Therapy is practically useless and impotent in most cases.
It can’t solve your problems but can ironically augment them and slow down healing. It could also be an immoral business.
Talking About Your Problems Is Helpful But Only To a Point
The main value of therapy is that you export some of your thoughts and feelings for a brief moment. That very act is 90% of the benefit as it helps a process known as emotional recycling.
A basic example would be crying. Crying is both an expression of sadness and a self-preserving reaction. After crying most people feel lighter even though the situation is functionally the same as it was 3 minutes ago. How could it be any different?
But the very act of exporting your emotions through tears helps (always).
Talking to a therapist (who you believe cares and is a good professional) helps too, but after that short phase, you enter another one that could keep you stagnant forever.
The “Dwelling Phase”.
Therapists encourage greatly the Dwelling Phase because it’s beneficial to them financially and professionally (they get more info/research out of you). But dwelling on your problems NEVER solves or betters them.
Imagine that you are 30 years old and have suffered from low self-esteem for years that was initiated by non-supporting parents and bullying at school.
A therapist gets to dig into you for endless sessions and makes you relive all those moments.
“How did that make you feel,” he/she would ask.
Well, if they have to ask the question, they already know the answer – it made you feel awful.
Reliving those painful memories is scary close to resurrecting them. Or in other words – you are keeping the wound open.
If a bully put your face in the toilet when you were 12, recreating that moment in your head as an adult over and over again is just counter-productive.
I’d even say that doing the EXACT opposite a.k.a. burying it and moving on as fast as possible would be healthier. That can’t be done right away, but constant digging only postpones that moment.
For example, I’ve had a ton of “romantic rejections“. I am not proud or happy of that fact. And I can undoubtedly say that it made me feel bad inside. But I do my best to never resurrect any of those rejections as I know that the enriched experience won’t do me any good.
You can’t move on while hanging on to the past. The old you has to die.
Therapy = Impotence
Therapy doesn’t even fully treat the symptoms let alone the root issue.
Imagine that you are a “low-value male” (a semi-polite way of saying poor and/or ugly) who can’t get a “romantic” partner in the modern age where even legit 9/10 dudes receive harsh treatment occasionally.
How exactly is a therapy session going to help the situation outside of calming you?
What if you get a divorce and lose your house, and the ability to see your kid as frequently as you would like (or at all) all while paying a massive alimony?
How is therapy going to solve that?
Honestly, it just can’t and anyone telling you otherwise is a liar. It can ease your mind once in a while, but the problem stays.
Ultimately, it boils down to this – if “lack of therapy” didn’t create the issues that you are facing, then therapy can’t fix them in the long run.
Playing With Your “Firmware” Is Dangerous
In a way, therapy is а “firmware patch” that people seek after or during a traumatic event.
You can’t let just anyone play with your firmware. If the therapist in question is incompetent or simply malicious towards you for whatever reason, they can cause a bug on purpose.
I know a story about a 19 y.o. boy who went to some therapist who played a real number on that kid’s psyche. Why? The boy’s mother had cheated on the therapist decades ago. So the therapist used his skills to fill the boy’s head with “viruses”.
But that’s a very rare scenario. The most common one is more trivial and is, of course, money-related.
Some therapists would purposefully keep a person’s wound open simply to keep them paying. Just when the patient has received about 99% of the positives that the healing sessions can provide, the therapist would restart the virus.
E.g., Tell me about your relationship with your mother.
How To Get Free Therapy
The main point of therapy is to “just get the emotions out”. In 99% of the cases, we are talking about a form of sadness or anger.
Ideally, you will just talk to a friend or a relative….or honestly to someone who would listen. They don’t necessarily have to “hear you”. They just have to listen. Of course, that’s not always possible due to different agendas.
For instance, I’d never tell my parents (unless I 100% must) about my “romantic rejections”. But I did so in writing and that helped me.
But you don’t have to write.
Sometimes even talking to yourself helps. The key, however, is to talk out loud. If you are talking in your head, the effect is smaller, albeit still present.
One of the options is to go to a quiet place (a common choice would be to drive somewhere because cars are sound-isolated to a large degree) and just scream and/or cry. It will help, but obviously, none of this will solve the actual issues.
However, you will become more balanced because some of the “negative chemicals” will leave and the recycling process will start.
Depression Is Rarely a “Head Problem”
All of this brings me to an important point.
Depression is rarely a “head” problem. Yes, I know that depression could be classified as a “chemical imbalance”, but that imbalance didn’t occur because you weren’t taking anti-depressants.
Do you think that every person who appears at peace is on drugs?
Depression is mainly caused by unhappy/unfortunate/nasty life situations rather than nutrient deficiency (although food and sleep are important for mental health).
Let’s take the divorced guy from above as another example. It would be surprising if he doesn’t get depressed. Yes, the degree depends on the individual, but no one would be exactly happy in his shoes.
Now, imagine that this same guy wins the lottery. Suddenly, he can quit his job as a pipe welder in the middle of nowhere and can easily pay the alimony. He starts “balling”. His wife calls him back because she’d accidentally found “a new spot for him in her heart”.
But he rejects her. He no longer needs her as there is an army of gold-diggers just like her (but with bigger boobs) waiting for him.
His kid shows more interest in his company because well…having a rich dad is fun. The guy finds a new wife (15 years younger than his middle-aged depression-inducer) and starts a new family. He also opens a business (e.g., a bakery) that starts generating coins.
Don’t you think that this outcome will kinda cure his depression a lot “better” than some pills?
Ultimately, changing your EXTERNAL situation rather than digging INTERNALLY forever is a lot more effective in curing or at least diminishing sadness/depression (a complete cure doesn’t exist).
And therapy doesn’t do that. At best, it calms you don’t before you start working. But otherwise, it’s just head-scratching and dwelling on the past that keeps you chained to a younger version of yourself that probably doesn’t need endless resurrections.
– Truth Seeker
As someone who went a few times to therapy in recent years, I agree 100%.
Classic therapy might work well for most women, but for men I think it can be way less effective. While there are exceptions, a lot of men (including myself) don’t feel particularly comfortable talking about ourselves and our emotions with a complete stranger. A therapist might be a professional, but like all humans they have their own biases and agenda, so blindly trusting them and revealing them everything is naive.
That’s why personally I think people should preferably look for psychologists of their same sex if possible. There are certain topics (such as romantic/sexual frustrations or bad experiences) someone of the opposite sex will just fake empathy at best and be horrified about at worst. Only men can truly understand and put themselves into the shoes of other fellow men.
Agree about the same sex. If you go to some woman therapist as an adult male no matter how much she tries, she just can’t understand/relate.
The ideal person to learn from is someone similar to you who has successfully (or semi-successfully) overcome similar struggles.
Hello, very good article, I don’t believe in therapy either, but I recommend, if you want and have the opportunity, to read and analyze two books by a psychologist, who does not believe in Freud and follows cognitive behavioral therapy, which helped me a lot and without need. going to therapy: feeling good and goodbye anxiety. by David Burns.
I recommend them to my friends
Well, regarding who to go to therapy with, it would always be a man in this case, even if the patient is a woman, why? Male rationality tends to detect problems, female dramas are also in the academic aspect (even if she is a super successful CEO, her female biology will be like an iron that attracts a magnet for what is modern female madness).
Now, a slightly less synthetic way would be boxing, an interesting way to get rid of stress and cultivate a necessary skill, in addition, men do not feel sad but rather we want solutions (hence therapies are of no use at all), to move forward and solve problems, boxing may not do it, but if it is about releasing pressure as if it were a valve, it is efficient.
I’m not much of a boxer myself, but I must agree with you. I used to do Thai boxing years ago. I wasn’t any good, but I got into a stage where we were sparring. It’s difficult to think about other problems when you’re being punched in your face. Bills, work and family issues etc. just seem to go into the backburner when the adrenalin kicks in and you are in the tunnel vision. You only have one problem in front of you, that is very difficult to hit and deal with, and it gives you back all the time. And of course, on top of it, you get all the other benefits of exercise, dopamine or whatever the hell they are. Exercise have been proven to be more powerful tool against depression than antidepressants to my knowledge.
Oh yeah, as an exception to the rule. You can be depressed and get punched in the face at the same time too. One legendary occasion was when the great Lennox Lewis got his revenge over Oliver McCall in their second fight. In all of its sadness, that is a great demonstration of what depression and mental problems may look like.
Therapists and Psychologists, Are nothing more than – Legal drug dealers.
“Talking to a therapist (who you believe cares and is a good professional) helps too”. This is super important. I had a friend who moved to another country to study psychology. While there he learned that in psychotherapy, the most important factor when it comes to how successful the therapy is, is the trust and relationship between the therapist and the patient. The approach and methods aren’t that important and all those things can´t overcome the importance of the relationship. This information was too much to my friend, so he jumped from psychology to philosophy.
The biggest thing about therapy to me is / has been the fact that is timed occasion where you stop and go through your own mind, and you do it to an “outsider”. The “outsourcing” is one of the key takeaways. I’ve delt with depression my whole life and although I’ve always had things seemingly good, all the basics covered, sometimes my own network hasn’t really been that helpful. When you get to that automation phase in the treadmill of life, you can easily get to a point where it’s very difficult to see outside the box. Talking to someone else makes it easier to figure out things, and kind of elevate yourself out of the box.
On paper it would be easier and a lot cheaper to just think and figure shit out by yourself. But once again, knowing what to do and doing it are just completely two different animals. Good luck making an appointment with yourself where you just talk to yourself and reflect shit by yourself. It may be done, but in most cases, you just put that “me time” in your calendar and then you just don’t do anything with that time. Probably you end up watching social media or whatever and by the end of the “session”, you feel a lot worse.
Also, the type of therapy means something. I used to have the idea that only the “solution based” therapy works, so I would only get ways to deal with the current issues and situations in my life. I didn’t want to dwell in the past. And yes, it was somewhat helpful, there’s no doubt about that. But after I quit the therapy, I eventually started to see different things emerging into my behavior. Those were all related to my past, which I didn’t have any interest in opening. But it had to be done too, eventually, and I’m glad I did it. Since then, I’ve been able to go through some of the most satisfying and some of the most difficult conversations in my life with my loved ones.
One thing I haven’t really experienced in my life yet, is what Truth touched in the of this article, money. I think that would ease up thing a notch. I just saw an interview with Francis Ngannou, who came through shitty conditions, from rags to riches. In the interview he said that he never understood the idea that you couldn’t buy happiness with money. He just said that I gladly take the money and go for it, you can keep the happiness. That’s because he knows what it is when you don’t have any of it. But I guess that’s how it often is, we value the things only when we don’t have them / we lose them. The lyrics of Barret Strong’s song “Money (That’s What I Want)” put this out very well.
Nice work…
The use of therapy/counselling is the following:
Comfort: solidarity, sympathetic listener, reassurance that you’re not ‘unusual’
Identify a problem: negotiate a realistic, pragmatic view of a situation that is causing distress
Strategise a solution: realistic, manageable actions that could lead towards a desired, change of circumstances
Encouragement: continuous reassurance through the process of change as the person enacts/attempts to enacts the agreed upon solution(s)
It’s very common for people to get stuck on the identification step, which can be seen as just bitching. It’s also very common for people to get stuck on the encouragement step, as enacting change is naturally distressing, even terrifying.
When this is made clear, the mystique around what goes on inside the therapy room is diminished, and it’s clear to see that really family members, friends, and your wider community should naturally fulfill this role. It says a lot about our society that such a human interaction is being professionalised and pathologised.
I had a father who mentally abused me. What was the pragmatic way I had? Now the jerk is dead. It’s much easier for me. I’m only sorry he didn’t die earlier. People don’t change. The jerks have to physically disappear, to make the victim feel better. Another way is to simply walk away from the jerk as much as possible. A jerk can be a parent, a spouse, a child, a sibling, a colleague at work, a boss… It’s less or easier to run away from them. A YouTube star (a car mechanic who recorded car videos) killed himself because he was abused by his ex-wife. The whore used their daughter for extortion. In one clip, he says, “I come to the service center when I don’t want to argue with people, with family members…”. We all understand the first, and after all, the second.
My neighbor killed himself in custody because his wife reported him for physical abuse. While he was in custody, she started to sell off his household. The man had never been in trouble with the law before.
A very familiar story to me. My father did the same. At the same time, I always felt there was something about him, like I had to admire him although all the things he did. But I guess that’s how a kid’s brain works. When I got a bit older, I finally realized that all the shit he pulled off was completely wrong. At the time I read in Charles Bukowski’s book about an attitude / survival mechanism he developed, where he handled his relationship to his father as if his father was dead although he wasn’t yet. I did the same and it made things a lot easier. The irony of the thing is that a few years ago I got a call, and I was told that my father had been in a horrific accident and was in intensive care. Although I had treated him as dead for about 2 decades already, I was still stunned. He made it through after hours of surgery, but that didn’t change our relationship at all. Well, it changed it for a week or so.
I always felt that many of my friends had a lot better relationship with their fathers although their fathers were far from perfect too, but they didn’t do that constant emotional damage, which kind of stays with you. Then again, childhood trauma is a standard finding. I always envy people who have a great relationship with their father, it can give you so much. Th truth is that you must really screw something badly up if your kid treats you as dead. I just can’t imagine how it happens, and as a father myself, I hope I never end up in that situation with my kid. If I do, it will be the biggest failure in my life. Sad thing is, we usually end up doing all the same mistakes our parents did, although we always say we aren’t going to do them.
Forgot to add this. Sometimes I think that we could kind of start again with our relationship. The difficulty is of course that someone would have to make the first move, which is probably as difficult for us both, and I somehow feel that he should do it. Then again what is the probability for it to go well, I would probably tap into some of my childhood memories, and it would feel like shit to be with him. I don’t know, maybe reuniting with a parent is just something from a movie.
12 step recovery programs did what therapy could not, which is to get me to use the tools learned dilegently. The biggest things I got from therapy was learning tools to use to deal with my anixiety and strong feelings when they come but 12 step programs provide the accoutablilty to keep doing those tools through doing the steps daily and making those phone calls to recovery buddies with more progress in recovery then myself.
12 step work got me doing things I never thought I could do like block my Parrents on my Phone, learn to not freak out when someone is mad at me, and to express how I feel and what I need, and Suggest Marriage Counsiling for Me and my Wife.