Comment by justonceokay

Correct. And even if you've identified whatever changes need to be made, that doesn't mean you're ready to quit therapy. Often the required changes are difficult and emotionally challenging!

BTW, I think a lot of the HN cynicism on this subject comes from how psychotherapy is practiced in California specifically. California has a separate licensing system from the rest of the country and doesn't allow eg. teletherapy from therapists in other states. As a result I found that therapists in CA were more expensive, more difficult to access, and significantly lower quality than I've experienced elsewhere. I've heard that regulatory reforms might be on the way though, hopefully that happens.

I think "a lot" is understating it, I would guess that this describes the vast majority of people. It can take years just to find the connection between surface level problems that you see and their root causes. Then once you find the connection it takes a long time time to accept it and even longer to actually heal from it (if ever).

From what I understand, it's generally a lot easier to heal from an acute traumatic event of some sort, no matter how serious it is (e.g. physical or sexual assault), that than it is to heal from sustained and repeated trauma caused by "well-meaning" people.

In the latter case you probably don't even realize that it happened at first because it's an accumulation of a million paper cuts throughout your life. Then if you try to talk to the people involved (e.g. your parents) they'll probably dismiss you and say that you're being dramatic because each instance is utterly insignificant on its own.

You have to peel back so many layers of it until you finally understand what happened, how it affected you, and how to heal from it. And that's just on a cognitive level, on an emotional level which is the one that actually matters it's going to take even longer to internalize everything.

The best thing we could do as a society to solve like half of all of our problems (with everything from unemployment due to personality disorders, to drug use, to violent crime) is to start taking mental well-being seriously, to prevent as much harm as possible and to offer help (for free) at the earliest possible opportunity.

There should be mass public education campaigns about how seemingly subtle and inconsequential things can break people's minds if they're sustained and perpetuated over a long period of time and especially in childhood. And I don't mean those trendy "mental health matters" and "we accept your depression and anxiety <3" campaigns that have been going around for a while because 99.9% of that is completely inauthentic. Even out of the people who claim to care, the vast majority only care long as it's a mild case of it that doesn't actually visibly affect you too much - then the judgement starts.