Every negative emotion I have, I’m told to go to therapy.
Negative emotions are human!
Why have we, as a society, grown to fear them?
I was told by many family members that I need to go to therapy. I suffer from severe fatigue due to my many medical conditions, so I must obviously be depressed (???). I felt fine, but I went anyway, because surely something must be wrong if so many people are insisting.
The therapist started with, “what brings you here?” and I’m like “I don’t know, my partner talked me into it.” We actually had a decent discussion come out of that. Turns out that my (now ex) partner was controlling and abusive, and the problem wasn’t with me at all. I didn’t see it because it’s apparently really hard to notice such things from the inside, but it’s obvious in hindsight.
Leaving my ex improved my mental health tremendously, but probably not in the way my ex wanted. Still tired all the time, but now I’m happier about it, more confident, and actually like myself, without all the constant negging and abuse.
So I guess the moral is, even if you feel fine, therapy can still be helpful in unexpected ways.
Sounds like something you should talk over with a therapist.
I’m pretty sure the sarcasm in your comment was totally lost on most people who modded you up. And just for that, have a mod point 🙂
Modded you up? Mod point? What are these?
If you get 1,000 Mod Points you become a Moderator
The Mods
I’m pretty sure the sarcasm in your comment was totally list on most people who voted you down. This includes me.
People don’t see your emotions. They see your behavior. They hear what you say, observe your actions and reactions, and from that they decide if they want to suggest therapy or not.
I don’t know if you need therapy or not because I’ve never met you in person. But if a large number of people you encounter suggest you seek out a therapist, it’s not because of anything you felt. It’s because of something you said or did. And you may be wise to reflect on those moments when they happen.
I acted out on feelings I didn’t recognize myself when I was at my worst, people told me to go to therapy. Then I finally did, and after three years I was more in touch with my emotions and more in balance with my inner world. I’m still a wreck, just a more functional wreck who no longer shouts out the shit that’s churning inside.
Negative emotions are human but some people need help to learn to handle them in healthy ways.
Therapy isn’t “just for negative emotions” in the same way the doctor isn’t just for dealing with the occasional common cold.
If you’re being told to see the doctor all the time, and you’re being dismissive of it without a reason past knee jerking, maybe hear them out? You’re positing this openly online so I think you’re already considering this.
Therapy isn’t for negative emotions. It’s for poor reactions to negative emotions.
If you’re told to go to therapy for “every negative emotion you have” it sounds like there’s more going on here than you just having them.
Great response.
I have a family member who gets angry very often. Things make him mad, I get it. The emotion isn’t bad. However, he then starts yelling at everyone around and becomes hard to be near him. Anger isn’t why he needs therapy. Yelling at those he supposedly loves instead of communicating why he’s upset is why.
It depends on how you manage those negative emotions. Not that you are having negative emotions.
Tbh, there’s been people who have judged me just for being frustrated or mad about something, even if I didn’t act on it. Turns out a lot of people just suck.
Sure, people don’t like to be around negativity. But have they repeatedly told you that you should seek therapy like OP?
Mmm, did they read your mind, or did your expression of your frustration warrant a response. (Doesn’t mean it’s fair. just adding maybe some nuance, but often people do suck)
Because I went from having 4 to 15 panic attacks a month to being able to count the time between panic attacks in years.
Because my panic attacks went from being because it’s Tuesday to being because I was in situations with actual dire consequences.
Because once I learned that it served no one involved for me to bend myself into an an ill fitting shape to avoid all conflict I was able to have lasting romantic and platonic relationships (married 8 years now and have told my wife I’m glad I met her after doing all the therapy).
Because of the dozens of things I learned explicitly and implicitly through the process. Because I am still using tools offered to me. Because I am actually happier and more fulfilled than I had ever expected I could be.
Me personally? Because I experienced childhood trauma that I had no idea was childhood trauma. All I knew was I kept losing friends in my life and had a lot of conflict and I was clearly doing something wrong.
So I decided to try therapy. Turns out, normal people communicate their problems with people around them and try to find a solution. They hold boundaries to keep themselves happy and safe.
They don’t manipulate people into doing things. They’re not overly helpful and try to fix every problem around them for every person at the expense of themselves. They don’t take little meaningless things as a personal attack and they don’t expect others to read their mind.
People didn’t want to be around me because I was overly helpful and tried to fix them to the point I was manipulating people and situations and causing harm to myself and others. Turns out when you grow up with a narcissist, even if your intent is good, you still have to unlearn all the fucked up lessons of your life.
That’s why I personally went to therapy. My life is significantly better after several years of therapy. I might even go back one day. I’m able to have deep and meaningful relationships now. Therapy didn’t make me not feel negative emotions. Actually, it forced me to. Because I had been running away from then my entire life.
Therapy is a wonderful tool if you’re willing to actually reflect on yourself.
Therapy is great because we’re a social species who live in a world in which we are growing increasingly disconnected from both each other and the world we evolved to live in. It causes our minds a lot of stress and talking to other people about it is a great way to alleviate it.
Though I do agree with you that negative emotions are human and that we shouldn’t necessarily fear them. Sometimes you’ll be in situations where you’ll be uncomfortable and upset, and you’re going to experience things you don’t like or you’ll have to do things you don’t want to do. That’s part of the human experience and dealing with it is an important life skill to learn, especially for children.
The problem is rich people don’t handle their emotions, they outsource that labor to therapists.
And they now expect everyone else in society to follow that model and it has trickled down.
The issue with mental health resources is must are being taken up by trivial nonsense of rich folks, where as people who legit mental health problems can’t get the resources they need because they are inaccessible to them. Very similar to physical health care. Hence why the advice is ‘oh you are feeling mad about something, go to therapy’, because that’s what a rich person does. Just like they have the luxury of going to a doctor over ever trivia healthcare concern.
There is a special suite for high roller patients at the one of the hospitals near me now. Basically, if you can pay them 100,000 in cash, you can get your own army of exclusive doctors for every little ache and pain, meanwhile the average person has to wait months or years for basic medical checkups and appointments…
Imagine actually believing that therapy is only for rich people.
I’ve known plenty of therapists, and every one of them had a sliding scale based on income if insurance didn’t pay.
cool. i have known many therapists and they all hate poor people because their insurance pays them shit, so they day dream about building up their practice full of exclusively rich clients who can pay out of pocket so they can make 300-500hr in private practice.
they only ever see treating the poor as a ladder to climb up out of.
The clear belief behind your post is that people suggest going to therapy because they think it will relieve you of your negative emotions. This is not what therapy does though, so maybe it would be helpful to start there. Is that what you think therapy does?
every negative emotion you have, someone tells you to go to therapy? I see two options: you are either having a lot of extreme overreactions that make bystanders uncomfortable, or, you are spending too much time with someone who is probably just trolling you.
Or maybe you just exaggerated a bit here
Negative emotions are human, but often we arent well equipped to deal with them. If you can deal with them in a mature and responsible manner, congratulations! If not, therapy can get you to that point.
We dont need to journey through everything alone, often a helping hand is necessary to pull you forward.
Why do you suppose humans aren’t well equipped to deal with negative emotions? Also, why do you suppose people have so many more negative emotions than we did in the past?
I’m nearing the half century mark. I work in education. I used to work in sales and retail. I’ve traveled to most corners of the planet. I read widely. I can attest, humans aren’t well equipped to deal with negative emotions and people have so many more negative emotions than we did in the past. This is the Internet.
Also, I’m not shitting on therapy. Therapy is keeping the wheels on this bus I’m riding. That said, therapy often fails at addressing underlying causes precisely because the dreck we exist in — and are forced to wade through — drives us back to therapy.
“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted in a profoundly sick society.” ~ attributed to Jiddu Krishnamurti
It’s modern society, propaganda on TV is designed to create negative emotions with the solution of buying and consuming being the answer.
Therapy is a band aid for the alienation we feel under capitalism. We are an increasingly isolated society. It’s every man for himself out there. We’re not meant to live like this. We need other people. We need people to share our experiences and feelings with. Therapy fills that role very well. I have been in therapy for 6-7 years and it’s helped me a ton. I would recommend it, but I’m also of the opinion that if we ever were able to make to communism, very few people would need therapy.
Therapy is a band aid for the alienation we feel under capitalism.
Therapy is the bandaid for the troubles facing all vegans.
Therapy is the bandaid for the unreasonable expectations that neurodivegents face.
Therapy is the bandaid for the products of systematic racism in Western nations.
Bro. This is not an infomercial. There are problems in the world and one aspect that touches you is not the explanation of all therapy. Jesus H.
Are you American? As a European, it seems that Americans are obsessed with therapy, whereas I don’t think it’s at all common over here.
you seem to think therapy in america is some kind ofad, or a phase. more and more people are coming foward for therapy, plus recently women/girls are being properly recognized for adhd/autism properly now. when before they could mask it easily, and sometimes they were seen as lazy, still living at home types.
It’s a rich American thing.
poor Americans don’t have access to therapy. it’s a luxury good, like travel.
and the people who tell you you have to have travel 3x a year are the same ones who think you must have a therapist.
it’s a luxury good, like travel.
It shouldn’t be.
A lot of major health insurance providers have free “self-help” style mental healthcare options, which are better than nothing even if they’re kind of lame, but even one of the worst insurers I’ve been on (Kaiser Permanente) had decent mental health benefits. They like money and they know that subsidizing therapy is way cheaper than paying claims for a lot of the issues poor mental health can lead to
That’s bullshit. Most places have free or extremely low cost therapy available. Most. Not all.
Fuck, if you’re really broke you can pirate a CBT or DBT workbook. Less effective than the real thing, but if you’re committed to change it can really help
You don’t even have to do that, there are free CBT, DBT, and shadow work exercises that are printable.
Good to know. You can also probably find books describing techniques at the library.
I’m not saying self administered CBT alone fixed me, but it took me from unstable to manageable, and from there practice and experience got me pretty far. Also lsd helped.
So yeah, if you’re too poor for therapy (and medicaid doesn’t cover it in your state) self administer CBT/DBT then when you’re more stable if you don’t have a family history of psychosis pop a few tabs of acid
I was in and out of available low-cost, therapies, often with poor or outright bad therapists, for a long time. It was sort of a convergence of factors that healed me, beginning with someone who said something that prompted me to look up something from early childhood behavioral psych from decades earlier that no therapist mentioned: attachment theory, and from there another year or so of floundering my way along, until I was able to access good telehealth therapy, from a good therapist, who attended a horrible school, and finished out months later, in person.
Yes, there have been ups and downs since, and a couple of times I almost spun out, but was able to catch myself until I was able to get privacy and time to do the work while actually feeling the feelings. The point is, if you really want it, you’ll do whatever it takes as often as possible.
Every therapist I’ve known has an income based sliding scale if insurance doesn’t cover it.
That is a bad thing. While therapy can’t solve every problem, it can solve a lot. That American’s can admit to using therapy means we can get the help we need when needed. I don’t know how, but Europe needs to fix their culture and get people the help they need, not be smug in the “we don’t need it” attitude which harms those who need help.
You’re reading a lot into that comment, it’s indeed not that common over here, but it isn’t non-existing either. If people need/want therapy, it’s available.
Edit: It’s also not that common to talk about therapy over here. Not that it’s taboo, but we don’t like to over share our medical history.
Perhaps then you’re also reading into Americans obsession with therapy as being a [fad? Perhaps?], and less the reality that many Americans desperately need therapy and is actually a real, tangeable problem
Americans actually need affordable housing, medical care, education, vacation time, workers’ rights, etc. Therapy is how oligarchs want you to “solve” your problems.
We can have all these things. Many therapists connect their patients to resources or even are volunteers in their community. I don’t see how these are exclusive
But also therapists are doctors, “people need housing not medical care” basically. We need all of them, holistically, every single resource we need to survive includes medical specialists. Would you say don’t go to an oncologist because the oligarchs want to die of cancer? What even is this logic
Also the oligarchs need therapy too for their psychopathy but their power systems wouldn’t allow someone non syncophantic in their circles so 🤷♀️ guess we all suffer cause of that too
everyone could benefit from a personal trainer too!
should everyone have personal trainers?
Actually yeah, if everyone could check in with a personal trainer every month or two for free, that would probably return many times the value of its cost through how much healthier it would make the population in the long term
that would probably return many times the value of its cost
This seems like a testable hypothesis.
Personally, I’m skeptical that it would offer significant benefits over much cheaper interventions.
cool, do you live in a world where money grows on trees too?
No, money grows in the pocketbooks of the rich because we let them avoid paying their fair share.
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What colour is the sky where you are?
should everyone have personal trainers?
Yes, that would be an awesome thing for universal healthcare to have. It would help people not get sick or injured.
Not the gotcha you think it is.
