examples:

living alone: for centuries people just didnt do this and families lived in intergenerational households.

finding ”the one”: as liberal societies started promoting the nuclear family and the spouse as being the main source of emotional confidant as opposed to interconnected communities

being happy with your job: most of the times the job was just for survival

being happy/stable most of the time

  • Maeve @lemmygrad.ml
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    1 month ago

    It isolates these processes from systemic factors (e.g. it can’t be that the system is creating this kind of behavior in a person - it must be something going wrong inside of them that can be overcome with better striving, willpower, techniques, etc.). Or sometimes it might delve into your upbringing, but it’s not going to get into the superstructure you live within.

    It emphasizes that you are the only one you can control, cleanly cutting you off from thoughts of broader social change. So individualist therapy is all about changing who you are and, in so doing, blaming yourself, whether it explicitly frames it that way or not. It might even say it’s not your fault, yet still instruct you in such a way that the emphasis is on changing you.

    This is not my lived experience, and I had some pretty bad therapists, when I had them. I did have one therapist like that and she told me “just believe in G-d.”

    Ironically, the best and last therapist I had was reared evangelist and went to an evangelist school, and was a believer. One day I asked her, “if belief and worship of pagan deities is magical thinking, why isn’t belief in mainstream religious deities magical thinking?”

    This woman looked me full in the face and emphatically said, "It is!”

    Last therapist needed. I’ve had some rough patches since then, but I gathered enough tools over the years to weather the storms.

    • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 month ago

      Sorry to hear that. And fair, I’m generalizing a bit based on what I’ve seen and my understanding of the academic secular practice of therapy, for lack of a better way to put it. Yours is not the first story I’ve heard of therapists who basically just say “god” is the answer.

      • Maeve @lemmygrad.ml
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        1 month ago

        More to the point, faith in anything isn’t just “flipping a switch.”

        That the more hardcore evangelical believer was more honest than the WASP believer was astounding, and reminds me not to become too entrenched in even “safe assumptions.” You may guess I continue to wrestle with challenges set before us.