> A lot of beliefs are neither true nor false, but rather "self-fulfilling". If you believe that you lack the ability to succeed professionally, you aren't goin

> A lot of beliefs are neither true nor false, but rather "self-fulfilling". If you believe that you lack the ability to succeed professionally, you aren't going to put in the effort to try, which means you won't succeed. This isn't true. Satisfactory work is not always affected by perception or quantity of work (someone may be doing good work and thinking it's poor; someone's hard work can be another's easy work; someone can do a lot of quality work without huge effort). Quite a few successful people with imposter syndrome and depression exist. People don't have super powers in terms of causality. What people think or "think" often doesn't matter that much and it's rather dangerous to give it so much gravity. This is far more gravity than the individual themselves gives their thoughts. > If you're getting good results in your life it's a good feedback loop, but if something is wrong and you haven't been able to fix it The problem is this describes an incredibly linear, just-world model of reality. I.e., if someone is getting good results in their life, it's due to them. If someone is getting bad results in their life, it's due to them. There's no room for randomness here, while in reality our world is very random, and people may be getting very random results and assigning them all sorts of wrong causalities. It's really going to be a rather lousy therapist not realizing this and blaming some patient for reacting to some trauma. People's weird loops are often just adaptations to the random, erratic, and unfair world around them. > If you believe therapy is completely unhelpful, you won't listen to anything the therapist says and so it will be unhelpful. Well, that's useful, given that despair is pretty common in depression, one of those illnesses people go get therapy for. Good thing this isn't true, and people absolutely can be pulled out of ruts by random outside events or by well-placed conversation. I would say therapists are not very useful if they can't do something as simple as pull a person out of a standard "everything sucks and will always suck" loop.