Reflections and Philosophy

The Field of Psychology - Part 2: The Reckoning

Why Psychology Has Failed & the Rise of Transformational Healing

Something is cracking open in the cultural psyche, and psychology — the field that promised to understand the human mind — finds itself exposed.

This is not a minor wobble.

It is a reckoning.

For decades, psychology has claimed authority over human well-being, mental health, behaviour change, suffering, transformation, resilience, and the deep architecture of the human experience. It positioned itself as the gatekeeper, the arbiter of legitimacy, the rational voice in a sea of superstition.

Yet:

  • rates of depression and anxiety have skyrocketed

  • loneliness is epidemic

  • trauma is widespread

  • meaninglessness haunts whole generations

  • psychological services are overrun

  • medication use is at historic highs

  • recovery rates remain shockingly low

At the same time, people increasingly move toward yoga, meditation, psychedelics, nature-based healing, breathwork, somatic therapies, coaching, mentoring, mindfulness, community circles, spiritual practices, alternative modalities, and simple lifestyle redesign.

The marketplace has spoken.

Psychology is not meeting the human need.

This manifesto begins by stating plainly what most professionals whisper privately:

Psychology has failed to deliver what it promised.

 

Not because of lack of intelligence, lack of effort, or lack of compassion within individual psychologists. But because the entire system is built on:

  • the wrong assumptions

  • the wrong models

  • the wrong incentives

  • the wrong training

  • the wrong power structures

  • and a profound misunderstanding of human transformation

This is not an attack.

It is a diagnosis.

And like any honest diagnosis, its purpose is to open the door to a cure.

What follows is a clear, uncompromising, and evidence-aligned case that psychology — as a profession, as a culture, and as an institution — has reached the limits of its usefulness.

And that a new era is already emerging.

1. Psychology’s Promise vs. Reality

Psychology promised several things:

  • a science of mind

  • effective treatments for suffering

  • an evidence-based path to flourishing

  • a profession equipped to guide individuals into wholeness

But the reality is stark:

  • outcomes for most common conditions (anxiety, depression, trauma) have barely improved in 40 years

  • evidence-based therapies routinely underperform in real-world conditions

  • the profession remains fractured, territorial, theoretical

  • large portions of psychological “knowledge” cannot replicate

  • the field is dominated by standardised protocols rather than transformational processes

Psychology promised mastery. What it delivered was management.

2. A Profession That Cannot Heal

This is the heart of the crisis. Psychology, at scale, does not heal people. It supports, stabilises, sometimes helps, often provides relief, but rarely produces deep, enduring transformation.

This is because:

  • the models are cognitive, not experiential

  • the methods are symptom-focused, not integrative

  • the training prioritises assessment, not relational presence

  • transformation requires engagement with altered states, embodiment, breath, emotional depth, existential meaning — territories psychology avoids

People seek healing. Psychology offers coping.

3. The Collapse of Public Trust

The explosion of self-help, breathwork, coaching, somatics, meditation, embodiment, and alternative healing is not a fringe movement. It is a referendum. When millions of people bypass a profession, it is because something in them knows: help is not found where the profession claims it is.

People are more likely to trust:

  • counselors

  • yoga teachers

  • meditation instructors

  • coaches

  • somatic workers

  • breathwork practitioners

  • community healers

They go where transformation happens, not where credentials are issued.

4. The Educational Problem: Training Without Transformation

Psychology education has drifted into absurdity.

  • Masters degrees in clinical psychology now spend far more time on assessment, diagnosis, standardised tools, psychometrics, research methods, ethical codes, and legal frameworks than on actual therapeutic process.

  • Students graduate having written thousands of words of academic essays but with almost no embodied theraputic skills.

  • Empathy, presence, deep listening, therapeutic attunement, relational intelligence, emotional understanding — the foundations of healing — receive shockingly little training.

  • Students are socialised into conformity: “don’t stand out,” “don’t innovate,” “don’t go too deep,” “don’t challenge the model.”

 It is a system built to produce bureaucratic operators, not healers.

5. Psychology as a Cultural Inhibitor

Psychology positions itself as liberating — but it often functions as a mechanism of conformity:

  • pathologising non-conforming experiences

  • discouraging spiritual or altered-state exploration

  • narrowing acceptable expressions of emotion

  • reinforcing normative cultural behaviours

  • favouring diagnostic categories over human experience

In claiming scientific neutrality, psychology has become a subtle enforcer of the status quo. It shapes society to fit the model, not the model to fit the human.

6. The Vacuum Filled by Everyone Else

With such meager and often unsatisfying offerings from psychology, the world turns to:

  • breathwork

  • coaching

  • somatic therapy

  • psychedelic-assisted work

  • meditation and contemplative practice

  • community, cultural and indigenous healing

  • spiritual psychotherapy

  • lifestyle simplification - for instance the tiny-house movement

  • philosophy, existentialism, and wisdom traditions

People are migrating to what works and has energy. These fields thrive in part because psychology ignored and abandoned the terrain of transformation.

7. The Missing Fundamentals of Human Flourishing

There are foundational principles of human transformation that psychology largely ignores:

  • Attention shapes experience.

  • Perception constructs reality.

  • Where attention goes, energy flows.

  • Embodiment precedes cognition.

  • Breath is the bridge between psyche and soma.

  • Meaning-making is neurological and existential.

  • States of consciousness matter.

  • Transformation requires experience, not instruction.

Within the discipline, qualitative investigation has long been treated as second-rate — a soft, inferior cousin to “real science.” The very methods most suited to exploring depth, nuance, meaning, and lived experience are routinely dismissed as anecdotal or insufficiently rigorous. In doing so, psychology devalues precisely the forms of inquiry that can illuminate what it claims to care about: the complexity of human consciousness and the subtle processes of inner change.

8. The Hiddenness, Secrecy, and Defensive Posture of Psychology

Many yoga teachers, coaches, and alternative healers, and even counselors feel intimidated by psychologists — and this is not accidental. 

Psychology maintains:

  • opaque standards

  • complex definitions

  • protected terminology

  • territorial regulations

  • an insider/outsider hierarchy

  • defensive professional boundaries

Much of this is not about client safety — it is about preserving an image of legitimacy in a field that hides its insecure about its results - results that are often acutly experienced as unsatisfying for the practioner and the client. The secrecy exists because transparency would expose the fragility.

9. The Illegitimate Territory: Claiming a Domain It Does Not Understand

Psychology claims authority over:

  • trauma

  • meaning

  • consciousness

  • emotion

  • identity

  • existential suffering

  • transformation

  • well-being

Yet the field, especially clinical psychology:

  • does not understand consciousness

  • avoids spirituality

  • distrusts altered states

  • sidelines embodiment

  • dismisses breath

  • minimises existential realities

  • devalues the transcendent

Simply put, psychology has claimed a domain it has no real mastery of. Its authority is cultural, not earned. And beneath that unearned authority, many clinical psychologists carry a quiet, unspoken tension — a kind of professional imposter syndrome.

10. A Profession in Retreat

Around the world, psychology is being quietly displaced.

  • In America, the rise of Clinical Mental Health Counselling is shifting therapeutic authority away from psychologists.

  • In Australia, counselling associations have rejected the over-professionalisation that crippled psychology.

  • In New Zealand, counselling pathways are becoming increasingly robust while psychology struggles with bottlenecks, shortages, and public dissatisfaction.

The monopoly is dissolving. And people are already well underway in building what comes next.

11. The Simplicity of Well-Being (and the System Built to Complicate It) 

At its core, well-being is not complicated. Fundamentals such as:

  • breathing well

  • connecting deeply

  • living simply

  • moving the body

  • expressing emotion

  • being present

  • creating meaning

  • forming community

  • living in alignment with values

  • cultivating awareness

  • experiencing transcendence

These are simple human capacities. But simplicity is the enemy of institutional psychology, because:

  • complexity justifies professional authority

  • jargon creates dependence

  • diagnostic categories create patients

  • standardised systems create legitimacy

In the attempt to become a “science,” psychology abandoned the simple truths that actually create well-being. 

Anything too difficult to measure was quietly sidelined. Anything too complex, too layered, too philosophical, too human was deemed “unscientific.” If it could not be put on a Likert scale, operationalised into a questionnaire item, or isolated in a 12-week intervention study, it simply did not belong.

But real exploration of the human experience is not tidy. It is not fast. It is not easily quantified. It requires time — sometimes years — and it demands a willingness to sit inside ambiguity, paradox, and depth. It asks us to engage with philosophy, contemplative traditions, lived experience, and the slow unfolding of insight.

In prioritising what could be measured over what mattered, psychology traded depth for data, mystery for metrics, and genuine understanding for the illusion of scientific precision. Quite sad really.

12. Infighting, Hierarchy, and Identity Fragmentation

Psychology is not a unified field. It is a federation of competing tribes:

  • clinical psychologists, even while still wet behind the ears after completing a master degree, claim supremacy

  • psychologists with PhDs are marginalised by professional associations and clinicians

  • social psychologists are treated as outsiders

  • environmental psychologists are dismissed

  • counselling psychologists are minimised

  • existential, transpersonal, and humanistic psychologists are pushed to the edges

This infighting reveals the insecurity at the core: the field does not know what it is. When a profession is this internally fragmented, it cannot coherently guide anyone else.

13. Academia’s Paper Mill and the Drift Into Irrelevance

Academic psychology is held hostage by one demand: publish or perish.

The consequences:

  • meaningless studies churned out for career survival

  • student labour recruited into research for publication quotas

  • replication crises

  • research disconnected from real human experience

  • theory disconnected from practice

  • academics producing knowledge nobody uses

  • practitioners working with methods academics do not respect

The field is devouring itself for relevance. Instead, it becomes increasingly irrelevant.

14. Guidance for the Young Person Drawn Toward “Helping”

 A young person fascinated by psychology usually feels one of two things:

  • a calling to help others

  • a desire to understand their own pain

These are noble instincts. But psychology may not be the path that nurtures them.

Before entering the system, consider exploring:

  • meditation and contemplative traditions

  • breathwork

  • embodiment and somatic practice

  • philosophy and meaning-making

  • community-based healing

  • nature-based practice

  • authentic movement

  • spiritual psychology

  • interpersonal neurobiology

  • coaching models

  • indigenous perspectives

  • experiential training (not academic training)

If after all this exploration the person still wants to study psychology, they’ll enter it with eyes open — not as a seeker of salvation, but as a builder of something new.

15. Guidance for the Person Seeking Real Transformation

Many people approach psychologists with unrealistic expectations:

  • “They will fix me”

  • “They will know what to do”

  • “They will make my suffering go away”

After multiple failed attempts, they assume, “There must be something wrong with me.” But the truth is often simpler:

the modality was wrong, not the person. To find real transformation, look for approaches that:

  • engage body and breath

  • work with altered states

  • integrate emotion rather than manage it

  • touch meaning and identity

  • involve experiential processes

  • create coherence between psyche and soma

  • honour the spiritual dimension

  • allow deep expression rather than analysis

  • open states of presence, insight, or transcendence

Healing requires experience, not discussion. It requires processes like Guided Respiration Mindfulness Therapy (GRMT) — transformational, embodied, integrative, evidence-aligned, state-based, and meaning-centred.

16. Toward a New Paradigm

If psychology’s era is ending, what comes next? A new paradigm is emerging, built on:

  • consciousness studies

  • embodiment

  • breath and physiology

  • neuroplasticity

  • presence

  • meaning-making

  • experiential insight

  • altered states

  • spiritual integration

  • contemplative science

  • community and connection

  • integrative models like GRMT

This is where human transformation actually occurs. The future does not belong to an academic discipline.

The future belongs to a new kind of practitioner:

  • embodied

  • present

  • experiential

  • integrative

  • spiritually literate

  • existentially grounded

  • breath-based

  • somatically attuned

  • neurologically informed

  • deeply human 

Psychology will not disappear. But it will be one small voice in a much larger movement. The age of the human awakening is beginning.

END NOTE: Psychology’s One Uncontested Triumph

If psychology has succeeded anywhere without question, it is not in healing but in selling. From advertising to social media to political persuasion to compulsive consumption, psychology has provided corporations with razor-sharp tools to:

  • capture attention

  • trigger desire

  • manipulate emotion

  • bypass reflection

  • stimulate craving

  • induce impulsive behaviour

It has shaped entire societies around consumption. It understands perfectly how to make humans want things. It just doesn’t know, or is strategically disinterested in, how to help them suffer less. This may be psychology’s strangest legacy: the profession that failed to transform human suffering but succeeded spectacularly in transforming human behaviour in service of consumerism.

A fitting symbol, perhaps, for an era that is now ending.