Any guess who causes all the trauma and disappointment?
Why are the people who really could use some therapy the last to get any?
I’m sure this is a common dynamic.
Any guess who causes all the trauma and disappointment?
Why are the people who really could use some therapy the last to get any?
I’m sure this is a common dynamic.
Comments
>Why are the people who really could use some therapy the last to get any?
Because acknowledging to have feelings, or be wrong, is not being real machos. Sexism is a vile thing that damages even those perpetuating it.
Abusers don’t go to therapy because they get away with it. It is easier to hurt other people, just to numb your own pain. Going to therapy would mean, confronting yourself.
I was really unhappy and miserable towards the end of my last relationship. I contacted several therapists by myself thinking they’d tell me how I was the problem and how to change as I’d come to believe it in the relationship.
All of them asked me if I had a safe space to go to, told me I was being abused. My ex told me all these therapists were not good at their jobs. I moved out and suddenly my sleep improved, my mental health got better, stopped breaking out and losing hair etc.
TLDR: I think some of them are scared the feelings they share in therapy might be subpoenaed in the future when it’s time for them to face justice 😉
I’ve been experiencing this lately in my 30s with friends. My female friends have been slowly getting on top of their shit, getting therapy, getting doctor appointments, getting diagnosed, and getting help.
And the male friends have mostly (not 100% to be fair) just not been doing anything like that, claiming this condition or that – which I believe, my friendship group is mostly neurodivergent of some kind – but never getting help or trying to change the behaviours that are clearly making them unhappy. To the degree that they have been seeking help, it’s mostly been their female partners leading the charge (usually at the same time managing their own shit). It’s incredibly frustrating.
Check out the sub Reddit “raised by narcissists”… and check out Dr Ramani on YouTube. It’s sad these toxic family dynamics exist…
Yep. It’s not just our husbands, it’s our brothers and fathers too. This pattern repeats time and again. My mother recently buried the second of her brothers who drank himself to death, after years of bottomless support from her and my aunts. My brother is also on his way there, but I refuse to be his emotional support monkey anymore (he’s burnt through women throughout his life).
Fortunately I found a unicorn (second) husband who has his shit together, talks openly with me about our feelings and issues and takes responsibility for himself. If anything happens to him I’m done with men for good though.
Wife and I have been trying to get our entire families into therapy for over a decade.
Numbing your pain is what most men learn to handle emotions. Some men lash out and are abusive. We are not rewarded for being vulnerable under stress. Men who talk about their problems instead of taking action after planning or just moving on are often suspected of weakness.
Therapy has a place for men. However, in my opinion, it works best as an action and accountability session. My one experience with therapy after a child died from cancer was with a male therapist. After two sessions, I realized he didn’t recognize that my responsibilities were more important than anything. My wife often said, “Only results count.” That’s sums up most mens life.
Therapy is wasted on abusers unless they’ve successfully completed a high quality batterers intervention program first. BIPs are the ONLY way an abuser would get the tools they need to change, not anger management or therapy.
One of the best programs in the country is through Family Peace Initiative. They offer a fully online version.
Bc the women are given coping strategies for being married to non adults rather that support for truly making our lives good. Some men know how to be part of that but many just leech on like emotionally under developed barnacles holding us down and we are told we need to work in our communication skills.
Zawn Villinies has an amazing substack called something “motherhood” – I don’t have kids but she is the definition of spitting facts. It is very accurate, sometimes painfully so but I love it.
Yeah.
I’m so tired of men and their excuses.
Even if there’s this stigma from gender, where’s all that bravery men supposedly have?
I agree with the gist of what you’re saying, but therapy only works when the participant wants therapy and actively engages. Therapy is not going to be effective in treating an abuser unless they want to change something.
> Why are the people who really could use some therapy the last to get any?
The truly insidious thing about actual mental illness is that the very thing that most needs treatment is also the thing that stops them from getting treatment.
That’s why you tend to see more of the victims seeking treatment. Because they don’t actually have the underlying mental problems that cause the negative behaviours. They have mental illness by proxy and therefore it’s A LOT easier for them to ultimately seek help.
It’s a lot harder to self examine and say “there’s something wrong with me, I need to get help”. Rather than “this person has been causing me harm, I should get some help”. Particularly since the person causing the harm often lacks the ability to acknowledge when they are in the wrong at all, so how would they seek to treat themselves if they can’t even admit when something is wrong.
At the end of the day, with people like that. It’s only when everyone is gone that they finally MIGHT come to the conclusion that actually they might have been the cause all along. And even then, it’s unlikely.
Honestly, this is why I don’t go to therapy. I’m functional, I’m enjoying my life – why should I increase my expenses because a careless person caused me trauma? It’s just putting the burden on me to fix what others broke. I used to give more to others and second guess myself – no more. The only time my ex decided therapy was a great idea was when I was divorcing him, and he only asked as a last ditch effort to keep me trapped, as a tool to push his wants and needs over my own.
I don’t have therapy, but what men have taught me is you always have audacity available for free.
The only man I know who went to therapy was, I shit you not, dropped by his psychologist. Learned later that he went to therapy with the idea of learning how to ”read” women emotions better in order to have better control over them. He had no plan on working on himself.
Weaponized Emotional Dysregulation
Sometimes depression is really just dealing with assholes.
My mother would always have to drag my father to couples therapy, a place he usually refused 100% to go to. I don’t really know if it was because of his refusal to acknowledge interpersonal problems or just the general culture of “therapy makes you vulnerable and vulnerability is weakness” nonsense, but that stubbornness definitely contributed to their relationship ending.
As long as the world lets you do it, it’s so much easier – and cheaper – to avoid and numb your pain by being shitty to those closest to you, and make them carry the burden of your emotional dysregulation
My ex even tried to use that against me: “you’re the one who has all the issues. You’re the one who is in therapy” I just laughed in disbelief.
And yes, a lot of what I was talking about in therapy waa the fallout from that toxic relationship
Funny you should say that because my ex whom I often pleaded with to go to anger management therapy and always made excuses not to, was the first one to suggest I should go to therapy when I told him we were over (I had to be fixed because why wouldn’t I want a miserable life with a low life…).
Probably the lack of accountability.
“I go to therapy to deal with the people in my life who won’t” 🙂
Same therapist who misdiagnosed me with BPD (I have C-PTSD and not BPD) and was very very weird about my diagnosis ——- gave a clean chit to my abusive ex who definitely had extreme mental health issues. My ex showed me his file which made him look like your average guy – absolutely nothing to work on. These files are confidential but he threw it at me because the only reason he went for therapy was because that was my condition to stay with him after years of abuse. So it was a ‘told you so, what a waste of time’ smack. And I was dumbfounded. How can a person who was so horrible to me (that I still get nightmares from that relationship which I ended 8 years ago!) not have absolutely any diagnosis or therapy plan or anything to work on.
Then I went for my session where the same therapist basically blamed my abuse on my non-existent BPD. ‘It is going to be like this, no matter who you are with’, he said; ‘you need to ask if you can have a relationship at all.’
Years later I know, that that man was a bad guy and a bad therapist. But he is not alone. I also met a renowned child psychologist (woman) who told me that her niece confided in her that she was raped when drunk and the therapist went on a 10 minute lecture on ‘what did she expect getting drunk among strangers?’. And then there are so many predators among psychologists.
TLDR: Psychology is as fraught with patriarchy and misogyny as general life where if something’s wrong among a man and a woman, woman needs to work on herself and man has absolutely no accountability. Remember how any woman not happy with her societal role was institutionalised, all it needed was her husband’s or father’s word…
Oh, my narcissist dad went to two therapists briefly twice. The first he quit after receiving what he seemed to use as an excuse for what little of his behavior he was willing to acknowledge was negative (“I was raised in an abusive household! It’s why I’m like this!” with no effort to fix his behavior-“woe is me” shit) and the second one he was forced to go to formally diagnosed him with NPD after a few sessions, and asked that my mom and I be included as well and have sessions with her separately (narcissists are notorious liars and manipulators-I think she wanted a more rounded picture/the whole story). My dad refused to let us participate, so this therapist refused to see him anymore. That was the end of his attempt at therapy. He is an asshole with zero accountability to this day.
Yes. In therapy bc of the one that should be in therapy.
As a therapist, I can say that this is as textbook as it gets. The victims of trauma are almost always the ones to come to therapy, the perpetrators almost never. I see this dynamic all the time when it comes to families (parents traumatizing their kids) and relationships (one partner traumatizing the other) in particular.
And yes, it’s often gendered.
Because we’re taught to ignore our pain/trauma. We’re conditioned to just ‘push through’.
My mom is a good example. I told her I(m46) was in therapy, she started going on about how she thinks she’s just mentally tough. Things don’t bother her.
Meanwhile she has depression and anxiety, which I pointed out, after my father died 2 years ago, and on my last visit she alluded to the fact that her uncle molested her and her sisters growing up but in her words ‘you just dealt with it’. My siblings and nieces make her so stressed out all the time her heart issue is getting worse.
Of course when she comes to visit my wife and kids, she doesn’t need her blood pressure medication because she’s way less stressed. Can’t convince her to move here though, even though it would be better for her, mentally and physically. Sorry for blathering on.
It’s far more common for people who are in the “abused” part of the dynamic to seek therapy first. (Using quotes cause idk your family) This is because step one of mistreating your partner is to make them think there is something wrong with them.
Those mistreating others rarely see the need to change. In their opinion, the other person is the source of their bad behavior, not themselves- so why would they need to seek therapy to better themselves?
A large part of shitty behavior is a refusal to accept personal responsibility for ones own actions.
As someone in AA I often laugh about the “Men will do anything except go to therapy.” Because even AA has to be called a “spiritual program”. It’s therapy. AA is therapy. We can’t call it that because then men would avoid it. Yes, it’s more than that, but at its core it’s learning how to process and regulate emotions, clean up past trauma, and use new life skills to maintain emotional regulation and not cause new traumas… so, therapy.
This is just bog standard toxic masculinity.
Men are taught by society (including by women) that being weak is bad and they’re vilified for not being self sufficient or needing help. So they’re far less likely to admit (even to themselves) that they need help, let alone actually reach out for it.
On top of that, they’re also heavily punished socially (again, by women as well as other men) for discussing their feelings. So therapy is basically the end game worst case scenario for someone trying to live up to society’s expectations for men.
In some scenarios, perhaps relevant to your question, perhaps not:
Abusers benefit from abuse and therefore have no incentive to change. (Lundy) Victims seek therapy because they are suffering, and often carry the blame.
With some personality disorders, the negative effects hurt other people more than the person carrying the illness.
Since we are talking about therapy I feel it’s warranted I mention how judgmental a lot of the comments here are – people who have been to therapy will know that judgement isn’t always helpful in understanding others – seeing feelings behind words is.
I have gone for years now and learned a lot about myself and my partner (a cis male). My communication has improved significantly – he has gone a few times, but never stuck with it and it is frustrating to me, however, a relevant thing to note is, usuallyyyyy men are the avoidant types (in terms of attachment styles) and it is quite literally in their nature to avoid handling any emotions – so therapy sounds like an absolute nightmare. It’s something much more complicated than just “I don’t wanna”.
My Dad has chronic depression and did not treat my mom well at all, and he tried to get therapy but stopped because, and I quote, “I could help him more than he could help me.”
He still has no idea why my mom divorced him.
Therapy and emdr healed some past trauma and I had to stop people pleasing.
always the ones causing the mess that swear they don’t need to clean it up
I think a lot of men avoid therapy over the perception of being seen as weak from other men.
Therapy can’t help someone who doesn’t want help.
This tracks among my friend group too. All of the women are in therapy. All of their husbands refuse. My wife and I (39F) each have our own individual therapists and have noticed that the clients are almost all women as well.
For my friend group its 50/50 mix but its mostly those who could afford it vs those who can’t
I’m literally the only one in my family in therapy lol. God knows all the rest of them need it but will never get it.
I (F) am in therapy and love it. I had a HORRIBLE male co-worker who made my life a living hell. One of the worst adjusted people I’ve ever met. Obviously he thought there were no issues with him and didn’t go to therapy. I understand people not going to therapy because of financial reasons. But he was higher up than me, and we had the same health insurance through work so he could have gotten therapy for next to nothing. He just made his issues everyone else’s problem.
Eh, the men would probably just weaponize it
My therapists tell me I am right, that wife and adult children have weird attitudes, like working on personal growth is a waste of time.
Everyone in my in laws family talks about how everyone else needs therapy all the time.
Guess who’s in therapy? Me.
And they will whine that no one takes men’s issues seriously.
I think we women are much more likely to seek help than are men. They have this macho charisma that sees therapy as something that wimps do.
I’ve been in therapy since 18, neither of my parents have. My mother is quite alt right leaning, misogynistic, fatphobic, and will put down other women if she thinks it will get her the approval of men. My dad is also misogynistic but somehow his life is a little more put together due to relatively stable extended family.