Comment by nostrademons
2 days ago
> told me it take years to get to the core.
So FWIW, that part is true. I started therapy in 2012. I got to the core in 2020, after going through 4 different therapists. Along the way I founded about 15 startups, missed out on roughly $2M in lost wages, almost divorced my wife and walked out on my kid, thought seriously about killing myself, and needed a global pandemic to finally get my life in order. But I did eventually get my life back. And I didn't even get involved with any drugs or chemical dependencies; video games were my worst addiction.
The reason it takes so long is because a therapist will never tell you the problem, they need you to experience it for yourself. That is part of the point. As one of the better therapists I saw (the last one, actually, the one that got me through the breakthrough) said: "One of the ways to make feelings go away is to, well, feel them." Until your brain has the capacity to distinguish your feelings from existence, separate them out, and then push through some often very unpleasant, potentially life-ending feelings and actually feel them, you'll usually tend to end up deflecting or coping with them.
Much of the process of therapy involves stripping away these coping mechanisms and seeing what the feelings are beneath them. And that takes years, and has to be done in parallel with your life, because living your life is the point of therapy. That's why my first therapist encouraged me to try getting involved in my first relationship, even though I suspected I would end up hurt by it. (I ended up marrying and having three kids with her - the youngest is currently sleeping with his foot draped over me. And yes, I gave up nearly all my dreams and everything I thought was my identity for her.) That's why my therapist encouraged me to quit my highly-paid but soul-sucking FANG job to follow my startup dreams. Until you're actually in those situations, where you are risking your ego and living with vulnerability, you're not in a position to process the feelings that arise from them.
Possibly the best advice I got - from a random stranger on Reddit, not a therapist - was to think of your therapist as a guide, not a fixer or even an expert. You do the work of figuring out yourself, and it takes years, perhaps a lifetime. The therapist is there to make sure you don't hurt yourself and to keep the focus on your real issues, because when it comes to unpleasant feelings, the natural inclination is to avoid them. It almost doesn't matter if they're any good, as long as they adhere to a basic code of ethics and professional conduct, because all of the heavy lifting and all the major discoveries are made by you yourself.
Took me four years to "graduate" therapy (showing up happy to every session and my therapist asking me "why are you still coming in?") and I agree with every word you wrote here.
With that said, those first few months were not just my therapist being "a guide" through the life I was living. There were parts of my history that I didn't realize I needed to cry about and forgive myself over, before I could even try to go through life without that chip on my shoulder.
> almost doesn't matter if they're any good
It's very difficult to rate therapists, because there's both an empirical (their training and experience) and subjective (do you feel comfortable with them?) component. A therapist can be incredibly smart and talented and will be the absolute wrong fit for a patient who doesn't feel comfortable with them. And someone else can be not-a-therapist-at-all (i.e. clergy), who the patient feels very comfortable talking to, but those conversations will go nowhere if the patient is never challenged and/or never willing to face the challenges. All anybody can do, really, is just keep trying.
You know why audiophile grade cables takes 900h of burn in? Because that's more than 30 days of return policy.
If you go a therapy and all you get is talking to a wall while you're therapist is skimming through a phone, that's not a progress, that's a scam.
The therapist should at least be engaged in the session and actively listening - if they're just scrolling through their phone, find a different therapist.
But if you've been to 11 therapists and none worked, the problem is probably not all 11 of the therapists.
You have to be at least engaged in the session and actively introspecting too. If you're not curious about where your issues stem from and willing to try some (oftentimes difficult) approaches to dealing with them, the therapist isn't going to be either. They'll happily take your money and give you their time, but there isn't anything to work with to get better.
Some people just need a wall to talk to, to be fair.
That’s also a misrepresentation of what happened for many of us when we did therapy though. You have to want to change badly enough that you’re willing to try things. It’s not enough to have a vague sense that there’s something wrong. It has to be crystal clear to you that you need to change somehow.
This is not to try and devalue the nature of your specific experience at all, okay? But, with your and some other descriptions here of how therapy works and how much looking around and trying out a number of vaguely defined things it involves, i'm getting a distinct woo vibe from much of the industry, made, maybe, all the worse given how much more fashionable the idea of therapy has become in recent years and how few concrete standards some parts of the business (and it is a business in large part) really require.
Add to the above the subtle notion of the onus on improvement lying with oneself as the patient, and it becomes all the easier for a therapist to fail because they don't know what they're doing, and then claim their patient failed because they didn't "try hard enough" or do the right things.
I've seen cases of therapy working, and know there's a lot of good exploration in related psychological fields, but it's definitely an area in which to tread carefully as someone seeking help.
There’s no silver bullet. Only a lot of flailing around and unmaking patterns that don’t work and sometimes patterns that did work.
That's fair enough, and common even in medical areas where the hard science and research are far more firmly established. However, with therapy, the looseness of those very things make the field much more open to easier quackery and that's what my point was about.
Priceless comments in this thread, thank you.