this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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me_irl
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I dont understand how a therapist could help me be a better version of myself? They dont know me and they likely arent any better of a person themselves. I can only imagine its generic self help advice parroted to for hundreds of dollars as hour.
Therapy is only useful for people that need help working through a disorder.
I don't know what's up with the therapists in the US, but i can report that my therapy sessions consist of a lot more than just mirroring people, and shit like violating confidentiality doesn't fly because it would mean for the therapist to lose his license. My experience were multiple phases - the first is to build up trust, because without it there is no reason to continue. It also contains analytical approaches: what are the stressors in your life, what were the defining experiences of your life and how did you cope with it.
Later on you slowly start modifying the path your train of thought takes. That's slow, hard work, and often it can be that you realize that you were at this exact point in the discussion before, but you took another way there - that's sometimes frustrating, but on one hand it shows how interconnected some seemingly different issues are, and OTOH you come to realize that it took your whole life to build those (sometimes faulty) pathways of thinking; of course it will take quite some time to form new pathways in your mind.
And during the whole time you try to find practical and healthy ways to cope with current or recurring issues.
I am blessed with a pretty good therapist, which gave me a lot of stability and healthier ways to deal with my emotions.
Thank you for writing this amongst the vast number of negative responses here.
Your steps listed are pretty on par with my experience with therapy too.
every time i see that someone says that "therapy isn't for everyone" my reaction is "you haven't found the right therapist yet". My current therapist is the fifth in my life, and i made progress with every single one of them, but some just didn't work out with my specific issues.
My current therapist said that i do everything that i am asked to do for therapy, but if it becomes too tough, i am very skilled at changing the direction we're going, and it took him a while to realize that; but he's the first that DID realize what's happening.