My layman theory is that therapy is only useful for second-order emotional suffering.

Many people are miserable because they live miserable lives, identifying the emotions involved and the needs that aren't being met is good but the emotions are there and the needs aren't being met for very practical reasons, and reframing isn't going to do jack to solve it. That's first-order emotional suffering.

Then there are the emotional pathologies that develop on top of that, the second-order emotional suffering, and that can be treated by therapy. For example, if you're miserable because you're poor, therapy won't help solve the anguish and stress of making rent, but it can solve second-order emotions like feelings of shame and self-hatred. Or if you have a life altering accident, it won't solve the baseline misery dealt by the terrible life consequences, but it can help with the residual panic attacks from the trauma of the accident.

Most poor people are not emotionally miserable, in my experience.

They deal with very tough situations, but have learned to find happiness in them.

A lot of emotional misery is found in other groups, often groups with more material wealth, because they haven’t learned to find happiness in their circumstances.

Happiness is just as often about letting yourself be happy than anything else, and that’s a cultural and emotional situation independent of circumstances.

I grew up in Africa.

I’ve seen poverty that I suspect is out-of-bounds, for many folks on this forum.

I can say that the most astonishing thing, to me, is the healthy attitude, of many of the folks I’ve met, that live under those circumstances.

“Healthy” does not mean “happy.” They desperately want to escape their circumstances, but they do accept their challenges, and do their best to live [a hard] life.

My guess is a lot of what we’re talking about comes down to expectations, and definitions.

I haven’t experienced what you have to that extent directly. I was poor growing up by American standards, and that is a different bar.

I’m curious about your take on this - Someone being able to enjoy their kids growing up, or see the value they bring to the people in their lives, or feel the importance in their role in keeping everyone alive, is a large part of my definition of happiness. It goes more towards ‘contentment’? Or purpose.

It includes processing the hard things, and finding the value in getting through them too, and the feeling of being good at what someone does and who they are.

For others, their definition of happy is the excited state of enjoyment (laughing, glee, etc).

For most, it’s a mix of the two.

Near as I can tell, getting rich often requires a significant degree of not being reasonable or content with the status quo. Sometimes ‘getting rich’ here is more about not being poor. Sometimes, it can be ‘there is never enough’.

Being content for someone in that state can happen of course, and after someone gets to a certain degree of wealth, tools to make it easier to get or maintain it are more readily available, but so are tools to hurt oneself. I’ve seen a lot of people hurt themselves on this front over the years.

A lot of the contentment elements here are also quite difficult to feel productively for someone with material wealth. Mucking out a chicken coop because it’s nasty and you need healthy chickens to survive is a very concrete thing with a clear chain from ‘problem’ to ‘solved’.

Trying to get Alpha out of stocks is not.

The idea here is adaptive traits becoming maladaptive over time as a situation changes. So you develop a coping mechanism that, temporarily, is better than not coping with the situation you're in, but as either the situation changes or becomes long-term, it ends up disrupting your ability to engage in higher-order functioning or pursue "happiness" or "meaning" in your life.

The fact that stuff happens in life that makes you suffer is something you generally learn to deal with early on, and most people can handle a bit of suffering, but where things get challenging is when the "second order" stuff stops you from being able to see the goal you're shooting for, the light at the end what makes the suffering something you were able to tolerate.

I always thought the line was "you'll never watch your life slide right out of you" which hit me hard.

Of course, distractions and addictions are our coping methods du jour - but they are backward escapes and keep us stuck.

We need to get people to break away from those behaviors and get on the hard road of self-actualization, and those who have an easier situation should be the first ones to do it.

I cant tell if you are arguing for your own position but spoken in the third or if you are upset that this solution doesn’t work for everyone (for whom you are creating an example and arguing on behalf of).

It seems a bit cheap to attack the qualities of it for not being able to solve a theoretical.

Not a native English speaker so I’m aware that I might not have been the most explicit.

My point was that I think the OP was saying this: “a person is sad because she’s not aware of her inner problems, she should become aware of those inner problems, potentially solve them, she’ll then be less sad, potentially even happy”.

I think that the onus of OP’s point (and of persons making similar points) is that the person from my example might not want to go through the “become aware of her inner problems” step.

I was saying that many persons choose to not go through that step because it would be futile, mostly because of material and societal external conditions that they cannot control and which make solving the problems causing the inner problems impossible.

Hopefully things are clearer now.

I didn't mean that at all. That would be ridiculous, and totally worth criticizing.

It's simply about untangling your mind. Often people get so wound up in pathology due to their problems that they make things worse than they need to be, so in that sense it can make things easier.

I never said in my example that my realization caused my problem to vanish. In fact, in some ways things quickly got worse, because now I'd started trying to deal with it without deflection.

> a person is sad because she’s not aware of her inner problems

A person is sad because something's fucked. If she doesn't even know what that is she's going to have a have a harder time dealing with it. Maybe it's something simple to fix, maybe it's not.