GeniesLoki

Compare: anorexics reject food "by themselves". But supporting an anorexic does not mean just yelling at them "EAT THE FOOD". Likewise supporting men to get therapy does not just mean yelling "GO TO THERAPY".

Sorry, by "by themselves" I meant "by other men" rather than by the individuals who are failing to seek therapy. I agree that this is the result of abusive conditioning and needs a systemic approach to fix. I'm certainly against yelling "go to therapy" at anyone.

TBH I'm mostly on whether therapy helps at the individual level at all - I think it's much more useful to have a whole bunch of therapy skills in the water in a community than therapy is for individuals themselves.

(I think therapy clearly helps if you have a great patient/therapist match, a willingness to work on your problems yourself, a lot of money to throw at the problem, and the sort of problems that are amenable to solving with therapy, but that's a lot of preconditions)

I think therapy has become a dumping ground where instead of saying the reactionary "shut up and deal" (because society at large doesn't want to support you) you can say the progressive "go to therapy" (because society at large doesn't want to support you)

I think it's worth distinguishing therapy from the weaponisation of go to therapy discourse - the latter basically never actually results in people going to therapy, it's just a tool for shifting blame because you know they won't. Actual therapy almost doesn't come into it.

I want tools of therapy in the water, but it basically just means real friendship A real call to go to therapy would be more like go to poker night, go camping, go hunting, go to Vegas with the boys You need space and time for men to be men

I don't think it just means real friendship. There are a lot of skills of communication and emotional awareness that tend to come out of therapy that are not present in the general population and that no amount of real friendship substitutes well for.