To think therapy is for the benefit of others

[Soggybogdog]

I've become increasingly suspicious that therapy and counselling is primarily for the benefit of the people around the bereaved or anxious or struggling person rather than the person themselves. It doesn't seem to help the person going to therapy, but it means they talk to the therapist more than the people around them. They don't intrinsically feel better about the situation.
I think the only way it helps is that it lessens people's perception that they are a "fun sponge". It's a way for everyone else to not have to listen to worries and upset. The person in therapy feels the same but has spoken into a therapy void rather than weighed everyone else down.

Hard disagree. As a child and teenager, my mum leaned on me heavily for emotional support in her relationship with my step father. It felt weird at the time and now I can see how utterly wrong it was. I wish she had seen a therapist instead, and even now aged 55 I hate being her emotional sounding board. Also I'm hardly objective.

I think you're being unfair. Most people will support their friends an listen to their problems without question. It's when the friendship only exists for one person's benefit that people get understandably annoyed.

It's very important to find the right therapist and the right kind of therapy. My sibling has benefited hugely from therapy (a specific kind), and no amount of talking to friends and family could have provided the same support. Certain types of therapy can rewire the brain and stop harmful spirals and repetitive thought patterns. Therapy isn't just talking, in many cases. Sure, if the person is just sitting there and pouring out all their problems to someone, then that may give the person an outlet and spare their friends and family, but that is counselling, it's not therapy.

Your family and friends may love you and care for you hugely, but they cannot absorb or handle everything, and it's not fair to expect them to do so.

Agreed, plus they may not be able to help you! Just talking about something is not enough if someone is suffering with trauma. In fact, it may do them more harm that good, if the listener thinks it's their place to give advice. There is a lot of ignorance in what the OP posted.

@Soggybogdog Have you ever had therapy yourself? If so, I suspect you had the wrong therapist. They vary wildly in their approach and effectiveness.
I've had a lot of therapy and it helped me enormously. An additional benefit may have been that my friends didn't hear me droning on so much, but that's a 'side effect', as it were, rather than the main cure.

I mostly agree. I think that there can be a definite benefit in a person having someone to vent to without friends and family being burdened...but it's an expensive benefit.
I've also never found therapy helpful in the slightest, but some people seem to, so there's that too.

But again, therapy isn't about 'venting' in the slightest. If you thought it was, you were doing it wrong. Therapy done well with the right therapist is brutally hard work, involving having all of your beliefs about yourself, all of the childhood scripts you may have inherited, all of your relationships challenged.

That's only true when the person having therapy believes they are not the problem but they generally listen to what the therapist advises them.

That's because the listening bit lessens the harm they cause even though they are only doing it performatively.

It may feel like the benefit to everyone else is much greater than that you as you sre taking therapy if these changes mean you can no longer rely on manipulation tactics in your relationships.

My mother who is a medical professional says this. She likes it when I go to therapy as then I’m not over sharing those things with her or DH on a daily basis.

I disagree. Speaking as somebody who has had therapy and hugely benefitted.

It's more that without therapy, friends and family do end up being untrained therapists, and as time goes on are increasingly resentful of that role and start to distance themselves.

This is just not true in all cases.

If you are speaking from experience maybe don't put all your woes onto your friends and family? Or if somebody is doing that to you, ask them not to.

Well that means the therapy is working because your friends and family get to be your mutual companions instead of your therapist. You get to have a better relationship with them as they aren't as fatigued.

Talking therapy is about achieving healthy thought processes using skilled non-judgemental conversation. Its the same as physiotherapy which uses movement to improve your health etc.

Unlike medicine which is based on drug/surgery intervention, and nursing which is caring intervention- the success of all therapy (Physio, SLT, OT, Dietician, Pysch) requires the person to take on board information and change their behaviour.

Because of this your relationship with the therapist is really important. It is also important to know that the first therapist you will see usually has to manage a person that has little self-knowledge. The next therapist is dealing with someone who has a litlle more self-knowledge- so it might just be that you are starting in second gear as well.

As someone who has has extensive talking therapy, the inner work is incredibly hard but absolutely worth it.

The person in therapy feels the same
Then they need a different therapist.

I put it off for years thinking it wouldn't help. It didn't bring my loved ones back but it enabled me to function, it enabled me to speak about them without the constant tears

I had an acute period of poor mental health about five years ago, and my husband helped by giving me time, space and financial security to quit my job and work out my issues. I was out of work for seven months, had a low-key job for 14m, then moved into a higher paying job once fully recovered and retrained. My husband's only functions in my recovery were "being nice" and "providing financially". Both of which were very important. It was the support I got and the time to work on myself that made the difference.

Ironically though, he's been through poor mental health in the past year, and wants me to act as his therapist. I have experience of making the healthy changes, and have given that basic advice, but I can't actually be his therapist. I'd happily give him the same support he gave me, but the emotional and therapeutic support actually isn't something I'm qualified for.

I see where you are coming from but don’t think it’s that black and white.
I had counseling when I was grieving and felt pushed into it by those around me who were making little to zero effort to understand me or be what I needed. They didn’t adapt their approach at all, it was very much ‘this is how we are’ rather then ‘how can we be what you need’.
I didn’t want to talk to a stranger, I wanted someone who knew me. But it was useful.

I've been to five different therapists over the years (not in the last 6 years), two of whom were highly accredited clinical psychologists. It did seem to involve a lot of talking about my past, my feelings, and my perceptions amongst other things, much of which I'd consider akin to 'venting'. I found the experiences very unhelpful, and honestly I was surprised that they didn't do more, if that makes sense – although I don't know what I'd expect them to do.

Perhaps they were all doing something wrong, but I certainly wasn't!

It's an arduous painful process that you have to stick with.

I think the differences between talking to a therapist vs a family member is that the therapist is neutral, emotionally unaffected by the event/situation that caused the distress and has both experience and training to provide a place to speak without judgement and to provide support with some unhelpful patterns of thinking.

You are correct that it is hard for a person's friends and family to continually absorb the emotional difficulties of others when they do not lessen over time or their thought patterns are not logical. Whilst some people are very ready to become 'fun sponges' others dread this so don't tell anyone how they are feeling and this can be incredibly dangerous and sometimes fatal.

There are only so many times a friend or family member can cover the same ground. We've all been in the position of our patience running out when a friend is still upset about a break up from years ago. Some people are prone to ruminate and dwell. I think therapy can be really very helpful to everyone.

Living with an upset family member who is constantly on the brink of emotional collapse is also very difficult. The saying 'you are only as happy as your unhappiest child' does hold some truth, alas, and our current generation of young people are perhaps a little less resilient to the knocks of everyday life than we remember being ourselves, so I suspect therapy's contribution to the economy will continue to increase.

There is a grain of truth and what you say. However, ultimately therapy must benefit the person seeking it and there is the potential for it to do harm if it does not.

I like how people are assuming I must've done it wrong or not stuck with it, just because it didn't work for me. That feels a little offensive.

As I said, I went to multiple different therapists over the years while I could afford to (therapy on public health has an immensely long waiting list where I am), for extended periods of time (18 months was the longest with one) and never had any benefit whatsoever.

Perhaps if I could afford to try other modalities than what I did, I might eventually find something that is helpful, but unfortunately that's not an option.

Well, it's either your five carefully-chosen, highly-accredited therapists all being dreadful at their jobs, being a poor choice for you and your issues because of their modalities (though if I'm reading you right, you had no choice of therapist or modality?), or you for whatever reason not engaging/being a poor subject for some reason. The fact that you thought it was akin to 'venting' suggests something was way off.

Who judges whether therapy is working by what the people around them think? Sure, from their perspective, they might think it's helping for that reason, but that's not how I've ever judged the success of any of the times I've been in therapy, and it's certainly misleading to say that it's 'for the benefit of others'. Maybe that's a side effect - weighing too heavily on loved ones when you need professional help IS a problem - but the point of therapy is to help the person getting it, including sometimes by giving them a dedicated space to talk through something. Other people being less impacted by that is just an unintended side effect.

So you want everyone around you to say things are terrible for you? Wrong therapist probably.

I said two were highly accredited; much good that did. Perhaps venting was a poor choice of words; I spent a lot of time talking about myself – my past my feelings, and my issues and felt as though the therapists generally provided surprisingly little feedback.
I found myself being praised for how self-aware I was, which was incredibly frustrating given that supposed self-awareness didn't help me deal with my issues at all!
(If it matters, I was recently diagnosed AUDHD, and have been told that can affect which therapy works best.)

Regardless, in my experience I found therapy no more helpful than talking to a friend.

I do notice that whenever people say therapy wasn't helpful for them, others tend to immediately jump to the conclusion that they must've been 'doing it wrong', and that the fault lies with them personally.

YABU 100%.

Counselling helps you to work through awful situations and to learn how to live with them and how to move on, how to deal with your feelings, how to realise that you can't change other people, only yourself.