It’s not even that it’s “bad” therapy exactly. It’s clearly well intentioned and thoughtful, with a lot of thought put into it, and that’s a lot more than some people get from therapy if stories are any indication (and better than some other experiences I’ve had with it). But the part that shows up over and over again in the background is how focused it is on the individual. It sounds like it sort of makes sense at first, you are there to address your own problems, after all. But the thing is that a therapist has no solutions for what is beyond that. And the solution they often do have, in my experience, is some form of rugged individualism; be better at being you in a vacuum because you can’t control others and most things are outside of your control.
Self-improvement can be a thing, I don’t think that’s somehow wrong. Healing from trauma can be a thing. But the most abled, neurotypical, “healthy” of individuals in western capitalist society are still dealing with a lot of bullshit from capitalism itself and its consequences. Maybe I just wish people in mental health would call attention to that. I don’t expect the existing society to casually teach people how to be revolutionaries. But that doesn’t make it any less frustrating when you go to get help and feel like you’re being asked to either pretend a huge portion of what impacts you is not a factor, or take it like it’s some kind of inevitable stress of life and just cope.
It’s like this sort of “it doesn’t get better out there, so you have to make it better in here” is the best way I can think to put it. Like tacitly giving up on a fundamentally better world, even if that’s not the conscious intention.
When I was looking up CBT on Wikipedia because a friend of mine wanted to start it, I came down to the “critisisms” section and found a very interesting blog which might be worth a read.
https://melbournelacanian.wordpress.com/2014/02/03/a-critique-of-cbt-as-ideology-part-1/
I would argue most modern forms of therapy aren’t actually on the side of the individual, even if they seem like they are. They can’t address certain things that would empower you as an invidual, because it would be dangerous and also just not profitable.
And imo therapists don’t need to address or even recognize societal or economic problems, it’s out of their scope.
Anyway, take the blogposts with a grain of salt, I don’t know how accurate the critisism actually is.
Thanks for sharing it. Throughout reading it, I kept reviewing my experiences with therapy and comparing, going like, “Are they doing CBT? Oh no…” Best I can conclude, I don’t think they are as a forceful, streamlined practice, but they do seem to pull out elements of it like from a grab-bag of tools, or as a fallback when they don’t know what else to do with what I’ve said. The interesting thing though, is it got me thinking more about where the “pain points” are in therapy for me, for lack of a better phrase, and I think (I suppose unsurprisingly, if you consider the social tendencies of human beings) that I’m most happy at the end of sessions where I feel understood and supported, and most mixed or disturbed at the end of sessions where I feel misunderstood or like I have primarily been given a refresher on Mayo Clinic style descriptions of how I supposedly function and what I can do to fix it.
This line in particular from the article/essay stood out to me, so I took note of it:
So something like (I’m making this up as an example, not citing from actual anxiety measurement charts): an English language statement with a personal and subjective history behind it like “I feel anxiety when talking to other people” gets transformed into a +1 on a measurement for “anxiety disorder” and then if you get enough +'s, you get a diagnosis with anxiety disorder. This diagnosis is then treated as if it is identical to all other forms of anxiety (because it is now a neatly categorized and studied disorder), you get told it’s being perpetuated by all of the same sources (the “mind and body”, sources which are always internal… and this is a critical part, them being always internal makes them non-falsifiable and so easy to universalize across culture, background, etc., and pave over with a statistics-based aesthetic of empiricism), and can be “fixed” with the same generalized solutions (bring your thinking and behavior back in line with the status quo from wherever it has gone off to that is incompatible with it).
This is not to argue there isn’t any commonality in psychological struggle. There probably is a lot of commonality, at least within same cultures and conditions. But the particular problem form of clinical commonality I’m focusing on, which relates to what the article is talking about in my interpretation of it, is a commonality developed out of a very distorted and biased lens, and one which puts on a pretense of not being a distorted and biased lens, and that presents major problems.