Why Group Therapy Worked
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
With paid individual therapy, the therapist has a few competing incentives: 1. To make you feel you are progressing towards solving your problems. 2. To not do so in a way that pisses you off so much you leave. 3. To not completely solve your problem so that you no longer need therapy.
I'm not cynical enough to think therapists deliberately heed the third point, but I believe the second one—not being so confrontational that you drive the patient away—is a real challenge.
With group therapy, the other unpaid participants have no such incentive. There are others in the group, so if you are not making progress and are stifling the group, it hurts no one if you leave. They can be direct and honest with you because there's no incentive for them not to do that.
One of the many realizations I've had from doing meditation. The next hurdle is to stop beating yourself up over it...
On the one hand, meditation (or more broadly, zen buddhist practice) has given me more insights in just a few months than I've had in years. Or perhaps more accurately: I stopped having the exact same insights over and over again without any next steps. Now I feel like things are actually changing. More slowly than I'd wish sometimes, but at least they feel solid and real.
On the other hand, realizing how much my thoughts have been going in circles for so long, how much time I've been wasting on those thoughts, how insightful I often felt them to be and how little they changed and how little sense they make in that light and, perhaps even more confronting, how much of my self-image is based on the usefulness of all that introspection, well, those realizations make me feel very sad and a bit depressed.
But then, more and more regularly, I realize that dwelling on such realizations are how I got here in the first place, and so I go for a walk, focus on something else, or meditate, and I break out of those thoughts.
Meditation feels a bit like debugging to me. Especially at first, it was like I was working with some some really shoddy code that would get stuck in an infinite loop, and meditation was like discovering ctrl-c to break out of it, instead of rebooting my machine. As I'm progressing, it's starting to feel more and more like setting breakpoints and learning step by step how the bug arises. Perhaps enlightenment will feel like a Lisp REPL (I kid, I kid)?
The benefits of meditation might not be as pronounced for others, but based on people around me with very different temperaments, it seems to benefit all of them at least somewhat. I can highly recommend it! I started out with the Headspace app (iOS?), but there's plenty of material available.
(I'll add that Alan Watts, especially at the start of this journey, was really effective at shaking my thoughts up. That guy has a way with words, and a wonderful voice to listen to.)
Sometimes we aren't aware of how badly we want and choose ignorance and avoidance