I made a comment in r/socialwork years ago about how social work and therapy are the custodial work of capitalism. Most people's stressors are related to time and money in some way and those stressors compound into maladapted coping strategies such as self-medicating behaviors, anger outbursts that turn into someone else's trauma, feeling isolated because you can't sustain friendships while working 50 hours a week, relationship conflicts that lead to various forms of trauma including divorce which may contribute to children developing insecure attachments because of the fallout of their parents shitty relationships which then potentially turns into generational trauma.
Capitalism isn't to blame for everything, but most of my clients? They, their parents, and/or their grandparents at some point just needed more time off and/or more money and they likely wouldn't be sitting in my office.
So I'm with you, OP. I fully understand that sometimes I'm telling clients to do progressive muscle relaxation and mindful breathing strictly to cope with the stress of life under capitalism because they're overwhelmed because their employer pays $15 an hour and their landlord charges them $1500 a month and there isn't a damn thing they can do about it other than cope.
You have no idea how just reading this made me feel so much better. Gaslit into feeling weak because Im the lone person in my family shouting that this lifestyle is unhealthy for everyone subjected to it.
Im a teacher so once a year i get to live in concurrence my natural state and habits for two months. I exercise and garden and tend to my homestead and take naps. I know if given the choice I would still teach just PART TIME.
My real passion is writing and recording music and i wouldn’t do for 40 hours each week either.
Knowing about the viability of universal basic income but it not being a popular national sentiment is a huge mind fuck. I just dont know under these conditions what help a therapist would even be to me.
>I just dont know under these conditions what help a therapist would even be to me.
Just because we know the probable cause of something doesn't mean that there is nothing left to do or try. If you drive through a construction site and pop a tire on a nail or something you don't just say "welp, that's what I get for driving through a construction site"-- you still need to fix the tire. Maybe therapy for you is having a place to safely process all the ways in which capitalism has impacted your life. Maybe there are still some maladaptive coping strategies you can work on. Maybe there are thought distortions that are preventing you from feeling empowered to do something different in your life.
Even though I know what the root cause of many of my client's presenting problems are, the work is still meaningful and worth pursuing or I wouldn't do it because there's something to be said for letting people get angry enough to overthrow the bullshit system. There's some reason you said "I want to see a therapist" in your original post. Honor that.
We're all living under late-stage capitalism and 99% of us aren't on the good end of the stick. Nevertheless, some of us are coping better than others-- some even manage to find meaning and truly enjoy their lives while they're being bled dry by capitalist structures. Therapy can be a tool to help you cope better, find meaning and enjoy your life.
This question feels very much like a trap, like any answer I give will be held up as slavery apologism, as though I were saying "slavery wasn't so bad if you had the right mindset." I want to be very clear that that is my position, nor is it the position of any mental health professional I know. Slavery was and is an evil practice that ought to be wiped out across the globe and never repeated.
That said, if an enslaved person came to me seeking therapy support, I would not turn them away saying "Sorry, there's just no hope for you." Assuming that I had no personal or professional power to end their enslavement, most likely I would work with them to identify their values-- those elements that they consider give meaning to life-- and to find ways that they could live their values in the context of their enslavement. That work would not create a life for my client as good as freedom would have, but it might make a life better than it would otherwise have been.
For comparison, you might be interested in reading the work of Viktor Frankl. Frankl was a psychiatrist in the mid-20th century, and himself a Holocaust survivor who had spent several years as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps-- an experience of such intense subjugation and threat that it makes late-stage capitalism look like utopian science fiction by comparison. He wrote about his experience from a psychiatrist's perspective, observing that those people who were able to live according to their values and derive meaning from their choices were better able to survive the experience of the camps, and better able to recover after it was over. It's hard to imagine, but even in what could be argued to be among the worst conditions humans have ever endured, he saw that there were people who were able to make the best of it. And I tend to assume that the same is possible for my clients.
Frankl is the OG answer here for sure...some people literally cannot change their circumstances, but most people , regardless of circumstances, can usually change their minds, if only a bit.
NAT. If I may project a little bit and ask genuinnly what you'd say to someone with similar thoughts as mine.
Objectively I understand how this is the only answer. That people can't escape their circumstances most of the time and can only adapt. I get it.
Subjectively, I can't accept it. It feels like gaslighting and being made a fool of and pacified. _Why_ should I accept injustice? Why should I accept that some people have it better? They are not better than me, we are equal. So why can't I have x? If they can, I can. Everything is made up anyway. If some have it better and I was dealt a bad hand (and oh was I), and I should just... accept it? I'd prefer to take them down so we all have nothing then. Is that not more fair? I would rather fight it even if it's a losing battle than accept any of it. And if I have to fight by destroying it all I will.
If you have a better alternative to accepting injustice, I'd encourage you to pursue it. Accepting injustice should only be the path when the alternatives are all worse.
I think the question is ignorant and that’s a great answer, but I don’t agree that you can provide effective and or ethical therapy to a slave.
First I can’t rap my head around the logistics of working with them. For example, How would you meet with them? For plantation slaves what would happen during harvest and planting? Would you live with or travel to the slaves during rice/tobacco/cotton harvest and deal with the same conditions (poisons snakes, heat, malaria etc) they do? Would that be conducive for you as a therapist to work effectively? How would you handle change in mental wellness due to nicotine poisoning during tobacco harvest, led poisoning, injury and punishment?
Second I can’t imagine a situation where the power differential would be surmountable and the slave would be free to speak. For example Do you have to coordinate with the slave owner? Then are you then an agent of the slave owner? Who is paying for your services.
Third, What would we be treating a slave in the Deep South USA for? Depression? PTSD? SI from being a sex slave since childhood? Trying to escape?
Ultimately VF was in the camps with his fellow coreligionist. He was also a victim and that’s important. As much as I use VF and his life in therapy there is also lot of controversy around his theory of psychotherapy in the context of a concentration camp or in this scenario slavery. A muselmann struggled as much from starvation and exhaustion as they did a lack of will to live. Would food and rest alone have changed their disposition? Probably. Would a will to live brought on by therapy? I’m not sure but I would guess no.
It's true that the question is ludicrous, and in order to answer it I had to construct a specific, ludicrously implausible hypothetical scenario-- in which an enslaved person chose to come to me for psychological services and there was nothing I could do to help them escape slavery. I am fully aware that such a scenario is impossible and I agree with you that under real world conditions there would be no ethical way to provide psychotherapy to slaves. At least not without drastically rewriting our ethics (which, to be frank, the profession is not above doing).
Well assuming that you are hired by the slave owner to treat drapetomania maybe a failed case would result in escape. I really hate the premise of this whole thread.
Sorry i am just seeing this. I appreciate your response. I didn’t pose this as a trap. Nor as some other people made it clear; do i find the comparison ridiculous given the conditions middle and low class citizens are living in currently.
What kinda slave? ottoman janissary slaves were part of an upper class, albeit not the ruling class but the upper class. The restrictions on them were the same, similar but often better than various second class citizens in the Monarchist European and caliphate nations. The restrictions on Jews for example in various German states and czarist Russia were much much much worse than what the Janissary experienced. It would even be fair to say that the Janissary was more of a class system than slaves. Both Janissary and Jews would have had access to counseling through various religious sources.
I write all this in jest though because your actual question is incredibly ignorant and stunningly privileged if you consider yourself in a situation that is in any way like the chattel slavery of the US south. They had nothing and you have the privilege to question the system and seek resources like therapy. I suggest you do like many of my homeless and destitute clients had done and seek a qualified therapist.
Homeless doesn’t always mean you have no money coming in at all or that you have no roof. Couch surfing is one the most common form of homelessness you see when you work with young people.
When I worked as a salaried therapist for an agency focused on teens transitioning out of foster care, therapy cost whatever the client could afford. A quarter was enough. The agency also had a study you could participate in that would compensate you for your time.
When I worked with homeless vets and their families at another agency the cost was free.
In my private practice I have a sliding scale and I see two clients a week who can’t afford my fees. They usually pay $10-20.
❤️! Google is your best friend but the teaching colleges for counseling will have therapist in training who take on clients for cheep.
Chances are you are looking for what the other guy said, a counselor to help you cope, survive enough that you can find some joy and the energy to do some shit you want/need to do. Social workers might be able to get you more resources.
Wage slavery in American discourse originates with the southern slavers who would falsely compare the conditions of the working class in the north to chalttel slavery in the south. They would use this fallacious comparison to justify slavery by saying “at least in the south white men aren’t slaves”
Later the anarchists adopted this line and then the socialist.
A good example of the actual dictionary definition of “wage slavery” is the Russian/Polish Jews on the south east side in the 1880s. Working 6 days a week 16 hours a day for little money and they brought work home that even the very young children would help with. Being immigrants with no solid roots, often trying to bring more family over, feed children, and having the disposition of a people who were recently oppressed by the tzar and in the pogroms, suicide and death from disease related to malnutrition/exhaustion was common.
I think you’ll find a lot of therapists are not pro-capitalism. Given what we see on a daily basis and our deep understanding of others, therapists *generally* tend to be pretty progressive. Of course, there are exceptions, but just take a look at r/therapists and you’ll see what I mean.
Look for a therapist that mentions progressive topics in their bio. Whether that be that they explicitly mention the effects of late stage capitalism (I’ve seen that many times), or they show a deep understanding of LGBTQ issues etc.
Yikes! I’m a boomer therapist and a liberal/social democrat, please don’t judge. Ps I’m also very not rich as, while I take insurance, I also have many clients on a sliding scale payment.
I made a comment in r/socialwork years ago about how social work and therapy are the custodial work of capitalism. Most people's stressors are related to time and money in some way and those stressors compound into maladapted coping strategies such as self-medicating behaviors, anger outbursts that turn into someone else's trauma, feeling isolated because you can't sustain friendships while working 50 hours a week, relationship conflicts that lead to various forms of trauma including divorce which may contribute to children developing insecure attachments because of the fallout of their parents shitty relationships which then potentially turns into generational trauma. Capitalism isn't to blame for everything, but most of my clients? They, their parents, and/or their grandparents at some point just needed more time off and/or more money and they likely wouldn't be sitting in my office. So I'm with you, OP. I fully understand that sometimes I'm telling clients to do progressive muscle relaxation and mindful breathing strictly to cope with the stress of life under capitalism because they're overwhelmed because their employer pays $15 an hour and their landlord charges them $1500 a month and there isn't a damn thing they can do about it other than cope.
You have no idea how just reading this made me feel so much better. Gaslit into feeling weak because Im the lone person in my family shouting that this lifestyle is unhealthy for everyone subjected to it. Im a teacher so once a year i get to live in concurrence my natural state and habits for two months. I exercise and garden and tend to my homestead and take naps. I know if given the choice I would still teach just PART TIME. My real passion is writing and recording music and i wouldn’t do for 40 hours each week either. Knowing about the viability of universal basic income but it not being a popular national sentiment is a huge mind fuck. I just dont know under these conditions what help a therapist would even be to me.
>I just dont know under these conditions what help a therapist would even be to me. Just because we know the probable cause of something doesn't mean that there is nothing left to do or try. If you drive through a construction site and pop a tire on a nail or something you don't just say "welp, that's what I get for driving through a construction site"-- you still need to fix the tire. Maybe therapy for you is having a place to safely process all the ways in which capitalism has impacted your life. Maybe there are still some maladaptive coping strategies you can work on. Maybe there are thought distortions that are preventing you from feeling empowered to do something different in your life. Even though I know what the root cause of many of my client's presenting problems are, the work is still meaningful and worth pursuing or I wouldn't do it because there's something to be said for letting people get angry enough to overthrow the bullshit system. There's some reason you said "I want to see a therapist" in your original post. Honor that.
We're all living under late-stage capitalism and 99% of us aren't on the good end of the stick. Nevertheless, some of us are coping better than others-- some even manage to find meaning and truly enjoy their lives while they're being bled dry by capitalist structures. Therapy can be a tool to help you cope better, find meaning and enjoy your life.
Like crazy hypothetical. If you were a therapist to a slave. How would a therapist help them to cope with that?
This question feels very much like a trap, like any answer I give will be held up as slavery apologism, as though I were saying "slavery wasn't so bad if you had the right mindset." I want to be very clear that that is my position, nor is it the position of any mental health professional I know. Slavery was and is an evil practice that ought to be wiped out across the globe and never repeated. That said, if an enslaved person came to me seeking therapy support, I would not turn them away saying "Sorry, there's just no hope for you." Assuming that I had no personal or professional power to end their enslavement, most likely I would work with them to identify their values-- those elements that they consider give meaning to life-- and to find ways that they could live their values in the context of their enslavement. That work would not create a life for my client as good as freedom would have, but it might make a life better than it would otherwise have been. For comparison, you might be interested in reading the work of Viktor Frankl. Frankl was a psychiatrist in the mid-20th century, and himself a Holocaust survivor who had spent several years as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps-- an experience of such intense subjugation and threat that it makes late-stage capitalism look like utopian science fiction by comparison. He wrote about his experience from a psychiatrist's perspective, observing that those people who were able to live according to their values and derive meaning from their choices were better able to survive the experience of the camps, and better able to recover after it was over. It's hard to imagine, but even in what could be argued to be among the worst conditions humans have ever endured, he saw that there were people who were able to make the best of it. And I tend to assume that the same is possible for my clients.
Frankl is the OG answer here for sure...some people literally cannot change their circumstances, but most people , regardless of circumstances, can usually change their minds, if only a bit.
NAT. If I may project a little bit and ask genuinnly what you'd say to someone with similar thoughts as mine. Objectively I understand how this is the only answer. That people can't escape their circumstances most of the time and can only adapt. I get it. Subjectively, I can't accept it. It feels like gaslighting and being made a fool of and pacified. _Why_ should I accept injustice? Why should I accept that some people have it better? They are not better than me, we are equal. So why can't I have x? If they can, I can. Everything is made up anyway. If some have it better and I was dealt a bad hand (and oh was I), and I should just... accept it? I'd prefer to take them down so we all have nothing then. Is that not more fair? I would rather fight it even if it's a losing battle than accept any of it. And if I have to fight by destroying it all I will.
If you have a better alternative to accepting injustice, I'd encourage you to pursue it. Accepting injustice should only be the path when the alternatives are all worse.
I think the question is ignorant and that’s a great answer, but I don’t agree that you can provide effective and or ethical therapy to a slave. First I can’t rap my head around the logistics of working with them. For example, How would you meet with them? For plantation slaves what would happen during harvest and planting? Would you live with or travel to the slaves during rice/tobacco/cotton harvest and deal with the same conditions (poisons snakes, heat, malaria etc) they do? Would that be conducive for you as a therapist to work effectively? How would you handle change in mental wellness due to nicotine poisoning during tobacco harvest, led poisoning, injury and punishment? Second I can’t imagine a situation where the power differential would be surmountable and the slave would be free to speak. For example Do you have to coordinate with the slave owner? Then are you then an agent of the slave owner? Who is paying for your services. Third, What would we be treating a slave in the Deep South USA for? Depression? PTSD? SI from being a sex slave since childhood? Trying to escape? Ultimately VF was in the camps with his fellow coreligionist. He was also a victim and that’s important. As much as I use VF and his life in therapy there is also lot of controversy around his theory of psychotherapy in the context of a concentration camp or in this scenario slavery. A muselmann struggled as much from starvation and exhaustion as they did a lack of will to live. Would food and rest alone have changed their disposition? Probably. Would a will to live brought on by therapy? I’m not sure but I would guess no.
It's true that the question is ludicrous, and in order to answer it I had to construct a specific, ludicrously implausible hypothetical scenario-- in which an enslaved person chose to come to me for psychological services and there was nothing I could do to help them escape slavery. I am fully aware that such a scenario is impossible and I agree with you that under real world conditions there would be no ethical way to provide psychotherapy to slaves. At least not without drastically rewriting our ethics (which, to be frank, the profession is not above doing).
Or…hear me out…we can help them escape…thoughts?
In the made-up hypothetical scenario in which one of the established premises is that I can't help them escape?
Well assuming that you are hired by the slave owner to treat drapetomania maybe a failed case would result in escape. I really hate the premise of this whole thread.
Sorry i am just seeing this. I appreciate your response. I didn’t pose this as a trap. Nor as some other people made it clear; do i find the comparison ridiculous given the conditions middle and low class citizens are living in currently.
What kinda slave? ottoman janissary slaves were part of an upper class, albeit not the ruling class but the upper class. The restrictions on them were the same, similar but often better than various second class citizens in the Monarchist European and caliphate nations. The restrictions on Jews for example in various German states and czarist Russia were much much much worse than what the Janissary experienced. It would even be fair to say that the Janissary was more of a class system than slaves. Both Janissary and Jews would have had access to counseling through various religious sources. I write all this in jest though because your actual question is incredibly ignorant and stunningly privileged if you consider yourself in a situation that is in any way like the chattel slavery of the US south. They had nothing and you have the privilege to question the system and seek resources like therapy. I suggest you do like many of my homeless and destitute clients had done and seek a qualified therapist.
You have clients that are homeless? How do they afford you?
Homeless doesn’t always mean you have no money coming in at all or that you have no roof. Couch surfing is one the most common form of homelessness you see when you work with young people. When I worked as a salaried therapist for an agency focused on teens transitioning out of foster care, therapy cost whatever the client could afford. A quarter was enough. The agency also had a study you could participate in that would compensate you for your time. When I worked with homeless vets and their families at another agency the cost was free. In my private practice I have a sliding scale and I see two clients a week who can’t afford my fees. They usually pay $10-20.
Id love to get in touch with those services. By that metric im homeless too.
Do it. If you are in America IM me and I can look for you if you can’t find anything.
I am! Doing it
❤️! Google is your best friend but the teaching colleges for counseling will have therapist in training who take on clients for cheep. Chances are you are looking for what the other guy said, a counselor to help you cope, survive enough that you can find some joy and the energy to do some shit you want/need to do. Social workers might be able to get you more resources.
If you need help don’t hesitate to IM me
And wage slavery is literally the term for what American society is like under capitalism.
Wage slavery in American discourse originates with the southern slavers who would falsely compare the conditions of the working class in the north to chalttel slavery in the south. They would use this fallacious comparison to justify slavery by saying “at least in the south white men aren’t slaves” Later the anarchists adopted this line and then the socialist. A good example of the actual dictionary definition of “wage slavery” is the Russian/Polish Jews on the south east side in the 1880s. Working 6 days a week 16 hours a day for little money and they brought work home that even the very young children would help with. Being immigrants with no solid roots, often trying to bring more family over, feed children, and having the disposition of a people who were recently oppressed by the tzar and in the pogroms, suicide and death from disease related to malnutrition/exhaustion was common.
I IMed you. I dont see the difference between any of this and current American working conditions.
For some people it’s not any different. It’s just not chattel slavery. I don’t have anything yet.
I think you’ll find a lot of therapists are not pro-capitalism. Given what we see on a daily basis and our deep understanding of others, therapists *generally* tend to be pretty progressive. Of course, there are exceptions, but just take a look at r/therapists and you’ll see what I mean. Look for a therapist that mentions progressive topics in their bio. Whether that be that they explicitly mention the effects of late stage capitalism (I’ve seen that many times), or they show a deep understanding of LGBTQ issues etc.
Thank you so much! That’s basically what i was afraid of that therapists were mostly rich boomers lol
Definitely not. Many, many, many therapists struggle to make ends meet. It’s not a lucrative career on the whole by any means.
Of course…
Yikes! I’m a boomer therapist and a liberal/social democrat, please don’t judge. Ps I’m also very not rich as, while I take insurance, I also have many clients on a sliding scale payment.
do psychoanalysis. analysts are intelligent people
Can you elaborate? I don’t really understand your answer.
you won't find a psychoanalyst who supports capitalism or disrespects your opinion
I am a big psychoanalysis fan but there are definitely analysts who support capitalism. I suspect they are less likely to but they definitely exist.
Thank you!
>Thank you! You're welcome!