self-insight, but that's another matter), but not to a British pop psychologist.

From salon.com:

An expert has proclaimed that single women, despite their protestations to
the contrary, are completely miserable. According to Pam Spurr, an author and psychologist, single women who assert they are happy with their lives despite "their crushing loneliness and desperation" are not merely deluded, but outright lying. How does she know? Body language.
Upon talking with a woman at a party, who had every semblance of confidence, maturity and fulfillment (every semblance, that is, except for a ring on the all-important finger), the subject of sex and marriage came up. The sex therapist recounts:
"She immediately described herself as happily single. And yet her body language told another story: Chloe crossed her arms defensively over her chest until I just wanted to shout: 'Yes my dear, now try pulling another one.'"
Hmm. You don't suppose her body language seemed defensive because she realized she was talking to a hostile busybody eager to make snap judgments about her life on the spot and write disparagingly about her in an international newspaper, do you?

The Salon poster also makes the excellent point that, in using her patients as her other source of evidence that single women are unhappy, she's using a very skewed sample. (She's also using a skewed sample in that she's only looking at successful professional women in their 20s, 30s and 40s.)
What the poster doesn't point out is that the psychologist in question seems to be taking at face value her patients' assessment of why they are unhappy. This isn't neccessarily a bad thing, but living in a society in which happiness through relationships is such a major talking point, and participating in a sector of the economy (psychotherapy) that produces many ready-made solutions and snap analyses for these problems, patients like those seen by the psychologist in question have a ready-made, easily presented explanation for their malaise. Taking this explanation for granted might be a disservice to her patients, and it's certainly a disservice to anyone listening to your explanation of widespread social phenomena.

(The issue [mostly] overlooked in this very class- and age-specific discussion: are ways of living that are adaptive to upwardly-mobile professionals in their 20s and 30s maladaptive afterward? [The psychologist would be receptive to this argument, and hints at it.] Or are enough people taking on these ways of living that they will develop, as a cohort, adaptive new responses to their situation as they reach their 40s, 50s, and upward [to which I think the salon poster would be receptive], and what are married rich people unhappy about?)