Therapy only helps others, but doesn't actually help me

[RosebyAnyName]

I'm close to giving up on therapy, because I've realized something. If your problem is irreversible and incurable, why even bother healing? In this case, people only want you to heal for everyone else's benefit. Killing myself only hurts others at the end of the day. Certain struggles or problems can never stop hurting you and are incurable, like personality disorders or serious trauma. In this case, is "healing" not just lying to yourself and pushing down your own unmeetable needs and feelings for everyone else's benefit?

At least, that's what healing has always felt like for me. "Anger management" was learning to not lash out at others when they were hurting me, but I always still felt the anger. CBT felt like self-gaslighting, or using logic brain to tell myself that my emotions were disproportionate or wrong. "Mindfulness", at least in a social context, felt like acknowledging how *other* people feel and how I can accomodate their needs (without expecting anything in return, because wanting kindness back means having unrealistic expectations). DBT is just compartmentalizing. EMDR is ineffective. Even prescription drugs essentially just make you zone out, not actually happy.

I always craved intimacy, in levels that I've found are much higher than the average person. I always want to be held or loved deeply, in ways that seems to make other people uncomfortable no matter how close I try to get to people, or how slowly and carefully I try to express my emotions and needs. No matter what, other people find the extent of my needs demanding and uncomfortable. Relationships always feel like casino-style gambling, where the house always wins and the gambler always loses out eventually: in the long run, you always lose more than you put in. The extent of my desire to be loved is only considered maladaptive because it inconveniences others, and any kind of therapy or healing I've tried is only trying to pretend that humans are not social creatures that desire intimacy, and that I was born with a very high need for intimacy that is incompatible with 99% of people. No amount of healing can make these base desires go away, just as no amount of "healing" can make a person stop breathing or eating. Society seems more willing to provide a dignified, merciful death to people who are irreversably suffering from fatal diseases or birth defects, so why suddenly feel the opposite for people who are irreversably mentally incompatible with life?

It made me realize that the true purpose of most therapeutic methods is to get a person to integrate into society, not to make them confident or happy. Confident and happy people stop paying for therapy, and start rebelling against the systems that abuse them. "Integrated" people just learn to keep to themselves and not be a nuisance to others. If you're born destined to have needs that are unmeetable by a cold society, you just get strung along so they can wring out your money while trying to keep you as a cog in the machine.

 

[Moniker]

More broadly, I think about how therapy and psychiatry have integrated themselves into culture. Terms like bipolar and narcissistic have been adopted as insults. Therapy speak is a phenomenon now. Stuff like that.

It's hard to find the right words, but there's this sort of insincerity that underlies all of it, particularly when it comes to mental health awareness stuff. It's kind of like small talk, I guess. No one really cares all that much about what's being said. Suicide prevention really exemplifies all that with how it equips people with dumb phrases like "it gets better." There's this pervasive toxic positivity that I'm always inundated with. Sometimes I wonder if anyone actually thinks this sort of mindset is helpful.

Maybe I'm being conspiratorial, but it feels like therapy is just a racket to charge people hundreds of dollars in exchange for lousy life guru advice.