gncpriv:[ ID: A Facebook post by user Han Koehle. It reads: “Therapy is not meant to replace intimat
gncpriv:[ ID: A Facebook post by user Han Koehle. It reads: “Therapy is not meant to replace intimate, giving friendships. Please stop telling people that asking for emotional support or time or energy from their friends and family is exploitation. The people who come to therapy with the belief that we are the only people they are allowed to have needs with are dying, and the first thing we tell them to do, sometimes on the spot, is to ask their friends and family to support them by being honest about how bad things are.It is a deathwish to try to make yourself a thing without needs. You are not a thing. You are a person. You have an inherent, beautiful, holy, nonnegotiable need for other humans. Your emotional needs cannot be reduced to a half hour once a week or once a month or even once a day. Your emotional needs are constant. Not because you are weak or frail or needy or attention-seeking but because you are alive.Stay alive, beloved, and do not resent your alive friends. It is okay if you cannot meet the need right now. It is okay if you do not wish to meet the needs of this particular person, for any number of reasons.But beloveds, it is not okay to tell people that they may only need in exchange for money. Even if everyone had the money to do so, there are not enough feelings professionals in the world to meet everyone’s emotional needs in the medium of therapy, and even if there were enough time, therapy is not a friendship. We are not allowed to love our patients in all the ways that they need to be loved.It is proper and good for you to need to cry with someone who loves you. It is proper and good for you to need to be held, to need to be cooked for, to need to be heard, to need advice. Only small parts of this could ever be accomplished by a therapist in exchange for money.Resist the capitalist curse that says you do not deserve to be alive if you cannot pay for it. And for the love of all good and living things, resist the lie that this curse is the real liberation.” End ID. ] -- source link