“You Are Not Special”: 30 Times People Got Viciously Truth-Bombed By Their Therapist

We managed to get in touch with the author of the post, and the Redditor agreed to have a little chat with us about it.

"I was making plans with my difficult family for the holidays but had just been looking at another post on Reddit when the idea for the post came to me," Anonymiss0018 told Bored Panda. "I was thinking about my own therapy and how it has improved my life dramatically."

After going through the discussion, they said that "a lot of [the recurring] themes I noted were that people want love and acceptance, and they're trying to take responsibility for their own mental health."

"There's a lot of generational trauma, and people have a lot of heartbreaking stories. But they're putting in a lot of hard work to better themselves and heal."

In 2021, 42 million American adults sought mental health care of one form or another, up from 27 million in 2002.

Increasingly, people have been buying into the idea that therapy is one way they can significantly better their lives.

That conviction gained momentum in 1977, when the psychologists Mary Lee Smith and Gene V. Glass published the most statistically sophisticated analysis on the subject until that time. In their meta-analysis, they looked at some 400 studies and found that among the "neurotics" and "psychotics" who had undergone various kinds of talk therapy, the typical patient fared better than 75 percent of those with similar diagnoses who went untreated.

Since then, the notion that therapy has real benefits has been replicated numerous times in analyses applied to patients with anxiety, depression, and other prevalent disorders.

“I think the evidence is fairly clear that psychotherapy is remarkably effective,” said Bruce Wampold, a prominent researcher in the field who is an emeritus professor of counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

To him, the power of such a low-tech treatment is nothing short of a miracle, especially given that studies typically follow patients for 20 sessions or fewer. "The fact that you can just go talk to another human being — I mean, it’s more than just talking — and get effect sizes that are measurable, and remarkably large?"

Chris Blattman, a professor of economics and political science at the University of Chicago, agrees.

"I think of [cognitive behavioral therapy] as one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century,” Blattman, who's tested CBT as a therapy for young men in Liberia with criminal backgrounds, said.

"A lot of CBT is just habits for overcoming automatic thoughts and behaviors that we all would love to avoid, everyday anxiety or anger or stress. We can all learn something from that."

AnonyMiss0018 too thinks that therapy can be amazing. "I'm in awe of what some therapists can accomplish ... I'm thankful for my therapist so often!"

"However, it is really traumatic to read ... stories of therapists who said really insensitive things [to their patients]," the Redditor added.

True, while anywhere from 50 to 75 percent of people who go to therapy report some benefit, around 5 to 15 percent of clients get worse as a result of treatment, and for members of marginalized groups, harmful outcomes may be even more common. Plenty of would-be clients go once and, feeling alienated, never return.

So finding the right therapist is crucial.