r/PsychotherapyLeftists

Hi everyone, I’d like to ask a somewhat delicate question. I hope I can frame it properly, without offending anyone.

As therapists, how do you handle situations where a patient’s behaviors, values, or relational style clash with your own values or with what you consider “healthy” or “appropriate”?

I’m not referring to clear cases of abuse, human rights violations or illegal behavior, but to more subtle, culturally rooted differences.

For example:

- A patient who has a very direct, blunt, or even crude communication style that feels normal and respectful to them, but can come across as aggressive or invalidating to you.

- Very close and interdependent family relationships (by choice, not coercion), which in your framework might be interpreted as “enmeshment”, codipendency or poor boundaries.

- Values related to family loyalty, respect for elders, or more traditional gender roles that conflict with the strong emphasis on individual autonomy and rigid boundaries often taught in therapy.

In these cases, how do you distinguish between: What is objectively problematic or harmful, and what is simply different from your own culture or personal values?

And how do you manage the risk of unintentionally imposing your own cultural and therapeutic framework on the patient?

Thanks to anyone willing to share their experience or way of thinking about these situations.

r/psychotheraphyleftist

Psychologys solutions may work, but for complexer problems they are way too simple.

Therapists lack knowledge in culture, society, patriachary, raceism, history, hierachy, outcasted subgroups and the overall structure of society.

How can a problem, that was caused by the outer world, and caused in the inner world of a person, need to be "fixed" by "fixing" the person. It's like the same person who put a bandage on you, forces you to play football with a broken leg.

Overall the cause of trauma is far too generalized.

By the lack of understanding society, the combination of the differnent factors, which caused the issue, will never be fully understood nor fixed.

Theraphists and Psychiatrists have the abilty to emphatise with the clients words, inform them about individual human behaviour,

analyze theier current emotions and state of mind, but when it comes to the way the world spins,

theier own experieneces are the only source of information.

It is physically imposible to understand each situation, without deeper insight into society.

It's nature that humans CAN NOT emphasis with a person, who is socialized so differently than us,

in our society.

There is no natural understanding for the person infront of you, if theier culture is unfamiliar.

Understanding does not just emerge with emphathy. Understanding needs insight.

Also significant is the impact of attempted empathy on only the client.

Most people don't want to be judged by one another, even your own theraphist could think of you as "a bad person". It feels best to avoid

faceing our own behaviour,

and focus on others wrongdoings.

In theraphy conflicts are just one sided perspectives, which mostly result in break-up or communication. The theraphists evaluation of the other persons behaviour can cause deep resentment, frustration, doubt, false confirmation as well as conditioning certain behaviours the theraphist may not even know of.

For example imagen a conflict between two individuals. Both tell theier conflict to eaches own theraphist, but both leave out their own wrong doings.

They will just feel confirmed in themselfs, lack selfreflection and start blameing each other.

In summery modern psychology does not teach the Client the way of live, instead it teaches cope in a broken world. In the name of individuality we blame others and grow apart. I wish for the acceptance of others and our own wrong doings. Only with honesty can communication be effective. It is time to change Freuds outdated concepts, and combine needed humanities so we can finally evolve as a whole.

Societal psychology would be a good starting points.

It is characters is characterised by fifteen key positions:

1.Human beings need to be studied in a sociocultural context

2. The individual and the collective cannot be separated ontologically

3. The ecology of the environment, its objective characteristics, needs to be studied alongside ₹9 mediated reality

4. People create social organizations-but it is the ocial organizations that recast people

5. Innovation is as much an imperative of the social system f relations tO the environment as is conformity

6. The aim of societal psychology is the development of conceptual frameworks or models rather than the forlorn search for invariant laws

7. The need for theoretical and methodological pluralism

8. There is a need to maintain a historical perspective

9. Cross-fertilization between societal psychology and A7 other social sciences is indispensable for the adequate analysis of social phenomena and social systems

10. There is a need for cross-fertilization among societal, developmental, and personality psychologists

11. There is also a need for cross-

fertilization between basic and applied esearch

12. Societal psychology requires a systems approach

13. The study of a s social phenomenon requires a multilevel approach, at the macro as Weff as the micro level

14. We need to accept and examine the mplication that there iS no such thing as value-free social research

15. We need to adopt a much wider range of research tools