A tireless conversationalist who knows how to generate optimism and good vibes around him. That’s right Nacho Coller (Valencia, 1969), a psychologist and teacher who combines his professional facet as a clinical psychologist with multiple immersions in the Spanish media scene.

Interview with Nacho Coller

We met with him to talk about his personal and professional life , to learn about his vision of the profession of psychologist and his present and future plans.Today we are talking with the great Nacho Coller.

Bertrand Regader: Nacho, your work as a clinical psychologist has been going on for more than 20 years. You are one of the most renowned psychotherapists in Spain, and yet it seems that you are always training and embarking on new projects. Is it this vitalist attitude that led you to want to dedicate yourself to clinical practice?

Nacho Coller: To tell you the truth, the attitude I had 20 years ago towards the profession is nothing like the one I have now; in those years insecurity and fear prevented me from doing many of the things I do now. I was distressed by the criticism and also thought that the other psychologists were better than me.

So imagine, on the one hand, the desire I had to eat the world and do things, and on the other, the brake I had in my brain as a result of my Darth Vader and my Dark Side of the Force . In my case, and based on personal work, life experiences of all kinds and how much I have learned from my patients, the cool part has won, the part that adds up and takes risks. My Darth Vader keeps talking, but I try not to pay too much attention to him.

B. A.: What are the three virtues necessary for you to treat clinical cases? And how have you managed to develop your talent in each of these facets?

Be a good human being, be well formed and accept your own limitations and imperfections. I don’t understand being a good psychologist without being good people, without being a good person. To be at the cutting edge of training, to read, to study, to train yourself, to ask when you don’t know and to make an effort and persevere. Adapting a phrase from the great Bertrand Russell , I would say that psychotherapy has to be guided by love and be based on knowledge. A third virtue is to recognize our own psychological and emotional limitations. We psychologists also cry, get depressed, have anxiety and suffer like the rest of the staff. The important thing is to accept our mistakes and work on them to get better. How can we ask a patient to make an effort to change if we are not able to do so? In order to develop my virtues, I try to be clear about my life project; recognize my limitations and know how to ask for help, accept my many imperfections, try to do my best to help the people around me and finally, surround myself with good people who bring balance and value to my life. People who are colourful, those who are subtractive, those who see the world under kilos of dandruff, the further away the better.

Even so and having more or less clear what you want, with a positive mood, leading a balanced life or at least trying and having good people around, one is not free from psychological disorders.

B. A.: Have you ever talked about the bad times you had in the past?

Yes, I’ve had a depression that’s been narrated in this article: nachocoller.com/depresion-a-black-dog-and-a-surprised-psychologist/

If you only knew how many colleagues have congratulated me publicly and privately for this act of sincerity and supposed courage.

With psychological disorders there is a lot of stigma and we psychologists join the copulative verbs to be, to be and to seem with the word good or perfect, what an obligation and what a drag not to allow oneself to be an imperfect person. In addition, there are professional colleagues who sell that they are mega happy and that they have the method to have control of thoughts and emotions full time (how much damage selling fallacies does). Note that when I had depression I lived it in silence and with much shame and now I am a teacher in the field of depression, precisely.

A psychologist like me, phew! I had a terrible time, no, the next thing, besides the sadness, was the guilt. Writing the article was balsamic, it helped me to banish the posture of ‘everything is fine’ and the ‘I can handle it’ and to be able to say to others: “Well, yes, I’ve had depression too! I know from the number of messages I’ve received in public and in private that this post has helped more than one colleague, especially the youngest ones, to feel guilty for feeling bad. And the best part? You should see the faces of many people who come to the office for the first time in anguish and depression when I tell them that I had depression too. I tell them about the article and encourage them to read it, that you can get out of it, that it’s normal, that anyone can fall, even the psychologist who is there with a half smile and looks like Superman , also had his dose of Kryptonite .

B. A.: In addition to your professional side as a therapist, you are one of the most followed psychologists in social networks. In fact, you were recently named by our online magazine as one of the 12 biggest ‘influencers’ in the field of mental health. What is your main motivation when it comes to taking care of your social networks?

Wow! I assure you that the main one is to enjoy and have fun; the day I stop laughing and enjoying my work as a clinician, publishing articles, participating in some media or giving classes, I will wonder what the hell is wrong with me; it will surely mean that I have lost my way. And I’d be lying to you if I didn’t add another motivational factor to keep doing things and that’s none other than personal ego and a certain amount of vanity.

Knowing that my work likes and has social recognition, it’s cool. I am very happy to know that with my contributions I can help some people make their lives a little more fun and safer. And if I also bring a smile to the staff’s face, I’ve achieved my goal.

B. A.: We recently saw you giving a TEDx talk in Valencia. How did that possibility arise?

My experience in TEDx was fantastic and from an intellectual point of view one of the challenges that has squeezed my brain cells the most. It seems like an easy matter once you see the video, but to prepare something original, with your own style and without copying, with more than 300 people in the audience and knowing that what you say is going to be recorded and can be used against you… (laughs) It was a huge challenge and very rewarding.

The story came about after a conversation with TEDxUPValencia , BelĂ©n Arrogante and CĂ©sar GĂłmez Mora (an excellent coach). We talked about anger, the loss of control we have in the car, the smoke vendors and the excesses in the Taliban’s messages of positive psychology and that’s where the story of the inner Neanderthal began. The video came later.

B. A.: Those of us who know you know that you combine your experience of many years with a remarkable sense of humor. Do you think that humor can help during therapy? Should life be de-dramatized?

I don’t understand living life without humor and laughter. Humour is therapeutic, it helps to relativize, to de-dramatize and to take distance from problems. In my practice, we cry, nothing else was missing, and sometimes we cry (on more than one occasion the tears have come out and they keep coming out, this will mean that I am still alive), but I assure you that if we put the scale, there is more laughter than crying. It is amazing how we are able to use humor even in extreme situations.

B. A.: We read in your blog an incisive article in which you claim the role of the psychologist with respect to other professionals, such as coaches. This is a controversial issue and the different Psychological Associations are beginning to face up to these forms of intrusion. What do you think the position of psychologists should be with respect to this?

I’m very angry about this. Our professional group is a bit peculiar. The moment we see a colleague who stands out, who appears on TV in a debate or in an interview, we start criticizing him or her and wondering which school he or she belongs to or that he or she is not one of my people; we go straight to the error. I cannot imagine two orthopaedic surgeons doing the same thing as us or two psychiatrists or two lawyers.

In the rest of the professions there is respect for the colleague, in ours there is not in general. I’m telling you this because while we psychologists are with the criticism and we continue to fuck it with cigarette paper and anchored exclusively in the pathology, in the problems and in that there are things that we do not have to say or do in consultation because that is what the brainy university manual indicates, a group without training has come along that has caught us with the change. A collective that, under the fallacy that everyone can be happy if they want to, in the “if you want to you can” and the infinite power of the mind to improve in life; with the wind in favor of the media pressure that we must be happy at all costs (the self-help industry moves 10,000 million dollars annually in the USA) and taking advantage of a certain legal vacuum, they sell happiness of everything at a hundred percent and sell personal development without having the slightest basis of studies in psychology (the Degree, of course).

I am very sorry to see a lot of prepared psychologists, with an excellent formation, with many desires to work and to contribute their grain of sand to the improvement of the society, that they see them canutas to become a labor hollow and that a type or type arrives that is a good communicator, with some negative vital experience of which then it is going to be taken advantage of to sell itself, that uses some words of powerpoint or motto of sugar and that sells smoke and takes the cat to the water. There is something we psychologists are not doing well, and I think we need to do an exercise in self-criticism. We are in a society of image, of perfect photographs and we must recognize that many coaches, mentors, companions and tarot players handle the image very well. Psychologists do not only go to the photo, to the static, we go to the X-ray, which is more accurate and we go to the film, which is more complete. By the way, we psychologists work on personal growth; in fact I usually do it in consultation, we are not only in pathology. Mental health is not something to be toyed with and coaching is no more or less than a tool of psychology.

B. A.: Is it so difficult to be happy? Or have we been led to believe that happiness is a consumer good?

If by happiness we mean living in congruence with your values and with your life project, being good people, showing attitudes of generosity towards the people around you and accepting that from time to time one will be bad; one can manage to be happy, yes. But of course, accepting that suffering is not going to disappear, that we cannot control everything, that we are not superman and that on many occasions we are going to lose battles because of our own inability to face challenges or conflicts, or because life sooner rather than later is going to give us news that is going to make us suffer, sometimes suffer a lot.

When I hear people going through life saying they’re mega happy or happy all the time, it makes me sick to my stomach, I can’t stand them. Just as I get a certain amount of grumbling from those people who make complaining an art and a means to get by in life.

B. A.: Lately you have been “on tour” with Miguel Ángel Rizaldos, Iñaki VĂĄzquez and SĂČnia Cervantes. What is this experience as a speaker contributing to you personally and professionally?

Our profession is very individual and solitary, and meeting a group of colleagues with whom you share the stage and who see life and psychology in a very similar way to yours is comforting. Professionally, it provides me with continuous learning from the best and personally, I take with me new challenges, new experiences, lots of laughter and good friends to keep on travelling, and as many years as I can carry my suitcase.