your presumption is that you’d be a better therapist, not a worse one, if you have more shared experiences with the client. that’s not something current evidence supports.

That isn't something I said or what I meant. Have fun arguing with your strawman.

You just lack the self-awareness and victimise yourself under the guise of "men's issues" so that other guys can emapthise with you and give credence to the idea that men are simultaneously completely forgotten about and that mental healthcare is a soft-science, or doesn't work for us. When clearly you can see how in this male dominated space, your feelings are not forgotten about. But, because you've never actually been to therapy and don't understand the core concepts. Everything falls back to "society treats women like this and treats men like this" and "this is the reason therapy is bad." When the reality is that self-reflection and analyses is hard and a skill and very taxing. That's why people do drugs instead of going to therapy. It's why men coalesce around the idea that we're treated "worse" by "society" forgetting that men and women basically make up all of society. Ironically, making your own safe space where you can appeal to shallow emotional arguments around injustice and inequity, while also complaining that the tools, knowledge and science we have at our disposal don't work.

It's this really apparent cognitive dissonance that you display here. i.e. You take the premise, stating that talking about your feelings, analysing your behaviour and coming to conclusions about yourself (therapy) is a waste of time. But also, nobody cares about men's issues and your psychological state isn't something you have any agency over, but it is a rational response to the state of the world around you. You should read Viktor Frankl. He was an Austrian Neurologist and psychiatrist who was put into forced labour at a concentration camp during World War 2. It nearly killed him, but he survived and died 50 years later. He published a book called Man’s Search for Meaning. Which is a detailed account of how happiness can be achieved in the most unthinkably monstrous circumstances. How Love, Beauty and Humour can exist if you look for and cultivate them and how those glimmers, no matter how small. Lend to his assertion that meaning can be found in the most miserable of conditions.

Which immediately discounts the doomerism you display in your other comments. I'd also say listen to some Alan Watts if you really are stuck in this mindset. He was much more a philosophical entertainer than an actual great thinker. But, one of his better opinions is that, you are your mindset and your mental health. Like, if you perceive, or tell yourself you perceive all of these horrible things about the economy, housing, the state of human loneliness. Then that is what you feel, it will be true to you and you will be unable to do anything. Alternatively, if you move away from constantly thinking about existential threats. To just actually, what is in front of you perceptively. You can find these glimmers of positivity that give your life dignity and meaning. It's the same as before, when I confronted you on the sexism of saying, "women are therapists, women can't understand men. Therefore, mental healthcare doesn't work for men."

I confronted you about that and then you made it existential by tasking me with finding how many therapists across the entire field (and there are thousands of niche categories within this discipline, just fyi) are unbiased.

how many well trained therapists are there out there who are totally objective, compared to poorly trained ones who will often perpetual their harmful biases?

does anyone know? how do we even measure that? do we just assume people who have a certain degree from a certain program are inherently ‘objective’?

Which are things no one can possibly know, which are not necessary to know in order for what your saying to be proven false, or for therapy to be effective. You purposefully make it existential by doing that. Because, now you've made an impossible task an essential requirement for you to change your perspective on things. You require it to change your perspective on therapy and actually go. This way, you dismiss what I am saying and then you don't have to do the thing you don't want to. You can just, sound like advocate for men's issues and then you can get all the emotional validation you require from other men, who also feel disenfranchised, in the form of supportive comments and updoots. All without having to go through the painful, (coded: humiliating) and personally challenging prospect of psychotherapy. Honestly dude, you read very much, like someone who really wants therapy.

Who wants to understand why they are this way, wants to be understood and wants to improve their life. But, it's expensive, what if I don't like them? What if it doesn't work? So, instead you get emotional validation anyway you can. By appealing to the male disenfranchisement sentiment, which is literally everywhere online from Andrew Tate to Sam Seeder. It perpetuates wallowing in victimhood which is tantamount to drugs in terms of emotional coping. The ultimate goal of therapy is to overcome these issues. So, that while the factually true things about the negative existential events we cannot control continue to occur. It does not become a crutch to support your failures in interpersonal communications, bad behaviours, lack of motivation, or lack of emotional fulfillment. Seriously, I recognise from what you're saying that you've never been to psychotherapy. Genuinely, it would help you stop equating your personal feelings with the inequity of men's issues, which would make those problems feel less like existential threats and help you improve your life. I'm not even trying to be condescending, I recognise this as a neuroticism I have dealt with as a younger man and I can speak from experience. Confronting it honestly and with curiosity and self-reflection has massively improved my outlook on life and helped me become much more secure in my masculinity.

Give it a try, because the other option is you just self-flagellate in this cyclical mindset of victimisation that doesn't actually go anywhere and is only validated by others caught in this myopic and isolating worldview. Give it a shot.

Personally I also ran some distilled versions of DeepSeek locally, though I'd imagine that isn't really possible for most people.

That was the whole premise of a King Of The Hill episode. Bobby and his friends working out their differences repairing Hank’s truck.

Wow, I can’t say I’ve ever had therapists who gaslit me. Then again, I’ve purposefully sought out therapists who couldn’t prescribe meds.

okay then... I guess you're making this an adversarial thing. I'm not sure what you intended to mean by bringing up shared experiences if you weren't speaking to efficacy. but i guess i get why you made it adversarial: it's frustrating being misunderstood. happens to me too. i just got a comment like that in my inbox just like it. I tried to share insights on how empathy and diversity contributes to positive outcomes in therapy, and i got this bizarre tone deaf debate bro response instead. cant always be understood, i guess. it's fine. if you can't find common ground, you can at least tell people off who are trying to have a pleasant conversation with you, that'll at least ensure fewer and fewer people interact with you

thank you for the clarifications, sorry if I disturbed you. getting services in rural areas really sucks too. Hopefully you can find a good online practicioner. therapy needs more national certificates so we can stop leaving red state people in suffering

Your responses have been extremely unpleasant and argumentative.

Are you confusing my responses with sp3ctr4l?

I mean, I explained why I don't really need a basic therapist beyond just going over the basics of CBT, which I've already done now... but sure, ok, thanks?

For what its worth, I'm not the single downvote your comment here has.

I didn't even check.

um, I'm not sure why you're off-put by my comment either, i guess instead I'm supposed to i wish you didnt have access to services?
(or i guess i wish your life is so dull and uneventful such that you never need therapy again /j)

either way the only reason I responded was to say sorry i disturbed you. not really sure i mean that any more, that was kind of a dick reply but whatever

i just want to point out the irony of someone going on and on about anti therapy stuff, and then says there's no mental health care around me. if you think it's just a pill mill, maybe you didnt understand where you were going. the vast majority of therapists cant even prescribe rx.

and the complaint you have about how, in your words, "no one ever quotes me directly, they always ruin my words by interpreting me instead of parroting me" get over yourself. you see why they call you argumentative? because you bitch and moan about an interpretation not being perfect. guess what, communication isn't perfect, that's why you compromise and clarify.

Honestly your response to me has been so fucking rude i dont know why I'm wasting five minutes on you. you dont seem to give a shit about what anyone else thinks

nope, not confusing you with anyone.

and the point I'm trying to make is that you're perceiving it as argumentative when it's not. you finding me unpleasant is entirely your business, not mine.

just please be aware of what I'm trying to tell you about the value of demographic differences.

(or i guess i wish your life is so dull and uneventful such that you never need therapy again /j)

I would entirely seriously prefer this.

You're talking to a high functioning autist who got two bachelors degrees simultaneously and then went off to work for various Fortune 500 companies...

... who came from a dysfunctional white trash family of abusive narcissists who all gaslight each other by default, all have various drug/alcohol addiction problems... as well as criminal records, fairly extreme religious views, fairly 90s white nationalist militia types.

Last time I talked with my dad, he was explaining to me how Tom Hank's son killed raped and ate babies for their adrenochrome (Q Anon insane shit), and then proceeded to take me to his garage where he showed me how he assembles untraceable ghost guns by ordering parts without serial numbers separately snd then doing some light machine tooling to construct them.

... I am very much enjoying my having ghosted all of these fucking nutters, but quite seriously, when I tell therapists things like this, they often suspect I am delusional, exaggerating, lying, etc, to the point of trying to diagnose me with some kind of disorder involving persistent hallucinations.

either way the only reason I responded was to say sorry i disturbed you. not really sure i mean that any more, that was kind of a dick reply but whatever

you're in 'therapist' mode, thats why you sense hostility from me.

you presume you have a better ... at least potential, understanding of myself, of any topic you feel you are well versed in, than I do or potentially may, and you speak and ask rhetorical questions with arrogance and authority, presuming you will be able to prove yourself as correct.

then on a dime you will flip to acting offended or outraged, as if you have not been being rude the entire time, by not actually reading or understanding what I say, and by throwing in your own assumptions first, then coming to conclusions, then getting emotional over those conclusions... when you could have just asked for clarification in good faith.

I have already expressed to you mutliple times that I require a therapist who understands how to communicate with and to a high functioning autist... and you continue to exemplify why this is the case; you have no idea how to connect with an autist, as evidenced by the fact that you do not understand why I do not appreciate the things you have been saying to me, the way in which you have been saying them.

In less words: you could stand to be more humble, less conceited.

I'm aware of what you are saying and disagree. You apparently take disagreement personally as most of your comments in that post to various other users are hostile too.

Please be aware of how you are approaching discourse.