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It might be a helpful framing to think of handling emotions and dealing with adversity as life skills, like cooking. There isn't one single "correct" way to co
by tveita 3y ago
It might be a helpful framing to think of handling emotions and dealing with adversity as life skills, like cooking.
There isn't one single "correct" way to cook. Most people pick up some cooking skills naturally as they grow up - from family, from friends, through reading books or TV shows. But some people grow up with parents who are bad at cooking, in an environment where most people don't cook, and they will themselves be bad at cooking as adults. If they realize that later, "How come all my friends talk about cooking rice like it's no big deal", they might benefit from taking a cooking class, or sitting down and reading a basic cookbook. It could be a "food science" book that tells you the chemistry of Maillard reaction, but it doesn't have to be. The important thing is to try out different ways to cook than what you're used to, guided by someone who is good at cooking. That will be more effective that sitting down and trying to rediscover how to make an omelette from scratch.
Most people are getting by with their normal cooking skills, but everyone who could probably discover some ways to improve by watching a cooking show, or taking a cooking class. We could consider teaching more cooking in school to make sure everyone knows some minimum amount of cooking to get by in life.
- strogonoff 3y agoNice analogy, and there’s similarity between cooking and mental health care in how either can probably be explained quite formally at low levels, but the rabbit hole is so deep that to get any real-life utility in reasonable timeframe it seems like you just have to give up theory and follow some guidance or recipes. Which I don’t mind, generally (discovering and applying meditation or other therapy techniques). What I mind about typical “therapy” as described here is that consulting someone, unlike with cooking, seems to require disclosing a lot about yourself to a person whom you probably don’t have enough information to determine the skill and depth of until after that disclosure has happened. Plus, I suspect if you become sufficiently interested in how cooking works, you are not going to be satisfied by recipes or just-so advice. You’d be curious to know the why.
- rzmmm 3y agoOne alternative viewpoint for understanding why therapy is so effective for mental health issues, goes as follows: Humans evolved in closely knit groups, where social relationships were extremely important. Good, close friendships were essential for survival. Humans evolved to innately feel better, when they feel that they have formed a close bond with another person. Common Factors Theory posits that successful psychotherapy needs: alliance, empathy, genuineness, affirmation... The school of the psychotherapist is not relevant(!), it's much more important that the patient and therapists are a "good match". Having this viewpoint makes psychotherapy more understandable, and also explains why depressed people can't just read psychotherapy books and self-heal.
- strogonoff 3y agoAs a counter-example, one can read sources that provide logically coherent reasoning/research into how humans require human interaction and “self-heal” by exposing oneself to more of it. Which, in fact, I have done and I do. (I am also somewhat fond of the “recursion” theory of self-awareness, in which modeling humans around us requires us to create a model of ourselves within their model, and which more or less requires other humans for human consciousness as it is generally understood to even occur.)