therapy

14 Therapist Reveal Unusually Common Things They Often Hear, That People Are Hesitant To Disclose

April 5, 2024

1. Unwanted intrusive thoughts are normal and do not mean you are a bad person (yes, even intrusions of sexual/religious/moral themes).

By definition, these are thoughts that are unwanted bc they go against your own values and highlight what you don’t want to do (eg, a religious person having unwanted blasphemous images pop into their mind, or a new parent having unwanted sexual thoughts about their new baby).

However normal these thoughts are (over 90% of the population), the moral nature of these thoughts mean that often people experience a lot of shame and take many years before they first tell someone about them.

14 People Reveal The Most Helpful Thing A Therapist Has Ever Told Them

March 15, 2024

1. “Maybe you can treat yourself like a person and not like a project.” It changed my life. I’d been treating myself like something to fix, and seeing every little problem as evidence that I was a failure and a terrible person. I learned to give myself the same benefit of the doubt as I’d give any other human I met on the street. Humans make mistakes, including me—that doesn’t mean there’s issues to fix, it means I’m a person.

Why Can’t We Just Do Therapy On Ourselves?

July 14, 2023

Because therapy isn’t a kind of procedure, it’s a kind of relationship.

A lot of people here think this is about knowing something (like what an automatic thought is or how to do a breathing exercise) or having insight (recognizing your own motives and biases). Those people aren’t exactly wrong, but that isn’t the answer to your question.

Really, there are a certain group of people for whom self-help books work quite well, and those are the people for whom the only thing they don’t have is information. But most people don’t do well with self-help books, because they’re lacking something more than information.