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.
Me too comrade, as someone who has been through a lot of traumatic and unjust shit in my life therapy always left a bitter taste in my mouth as what I wanted wasnt just my own peace of mind, but restorative justice; I wanted what happened to me to never happen to anyone else.
So what if im ok?
Other people are going through the same as me and they arent!
It just never felt fair you know?
Im smart enough to know that their is no entirely unique lifestory, if you’re experiencing something its because it has a material base, and as such other people are also going through it as well.
I also feel the pressure of therapy not to make things better, but to provide me with enough behavioral psychology reprogramming that I can numb myself to the pain rather than again, actually dealing with the root causes that keep reproducing these outcomes.
It feels like the bandaid handed down by capitalists as they saw your legs off.
No justice, no peace - liberal and class society is inherently unfair and proletarian justice would fix that.
I think I know what you mean here. Not to say my experience is one of therapists never trying to get me to do anything different (there is that too, in my experience) but there is also a certain degree of “fix the thought patterns” stuff that I hear, which seems more about “bearing the cross” than dealing with the sources of suffering directly. Not that it’s presented to me as religious in my case, but it does remind me in this moment of the Christian and Catholic connotations to do with suffering.