No, a (good) therapist helps you find things that would be difficult or impossible to find on your own, it's literally an outside perspective. If what you did works for you, you either didn't have any serious mental health issues to begin with, or you figured out a hack to avoid thinking about the things which trouble you, which isn't much different from people avoiding problems by losing themselves in work, alcohol, religion, whatever. It's essential to have techniques to help yourself stay on an even keel, but it's damaging to other people who actually have problems to encourage them to dismiss their problems as insufficient detachment.
Oh, absolutely! A GOOD therapist will encourage you to confront your problems.
The problem is finding a good one. My experience is that the vast majority are on the wrong side of the couch, or assist you in suppressing the problem instead of confronting it.
After writing this reply I feel like I should point out firstly, that this is not in offense to the parent comment. He/she did it right and I just wanted to add/share my own experience.
I completely agree, but this is easier said than done. The emphasis is on RIGHT therapist. There aren't necessarily good and bad therapists, but ones an individual can work with. Finding those is very difficult and time consuming. I'm not sure if pointing this out is doing more harm than good, but it's certainly true. This is something I was affected with. People told me to go to the therapist as if it was that easy to solve a problem. Like, therapists are doctors for you mind. I went there with no prior knowledge or expertise on how a therapy works and after 7 weeks I was utterly disappointed and lost. What I (wrongfully) concluded, was, that therapy doesn't work for me. That therapy was for worse cases than me. That I didn't fit the system. Surely this is my own fault for not having a problem oriented mindset towards therapy, but in the end, it's not about whose fault it is. It's about helping people. So, after all of this I sometimes think we should at least imply that there is more nuance and effort to this approach (that is, visiting a therapist).
Ehh, I don't know about that conclusion. Just because people are more open doesn't mean that the therapy is effective. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if you're right.
But at the end of the day, a good therapist (in my experience) is really just a sounding board that points you on the right direction. If you've had a recurring concern recently, they may be able to push the conversation in the right way to figure it out.
For those who haven't seen a therapist, the best analogy I have is rubber duck debugging; it's not that the listener solves your problems, but rather that they allow you to help yourself.
Absolutely, but, know that finding the right therapist is less like finding a doctor, and more like dating or finding a church. One isn't interchangeable for another; you may have to search around a bit.
A good therapist is someone who:
- Really listens to you, and doesn't dismiss your feelings and experiences or try to put them in a box.
- (Gently) pushes you to dig into things and really uncover real stuff that leads you to progress. Some therapists just offer vague encouragement that feels nice for a bit but doesn't really help long-term.
- You trust. At least for me, there were some deep existential/identity developments I had to make. And I had to be aligned enough with my therapist on the big questions that I trusted them to help me along in the right direction. They won't ever have all the answers for you (be wary of those who say they do!); ultimately those come from you. But they're going to be an integral part of the process, so you have to be compatible as a team.
It took me three tries to find a therapist that was really right for me. It could take more than that. But it's absolutely changed my life in ways that nothing else could have.
One other tip: different therapists have different styles. At least for me and the people I know, "cognitive-behavioral" therapy was pretty useless. It tends to treat symptoms rather than causes. I recommend "parts-work"/IFS, which gets at the root causes and encourages you to identify and heal dissonance between different parts of yourself so that you can be on your own side instead of being in inner conflict. That said- everyone's different, and I'm sure other styles work for some people out there.
Part of many personal issues is that you "cheat yourself", or simply avoid tough topics (psychoanalysts call that resistance). A good therapist uncovers these topics, helps you to face them, and supports you in finding ways to deal with them. It is hard for me to imagine how one could do that without a human counterpart.
Yes, people are generally wary of seeing mental health professionals. That's understandable. There's some stigma associated with being thought to be mentally ill, and psychology is a young science studying phenomena that are devilishly hard to study. Clinical psychology in particular is forced to rely a lot on inherited lore, personal experience, and intuition, because the needed science isn't really there yet.
But that doesn't mean nobody should see a therapist. It isn't all snake oil.
A good therapist can help you identify where you need to get to for your own sake, and what skills will help you get there. They can help you realize when you're putting stumbling blocks in your own path and figure out how to stop doing that. They can help you pick out goals, point you in the right direction, and sometimes offer some help getting started on the way. The rest is up to you, of course.
You don't have to be mentally ill to benefit from a therapist's help. In fact, I think you're likely to benefit more if you're basically pretty healthy than if you're not, simply because you're more functional, and therefore better able to make use of what you learn.
That's my perspective from having seen a therapist for a while a couple of times earlier in life, from having encouraged my offspring to see them at difficult moments, from having a friend who is a licensed clinical counselor, and from having gone to graduate school in clinical psychology before I became a programmer.
Caveat emptor, of course. There are good therapists and there are charlatans. Look carefully and use common sense.
At its best, therapy helps you with the problems that you don't realize that you have. Or problems that you misunderstand, and keep wrapping yourself around the axle trying to solve the same way, but harder. A bit like rubber-ducking, in programming.
It's not that therapists have the solutions to your problems. What they have is a set of tools for helping you look at your problems in different ways, and experience in applying those tools.
It's really easy to be skeptical of that. You have, after all, been working on your own problems for a long time, and you know the domain better (yourself) than they possibly could. What can they contribute?
And the answer is that they're not you, and can therefore often see what's obvious to everybody except you. You know those friends of yours who can't figure out what's wrong even though everybody else already knows, but can't figure out how to convince them? Well, it's like that? That happens to everybody, including you. And unlike your friends circle, they're paid to be objective about it, to solve the problems rather than remain your friend.
This isn't a panacea. Finding a therapist is like dating -- you need somebody who clicks with you. It can take several tries to find one who works. It's not cheap -- it's covered under many insurance plans, but sadly conventional wisdom is that the best ones are those who can avoid working under insurance.
And that makes it kind of a catch-22: you have to trust the process for it to work, but it's not trustworthy. You have to be willing to step outside your preconceptions, which sounds noble in the abstract but is really aggravating in practice, since it feels wrong and feels like it's getting worse instead of better. Which it could be -- all of those various defaults and defensive mechanisms you've got, they came about for reasons.
Still, I'd say not to dimiss the notion. If you've dismissed it as clearly unable to help, I'd say you're wrong. Which isn't the same as saying that it can help.
The best I can say, as it relates to the article, is that if you're willing to go to therapy and take on the trust involved, that alone does make you more likely to succeed at dating, because you're at least trying to think about it. Or at least, you're demonstrating that you always were that person all along.
I hope that answers your curiosity, or at least helps point it in the direction of an answer.
I think I would agree with the article more if it were framed "Maybe You Don't Need to Talk to Just Anyone", as in, you might only find helpful outcomes from the right therapist.
There are different approaches to therapy. The article points out some ways that talk therapy could actually make problems worse, not better. But a good therapist would recognize the kind of problem their patient is experiencing, get to know their patient, and opt for a treatment path or an approach to talk therapy that will not be detrimental.
And therapy goes way beyond "talking about your problems to a professional." Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, for instance, is a structured process that is often utilized specifically in cases where talk therapy would not be effective. [0]
Therapy isn't the answer to every problem, sure. It's not going to help me unclog the garbage disposal. But I think the generalization that most people would be better off with the support of a good therapist is a true one. And sure, that's just my own opinion - but it's my view that mental hygiene isn't that different from the other ways we maintain the health of our bodies, and most people don't seem to object to the generalized advice that everyone should see a dentist twice a year.
Some of the points this article raises, like the negative effects of rumination or the potential utility of stress, are already known to me because I learned about them from my therapist, advising me about them!
Choosing the right therapist can be a challenge though, especially if you don't know what a good therapeutic outcome should look/feel like. I think most of the advice in this article would be better applied to "how do I choose the right therapist" than "should I just completely rule out therapy."
"What exactly would a therapist do? Saying consult a therapist seems a bit like a trope. It isn't within itself an answer."
Seeing a therapist won't magically make your problems disappear, but it could give you insight in to their cause, and if the therapist is good they could help you overcome those problems.
No one should be under the illusion that it'll be the therapist doing all the hard work. The hard work will have to mostly come from you. As the saying goes, you have to want to change.. and also you have to be able to put in the work to change.
The difference between this and trying to go it alone is that you'll have a trained professional on your side helping you to see your own blind spots, making suggestions you might not have thought of, and hopefully helping you to open up and look at issues you, your family, and your friends aren't trained to or necessarily willing or able to uncover or face.
It's no guarantee, however. Maybe you'll wind up with an ineffective therapist, or a therapist you can't trust, or a therapist you don't like, or one that's using the wrong methodology for you, or maybe you just won't be willing or able to put in the hard work or face the pain you might encounter along the way of self-discovery and change. No guarantees. But hope and professional help and support -- things you might be lacking if you've tried to go it alone and failed.
Some of us are stuck in a loop and need more than another self-help book or blog post to make progress with our issues.
A good therapist can be very helpful in helping you unpack why and how you think about things, and how you might change both for the better. That can be a valuable professional service. Especially for people who might otherwise have few or no relationships where they can talk about those things.
It is tragic that your family member did not get enough out of therapy, or perhaps was actively harmed by it. But I think therapy has helped enough people that I find it strange to blanket recommend against it.
Perhaps we can at least agree that short-scale (a few months, not years), deliberate therapy has a place?
Correcto. Also - what a therapist can be good at varies. They might be really good at zoning in on specific traumas but absolute dogshit at getting you over your general malaise.
I went to a therapist because I started having very obvious anxiety attacks (and my life sucked generally) but I couldn’t pinpoint the reason down. They were able to immediately pinpoint the source of the anxiety attacks (abandonment issue) and I stopped having them immediately cause that’s all I needed to hear to get over it.
But when it came to trying to get over my chronic stress and malaise and overall shitty life/lifestyle? They had nothing. They were basically like - “well you are with the wrong partner, you were born poor, and you’re trying to live in the most expensive place in the world and do it on single income. Yeah - you’re gonna fucking suffer. Sorry I have literally no solutions except move away and give up - which obviously does nothing for you because you’d never be here if you were the type of person to ever give up career wise or in relationships.”
It was like talking to a brick wall for those issues. Great for specific trauma problems - terrible for anything more ambiguous. Which - to be fair - I really don’t think any therapist could solve. It’s why I don’t think I’ll ever go back. It doesn’t seem solvable by wishful thinking.
Anecdotally, I’ve also been to several therapists, and after a few that didn’t fit, found one who focuses on the issues I’m dealing with, and the experience has changed my life. I have friends who have experienced the same. I also have friends who are frustrated by it all. Good care can be tough to find. This doesn’t invalidate the field, or the benefit of seeking help. I’d tell people to treat this like they would other life impacting health providers. Take charge of the situation, and leave providers behind who are not helpful. I do think too many people approach therapy like it’s a prescription. “Take this much, get this result”. I started with this mindset, and adjusted when I realized that it doesn’t make sense.
All of that said, the main point was that talking about therapy in a dating context is more nuanced than “everyone should be in therapy”, and that some people look for this signal for understandable reasons.
How credible that signal actually is, is another question. If you’re looking for “I’m working on myself”, that doesn’t imply an expectation that someone has reached enlightenment. Just that they’re trying to be better.
A large number of people don’t seem to try at all, so I’d still argue that it’s a signal worth considering. But like most signals, it’s just a signal. It doesn’t guarantee anything.
> meeting a therapist (a good one) and taking professional help is the easiest and most preferable route when you hit a rut.
"Professional help" is not always positive. If you have internal issues to fix, external help may or may not be the right thing for you. There's absolutely no standard approach for this kind of things.
> a therapist (a good one)
So what they end up with a bad one, was that good advice?
You've got a point, but depression often leads to isolation. One clear benefit to therapy is that – if the therapist is any good – you will get a relatively neutral, objective opinion reflected back at you. Friends, community and religious or other support systems rarely give sufficiently objective advice or a bird's eye view of the problem. It's not so much about renting a friend as it is to pay an outside professional who can hopefully give you more insight into why things are not going as well as you were hoping for. It is notoriously hard to analyse your own issues, even if you are knowledgeable about psychology or feel you have good self-knowledge.
I want to pay for neutral insight from somebody not vested in me personally.
Therapy is only as good as the therapist, and it's difficult to gauge if a therapist will be any good for one particular person. Getting the right therapist is critical for therapy to 'work'. Same applies for meds. But generally, it's about helping a person help themselves.
> As I mentioned above, the problem didn't even end up being with anxiety, so going to a therapist would have been worse than useless for me.
I wouldn't go that far. Therapy is a broadly-useful non-medical intervention that can increase across-the-board mental health. It bridges the gap between medical intervention, where specialists act as necessary gatekeepers to otherwise-dangerous courses of action, not that they're always successful at reducing the danger, and self-help, which is thoroughly hit-or-miss.
There is an established body of psychological research that the therapist brings you in contact with that the medical community is only tangentially aware of. Sure, you could read up on this stuff yourself. But it's the talk therapist's job to know about it. And even if you don't find purchase on your stated problem, you might find other problems that you didn't realize you'd had.
If you can afford it or get it covered, I highly recommend regular sessions for a few years.
A decent therapist will help you learn the skills you need to manage your mental health. I've found therapy to be extraordinarily helpful, both as an external sounding board but also as a person who can help me find resources without spinning my wheels for hours and days.
reply