expecting "good for me" to be "always fun and easy" is, broadly speaking, going to lead to some weird and probably disappointing mismatches of expectation and outcome.
Meditative practice, prayer, etc. are "good for you", but they are _challenging_, which again, doesn't mean "a thing that is hard to learn but is sunshine and rainbows once i learn it". It means that you will come up against some dark shit sometimes, and that's "good" but it is in no way "fun", and yeah, you need a community of like-minded practitioners to help you.
Relatedly, therapy is "good" but usually not "fun"; and therapists need therapists of their own, too.
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.
I've had a couple bad therapists and a good therapist.
The good therapist discouraged me from worrying too much about using a drink at the end of the day as a tool to unwind (I was considering quitting alcohol to try to help my anxiety).
Therapy can be great, but it's not a commodity. Success is highly correlated to a strong relationship between patient and therapist, and finding that is very challenging for me and others I've discussed that with.
There’s a rub to all this in that all the good therapists are licensed, but not all licensed therapists are good. Anecdotally, therapy is at least as much art as it is science. There will always be those things that science cannot answer, that “logic” cannot provide a sufficient answer for. But yoga, meditation, art, dance, all these other things are also difficult to measure and quantify, and, we apply scientific rigor with various levels of failure to them.
How do you know someone has really meditated? You don’t. How do you know someone has had a good dance? You kinda don’t know that either.
There is a basis for understanding this from an engineering perspective, and it’s right there in what you just said — that outcomes are not correlated with educational background of the clinician. Sound like programming at all? Programming is also as much art as it is a science.
So therapy is no sure thing. That much, to me, is fine. And that’s the other rub. If you want to get something out of therapy, you’ll only get out as much as you get in. There can be no shortcuts blaming things you don’t like, nor idealizing the things you want to like. We can talk standards and rigor all day. But there’s no getting around having an internal compass of honesty, and a desire to apply that honesty to one’s life. That’s what a therapist (or therapy group) should be for you — an objective voice that questions your view of things while letting you be heard, as well as creating a safe environment for you to unwind the dark corners of the mind that are normally difficult to reflect upon on one’s own. Even there it is up to you to reflect on what happened afterwards. Your therapist cannot follow you all the way.
> It's not that therapy is bad (it's pure luck if you find the right therapist), it's that there was a solution for the problems it is trying to solve. A community. And the friends that come with it.
Pretty common problem people are trying to solve is "why do I always pick friends/partners that get me into trouble or abuse me" or "how do I stop repeating to others what my family done to me".
Otherwise said, for healthy person that does not need therapy, yep community solves loneliness. For people who do need it, if dont.
Therapy could be harmful if you have a bad therapist. Therapy as a practice though, I can't think of any reason why it would. I don't think it's ever a question of do / do not go to therapy but finding a therapist appropriate for you.
I know, I'm pointing out that trains of thought similar to "I was unsure of therapy but liked it and kept going" are not going to be universal because maybe there is some underlying thing that makes you more likely to be helped by therapy.
Uncharitably I've seen this framed as something like "therapists only help people with simple problems."
Maybe I need better therapists, then! Wish there was a good way to identify the good ones... that goes for all healthcare, actually. It always seems like such a gamble.
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.
It’s hard to bring up that point without being misunderstood. While therapy can obviously be incredibly positive, like any discipline it suffers from a large proportion of mediocre practitioners, and a smaller but more dangerous proportion of harmful practitioners.
My personal experiences with mental health professionals (over several decades, in multiple countries) were unhelpful at best, and at worst they included things like recklessly prescribing medication (within 10 minutes of the first meeting), relying on outdated junk science, pushing for more appointments/making it very hard to end the patient relationship, etc.
Considering that many people who are likely to go to a therapist are likely to be in a vulnerable place to begin with (doubly so for children/teenagers), the recent wave of blind faith in therapy and the belief that “go see a mental healthy professional it can only make things better” is reckless.
Your question would be answered by seeking help to see if it is right for you and for a common sense therapist to reject you if you’re doing fine. Sadly that is unlikely given incentives and the need to keep practicing.
They are great arguments but just feels generalizing something many don’t even do to begin with.
(Finding a good therapist is a bit like tech recruiting --- signal is low, false signal is high, quality variability is tremendous, search costs are high, consequences of a poor decision are high.)
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've found that most people vastly underestimate the helpfulness of a good therapist.
Your fear of making a fool of yourself smacks of an irrational level of insecurity that may stem from dysfunction that you may not be aware of.
A good therapist can help you get to the root of that dysfunction and teach you exercises and attitudes that could make you feel immensely more confident and happy.
If all else fails, a therapist will recognize if you might need pharmaceutical help.
I've seen therapy work for multiple people in my life - but addressing dysfunction isn't something that you can deal with on HN. You have to seek out a professional and commit yourself to working hard on getting better.
The point is they do something, but for that something to be most likely good/positive, you also need therapy, which if you want, you can interpret as a "trip sitter" or whatever the phrase is.
> A danger one can fall into with therapists, is that therapists have a self-interest in you coming back and/or giving a positive referral. If the therapist has that self interest in the back of their mind, they can avoid pushing you out of your comfort zone and/or enabling unhelpful patterns in order to get along.
This is an example of a pattern I see everywhere now that I look for it. I think of it as the junk food metaphor. There are many products/people/experiences/ideas/relationships that make you feel good right now but later leave you feeling even worse than before. Every time I eat McDonald's, halfway through that double quarter-pounder with cheese I find myself thinking "This is so fucking amazing. Why don't I eat this everyday?" Ten minutes later, when my stomach feels like I took a punch to it, I remember the answer. McDonald's is good to me, but not good for me.
I think a lot of therapists are like that too. They are unconditionally kind and you get an hour to talk about nothing but yourself. You can walk out feeling amazing. But did you leave with any tools? Did you get any closer to solving the mental problems that hold you back? Often, the answer is no.
I'm lucky that the therapist I found strikes a very good balance of being short-term good and long-term good. When I'm really struggling and in a rough spot, he focuses the session on easing my pain right now. But when I come in and things are going OK, he says, "OK, now is a good time to try to work on some of those deeper problems." Then he'll ask a series of probing questions that turn over dark patches of my psyche I've been afraid to look under.
I leave those sessions with sweaty hands feeling like I got a root canal and a math test at the same time. Those sessions aren't good to me. But over the next couple of weeks, I start to feel like an abcess has been drained. Those sessions are good for me.
These days, a big part of life for me is finding the right balance between short-term and long-term benefits. I've erred too far in both directions and ended up miserable, but there does seem to be a sweet spot somewhere in the middle.
Meditative practice, prayer, etc. are "good for you", but they are _challenging_, which again, doesn't mean "a thing that is hard to learn but is sunshine and rainbows once i learn it". It means that you will come up against some dark shit sometimes, and that's "good" but it is in no way "fun", and yeah, you need a community of like-minded practitioners to help you.
Relatedly, therapy is "good" but usually not "fun"; and therapists need therapists of their own, too.
reply