[wruza]

if you follow these practices, you will maybe get better

Idk if my therapist used something from outside of CBT, but he definitely marketed himself as a CBT-ist. I was never given this "these practices" thing. I've solved my:

- Environment control anxiety (long story)

- Strong anxiety of being late. Eradicated via specific methods that I fully understand and were specific to me: recollecting the actual source event through pre-sleep questioning, realization of specific anxiety behavior loops (just by talking about my routines) - long preparation and inability to do anything deep 4-5 hours before an appoinment, then few times intentional being late, then later unintentional, now I mostly don't care when it's not a big deal and not my need. Can just do my things up until a notification, or miss it completely.

- Depression with one heavy clinical episode without using pills. Basically I have found a key misconception in my life, work related, and adjusted thoughts radically to a real reality rather than old made-up (which was so comfortable to people I worked with).

Is that mumbo jumbo? Cause if it is, I couldn't care less how anyone calls it. That said, I can see how different people could fail to perform the methods and ideas involved. It really requires a skill of debugging and questioning yourself. Lots of people are too stubborn to even think about being less stubborn for just a minute, ime.

[megous]

Yes, it's still mumbo jumbo. And yes, I acknowledged your view in advance in the last paragraph.

Therapy school can have simplistic invalid theories of functioning of human beings, and still be useful to some people. Just like religion can be psychlogically useful to people but it's all nonsense. Whether some therapy works says nothing about rationales and theories behind it, in other words.

Whether you got better or not is irrelevant to the question of whether CBT views on how human beings function are valid.

[wruza]

I’ll try to take your point and let’s assume that it worked for me due to “therapothropic principle”. But I have three questions, all seem to be related.

1) It still involved structured work without which it couldn’t sort out on itself. Okay, this is still religious. I believed (wanted) that it should work, and it did. But we’re talking about modifying thinking itself here, beliefs themselves. That’s a strange area because how can you even avoid that? It’s sort of an incompleteness theorem thing. Like, a therapist changed me, but he can’t change those who don’t believe in change, while “belief” is a part of the… yadda yadda. Iow, how does one falsify a therapy, I guess?

2) Since we’re talking statistics and not structure (are we?), can it be that naturally only a part of population can be “cured”? Like, you can’t cure really bad medical cases either, and some of these are common. What if there’s a consistent set of prerequisites and “therapothropism” is not random? I guess this question is naive and there’s more to it, but can’t think of anything here.

3) In my experience, religion is much more shallow wrt to “you”, and is fixed. In a sense that cbt solutions are more “meta” and then get tailored to the personal events. While religion is usually an omnidude watching you and many others and rules and requirements are all the same. CBT actively refrains from judging and giving specific advices. Even from both-religious position, is it fair to put both on the same line?