Explaining that an overwhelming amount of feminists are insufferable to me due to their performative white, liberal bullshit with zero intersectionality and not because I'm an edgy anti-feminist teenage male with a lot of toxic masculinity.
"You make fun of feminists because you're a cringe toxic male.
I make fun of feminists for their complete lack of intersectionality, their liberalism & their cracker behaviour.
We are not the same."
:)
Explaining that I hate therapy because the historical relationship between therapists and queer people is adversarial and not in a cool leftist way
I've had literally a dozen therapists over the course of my life and after I get through my deep lore, they usually find reasons to stop seeing me. Haven't gone longer than a year with the same doc since I was a pre-teen. The last one I had straight-up transferred out of state a week before a followup appointment, despite having scheduled me himself a week before; and I gave up.
Like, I pull up to the check-in kiosk like "I'm here for my three o'clock with Dr. H", and the receptionist just gives me this Kubrick stare while "Dr. H transferred to another facility last week and we don't have any cognitive behavioral therapists here anymore"
Yo, I had a psychiatrist who disappeared once and I called the clinic and they were like "so and so doesn't work here and I don't know who that is. You have the wrong number." and I was like "No?? wtf??" I think the receptionist was just mean or something but they did just leave and ghost everyone. I still don't know the full story lol.
Explaining that I hate therapy in a cool "I will never be able to afford therapy or the time off it would require" way and not a toxic masculinity way
Ngl I really do hate therapy. It's useless without a material change imo. And therapists often are gatekeepers holding the possibility for material change away from you
In certain situations it's just strictly logical that you're an anxious traumatized mess
you mean how continually paying a therapist is what gatekeeps you from the pills needed to function in purgatory?
pretty much. or worse, with transgender stuff, life saving surgical stuff
Explaining that I have issues with therapy as an institution of policing what is considered “normal” in late stage capitalism because modern psychiatry from its inception has been about enacting violence on what it deems to be acceptable targets… and not in a toxic masculine way.
The model for mental health treatment under capitalism is completely backwards. Working from the assumption that there is something wrong with the individual, as opposed to the FACT that most of us live in a deeply diseased, dying society on a dying planet, that rewards anti-social behavior and punishes compassion and empathy is the fucking standard. I've seen countless therapists in my day, pretty much all have been absolutely dog shit. On the flip side, psychedelic therapy has been INCREDIBLY helpful to me. Ketamine injections keep my depression and insomnia under check without needing to take the drugs that scramble your nervous system (antidepressants).
Just want to recommend It's Not Just In Your Head for its cool leftist critiques of mental healthcare under capitalism. Some of the general mental health advice they occasionally drop has been personally helpful. It's nice to hear leftist therapists acknowledge how shitty everything is.
From their bio: Two mental health professionals explore how our capitalist economic system impacts our emotional lives. From precarious housing and employment, to unaffordable healthcare, to endless debt -- it's not just in your head!
I struggle to put into words how I'm pretty sure therapy would be pointless because my presumed depression (not diagnosed just a guess my girlfriend makes) comes from learning communism I think. I can't imagine your average normie therapist would have any treatment that wasn't just an attempt to get you to accept your conditions and get over capitalism so you can return to happily droning for your boss
0.000% of Communism has been built. Evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself sad. He is starting to suspect Kras Mazov fucked him over personally with his socio-economic theory. It has, however, made him into a very, very smart boy with something like a university degree in Truth. Instead of building Communism, he now builds a precise model of this grotesque, duplicitous world.
my last therapist wasn't a therapist but just a drug pusher who would prescribe anything that allowed him to charge my insurance $400 for the least possible amount of time talking to me each month
"Doc help, the profit-driven nature of our society makes me feel hopeless and money anxiety keeps giving me panic attacks. What do I do?"
"That sounds really hard. Have you considered making a budget? Also, the computer says your insurance says you have to pay for this session OOP, Do you need to set up a payment plan?"
Not trying to make any coherent point, just venting...
real and cool therapy exists but a lot of the most prominent strains of it (looking at you CBT) are individualist nonsense that will never help people see what's actually making them miserable and essentially serve to keep people locked into a capitalist realist mindset
Sorta interested in more details, or an article, if you have it.
just based off personal experience. CBT as I've experienced it places the problem on the individual and expects them to shift their mindset to essentially become more compatible with this awful world. I think if you're neurodiverse, have an emotional disorder or generally your mental health goes beyond "I get sad/anxious sometimes" it's totally unfit for purpose. I've had numerous psychologists/therapists agree with me on this, it's thankfully coming to be seen as a dated practice that doesn't work for as many people as once thought. Like I said not opposed to therapy in general, I did a course of DBT last year and it helped me more than any other mental health intervention I've ever undergone. But CBT to me as a neurodiverse individual feels like professional gas lighting.
Here is an image from a psychology textbook, an extreme example for sure but it illustrates what I see as the problem with CBT under capitalism. It's individualist in the sense it maps problems with people back onto their own mindset instead of ever helping them see the greater picture that's causing them pain in a lot of cases. Not saying all therapists need to be commie polemicists but good ones help you explore big-picture reasons for why you feel like shit which CBT doesn't.
Good post. Thank you.
I don't think CBT is inherently individualist. Under a capitalist setting maybe, but in a post-capitalist world people would still have to deal with trauma somehow.
well we are under a capitalist setting, I think it would look very different under socialism sure but that's what it's doing currently
What you say may be true, but reading about le communism and "organizing" doesn't make me feel any better. Maybe I am contributing to a better society, but it doesn't make ME feel any better. And that's the thing honestly. For me, being knowledgeable about the larger forces that exploit us and trying to help others or voicing my discontent is just a cope because it's easier to look at something so nebulous and grand than it is to look at myself and contribute to ME. I hate Jordan Peterson or motivational video type assholes, but honestly, there are times where I envy that such people are simple minded enough to hear some asshole yell at them and get up and do something to change themselves for the worse; and I don't mean that I'm not simple minded or smarter than anyone for being depressed and apathetic - I just think those people are idiots lol.
It doesn't matter if society instantly turns into a communist utopia tomorrow and therapy is reformed or whatever. You can't change someone; they have to want it themselves, or at the very least they have to believe there's light at the end of the tunnel. But for me it's like driving in the tunnel and seeing 50 different routes towards the light on the GPS, and I just sit there in the darkness.
i like psychodynamic. It's really the only type i've interfaced with and it's nice, it's literally just me talking and being guided into what I'M saying; not what the therapist is saying
Therapy is a tool, it works great for a lot of people, works okay for others, and isn't super helpful others.
Also whether or not it helps you depends a lot on finding a good therapist which sadly can be difficult cuz there are a lot of mediocre ones out there.
Explaining to my therapist that I hate therapy even though I am training to be a therapist 
Me: I am genuinely pessimistic and feel unable to enjoy the present, as I'm deeply concerned about the future due to current and future material conditions. It also causes me to just spend all my money as soon as I have it as I don't expect things to get cheaper, or more easily available later and it is a source of stress and conflict with my wife.
Therapists: Have you tried, not reading the news?
Have you tried, not reading the news?
I mean there certainly WORSE advice
Therapy is a like to door to a psychward room
My very last therapist was cool, but sadly they quit, helped me get through some rough times, I only initially went for gender affirming surgery req else I wouldn't have, since one before them is why I'm afraid of therapists the lady kept trying to get me to join her weird culty church saying it'd help with my various issues and all I needed to do was pray and believe in a higher power to fix everything. 
Then I don't think she really listened to me, it was sitting in there and she'd mix my stories' up with those of some random patient, and I wouldn't correct her right away since I was too morbidly curious what wildness she'd scold me about. Nothing like having teenage children and spouses I never knew I had. And she went on a shouty hellfire sermon, again nope.
Fortunate to have a cool they/them therapist who acknowledges that my trauma and anxieties as trans person in the world are valid. Definitely had the gatekeepers too. Leave it to capitalism and it’s old individual responsibilty of leaving you, a vulnerable person, to have spend months and often hundreds of $ vetting various therapists before finding one that isn’t a total piece of shit.
I'm not critiquing any leftist complaints about therapy. But I've stumbled into YouTube channels that were progressive sounding complaints about therapy, only for it to be well veiled reactionaries saying that therapy was unfair to white men. It's another grifter avenue.
I guarantee paying to talk to someone about how it sucks that I'm poor and all avenues for anything beyond barely treading water for the rest of my life were systematically blocked off in ways I can demonstrably prove happened won't help cause then I won't be able to pay rent.
Feel like "therapy" is only useful for people who have any hope of things getting better. And I'm not just talking about the world or whatever. Every therapist I've seen just keeps going on about mindsets and reframing and setting goals and all that. That's great. I understand. But now what? I care enough to wake up and shower and attend to most of my responsibilities, but I clearly don't care enough to attend to the rest of the responsibilities or do anything to make my life better, and the misery and apathy have engulfed the entirety of my mind. Socializing makes me hateful towards myself, helping others make me hateful towards the world, engaging in hobbies make me hateful towards myself, etc.
There's nothing here but hate and apathy and contentedness with being like this forever because I am functional enough to enter society and meet my needs and not touch drugs and alcohol. What therapist is trained to address any of this? None that I've been to for the past 5 or so years. And of course, I understand that no one can force you to genuinely change and that you must want to change yourself. I guess I don't want it enough, and I can't imagine a day where I ever will.
no amount of therapy or even material change will make me ok with the fact that my consciousness, and those of everyone i have ever cared about or could possible care about, will probably be permanently halted someday. nothing i do, or that i could hypothetically do, matters in that context, me and everyone i could fight for may as well not exist in the long term. sure we could maybe build FALGSC, but why? it would be like a mold spreading from its petri dish, just more meat to spoil at the heat death. meaninglessness and my incapacity to create meaning seem to be intractable problems of reality.
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