cyborg-sevalle:

cyborg-sevalle: cyborg-sevalle: Therapists et al exist as a way to outsource emotional support that should be performed by the people in our lives who we have mutually emotionally invested in, but because capitalism dominates all our time and energy, those people are unable to, and the whole body of psychological therapeutic practice is just the development of methods to make that as efficient, sterile, and uniform as possible. Also, keep in mind, modern psychology is founded in the development of “The Talking Cure” which was literally just the revolutionary discovery that, if you sit down and let people in psychiatric distress just talk about their problems and then help them work through them, they can begin to recover, and the fact that that occurred around the turn of the previous century really isn’t just a coincidence. Meanwhile, “therapy dogs” are treated as a fairly recent breakthrough, which isn’t to say that dogs aren’t therapeutic, but that the bulk of non-medication therapy is just a medical repackaging of basic human emotional fulfillment. Therapy is basically the commodification of love

I went to school to become a therapist and this is exactly why I dropped it off that program. I realized that the specialist knowledge was a lot less scientifically rigorous than the public was led to believe and that what therapy really amounted to was selling your friendship for money.

… which I find abhorrent.

And yes, I have used therapists. I have used therapists to cope with abuse. I’ve used therapists to cope with a serious mental disorder. I recognize that the way out culture is set up laypeople really aren’t equipped to cope with a lot of that.

… and that isn’t okay.

There is a lot that is wrong with therapy. Structurally wrong down to the very core. That problem is money and the fact that the therapeutic relationship will always hinge on your therapist getting paid. That isn’t necessarily the individual therapist’s fault–they need to eat, after all–but the relationship is an exploitative facsimile of the kinds of genuine relationships that we should all enjoy but rarely do.

As someone who has grown into some very deep friendships I can say that their emotional counseling is orders of magnitude more therapeutic than anything I’ve gotten from a professional.

Do therapists fill a needed niche in our society? Yes. Especially so long as abuse is a thing because when you’re being abused your abuser basically controls your access to social support and victims need places they can turn to that they know are safe and that can help.

… except therapists actually do a terrible job at this. They can provide a safe place to talk–if you’re abuser let’s toy talk to them–but they are profoundly incapable of providing any of the material support a victim needs to actually escape. Those rules ‘for your safety’ prohibit your therapist from offering you their couch or the kind of long term friendship and support that real recovery requires.

If we cared about survivors we would have trans or specialists with material resources to meet the physical needs of a victim who had been made dependant of their abuser. They should be a transitional role as that person is introduced to be friends who can then take care of them emotionally.

… and they can then help the next generation of survivors. There is literally nobody more qualified to help someone deal with trauma than someone who has survived it and is healed enough to help others.

People already do this. This is literally a cultural institution among trans women. Largely in part because psychiatric violence leaves therapists largely inaccessible to us. Ditto people with psychosis or bipolar disorder.

Anyway… To all the people replying to this post clutching their pearls about how lay people don’t know how to handle a crisis or anxiety or [insert mental health thing here]: maybe that’s the problem?!

That’s literally the entire point of this entire thread.

Disempowering the average person from providing emotional support to survivors and disabled people through a lack of education and through capitalist exhaustion is the problem and therapists aren’t the solution.

Also… To all the people angry at the op for 'talking down’ to disabled people like this is someone telling you to 'try yoga:’ this is what radical mad liberation discourse looks like. This thread.

In other words therapists do have an important role to play but that face is a symptom of a deep social sickness and we, as disabled people, should be trying as hard as we can to dismantle three conditions that support this institution.