When Psychotherapy Doesn’t Work

Everybody Knows The Deal Is Rotten

All good therapists are dead.   Jung.  Perls. Maslow.  Psychotherapy, or talk therapy, used to be a way to help people for thousands of years. In our emotional DNA, we are wired to tell, listen and share life stories. The good, the bad, and beyond. But the storyteller is mute.  And the listener is deaf. And we are only willing to share stories that are compressed below ten seconds. The healing benefit of psychotherapy is a dead figure of speech that has lost its original meaning and imaginative force through the frequent use of nonhuman guidelines, robotic terminology, and an army of heroic professionals ready to kill laboratory animals and human heart intelligence with it.  Since the 1950s, psychotherapy has been subjected to the heartless control of science. Obey or die.  Most therapists accepted that the world of science and the world of the human psyche is one. The tragic result is generations of mental health professionals who came to school already believing in scientific conclusions about the human psyche to reinforce their beliefs. Almost all simple and less complicated perspectives on life and healing methods have been rejected and destroyed by them. The academic phrase bank has grown richer, new artificially made diagnoses popped up such as ADHD or ADD, and the government became more manipulative in its efforts to control mental health practices. The outcome is simple. The failure rate of mainstream psychotherapy is 50%, between 10% of clients get worse and 40% experience no benefit whatsoever. That’s one-half. The second half maybe doesn’t complain that much. Maybe overprescribed Xanax keep them happy and quiet. Yes, I believe that psychological explanations wired from mind to mind can be valuable and that psychotherapy can be useful for some people. However, at least half of the mainstream therapies that are into the neurochemical mechanisms are not helpful and somehow confused, because they rarely free people from the real root cause of suffering.  Traditional psychotherapy modalities simply don’t work anymore as evidenced by their poor success rate and very long and expensive treatment programs. Yes, most of the therapists with a narrow mind treatment approach mean well, but will generally fail to be of any assistance. Many clients who enter traditional psychotherapy aren’t helped at all.  And ironically, some psychotherapists are examples of the kinds of problems they’re trying to treat. Psychotherapists go through therapeutic training, programs, and courses before they help another person. The books of knowledge do not matter if they lack an understanding of the human psyche.  It is most likely that they end up in the trap when helping others is beneficial to their self-healing. To be a healer of any kind,  one must come from a healed place. Otherwise, the person remains just an empathetic therapist struggling more or less with the same mental states as clients. Most therapists are not healed at all since mainstream mind therapy rarely heals the real source of our physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual problems.  In very simple terms, mainstream psychotherapy is still looking at people as if their problems were “all in their heads” and “nothing in their hearts”. Not everything is about the science of behavior and mental processes. I strongly feel, that almost all dualistic psychotherapy healing systems are too prolonged,  mind-oriented and almost one size fits all. This isn’t about finger-pointing or blaming. The damage has been done. Now it is more about understanding. The client. The problem. The therapist. Frequently and continually the click factor is missing. And it’s not about the usual cliche that the client and the therapist are not a good match. The client is poorly reduced to a diagnosis. The therapist is working under highly controlled conditions, for instance, strict supervision, a therapeutical guidebook,  or codes of ethical conduct. In other words, there is no space for authenticity, creativity, or flexibility. Therapists who are never going beyond themselves work in constantly stressed and repressed environments. Many therapists are mind-control robots with a lack of compassion and lots of neutrality. The mental health system sees clients as walking diagnoses without any need to better understand the client’s life.  For psychotherapy to be fully functional and healing, the client, the therapist, and the interaction must fit naturally through the heart’s intelligence, not only the mind. In mainstream therapy, this healing click is often missing. Yes, some therapists are going through a lot of soul-searching and trying to escape from the mainstream dysfunctional mental health system of which they have been a part for a long time. As a result of their journey, they keep switching from one nonsense ideology to another and projecting new-age propaganda on their innocent clients. Namaste, tell me more about your mother. Feeling depressed and a little lazy? Get psychedelic-assisted therapy.  To make psychotherapy useful, unpretentious, and human again, the listener might stay brainless for a while, to listen to the heartbeat of the storyteller. It is more about the heart-to-heart story than mind-to-mind. The problem is, this is too simple, so mainstream psychotherapy will remain complicated, and outdated, and most likely will be replaced by AI happily driven by digital algorithms.  Everybody knows the deal is rotten. That’s how it goes. Everybody knows. Yes, Leonard Cohen. Cohen did go to a therapist once, actually — out of desperation. 

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