If you go to talk therapy for whatever reason and you feel that it is benefitting you, that’s fantastic. If you have a mental health condition, especially one that is difficult to manage by yourself, please do seek medical help if you have not already. This blog post is purely my own views on the subject.

“I cannot seem to shake the anxiety and the intrusive thoughts about being hurt and hurting people.”

“That’s hard. What does your elementary day look like?”

“My elementary day comprises of an anti-anxiety routine in the morning, thinking about anxiety all day and about how it is damaging my daily functioning, obsessively researching about it, and of course, having the intrusive thoughts.”

“Right. And what do you think the elementary day of a person who does not have anxiety looks like?”

“Well, I would say it looks like them just living their lives and not thinking about anxiety whatsoever.”

“That is correct. Your elementary day does not match the elementary day of the individual you want to be— a person who does not have anxiety. And that is the reason you still have anxiety.”

Therapists are human beings. That means that many of them are exceptionally gifted at providing effective talk therapy and helping their patients with their problems. Many others are just normal people who did okay at school and decided they will become a therapist. Many others are businessmen first, which means if their patient gets “cured”, they essentially lose a client, which is unideal. Many others can be damaging to their patients, sometimes extremely damaging.

A very common cognitive behaviourial framework used in talk therapy is called reframing. “Perhaps that’s not such a bad thing,” “Perhaps you can learn to live a fulfilling life while managing it,” “Perhaps we can look at this from another angle,” et cetera. That is the kind of therapy I have been most subject to, also. I was going there every week, talking about my problems every week, labelling myself and my situation every week.

I want to take a moment to establish the difference between education and labelling. I feel that it is very important to understand yourself, and understand what is causing the trait or behaviour in you that you do not want. I would not have been able to improve internally at all if I had not confronted my past and my mistakes, and educated myself as thoroughly as I did. The purpose of this introspection and education is to recognise what is the elementary day that you need to be pursuing to eliminate the unwanted traits or behaviours, and recognise the path to get there. I would not have known that I should be pursuing the elementary day of an individual who is securely attached, if I had not educated myself about the anxious attachment style. (I might discuss attachment styles in a future blog post.) I would not have known that I should be pursuing the elementary day of an individual whose daily functioning is not impaired by post-traumatic stress, if I would not have pushed for my CPTSD diagnosis in January and learnt about the disorder.

What the purpose of this introspection and education is not is labelling yourself and/or your problems. You must not form beliefs that do not serve you when understanding yourself. The understanding and the education must be an objective examination which must be done with empathy. You are a blank slate when you are born, with no experiences, and thus, no beliefs. Then, things happen to you. You and your behaviour are but products of your circumstances. Thus, framing and language is critical to this self-examination. Perhaps try “I was overwhelmed by my postpartum depression and failed to address it properly, which ended up damaging my family,” which is a description of events, positive, negative, or unassigned, instead of “I am a bad mother,” which is a belief that does not serve you. For an example from my own life, I did not see my CPTSD as a problem, but rather an explanation. “Traumatic events have happened to me repeatedly and persistently, which has caused to me to default to thought patterns that have harmed me and those around me,” instead of “I am a traumatised person”.

This is why I dislike most therapy. I dislike discussing my problems as problems, and effectively reinforcing them every day, to “manage” them. Managing a problem is not the same as solving it, and often, the problem is indeed very solvable. These therapists reframe and restructure instead of taking steps to eliminate, and I don’t know why, but probably because there is more money in the former. Because, in my belief, the most effective way to eliminate most problems, per the concept of the elementary day, is to disempower them so completely that you cease to even acknowledge them anymore. A non-anxious person does not think about anxiety. You do. You are giving your anxiety power by doing so, or your unhappiness, or your panic attacks, or your fear of not being enough, or your fear of being a bad father, or whatever it is. You are making the “problem” so important by worshipping it so much all the time, while you are failing to see that is the biggest reason that it is such a big problem in the first place. You are obsessing over the symptom rather than educating yourself and trying to find and understand the cause. And most of all, you are associating the “problems” with your identity.

“Good morning. I’m Ratin, and I am a drinker.”

“I am a smoker.”

“I am addicted to pornography.”

Every single session.

This is insanity to me. How do you expect to remove the unwanted traits if you are identifying with them and reinforcing them so regularly? If you are a smoker, you cannot quit smoking. Why? Because you are a smoker. It is who you are. This is the polar opposite of what works in my personal experience. Identifying yourself with problems is more powerful and damaging than people think! In every aspect of life, and of work. “Oh I AM a person who is not productive in the mornings,” “I am a person who cannot start a project in the middle of a calendar month,” “I am a person who goes all in regardless of risk involved.” Very fun to say but how does this serve you, and where? You’re not even saying “I tend to,” or “I have a proclivity towards,” you are saying “I am“.

I am whatever I need to be at any given time to accomplish my goals.

Personally, I have definitely had some positive experiences with talk therapy, but overall, it has been overwhelmingly negative. I stopped going in February, and I have been doing much better since. I believe the best way to live is to understand the human animal, understand yourself, and work every day on optimising everything as much as you can. Understanding the concept of belief and identity is a big part of this, and that is why I am so passionate about this and learning about this. I am very far from where I want to be in this regard, but it is incredible how much my life has changed for the better since I started.

Try an exercise. Take a pen, open up a notebook, and write down the story of your life. You must include all significant events, positive or negative, and you are not allowed to lie about or manipulate anything. Then, repeat this exercises. You are again not allowed to write anything untrue, but now you can leave out any events of your choosing, or details thereof. Repeat the exercise once more, and this time you can lie too.