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The phase: "Losing weight is simple, not easy." Sums it up nicely. Just like, your example of poverty, or smoking/drug use. Addictions are often "simple" to qu

The phase: "Losing weight is simple, not easy." Sums it up nicely. Just like, your example of poverty, or smoking/drug use. Addictions are often "simple" to quit, just stop doing [bad thing], but they're far from easy because it ignores the underlying reasons people are addicts or have emotional regulation issues to begin with. A common online solve-all is: "Just go get therapy." Which, while better intentioned than bullying, or yelling "CICO!!!" is often suggested by people who don't realize how expensive, inconsistent, and uncommon good therapy is. People treat it like a "just talk to a therapist, and you'll be fixed" rather than more realistically: "just spend $100 a session until you can even find a therapist who could help you, then spend thousands on that therapist."

safety1st 4y ago
To add to this, therapists are the first ones to admit that not all disorders are curable, and that therapy doesn't work 100% of the time. Even the best therapists work with patients for years in some cases and fail. When someone says "just go get therapy" it says more about them than anything else: they're demonstrating that they're misinformed, low empathy, or both.
UncleMeat 4y ago
I'm a big fan of therapy (it was definitely useful for me) but there is something even more insidious about how discourse has shifted towards promoting therapy for almost everything: therapy does not actually fix most causes of suffering. Tools like CBT give people the ability to endure suffering and even thrive in it but they do not eliminate suffering. It almost feels like a trick. One more way in which people are trained to assume that suffering because they've got a shitty job with a boss that hates them working for a faceless corporation and anonymous customers is just a property of the universe like gravity. I don't think that therapists are doing something wrong or that going to therapy is bad but there is something sick about how human suffering just becomes one more market where megacorps can extract wealth from the masses.

safety1st 4y ago

To add to this, therapists are the first ones to admit that not all disorders are curable, and that therapy doesn't work 100% of the time. Even the best therapists work with patients for years in some cases and fail. When someone says "just go get therapy" it says more about them than anything else: they're demonstrating that they're misinformed, low empathy, or both.

UncleMeat 4y ago

I'm a big fan of therapy (it was definitely useful for me) but there is something even more insidious about how discourse has shifted towards promoting therapy for almost everything: therapy does not actually fix most causes of suffering. Tools like CBT give people the ability to endure suffering and even thrive in it but they do not eliminate suffering. It almost feels like a trick. One more way in which people are trained to assume that suffering because they've got a shitty job with a boss that hates them working for a faceless corporation and anonymous customers is just a property of the universe like gravity. I don't think that therapists are doing something wrong or that going to therapy is bad but there is something sick about how human suffering just becomes one more market where megacorps can extract wealth from the masses.