Why is therapy bad so often?
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collected some scattered thoughts here:
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@slatestarcodex post on therapy books all promising to bring about revolutionary change but all therapies seeming about equally okay in studies. i have many thoughts:
1. what if therapies start out effective but people adapt to them over time
slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/20/boo
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skimming back over this + the original SSC post and i think i am more confident in the "people develop resistance to therapy techniques" + "therapists get worse at passing them on" combination
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what this implies, quite regrettably, is that talking about e.g. IFS too much in public will eventually make it work worse 😬
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That just means therapists are bad tho doesn't it?
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Like, if you're not dealing with resistance to change and meta-reaistance what even are you doing? Don't you notice your clients getting more and more resistant over time?
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probably not 😬 i think the median therapist is much more of a "normie" than you're thinking. mostly just repeating what they learned in school. everyone we know who does coaching is noticeably more skilled than the median therapist along these dimensions afaict
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i do also believe there are insanely skilled true masters out there of various sorts but they're super rare / hard to find / expensive etc.
nearly all therapists are normies. even the ones who aren't often don't have enough vision to facilitate life-transforming identity-metamorphosing changes
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my best ever therapist was a guy super steeped in trauma stuff, really knew his shit, deeply cared, yet his perspective still wasn't sufficiently integrative or something
i don't think he appreciated the degree to which the material we were working with needed to ... 1/2
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