Does therapy help, or is it simply an expensive way to pass the time? An article in Salon, Off the couch, summarizes the author’s many years of therapy and her decision to quit. She raises questions about the value of therapy and whether it really is of any use, when other pursuits might work just as well. She was taken to a therapist in her childhood, and it became part of her self-definition, the way in which she learned to cope with life. She writes:

The choice, as I see it, is not between doing therapy and getting better versus not doing therapy and staying screwed up. The choice for me — and I keep making it, one day at a time — is whether to be screwed up and broke and dependent on someone I pay to care about me, or screwed up and less broke and more self-sufficient. People who choose to stay in therapy have harder decisions to make: who to see, how to know if it’s working, when to move on.

The author states that she thinks therapy has its place in being part of a solution for “for people with mental illness, people in true life crises, people who are court-ordered or girlfriend-ordered into self-examination.” While the essay makes good points about the alternatives to therapy, the tone was sour. I sent it to my brother, Tony, for his thoughts. He responded, and with his permission I post it.

I found I had a couple reactions to it. In particular, I’m amused and a little irritated at the universal tendency to generalize one’s experience — e.g., I got addicted to therapy, so it must be bad for everyone.

It also had me thinking about the whole notion of therapy and personal authority. This person very much sounds like she was expecting to be “fixed” and grew dependent on the therapeutic context for comfort. I tend to view the prospective success of therapy as dependent on a client’s willingness to actively work and learn, not simply sit back and have all of their neuroses normalized.

Which is not to say that normalization — by which I mean being reassured that one’s various impulses and recurring behavior patterns which one is tempted to pathologize are in fact very much part of the “human condition” — is not an important part of the therapeutic experience. You can’t hope to decondition defenses when they’re constantly aroused. But at some point, each of us must come to grips with our hatred of authority, whether in others or in ourselves, and a therapeutic context in which this issue is not actively explored could easily lead to the sort of (dysfunctional) dependence this author describes.

I think there are indeed questionable therapists out there whose goals are primarily to ensure lifetime income from their clients. But I think there are others who truly seek to help their clients learn to reclaim their own authority and autonomy in taking care of themselves and others around them. Those clients (and therapists) who choose to follow/be led into the unknown, and to muster the courage to bear the uncertainty that accompanies that path, will learn something. Those who seek only comfort will probably keep returning to what they “know” to be comfortable — which may in fact be fueling their unhappiness. For clients and therapists both.

One of the tenets of SCT is that talking explaining one’s experience tends to take us back to what we already know, e.g. by verbalizing and cognizing in terms of our reference experience, while exploring one’s experience tends to take us into what we don’t yet know, opening the possibility for learning. I think this is relevant to this thread, as is Senge’s notion that certainty is the enemy of openness and discovery.

Just some food for thought from my inimitable brother.

*The post title is derived from a novel I read as a teenager, Lisa, Bright and Dark, by John Neufeld.