Handling Objections To Therapy
For those looking for results from a meta-analysis showing that psychotherapy works, I’ll give you the link up front.
If you stop midway through this write-up, it may be because you’re having an uncomfortable feeling come up and so you’d rather write me off as “boring” or “liberal” than deal with the arguments I make.
I thought I’d take a bit to look at some of the viral takes on X recently that are critical or completely disparaging of psychotherapy.
This tweet was pure midwit chum when it came out. Middle-sized paragraphs that have the semblance of thinking work having been done is what performs highly on X.
The normalization of therapy is a becoming a bad thing for society because people misuse it?
This isn’t an argument against therapy itself but a conflation of the process of therapy with people being dickheads.
A competent therapist would address this man’s issues:
1) If a client is using it as a get-out-of-jail-free card, the client will be confronted.
2) “Word as Gospel Truth” effect is common in therapy because the client is idealizing the psychotherapist. Competent therapist will identify idealization, often accompanied by grandiosity, and will humanize themselves in the eyes of the client so the client can identify and then work through the idealization.
3) The first step toward improvement is admitting you have a problem. There is a qualitative difference between clients who pay out of pocket and willingly seek out therapy versus clients who have been mandated by the State.
Less personal responsibility for bad behavior is the result of the welfare state, not the result of therapy but therapy is being built into the welfare state - by bad therapists! The welfare state should be completely demolished.
People look at Millennials and go, “Oh these frickers have too much empathy. They should have a damn backbone!”
The way Millennials are is because they are the daycare generation.
Finding the exact chart showing the precipitous uptick in daycare rates from the early 1980’s onwards is a pain in the ass. But I’ve seen the chart, it exists.
Empathy is the accurate identification of the emotional state of others.
Nothing more, nothing less.
The problem people are seeing with “empathy” is more about children having to bond with strangers (aka being dumped in daycare so mommy can work) and “going soft” in the public schools as a survival mechanism in the face of multiculturalism where the newcomers have every legal advantage over the native European children. The teachers and administrators are mostly all in on the mindjob of de-Americanizing native White schoolchildren. American children are raised in a mongrelized culture of self-effacement where they have no bond with their parents and then we wonder why they’re so gosh danged soft. It’s just confused thinking that passes for penetrating insight.
This British fellow appears to be some kind of next gen Tommy Robinson operative. That said, it’s true that psychiatric medication usage among women in the UK is sky-high. I believe it is the highest in the world. Feminism has done its worst work in the UK. British women, on account of violent mass migration, live in constant fear that they then have to manage. The men won’t aid them because the feminism of the women has totally demoralized them. The socialism in the British Isles has been off the charts for far too long and they’re one major fiscal crisis away from being modern Greece.
Women are trained to lie by the State, especially in England. The TV “loicense” in England alone puts hundreds of brain-dead feminist voices into English homes every day.
There is a dogma enforced by any government entity. It will forever insist on its continuing existence, irrespective of market factors, and it doesn’t care whether the window dressing is right wing or left wing - just so long as it gets to exist. Trump was elected and he’s putting in all sorts of stone-faced “patriots” as heads of agencies he used to promise to abolish - before lawfare made him wholly dependent upon special interest donations.
The modern therapy state is a licensing cartel enforced by the gun of the state. The more statist therapy becomes, the more retarded and useless it will be at the training/university level. And the more welfare-cases seeking jawbs will flock to it. This is the same thing that happened with schoolteaching. This is an indictment of force, not therapy. But calling it “modern therapy state” is a nifty little trick of language to score points against therapy. It’s just bureaucratic dickheads who have oversized mortgages to cover. Same as in any other field of government.
Responsiveness to therapy scales upward as the intelligence of the client increases. I read this in an Edward Dutton book. It has borne out, in my experience, as well. I’m not sure where to go with this tweet because it depicts all therapy as positive self-affirmations, which is the realm of mysticism, not rational self-inquiry. Licensing boards tend to eschew more overt mystical “therapies” as the realm of roadside Tarot card types.
What people don’t ever want to touch with ThErApY that they snarkily denigrate on social media is that some of it, namely psychodynamic therapy, does inquire into the childhood as an explanation for adult dysfunction. People who are not ready to work through their histories in a way that has empathy for their younger selves must denigrate therapy when it comes up in order to maintain their adult dysfunctions. Just like the State, which insists upon its own existence regardless of cost, so will the False Self drag people into all manner of sophistries and snarky justifications in order to stave off the transformative work of empathizing with and redeeming one’s younger self.
This clever tweet pre-supposes men are, OUT OF NOWHERE, destroyed by feelings of powerlessness. We, in America and Pax Americana, have had to endure feminism - which was brought on by the welfare state. The state fundamentally emasculates men by transferring wealth from their wallets into the pockets of womyn, minorities, and far-off thief nations. And all of this is a reflection of the family. Male feminist fathers, the bulk of the Boomer and Gen X and now Millennial generations, whiteknight for female evil at the expense of their sons. And women feminists cuck their sons. These two sentences explain the entirety of the manosphere and the big “masculinity push” that has come alive to some degree with the “bro podcast culture”, helmed by Joe Rogan, the UFC, Tucker Carlson and their murky backgrounds.
Men who don’t talk about “feelings” will do well with other men who also don’t talk about their “feelings”, so long as they speak the language of dominance and submission. They will simply slot into a “dominance hierarchy”. But they make miserable fathers and husbands. And these dependent family members just have to swallow down the gruff, intellectual front of these men because it’s “trad” and because it suits the designs of the rulers - who have figured out you need to enfranchise the white men if they’re going to topple Iran, China, Russia, and whoever else. We are entering a weirdy beardy era of “reverse feminism”. There can be no middle ground. 60 million Americans were destroyed by feminism. Now it’s time to use the CIA/DoD media complex to swing the pendulum the other way and mop up the survivors.
“Therapy turns men into pussies and liberals!” is the final outcry to cover here.
From Andrew Tate:
That's what life is, friend. Losing what makes you happy, being miserable. That's what life is, we're all miserable. You just have to get on with it. My theory is that everyone's equally depressed, and some people just don't complain about it. Oh, my life's so hard, your life's so hard than anyone else's, you have no bigger problems than anyone else. Your anxiety is no worse than anyone else's, you're just a pussy. And everyone around you is allowed to be a pussy because no one's called you a pussy. I should be a therapist. Come see me with your problems. I'm gonna make you sit in front of a cancer patient and explain to them everything that's wrong with your life, to a terminal cancer patient. And if you can manage to make that terminal cancer patient feel sorry for you, then you're allowed to be depressed. Otherwise you could shut the fuck up and get on with it.
“We’re all equally depressed” - no, no were’t not.
“All problems are equal” - no, no they aren’t.
“The way you deal with things is to minimize them” - no, that just covers them up.
“Shut the fuck up and get on with it” - with what?
Life isn’t about being miserable. Life is about spreading virtue. And if you can’t define what virtue is, you aren’t spreading it. Funny admission for Andrew Tate to say that life is about misery and “getting on”.
This whole lament that “therapy turns men into liberals” assumes that men don’t have any ability to push back against the elements of therapy that licensing boards and libshit professors slip in there. Men are just helpless, unwitting NPCs reacting constantly to emotional programming. What kind of dysmal view of men is that? Yet that is the view that STALWART DISSIDENTS betray when they play the State’s power game.
Men are able to take to the good and leave the bad, granted they have philosophy. Philosophy is the basis of all coherent thought, not feminism or counter-feminism (see Andrew Tate) or even therapy. Philosophy is the root core of concept formation. Learn philosophy and you can go anywhere you like.
That includes the therapist’s office.
Find the words on power interesting? Try my article on the glories of leaving politics.
Think I have a cogent view on interpersonal advice? Work with me as a client!