31: freud
the older i get the more i realize freud was lowkey right about everything
but the one thing he got wrong was this idea that you need to identify the "root cause" of your trauma in order to overcome it.
there's this western psychoanalytic belief (silent infohazard) that somehow understanding exactly WHY you're broken and building up this mental model/logical history of the childhood events that happened to you will somehow fix you. mental masturbation on steroids.
this seems to create a sort of nerdsniping phenomenon where already-heady people dig themselves a deeper hole by trying to intellectualize their way out of lifelong depression, anxiety, etc..., when in reality all you have to do is FEEL the shit you don't want to feel.
it's like reading volumes of books about how to ride a bike, talking to Claude for hours about bike theory and the mechanisms of physics that allow you to ride a bike, learning about the history of biking, only to time and again face the fact that you still have never gotten on the bike. and you will never learn how to ride one until you decide to put your ass on the seat and fall a couple dozen times. or like find a good bike teacher
btw Eugene Gendlin figured this out half a century ago when he looked into the difference between therapy modalities that produced lasting healing and the ones that did jack shit.
and guess what? the modality didn't matter. what mattered was an ability in the PATIENT, this skill of pausing and assessing what was going on in their body, in the present moment during interactions with their therapist. interoception, emotional awareness, etc.
and the fucked up thing is that most people never learn this or are taught this or even know this thing EXISTS, and spend their lives searching for an answer Out There when it's rly a skillset that can/must be cultivated In Here. serious mega mindfuck that this isn't more common knowledge if you think about it. maybe don't think about it tho. just try it and see for yourself
love, k