Atavistic Autist
Intersectional autistic supremacy
★★★★★
- Joined
- May 28, 2018
- Posts
- 9,335
There was recently a thread asking about people who have attempted to blackpill their therapists, but this fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the power dynamic that is present in therapy. Conversing with a therapist, especially if they are trained in CBT and intend to apply these methods onto you, is not like having a normal conversation with another human being, or even paying for a surrogate friend. You are paying, on the contrary, to be conditioned/brainwashed, and in this regard the therapist is totally obstinate to any imposition from you. If they're an accredited psychologist, after all, they studied countless hours for a PhD and have wracked up thousands of dollars in debt to learn supposedly scientific techniques that are infallible, and nothing will shake them from this conviction because their livelihoods depend on it.
Therefore, if you share your beliefs about society or politics to the therapist, you will get absolutely nowhere if it contravenes the therapist's program. Because you are not viewed as an actual human being borne from experience during "treatment." You are viewed instead as an object that has not been sufficiently socialized or manipulated into a particular way of thinking and/or behaving.
In CBT, there is an assumption that what the patient presents in the clinic in terms of their affect is the remnant of a no-longer existing past. You might be anxious or depressed due to real-life, external factors, but it's just because of what happened in the past, and this no longer applies to the present. It is considered a turning point in CBT therapy when the patient agrees to the "move on," because "the past is the past."
This highly specific interpretation of somebody's problems is considered applicable to nearly everyone, so sure are CBT "practitioners" of their ability to condition you without considering the context of your life and its history. And this attitude easily transfers onto your beliefs. The therapist will see your beliefs about society or politics as ultimately irrelevant, if not an impediment, because they are not being paid by insurance companies to "treat"/adjust society, but just the opposite, to "treat"/adjust you to society. And the idealized end-product, which is artificial and detached from experience, they call the "true self."
It is notable that psychodynamic therapy concedes that the past is precisely what creates a person, but it still attempts to have you detach from the lessons of your life, and re-constitute you into an artificial end-product. You can find the same noxious, pseudo-Buddhist rhetoric among both psychologists who specialize in CBT and psychodynamics, and this boils down to: "you should not concern your petty little self with upsetting thoughts about reality; just be happy because of perceived stimuli -- the sights, sounds, and smells that surround you." Or what they call "mindfulness," in another counterfactual phrase.
Therefore, if you share your beliefs about society or politics to the therapist, you will get absolutely nowhere if it contravenes the therapist's program. Because you are not viewed as an actual human being borne from experience during "treatment." You are viewed instead as an object that has not been sufficiently socialized or manipulated into a particular way of thinking and/or behaving.
In CBT, there is an assumption that what the patient presents in the clinic in terms of their affect is the remnant of a no-longer existing past. You might be anxious or depressed due to real-life, external factors, but it's just because of what happened in the past, and this no longer applies to the present. It is considered a turning point in CBT therapy when the patient agrees to the "move on," because "the past is the past."
This highly specific interpretation of somebody's problems is considered applicable to nearly everyone, so sure are CBT "practitioners" of their ability to condition you without considering the context of your life and its history. And this attitude easily transfers onto your beliefs. The therapist will see your beliefs about society or politics as ultimately irrelevant, if not an impediment, because they are not being paid by insurance companies to "treat"/adjust society, but just the opposite, to "treat"/adjust you to society. And the idealized end-product, which is artificial and detached from experience, they call the "true self."
It is notable that psychodynamic therapy concedes that the past is precisely what creates a person, but it still attempts to have you detach from the lessons of your life, and re-constitute you into an artificial end-product. You can find the same noxious, pseudo-Buddhist rhetoric among both psychologists who specialize in CBT and psychodynamics, and this boils down to: "you should not concern your petty little self with upsetting thoughts about reality; just be happy because of perceived stimuli -- the sights, sounds, and smells that surround you." Or what they call "mindfulness," in another counterfactual phrase.
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