Your post didn’t really seem to be a response to any particular post, not really the OP, but since I defended the idea that therapists are not just people who fail into the position because they couldn’t cut it at other professions and that people seeking therapy need to play an active role in their changes, it seemed like I was the most likely target of your posts.
I do think it’s possible that some people can’t be “cured” by any means, including therapy. I also think that it’s not helpful to think of a therapist like you would a surgeon - someone that’s going to come in and make changes to you that fixes your problem while you simply passively let it happen. That attitude is likely to result in unsuccessful therapy.
But since I’ve never encountered anyone who displays the attitude you characterize despite being well above average in my familiarity with therapy, I feel as though you are probably constructing a straw man or at least engaging in hyperbole to the point where you aren’t attacking a real position.
Speaking as a teacher, this strikes me as quite far off base. In fact, students do have to change themselves—i.e., be willing to put in the attention and the effort and the adaptability to learn something they don’t already know—in order to be successfully taught a subject.
Students who are frustrated by their initial failure to learn something and consequently give up on the learning process are not reachable, or teachable, unless they themselves decide to change. And pretty much every teacher has had a nonzero number of failures who wouldn’t make that commitment.
We tell our students all the time (at least at the college level, but it’s true before that as well) that it’s up to them to do the work of learning the material, and if they won’t do the work and take responsibility for paying attention and struggling through their confusion, they won’t learn.
I’m not saying that every therapist, or every teacher, is equally good or effective in communicating to their clients/students the most helpful ways to change themselves. But it’s inaccurate to think that the basic principle of “people have to change themselves” doesn’t apply in teaching, or that teachers aren’t conscious of it.
Training dogs and fighting wars, on the other hand, don’t require achieving conscious understanding or consent on the part of the other participants. The job of trainers and soldiers is basically just to get the dog or the enemy to do what you want them to do, irrespective of whether they understand or are personally committed to what they’re doing. That approach won’t really fly in teaching or therapy.
Have you considered seeing a psychiatrist instead? CBT does not work for everyone, since every brain is different. Several anti-depressant medications can be used to treat OCD.
I’ve tried several medications but they had some side effects (one of them, I forget which, which caused dangerous drowsiness while driving) so I stopped.
Yes, I agree that college level teachers are part of the problem. We had a particularly bad example in the psychology stream of an engineering course I was associated with, where the faculty decided that they weren’t going to teach anymore, it was up to the students to learn.
Where it does the most damage is in teacher-training institutions, when they are captured by people attuned to a theory of education, rather than to demonstrated observations about education (research). They turn out teachers who think that it is up to the students to change themselves, with predictable affect on student achievement. Mostly, teachers teach anyway, but the faulty theory of education doesn’t help any.
It is “up to the students to learn”, although that in no way excuses the teacher from the responsibility of teaching.
You seem to be the only one here trying to insist that the totally reasonable observation “People have to change themselves” has to be interpreted as implying “and nobody else is obligated to do jack-shit to help them achieve that more effectively”.
Most people have enough common sense to recognize the truth of the former statement without thinking it implies the latter.
You have to be willing to put in the effort and work.
A therapist can give all kinds of advice and guidance on what research and experience has shown to be effective for others that might also be effective for you but if you do nothing with that and don’t put in the effort and work to make the change that you want then nothing they say will be of any help.
They aren’t genies who can magic the change you want. For therapy to work it’s 10% therapist and 90% you.
I’ve found extreme range in psychologists/therapists. I’ve been to three, two of which I feel were incompetent and the third I feel was competent but ineffectual. (I don’t feel like giving details). I have a friend who had severe PTSD and saw a variety of psychologists and therapists. The majority were severely incompetent. One abused my friend and made her PTSD worse! The third was like a miracle worker, and my friend is doing much better now.
I think the state of psychological therapy is extremely complex, and that many in this thread are either over-simplifying it or talking past each other. There are many very bad therapists out there. I feel that part of the problem is regulation. For example, this abusive therapist is still practicing. Obviously there is the aspect that patients need to put in the work, but the therapist must be competent. The other aspect is that there are simply many mental illnesses we have no idea how to treat (e.g. autism and similar issues). We, as a culture, need to realize that therapy is important but significant research still needs to be done to make therapy REALLY effective.
