Therapy is a rather disappointing institution. It’s not without value and I say that from experience of doing it for like two years, but it’s also painfully limited in what it can actually accomplish. Bougie ideology taints it with a directive of “getting people back to work” and in general, it’s not built to do much more than tell you what might be going wrong and urge you to do stuff that might fix it, or help you process something which can help some but probably won’t result in dramatic change. Because most of the problems aren’t actually caused by what you’re doing in the first place and bougie therapy can’t say that. It can only tell you what to do differently. So it reinforces individualism and pushes you more toward internalizing problems you have as having largely internal causes. This conveniently lets the systemic exploiters off the hook, even if it’s not expressly what the therapist intends.

I’m sure some therapists are better about this than others, but as a whole, the practice is, I guess I would say, a lot more underwhelming than I thought of it at some points in my life.