We are a highly-intelligent species and yet we are often not able to resolve or often even recognize the stuff going on in our own heads. Why is that?
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Because your disease knows everything you know, doesn’t mind lying to you, and never goes to sleep. The disease wants to stay and will do anything it can to keep going, because it thinks that it’s helping you. Humans are social animals, and are supposed to interact with others on a regular basis. The normal response to having negative feelings is to seek out a friend, relative, and/or spiritual adviser. Isolating is the way the disease keeps itself strong.
ELI5: Take your favourite book, put your nose on the page and try to read. All the words are still there, but you’re too close to make sense of them.
Not-so-ELI5: As a highly intelligent species, we’re also very good at lying, especially to ourselves. And our biases can and will get in the way of our self evaluation. You might train yourself to overcome them, but a guide still makes it infinitely easier to figure it out.
I imagine it has to do with this important factor that you have missed.
We are unable to process our lives from a standpoint outside of our own perception.
Your subjective perception is often the problem.
People have difficulty seeing the world outside themselves accurately. Now imagine that you are trying to look inward with a lens that distorts everything.
We can not do therapy on ourselves for these reasons and we lack the training and understand to do it on others.
Given that therapists seek outsiders for therapy themselves, even if we did, it still would not be enough.
With people who have serious mental health issues, they will deny that they were ever ill when treatment is working
There are many layers to this question but i feel one of the biggest barriers to self-improvement is self-deception. Cognitive Dissonance is a concept in psychology that plays a large part in people basically lying to themselves to avoid information that contradicts their current way of being. Also just on a very basic level admitting you are flawed and going over why is a very uncomfortable process so a lot of people just choose not to do it. In that way having another person with no bias to help talk you through it and guide your thoughts makes it easier for most people. Its provides human connection as well as accountability to change for the better.
Honestly there is nothing stopping you from picking up a book on any number of therapeutic interventions and applying them to yourself. Only a handful of interventions actually require another person or equipment (EMDR). Most of the time therapists are guiding you through the process because you don’t have time to learn the concepts and science involved, and they do this all day. But you can sure do stuff like CBT on your own.
I believe that in most cases we wouldn’t choose to need therapy, we’d choose to be well adjusted, happy, and healthy.
For whatever we reason we couldn’t and didn’t make that choice, so we need an external viewpoint to help us see why.
Just like learning a new topic, the knowledge comes from outside of ourselves, which we then learn from and aadapt.
ELI5: you weren’t born knowing how to tie your shoes. If you didn’t figure it out on your own then someone needs to teach you.
We can absolutely do therapy on ourselves. Look into ‘self directed cognitive behavioral therapy’ for one method for doing this.
“we are a very intelligent species, yet we can barely recognize what’s going on inside our kidneys, lungs, liver and heart”. The brain can “misbehave” or behave in a way which breaks your function in society or with your peers or lead to very poor personal functioning in your own life ( definition of mental health issues?). You may not be able to figure out what’s wrong with you or your behavior patterns all by yourself or it may prove to be very difficult or slow. Therapists are just like a third party which will help you along to figure things out in your mind.
It depends a lot on what issue you’re working through, but generally, having an alternate / outside perspective is a large part of why therapy is helpful. It’s extremely difficult to offer that to yourself.
There are great explanations, but I wanted to try to add an ELI5 explanation. There was a story/joke about a foolish person who went to the doctor and said “every part of my body that I touch hurts. I touch my shoulder and it hurts. I touch my belly and it hurts. I touch my leg, and it hurts.” The doctor replies, “your finger is broken”.
This joke is similar to mental health because if there is an issue with the part of you (the brain) that determines if there is an issue, you can end up with wrong answers or blaming the problems on other (especially external) things.
In many cases, a therapist is trained to ask the right questions, and follow up in the right ways, similar to how a doctor looks at a person to determine what kinds of physical issues a patient might have. However, some of those questions might seem silly to someone just listening in, or who is not being honest with the therapist (and themselves). (This is why sitcoms often have therapists ask questions like “and how does that make you feel?” That seems strange out of context, but it is no different than only hearing one question from a doctor, like “was your mother diabetic?”)
Even in cases of physical health, even if we know there is an issue, we might have no idea what is wrong or how to address it. “My leg hurts” is not really a diagnosis, since it could be muscle damage or strain, nerve issues, blood clot, chipped bone, or many other things. Even if the person in the above joke knew their finger was broken, they would still want to go to the doctor to get it x-rayed, make sure there were no loose bone chips or other damage, and get it set and in a cast to make sure it heals correctly. A simple and clean break could potentially be addressed without a doctor, but as it gets more complicated, it is possible to do more short-term and long-term damage trying to fix it without a professional.
Keep in mind that none of this should prevent you from learning more about what is going on with you (or a loved one), physically or mentally (and note that many mental health topics have physical elements as well). It would be difficult to match the breadth and scope of the entire medical realm of a professional, but the narrow topic of one or a few conditions is worth understanding.
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