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This is fair, but I would also add that this shifts the incentives for therapists as well, towards mechanisms of therapy that are "easier," or more "humanistic" for patients. The humanistic school announces just what you've outlined as a point of pride:
The academics whose studies are always presented as evidence for the effectiveness of therapy almost universally practice strict cognitive-behavioral therapy, which explicitly involves persisting in important activites despite negative feelings, acting on carefully-reasoned directions rather than following emotions, and trying to clearly understand how your actions affect other people. In other words -- exactly what someone whose negative emotions harm themselves or others needs (emphasis mine):
It does strike me as funny that a lot of criticisms of therapy culture you see on the motte and elsewhere are essentially that therapy should be just that -- short, goal-oriented, placing a great deal of responsibility on patients, focused on behaviors rather than emotions, emphasizing change instead of validation. If all therapy were like that, it would be a much better profession!
Yeah, in practice they just go in and talk and talk about themselves without pushback, creating a 'history of me', the end result being that they 'learn' that the original source of all their problems is that their parents/siblings have screwed them over in childhood and there’s nothing they can do. It’s incredible, what garden-variety therapy accomplishes. They blow up their small, real problems to gigantic proportions, convince themselves they cannot be resolved, and also destroy their relationships with their closest family members.
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