I never found CBT particularly helpful to me, but the therapist I was seeing while I was at one of my lowest points introduced DBT to me, and it was a helpful tool for the me then. I wonder if I would feel the same about it now, over a decade later. DBT definitely focuses on many of the things you touch on in this video, such as mindfulness, that don't get at the root of the problem. But for 20-year-old me, it was a game changer.
I can not afford therapy and I hate all the memes where men are smugly told that they rather do something X instead of going to therapy, when the option just is not there. I have consulted a mental health nurse, she that told me that hatred is an asset, reserve of strength and I believe her
As an autistic person, I used to want to be "normal", until I realised that "normal" seems to mean blind compliance, a lack of imagination, and a level of moral flexibility that borders on sociopathic. It irritates me that so many people seem to view our man-made systems as unchangeable monoliths.
as a fellow autistic/adhder I agree that one of the gifts of neurodivergence is to have a way of questioning and seeing things differently than most people and that is a beautiful thing
Same. ADHD and autism have been tough, but that was only because the world is built for people who don't think like me. People who are easier to convince. People who can tune into the subtlest frequencies of socialization and indoctrination, leaving them blind to the no-nonsense perception and presentation we typically abide.
People look for stability, especially after 30yo or when they have kids. And there's also a stoic saying: you cannot change the world, but you can change yourself and the way you interact with the world. It's not about forgetting everything else, it's about being efficient and functioning for your own sake.
@Sucellusification I don't mean to sound harsh, but your reply kind of epitomises my point. Using a "stoic saying" points to a lack of imagination, and this is even more so when the saying in question seems designed to keep people in their lanes and hope for less from the world around them. Instead of functioning for our "own sake", wouldn't the world be a better place if we functioned for each other? I guess one person's idea of "stability" is another person's idea of stagnation.
@@joesimpson4522 I don't see how adapting to reality shows lack of imagination. There are several ways you can adapt, depending on your personality and you can even create new ways of living that nobody thought of before. They will succeed as long as they can find a niche where you can thrive. In my opinion, seeing it as a way to keep people in lane and make them hope for less IS the unimaginative way of thinking. "For your own sake" doesn't mean, in this context, that you should become an egotistical mean person that only thinks of themselves, it means that you should try to live better and become stronger in every way, SO THAT you can do for yourself and others what you consider best, and follow your values instead of just having to barely survive. By following this path, you build yourself first in order to then build a better society with others, so in the end you function for each other, avoiding one of the main problems that can arise from that: forgetting to take care of yourself, and making others take care of you because you take care of them. That can be dangerous if the reciprocation breaks, and can leave you very vulnerable and with no resources. But if you consider yourself one of the main persons to take care of, you'll never be left adrift. I hope I explained myself clearly enough 😊 if you have more questions please ask and we can discuss this or other points of view
First experience with therapy to treat the return of symptoms of a sexual trauma. It went well, I liked the clinician psychologist who was around my age, was aware of systemic issues. She asked for a psychiatric advice/back-up and when it was achieved on my own. She interrupted my own therapy by an unclear email and refused to answer to all my trials to understand why. I wish she could respond for the extreme violence she inflicted on me
i've thought i needed therapy for a long time but the paraphrased quote "it's not healthy to be healthy in a sick world" is something that feels far more valid than just trying to be happy in a broken world which has been a major contributor to leading me to avoid going into therapy. edit: ive been thrown off by the yugopnik voice over[
I'm not sure life is about being happy, but being able to find some measure of contentment in the company of friends, family or lovers, despite the darkness of the world, is a worthwhile pursuit. It's a very individual choice about whether to partake in therapy or not, but my decision to do so helped my mood lift and feel more comfortable with who I am as a person. It led to me becoming a therapist myself and I love the work! You must judge how you feel and whether therapy might help you feel slightly different (hopefully better in some way) or are content to let things remain as they are.
nah. These phrases about the world being a horrible place are cool and all, but don't let it blind you. There is inner work that you must do. If you stay indifferent to your bad psyche patterns, they will continue to govern your life (in the worst way they can) and pass themselves to others. If you don't set your realities straight, other people will be happy to do so and that's dangerous. Never be afraid of being the best self you could be.
A huge issue with therapy is that nobody knows what we are doing. The field of psychology is young, about one of the most sophisticated structures we are aware of, grotesquely underfunded, much of the research is either very poor from the outset or doesnt survive replication. So anyone who proclaims themselves an expert therapist is kidding themselves. This has led to the treatment becoming something of a statistics game, what framework of treatment can cost the least and have the highest rate of success. (Which is why youll see CBT everywhere and for damn near every thing, at least in public healthcare.) Ostensibly that seems fine, and maybe it is, maybe its the best we can do without a lot more funding and a firm scientific foundation, but the reality of it is that huge percentages of people who dont fit in to the broadest categories will leave essentially untreated. I dont think this is acknowledged or admitted to by many therapists, and there is often little flexibility in the system to even attempt to tackle the problem.
I've also found it unethical sometimes that charities I've signed up for have offered 12 sessions of CBT for issues as complex as CSA. Perhaps it's better than nothing, but it also feels unethical to offer thought-work techniques to people who are probably dealing with deep rooted trauma that needs a lot of time and attention to uproot.
This is one of my main issues with my practice, how can i even give therapy when the foundations of it are so shaky and outright wrong at times? I couldn't help but feel i could be doing something else, something better for my patients during my practice, but searching in theory, it all seems muddly and limited, specially when i have to translate methods tested in developed countries into the conditions of my own country
"Much of the research is either very poor from the outset or doesnt survive replication" This is why for most of us philosophers, psychology just barely qualifies as science, i'm sorry. As a discipline, it quite simply runs on gross generalization of a phenomenon that we can't even replicate.
"What's depressing you?" "All the homelessness, poverty and preventable socially engineered human misery all around me." "Oh, you're just thinking negative thoughts. Here,have some pills!"
@coolchameleon21 yes, and the tendency of everyone around you to say, "you don't have real problems, it's just that you're not taking enough pills" once you've been "diagnosed." Has anyone ever gone to a psychiatrist and left without a "mental health condition"? Maybe it's the psychiatrists causing them...
As a therapist i try to never ignore the structural systems, intergenerational inheritances, poverty and economic vulnerability from housing to food banks etc as integral parts of the problems people face. One of the biggest problems with the psychodynamic models and CBT in general too is the idea of locating the source of all problems as originating within the individual rather than using a more accurate wider lens and exploring so much of what you speak about in this video. Really good video! Thank you! ✌🏿👊🏿
Yeah, the more I learn about humans and multi-polar traps (look up Daniel schmactenberger) and the logic and thinking of people in hierarchies and the incentives of the systems that props up obligate sociopathic corporations due to them not having empathy but requiered to maximize share holder profit and because of the liability protections they have the “move fast and break things” incentivized way of acting 🎭 become more like profiting off poison 😊society and then outsource the negative 2nd order and 3rd order effects on peoples bio/psycho/social outcomes in life. Like the American chemical society shows over 300 cancerous chemicals in our enviroment released by industry, these show up in breast milk too. To the fact that leaded gasoline took 11 pts of iq off the worlds population intelligence and lead poisoning has been used to keep minorities down by showing lack of interest in solving, that religion just seems to protect and partner with this same machine all because uncertainty is scary and people desperately cling to the hot water shower that regulates their nervous system at the end of a day of being used. It’s like wtf kinda dystopia was I brought up in?
Even when acknowledging these issues, therapy remains completely ineffective to tackle the issue. A person in a bad place needs to not only change the mind, but also the setting, and changing the setting requires money and opportunities. Since therapists won't do anything about the latter, they overfocuse on the former. Sometimes to the person's detriment.
Those models are fantastic at what they're designed to do: Getting people out of crisis and improving their quality of life. As a patient, it seems like the problem is just that therapists - at least the ones I've worked with/heard of - tend to just apply CBT to the patient as if they're hammering a nail. It's important to work with the patient to establish goals, and to clarify what the purpose of tools used is. Just having CBT thrown at you as a patient who has identified and is focusing on real problems can feel invalidating, manipulative, and sort of adjacent to gaslighting. It's especially bad with depression, where the "muh chemical imbalance" lingo tends to be used to just dismiss all suffering as a "bug in the code" and not real. I would have had much more success in therapy if my therpist had just told me something like "Listen, the problems you see are real, horrifying, and worth addressing. However, right now you're pretty much non functional and homeless. You're not in a position to change anything, so the best possible strategy is to build a foundation that allows you to function." Instead of "The problems you see aren't real, your brain is just broken." or "Just stop caring."
I described the therapy as something for people near the peak of Maslow's Pyramid needing a boost up the final steps. It's a sick joke for those near the bottom. And the sides of the pyramid keep getting covered in grease.
Therapy just made me believe that there was something fundamentally wrong with my brain that I needed to fix. Like I was a car and the therapist was the mechanic. When I realized that most of my emotional reactions to the things going on around me are actually very normal and human and a sign that my brain was working correctly, I finally began to stop hating myself that much.
Therapists are not actually trained to be general advisors of mental wellness, but to address the rare but serious problem of "there's genuinely, factually, *not a single thing actually wrong in my environment* . But I'm miserable anyway." That's the only thing the training actually prepares you to do.
I feel really strongly about trying to defend my mind from that kind of belief. I fear how therapy, with a weekly talking session focusing on all my 'problems', could potentially enforce this sort of worry of whats wrong with instead of improving my happiness and personal fulfillment. Add to that the risk of being pressureed to take medications or at worst losing freedom through involuntary detainment, then the potential reward of finding a good therapist just doesn't seem worth it compared to the potential downsides. So I am content I refused to opt in to therapy when my parents and the school counselor tried to coerce my with all kinds of talk about I would fail in life. (horribly negative persuasion tactic - why should I agree to think so hopelessly about myself?) Despite this, I still think in theory maybe the services of a therapist could potentially benefit me, but if I consider the systhem that therapy is embedded in, the historical background with diagnosis like "hysteria" and the risk of ending with someone who can't understand/help me and might even make things worse ... I don't want to engage with all of that.
@@sophiemay9645 If it is clearly obvious to you, and those around you, that you are not the architect of your own suffering, then there is likely little for you to gain from one on one therapy. I think everyone sometimes in life self-sabotages, and I think some people's predominant problem is how often they do so, but that's not everybody all the time.
"Is Therapy Under Capitalism Just Systemised Gaslighting?" As someone who has studied social psychology: yes. For anyone interested in reading further, I recommend anything coming from the neurodiversity paradigm.
Seconding this, the liberation psychology approach is also really fascinating, which brings in a lot of decolonial theory from Freire and Fanon, first conceptualized by Ignacio Martin-Baro. Western psychology under Capitalism is so individualized and mired in "self responsibility bootstraps" ideology, as well as the profit motive, its disgusting, and we need to revolutionize the field with these new approaches.
I just feel like pouring out my thoughts rn so I'm just going to do it lol. I want to go to uni and go study social psychology to help others in this shitty world. Sociology is something I love and have been a hobbyist, basically my entire life. Sadly my grades aren't good enough YET but I feel like I have a good grasp on the subject, when it comes to general definitions and ways of thinking. I mean I recently came out of my own shell of alienation by just trying to understand the capitalist system by myself. I didn't want any other ideologies to "corrupt" my realizations of deep materialist truths of society. I wouldn't even take on my marxist father's understanding at face value, and critiqued everything up and down. I don't really want to be a labelist but I've become a heterodox marxist and a revolutionary optimist, and I view the entirety of the leftist movement holistically and as a collective unconscious movement. It's currently in the process of bringing about socialism. Not efficient but effectively in a compartmentalized way, breaking down capitalism from all sides. Oh well, but sadly this process of mine of understanding the world took a decade or so and came at the cost of not living life to the fullest. According to capitalism I guess I deserve my current situation, which makes me so happy to know that capitalism will be completely destroyed, with or without humanity. Well deserved, into the trash bin of reality it goes. So basically I'm currently slowly reintegrating myself into society and am on a path of self-actualization, while trying to be humble and actively rejecting "great man theory". Because in this individualistic society ppl keep falling into the pit of believing they're superior and by doing so, they actively work to continue this exploitative and illogical system. Which is why I want to rehabilitate such sick ppl, being created by an even sicker ideology All of these things that I try to keep in mind have made me a little crazy, but being sane in this insane world is not for me lol.
@@javierromo8711 @andrer1664 Ignacio Martin-Baro should have the most foundational, "canonical" writings, such as his "Writings for a Liberation Psychology." There's also a really good series of talks he's done at universities on TH-cam, if you can understand Spanish m.th-cam.com/video/7w4i2nT9vVo/w-d-xo.html&pp=ygUlSGFjaWEgdW5hIHBzaWNvbG9naWEgZGUgbGEgbGliZXJhY2lvbg%3D%3D What I would recommend as well, as a good introduction to this approach and some of its core ideas / expansions in the modern day, is the collection of essays, "Liberation Psychology: Theory, Method, Practice, and Social Justice" by Lilian Comas-Diaz, which should be on LibGen or Anna's Archive for free ; in fact Chapter 5 was written by a professor of mine who I've gotten really close with because of our similar interests in academia and activism :) Good luck!
Therapy cost too much I tried to see someone she was charging 750 a session. I’ve seen a handful of therapist over my years. One I found last years was a low income therapist (for poor folks like me) who would cut the 60 minute session down by 30 minutes and charge my card full price. They all say the same thing, “oh just focus on something else.” “Breathe” it’s like they’re reciting a script. I feel so invalidated whenever I go to therapy like my problems aren’t a big deal. I’ve been trying to get tested for autism for almost 10 years now and I keep getting dismissed had one therapist tell me “it’s very costly.” Another therapist saying “what we would be the point in getting an autism diagnosis?” Another one said I don’t appear to be autistic, and dismissed me after talking to me only for a few minutes. The place I work talks about the mentally ill in a sarcastic tone, they’re constantly mocked behind their backs. And it’s left a very bitter taste in my mouth and left me looking at the whole “mental health care” system as nothing more than a circus. Sorry for going on a tangent, great video by the way, you’re very well spoken!
So sorry to hear about your experience, I've also had the same dismissal of my neurodivergence because I don't seem autistic/adhd - it's deeply heart-breaking to get invalidated by the very people that should be giving you the love and care you deserve. Thank you for sharing your experience!
As someone with autism, that sucks. However I do want to offer a alternative here- there really isn't much practical point being diagnosed with autism past a certain age. Because autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder, there is no drug or medicine that can impact it, at least not proven or tested drugs. Most of what an autism diagnosis is useful for (beyond personal validation/insight) is to secure accomodations and therapy in a K-12 and occasionally collegiate setting. Past that an autism diagnosis is pretty much just a piece of paper. I suppose it can help with certain employers, but that's iffy, businesses still have stigma sometimes if you share that you have autism. Because autism is so we'll researched if you feel like you have it there really is very little you cannot find online, either through pop psych mags, TH-cam videos, or actual research papers.
Self diagnosis is accepted among the autistic community because the community knows what getting an official diagnosis is like. Self diagnosing can be a validating alternative for you
Sameee, I remember when I was talking to a therapist I used to have, I told her "I think I might have autism" she interrupted me and said "we shouldn't believe everything we see in tiktok" And I was like: OK, first of all, you didn't even let me explain why I think so, second, I don't even use tiktok! But then she stopped being my therapist when she discovered I was queer, she literally told me "I can't help you anymore" and kicked me out so all in all, she was a terrible person lmao
@@goMikeMeloyou can’t have capitalism without the state. The state establishes a currency, delineates private property, and holds a monopoly on the violence used to reinforce and protect that property, as well as the privileges of those who hold the most wealth.
@@livthedream5885 All of that was dead wrong. Reject your authoritarian urges and respect human rights fully. The state is stupid and criminal. Capitalism is extremely moral and based.
@@goMikeMelo Everything I said is extremely correct, but perhaps you don’t know the difference between capitalism and markets. Without a vast commons you cannot have free markets. Capitalism emerged from Monarchism (as large “trading companies” establishing global trade, usually a foothold for colonialism) and feudalism (where feudal lords held vassal states and threw peasants out of their enclosures through militarized violence). Free markets require free access to capital resources, and freedom of movement and trade. Capitalism cannot exist without a state to provide the militarized protections it requires to prevent peasants and later workers from uprisings. What you seek is anarchy, and something like syndicates cooperating, trading, and negotiating. The Paris Commune would have been a major success if both capitalists and “communists” had not sabotaged and destroyed it. True communism is a stateless, classless, society. Precisely WHY do you think so many private banks, corporations, and investment firms are throwing millions into the establishment of cop cities all over the USA???
Much of what brings us to therapy is actually caused by capitalism's sadistic coercion of the working class. In a society where all people are welcomed participants, it's hard to imagine a deep need for therapy such as we've had in the last 100 years. The goal of therapy in our capitalist society is to convince you that your unhappiness is caused by your inadequacies. Gaslighting is the exact correct term for therapy today. Well done!
This, this right here. Everyone's mental ills are always put off on having depression or anxiety because of the easy scape goats of their parents or just having some brain disorder with out a cause. WHAT IF my depression and anxiety is from being a very creative and free spirited person forced to live In a culture of the cult of capitalism? Maybe I'm anxious because I have to constantly worry about food and money in a system that's meant to always inflate prices every 10 years making it near impossible for lower middle class and low class civilians to truly get ahead. Maybe it's because I can't even own land without risk of being thrown off it if I don't constantly pay my due to the government. Maybe instead of therapist handing out pills and blaming everything on your childhood Maybe they hand out money, food, housing and cover all medical expenses. I bet everyone will be surprised how much their mental health improves after that. There are tons of people who have real mental illness, however nobody talks about the people who have mental illness from living in a toxic money driven society and like you said you're gas light into not considering that. Therapist never ask "can you afford to fix your car?" "Can you afford groceries?" "Do you feel enslaved and stressed at your job and feel you can't leave out of the fear of poverty?" Nope, it's always "blame your parents!" And lastly, like you said this capitalist system isn't a choice you have to partake In it or not without consequence. Either you agree to take part and become a cog in the machine or you don't and you live homeless or in prison. No choice or free will and whether someone is aware of it or not, that lack of will puts major stress on some individuals.
@darkarai5241 well there are people, like me, who grew up in abusive homes with fucked up parents AND live in a shitty capitalist system. Healing the former is much more doable than overturning the system 🤷🏽♀️
i gave up on therapy. i’m autistic and i’ve only ever been gaslit, misunderstood, and harmed by therapists (even neurodivergent ones). im so tired of people telling me to go to therapy because “it’s the only thing that will help”. like no, having a community of consistent and supportive people who understand and love me would help me far more than therapy. i won’t even get into how much the world we live in impacts my mental health because i would go on forever. therapy has never and will never be beneficial for me personally.
Omg same, I feel everything you're saying. 😢 I don't have autism atleast I don't think so ...but I do have inattentive adhd and all therapist I've been to have gaslight me, and misdiagnosed me with things I don't have. It wasn't helpeful. Hurt me more, And cost alot only for them not to help me. like you said having a supportive community of people who actaully understand and care about you is way more healing. Also I find alot of stuff online and in books I've read so much more helpful than a therapist who thinks cuz they have a degree they know best and are God's.
I have felt a gut feeling mistrust of therapy, and eventually i realized they are trained to get people to be a "functioning" member of a society that damaged the person in the first place. Part of that too I suppose is that the people in my life who expressed a desire to help me have ended up doing more damage than good. Good intentions aren't worth much.
Yes, because we are all stuck in it and must figure out a way to cope and stay as sane as possible, to somehow be productive even in the face of all the adversity.
My brother's therapist has him blame all his problems on me and has had him on emergency (2 week) Ativan for going on 2 years now. He's never getting off it
@@timmysmith9991 bruh. All I can say is I appreciate more than I can say that life began teaching me to trust myself before anyone else, even if I am wrong. It is worth noting that not all therapists are that way, but like all such qualifying statements that only applies to a small minority. Not enough to risk spending money and time on when there are better options
"Well, my family can't live in good intentions MARGE! Oh your family is out of control but we can't blame you because you had gooood intentions!' - Ned Flanders (The Simpsons)
Here in Brazil we have a program called Sameca (Saude Mental Camarada), which means Comrade Mental Health. Its a program led and organized by a brazilian socialist organization called Soberana. It takes into account not only personal/individual subjects into account but also the societal/systemic questions, passing through a socialist (Marxist-Leninist) lens. Just thought of leaving this here for whoever's interested!
Modern therapy is captured by the insurance structures that pay the bills. A lot of the problems discussed in this video are as much a result of that reimbursement system as they are of some really terrible therapists. The origins of psychoanalysis are deeply intertwined with the class biases present at the time it was developed. It was built for rich people. I'm a therapist and fully endorse activism as therapy.
I've been in therapy for 13 years, the entirety of my adult life. I was diagnosed with severe depression at 17 years old and started therapy and anti-depressants. It took 12 years for me to realise what the problem was: I am an autistic trans person being forced to fit into an allistic cis world. None of my multiple therapists ever explored or asked about this, none of them realised that after continuous incidents of self **** or s******s that something deeper was happening. I had to push for my own neurodivergent diagnosis and explore my gender on my own at 28. I'm still mad. I'm still grieving. I have a queer and neurodivergent trained therapist now but i wonder if it is really helping. Is it placating me rather than healing me? How do i reconcile the harmful decisions I've made to fit in and please others, including my therapists, with the person i am and always been? I'm figuring out what it means to be me and I'm still not sure.
Sorry, I'm just venting at this point and the video has hit a sad nerve ❤️ thank you for the video and talking about this! I've been thinking a lot about it
Thanks so much for sharing. I'm a trainee therapist, but someone with a similar life experience to you by the sounds of it. Grieve and be rageful, and I hope you can set down some of the burden of you being the problem. Much love
thank you for sharing your experience! I feel so much love and compassion for the parts of you that made ''harmful decisions'' - it sounds like parts of you that were just trying to protect yourself understandably given the world we live in. I would actually recommend the book ''No Bad Parts'' as I've personally found it helpful struggling with similar feelings. Much love x
With it being hard enough to find a truly neurodivergent aware therapist your trans queer thing just adds a level of complexity that I wouldn’t expect to find except for the fact that a lot of autistics actually become trans. The theory there is it has something to do with metallization is my understanding but if desired look that up. So it might be possible due to that connection. But otherwise to find masters in both just becomes hard forcing you like I’ve had to do seek out specialist on line and do their programs
I am in a different situation. However, I just feel like what I want is something that let me feel like I had the life I missed out on. I said that if the Total Recall new memory device was invented, I would take my chances with it.
⌚Timestamps: 00:00: Introduction 01:04: The Privatisation of Pain 06:11: Be Normal 09:34: Insanity 12:35: Prison 16:29: Mind/Body 20:41: Transformation 24:30: Psychology of the Oppressed 27:24: The Trauma Industry 31:40 - Conclusion: Beyond the Sofa
As an unemployed chemist and chemical engineer living at my parents house I agree. Therapists try to frame me as somebody who isn't willing to look for a job. I explain that I've spent 4 years looking for a job and recruiters simply never help me foster a relationship with the hiring manager at a chemistry or chemical engineering job that I qualify for and that career experts consider full employment. The therapist says I'm just not looking again, completely ignoring everything I just explained.
When I was also abused I said similar things about being angry and frustrated with the prison industrial complex to my trauma therapist. He laughed at me and said I was funny. Thanks for speaking on this
I appreciate that you mention patriarchy and oppression. There is so much to say about that. When you sit in a room with a therapist who is a white American male, he has no freaking idea what it's like to be a woman, an immigrant, oppressed, tired, exploited. He tells you that you have all the power in the world to change your circumstances (as soon as you become normal, of course).
@@keylanoslokj1806 Did you really come into the comment section of a video about how structural issues specifically effect vulnerable people in a way that isn't addressed by the standard practices of therapy, and then say to someone "nah actually the problem is just you, skill issue on your part tbh"? That is neither empathetic nor helpful in any way. Rethink your priorities in life.
In capitalism, it's impossible to be a good moral person, unless you are willing to be broke or homeless. This society rewards evil and sociopathic behaviour. Only those people succeed, at least when it comes to wealth.
I've been thinking about this too, and that's why I want to work on the public or third sector (ngo's) and vote the leftists into power to govern them, but also I've been thinking about this dilemma of 'being good' vs. 'doing good'. I'm of the opinion that it's impossible to 'be' good in this world and therefore we can only 'do' good, and must try to do good every day. We should also try to picture a world where being a good person would be easier, and aim our everyday actions towards that goal. For example, as alternatives to capitalism, I think supporting libraries and co-ops is a good thing to do, as well as participating in ngo's and local communities. Taking care of the shared, is I think, vital to our wellbeing. We get both pride and dignity, and care from others ourselves, when participating in communities. Therefor I think helping others and being part of something together is a primary need of ours. Not part of Maslow's hierarchy of needs maybe, but when I tested it out in my scout group of teenagers, they placed it pretty low on the pyramid as foundational for other things. And I'm pretty proud of them for that. So yes, while it may be impossible to be good in a capitalistic system, fortunately that's not all we have, and we can always strive to do good things in the context of shifting the weight of activity from capitalism, greed, and selfishness, to other things. Reality is a complex web of systems and institutions existing together, and new ones being created every day.
Mental health care basically doesn't work for me. The NHS where I live only does mindfulness or cbt, both of which have been contraindicated for autistic people, but they just ignore that. Cbt is just "you are thinking wrong stop thinking wrong" which doesn't help when you know your anxiety isn't reasonable but that doesn't stop it, or when it is reasonable. Help for my eating disorder has amounted to a dietician telling me "try to eat more" .
@@Kathrin_yt im not so sure that its failed me spesifically, more that its only set up to work for certain people. or atleast certain ideas of how people "should" function. I think its set up with the assumption that people are the ideal neo-liberal subject, rational, capable of solving "their own problems", independantly of systemic support. mindfullness inparticular strikes me as very neoliberal in its sensibilities, as it explicitly state that the problem is not your circumstances, it is you worrying about your circumstances, and if you simply learn to let these thoughts go, and not dwel on them then all will be well. It ignores that fact that sometimes we must think on our circumstances, inorder to improve them, and that some level of distress in distressing situations is not the brain functioning abnormally or in a way that particularly needs fixing. its the ultimate theraputic mode for maintaining the status quo. dont think on your problems, dont try and solve them, dont take time of sick because you are overwhelmed, just keep working and put those thoughts out of your mind.
@@megt9171 yessss well said! And I agree about mindfulness, it's helped me personally but still is status-quo reinforcing at least in the way it's generally practiced
I really enjoyed this video because my experience with therapy has been somehwat similar. No matter how well intentioned professionals are, they just can't relate to my problems. They tend to be from an upper middle class background, and mostly emphasize that I focus on things that I can control. However, when you're poor, there really isn't too much you can control and downplaying systemic factors is not helpful. Though they've been helpful in simply just listening to me vent, I always felt worse after therapy sessions and even more isolated.
@@DusBeforeDawn2008 I don’t think there’s one specific right thing to say but I believe simply skipping over systemic factors can be wrong. I’ve found tremendous help from connecting to others who share my experiences with poverty. But finding community in a modern setting is often hard for people with limited means. Perhaps therapists could help people connect with groups that can relate who make people feel included and valued, and not just shamed by society for being poor.
I've had terrible experiences with spiritual healers as well as therapists. At least with therapists and mental health counselors there is a licensing board to account to. New age healers and other con artists will never face accountability for their harm and grifts.
On one hand, the only person I'd trust to therapize me is a which who recommended I solve a phobia by talking to spirits (slow exposure therapy) On the other hand, I know and know of about a dozen other magick-y and spiritual folks who used their healing services to coerce people into intimate relations and fetish scenes... Spiritual and alternative methods can be great but you have to vet your guide very very thoroughly and have to pay attention to what you're doing
The best therapy advice I ever got was, "Stop being so hard on yourself," and surprisingly, that worked for me. I will say, disappearing too much into system blaming is a sure fire way to prevent your own happiness. It's all valid, but if you do it too much, you don't focus on anything that you are actually in control of. You won't accept that you have the power to unionize your workplace, organize your community, start/join a protest, bug the hell out of your representatives, build power so that you can scare the hell out of your representatives, etc. lol All of these things got me paid better, started improving my connection to reality and my general life conditions. Hitting 30 also helped. Everything is a nightmare in your 20s.
I TOTALLY agree about the disappearing too much into the system thing. I worry sometimes that talking about the system leaves people feeling totally powerless and not taking any responsibility at all for changing their lives/the world... it's definitely a ''we need both'' situation I think
Good point about the lack of power. What I found in the history of neoliberalism is a fear of collective action. It is not a freak accident that markets isolate and atomize people, nor that "debate" on social issues turns neighbour against neighbour.
Can you imagine a therapist in a cannibal society? His job would be to make you a better cannibal. He would say you need to eat better quality people to boost your self-esteem.
as someone who is neurodivergent, ive found traditonal therapy and the cesspool of most self help advice on youtube to be useless. it wasnt until i started reading self help stuff from a neurodivergent lens where things started to change and make sense. (also there are some great neurodivergent therapists out there)
@@loveandrea3313 sure, 2 recommendations i could give would be unmaksing autism by devon price and what i mean when i say im autistic by annie kotowicz (quick read, 100 pages). also there are some great youtube channels out there like the thought spot :)
Sam Vaknin has mentioned how important it is to vet these therapists online and their credentials, where did they go to school? How many years? Have they written peer reviewed journals and articles? Etc... and he is a well decorated and achieved psychologist but also a narcissist. Still he's brilliant.
@@ShinySilverBunny peer reviewed journals? Spoken like a true narcissist. Now a days only narcissistic people write way too many fake papers. One after another are getting exposed after doing it for more than 20 years
@@esnutaliah Can we not with the constant NPD slander? The unending conflation of NPD with abuse is just nauseating and exhausting. Being a narcissist doesn't make you evil, it's a disorder just like anything else, and there are many varied ways it can present. Some outwardly focused, some inwardly focused, some toxic and abusive, some not. Using the word "narcissist" as a pejorative and a stand-in for "bad person" just ends up hurting people who are already struggling, and who are themselves oftentimes victims of abuse.
Healing touch is insanely powerful, when i first started dating my partner held the hand i cut a lot when i was really depressed and started rubbing loving circles on it, he didnt know that i had a history of self harm until i told him afterwards, but it released a tension i had there that i never knew i had been holding ❤️ the mind may warp and forget, but the body remembers.
This is so incredibly validating, thank you so much for this. I started therapy around 15, and went through about 10 horrible therapists in my short time from 15-21 years old. In that time, I was consistently told "just keep attending, just keep going, we'll find the right therapist," yet there was always a cognitive dissonance I had about that notion- how long should I have to be going before I get better? How long before my issues are actually addressed through my minority experience, not through the lens of the norm? Therapy has failed a lot of us in these systems, and I relate a lot to that sentiment, "I feel I am the sane one living in an insane world." Honestly.
Hey, I am at the moment studying psychology to become a therapist myself. I enjoyed your thoughts about the subject a lot. In my environment, I also meet many people who struggle to find good therapists. Sadly it is the reality that there are not enough (good) therapists. Therefore I am always looking for answers to my (everlasting) question of becoming a good therapist. One of the answers to that question is understanding. Videos like yours where you share your experience and thoughts help tremendously in creating this understanding. Also, they inspire me too stay open about the experiences of others and to never invalidate them. Thank you so much for making this video. Also an uplifting bit of information, my university is very critical of the current mental health structure in our country (the Netherlands). A lot of things you mentioned are also talked about in our university. So rest assured that a lot of ideas you spoke of are still allowed freedom of expression at the place where every psychologist starts their career.
thanks so much - I really appreciate this comment and the validation that my thoughts make sense coming from someone with more experience in this field! Very happy to hear so much progress is being made in the Netherlands!
This is a very thoughtful video... I especially love the quote talking about how it isn't actually a good thing to be well-adjusted in a profoundly sick word. That honestly makes me feel better about a lot of the existential dread I feel a lot of the time 🤣 I honestly really feel for therapists, too. They are kind of in a no-win scenario for diagnosis. You are taught to use the science available to you, but it's hard to know when you're pathologizing who people are because the field is so young.
Short answer: yes. The only way I got "better" is by fully and deeply understanding the mechanisms at play. Realizing I'm fncked and it's not my fault. Accepting reality, my reality. From a position of understanding and acceptance a person can figure out what to do, how to feel, how to be. The mental health *industry* in general, seems to be a mechanism to keep the slave class docile and deluded.
I recently had a traumatic experience in therapy and had to find a discord channel to get me out of the crisis. This lady has spent months building up my self esteem. She was doing a good job. I felt like I was about to turn a corner. I became more confident in the sessions. I noticed her demeanor change. She became less supportive and more confrontational. This change occurs over about two sessions until I'm telling her about my lack of friends and she literally says "that's shitty" and then mocks my voice while repeating what I just told her... I'm still unsure what happened and why she did this but everything we had been working towards for months went right out the window and I was severely SI for about two weeks.
I only started going to my therapist because I was being pressured by my aunts. Then when I start going to my therapist my aunt (who is a stereotypical mean girl-to-doctor) starts talking to them over the phone and they start being dismissive of my issues and chuckle a bit at my problems. Then they started asking leading questions directing me away from my concerns or feelings. The title of this video honestly is a bit of relief to see being talked about , especially when you know how gaslighting works
I’ve had pretty good, so so and so appalling I need therapy from them. The last one was very dangerous. I got away but I’m still unpacking it. Oh and the super religious one who was nice but useless
That's so disappointing, we all deserve better. I missed many, many times I needed mental health support up until I secretly worked with a therapist at age 21, as my family insisted on positive thinking and pseudoscience, luckily a decent therapist. The alternatives given were failing me, they were literally starting to trigger an identity crisis and make me proud of all the labour I would give away to everyone constantly as a "positive thing" (and not a maladaptive, unsustainable coping mechanism) We need therapists who not only work with sound research, but actually engage and centre us and all our factors in our treatment, and go into it with the sincere goal of helping us heal. Not dangerous, dismissive, excessively religious/biased efforts. We deserve therapists who will actually have us, the functional pillars of society, no longer crumbling under mental trauma and unsustainable cycles.
Those kinds of videos are so important. It really helps me feel less alone. As much as I recognize the benefits of psychotherapy and the push for mental health awareness, I have to admit that sometimes there is this underlying assumption that all you need to do to get better is "get therapy" and everything will be fixed. For me, it created some very heavy feeling of alienation when all the therapy I tried were pretty useless for solving my situation. But the entire time, society treats therapy as a panacea for mental illness and when you tell them it’s just not working for some people, there’s this uncomfortable sensation of just being ignored. I often feel like they are treating me like I‘m the problem for not making it work and the entire response I get is just an awkward shrug of the shoulder and tell me to try another therapist until it clicks. I know this all anyone can say in this situation but still, it hurts a lot when even the solution that’s being given is useless for you. It just makes you feel hopeless
@@H3rmon861 I’m happy to hear it’s helped you feel less alone! I’m sorry the therapy system has failed you - I very much relate to the feeling of alienation, sending much love 💕
Therapists are some of the most dangerous people in society I believe, similar to security guards. Ironically the most predatory people in our society are drawn to these professions.
@@Kathrin_yt Why the hell this isnt monitored? Oh wait the bad actors up there allow it and are with the perpetrators because theyre perpetrators themselves, the same in school with teachers and bullies.
You're very wise, intelligent, and perceptive. I can connect with this a lot, which helps me feel a bit less isolated in this insane world. It takes great courage to share our most intimate thoughts and experiences like this, which is why so many people opt to just suppress everything and go with the flow of the insanity.
Therapists are not actually general practitioners of mental wellness but highly specific specialists for addressing "I wish to no longer experience [emotion] when [thing] happens." Not "I want [thing] to stop, or be different." "I want thing to keep happening on, I just want to feel differently about it." It's like we're making orthopedic surgeons treat diabetes because it affects the feet.
I once knew a woman who purposely used the system of psychology to get away with abuse and exert control. She would read up about a mental disorder and then make up stories that had the themes of those behaviors about her children or a vulnerable person and then threaten her children with arrest if they didn't corroborate her story. Any time one of her children tried to talk about the abuse, she would invalidate them by simply stating they had this or that mental disorder and therefor nothing they said was valid. As a result, nearly all the people legally responsible for reporting the abuse did not do so. In retaliation, she would then have them sent away to mental institutions as punishment for having the gal to talk about what was going on. As a result of her and the institutions "treatment" these children did develop mental disorders such as PTSD. The woman responsible for all this, however, was never diagnosed with having any mental disorder probably because she seemed very normal to those who did not know her well. This is why I favor a more scientific, neuroscience and social environment approach to mental illness.
@@CMStrawbridge You're gonna arm-chair diagnose the woman in this commenter's story as a narcissist despite having only a paragraph or two to go off of? That's really messed up of you. They gave no indication that she had NPD, only that she was abusive. But I guess you think those two things are the exact same thing. All narcissists are abusers, and every abuser is a narcissist: am I right? NPD is not just "the asshole disorder", and you pushing around that stereotype hurts people who are often themselves victims of abuse. Educate yourself. And quit trying to pathologize shitty behavior. You don't need to be mentally ill to be a bad person. Neurotypical people manage it just fine every single day.
I miss my good therapist.... I need therapy for how the others after treated me. They cut me off from care without warning. Sent me a letter i never got. No more meds for me. I'm too crazy to deserve help apparently....
I’m really sorry you had this experience! It is very unethical to suddenly take care from people who have been made to feel they can trust the relationship that has been built!
@GaasubaMeshkhenet I don't know if I can be of much help in a TH-cam comment. But I think some times we are always looking for an absolute answer. And, sadly, people just don't know the answer to that question. Some people are happy and they don't know exactly why. Some people are not and they don't know exactly why. Maybe you are just a normal person. People often hide their feelings in social interactions. So maybe you are just speaking out your thoughts in situations where most people would hide their feelings. Causing this difference in expectations that result in us being perceived as a foreigner. So, in other words, you are being too honest with them. Maybe, in this crazy world, you are the person that understands you don't know the answer to that question. Most people think they do, they act like they do, but they don't. In conclusion, I would say that people talk confidently about subjects they have no idea what they are saying. You know that you don't understand a subject. That is a good thing. The issue is that many people don't understand that they don't know either. We can never truly know when we are 100% right or wrong. So we should always keep an open mind to everyone's perspectives. Including our own. Also, I am much happier being a weird guy that stands out in social environments than being someone that is easily forgotten. So maybe being weird ain't that bad.
I get the sense that the main value of therapy lies in having someone to talk to without obligations/risk of social cost. Therapy didn't work for me, in big part because my therapists tendencies to indirectly manoeuvre around systemic issues. Focusing on myself and breaking out of obsessive thought spirals about problems out of my control WAS an important part of getting better, but I couldn't do that without acknowledging the problems I saw in the world as real. The therapists I've worked with have actively worked against that acknowledgement, hindering my progress. What ended up working was saying to myself "yes, the world is messed up, but paralysing myself with dread over that doesn't solve any problems, so I should redirect my attention."
I've also found a similar attitude really helpful, I can take responsibility for directing my energy and time towards where my gifts/interests are best suited to make a difference and let the rest go as much as possible - that has far more efficacy in helping to transform society and in keeping me happy :)
Yes this! I will use this this is so helpful! I’m currently struggling with that with my therapist, she keeps telling me if I can reframe a slightly exaggerated but grounded in reality thought, however the way she puts it just sounds like gaslighting myself of what the reality is. But yes paralysing myself with dread is not helpful.
These are the main criticisms of the Latin American Social Psychology, the understanding of how systematic issues and the capitalist system influence mental health. Some authors like Martin Baro even say that the role of a psychologist is to raise political awareness and empowering
Yes. More precisely: systematic gaslighting to make you "a productive member of society". I had to seek therapy after crashing down with severe, stress induced burnout some ten years ago. The first thing my therapist said was a jovial "Well, let's get you back to going to work again". At a time when I was barely able to put on some clothes and leave the house.
In response to the pinned comment, I've had a lot of success from therapy for my OCD. OCD was kicking my ass and I nearly lost my life to it. Therapy and medicine turned that around. However even though it worked for me I still understand that therapy and many other seemingly good institutions are products of and thus reinforcements for the Capitalist system. Just as with everything, Therapy cannot reach it's full potential as long as Capitalism exists.
Like everything in healthcare, therapy is meant to treat but not cure. You need those repeat customers! This video hits that topic directly! Also VO from Thought Slime, yes!
Therapy has the potential to be very transformative, but it needs to be protected from the worst of Capitalism or even completely freed from it. My personal experience with therapy was amazing. It was a depth psychological group therapy. We all learned something from each other, the therapist was there to give us the tools but the main learning part came in getting to know each other, understanding each other and trying out our techniques together. Also it was a therapy funded by the public healthcare system which removed so much pressure from us and the therapist. I can truly be lucky to have been in this kind of therapy
My first therapist tried cbt for like 2 sessions then gave up. My second (current) therapist is the sweetest person ever and helped me through a lot of self esteem issues and self destructive behaviors.
Your videos are so unbelievably good. I'm very glad I subscribed. The quality of these latest videos is honestly unmatched in my very long TH-cam experience. Maybe I just think a lot like you, idk. I myself didn't like therapy at all and haven't gone back. My biggest problem was that I needed somebody to listen to me but more often the therapist just felt like an academic robot listening only for keywords and regurgitating statistically likely solutions which never remotely fit my circumstances. It also didn't help that I had to be very careful not to mention that I was suicidal because every time I did so I regretted it (when police were involved, when the local hospital was involved, when the helpline was involved and even when just my therapist was involved-four separate occasions). I learned painfully slowly that I should never mention that I was/am suicidal, and that realization made me feel all the more alone in my struggles. As it turns out, therapy is so volatile in quality it can actively make you *more* likely to kill yourself. Pretty ironic haha. I don't know the history so it's only my own theorycrafting, but I've always assumed pastors and shamans served the role of local therapist for villages and cities. At the very least, an emotional ear. I only got this idea in my head after my first good time on weed though when I realized the emotionally therapeutic usefulness of psychedelic drugs for some people. Then the stereotype of the shaman always high on some natural incense started making logical sense to me as a glue for a village's emotional well-being. But anyway, very good video. I'll be rewatching this one.
@@glowerworm thank you so much! This comment was exactly what I needed right now. And I appreciate you sharing your experiences, I’m sorry they were so traumatizing but it’s therapeutic to hear because I very much relate! ❤️
@@Kathrin_yt i am sorry to hear you needed my comment, honestly. I guess I took it for granted that someone capable of this quality knew themselves and their skills very well. You definitely deserve to love and be proud of yourself (hopefully I haven't jumped to a conclusion haha) because from my perspective you're a bit of a role model.
To be fair you can say that about most fields. Health is a bandaid for capitalist exploitation and erosion of the body, and therapy is a bandaid of the capitalistic erosion of the mind. It‘s a thing needed in a world where our minds are actively eroded. And I can say that coming from the field you are critisizing here. It is very true. And while therapy in my eyes is still fundamentally good if done properly ofc, but it would be willfully ignorant to blame the patient for their issues or shortcomings. But as a therapist, you are tasked to help the person live well inside the system. Not to overthrow it cause that is impossibly difficult and unrealistic. Doesn‘t mean therapists are fundamentally pro system. But it is difficult to help people when the thing hurting them is so difficult to shake up. It‘s more like damage control than actual fixing of things. And that is sad but also our reality.
This made me feel lucky to have had a great first therapist. Makes me wonder if, since she has her own private practice, she was able to have a more helpful approach in our sessions without so many of the pressures of the system.
The struggles i had were very much external. Even though I had anger issues steming mostly from my ADHD. The fact is that the difficulty of attainting finacial aid for college and the difficulty of getting a job that would pay enough, let alone if I could keep it long enough, and if I even have any ability of getting another one right after being let go, were just too much for me to bare. Despite my efforts to learn and improve my abilities in resume writing and interviews, getting an enormous amounts of rejections along with the fight or flight response I got from dropping out of college because of lack of finacial assistance turned me absolutly hopeless. My standards for a job were really low too and the fact I couldn't get that speaks volumes. I'm going through therapy and medication just so I won't feel so awful but I don't think it's enough. I just wish the job search wasn't so god awfully horrid. I wish going to college didn't have a cost to it either. I wanted to be an engineer so badly but I couldn't afford to. I hate this economy and the economic power structures in society so much.
Therapy has helped me alone, specially with my current therapist, she is the best one I had by far. Look for the good emphatic ones with, obviously, a minium of 3-4 years university degree. They exist and they really help!
Seems like I've been super lucky with my current therapist. He's never invalidating, and he supports me when I complain about systemic racism and wider social issues that affect my life. He doesn't spend time trying to make me think differently. I'm planning on changing therapists because I need a more structured approach. But I'm honestly more appreciative of him after reading these comments. I'm really shocked and saddened by how many bad therapists are out there.
Me personally , don’t understand how therapy works for others in a general sense. I understand that for severe trauma , therapy can help. But, when everyone says “everyone needs therapy to become a better person” I just don’t understand. People outline “therapy helped me become better with everything by asking the right questions and digging deeper to the origins of my thoughts” and I always feel like …. I do that on my own? When I feel something and don’t like it, I reflect on why I feel it , where that feeling came from. I am concerned that there are people that need an external person to have basic self reflection. It makes me think we either are one of two things: One, our society has drained self reflection and self awareness from people to the point where even to ask the most basic rhetoricals about themselves , people need it instigated by an external person or- Two, we have successfully convinced people that they cannot self reflect, in order to make money off of their society - induced handicap with self awareness. And im not saying all this in order to belittle others. But it has made me very concerned that some of my generation (maybe many actually) have become unhealthily reliant on therapy, like they are now unable to help themselves on their own. For instance , let’s say I get mad when someone calls me a certain word or name. And it makes me frustrated and demoralized. I can work in my mind, backwards, to unravel the origin of that word triggering that feeling, all the way back to an action that occurred when I was a kid. This is just an example. But I feel as though this over reliance on therapy is emotionally handicapping others, rather than emotionally empowering them.
I’m replying to myself to say every single issue I’ve ever had, no therapist helped me with. I could only delve into and solve them on my own. I unravel all of my own issues , analyze hang ups or behaviors in myself that I don’t like. I have worked on and fixed so many issues with myself and problems I’ve had and nobody could help me more than myself. I follow logical lines of thinking to analyze my own responses etc. I’m sure you get what I mean. I have found therapy to be very surface level and not very helpful to me personally. The best way I have ever had is to find the origin of a trauma, or a bad thing, or something I don’t like, feel it deeply and then reflect , and then let go. Not distancing myself like how therapy focuses on; therapy focuses on othering ourselves from our own experiences to cope but this is not healthy.
This is a really interesting point. I do think that our culture breeds narcissism and doesn't teach emotional intelligence in general so it could really be the case that many people genuinely don't have the tools to self-reflect. That being said, even for the most self-reflective of people, it can still be very useful to have an external input sometimes I think as there are always blind spots in us all (but ofc this doesn't have to come from a traditional therapist).
I self reflect but it’s also nice to have a third party to discuss my current struggles, utilise various tools to improve my life and hold me accountable. Therapy is imperfect and many of the points outlined in this video highlight many of my concerns.
I never trusted the capitalist society to solve my mental problems. It "only" took me a decade or so to fix myself, while half isolated from the world. I feel so much better now having broken out of my shell of alienation and all that. My conviction is that, for me personally, this path that I took would only have been possible in one of the Scandinavian nations that I live in , thankfully.
I haven't yet watched the video but recently in therapy really felt like gaslighting. I have terrible trauma and that woman kept saying 1- it's my fault 2- it's somebody else's fault therefore it's my fault to have literal physical symptoms of trauma because i'm not forgiving 3- i should be feeling like laying in a bed of roses even if i don't have a job and i depend solely in one person. Worrying about that person possibly dying before i get a job is stupid 🙄 i got another therapist.
this is actually pretty well timed considering its something id been thinking about and seeing other people talk about their experiences online with the good and bad on therapy. happy you found some things that work for you. it varies for everyone yeah. and sometimes i worry about the line between whats best to work on individually and whats stifling radical thought or stifling me as an individual.
Thank you Kathrin for another great video. In my life so far I've only had one experience with therapy, which was largely positive. One thing I did notice, though, was that my therapist made it clear that this was not the place to discuss things that are wrong with society etc, but that we were only going to talk about me as an individual who needs to keep functioning and going to work. She did help me to achieve that. I think it's important and safest to be in a state where we can function well enough to avoid being pathologized and institutionalized, so that we can use our time to organize and make the change we want to see.
thank you! And yes I think that's a good point - that by healing ourselveswe can have more energy to put towards making the world a better place - it's not a neat dichotomy between the two!
therapy is a tool of the punitive system that serves to surveil and control the population. there are *some* therapists that do work try and help address the systemic concerns their clients face tho. for example clinical social workers are trained to address clients as wholistic individuals existing in the many systems that put them in their positions, but even clinical social workers operate under and within these punitive systems. that is why as a social worker in training i refuse to be a clinical social worker, my goal is to work at the community level and/or the macro level. i want to help work with communities to change existing systems.
Even if you work at the community level your ability to enact real change is limited. Huge cuts to social policy, have to maintain positive view by those funding you, public policies around community are often limited and lack of appropriate taxation to the wealthy in favour of cuts means you are stuck in a cycle. I’m not saying you are wrong - rather there are limitations with clinical and community work - I don’t know how to truly change the status quo. Our neoliberal project is unlikely to end.
I appreciate the points made in this video. There's a lot of care and nuance in your words and the way you say them. I found this very comforting and the sentiments ring genuine, honest and full of concern. You're not "selling" me an idea nor are you doing a bit. I understand how hard it must be to say the things you're saying. I will surely keep coming back to this video in different times through my life, because it makes me consider and think through things in an empathetic way. Thank you, Kathrin.
I'm really glad the tantric massage helped you tap into the pent up emotions trapped in your somatic memory. I have a hypothesis/small theory that, the way trauma gets stored into the body is like an electric/photonic burn, like a hard scratch into a vinyl record, but instead of plastic, our bodies store these painful traumatic memories in the muscles and connective tissue, the fascia which communicates through the body with photons and piezoelectric/pressure signals, in a fiberoptic network of collagen and hyalauronic acid., in tandem with the electric connections of nerve tissues. so i truly believe that massage and tantra does physically heal and it's not just a woo-woo thing. Even stuff like drumming and hallucinogens can help our brains access brainwave patterns and electrical rhythms that allow us to "rewrite" the CD or Vinyl records in our body-minds, (so our bodies can have CD-RW mode and trauma shouldnt be a permanent CD-R or Read Only memory mode) and it's both physical, chemical AND spiritual, because at the quantum level, everything really is vibrations of subatomic particles and different frequencies light, just ordered up in different patterns as the meat, minerals, and liquids amd vapors of our bodies.
I really love your content.. The part at 13:00 really resonated. I've been suicidal since I was about 9 or 10 years old, and have always been a loner with low empathy, which made me reactive, reclusive, and spiteful in a way that made me obsessed with violence, not necessarily perpetuating it, but observing, cataloguing, stomaching, surviving, treating, any manner relating to these. When I was pulled out of school at 12 or 13 after a history of poor conduct dating back to when i was a toddler, my grandma said something like " If you aren't careful, they're going to send you to the psych ward. I don't want to lose you." I still can't stomach the thought of going to therapy, and I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to release some of my deepest secrets, even thinking about them feels dangerous, like someone's going to find out who I really am. I probably wouldn't have even thought of that specific event had you not mentioned it. I'm really happy to hear about your spiritual progress too. I hope one day I can make as much progress as you have.
In want to throw my own two cents into the mix, I'm an alter who's had very bad experiences with therapy. I've consistently found that I, and my fellow system-mates, have had to explain to mental health professionals about what D.I.D. actually is, and about what being an alter is really like to some rather egregious extents that have very much made me question the extent to which therapists are actually taught about those of us with rarer and/or more complex mental differences. My system-family and I would talk about alterphobia, patriarchy, LGBTQ+ struggles, and upset at the status quo with them only to be largely dismissed and ignored. We've found many a time where we'd just rant to them about struggles just to have them nod along and not say anything of any real value or to invalidate us largely on the basis of us being alters and them refusing to understand what that's like. So much of the struggles that various members of our system-family have dealt with aren't things that can be internally solved. Things that we don't have individualistic power over. But suggestions about how to deal with our struggles were always about dealing with the internal and westernized warping of mindfulness, as if one's struggles were less about the people and the societal and capitalistic structures that hurt them, and more about their unideal reactions to it. For our system-family, mental health professionals ended up causing more harm than help. Slowly, the members of our system collectively realized that traditional therapy wasn't for us. That traditional therapy was for those who were of more accepted identities and dealt with more accepted struggles than us, and that traditional therapy focused so much more on supposed harm-reduction than actual help. Finding community spaces, befriending kind people, recognizing the evils and extents of capitalism, and most importantly, relying upon one another, has helped our system-family far more than traditional therapy ever has. So many folks tout traditional therapy as a necessity for good mental health, which is frustrating, 'cause it so obviously ain't, and that viewpoint only encourages capitalism-though that's beside my main point. Traditional therapy is a method for getting help that works for some people, especially those who fit the westernized ideal and are more comfortable with the status quo, but it doesn't for everybody. For people like me and my family, there are far kinder, far less expensive methods of healing, not merely the healing of yourself, but of the world around you.
Everytime I’ve gone to therapy in the past 15 years they’d either try to convince me my shitty job wasn’t effecting me, or they were trying to convince me to get a shitty job.
This was so good! I feel like you elaborated on a lot of things the little voice in the back of my head said. I think I had some pretty different experiences with therapy but not many that I would describe as positive. I feel like everybody had their one thing. One guy was all meditation, one was all medication, one straight up said there's nothing I can do for you until you go 3 months without smoking weed, drinking is fine, whatever, no problem at all with alcohol. Then there's the religious nutjobs. One that suggested a bubble bath when I felt like hurting myself and strongly suggested that every bad thing that ever happened to me was actually my own fault. Woven through all of modern life is the assumption that if you're unhappy about anything, that emotion is the problem. The most progressive solution is allowing you to feel the feeling but not express it of course. Maybe in private if you can afford privacy. Most therapists just go straight to "I have a pill for that" and just immediately write you off if you don't want the drugs. Like you're refusing cancer treatment, implying that a thought or feeling is a sickness to be remedied, a mental virus that requires the scouring obliteration you can only get from american pharmaceutical conglomerates. Sorry I'm just ranting now but the thing that always killed it for me was the unshakable recognition in the back of my mind that I was paying a stranger to essentially pretend to be my friend for 45 minutes a week. What an absolute nightmare. 8 billion people on this rock and I have to pay someone who can't even pretend to care most of the time for 45 minutes once a week. The darkest, loneliest moments always come when I'm with other people, from moments like that, where you reach out for help and the world reaches out to take your credit card.
I went to a shitload of NHS therapists as a kid, and teen. My experiences with them were invariably terrible. They refused to listen to anything I had to say, insisted that literally everything I experienced or went through had to be in some way attributable to my autism, failed to-a-man to realise I was struggling with undiagnosed ADHD (one even explicitly telling me I couldn't have it because "It's something you grow out of", Jesus fucking Christ), and refused to acknowledge any systemic issues. I am currently in therapy with a really good therapist, and have been for almost a year. I had to go private-sector to find a decent therapist, and the only reason that that was even an option, was that I'd recently won a legal battle, and it had left me with money to spare. We legit spent the first couple of sessions just working through my bad experiences with previous therapists, because they rightly knew that we wouldn't be able to make progress on anything else, until we'd talked through that. I didn't even find them through any official channels. It was a personal recommendation from a friend-of-a-friend, whom I met in a certain online subculture. Seriously. If it hadn't been for that stroke of good luck, I would be in an *insanely* worse place now, both mentally and medically.
Yes !! Therapy within this system is just covering for a system that leaves many people disenfranchised & vulnerable which inherently causes trauma. I've never had a therapist question or critique the world that damaged me & was very focused on my internal feelings. It's just weird that the people here to assist me with my trauma are not thinking in the "macro" sense
My first therapist was my most helpful. But I think most of the help came from me being young (17) and not having much language to understand or identify the issues I have. That therapy would never solve my underlying issues but at least managed to help me build coping mechanisms. I was also very fortunate that she suggested early on that I was on the spectrum. I was in denial at the time, but remembering that further down the line helped me confidently self dx later. Understanding myself through that context alleviated a lot of the guilt and shame I had about myself. I haven't had any luck with talk therapy since. it hurts me more often than it helps by being put in a situation where I'm liable to be misunderstood in the worst setting possible. I've considered doing somatic therapy as I've become more conscious of how my body holds trauma even when I am unable to mentally recognize it. I really resonated with intellectualizing your trauma further alienating yourself from your body. I'm in the same hole. it often makes me physically ill because I can't recognize when I've gone way past burnout.
Really great ideas here, glad it was shared on the therapyabuse subreddit. I unfortunately grew up with a narcissistic counselor as a mother and lived through the reality how playing counselor can be a huge power dynamic, as the dynamic says all the problems are in you, not me. Also there are almost no prevention mechanisms to stop narcissists or sociopaths from becoming therapists. Many famous therapists are theorized to have NPD. The drive up be famous can be part of that disorder Note that now we're in a time where individual therapy and learned helplessness is the norm. There have been counter currents, including family systems theory. A great example of what could work is Open Dialogue in Finland which morphed into Peer supported Open Dialogue in England. The focus is on no power differential and treating someone holistically. I'd also shout out to Bruce E Levine as he's a Maverick I love
very interesting to hear about ''Open Dialogue'' I hadn't heard of them before. And I am currently doing some family systems work via the book ''No Bad Parts'' and it's really feeling life-changing to me already. Thanks for sharing your experience!
Very relatable. Therapy has helped me in some ways, but has caused me a lot of personal trauma, mainly caused by the structure of society and incomplete data from studies. It always feels like they tell people to do some form of therapy or take a certain supplement, and then 2-3 years later it is debunked by other studies. It feels like mental health researchers are always chasing trends and influenced by media too much. Thank you for making this
I was just looking for my comment (wrote before finishing the video) to add that. Fanon I think is the ultimate point of reference for critiques like these. His work was ahead of its time. Also, maybe abolitionists work would be of interest: grace Lee Boggs and Miriam Kaba
I feel like this and the “put a raisin in your mouth thing” are the results of these therapists missing a step somewhere. Like, I can see where they were both coming from. Seeing a problem as an external being can help you think of ways to deal with it, and mindfulness can help you break off emotion associated with memory for a time. But the first step that a therapist has gotta do is validate. Say “that’s fucked up, and I get it”.
@@Bluestarferies Yes she's actually got two Masters and a doctorate. She practices internal family systems and apparently when you get far enough down the line with them, they have a belief that these entities called unattached burdens can quite literally attach themselves to a human being. They are described as foreign energies that feed off of the energy of the host. It's a fucking demon.
post 1950s mental healthcare: individualize, pathologize, emphasize doing "the work," which never ends. or, just a reflection of the economic conditions.
I also had a similar experience during my awakening (or “acute paranoid psychosis”) when I was touched by dead children. I knew they were dead and at first felt responsible for their deaths. Then, after several more experiences, I was convinced there were previous generations trying to communicate with me.
The mind/body part is super relatable - like in my teenage years, I had this constant physical feeling of my stomach falling in a way similar to anxiety, so the best language I had to explain how I was feeling was "anxious," and then the entire focus became on how it was my fault for not thinking correctly to stop having anxious thoughts. Anyway, turned out I had celiac's and when I eat gluten, it causes that physical feeling akin to anxiety, which then causes me to investigate "what I'm anxious about" which would just MAKE me anxious. I did have anxiety, but the focus on it was just focusing on an effect, not a root cause (much like therapy can often do when someone's mental distress is caused by external systems that, yeah, have that affect on a person's psyche, often because there really is a danger). I've also been finding a TON of help with my (seemingly) overactive fight or flight responses and emotional regulation difficulties with some vagus nerve soothing/somatic techniques as well. I think a lot of able-bodied neurotypical people find comfort in the idea of "it's all in your head," which they often extend to "it's all just what you're thinking consciously," because they see that has something they have almost total control over, and the idea of not having control over your body or mind can be very scary (esp in our current capitalist system, where it becomes a cycle of "must be mentally well to do capitalism, must do capitalism to have the comfort to be mentally well"). And then on top of THAT, capitalist/production-focused cultures enforce a "push through what your body and mind are telling you so you can perform for the machine" narrative that led to the tragic and ultimately fatal paralyzation of Soviet gymnast Elena Mukhina right before the 1980 Olympics, or the narrative that Simone Biles was "weak" or "letting her country down" for stepping down from the olympic competition in 2021 when she felt her body/mind weren't conducive to performing safely (don't get me started on that lol- she didn't let her country down, her country let her down when they didn't take reports of her abuser seriously and gave her crap for prioritizing her safety over a shiny jingoistic symbol of greatness). This whole topic also feels very relevant when seeing the state of the world - in my opinion, we probably should be extremely disturbed to the point of not being able to focus on "functioning under capitalism" and performing for the machine when we see things like war crimes that have been far too common lately. But if viewing the footage of war crimes (or anything horrific and unjust) do lead you to that state of not being able to function under capitalism, then you're considered "defective." It goes along with the "just be normal" section you covered - an important piece of "normalcy" in our society is feeding the machines of capital and production. Another great video with inspiring ideas and impeccable vibes 💕
I never saw the problem of "gaslighting" in therapy as something FROM theraphy. To me, the therapists were just bad at their jobs, and I had to find a new therapist. That's because I felt like "thinking positive" was terrible, as a lot of my problems came from burying my feelings, and it was "just the same." After this video and the comments, I've never been so grateful to my therapist. I knew she was good, but now I feel like I could cry because of it, lol. She does not ignore any of it, and because of her, I've been able to realize that some of the problems I have come precisely from being raised with the pressures of being a woman. I knew that before, but in a more general way. I've been with her for about 4 months, and I'm really grateful for her work.
@@Kathrin_yt yes, but it made me sad too lol. I think I might now have expressed myself well enough, but I started the comment talinkg about me seeing the "gaslighting" problem as a therapist being bad at their job, because I hadn't realized it was a real issue (by that I mean something more "general") before your video. I thought I was just unlucky when I found therapists with this problem, but all the stories opened my eyes
Therapy helped me tremendously. I had PTSD, a teeny tiny ED and depression. Now after 4 years of therapy with a change of therapists in the middle because the first one showed some alarming signs of acephobia... I can happily say I'm pretty much cured from PTSD 🎉 Maybe I'll be fine in 8 years or so 😅
I have to add though, my current therapist is adorable and makes me feel very much in control of the therapy. I'm the one doing the work, she gives me the tools I guess? She's not like an all knowing being or even above me or anything. The previous guy was a little bit more obnoxious like you described. Very much in a "Knowing", vaguely mysterious and judging posture. He helped me some because he was still ok overall, but I felt uneasy and sort of like an interesting but weird creature. The acephobia part was subtle and he probably didn't even realise he was dismissive of my feelings, and that's such a red flag to me! I'm so glad I changed.
I’ve been sleeping on this one but holy shit the first 30 seconds had me locked in because my very first therapist ever was literally just my mom’s best friend and told her everything that I said. Good Lord, the beating I received . Thank you, for making this video and in all honesty, all the content you make because I feel it is unfortunately necessary as no one else is.
It was crazy to me when you said your friend had a therapist who fell asleep because that happened to me once as well! 😅 it made me feel pretty bad about going on about myself.
I feel so so so so so lucky that i have the therapist I do now. She's lgbtq+ affirming, neurodiverse affirming, and she does acknowledge the ways in which society is the cause of some of my problems. That doesn't mean i've never disagreed with her, there certainly have been things she's told me that i didn't agree with, but for me currently the benefits far outweigh those few things I didn't perfectly agree with her on. I certainly agree with you that there are tons of bad therapists, and tons of therapists that aren't really helping anyone. I also completely understand if someone has tried therapy and given up on it after years, because it's ridiculous to expect someone to continue trying something that hasn't worked after a good try. I think to tell people to just "get therapy" is actually a really dismissive statement in some cases. I remember the very first therapist I ever saw, not my current one, and she was not a good therapist. She had me journal but that was just about it, she didn't discuss or do anything else for me. I totally could have decided to not try therapy any more after that if I had wanted to.
Therapy can be a lifesaver, BUT I wish anyone recommending it would warn that a lot of therapists can do more harm than good. It's enraging that some of them are getting paid an arm and a leg an hour, and not only can they not be good therapists, they can't be bothered to be half decent people either. I was trying to go no contact with my crappy mom and this is the gem I got... Therapist: so when will you want to talk to your mom again? Me: never, I only want to get away from her. Therapist: well, I can't tell you what to do with your life *doesn't ask more questions, ends conversation*
I've been litteraly retraumatized by my first therapist allegedly trained in trauma who ended abruptly my sessions without further explanations or mutual shared discussion to decide. I went to treat a sexual trauma, all the work I did during one year had vanished BC of her brutal betrayal and abandonment. I resent deeply this person, felt I was punished because I blamed her for not helping me finding a psychiatrist when she was asking me to get a medical backup added to the psychotherapy with her
First video i watched of this channel, didn't know what to expect because the thumbnails are kinda attention-grabbing, which is mostly a red flag, but even youtubers gotta eat so I can't really blame ya. This was surprisingly high quality, and i very much enjoyed, very reassuring to hear all this from someone else, living in a very patriarchic and nationalist country kinda means I'm the only one criticizing therapy for these exact reasons. It gets lonely being told to go to therapy, after i was in it for like a year with what amounts to negative results. And not for something big or anything, just being constantly anxious from my "economic circumstances" and a shit situation at home. Thanks for the work you're doing, wish you well.
![that's a red flag? but I do that.... [cc]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/NkLM8HTYY1g/mqdefault.jpg)
What are your thoughts & experiences of therapy, either as a client or therapist?
I never found CBT particularly helpful to me, but the therapist I was seeing while I was at one of my lowest points introduced DBT to me, and it was a helpful tool for the me then. I wonder if I would feel the same about it now, over a decade later. DBT definitely focuses on many of the things you touch on in this video, such as mindfulness, that don't get at the root of the problem. But for 20-year-old me, it was a game changer.
@@Nernel interesting, I will look into DBT I hadn’t heard much about it!
I can not afford therapy and I hate all the memes where men are smugly told that they rather do something X instead of going to therapy, when the option just is not there. I have consulted a mental health nurse, she that told me that hatred is an asset, reserve of strength and I believe her
Therapy was a game changer for me.
@@Regambler I'm happy to hear it worked well for you!
As an autistic person, I used to want to be "normal", until I realised that "normal" seems to mean blind compliance, a lack of imagination, and a level of moral flexibility that borders on sociopathic. It irritates me that so many people seem to view our man-made systems as unchangeable monoliths.
as a fellow autistic/adhder I agree that one of the gifts of neurodivergence is to have a way of questioning and seeing things differently than most people and that is a beautiful thing
Same. ADHD and autism have been tough, but that was only because the world is built for people who don't think like me. People who are easier to convince. People who can tune into the subtlest frequencies of socialization and indoctrination, leaving them blind to the no-nonsense perception and presentation we typically abide.
People look for stability, especially after 30yo or when they have kids. And there's also a stoic saying: you cannot change the world, but you can change yourself and the way you interact with the world. It's not about forgetting everything else, it's about being efficient and functioning for your own sake.
@Sucellusification I don't mean to sound harsh, but your reply kind of epitomises my point. Using a "stoic saying" points to a lack of imagination, and this is even more so when the saying in question seems designed to keep people in their lanes and hope for less from the world around them. Instead of functioning for our "own sake", wouldn't the world be a better place if we functioned for each other? I guess one person's idea of "stability" is another person's idea of stagnation.
@@joesimpson4522 I don't see how adapting to reality shows lack of imagination. There are several ways you can adapt, depending on your personality and you can even create new ways of living that nobody thought of before. They will succeed as long as they can find a niche where you can thrive. In my opinion, seeing it as a way to keep people in lane and make them hope for less IS the unimaginative way of thinking.
"For your own sake" doesn't mean, in this context, that you should become an egotistical mean person that only thinks of themselves, it means that you should try to live better and become stronger in every way, SO THAT you can do for yourself and others what you consider best, and follow your values instead of just having to barely survive.
By following this path, you build yourself first in order to then build a better society with others, so in the end you function for each other, avoiding one of the main problems that can arise from that: forgetting to take care of yourself, and making others take care of you because you take care of them. That can be dangerous if the reciprocation breaks, and can leave you very vulnerable and with no resources. But if you consider yourself one of the main persons to take care of, you'll never be left adrift.
I hope I explained myself clearly enough 😊 if you have more questions please ask and we can discuss this or other points of view
Needing therapy to get over the trauma of bad therapists is too relatable.
That is a sign it is time to escape the trauma cult.
same
First experience with therapy to treat the return of symptoms of a sexual trauma. It went well, I liked the clinician psychologist who was around my age, was aware of systemic issues. She asked for a psychiatric advice/back-up and when it was achieved on my own. She interrupted my own therapy by an unclear email and refused to answer to all my trials to understand why. I wish she could respond for the extreme violence she inflicted on me
i've thought i needed therapy for a long time but the paraphrased quote "it's not healthy to be healthy in a sick world" is something that feels far more valid than just trying to be happy in a broken world which has been a major contributor to leading me to avoid going into therapy. edit: ive been thrown off by the yugopnik voice over[
I'm not sure life is about being happy, but being able to find some measure of contentment in the company of friends, family or lovers, despite the darkness of the world, is a worthwhile pursuit. It's a very individual choice about whether to partake in therapy or not, but my decision to do so helped my mood lift and feel more comfortable with who I am as a person. It led to me becoming a therapist myself and I love the work!
You must judge how you feel and whether therapy might help you feel slightly different (hopefully better in some way) or are content to let things remain as they are.
Sounds like a an excuse not to take responsibility. The purpose of therapy is not necessarily to be "happy"
"It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society." That quote keeps me going tbh :/
Don be so literal . Being happy is just a way of saying it
nah. These phrases about the world being a horrible place are cool and all, but don't let it blind you. There is inner work that you must do. If you stay indifferent to your bad psyche patterns, they will continue to govern your life (in the worst way they can) and pass themselves to others. If you don't set your realities straight, other people will be happy to do so and that's dangerous.
Never be afraid of being the best self you could be.
A huge issue with therapy is that nobody knows what we are doing. The field of psychology is young, about one of the most sophisticated structures we are aware of, grotesquely underfunded, much of the research is either very poor from the outset or doesnt survive replication. So anyone who proclaims themselves an expert therapist is kidding themselves.
This has led to the treatment becoming something of a statistics game, what framework of treatment can cost the least and have the highest rate of success. (Which is why youll see CBT everywhere and for damn near every thing, at least in public healthcare.) Ostensibly that seems fine, and maybe it is, maybe its the best we can do without a lot more funding and a firm scientific foundation, but the reality of it is that huge percentages of people who dont fit in to the broadest categories will leave essentially untreated.
I dont think this is acknowledged or admitted to by many therapists, and there is often little flexibility in the system to even attempt to tackle the problem.
Very well said!
I've also found it unethical sometimes that charities I've signed up for have offered 12 sessions of CBT for issues as complex as CSA. Perhaps it's better than nothing, but it also feels unethical to offer thought-work techniques to people who are probably dealing with deep rooted trauma that needs a lot of time and attention to uproot.
This is one of my main issues with my practice, how can i even give therapy when the foundations of it are so shaky and outright wrong at times? I couldn't help but feel i could be doing something else, something better for my patients during my practice, but searching in theory, it all seems muddly and limited, specially when i have to translate methods tested in developed countries into the conditions of my own country
@@Kathrin_yt prob is trauma treatment is still a specialization right now.
"Much of the research is either very poor from the outset or doesnt survive replication" This is why for most of us philosophers, psychology just barely qualifies as science, i'm sorry. As a discipline, it quite simply runs on gross generalization of a phenomenon that we can't even replicate.
"What's depressing you?" "All the homelessness, poverty and preventable socially engineered human misery all around me." "Oh, you're just thinking negative thoughts. Here,have some pills!"
"Why are everyone addicted to opiates?"
and don’t forget all the horrific side effects that will come with taking those pills!
@coolchameleon21 yes, and the tendency of everyone around you to say, "you don't have real problems, it's just that you're not taking enough pills" once you've been "diagnosed." Has anyone ever gone to a psychiatrist and left without a "mental health condition"? Maybe it's the psychiatrists causing them...
@@FarDrifter You're reaching too far, and making too many assumptions
Therapists can't prescribe medication.
As a therapist i try to never ignore the structural systems, intergenerational inheritances, poverty and economic vulnerability from housing to food banks etc as integral parts of the problems people face. One of the biggest problems with the psychodynamic models and CBT in general too is the idea of locating the source of all problems as originating within the individual rather than using a more accurate wider lens and exploring so much of what you speak about in this video.
Really good video! Thank you! ✌🏿👊🏿
thank you for sharing your thoughts/experience!
Yeah, the more I learn about humans and multi-polar traps (look up Daniel schmactenberger) and the logic and thinking of people in hierarchies and the incentives of the systems that props up obligate sociopathic corporations due to them not having empathy but requiered to maximize share holder profit and because of the liability protections they have the “move fast and break things” incentivized way of acting 🎭 become more like profiting off poison 😊society and then outsource the negative 2nd order and 3rd order effects on peoples bio/psycho/social outcomes in life. Like the American chemical society shows over 300 cancerous chemicals in our enviroment released by industry, these show up in breast milk too. To the fact that leaded gasoline took 11 pts of iq off the worlds population intelligence and lead poisoning has been used to keep minorities down by showing lack of interest in solving, that religion just seems to protect and partner with this same machine all because uncertainty is scary and people desperately cling to the hot water shower that regulates their nervous system at the end of a day of being used. It’s like wtf kinda dystopia was I brought up in?
Even when acknowledging these issues, therapy remains completely ineffective to tackle the issue. A person in a bad place needs to not only change the mind, but also the setting, and changing the setting requires money and opportunities. Since therapists won't do anything about the latter, they overfocuse on the former. Sometimes to the person's detriment.
Those models are fantastic at what they're designed to do: Getting people out of crisis and improving their quality of life.
As a patient, it seems like the problem is just that therapists - at least the ones I've worked with/heard of - tend to just apply CBT to the patient as if they're hammering a nail.
It's important to work with the patient to establish goals, and to clarify what the purpose of tools used is.
Just having CBT thrown at you as a patient who has identified and is focusing on real problems can feel invalidating, manipulative, and sort of adjacent to gaslighting.
It's especially bad with depression, where the "muh chemical imbalance" lingo tends to be used to just dismiss all suffering as a "bug in the code" and not real.
I would have had much more success in therapy if my therpist had just told me something like
"Listen, the problems you see are real, horrifying, and worth addressing. However, right now you're pretty much non functional and homeless. You're not in a position to change anything, so the best possible strategy is to build a foundation that allows you to function."
Instead of
"The problems you see aren't real, your brain is just broken." or "Just stop caring."
I described the therapy as something for people near the peak of Maslow's Pyramid needing a boost up the final steps.
It's a sick joke for those near the bottom.
And the sides of the pyramid keep getting covered in grease.
Therapy just made me believe that there was something fundamentally wrong with my brain that I needed to fix. Like I was a car and the therapist was the mechanic. When I realized that most of my emotional reactions to the things going on around me are actually very normal and human and a sign that my brain was working correctly, I finally began to stop hating myself that much.
Therapists are not actually trained to be general advisors of mental wellness, but to address the rare but serious problem of "there's genuinely, factually, *not a single thing actually wrong in my environment* . But I'm miserable anyway." That's the only thing the training actually prepares you to do.
I feel really strongly about trying to defend my mind from that kind of belief. I fear how therapy, with a weekly talking session focusing on all my 'problems', could potentially enforce this sort of worry of whats wrong with instead of improving my happiness and personal fulfillment. Add to that the risk of being pressureed to take medications or at worst losing freedom through involuntary detainment, then the potential reward of finding a good therapist just doesn't seem worth it compared to the potential downsides. So I am content I refused to opt in to therapy when my parents and the school counselor tried to coerce my with all kinds of talk about I would fail in life. (horribly negative persuasion tactic - why should I agree to think so hopelessly about myself?)
Despite this, I still think in theory maybe the services of a therapist could potentially benefit me, but if I consider the systhem that therapy is embedded in, the historical background with diagnosis like "hysteria" and the risk of ending with someone who can't understand/help me and might even make things worse ... I don't want to engage with all of that.
@@sophiemay9645 If it is clearly obvious to you, and those around you, that you are not the architect of your own suffering, then there is likely little for you to gain from one on one therapy. I think everyone sometimes in life self-sabotages, and I think some people's predominant problem is how often they do so, but that's not everybody all the time.
"Is Therapy Under Capitalism Just Systemised Gaslighting?"
As someone who has studied social psychology: yes.
For anyone interested in reading further, I recommend anything coming from the neurodiversity paradigm.
Seconding this, the liberation psychology approach is also really fascinating, which brings in a lot of decolonial theory from Freire and Fanon, first conceptualized by Ignacio Martin-Baro. Western psychology under Capitalism is so individualized and mired in "self responsibility bootstraps" ideology, as well as the profit motive, its disgusting, and we need to revolutionize the field with these new approaches.
I just feel like pouring out my thoughts rn so I'm just going to do it lol.
I want to go to uni and go study social psychology to help others in this shitty world.
Sociology is something I love and have been a hobbyist, basically my entire life.
Sadly my grades aren't good enough YET but I feel like I have a good grasp on the subject, when it comes to general definitions and ways of thinking.
I mean I recently came out of my own shell of alienation by just trying to understand the capitalist system by myself. I didn't want any other ideologies to "corrupt" my realizations of deep materialist truths of society. I wouldn't even take on my marxist father's understanding at face value, and critiqued everything up and down.
I don't really want to be a labelist but I've become a heterodox marxist and a revolutionary optimist, and I view the entirety of the leftist movement holistically and as a collective unconscious movement. It's currently in the process of bringing about socialism. Not efficient but effectively in a compartmentalized way, breaking down capitalism from all sides.
Oh well, but sadly this process of mine of understanding the world took a decade or so and came at the cost of not living life to the fullest.
According to capitalism I guess I deserve my current situation, which makes me so happy to know that capitalism will be completely destroyed, with or without humanity. Well deserved, into the trash bin of reality it goes.
So basically I'm currently slowly reintegrating myself into society and am on a path of self-actualization, while trying to be humble and actively rejecting "great man theory".
Because in this individualistic society ppl keep falling into the pit of believing they're superior and by doing so, they actively work to continue this exploitative and illogical system. Which is why I want to rehabilitate such sick ppl, being created by an even sicker ideology
All of these things that I try to keep in mind have made me a little crazy, but being sane in this insane world is not for me lol.
Can you name specific authors, please?
I would also like if you name authors
@@javierromo8711 @andrer1664 Ignacio Martin-Baro should have the most foundational, "canonical" writings, such as his "Writings for a Liberation Psychology." There's also a really good series of talks he's done at universities on TH-cam, if you can understand Spanish m.th-cam.com/video/7w4i2nT9vVo/w-d-xo.html&pp=ygUlSGFjaWEgdW5hIHBzaWNvbG9naWEgZGUgbGEgbGliZXJhY2lvbg%3D%3D
What I would recommend as well, as a good introduction to this approach and some of its core ideas / expansions in the modern day, is the collection of essays, "Liberation Psychology: Theory, Method, Practice, and Social Justice" by Lilian Comas-Diaz, which should be on LibGen or Anna's Archive for free ; in fact Chapter 5 was written by a professor of mine who I've gotten really close with because of our similar interests in academia and activism :) Good luck!
Therapy cost too much I tried to see someone she was charging 750 a session. I’ve seen a handful of therapist over my years. One I found last years was a low income therapist (for poor folks like me) who would cut the 60 minute session down by 30 minutes and charge my card full price. They all say the same thing, “oh just focus on something else.” “Breathe” it’s like they’re reciting a script. I feel so invalidated whenever I go to therapy like my problems aren’t a big deal. I’ve been trying to get tested for autism for almost 10 years now and I keep getting dismissed had one therapist tell me “it’s very costly.” Another therapist saying “what we would be the point in getting an autism diagnosis?” Another one said I don’t appear to be autistic, and dismissed me after talking to me only for a few minutes. The place I work talks about the mentally ill in a sarcastic tone, they’re constantly mocked behind their backs. And it’s left a very bitter taste in my mouth and left me looking at the whole “mental health care” system as nothing more than a circus. Sorry for going on a tangent, great video by the way, you’re very well spoken!
So sorry to hear about your experience, I've also had the same dismissal of my neurodivergence because I don't seem autistic/adhd - it's deeply heart-breaking to get invalidated by the very people that should be giving you the love and care you deserve. Thank you for sharing your experience!
the older I get, the more I realize the people who were labelled difficult or "crazy", often were 100% correct.
As someone with autism, that sucks. However I do want to offer a alternative here- there really isn't much practical point being diagnosed with autism past a certain age. Because autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder, there is no drug or medicine that can impact it, at least not proven or tested drugs.
Most of what an autism diagnosis is useful for (beyond personal validation/insight) is to secure accomodations and therapy in a K-12 and occasionally collegiate setting.
Past that an autism diagnosis is pretty much just a piece of paper. I suppose it can help with certain employers, but that's iffy, businesses still have stigma sometimes if you share that you have autism.
Because autism is so we'll researched if you feel like you have it there really is very little you cannot find online, either through pop psych mags, TH-cam videos, or actual research papers.
Self diagnosis is accepted among the autistic community because the community knows what getting an official diagnosis is like. Self diagnosing can be a validating alternative for you
Sameee, I remember when I was talking to a therapist I used to have, I told her "I think I might have autism" she interrupted me and said "we shouldn't believe everything we see in tiktok"
And I was like:
OK, first of all, you didn't even let me explain why I think so, second, I don't even use tiktok!
But then she stopped being my therapist when she discovered I was queer, she literally told me "I can't help you anymore" and kicked me out so all in all, she was a terrible person lmao
It seems that capitalism is a very large part of the problem
yep! most of my issues stem specifically to that.
Blame statism, not capitalism. Statism is a very large part of the problem.
@@goMikeMeloyou can’t have capitalism without the state. The state establishes a currency, delineates private property, and holds a monopoly on the violence used to reinforce and protect that property, as well as the privileges of those who hold the most wealth.
@@livthedream5885
All of that was dead wrong. Reject your authoritarian urges and respect human rights fully.
The state is stupid and criminal. Capitalism is extremely moral and based.
@@goMikeMelo Everything I said is extremely correct, but perhaps you don’t know the difference between capitalism and markets. Without a vast commons you cannot have free markets. Capitalism emerged from Monarchism (as large “trading companies” establishing global trade, usually a foothold for colonialism) and feudalism (where feudal lords held vassal states and threw peasants out of their enclosures through militarized violence). Free markets require free access to capital resources, and freedom of movement and trade. Capitalism cannot exist without a state to provide the militarized protections it requires to prevent peasants and later workers from uprisings.
What you seek is anarchy, and something like syndicates cooperating, trading, and negotiating. The Paris Commune would have been a major success if both capitalists and “communists” had not sabotaged and destroyed it. True communism is a stateless, classless, society.
Precisely WHY do you think so many private banks, corporations, and investment firms are throwing millions into the establishment of cop cities all over the USA???
Much of what brings us to therapy is actually caused by capitalism's sadistic coercion of the working class. In a society where all people are welcomed participants, it's hard to imagine a deep need for therapy such as we've had in the last 100 years. The goal of therapy in our capitalist society is to convince you that your unhappiness is caused by your inadequacies. Gaslighting is the exact correct term for therapy today. Well done!
This, this right here. Everyone's mental ills are always put off on having depression or anxiety because of the easy scape goats of their parents or just having some brain disorder with out a cause. WHAT IF my depression and anxiety is from being a very creative and free spirited person forced to live In a culture of the cult of capitalism? Maybe I'm anxious because I have to constantly worry about food and money in a system that's meant to always inflate prices every 10 years making it near impossible for lower middle class and low class civilians to truly get ahead. Maybe it's because I can't even own land without risk of being thrown off it if I don't constantly pay my due to the government. Maybe instead of therapist handing out pills and blaming everything on your childhood Maybe they hand out money, food, housing and cover all medical expenses. I bet everyone will be surprised how much their mental health improves after that. There are tons of people who have real mental illness, however nobody talks about the people who have mental illness from living in a toxic money driven society and like you said you're gas light into not considering that. Therapist never ask "can you afford to fix your car?" "Can you afford groceries?" "Do you feel enslaved and stressed at your job and feel you can't leave out of the fear of poverty?" Nope, it's always "blame your parents!" And lastly, like you said this capitalist system isn't a choice you have to partake In it or not without consequence. Either you agree to take part and become a cog in the machine or you don't and you live homeless or in prison. No choice or free will and whether someone is aware of it or not, that lack of will puts major stress on some individuals.
And then you have therapists be like "don't compare yourself to others" when they are the very ones who compare you to others.
not just today, always. the church coerced the population before therapy was a thing.
@darkarai5241 well there are people, like me, who grew up in abusive homes with fucked up parents AND live in a shitty capitalist system. Healing the former is much more doable than overturning the system 🤷🏽♀️
At the same time we are alianated from our neighbours by modern industrial society.
i gave up on therapy. i’m autistic and i’ve only ever been gaslit, misunderstood, and harmed by therapists (even neurodivergent ones). im so tired of people telling me to go to therapy because “it’s the only thing that will help”. like no, having a community of consistent and supportive people who understand and love me would help me far more than therapy. i won’t even get into how much the world we live in impacts my mental health because i would go on forever. therapy has never and will never be beneficial for me personally.
Omg same, I feel everything you're saying. 😢
I don't have autism atleast I don't think so ...but I do have inattentive adhd and all therapist I've been to have gaslight me, and misdiagnosed me with things I don't have. It wasn't helpeful. Hurt me more, And cost alot only for them not to help me.
like you said having a supportive community of people who actaully understand and care about you is way more healing.
Also I find alot of stuff online and in books I've read so much more helpful than a therapist who thinks cuz they have a degree they know best and are God's.
I have felt a gut feeling mistrust of therapy, and eventually i realized they are trained to get people to be a "functioning" member of a society that damaged the person in the first place.
Part of that too I suppose is that the people in my life who expressed a desire to help me have ended up doing more damage than good. Good intentions aren't worth much.
Yes, because we are all stuck in it and must figure out a way to cope and stay as sane as possible, to somehow be productive even in the face of all the adversity.
My brother's therapist has him blame all his problems on me and has had him on emergency (2 week) Ativan for going on 2 years now. He's never getting off it
@@timmysmith9991 bruh. All I can say is I appreciate more than I can say that life began teaching me to trust myself before anyone else, even if I am wrong.
It is worth noting that not all therapists are that way, but like all such qualifying statements that only applies to a small minority. Not enough to risk spending money and time on when there are better options
"Well, my family can't live in good intentions MARGE! Oh your family is out of control but we can't blame you because you had gooood intentions!'
- Ned Flanders (The Simpsons)
Here in Brazil we have a program called Sameca (Saude Mental Camarada), which means Comrade Mental Health.
Its a program led and organized by a brazilian socialist organization called Soberana.
It takes into account not only personal/individual subjects into account but also the societal/systemic questions, passing through a socialist (Marxist-Leninist) lens.
Just thought of leaving this here for whoever's interested!
that sounds amazing thanks for sharing!!
amazing
eu não sabia que isso existia, QUE FODA
Sério? Eu tmb não conhecia!
I am getting treatment for the first time in my life thanks to Sameca
I use activism as therapy because actual therapy isn’t designed to challenge social norms that badly affects people - only coping mechanisms.
Modern therapy is captured by the insurance structures that pay the bills. A lot of the problems discussed in this video are as much a result of that reimbursement system as they are of some really terrible therapists. The origins of psychoanalysis are deeply intertwined with the class biases present at the time it was developed. It was built for rich people. I'm a therapist and fully endorse activism as therapy.
I've been in therapy for 13 years, the entirety of my adult life. I was diagnosed with severe depression at 17 years old and started therapy and anti-depressants.
It took 12 years for me to realise what the problem was: I am an autistic trans person being forced to fit into an allistic cis world. None of my multiple therapists ever explored or asked about this, none of them realised that after continuous incidents of self **** or s******s that something deeper was happening. I had to push for my own neurodivergent diagnosis and explore my gender on my own at 28.
I'm still mad. I'm still grieving. I have a queer and neurodivergent trained therapist now but i wonder if it is really helping. Is it placating me rather than healing me? How do i reconcile the harmful decisions I've made to fit in and please others, including my therapists, with the person i am and always been? I'm figuring out what it means to be me and I'm still not sure.
Sorry, I'm just venting at this point and the video has hit a sad nerve ❤️ thank you for the video and talking about this! I've been thinking a lot about it
Thanks so much for sharing. I'm a trainee therapist, but someone with a similar life experience to you by the sounds of it.
Grieve and be rageful, and I hope you can set down some of the burden of you being the problem.
Much love
thank you for sharing your experience! I feel so much love and compassion for the parts of you that made ''harmful decisions'' - it sounds like parts of you that were just trying to protect yourself understandably given the world we live in. I would actually recommend the book ''No Bad Parts'' as I've personally found it helpful struggling with similar feelings. Much love x
With it being hard enough to find a truly neurodivergent aware therapist your trans queer thing just adds a level of complexity that I wouldn’t expect to find except for the fact that a lot of autistics actually become trans. The theory there is it has something to do with metallization is my understanding but if desired look that up. So it might be possible due to that connection. But otherwise to find masters in both just becomes hard forcing you like I’ve had to do seek out specialist on line and do their programs
I am in a different situation. However, I just feel like what I want is something that let me feel like I had the life I missed out on.
I said that if the Total Recall new memory device was invented, I would take my chances with it.
⌚Timestamps:
00:00: Introduction
01:04: The Privatisation of Pain
06:11: Be Normal
09:34: Insanity
12:35: Prison
16:29: Mind/Body
20:41: Transformation
24:30: Psychology of the Oppressed
27:24: The Trauma Industry
31:40 - Conclusion: Beyond the Sofa
What source is being quoted at 8:57? I love it.
As an unemployed chemist and chemical engineer living at my parents house I agree. Therapists try to frame me as somebody who isn't willing to look for a job. I explain that I've spent 4 years looking for a job and recruiters simply never help me foster a relationship with the hiring manager at a chemistry or chemical engineering job that I qualify for and that career experts consider full employment. The therapist says I'm just not looking again, completely ignoring everything I just explained.
that really sucks, I'm sorry for your experience!
You’re a victim of our toxic corporate culture. You need excellent allistic social skills or good social contacts to get a decent job these days.
When I was also abused I said similar things about being angry and frustrated with the prison industrial complex to my trauma therapist. He laughed at me and said I was funny. Thanks for speaking on this
@@moxiec6174 that’s so messed up! I’m sorry that happened to you!
Did you report him? Hopefully
@@zinzincoetzee1934 I should’ve but I was pretty young and it didn’t cross my mind
@@Kathrin_yt Thanks! Thanks for the great video also
@@moxiec6174 what a dog, I hope you're fine
I appreciate that you mention patriarchy and oppression. There is so much to say about that. When you sit in a room with a therapist who is a white American male, he has no freaking idea what it's like to be a woman, an immigrant, oppressed, tired, exploited. He tells you that you have all the power in the world to change your circumstances (as soon as you become normal, of course).
Thank you!
Intersectional leftist slop.
Everyone gets tired.
That's a bit of a cope/scapegoat. There are women and even minority women thriving. It's a you problem for a big part of it
@@keylanoslokj1806 Did you really come into the comment section of a video about how structural issues specifically effect vulnerable people in a way that isn't addressed by the standard practices of therapy, and then say to someone "nah actually the problem is just you, skill issue on your part tbh"? That is neither empathetic nor helpful in any way. Rethink your priorities in life.
In capitalism, it's impossible to be a good moral person, unless you are willing to be broke or homeless.
This society rewards evil and sociopathic behaviour. Only those people succeed, at least when it comes to wealth.
I've been thinking about this too, and that's why I want to work on the public or third sector (ngo's) and vote the leftists into power to govern them, but also I've been thinking about this dilemma of 'being good' vs. 'doing good'. I'm of the opinion that it's impossible to 'be' good in this world and therefore we can only 'do' good, and must try to do good every day. We should also try to picture a world where being a good person would be easier, and aim our everyday actions towards that goal. For example, as alternatives to capitalism, I think supporting libraries and co-ops is a good thing to do, as well as participating in ngo's and local communities. Taking care of the shared, is I think, vital to our wellbeing. We get both pride and dignity, and care from others ourselves, when participating in communities. Therefor I think helping others and being part of something together is a primary need of ours. Not part of Maslow's hierarchy of needs maybe, but when I tested it out in my scout group of teenagers, they placed it pretty low on the pyramid as foundational for other things. And I'm pretty proud of them for that.
So yes, while it may be impossible to be good in a capitalistic system, fortunately that's not all we have, and we can always strive to do good things in the context of shifting the weight of activity from capitalism, greed, and selfishness, to other things. Reality is a complex web of systems and institutions existing together, and new ones being created every day.
Mental health care basically doesn't work for me. The NHS where I live only does mindfulness or cbt, both of which have been contraindicated for autistic people, but they just ignore that. Cbt is just "you are thinking wrong stop thinking wrong" which doesn't help when you know your anxiety isn't reasonable but that doesn't stop it, or when it is reasonable. Help for my eating disorder has amounted to a dietician telling me "try to eat more" .
@@megt9171 thanks for sharing your experiences, it’s ridiculous how much the system has failed you, I’m sorry!
@@Kathrin_yt im not so sure that its failed me spesifically, more that its only set up to work for certain people. or atleast certain ideas of how people "should" function. I think its set up with the assumption that people are the ideal neo-liberal subject, rational, capable of solving "their own problems", independantly of systemic support. mindfullness inparticular strikes me as very neoliberal in its sensibilities, as it explicitly state that the problem is not your circumstances, it is you worrying about your circumstances, and if you simply learn to let these thoughts go, and not dwel on them then all will be well. It ignores that fact that sometimes we must think on our circumstances, inorder to improve them, and that some level of distress in distressing situations is not the brain functioning abnormally or in a way that particularly needs fixing. its the ultimate theraputic mode for maintaining the status quo. dont think on your problems, dont try and solve them, dont take time of sick because you are overwhelmed, just keep working and put those thoughts out of your mind.
@@megt9171 yessss well said! And I agree about mindfulness, it's helped me personally but still is status-quo reinforcing at least in the way it's generally practiced
I often saw it as "yes, my idea is irrational. Now why does beibg even more aware of it do anything? Why can't I push the mute button on my brain?"
that about sums up public healthcare, yea
I really enjoyed this video because my experience with therapy has been somehwat similar. No matter how well intentioned professionals are, they just can't relate to my problems. They tend to be from an upper middle class background, and mostly emphasize that I focus on things that I can control. However, when you're poor, there really isn't too much you can control and downplaying systemic factors is not helpful. Though they've been helpful in simply just listening to me vent, I always felt worse after therapy sessions and even more isolated.
thanks for sharing your experience, and for your comment, I'm glad the video resonated!
What is the right thing to say to a poor person struggling with systemic factors?
@@DusBeforeDawn2008 I don’t think there’s one specific right thing to say but I believe simply skipping over systemic factors can be wrong. I’ve found tremendous help from connecting to others who share my experiences with poverty. But finding community in a modern setting is often hard for people with limited means. Perhaps therapists could help people connect with groups that can relate who make people feel included and valued, and not just shamed by society for being poor.
I've had terrible experiences with spiritual healers as well as therapists. At least with therapists and mental health counselors there is a licensing board to account to. New age healers and other con artists will never face accountability for their harm and grifts.
@@nataliegilmore3508 yes that’s a very good point, I don’t intend to make out that “alternative” healers are the answer either
On one hand, the only person I'd trust to therapize me is a which who recommended I solve a phobia by talking to spirits (slow exposure therapy) On the other hand, I know and know of about a dozen other magick-y and spiritual folks who used their healing services to coerce people into intimate relations and fetish scenes... Spiritual and alternative methods can be great but you have to vet your guide very very thoroughly and have to pay attention to what you're doing
The best therapy advice I ever got was, "Stop being so hard on yourself," and surprisingly, that worked for me.
I will say, disappearing too much into system blaming is a sure fire way to prevent your own happiness. It's all valid, but if you do it too much, you don't focus on anything that you are actually in control of. You won't accept that you have the power to unionize your workplace, organize your community, start/join a protest, bug the hell out of your representatives, build power so that you can scare the hell out of your representatives, etc. lol All of these things got me paid better, started improving my connection to reality and my general life conditions. Hitting 30 also helped. Everything is a nightmare in your 20s.
I TOTALLY agree about the disappearing too much into the system thing. I worry sometimes that talking about the system leaves people feeling totally powerless and not taking any responsibility at all for changing their lives/the world... it's definitely a ''we need both'' situation I think
Parallel Truths
Good point about the lack of power. What I found in the history of neoliberalism is a fear of collective action. It is not a freak accident that markets isolate and atomize people, nor that "debate" on social issues turns neighbour against neighbour.
Wow 👏👏
This is what I wish therapists would focus on. Be knowledgeable about local resources and events to let the community that could benefit know
Can you imagine a therapist in a cannibal society?
His job would be to make you a better cannibal.
He would say you need to eat better quality people to boost your self-esteem.
that's a really interesting and poignant way to put it!
as someone who is neurodivergent, ive found traditonal therapy and the cesspool of most self help advice on youtube to be useless. it wasnt until i started reading self help stuff from a neurodivergent lens where things started to change and make sense. (also there are some great neurodivergent therapists out there)
Any recommendations of books/things to read for neurodivergents?
@@loveandrea3313 sure, 2 recommendations i could give would be unmaksing autism by devon price and what i mean when i say im autistic by annie kotowicz (quick read, 100 pages). also there are some great youtube channels out there like the thought spot :)
Sam Vaknin has mentioned how important it is to vet these therapists online and their credentials, where did they go to school? How many years? Have they written peer reviewed journals and articles? Etc... and he is a well decorated and achieved psychologist but also a narcissist. Still he's brilliant.
@@loveandrea3313I'm reading Neuroqueer Heresies and it's very good so far!
@@ShinySilverBunny peer reviewed journals? Spoken like a true narcissist. Now a days only narcissistic people write way too many fake papers. One after another are getting exposed after doing it for more than 20 years
It’s either gaslighting or someone vetting everything you say like you’re the best person ever
Yup. The choice is between a narcissistic or borderline mommy...
@@esnutaliah Can we not with the constant NPD slander? The unending conflation of NPD with abuse is just nauseating and exhausting. Being a narcissist doesn't make you evil, it's a disorder just like anything else, and there are many varied ways it can present. Some outwardly focused, some inwardly focused, some toxic and abusive, some not. Using the word "narcissist" as a pejorative and a stand-in for "bad person" just ends up hurting people who are already struggling, and who are themselves oftentimes victims of abuse.
Healing touch is insanely powerful, when i first started dating my partner held the hand i cut a lot when i was really depressed and started rubbing loving circles on it, he didnt know that i had a history of self harm until i told him afterwards, but it released a tension i had there that i never knew i had been holding ❤️ the mind may warp and forget, but the body remembers.
I do reiki, its spiritually guided energy healing. You might like emotional freedom technique if you haven't heard about it as well.
This is so incredibly validating, thank you so much for this. I started therapy around 15, and went through about 10 horrible therapists in my short time from 15-21 years old. In that time, I was consistently told "just keep attending, just keep going, we'll find the right therapist," yet there was always a cognitive dissonance I had about that notion- how long should I have to be going before I get better? How long before my issues are actually addressed through my minority experience, not through the lens of the norm? Therapy has failed a lot of us in these systems, and I relate a lot to that sentiment, "I feel I am the sane one living in an insane world." Honestly.
Hey, I am at the moment studying psychology to become a therapist myself. I enjoyed your thoughts about the subject a lot. In my environment, I also meet many people who struggle to find good therapists. Sadly it is the reality that there are not enough (good) therapists. Therefore I am always looking for answers to my (everlasting) question of becoming a good therapist. One of the answers to that question is understanding. Videos like yours where you share your experience and thoughts help tremendously in creating this understanding. Also, they inspire me too stay open about the experiences of others and to never invalidate them. Thank you so much for making this video.
Also an uplifting bit of information, my university is very critical of the current mental health structure in our country (the Netherlands). A lot of things you mentioned are also talked about in our university. So rest assured that a lot of ideas you spoke of are still allowed freedom of expression at the place where every psychologist starts their career.
thanks so much - I really appreciate this comment and the validation that my thoughts make sense coming from someone with more experience in this field! Very happy to hear so much progress is being made in the Netherlands!
This is a very thoughtful video... I especially love the quote talking about how it isn't actually a good thing to be well-adjusted in a profoundly sick word. That honestly makes me feel better about a lot of the existential dread I feel a lot of the time 🤣 I honestly really feel for therapists, too. They are kind of in a no-win scenario for diagnosis. You are taught to use the science available to you, but it's hard to know when you're pathologizing who people are because the field is so young.
Totally agree therapists are put in an impossible situation. Thank you for your thoughtful comment!
Short answer: yes.
The only way I got "better" is by fully and deeply understanding the mechanisms at play. Realizing I'm fncked and it's not my fault. Accepting reality, my reality.
From a position of understanding and acceptance a person can figure out what to do, how to feel, how to be.
The mental health *industry* in general, seems to be a mechanism to keep the slave class docile and deluded.
Facts. Well phrased
I recently had a traumatic experience in therapy and had to find a discord channel to get me out of the crisis. This lady has spent months building up my self esteem. She was doing a good job. I felt like I was about to turn a corner. I became more confident in the sessions. I noticed her demeanor change. She became less supportive and more confrontational. This change occurs over about two sessions until I'm telling her about my lack of friends and she literally says "that's shitty" and then mocks my voice while repeating what I just told her... I'm still unsure what happened and why she did this but everything we had been working towards for months went right out the window and I was severely SI for about two weeks.
so sorry you had this experience, this must have been incredibly jarring to have your trust and relationship built up suddenly broken like that!
...............wtf
This is a horror story...
I'm so sorry that you had to go through that, no one deserves to be treated like this. :(
That is infuriating. I hope there is recourse for you.
I only started going to my therapist because I was being pressured by my aunts. Then when I start going to my therapist my aunt (who is a stereotypical mean girl-to-doctor) starts talking to them over the phone and they start being dismissive of my issues and chuckle a bit at my problems. Then they started asking leading questions directing me away from my concerns or feelings. The title of this video honestly is a bit of relief to see being talked about , especially when you know how gaslighting works
I’ve had pretty good, so so and so appalling I need therapy from them. The last one was very dangerous. I got away but I’m still unpacking it. Oh and the super religious one who was nice but useless
It does seem to be incredibly hit and miss!
@@Kathrin_yt Yes it is
That's so disappointing, we all deserve better.
I missed many, many times I needed mental health support up until I secretly worked with a therapist at age 21, as my family insisted on positive thinking and pseudoscience, luckily a decent therapist. The alternatives given were failing me, they were literally starting to trigger an identity crisis and make me proud of all the labour I would give away to everyone constantly as a "positive thing" (and not a maladaptive, unsustainable coping mechanism)
We need therapists who not only work with sound research, but actually engage and centre us and all our factors in our treatment, and go into it with the sincere goal of helping us heal.
Not dangerous, dismissive, excessively religious/biased efforts. We deserve therapists who will actually have us, the functional pillars of society, no longer crumbling under mental trauma and unsustainable cycles.
Those kinds of videos are so important. It really helps me feel less alone.
As much as I recognize the benefits of psychotherapy and the push for mental health awareness, I have to admit that sometimes there is this underlying assumption that all you need to do to get better is "get therapy" and everything will be fixed. For me, it created some very heavy feeling of alienation when all the therapy I tried were pretty useless for solving my situation. But the entire time, society treats therapy as a panacea for mental illness and when you tell them it’s just not working for some people, there’s this uncomfortable sensation of just being ignored. I often feel like they are treating me like I‘m the problem for not making it work and the entire response I get is just an awkward shrug of the shoulder and tell me to try another therapist until it clicks. I know this all anyone can say in this situation but still, it hurts a lot when even the solution that’s being given is useless for you. It just makes you feel hopeless
@@H3rmon861 I’m happy to hear it’s helped you feel less alone! I’m sorry the therapy system has failed you - I very much relate to the feeling of alienation, sending much love 💕
Therapists are some of the most dangerous people in society I believe, similar to security guards. Ironically the most predatory people in our society are drawn to these professions.
yes it's a good point, that the field attracts a lot of potentially bad actors!
@@Kathrin_yt this was my favorite video so far this year maybe ever btw
@@Kathrin_yt Why the hell this isnt monitored? Oh wait the bad actors up there allow it and are with the perpetrators because theyre perpetrators themselves, the same in school with teachers and bullies.
Not always. Some of them are very well-intentioned but they are human too and make mistakes. Others are just egotistical hypocrite filth.
Could someone please explain why security guards are considered dangerous?
Therapy relies on good faith interaction on both ends. Which is actively disinsentivized under a privatized structure.
You're very wise, intelligent, and perceptive. I can connect with this a lot, which helps me feel a bit less isolated in this insane world. It takes great courage to share our most intimate thoughts and experiences like this, which is why so many people opt to just suppress everything and go with the flow of the insanity.
thank you so much!
Therapists are not actually general practitioners of mental wellness but highly specific specialists for addressing "I wish to no longer experience [emotion] when [thing] happens." Not "I want [thing] to stop, or be different." "I want thing to keep happening on, I just want to feel differently about it." It's like we're making orthopedic surgeons treat diabetes because it affects the feet.
I once knew a woman who purposely used the system of psychology to get away with abuse and exert control.
She would read up about a mental disorder and then make up stories that had the themes of those behaviors about her children or a vulnerable person and then threaten her children with arrest if they didn't corroborate her story. Any time one of her children tried to talk about the abuse, she would invalidate them by simply stating they had this or that mental disorder and therefor nothing they said was valid. As a result, nearly all the people legally responsible for reporting the abuse did not do so. In retaliation, she would then have them sent away to mental institutions as punishment for having the gal to talk about what was going on. As a result of her and the institutions "treatment" these children did develop mental disorders such as PTSD.
The woman responsible for all this, however, was never diagnosed with having any mental disorder probably because she seemed very normal to those who did not know her well. This is why I favor a more scientific, neuroscience and social environment approach to mental illness.
This is why they don't want narcissists near their practice
@@CMStrawbridge You're gonna arm-chair diagnose the woman in this commenter's story as a narcissist despite having only a paragraph or two to go off of? That's really messed up of you.
They gave no indication that she had NPD, only that she was abusive. But I guess you think those two things are the exact same thing. All narcissists are abusers, and every abuser is a narcissist: am I right? NPD is not just "the asshole disorder", and you pushing around that stereotype hurts people who are often themselves victims of abuse. Educate yourself.
And quit trying to pathologize shitty behavior. You don't need to be mentally ill to be a bad person. Neurotypical people manage it just fine every single day.
I miss my good therapist.... I need therapy for how the others after treated me.
They cut me off from care without warning. Sent me a letter i never got.
No more meds for me. I'm too crazy to deserve help apparently....
You're never to crazy too deserve help. I think there's great self-awareness and empathy in you.
I’m really sorry you had this experience! It is very unethical to suddenly take care from people who have been made to feel they can trust the relationship that has been built!
@@chrominoxI agree, there’s no such thing as crazy. Just people who are in need of love and support ❤
I’m so sorry they treated you that way! I’m so sorry they are so atrocious and still allowed to practice. We need to raise the standards of care.
@GaasubaMeshkhenet I don't know if I can be of much help in a TH-cam comment. But I think some times we are always looking for an absolute answer. And, sadly, people just don't know the answer to that question. Some people are happy and they don't know exactly why. Some people are not and they don't know exactly why.
Maybe you are just a normal person. People often hide their feelings in social interactions. So maybe you are just speaking out your thoughts in situations where most people would hide their feelings. Causing this difference in expectations that result in us being perceived as a foreigner. So, in other words, you are being too honest with them.
Maybe, in this crazy world, you are the person that understands you don't know the answer to that question. Most people think they do, they act like they do, but they don't.
In conclusion, I would say that people talk confidently about subjects they have no idea what they are saying. You know that you don't understand a subject. That is a good thing. The issue is that many people don't understand that they don't know either.
We can never truly know when we are 100% right or wrong. So we should always keep an open mind to everyone's perspectives. Including our own.
Also, I am much happier being a weird guy that stands out in social environments than being someone that is easily forgotten. So maybe being weird ain't that bad.
I get the sense that the main value of therapy lies in having someone to talk to without obligations/risk of social cost.
Therapy didn't work for me, in big part because my therapists tendencies to indirectly manoeuvre around systemic issues.
Focusing on myself and breaking out of obsessive thought spirals about problems out of my control WAS an important part of getting better, but I couldn't do that without acknowledging the problems I saw in the world as real.
The therapists I've worked with have actively worked against that acknowledgement, hindering my progress.
What ended up working was saying to myself "yes, the world is messed up, but paralysing myself with dread over that doesn't solve any problems, so I should redirect my attention."
I've also found a similar attitude really helpful, I can take responsibility for directing my energy and time towards where my gifts/interests are best suited to make a difference and let the rest go as much as possible - that has far more efficacy in helping to transform society and in keeping me happy :)
the problem is that the things you say in therapy aren’t entirely confidential either.
@@coolchameleon21 true
Yes this! I will use this this is so helpful! I’m currently struggling with that with my therapist, she keeps telling me if I can reframe a slightly exaggerated but grounded in reality thought, however the way she puts it just sounds like gaslighting myself of what the reality is. But yes paralysing myself with dread is not helpful.
These are the main criticisms of the Latin American Social Psychology, the understanding of how systematic issues and the capitalist system influence mental health. Some authors like Martin Baro even say that the role of a psychologist is to raise political awareness and empowering
'Therapy' is the commodification of meaningful conversation.
ooh that's such an interesting way of putting it!
Yes. More precisely: systematic gaslighting to make you "a productive member of society".
I had to seek therapy after crashing down with severe, stress induced burnout some ten years ago. The first thing my therapist said was a jovial "Well, let's get you back to going to work again". At a time when I was barely able to put on some clothes and leave the house.
In response to the pinned comment, I've had a lot of success from therapy for my OCD. OCD was kicking my ass and I nearly lost my life to it. Therapy and medicine turned that around. However even though it worked for me I still understand that therapy and many other seemingly good institutions are products of and thus reinforcements for the Capitalist system. Just as with everything, Therapy cannot reach it's full potential as long as Capitalism exists.
very glad to hear it was so successful for you, the last sentence summarises it perfectly!
Like everything in healthcare, therapy is meant to treat but not cure. You need those repeat customers! This video hits that topic directly!
Also VO from Thought Slime, yes!
thank you!!
Therapy has the potential to be very transformative, but it needs to be protected from the worst of Capitalism or even completely freed from it.
My personal experience with therapy was amazing. It was a depth psychological group therapy. We all learned something from each other, the therapist was there to give us the tools but the main learning part came in getting to know each other, understanding each other and trying out our techniques together.
Also it was a therapy funded by the public healthcare system which removed so much pressure from us and the therapist.
I can truly be lucky to have been in this kind of therapy
@@LibertarianLeninistRants that does sound like a great experience - totally agree it can have transformative potential!
My first therapist tried cbt for like 2 sessions then gave up. My second (current) therapist is the sweetest person ever and helped me through a lot of self esteem issues and self destructive behaviors.
Your videos are so unbelievably good. I'm very glad I subscribed. The quality of these latest videos is honestly unmatched in my very long TH-cam experience. Maybe I just think a lot like you, idk.
I myself didn't like therapy at all and haven't gone back. My biggest problem was that I needed somebody to listen to me but more often the therapist just felt like an academic robot listening only for keywords and regurgitating statistically likely solutions which never remotely fit my circumstances. It also didn't help that I had to be very careful not to mention that I was suicidal because every time I did so I regretted it (when police were involved, when the local hospital was involved, when the helpline was involved and even when just my therapist was involved-four separate occasions). I learned painfully slowly that I should never mention that I was/am suicidal, and that realization made me feel all the more alone in my struggles. As it turns out, therapy is so volatile in quality it can actively make you *more* likely to kill yourself. Pretty ironic haha.
I don't know the history so it's only my own theorycrafting, but I've always assumed pastors and shamans served the role of local therapist for villages and cities. At the very least, an emotional ear. I only got this idea in my head after my first good time on weed though when I realized the emotionally therapeutic usefulness of psychedelic drugs for some people. Then the stereotype of the shaman always high on some natural incense started making logical sense to me as a glue for a village's emotional well-being.
But anyway, very good video. I'll be rewatching this one.
@@glowerworm thank you so much! This comment was exactly what I needed right now. And I appreciate you sharing your experiences, I’m sorry they were so traumatizing but it’s therapeutic to hear because I very much relate! ❤️
@@Kathrin_yt i am sorry to hear you needed my comment, honestly. I guess I took it for granted that someone capable of this quality knew themselves and their skills very well. You definitely deserve to love and be proud of yourself (hopefully I haven't jumped to a conclusion haha) because from my perspective you're a bit of a role model.
To be fair you can say that about most fields. Health is a bandaid for capitalist exploitation and erosion of the body, and therapy is a bandaid of the capitalistic erosion of the mind. It‘s a thing needed in a world where our minds are actively eroded. And I can say that coming from the field you are critisizing here. It is very true. And while therapy in my eyes is still fundamentally good if done properly ofc, but it would be willfully ignorant to blame the patient for their issues or shortcomings.
But as a therapist, you are tasked to help the person live well inside the system. Not to overthrow it cause that is impossibly difficult and unrealistic. Doesn‘t mean therapists are fundamentally pro system. But it is difficult to help people when the thing hurting them is so difficult to shake up. It‘s more like damage control than actual fixing of things. And that is sad but also our reality.
There is a problem that I've experienced where a therapist can't, almost by definition of their profession, accept that you might not get "better".
This made me feel lucky to have had a great first therapist. Makes me wonder if, since she has her own private practice, she was able to have a more helpful approach in our sessions without so many of the pressures of the system.
The struggles i had were very much external. Even though I had anger issues steming mostly from my ADHD. The fact is that the difficulty of attainting finacial aid for college and the difficulty of getting a job that would pay enough, let alone if I could keep it long enough, and if I even have any ability of getting another one right after being let go, were just too much for me to bare. Despite my efforts to learn and improve my abilities in resume writing and interviews, getting an enormous amounts of rejections along with the fight or flight response I got from dropping out of college because of lack of finacial assistance turned me absolutly hopeless. My standards for a job were really low too and the fact I couldn't get that speaks volumes. I'm going through therapy and medication just so I won't feel so awful but I don't think it's enough.
I just wish the job search wasn't so god awfully horrid. I wish going to college didn't have a cost to it either. I wanted to be an engineer so badly but I couldn't afford to. I hate this economy and the economic power structures in society so much.
I'm so sorry to hear of your struggles - it sucks that you weren't able to follow the job you wanted because the system makes it impossible to pursue!
do you have paypal or ko-fi?
Therapy has helped me alone, specially with my current therapist, she is the best one I had by far. Look for the good emphatic ones with, obviously, a minium of 3-4 years university degree. They exist and they really help!
Seems like I've been super lucky with my current therapist. He's never invalidating, and he supports me when I complain about systemic racism and wider social issues that affect my life. He doesn't spend time trying to make me think differently. I'm planning on changing therapists because I need a more structured approach. But I'm honestly more appreciative of him after reading these comments. I'm really shocked and saddened by how many bad therapists are out there.
What's confusing is that you recognized something is wrong with the society yet somehow still conformed to the sketchy scheme.
Me personally , don’t understand how therapy works for others in a general sense. I understand that for severe trauma , therapy can help. But, when everyone says “everyone needs therapy to become a better person” I just don’t understand. People outline “therapy helped me become better with everything by asking the right questions and digging deeper to the origins of my thoughts” and I always feel like …. I do that on my own? When I feel something and don’t like it, I reflect on why I feel it , where that feeling came from. I am concerned that there are people that need an external person to have basic self reflection. It makes me think we either are one of two things:
One, our society has drained self reflection and self awareness from people to the point where even to ask the most basic rhetoricals about themselves , people need it instigated by an external person or-
Two, we have successfully convinced people that they cannot self reflect, in order to make money off of their society - induced handicap with self awareness.
And im not saying all this in order to belittle others. But it has made me very concerned that some of my generation (maybe many actually) have become unhealthily reliant on therapy, like they are now unable to help themselves on their own.
For instance , let’s say I get mad when someone calls me a certain word or name. And it makes me frustrated and demoralized. I can work in my mind, backwards, to unravel the origin of that word triggering that feeling, all the way back to an action that occurred when I was a kid. This is just an example. But I feel as though this over reliance on therapy is emotionally handicapping others, rather than emotionally empowering them.
I’m replying to myself to say every single issue I’ve ever had, no therapist helped me with. I could only delve into and solve them on my own. I unravel all of my own issues , analyze hang ups or behaviors in myself that I don’t like. I have worked on and fixed so many issues with myself and problems I’ve had and nobody could help me more than myself. I follow logical lines of thinking to analyze my own responses etc. I’m sure you get what I mean.
I have found therapy to be very surface level and not very helpful to me personally. The best way I have ever had is to find the origin of a trauma, or a bad thing, or something I don’t like, feel it deeply and then reflect , and then let go. Not distancing myself like how therapy focuses on; therapy focuses on othering ourselves from our own experiences to cope but this is not healthy.
This is a really interesting point. I do think that our culture breeds narcissism and doesn't teach emotional intelligence in general so it could really be the case that many people genuinely don't have the tools to self-reflect. That being said, even for the most self-reflective of people, it can still be very useful to have an external input sometimes I think as there are always blind spots in us all (but ofc this doesn't have to come from a traditional therapist).
Many people don't have the tools necessary for self-reflection. They ruminate instead.
I self reflect but it’s also nice to have a third party to discuss my current struggles, utilise various tools to improve my life and hold me accountable. Therapy is imperfect and many of the points outlined in this video highlight many of my concerns.
I've seen this conversation a lot in the USA. Does anyone from around the world experience as much as this kind of violence in therapy too?
I never trusted the capitalist society to solve my mental problems. It "only" took me a decade or so to fix myself, while half isolated from the world. I feel so much better now having broken out of my shell of alienation and all that.
My conviction is that, for me personally, this path that I took would only have been possible in one of the Scandinavian nations that I live in , thankfully.
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
💯
I haven't yet watched the video but recently in therapy really felt like gaslighting. I have terrible trauma and that woman kept saying 1- it's my fault 2- it's somebody else's fault therefore it's my fault to have literal physical symptoms of trauma because i'm not forgiving 3- i should be feeling like laying in a bed of roses even if i don't have a job and i depend solely in one person. Worrying about that person possibly dying before i get a job is stupid 🙄 i got another therapist.
Such a brilliant segment 👏🏾👏🏾💐💐. So refreshing to see a multilayered analysis of the psychotherapy industrial complex.
Thank you ❤
this is actually pretty well timed considering its something id been thinking about and seeing other people talk about their experiences online with the good and bad on therapy. happy you found some things that work for you. it varies for everyone yeah. and sometimes i worry about the line between whats best to work on individually and whats stifling radical thought or stifling me as an individual.
@@yellowbutterfly6796 yes that is a line I’m also constantly trying to figure out too!
Thank you Kathrin for another great video.
In my life so far I've only had one experience with therapy, which was largely positive. One thing I did notice, though, was that my therapist made it clear that this was not the place to discuss things that are wrong with society etc, but that we were only going to talk about me as an individual who needs to keep functioning and going to work. She did help me to achieve that. I think it's important and safest to be in a state where we can function well enough to avoid being pathologized and institutionalized, so that we can use our time to organize and make the change we want to see.
thank you! And yes I think that's a good point - that by healing ourselveswe can have more energy to put towards making the world a better place - it's not a neat dichotomy between the two!
therapy is a tool of the punitive system that serves to surveil and control the population. there are *some* therapists that do work try and help address the systemic concerns their clients face tho. for example clinical social workers are trained to address clients as wholistic individuals existing in the many systems that put them in their positions, but even clinical social workers operate under and within these punitive systems. that is why as a social worker in training i refuse to be a clinical social worker, my goal is to work at the community level and/or the macro level. i want to help work with communities to change existing systems.
Even if you work at the community level your ability to enact real change is limited. Huge cuts to social policy, have to maintain positive view by those funding you, public policies around community are often limited and lack of appropriate taxation to the wealthy in favour of cuts means you are stuck in a cycle. I’m not saying you are wrong - rather there are limitations with clinical and community work - I don’t know how to truly change the status quo. Our neoliberal project is unlikely to end.
I appreciate the points made in this video. There's a lot of care and nuance in your words and the way you say them. I found this very comforting and the sentiments ring genuine, honest and full of concern. You're not "selling" me an idea nor are you doing a bit. I understand how hard it must be to say the things you're saying. I will surely keep coming back to this video in different times through my life, because it makes me consider and think through things in an empathetic way.
Thank you, Kathrin.
What a beautiful comment to receive, thank you 💕
I'm really glad the tantric massage helped you tap into the pent up emotions trapped in your somatic memory. I have a hypothesis/small theory that, the way trauma gets stored into the body is like an electric/photonic burn, like a hard scratch into a vinyl record, but instead of plastic, our bodies store these painful traumatic memories in the muscles and connective tissue, the fascia which communicates through the body with photons and piezoelectric/pressure signals, in a fiberoptic network of collagen and hyalauronic acid., in tandem with the electric connections of nerve tissues. so i truly believe that massage and tantra does physically heal and it's not just a woo-woo thing. Even stuff like drumming and hallucinogens can help our brains access brainwave patterns and electrical rhythms that allow us to "rewrite" the CD or Vinyl records in our body-minds, (so our bodies can have CD-RW mode and trauma shouldnt be a permanent CD-R or Read Only memory mode) and it's both physical, chemical AND spiritual, because at the quantum level, everything really is vibrations of subatomic particles and different frequencies light, just ordered up in different patterns as the meat, minerals, and liquids amd vapors of our bodies.
so well articulated, I don't understand the science of it but I am very much in agreement!
I really love your content.. The part at 13:00 really resonated. I've been suicidal since I was about 9 or 10 years old, and have always been a loner with low empathy, which made me reactive, reclusive, and spiteful in a way that made me obsessed with violence, not necessarily perpetuating it, but observing, cataloguing, stomaching, surviving, treating, any manner relating to these. When I was pulled out of school at 12 or 13 after a history of poor conduct dating back to when i was a toddler, my grandma said something like " If you aren't careful, they're going to send you to the psych ward. I don't want to lose you." I still can't stomach the thought of going to therapy, and I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to release some of my deepest secrets, even thinking about them feels dangerous, like someone's going to find out who I really am. I probably wouldn't have even thought of that specific event had you not mentioned it.
I'm really happy to hear about your spiritual progress too. I hope one day I can make as much progress as you have.
In want to throw my own two cents into the mix, I'm an alter who's had very bad experiences with therapy. I've consistently found that I, and my fellow system-mates, have had to explain to mental health professionals about what D.I.D. actually is, and about what being an alter is really like to some rather egregious extents that have very much made me question the extent to which therapists are actually taught about those of us with rarer and/or more complex mental differences. My system-family and I would talk about alterphobia, patriarchy, LGBTQ+ struggles, and upset at the status quo with them only to be largely dismissed and ignored. We've found many a time where we'd just rant to them about struggles just to have them nod along and not say anything of any real value or to invalidate us largely on the basis of us being alters and them refusing to understand what that's like. So much of the struggles that various members of our system-family have dealt with aren't things that can be internally solved. Things that we don't have individualistic power over. But suggestions about how to deal with our struggles were always about dealing with the internal and westernized warping of mindfulness, as if one's struggles were less about the people and the societal and capitalistic structures that hurt them, and more about their unideal reactions to it. For our system-family, mental health professionals ended up causing more harm than help. Slowly, the members of our system collectively realized that traditional therapy wasn't for us. That traditional therapy was for those who were of more accepted identities and dealt with more accepted struggles than us, and that traditional therapy focused so much more on supposed harm-reduction than actual help. Finding community spaces, befriending kind people, recognizing the evils and extents of capitalism, and most importantly, relying upon one another, has helped our system-family far more than traditional therapy ever has.
So many folks tout traditional therapy as a necessity for good mental health, which is frustrating, 'cause it so obviously ain't, and that viewpoint only encourages capitalism-though that's beside my main point. Traditional therapy is a method for getting help that works for some people, especially those who fit the westernized ideal and are more comfortable with the status quo, but it doesn't for everybody. For people like me and my family, there are far kinder, far less expensive methods of healing, not merely the healing of yourself, but of the world around you.
Everytime I’ve gone to therapy in the past 15 years they’d either try to convince me my shitty job wasn’t effecting me, or they were trying to convince me to get a shitty job.
I love hearing the voices of others who I respect deeply
i remember dr k saying something like you need to lie to yourself and believe things are better than they are
This was so good! I feel like you elaborated on a lot of things the little voice in the back of my head said. I think I had some pretty different experiences with therapy but not many that I would describe as positive. I feel like everybody had their one thing. One guy was all meditation, one was all medication, one straight up said there's nothing I can do for you until you go 3 months without smoking weed, drinking is fine, whatever, no problem at all with alcohol. Then there's the religious nutjobs. One that suggested a bubble bath when I felt like hurting myself and strongly suggested that every bad thing that ever happened to me was actually my own fault.
Woven through all of modern life is the assumption that if you're unhappy about anything, that emotion is the problem. The most progressive solution is allowing you to feel the feeling but not express it of course. Maybe in private if you can afford privacy.
Most therapists just go straight to "I have a pill for that" and just immediately write you off if you don't want the drugs. Like you're refusing cancer treatment, implying that a thought or feeling is a sickness to be remedied, a mental virus that requires the scouring obliteration you can only get from american pharmaceutical conglomerates.
Sorry I'm just ranting now but the thing that always killed it for me was the unshakable recognition in the back of my mind that I was paying a stranger to essentially pretend to be my friend for 45 minutes a week. What an absolute nightmare. 8 billion people on this rock and I have to pay someone who can't even pretend to care most of the time for 45 minutes once a week. The darkest, loneliest moments always come when I'm with other people, from moments like that, where you reach out for help and the world reaches out to take your credit card.
I went to a shitload of NHS therapists as a kid, and teen. My experiences with them were invariably terrible. They refused to listen to anything I had to say, insisted that literally everything I experienced or went through had to be in some way attributable to my autism, failed to-a-man to realise I was struggling with undiagnosed ADHD (one even explicitly telling me I couldn't have it because "It's something you grow out of", Jesus fucking Christ), and refused to acknowledge any systemic issues.
I am currently in therapy with a really good therapist, and have been for almost a year. I had to go private-sector to find a decent therapist, and the only reason that that was even an option, was that I'd recently won a legal battle, and it had left me with money to spare. We legit spent the first couple of sessions just working through my bad experiences with previous therapists, because they rightly knew that we wouldn't be able to make progress on anything else, until we'd talked through that.
I didn't even find them through any official channels. It was a personal recommendation from a friend-of-a-friend, whom I met in a certain online subculture. Seriously. If it hadn't been for that stroke of good luck, I would be in an *insanely* worse place now, both mentally and medically.
Working in the mines for my collective is the only real way I've found to beat the dopamine cycle game
Yes !! Therapy within this system is just covering for a system that leaves many people disenfranchised & vulnerable which inherently causes trauma. I've never had a therapist question or critique the world that damaged me & was very focused on my internal feelings. It's just weird that the people here to assist me with my trauma are not thinking in the "macro" sense
Some are psychopaths. So they will screw up your mind even more, and you're paying them... Some of them are psychopaths.
My first therapist was my most helpful. But I think most of the help came from me being young (17) and not having much language to understand or identify the issues I have.
That therapy would never solve my underlying issues but at least managed to help me build coping mechanisms.
I was also very fortunate that she suggested early on that I was on the spectrum. I was in denial at the time, but remembering that further down the line helped me confidently self dx later. Understanding myself through that context alleviated a lot of the guilt and shame I had about myself.
I haven't had any luck with talk therapy since. it hurts me more often than it helps by being put in a situation where I'm liable to be misunderstood in the worst setting possible.
I've considered doing somatic therapy as I've become more conscious of how my body holds trauma even when I am unable to mentally recognize it. I really resonated with intellectualizing your trauma further alienating yourself from your body. I'm in the same hole. it often makes me physically ill because I can't recognize when I've gone way past burnout.
@@BurnBluefireK thanks for sharing your experiences! And I’m glad the video resonated with you 🥰
Really great ideas here, glad it was shared on the therapyabuse subreddit.
I unfortunately grew up with a narcissistic counselor as a mother and lived through the reality how playing counselor can be a huge power dynamic, as the dynamic says all the problems are in you, not me. Also there are almost no prevention mechanisms to stop narcissists or sociopaths from becoming therapists. Many famous therapists are theorized to have NPD. The drive up be famous can be part of that disorder
Note that now we're in a time where individual therapy and learned helplessness is the norm. There have been counter currents, including family systems theory.
A great example of what could work is Open Dialogue in Finland which morphed into Peer supported Open Dialogue in England. The focus is on no power differential and treating someone holistically.
I'd also shout out to Bruce E Levine as he's a Maverick I love
very interesting to hear about ''Open Dialogue'' I hadn't heard of them before. And I am currently doing some family systems work via the book ''No Bad Parts'' and it's really feeling life-changing to me already. Thanks for sharing your experience!
Very relatable. Therapy has helped me in some ways, but has caused me a lot of personal trauma, mainly caused by the structure of society and incomplete data from studies.
It always feels like they tell people to do some form of therapy or take a certain supplement, and then 2-3 years later it is debunked by other studies. It feels like mental health researchers are always chasing trends and influenced by media too much.
Thank you for making this
thank you for your comment and sharing your experience ❣
A psychologist or therapist cant fix Shit Life Syndrome, its just an expensive bandaid
Hehe. Shit life syndrome? Have a camera in my life pal?
I warmly recommend looking into the works and the life of Frantz Fanon. He was a psychiatrist who worked in colonies. Very insightful
I was just looking for my comment (wrote before finishing the video) to add that. Fanon I think is the ultimate point of reference for critiques like these. His work was ahead of its time. Also, maybe abolitionists work would be of interest: grace Lee Boggs and Miriam Kaba
Therapy allowed me to save my life. I’ve had marginal therapists, but two really great ones.
My therapist told me she thought I had a demon
I feel like this and the “put a raisin in your mouth thing” are the results of these therapists missing a step somewhere. Like, I can see where they were both coming from.
Seeing a problem as an external being can help you think of ways to deal with it, and mindfulness can help you break off emotion associated with memory for a time.
But the first step that a therapist has gotta do is validate. Say “that’s fucked up, and I get it”.
That or yours was a Christian counselor and was on some weird shit.
Was this person an actually licensed therapist? I don’t get it. Sounds insane to me.
@@Bluestarferies Yes she's actually got two Masters and a doctorate. She practices internal family systems and apparently when you get far enough down the line with them, they have a belief that these entities called unattached burdens can quite literally attach themselves to a human being. They are described as foreign energies that feed off of the energy of the host. It's a fucking demon.
post 1950s mental healthcare: individualize, pathologize, emphasize doing "the work," which never ends.
or, just a reflection of the economic conditions.
I also had a similar experience during my awakening (or “acute paranoid psychosis”) when I was touched by dead children. I knew they were dead and at first felt responsible for their deaths. Then, after several more experiences, I was convinced there were previous generations trying to communicate with me.
The mind/body part is super relatable - like in my teenage years, I had this constant physical feeling of my stomach falling in a way similar to anxiety, so the best language I had to explain how I was feeling was "anxious," and then the entire focus became on how it was my fault for not thinking correctly to stop having anxious thoughts. Anyway, turned out I had celiac's and when I eat gluten, it causes that physical feeling akin to anxiety, which then causes me to investigate "what I'm anxious about" which would just MAKE me anxious. I did have anxiety, but the focus on it was just focusing on an effect, not a root cause (much like therapy can often do when someone's mental distress is caused by external systems that, yeah, have that affect on a person's psyche, often because there really is a danger). I've also been finding a TON of help with my (seemingly) overactive fight or flight responses and emotional regulation difficulties with some vagus nerve soothing/somatic techniques as well.
I think a lot of able-bodied neurotypical people find comfort in the idea of "it's all in your head," which they often extend to "it's all just what you're thinking consciously," because they see that has something they have almost total control over, and the idea of not having control over your body or mind can be very scary (esp in our current capitalist system, where it becomes a cycle of "must be mentally well to do capitalism, must do capitalism to have the comfort to be mentally well"). And then on top of THAT, capitalist/production-focused cultures enforce a "push through what your body and mind are telling you so you can perform for the machine" narrative that led to the tragic and ultimately fatal paralyzation of Soviet gymnast Elena Mukhina right before the 1980 Olympics, or the narrative that Simone Biles was "weak" or "letting her country down" for stepping down from the olympic competition in 2021 when she felt her body/mind weren't conducive to performing safely (don't get me started on that lol- she didn't let her country down, her country let her down when they didn't take reports of her abuser seriously and gave her crap for prioritizing her safety over a shiny jingoistic symbol of greatness).
This whole topic also feels very relevant when seeing the state of the world - in my opinion, we probably should be extremely disturbed to the point of not being able to focus on "functioning under capitalism" and performing for the machine when we see things like war crimes that have been far too common lately. But if viewing the footage of war crimes (or anything horrific and unjust) do lead you to that state of not being able to function under capitalism, then you're considered "defective." It goes along with the "just be normal" section you covered - an important piece of "normalcy" in our society is feeding the machines of capital and production.
Another great video with inspiring ideas and impeccable vibes 💕
I never saw the problem of "gaslighting" in therapy as something FROM theraphy. To me, the therapists were just bad at their jobs, and I had to find a new therapist. That's because I felt like "thinking positive" was terrible, as a lot of my problems came from burying my feelings, and it was "just the same."
After this video and the comments, I've never been so grateful to my therapist. I knew she was good, but now I feel like I could cry because of it, lol. She does not ignore any of it, and because of her, I've been able to realize that some of the problems I have come precisely from being raised with the pressures of being a woman. I knew that before, but in a more general way. I've been with her for about 4 months, and I'm really grateful for her work.
@@anaelisa8805 so happy to hear this reaffirmed your experience with your therapist!
@@Kathrin_yt yes, but it made me sad too lol. I think I might now have expressed myself well enough, but I started the comment talinkg about me seeing the "gaslighting" problem as a therapist being bad at their job, because I hadn't realized it was a real issue (by that I mean something more "general") before your video. I thought I was just unlucky when I found therapists with this problem, but all the stories opened my eyes
Therapy helped me tremendously. I had PTSD, a teeny tiny ED and depression. Now after 4 years of therapy with a change of therapists in the middle because the first one showed some alarming signs of acephobia... I can happily say I'm pretty much cured from PTSD 🎉
Maybe I'll be fine in 8 years or so 😅
I have to add though, my current therapist is adorable and makes me feel very much in control of the therapy. I'm the one doing the work, she gives me the tools I guess? She's not like an all knowing being or even above me or anything.
The previous guy was a little bit more obnoxious like you described. Very much in a "Knowing", vaguely mysterious and judging posture. He helped me some because he was still ok overall, but I felt uneasy and sort of like an interesting but weird creature. The acephobia part was subtle and he probably didn't even realise he was dismissive of my feelings, and that's such a red flag to me! I'm so glad I changed.
it gives me hope to hear you have really been helped by therapy!!
I’ve been sleeping on this one but holy shit the first 30 seconds had me locked in because my very first therapist ever was literally just my mom’s best friend and told her everything that I said.
Good Lord, the beating I received .
Thank you, for making this video and in all honesty, all the content you make because I feel it is unfortunately necessary as no one else is.
It was crazy to me when you said your friend had a therapist who fell asleep because that happened to me once as well! 😅 it made me feel pretty bad about going on about myself.
I feel so so so so so lucky that i have the therapist I do now. She's lgbtq+ affirming, neurodiverse affirming, and she does acknowledge the ways in which society is the cause of some of my problems. That doesn't mean i've never disagreed with her, there certainly have been things she's told me that i didn't agree with, but for me currently the benefits far outweigh those few things I didn't perfectly agree with her on. I certainly agree with you that there are tons of bad therapists, and tons of therapists that aren't really helping anyone. I also completely understand if someone has tried therapy and given up on it after years, because it's ridiculous to expect someone to continue trying something that hasn't worked after a good try. I think to tell people to just "get therapy" is actually a really dismissive statement in some cases.
I remember the very first therapist I ever saw, not my current one, and she was not a good therapist. She had me journal but that was just about it, she didn't discuss or do anything else for me. I totally could have decided to not try therapy any more after that if I had wanted to.
'It is no measure of health to be well integrated in a profoundly unhealthy society.'
Oh my god I thought I was alone in this feeling!!!
Therapy can be a lifesaver, BUT I wish anyone recommending it would warn that a lot of therapists can do more harm than good. It's enraging that some of them are getting paid an arm and a leg an hour, and not only can they not be good therapists, they can't be bothered to be half decent people either. I was trying to go no contact with my crappy mom and this is the gem I got...
Therapist: so when will you want to talk to your mom again?
Me: never, I only want to get away from her.
Therapist: well, I can't tell you what to do with your life *doesn't ask more questions, ends conversation*
That's awful I'm sorry! And I totally agree!
I've been litteraly retraumatized by my first therapist allegedly trained in trauma who ended abruptly my sessions without further explanations or mutual shared discussion to decide. I went to treat a sexual trauma, all the work I did during one year had vanished BC of her brutal betrayal and abandonment. I resent deeply this person, felt I was punished because I blamed her for not helping me finding a psychiatrist when she was asking me to get a medical backup added to the psychotherapy with her
First video i watched of this channel, didn't know what to expect because the thumbnails are kinda attention-grabbing, which is mostly a red flag, but even youtubers gotta eat so I can't really blame ya.
This was surprisingly high quality, and i very much enjoyed, very reassuring to hear all this from someone else, living in a very patriarchic and nationalist country kinda means I'm the only one criticizing therapy for these exact reasons.
It gets lonely being told to go to therapy, after i was in it for like a year with what amounts to negative results.
And not for something big or anything, just being constantly anxious from my "economic circumstances" and a shit situation at home.
Thanks for the work you're doing, wish you well.
Thanks so much ❤