My generation has started seeing endless therapists & healers & coaches to make their lives better. Does it actually work???I'm skeptical in most cases. Seems often actively harmful – making ppl more navel-gazey.

What I actually see making lives radically better is adding a new positive daily influence. Or subtracting/transforming a negative one. Eg a friend, partner, city, community, job, project, diet, source of income.

IMO coaches & spiritual guides should be actively connecting you to new positive daily influences. They should be sending you a link to local DnD event where you might meet a friend/partner. Hooking you up with a dance class in the style you've wanted to try. Introducing you to a professor you can talk to about that history project you've always wanted to start. You know, like a good friend would do!!

IMO if your therapist or shaman or whatever isn't working with daily influences? and it's all just "inner work"? drop them

ps one exception is someone who can guide you to something like stream entry – I see that making a pretty big difference in ppl's lives where others sort of "inner work" don't

but even stream-entry isn't all it's chalked up to be if you lack daily influences to reinforce it! If the rest of your environment is implicitly asking you to go back to sleep, then good luck sustaining insight

pps what I DO see therapy/healing/psychedelics/etc doing is causing one-off powerful experiences that make people cry/weep/shake and have an entirely way of being (WoB)...for like a day.

And then they go back to being approximately their normal selves, often while either (a) beating themselves up over not having sustained that new WoB or (b) turning that briefly experienced WoB into something like a fashion show, acquiring the clothing/tattoos/etc that seem to vibe with the WoB but actually just turn it into an image.

As far as I can tell, the culture of most "healing" worlds don't actually care about integrating the new WoB into your life through action, new environments, and so on. They only care about making you dependent on them for the WoB, like spiritual drug dealers or cults

If you can't tell I'm feeling pretty angry about the whole healing-industrial complex rn, and our blindness to it