Problem with therapy

Sorry for the delay in blog posting, was busy 😅

Anyways, I was walking down the streets of Pune and saw a banner for counselling center. I’ve seen multiple of them throughout various cities, so it made me wonder about it. We see that therapy has become a buzzword in today’s world, especially among young Indians, with many seeking it to uncover the supposed deep-rooted traumas that are believed to be the cause of all their life’s problems.

But what if the reality isn’t that complicated?

What if the root of our struggles isn’t buried under layers of complex psychological analysis, but instead lies in the simple, everyday decisions we make?

In this blog, I challenge the idea that therapy is always the solution, questioning whether the therapeutic industry thrives on perpetuating problems rather than solving them.

One of the problems with therapy is that the source of your troubles in life is almost never some deep complex thing that you need years of therapy to uncover and understand. Any random dude on the street could listen to you whine for five minutes and tell you exactly what your problem is. But if therapists gave simple answers, they’d be out of a job. They need to keep you there and talking. That’s the whole business model.

In most cases, your life is screwed up because you’re making bad choices. The answer is to stop making those choices. If you don’t stop making them, your problems will continue. And that’s really all there is to be said about it. Therapy quickly becomes an excuse to avoid actually doing the things you know you need to do.

Many young Indians are going therapy. They’re not all suffering “complex trauma.” But the fact that everyone thinks they’ve suffered trauma is yet another indictment of the therapy industry.

The idea that everyone in therapy has “past complex trauma” to uncover is one the most damaging lies from the therapeutic industry. Everyone goes into it under the assumption that all of their problems can be traced back to some deep injury suffered in their past, and they’ll keep searching until they find it.

If a majority of people have “trauma” then trauma is just another word for ordinary hardships that are a normal part of life. And very often the best thing you can do with past hardships is move on and stop harping on them. Analyzing them to death in therapy will do more harm than good.

I prefer the older way of looking at trauma, which is that it’s a severe case of someone suffering something truly horrifying and catastrophic. A child who is sexually abused, for example. Obviously there is a lot of trauma that comes from that. But we have vastly expanded our definition of trauma to include things that, for most of human history, were considered pretty ordinary obstacles and setbacks.

The next level is to realize that the entire psychiatric industry is built on half baked theories, junk science, and false premises.

And obviously your thoughts may vary from this, so what do you think, do you agree with this blog or have some other views, let me know in the discussion down below. Until next time.