You’re welcome, Kevin.

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Most people have the basic need to feel understood before they’re able to adjust their way of thinking.

And oftentimes, as soon as a person feels understood, they find themselves able to adjust their way of thinking to a more helpful state (more insight) on their own.

And who knows? Maybe their way of thinking doesn’t need to be adjusted.

Conventional mental health practitioners get in the way no matter what ‘technique’ they use.

There’s nothing quite as unhelpful as a rehearsed, agenda-laden professional.

IMHO.

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Big thanks Birdsong for the book recommendation, and I totally concur that Gerard’s quote is a gem. FWIW, I think CBT, within the context of critical psychology and other critically informed process, can be pragmatically useful and even leading to long term benefits. But in my estimation, viz personal experience and lost of like stories from others, CBT has a fundamental propensity to suppress critical consciousness, i.e., memory, experiences, power abuses, etc… especially when CBT is facilitated by conventional professional mental health practitioners…

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Wow so well put I’ve been struggling to say this for years. CBT is the worst offender by far in this regard. Events cause emotionless automatic thoughts which cause emotions? Ridiculous. And cognition is linear sentence construction, open to the same correction scheme as analytic argument? Insane. I was subjected to infinite CBT and was always recriminated for not benefiting. Now I know a thing or two about philosophy and neuroscience and life and realize how unbelievably stupid and reductive cbt is. It’s literally been repudiated by cognitive science! With all its flaws and shortcomings, cognitive science can’t even be marshaled to support this intervention, which is based on a theory of cognition! I remember reading a cbt therapist defending against this charge saying ‘well, cbt is not meant to be a rigorous or accurate model of the mind.’ WHAT? And now we’re finding out what we always knew: therapy is actually just an instance of human connection that can be successful or unsuccessful based on the same relational qualities that matter across the board when someone is suffering. At this point all my friends, who’s suffering was not quite as destructive as mine, have tried cbt of their own volition and I feel affirmed by the ubiquitous reaction: this is unhelpful and in fact dumb. They simply cut the cord on the therapy because they found it unhelpful, no
One to coerce them into it infinitely because it must be on them if it’s unhelpful. Anyway thanks for this very validating.

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Gerard, as I was looking up “How to Survive Psychotherapy” I came upon a book called “Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry Is Doing To People”, by Tana Dineen. Both sound like good reads.

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Great quote!

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David Smail in his book How to Survive Without Psychotherapy

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