this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2025
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What you need to realize though is that you can only affect so much. Mostly if you need help you should help yourself first. Then if you're happy and capable, you need to help others. Not the other way around. So get with it and don't hang yourself up on "shit is fucked". It is, but it has been worse and it also can get worse. But that doesn't really matter for now, help yourself first if you need to.
Like ofc it's not wrong to also help others.
The situation is hopeless and has always been. But that's not as bad as it sounds and it frees you and me from the burden of the world. Do what you can, that's enough.
I can highly recommend this video for reflecting on hopeless thoughts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJaE_BvLK6U
I'm not having hopeless thoughts.
I'm having issues with CBT being used as a way to teach people learned helplessness where "you can't affect other people." Because, actually, society in aggregate (often called governance) can totally influence, affect, and change other people. We seemingly have given up on holding people who break the social contract accountable for anything while forcing those who do uphold the social contract accountable for everything. Fascism is the end-stage manifestation of that.
In my experience, in practice, it does more to teach people they can't affect change more than it teaches them they can. It teaches them to be helpless on purpose.
This isn’t what cbt is
Cbt is an extension of equanimity, learning ways to control your emotional response to things. You don’t deny your emotional response, but you moderate it
This is advantageous because what’s more effective? Dwelling in rumination and suffering? Or acknowledging that we are angry and frustrated and moving forward to something actionable when that is possible and moving on with our lives when it is not? This is where we get into more DBT skills and stuff like radical acceptance but it’s similar
This is what happens with these things in the modern context though. They get displayed at surface value with pop psychology social media bullshit and perverted. Then stoicism becomes “just deny your feelings” by right wing dipshits who have never read meditations when it is also about allowing yourself to feel and express feelings but not letting them control you through a practice of reflection.
CBT is essentially just an update of philosophy like this and Buddhism for the modern context with more explicit guidance and some neurology thrown in.
“You can’t affect other people” is incorrect as you say. While we do have to concede that other people’s willingness to change their behavior and perspective is ultimately up to them we can still advocate and influence. At the same time we can recognize that this process can be draining and harmful to ourselves and at a certain point maybe we need to take a step back. You can’t save fix a house with a rotting foundation.
Bad implementation doesn’t make CBT bad.
Well see here is the thing, it does when it becomes a key rhetorical tool the ruling class uses to brutalize poor and working class en masse and doctors shrug and say with a resigned smile "well that is politics, we help individuals with their health, nothing we can do about that!".
That doesn’t even make sense?
You are talking maybe about capitalism informing psychotherapy away from solution oriented therapies because they are too costly and impractical and that is fucked up but that has nothing to do with cbt?
Or maybe something else, clarify?
Just a heads up I won't be offering any back and forth here, too busy.
But for anyone reading, CBT is not what is being described here. CBT / DBT are effective and should still be explored as viable options.
It was a long time ago and only briefly, but I agree this does not sound at all like what I recall from a CBT session.
I don't have any experience with CBT, isn't it mostly for dealing with specific traumata?
I think you're not getting what they're saying. Of course you can only work on yourself, but therapy doesn't exist in a vacuum and frequently you're just learning coping mechanisms for the status quo. Which is frequently good, being able to cope with society and remain functional is good, but people often have coping as the goal instead of merely being a step.
This person wants to change the system so coping mechanisms aren't necessary to deal with society
I doubt this is true. This feels like something that I would have told myself before therapy so I wouldn't have to deal with myself
I think you might be projecting a little.
It's just not my experience.