OP upfront I will say it was a pleasure to read a thread like this and I admire the thought you've put in it. Even though I'm going to go ahead and voice a lot of disagreement with your theories, I still think you are high-IQ for studying this issue and you have demonstrated understanding of it which I think might be absent in >95% of our forumbase. You are a worthy opposition and I believe any clashes between us will better us both in our intraspective capacities.
Now prepare to get schooled son
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is designed to allow you to do the following, in order:
- Recognize negative perceptions you have about yourself and reality
- Dismiss these perceptions as false by using premade refutations
- Believe that you can control your circumstances
- Eventually change your "core beliefs" so that you no longer think your circumstances are bad
Note that "truth" enters nowhere into the equation.
I don't agree with you about that OP. The whole idea of condemning a "cognitive distortion" is that it is thinking distorted out of line with assessing what reality truly is.
Logic results in assessing truth more accurately: a logical fallacy results in assessing truth less accurately.
The problem is moreso that those applying CBT might not be recognizing distortions in their own thinking as they preach a supposed "truth" to a patient who could possibly have better insights about it.
The guide I've linked above makes many mentions about "rationality" and how certain thoughts are illogical. These are lies. The fundamental belief about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is that you, the patient, need to recognize that if you perceive reality negatively, you are irrational.
Source?
It does not matter whether your perception of reality is true or false. The fact that it is making you sad means that you are insane.
Source?
I've seen the intent to diminish sadness by amending your inner vocabular.
IE instead of "I know everyone in this room hates me" you replace that with "I suspect based on reasonable evidence that the vast majority of the people in this room probably hate me".
The idea is to make it seem slightly less suffocating by peppering in small insignificant hope pellets.
Question 1, for example, says that Peter should look at other people who aren't currently in a relationship.
This is designed to make Peter feel as if his condition is temporary, or that it might change.
You're doing some "mind-reading" about the intentions here, and I don't agree with your speculation.
I think more likely this is a response to confront the "I'm a loser" supposition".
Therapist directs you to look at someone you "like and respect" (ie don't view as "a loser") who is not in a relationship.
If that is done then it opens the possibility to think "I am not an absolute -loser- despite not being in a relationship .. I just lose at relationships but not at other facets of accomplishment"
Sure, you might not currently be in a relationship, but maybe you'll find someone to be with in the future!
Nope, that's not the point, IMO. The "not currently" is just I think because all you can witness sometimes is whether or not someone is currently involved, you may not have a window to witness if they had a relationship in the past or not.
Let's analyze Questions 2 and 4. They look logical, Peter should look at all of the evidence, right?
But look at what isn't said.
The therapist isn't asking Peter to look at all of his past,
Why the fuck would you do something like "review your entire past" as a question? That's fucking useless, you wouldn't know where to begin.
Questions should obviously be specific.
nor is the therapist asking Peter to examine any of the evidence that supports his current belief that he will always be alone.
Asking if someone has a past romance is clearly relevant to providing context for further questions along this line.
Also what Peter has said so far hasn't actually presented any evidence supporting his current belief: he has only expressed the belief.
Probing as to his past and reasons is basically inquiring about those motives.
That's basically what "discounting any life experiences to suggest that you will not be completely alone?” attempts to do indirectly but I find that a pretty messily-phrased thing, NGL
The therapist is just asking Peter to look at events in his life that go against his beliefs.
This is called "cherry-picking" as a logical fallacy,
and involves only looking at the evidence that supports a particular view.
The "fallacy of incomplete evidence" would only apply if you refused to talk about contrary evidence.
Doing specific questioning isn't a guarantee you will do this.
You could easily see it as the reverse: someone depressed might cherry-pick in the reverse direction, giving focus and emphasis to events which support his beliefs while ignoring things that don't.
In that situation it would be right to seek out ignored things which confront the person's beliefs.
Peter should only think about the one time he held hands with a girl when he was 10 years old.
Peter should not think about the hundreds of times he's been rejected in his life.
He should look at his "girlfriend" he had for 3 months in middle school, not the 12 years he spent alone.
You're delving into "mind-reading" again.
The questioner never says anything like this.
You can easily talk about these arguments for the reverse perception after indulging the "explore the positive" line of questioning.
Question 3 is simpler, Peter should try to comfort himself and not feel sad like he might comfort a friend that was feeling sad. Nobody is going to tell their friend "it's over give up".
So... no problem here then?
Question 5 is nebulously worded.
On the surface, it looks like the therapist is trying to tell Peter that he might not have control over his inability to be in a relationship,
Suggesting there is "something you do not have complete control of" is fine, since none of us have 'complete' control over anything.
But if lacking 100% control means you can't blame yourself then it would mean it's not right to blame yourself EVER, which I'd disagree with.
Better less "all-or-nothing thinking" phrasing would be something like "blaming TOO MUCH for something you have TOO LITTLE control over"
In actuality, it assumes that Peter has partial control over his situation
Not really, seems more like the reverse to me.
and tries to make Peter feel as if the situation is "not his fault", or that he didn't choose to be an incel.
Any problem with this?
You can't "choose" to be "involuntarily X"
This lays the foundation for the next step of cognitive behavioural therapy,
where Peter will discover that his lack of choice to be in a relationship means that he really chose not to be in a relationship.
How exactly does "I didn't choose to be incel" lead to "I chose to be celibate" ? You're flipping it.
What all of these questions have in common is that they are designed to change Peter's beliefs,
by making Peter himself recognize that his thinking is wrong.
You're engaging in "all or nothing thinking" here.
"Peter's thinking" is a multifaceted network of opinions. The intent is never to disregard ALL of them as wrong.
So we should clarify proportionality via "some of his beliefs" (perhaps "his WRONG beliefs") or "some of his thinking" (perhaps "his WRONG thinking")
Peter's thinking is being replaced here by the therapist's, with carefully controlled questions designed to make Peter think what is necessary.
You'd need more evidence here.
Also: replacing some of your opinions with some of your therapist's opinions is fine so long as those opinions are correct and better.
In cases where they are not, obviously that's bad.
The issue is being wary so that the latter doesn't happen.
Peter's beliefs aren't being challenged here,
Peter is just being made to "question" them.
This is illogical, "questioning" and "challenging" a belief are the same thing to the point that "Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief" was a question on the US common application for universities last year.
I agree with you that they're synonymous enough. This might be due to variance in usage where people perceive different implications and strength with certain nouns.
Those who use challenge/question as is to mean different degrees might view "challenge" as a stronger word (like "condemn") and "question" as a softer word (like "inquire" or "analyze")
But this misses that the goal here isn't for the therapist to challenge Peter's beliefs,
but for Peter to automatically recognize his wrongthink and correct it.
I dunno if I'd call it automatic, more like build habits of questioning the language of one's thoughts/narrative.
Like for example when I think to myself on the regular shit like "I can't live like this" which borders on suicidal ideation, I remind myself stuff like "but actually I am still alive, so that is technically incorrect... I am suffering from periods of increased stress and using incorrect language on impulse to describe it".
This leads us into step number 2 of the four step guide I wrote above. Peter the Incel isn't going to be with his therapist 24/7. He won't always have someone to think for him. So to help prevent wrongthink, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy relies on identifying common depressing thoughts and trains you to remove them.
For instance, "Overgeneralization", which in reality refers to any attempt to generalize your experiences and extrapolate future events. Let's say you installed Tinder and got 0 matches. The women on Tinder obviously thought you weren't attractive, so you might be tempted to say that it's possible that women in general will find you unattractive. This is when Cognitive Behavioural Therapy steps in, and you come up with a justification that "Tinder isn't real life! Real life isn't a meat market! I should try Bumble/etc instead." (notice how many normies say this? I wonder why).
CBT doesn't necessarily need to go so far.
I think it's more along the lines is if you get zero matches and say "NO WOMAN COULD EVER FIND ME ATTRACTIVE" and replace it with "it seems like most women don't find me attractive, certainly not enough to have a one-night tinder stand without me betabuxing"
Or "Black-or-white thinking", which refers to any attempt to categorize your experiences into a binary. e.g., being a failure for not having sex, as opposed to being successful for having sex.
That's correct to confront IMO: there are more ways to weigh value than sex.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is designed to step in there, and tell you that there are plenty of different experiences and there's no such thing as being "successful" or "failing".
In an objective sense that is true: success and failure are subjective experiences which require a context to have meaning.
You can say "I'm a failure as a man because I define manhood entirely about impregnating women and I haven't impregnated" which provides context/subjectivity.
But merely "I'm a failure" doesn't mean anything without context.
The reason why this is so powerful is because "binary oppositions" are what all human thought are structured on (t. Saussure
[2]).
By ignoring binaries and pretending they don't exist, your thoughts will lose all meaning and no longer make sense.
I don't agree with your implication that ignoring what is often a false dichotomy of failure/success (when there might be a continuum of reasults, like "finding happiness in love") and engaging in all-or-nothing black-and-white thinking (ie "sexual success or life is meaningless") necessarily means throwing away binary oppositions in general.
One can view things on a binary continuum, plus also think of some things in terms of absolute yes/no (example: did your penis touch a cervix? it's yes or no) while resisting applying that thinking to other spheres.
By eliminating the concepts of "success" and "failure" you will not feel like a failure.
Correct, and I don't think they hide that intent, and that's not a bad goal.
The identification of "all aspects of me are failure" is not just thoroughly saddening: it's usually factually incorrect in at least some respects where you might come in 2nd-last place in some comparisons to other competitors.
By creating catchy names and complex systems, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy allows you to identify and destroy rational thinking.
The names are to describe the meaning/intent of analytical strategies.
You haven't explained how this would destroy rational thinking.
CBT can be misapplied (by either therapist or patient) to attack rational thinking: there is a risk of that to be wary of, but I would not agree that this is it's inherent nature.
Basically CBT must be applied to also evaluate CBT strategies itself to make sure it stands up to it's own standards.
After the ability to recognize wrongthink is firmly ingrained in your head, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy will teach you to...
Believe that you have control
You do have control: the question is how much, and over what?
Control is a continuum in many cases of gradual influence you have over different things.
There is no absolute control, nor absolute lack of control.
There are of course wide differences in control-capacity between different people which is fucking depressing.
Once the ability to wrongthink has been removed from your head, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is designed to make you have a feeling of control.
CBT does not claim to (and cannot) remove the ability to wrongthink, only instill habits to confront and override wrongthink.
IE "I'm the ugliest man in the world" is wrongthink: you use CBT and replace that with "I am in the bottom 1% of male attractiveness in this world" which is slightly less saddening.
Or maybe more saddening: because you'd actually believe it, whereas deep down you know "I am the ugliest" isn't technically true, so you aren't harmed by it to the same degree as a realistic stat.
At this point, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy starts to implement "rightthink" so to speak. For instance, in the CAMH document, Nancy wanted to drive up to her cottage, but was scared of having a panic attack. So she creates a table that lists the situation she's in, the "automatic thoughts" (i.e. wrongthink) she had about the situation, and the emotions she was having. This allows her to target those and feel like she's in control.
By engaging in self-analysis you are exerting some level of control: the issue is how much.
If you are thinking of "control" as to mean "absolute control" or even "significant enough control to change an outcome" I think maybe you're going too far with the idea.
This is no accident and it's why Cognitive Behavioural Therapy stresses the importance of worksheets and homework. It structures your thoughts (homework is often called the "thought record") to align with how therapists want you to think and more importantly lets you feel like you're in control.
True: though a therapist might be forthright in saying "I'm trying to influence you to think in a certain way while giving you a sense of importance in the process" in which case, what's the issue?
Their attempt to make me think how they want is really only a problem if they're bullshitting and saying "no I'm not trying to change you".
I don't think any therapist would be that low-IQ unless dealing with some mental child with some kind of paranoid anti-influence complex... and even then it would seem an unwise strategy which many would avoid anyway.
You'll see this in a lot of the advice given from normies to incels, like "go to the gym" or "work on your personality".
Those types of generalizations tend to be insulting and non-committal, CBT tends to be a little more polite and respectful.
The goal here is to make you feel like you're in control of your inability to have sex, regardless of if you actually are in control or not.
I haven't seen anything in the CBT posts you've quoted that intend to influence them into thinking they could control the ability to have sex.
If anything I'd say it's probably closer to trying to whitepill them into finding happiness and fulfillment and self-respect through means other than achieving sex.
if you don't believe me, here's a direct quote from the document:
Structure your thoughts and soon you can generate "alternative viewpoints" for yourself!
That direct quote doesn't specify that the alternative viewpoint is "I can get a girl to want to fuck me" though.
The alternative viewpoint they're referring to is likely to stop thinking "I'm an (absolute) failure because I'm not part of a couple".
Is there a problem with this viewpoint?
No.
Thinking joining a couple is 100% of life's purpose in defining success/failure is cucked self-deceiving gynocentric bullshit.
You should definitely be rewriting that kind of thinking and reframing it.
Lacking a GF to compliment you is a horrible gaping void in your life but it's not an absolute determination of your value as a human being.
Changing your core beliefs
The ultimate goal of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy though, is to change something that's called your "core beliefs".
Source?
This means refiguring your value system to prevent yourself from becoming depressed ever again.
That seems like a very unrealistic high bar, and I'd like to know if you're inventing this narrative on your own, or quoting any particular rights.
"Never again" is clear distorted thinking: it's all-or-nothing fortune-telling.
Embodying CBT habits would automatically attack such an expectation.
Let's say one of your life goals is fulfilling sexual relationships. The ultimate goal of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is to remove that as one of your goals.
Source?
That's why "reformed incels" say that sex really isn't that important anyways.
That depends on what quantity you mean by the adjective "that" preceding "important" I suppose.
If it's downgrading your thinking from inflated "sex is the only purpose in life", I'm for it.
If it's trying to reduce it to some copey bullshit like "there's no use in aspiring for sex, fapping is just as good" then obviously that'd be going too far.
They've reached that stage, and no longer want sex because CBT has convinced them not to.
Of course, this is tough.
That's why the ability of choice is so heavily emphasized.
It is far easier to say you don't value sex if you're choosing not to have it, than to say you don't value sex when you can't have it.
You seem to have gone down a rabbit-hole of speculation here: can you actually show some examples of someone using CBT to try and achieve this "no longer want sex" outcome via CBT?
I think in the long run a therapist might think it's good for a patient to get sex, but first get them less fixated on it so they can better themself and thus have a higher chance of achieving it.
IE if you have such low self-esteem like "I am worthless without sex" it's going to seem to any foid you might have any chance with.
If you end up not having a chance with her anyway in the end even with boosted esteem: aren't you still better off by having boosted that esteem?
Once this core assumption is gone, the wrongthink that stems from it disappears.
A core tenent of cognitive behavioural therapy is that your core beliefs spawn these negative thoughts, and once they are changed, wrongthink disappears as well.
Any source explaining this as a "core tenent" ?
To me "core belief" seems like an exaggeration and false dichotomy too.
Beliefs aren't as simple as core/non-core or as unconscious/conscious.
I think they come in a gradual continuum of awareness, recurrance and connectedness.
Negative thoughts can come spontaneously, or recur after having latched on.
Obviously one negative thought (true or not) can lead to other negative thoughts (true or not)
So I think it would make sense to example underlying beliefs that lead to other ones.
Of course a key thing to it all is to try to be relatively objective and strive for truth even if it's uncomfortable.
Comfortable falsehoods wouldn't be a reliable poultice.
After all, if you no longer want sex, why would you be upset about being incel?
You can sometimes be upset by lacking an option even if you wouldn't want to take that option. Though I'd agree in thinking this would remove the major onus of frustration.
A truecel in a r9k thread yesterday was talking about something like this.
How other people’s opinions cannot have the ability to interfere with his inner state, protected by a huge ego based on his status.
Even as an old virgin NEET.
Inner/outer state division is a false dichotomy.
There is no absolute resistance to external influence, only varying degrees of it.
Basically convincing himself that if it makes him feel good it may as well be real.
Logical self-imposed deception is extremely cucked.
WTF does this have to do with CBT?
If it's deception it's by definition not CBT, it's Cognitive Behavioral Abuse.
Therapy helps you: if it fucks you up and makes you think delusions then it's not therapy.
My psychologist straight up told me it only works if you buy into it.
That itself exhibits a cognitive distortion in your psychologist: he's using all or nothing thinking here, needing CBT himself.
It would obviously work BETTER if someone believed in it, but it can still work if you're skeptical, since it's about applying skepticism humbly to your own thought processes.
You can even invent the questions yourself if you don't trust a therapist to guide you.
I wonder if perhaps your psychologist knew he was bullshitting but realized you were resistant so was just bashing it to try and make you lower your guard and feel chummy with him.
IE having you belief in HIM was more important to him than having you believe in the CBT.
To the point where he bashed a legit approach by deceiving you about it.
Which might help you so long as you stick with him but IMO it's cucked to let your psych manipulate you that way and make you reliant on him while axing alternatives.
He said that being able to pick apart the logical flaws in CBT makes it extremely difficult to treat someone so he gave up on it.
What logical flaws? I fucked up all the OP's objections, showing they were misapplications.
It's certainly voluntary brainwashing. I think the point of therapy though isn't learning to accept your life so much but about figuring out ways to cope with it
Voluntary brainwashing is mandatory to learn anything.
Why this fixation on attachment to fixed opinions?
Fuck it's like you'd reject being taught math or literacy.
CBT isn't necessarily about accepting your life: you can aspire to change things while applying CBT.
You guys are pigeonholing it into this one narrow application where CBT tactics might be misapplied abusively to remove people's dreams.
It's like the whole "I saw a shitty anime so all anime is shitty "crap
@Fat Link @AmIjustDreaming pin this shit. Everybody needs to see the scam that's CBT.
CBT can be abused and misinterpreted to scam but it's not inherently a scam.
It's fitting that I should read this thread today because I just quit my longstanding CBT therapist after no longer being able to bear their dogmatic bullshit. Like just hours ago
Good. CBT having sound principles doesn't mean the majority of therapists trying to apply it are worth their salt.
They're often hypocrites who don't use CBT to improve their own thinking and come at you with a fixed sense of reality they want you to conform to while not being willing to re-evaluate their own suppositions w/ CBT tactics.
CBT is bigger than any professional or profession.
Unlike @Ehwhatever's therapist, it's clear that mine would never stop scheduling new appointments until I told them to stop. Because therapy is primarily a money-making industry, and the therapist has student loans to pay.
Agreed. You don't need therapists to do CBT, you can just read a book on it and do it yourself.
Therapist COULD be useful but you should apply "it's not all-or-nothing" to whether CBT is beneficial: it doesn't have any absolute requirement of people with letters to work for you.
But what makes CBT so extraordinary compared to other forms of therapy is how vapid and dull it is.
One's rich, internal life, replete with varied emotions and thoughts, is crudely imposed upon by a mediocre liberal arts major who desires to replace your personality with their own
Not if you self-apply it.
CBT doesn't need any BA bullshitter to guide it, just guide yourself.
You can benefit from a pro, sure, but be skeptical: use CBT to take apart their own expressions the same way they want you to take apart yours.
Even as an autistic person, I found the mechanistic nature of CBT to be stilted and uninspiring af.
Not to mention unhelpful, given that autistic systemizers like me are already good at logic and rationality,
and don't take kindly to hypocrites who pose as beacons of reason.
You're not bashing bashing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy here AA... you're bashing Cognitive Behavioral "Therapists".
I think it's impossible for CBT to work.
you just sit there, and starts dialoguing with someone who has no ties to you
Not required: I just use CBT on myself for the most part.
I'm sure the guy I talk to every 3-4 months to get my sleeping pills refilled tries to use a bit of CBT tactics on me, that's fine.
It's nice having someone to talk to and I'm skeptical as fuck of him because he's a jew and an accomplished normy.
The problem isn't interacting with therapists/doctors, it's the expectation that you put an excessive amount of faith in them or drop your guard and stop thinking rationally.
zero emotional attachment to what she or he says, zero effects onto the person
CBT would inform you that you ought to replace "zero" with "minimal" to avoid your all-or-nothing generalization bro
There is some microcosmic amount of emotional connect and effect every human has on another, we just mentally round that down to zero because it's so underwhelming.
altering or restructuring thoughts is impossible either way
Thoughts are always altering/restructuring, truly static thought seems impossible to me.
We may be "set in our ways" but that would just mean saying "significant restructuring" and making large changes in a short period of time is unusual.
thoughts are automatically spontaneously generated, and anyone who thinks it's easy to do that, really is a moron
I wouldn't say automatic or spontaneous : they're probably chemical reactions because of neurons zapping each other and having orgies, but there's likely some underlying physical law there we just haven't been able to completely predict.
Also where does CBT advertise itself as easy? That's very subjective: even if understanding a theory is easy (ie "lift weights" or "drink whey" or "stop thinking fallaciously") actually organizing new habits to benefit greatly from them is pretty tricky.
if it was so easy, then OCD patients would barely exist.
Again arguing the strawman: I don't see anyone calling CBT 'easy'.
It just seems like the most feasible and logical psychoanalytical approach compared to most self-help bullshit out their written by new-agers.
Beats crap like "the secret" by far. What other competitors are we looking at here?
,,successful" stories of therapy or psychological treatments are mostly of females, as they've a predisposition, they're there to gain further reinforcement, validation of all their momentarily anteriorly set feelings, further strengthening all the encircling paranoia around about themselves until their Ego ignates beyond proportions.
Foids are mostly in therapy for attention and because they don't understand how blessed they are, so reframing their thinking to recognize how the world orbits around them obviously makes CBT a fast-happy switch for moer foids.
In terms of men benefitting from CBT it's basically just learning a slight cope where instead of thinking stuff like "she doesn't care if I live or die" you replace it with "she might slightly care about the outcome depending on how it benefitted her"
Brutal. In order to feel OK you have to lie to yourself (aka cope)
Depends on what you mean by "okay" tbh.
You don't need to lie to yourself to feel "better" though.
Even if "better than the worst" is still "awful".
psychologists are nothing but frauds that teach you to lie to yourself.
I don't agree.
That probably correctly describes 90-99% of them...
..., but I think there's some minority who, even if they don't care about you and WISH they could lie to you...
...might realize you're too high-IQ to mislead and will just be frank/honest
The question is figuring out which one you got.
Never assume you know, be humble and entertain both possibilities!
I think that for mental illnesses such as OCD therapy is actually legit (because the intrusive thoughts you get from OCD are fundamentally irrational and have nothing to do with reality)
I think this depends on whether we're correctly diagnosing OCD in the first place.
Like is your obsessive compulsive unhealthy/unneccessary, or actually a good habit?
For example: I obsessively make sure my door is locked when I go to bed. I sometimes, even after having locked it, jump out of bed, flip on the light, and double-check that I did it.
I don't see that as unhealthy or unnecessary, because it's entirely feasible that I thought I locked it but did not.
This is because I occasionally have memory lapses, or excess faith that I did something when in fact I skipped it while operating on autopilot.
but the problem is that people think CBT should be applied to every kind of negative thought now, regardless whether these thoughts are actually irrational or not.
Overuse is abuse.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't apply CBT to all thinking, though, just that CBT stops being applied when you realize a thought is true.
Also: it should not just be applied to negative thoughts, but positive thoughts too.
Having a delusion that makes you happy is still a bad thing.
Even if your only goal is happiness (and one really ought to have more) you'll likely realize it's a delusion eventually, and that won't hit you as hard the less you come to rely on it, which means eliminating it early.
Like a lot of "depression" is just people living in objectively shitty circumstances (like inceldom) and their negative reactions to these situations are completely sound and logical.
I wouldn't say "a lot". It seems unbelievable that anyone's reaction to anything is COMPLETELY sound/logical. Likely everyone (though I can't say for sure!) has reactions to things which don't mesh up with logic.
You could say we all 100% follow logical laws, but these laws don't necessarily correspond to what we think are logical strategies for our goals, instead they could be logics of competing processes.
And attemting to apply CBT here is when the whole thing goes from therapy to brainwashing and self-delusion.
A statement like that is proof to me you could use some CBT bro because you're applying all-or-nothing exaggerations in two respects:
1) that the "whole thing" alters in nature
2) that there is a complete shift from "therapy" to "delusion"
Your intentions are good and you have truth mixed in with the lies padding it, but it's about phrasing that truth accurately bro.
MISapplying CBT to try and alter logical beliefs into illogical delusions is indeed a shift from therapy to abuse (instilling delusions is generally considered abusive, with rare controversial exceptions)
But applying CBT is always correct: properly applied CBT doesn't result in replacing sound+logical thoughts with unsound+illogical ones.
Properly applied CBT would recognize those as genuine thoughts, not fuck with them, and instead just analyze if there were any legitimate ways to reframe those thoughts to alter their impact on you.
IE "it's bad you don't have a girlfriened" doesn't need to be replaced, so much as supplemented with "but eating chicken wings is pleasant, so is watching TV, maybe lack of pussy bothers you a bit less when you are finger-deep in chicken wings and cartoons bro"
TBH am probably taking CBT in directions most psychs wouldn't though
For what it's worth I understand what you mean by thoughts being automatically generated.
There's scientific evidence to support that thoughts are created before we're even aware or able to act on them.
Who the fuck needs evidence for these?
It's obvious to me that you can't be aware of a thought before thinking it,
Even moreso that you can't act on a thought which hasn't occurred yet.
It brings up the question of whether we really have free will.
How do we even begin to answer questions on that without defining what 'free will' means in that particular discussion?
We can't even consistently agree upon what lines to draw around concepts like "love" so what hope does free will have?
Freedom itself is subjective: free of what? Unfettered in which regard? Immune to what influence?
Absolute freedom/independence seems like an illusion, just as the idea of absolute reliance on any particular cause also seems like illusion.
Freedom is better understood (like with love) IMO as a continuum of increasing value as opposed to a discrete yes/no question.
Basically the reason we have dilemmas like this is we're trapped in a simplistic analog thought process.
Works better if you go digital.
till, I'm hoping that EMDR therapy will help. It's supposed to help reprogram your brain to help with trauma which I think a lot of people here have.
It's probably a huge cope but I'll try anything to not feel like roping at this point
Part of me wants to reprogram my brain so hearing a creak filled me with happiness instead of hatred,
Hatred is fucking exhausting and interferes with my hobbies and sleep possibly more than the creaking itself.
That said, part of me wants to resist such reprogramming, looking at it as cucked to embrace the abuse and inconsiderate nature of others.
It's clearly useful feedback that others do not regard you, and anger can motivate us to make changes to create distance from those who disregard our value and wellbeing.
If they would do it by making avoidable creaks then they would do it for other reasons like robbery/murder next.
I have always known it's bullshit,
but talking with a woman outside of family can be a bit refreshing,
even if she's just bulshitting.
NGL this is true, you know it's just your bluepilled subconscious LARPing, but dealing with some foid in a service industry with good manners can sometimes be uplifting.
Because of this I frequently leave the sessions feeling lighter (at least for the 10min travel back home).
I wouldn't pay for this, but my parents pay and it makes them feel better, so
The ideal is if you can arrange is to the foids you gain some occasional pleasure-of-connection speaking to, actually benefits you in some way.
IE a social worker who assigns your bux trying to build up your esteem so you'll get a job
Another word I like to use for therapy is "liberal brainwashing"
neo-liberalism is anti-therapeutic, I'm for classic liberalism tho
Frankly therapy is a waste of time, especially if you’re a man. Women have taken over social “science” and therapy and have bent the institutions to their bias.
Depends on the therapist, the approach, how you manage your expectations and strategies.
You don't need to put your faith in what you're told to listen.
"Therapy" is really just organized and systematic gaslighting.
Care to elaborate? Not sure you understand what gaslighting means.
I wouldn't necessarily call it a scam because the main premise of CBT is that a patient may have a distorted view of reality.
If that's the case, CBT can be effective.
Of course, this doesn't apply to based incels like us because we know that our issues aren't imaginary.
I would posit that EVERYONE has imaginary issues to some degree.
Nobody has a perfect view of reality.
You'll note above that I am also exhibiting such behavior in my phrasing by using everyone/nobody btw:...
...humbly I have to entertain the idea that there's some perfect fuck out there lacking imaginary issues
...but I lack faith in that perfect person existing.
Based incels with legitimate issues can still have some delusions or exaggerations in their thinking.
For example: maybe you are actually a 3/10 incel who thinks they are a 1/10 and your lack of confidence lowers you -1 to an effective 2/10.
That doesn't mean your root belief is wrong (that being unattractive dooms you)
Nor does it mean that correcting your misconception would actually help you achieve your goals: accepting you are 3/10 and being an effective 3/10 still wouldn't get you success.
Even temporary overconfidence instilled by illusion wouldn't help: if you convince yourself you're a 5/10 and that +1 confidence-boost makes you an effective 4/10, you're still doomed.
A therapist must be objective in every way. (well, at least in theory; most of them are still bluepilled cucks)
Obviously there's not true objectivity, just "more objective than the competition". Objectivity is a continuum and we shouldn't expect perfection in it.
Question 3: I would definitely tell my incel friend It's over. If he's sub 5, it'd hurt him even more to keep trying in futility
It's about phrasing: if "over" or "never began" means "no chance" it might softne it to use realistic terms like "odds so negligible it's not worth your time".
