Your friends are lying to you. For $10, I wont.

I think in this case we are dealing with a discrepancy between what people think they want, and what they actually want. I wouldn't be surprised if a fair number of people try this once, but he might have trouble getting repeat clients and I have concerns about how helpful, outside the most narrow niche cases, this will be.

I'm a counselor, and going into the field I naively thought that straightforward evaluative statements were central to what therapists did. I thought that what people needed was "objective" feedback on their situations, and I thought myself ideally suited to providing it.

You can imagine my shock when I found out that "direct, reality-oriented feedback" is one of the most ineffective forms of intervention, and leads to a significant rise in client dropout. In other words, people don't like to be judged, however politely or compassionately, and it doesn't help them (1). People need love, not honesty - especially when they are going through troubles which are likely already causing them to question themselves.

The one exception is, as jtheory noted above, within the context of an already established attachment relationship, in which mutual respect and affiliation is already firmly in place.

In general, the best interventions are those which, rather than telling the client "what they need to hear", compassionately lead them towards the acceptance of what they more than likely already know. But it must come from the person themselves, and in their own time - that alone is what damns or saves.

Addendum: The research also reflects my experience. My internship was as a career counselor at a university and the most common client I saw were students about to graduate (often with little to no work experience) expecting to immediately get prestigious/lucrative jobs. I remember one philosophy major in particular who stopped by to see me 3 months before she graduated, whose only work experience was as a manager of a strip club and who wanted a 60k + job writing children's books right after she graduated. I told her, as kindly as I possibly could, that her expectations were more than likely unrealistic. Not only did I tell her but I sat with her and searched through the job ads for the position she wanted so she could see for herself what the requirements were for those positions. She left in a huff and I never saw her again. In fact, not a single client with whom I took a "brutally honest" approach did I ever see again. However, when I took a questioning approach, the difference was night and day.

(1) http://mobile.williamwhitepapers.com/pr/2007ConfrontationinA...

> bro

And your whole assumption gives me the impression that you are a ridiculously superficial person.

good point :)

While this might be a good idea, but if you want the truth just post it to Reddit or Hacker News, those motherfuckers are brutal and won't take it easy on you, anyways, i wish you luck.

So it's an online psychic. No idea if $10 is cheap or expensive for psychics.