Every negative emotion I have, I’m told to go to therapy.
Negative emotions are human!
Why have we, as a society, grown to fear them?
Therapy isn’t for negative emotions. It’s for poor reactions to negative emotions.
If you’re told to go to therapy for “every negative emotion you have” it sounds like there’s more going on here than you just having them.
Great response.
I have a family member who gets angry very often. Things make him mad, I get it. The emotion isn’t bad. However, he then starts yelling at everyone around and becomes hard to be near him. Anger isn’t why he needs therapy. Yelling at those he supposedly loves instead of communicating why he’s upset is why.
People don’t see your emotions. They see your behavior. They hear what you say, observe your actions and reactions, and from that they decide if they want to suggest therapy or not.
I don’t know if you need therapy or not because I’ve never met you in person. But if a large number of people you encounter suggest you seek out a therapist, it’s not because of anything you felt. It’s because of something you said or did. And you may be wise to reflect on those moments when they happen.
I acted out on feelings I didn’t recognize myself when I was at my worst, people told me to go to therapy. Then I finally did, and after three years I was more in touch with my emotions and more in balance with my inner world. I’m still a wreck, just a more functional wreck who no longer shouts out the shit that’s churning inside.
Sounds like something you should talk over with a therapist.
I’m pretty sure the sarcasm in your comment was totally lost on most people who modded you up. And just for that, have a mod point 🙂
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I’m pretty sure the sarcasm in your comment was totally list on most people who voted you down. This includes me.
Negative emotions are human but some people need help to learn to handle them in healthy ways.
It feels like an over correction. Therapy has been long since been badly stigmatised and people realise how much it can help. If someone feels therapy will help then that’s great. But it’s not a magical solution to every problem. And even if therapy is helping you, you need to do 90%of the work on yourself and therapy helps you untagle the last 10% that’s too difficult to handle on your own.
Are you American? As a European, it seems that Americans are obsessed with therapy, whereas I don’t think it’s at all common over here.
It’s a rich American thing.
poor Americans don’t have access to therapy. it’s a luxury good, like travel.
and the people who tell you you have to have travel 3x a year are the same ones who think you must have a therapist.
it’s a luxury good, like travel.
It shouldn’t be.
A lot of major health insurance providers have free “self-help” style mental healthcare options, which are better than nothing even if they’re kind of lame, but even one of the worst insurers I’ve been on (Kaiser Permanente) had decent mental health benefits. They like money and they know that subsidizing therapy is way cheaper than paying claims for a lot of the issues poor mental health can lead to
That’s bullshit. Most places have free or extremely low cost therapy available. Most. Not all.
Fuck, if you’re really broke you can pirate a CBT or DBT workbook. Less effective than the real thing, but if you’re committed to change it can really help
You don’t even have to do that, there are free CBT, DBT, and shadow work exercises that are printable.
Good to know. You can also probably find books describing techniques at the library.
I’m not saying self administered CBT alone fixed me, but it took me from unstable to manageable, and from there practice and experience got me pretty far. Also lsd helped.
So yeah, if you’re too poor for therapy (and medicaid doesn’t cover it in your state) self administer CBT/DBT then when you’re more stable if you don’t have a family history of psychosis pop a few tabs of acid
I was in and out of available low-cost, therapies, often with poor or outright bad therapists, for a long time. It was sort of a convergence of factors that healed me, beginning with someone who said something that prompted me to look up something from early childhood behavioral psych from decades earlier that no therapist mentioned: attachment theory, and from there another year or so of floundering my way along, until I was able to access good telehealth therapy, from a good therapist, who attended a horrible school, and finished out months later, in person.
Yes, there have been ups and downs since, and a couple of times I almost spun out, but was able to catch myself until I was able to get privacy and time to do the work while actually feeling the feelings. The point is, if you really want it, you’ll do whatever it takes as often as possible.
Every therapist I’ve known has an income based sliding scale if insurance doesn’t cover it.
you seem to think therapy in america is some kind ofad, or a phase. more and more people are coming foward for therapy, plus recently women/girls are being properly recognized for adhd/autism properly now. when before they could mask it easily, and sometimes they were seen as lazy, still living at home types.
That is a bad thing. While therapy can’t solve every problem, it can solve a lot. That American’s can admit to using therapy means we can get the help we need when needed. I don’t know how, but Europe needs to fix their culture and get people the help they need, not be smug in the “we don’t need it” attitude which harms those who need help.
You’re reading a lot into that comment, it’s indeed not that common over here, but it isn’t non-existing either. If people need/want therapy, it’s available.
Edit: It’s also not that common to talk about therapy over here. Not that it’s taboo, but we don’t like to over share our medical history.
Perhaps then you’re also reading into Americans obsession with therapy as being a [fad? Perhaps?], and less the reality that many Americans desperately need therapy and is actually a real, tangeable problem
Americans actually need affordable housing, medical care, education, vacation time, workers’ rights, etc. Therapy is how oligarchs want you to “solve” your problems.
We can have all these things. Many therapists connect their patients to resources or even are volunteers in their community. I don’t see how these are exclusive
But also therapists are doctors, “people need housing not medical care” basically. We need all of them, holistically, every single resource we need to survive includes medical specialists. Would you say don’t go to an oncologist because the oligarchs want to die of cancer? What even is this logic
Also the oligarchs need therapy too for their psychopathy but their power systems wouldn’t allow someone non syncophantic in their circles so 🤷♀️ guess we all suffer cause of that too
everyone could benefit from a personal trainer too!
should everyone have personal trainers?
Actually yeah, if everyone could check in with a personal trainer every month or two for free, that would probably return many times the value of its cost through how much healthier it would make the population in the long term
cool, do you live in a world where money grows on trees too?
No, money grows in the pocketbooks of the rich because we let them avoid paying their fair share.
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I was told by many family members that I need to go to therapy. I suffer from severe fatigue due to my many medical conditions, so I must obviously be depressed (???). I felt fine, but I went anyway, because surely something must be wrong if so many people are insisting.
The therapist started with, “what brings you here?” and I’m like “I don’t know, my partner talked me into it.” We actually had a decent discussion come out of that. Turns out that my (now ex) partner was controlling and abusive, and the problem wasn’t with me at all. I didn’t see it because it’s apparently really hard to notice such things from the inside, but it’s obvious in hindsight.
Leaving my ex improved my mental health tremendously, but probably not in the way my ex wanted. Still tired all the time, but now I’m happier about it, more confident, and actually like myself, without all the constant negging and abuse.
So I guess the moral is, even if you feel fine, therapy can still be helpful in unexpected ways.
Society has been conditioned to treat symptoms instead of root causes. You complain about real problems, and everyone acts like you are the problem.
Then, unless you luck out and find a genuinely good therapist, the therapist just helps you cope. The therapist does not fix anything, does not heal. Instead, they give you drugs and techniques for pretending problems aren’t problems, all while the problems get worse and worse.
That has been my experience so far. I’m trying a fifth therapist in a week, but I’m not optimistic. I’m in the United States, everything is a scam.
Are you using one of the online therapy things? My therapist gets tons of offers to join those, but refuses because most of those services are pretty exploitative.
I tried three online therapists from three different services, all with poor results. Recently I went to the local community health center and had a session and a half with one therapist before requesting to be rescheduled with another.
I think part of the problem is that higher education in the US is fucked. Like everything else, it’s a scam, and it also serves other scams. For-profit healthcare is for profit, not for healthcare. So the therapists follow a flawed script and seemingly have nothing to offer but superficial coping mechanisms and prescriptions that treat some symptoms while causing other side effects and not actually fixing any underlying issues.
Why have we, as a society, grown to fear them? - Yes, people have been conditioned to ask are you OK but not actually do anything. We have also as a society become more fluffy and less accepting of anger and frustration which are very valid feelings. But you are expected to just to just go be quiet elsewhere. If you make a scene you are called dramatic/karen etc.
I think its great we can talk about feelings, and let them out, we as a society have absolutely gotten better at being able to express…(if politely) but in terms of help and support when fixing that’s a bit lacking.
The therapy thing seems a very USA/entitled thing, just pay to have it fixed. Most don’t have that luxury. But the bottom line is you may need to work on how you handle things. I know its easily said but anger and resentment can be used to fuel you to do good. Just remember there are people who care, even if its just another internet buddy.
the issue in the USA is the folks who horde all the mental health resources, need them the least.
they often use access to therapists as a social status symbol more than anything else, because in order to have regular access to therapy you have to be a higher income person.
we also have a therapy industrial complex in the USA, as in we want to turn everything into a mental health issue so we can sell you a solution to it, and there is massive increase in the pathologization of ordinary life experiences fueled by this.
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no, but i can block you for replying to my comments with insults instead of any legitimate commentary.
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You need therapy bills to economically quantify your emotional damages so that you can sue somebody for them.
My sister went to therapy all her life. I never did.
I may be wrong, but here’s my theory: she and I went through the same hardship: I allowed time to let the memory fade away in my brain (it wasn’t PTSD-inducing hardship, mind you) but her therapist never let her forget. And now decades later, she’s all kinds of messed up and I’m not.
Here’s my theory: therapist get paid to see clients and keeping old clients is easier than getting new ones.
You must be an American
Yup, that’s my context. Are therapists on public retainer in your country?
edit: haha yeah, 5 downvotes to 1 for this. definitely some emotions on display here.
The last one I saw was.
Cool. That’s sort of better… but it might not be, really.
For instance, you’d think commisions are bad because they push salespeople to sell you things you don’t need. So you’d think NOT having commissions are GOOD; but that is marketing, because every salesperson has metrics and goals, and if they don’t meet them, there are consequences.
Source: Worked at Best Buy, where customers were so happy that we didn’t take commission but didn’t know that our supervisors would chew us out if we didn’t sell a membership or get a credit card application.
So it depends on how the system is implemented.
Conflating therapists with sales people is a real good indicator that you need therapy.
Not knowing whether public healthcare has good outcomes is one hell of an ignorant take.
Therapists and sales people both exist in a capitalist systems and so are under similar pressures. (Edit: Unless, of course, they aren’t! Assuming US context here, I can’t speak to every therapists in every country in the world).
Here is one of MANY complaints from therapists about working in clinics where they are tracked on how many hours they are seeing clients / no shows / etc.
https://www.reddit.com/r/therapists/comments/10nfc88/metrics/
My partner is licensed to deliver some kinds of talking therapy for our public health system. They often talk with some concern about patients who have interactions with private therapists who keep patients on, continuously, for years, and points out that there is no evidence base for that kind of delivery. Evidence-based therapies are typically several weeks, though it does vary.
Life-long therapy is something I’m aware of from American TV shows, and those conversations.
Even siblings in the same household can have wildly different experiences with their parents.
Correlation and causation shouldn’t be confused for the other.
wildly different experiences with their parents
Nitpicking a bit here, but you assume what my sister and I lived through was our parents’ fault.
It was not: we both went to Catholic school. Let’s leave it at that.
Just an example. You revealing that it was at Catholic school bolsters my point - your sister probably had a wildly different experience than you did.
your sister probably had a wildly different experience than you did.
How could you possibly know that? Do you know my sister?
We talked about it you know. Rather extensively. We met the same people at around the same time and went through the same kinds of shenanigans.
You think you know more than you do.
every negative emotion you have, someone tells you to go to therapy? I see two options: you are either having a lot of extreme overreactions that make bystanders uncomfortable, or, you are spending too much time with someone who is probably just trolling you.
Or maybe you just exaggerated a bit here
It kind of depends if your negative emotions are grounded in reality or if they’re grounded in past trauma/cognitive distortions.
The very strong tendency of therapy is to assume the latter despite evidence of the former.
Society has completely lost its ability to deal with any personal/spiritual/psychological/social issues outside the context of professional talk therapy.
Let me introduce you to toxic positivity:
That’s only one form of therapy there’s a whole field and multiple disciplines within it, including the stuff you just talked about
I didn’t mention a therapy.
if they’re grounded in past trauma/cognitive distortions.
You did.
“Past trauma” has been around since Freud. “Cognitive distortion” is a term bandied about by CBT, but the concept has existed since people thought about thinking.
The basics of psychotherapy are extremely stable. Every time I learn about a “new” theory, it is essentially an old theory, repackaged.
Therapy is a band aid for the alienation we feel under capitalism. We are an increasingly isolated society. It’s every man for himself out there. We’re not meant to live like this. We need other people. We need people to share our experiences and feelings with. Therapy fills that role very well. I have been in therapy for 6-7 years and it’s helped me a ton. I would recommend it, but I’m also of the opinion that if we ever were able to make to communism, very few people would need therapy.
And how are all these people affording it?
they either have money, or don’t save any money, or both.
the most pro therapy people I met, are the poor little rich person type. As in living paycheck to paycheck but still getting $5000 handouts form mom and dad every couple of months and are in constantly mental agony over a lot of first world problems, that 90% of the rest of the population would be jealous of having.
Wow, you seemnto have a chip on your shoulder b about this topic
