So am I the only person who thinks therapy is kind of a load of crap?

bubububble:

tigerbeatdown:

jss:

I mean, unless you’re dealing with a legitimately traumatic situation, going to therapy seems like an act of a drama queen to me.

Sorry, this may not be a very popular opinion, but I can’t help but feel this way.

We’re all screwed up. We all have problems. But going to therapy, to me, seems like you think you’re problems are unique and special and no one could possibly understand you. But, you know, there are some people out there who deal with bigger shit than you and manage to move on without having to worry about dealing with it.

Um, I say no. I’m down with therapy. This is because, in my experience, it isn’t anything like the cuddly hand-holding free-to-be-you-and-me environment that people tend to describe.

The reason a lot of people describe therapy as self-indulgent, unnecessary, narcissistic, masturbatory, etc. - and thereby avoid going - is that therapy is a challenge to the way you think, the way you behave, and the choices you’ve made in your life. Which can be unpleasant. I got sort of an inkling of this when I read Freud for the first time; in “The Interpretation of Dreams,” he says (and this is a huge paraphrase) that analysis can never take the form that the patient wants it to take, because the patient has been determining the form that his or her life has taken thus far, and that hasn’t worked out. Basically, everything you think about the way you think is suspect. Now, I have a lot of issues with Freud, but one thing I do believe in and respect is realizing that you’ve fucked up, and that it may be because you are fucked up, and undertaking the commitment to examining and picking apart each and every factor of how you’ve fucked up, with an eye to changing it.

The reason therapists are gentle is that if they just came at you with all of this, you would probably never come back after the first session. Also: being confrontational with someone whose issues are founded in self-loathing only strengthens the self-loathing, which is counterproductive.

Now: in my experience, illnesses want to survive. Depression wants to survive; neuroses want to survive; addiction wants to survive. These things warp your worldview to such an extent that you genuinely cannot see outside or around them without another person’s help. They also allow you to come up with all sorts of nifty rationalizations about how you don’t need to see around them, they’re no big deal, all of the consequences you’re facing because of how they influence your behavior are just someone else’s fault, or the world’s fault, or what you deserve because you are worthless, and probably someone else could never help you anyway, probably in spite of the fact that what you have is a common, diagnosable, treatable illness you are somehow special in that yours can never be cured.

I’ve seen a lot of people totally wreck their lives by refusing therapy or treatment for their illnesses. And a lot of the time, they cite the same up-by-your-bootstraps thing that’s so much a part of the stigma surrounding mental illness: everyone else can deal, so you should be able to deal, so just deal already, until (basically) just “dealing” eventually kills you.

No, sir. I am not intrigued by those ideas and I will not subscribe to your newsletter. That line of thinking is responsible for a lot of preventable deaths. And a lot of wrecked relationships, and a lot of abuse, and a lot of addiction, and a lot of wasted, painful lives.

I say this as a person who has been through counseling, by the way.

I look at my grandma. Woman has gone through some messed up shit in her life. And sometimes she feels a little blue. But most of the time, she focuses on the positive and is aware that EVERYONE has a mess in their lives and you’ve gotta be able handle the ups and downs that are natural in life.

I’m all for whining about a problem. It’s the DWELLING on that problem that therapy requires that I have a problem with.

Your Grandma sounds very well-adjusted. Probably she does not need therapy. Lots of people do. Anything that discourages them from that or gives them a reason to avoid it is not something with which I can be down.

Tigerbeatdown says it better than I could. I spent a year in therapy with a psychologist - after years of other forms of therapy, and industrial quantities of antidepressants - and it not only enabled me to find a permanent (or quasi-permanent) way out of depression, but - by helping me change the way that I think - to change the way that I interact with the world and, if you’ll forgive the psychobabble, with myself. I am, in a literal sense, a different person from the one I was at the start of 2007. So it didn’t just help me, it helped my wife, with whom I was able to effect a reconciliation after eight years apart, and my three kids.

Source: jss