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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   35946 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

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This is all part of the rot and incipient counterproductive nature of "therapy culture." It invites negative feedback loop rumination on bad feelings, the opposite of personal agency, all while promising constant absolution from responsibility that one can presume and demand of others. It's a kind of inverted religion; a kind of satanism, if you will. A self-referential cult of the victim ego.

I agree with most of your arguments, but I have to jump in with #notalltherapy here. I have been helped quite a bit by therapeutic modalities, even though it took me years to find ones that worked with good practitioners.

Unfortunately, like with most fields, good therapists are few and far between. In general I'd estimate 90%+ of therapists out there provide negligible effects, or actively make their clients worse off. And indeed, much of the issues are the "cult of ego" stuff as you point out.

That being said, the truly good therapy that's out there can be life changing. Especially if it's focused on somatic practice and "emotional armoring" in the Reichan sense.

Very much agree on trauma not being an excuse to hurt others, though.

I have been helped quite a bit by therapeutic modalities, even though it took me years to find ones that worked with good practitioners.

Your choice of words alone in that sentence suggests a verbal IQ (if not general IQ) in the top 5% (and I'm probably underestimating). You're posting on a niche forum that hyper-indexes on good argumentation. The most liked posts on here routinely surpass 500 - 1000 words.

Therapy didn't help you, you helped you. I know, that's an outlandish claim to make. I don't know your whole story. How could I be so presumptuous blah blah blah. But this is yet another part of therapy culture I find so contemptuous. For the success stories out there - like yours - I believe 99% of them are just that person improving their life. The therapist was in no way necessary. But the therapist then takes the credit. And invites well-intentioned and genuinely praiseworthy people - such as yourself - to proclaim the advantages of therapy. At best, at the absolute best, you could maybe view a therapist as a coach in the sports sense. They help you stay disciplined, offer nurturing advice, whatever. But who went out and did the thing? You did.

Where therapy isn't a satantic self-religion, it's a grift. Where it isn't a gift, it's non-sexual emotional prostitution. Where it isn't even that (in the academy) it's a rent seeking non-scientific field that shits out pop self-help books backed by "TeH scIencE" and propagated over social media. Evil turtles, all the way down.

Semi-related tangent: Can't find the article / essay, but I remember a ACX style post about how most alcoholics who aren't a) extremely low agency (i.e. retardation levels of IQ) and b) past the point of the dangerous chemical addiction wherein cessation can be fatal, will self-resolve their alcohol consumption to manageable levels over the course of their life. Alcoholics Anonymous is more or less a placebo. I'd love to find that article again as I have enough people in my personal orbit who essentially have been functioning alcoholics for several years at a time, become completely sober for several years, and then resolved to totally responsible occasionally social drinkers after about a decade mixture of the preceding two phases.

Therapy didn't help you, you helped you. I know, that's an outlandish claim to make. I don't know your whole story. How could I be so presumptuous blah blah blah. But this is yet another part of therapy culture I find so contemptuous. For the success stories out there - like yours - I believe 99% of them are just that person improving their life.

Ahaha I appreciate it. I honestly can't give therapy too much credit - Jesus Christ saved my life more than anything. That being said, going to therapy and learning especially about somatic modalities (paying attention to what you feel in your body, your emotions etc) is a big part of what led me to Christ. So perhaps I can say He can work through these tools.

I actually agree with the emotional prostitution part. Ironically I wasn't able to get a ton out of therapy until I did a bunch of research on my own, learned to sort of discern who is actually wise and who is full of shit, and then pick from there. If you aren't able to do that discernment yeah, you're kind of screwed sadly.

Or, more relevantly, most people in therapy don’t need to be there, and doing therapy on a healthy person can’t help, might hurt.

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