Maybe shrinks are called shrinks because they shrink problems to the bubble of the client and ignore societal influences. Psychotherapy and Gaza and other systemic, not individual, catastrophes tend not to go well to together.
Therapists like to dig around in your personal history, but what if you are suffering not just because your parents were emptionally distant or made you responsible for their happiness or abandoned you when you needed them most, but because:
• inflation hits you and the rich have their mechanisms to benefit from it
• your corporate job requires you to be nice and subservient around people you loathe
• the dating ‘market’ has become a winner take all game via dating apps where the phenomenon of Chads seems to be a real thing
• loneliness is now an epidemic and trying harder will not solve much
• death and destruction benefit arms manufacturers and politicians, but leave you vicariously traumatized beyond recognition
• we do live in a system where if you are earning money by selling your labor you are always kinda screwed. A job does seem to mean: Just Over Broke.
• you may blame yourself for not dieting, but the whole economy is wired to ruin your diet
These are just a few examples.What most psychotherapy tends to do is to try and make you more adaptive to societal HELL while blaming the usual suspects for all your ills.
If psychotherapy was right now doing it’s job, I do believe we’d see the first signs of a real moral rebirth, but we’re not there yet.And where I do see those signs they are not being born in any room of a practicing psychotherapist.
Let me know what you think.
Speak up.
