There’s a rub to all this in that all the good therapists are licensed, but not all licensed therapists are good. Anecdotally, therapy is at least as much art a

There’s a rub to all this in that all the good therapists are licensed, but not all licensed therapists are good. Anecdotally, therapy is at least as much art as it is science. There will always be those things that science cannot answer, that “logic” cannot provide a sufficient answer for. But yoga, meditation, art, dance, all these other things are also difficult to measure and quantify, and, we apply scientific rigor with various levels of failure to them. How do you know someone has really meditated? You don’t. How do you know someone has had a good dance? You kinda don’t know that either. There is a basis for understanding this from an engineering perspective, and it’s right there in what you just said — that outcomes are not correlated with educational background of the clinician. Sound like programming at all? Programming is also as much art as it is a science. So therapy is no sure thing. That much, to me, is fine. And that’s the other rub. If you want to get something out of therapy, you’ll only get out as much as you get in. There can be no shortcuts blaming things you don’t like, nor idealizing the things you want to like. We can talk standards and rigor all day. But there’s no getting around having an internal compass of honesty, and a desire to apply that honesty to one’s life. That’s what a therapist (or therapy group) should be for you — an objective voice that questions your view of things while letting you be heard, as well as creating a safe environment for you to unwind the dark corners of the mind that are normally difficult to reflect upon on one’s own. Even there it is up to you to reflect on what happened afterwards. Your therapist cannot follow you all the way.