Agreed. Therapy is not a practical option for everyone, though it now makes me curious enough as to why the author insists upon it so much.
It's not that therapists have the solutions to your problems. What they have is a set of tools for helping you look at your problems in different ways, and experience in applying those tools.
It's really easy to be skeptical of that. You have, after all, been working on your own problems for a long time, and you know the domain better (yourself) than they possibly could. What can they contribute?
And the answer is that they're not you, and can therefore often see what's obvious to everybody except you. You know those friends of yours who can't figure out what's wrong even though everybody else already knows, but can't figure out how to convince them? Well, it's like that? That happens to everybody, including you. And unlike your friends circle, they're paid to be objective about it, to solve the problems rather than remain your friend.
This isn't a panacea. Finding a therapist is like dating -- you need somebody who clicks with you. It can take several tries to find one who works. It's not cheap -- it's covered under many insurance plans, but sadly conventional wisdom is that the best ones are those who can avoid working under insurance.
And that makes it kind of a catch-22: you have to trust the process for it to work, but it's not trustworthy. You have to be willing to step outside your preconceptions, which sounds noble in the abstract but is really aggravating in practice, since it feels wrong and feels like it's getting worse instead of better. Which it could be -- all of those various defaults and defensive mechanisms you've got, they came about for reasons.
Still, I'd say not to dimiss the notion. If you've dismissed it as clearly unable to help, I'd say you're wrong. Which isn't the same as saying that it can help.
The best I can say, as it relates to the article, is that if you're willing to go to therapy and take on the trust involved, that alone does make you more likely to succeed at dating, because you're at least trying to think about it. Or at least, you're demonstrating that you always were that person all along.
I hope that answers your curiosity, or at least helps point it in the direction of an answer.
It should be part of your mental health care, and it sucks that we've commercialized that along with the rest of our health care. That costs a fortune in the US, and mental health care is often limited. It would be great if we had a more rational way of paying for it, freeing up our professionals to put their help where it's best used rather than for those who can best afford it.
> I see it as a positive thing that there are those who have specialized in it, and that it's a resource you can get.
That is a positive thing but historically we haven't needed to turn to professionals for that resource. It's been provided, gratis, by community leaders and elders for most of human history. I see reliance on professionals for this sort of thing as a major negative. I'd argue that it reduces a community's ability to produce that resource for itself. Like this:
> And unlike your friends circle, they're paid to be objective about it, to solve the problems rather than remain your friend.
If you rely on a therapist to be objective with you, you don't need your friends to be, and you don't need to be that friend to other people. You can just tell them, "go to therapy, it's really helped me!" and be done with it...
Maybe I'm taking something different away from your post above than what you actually meant.
I see people talking about therapy as a way of maintaining mental fitness, rather than treating mental illness, and that bothers me.
A bit of a rambling post, but I hope you catch my drift.
I think it's wonderful that we have an outside resource for these things that:
* is not in a position of power (like community leaders and elders)
* is not compromised by pressures of friendship dynamics
* is bound to confidentiality and rules of ethical conduct.
People in positions of power and friends will still try and help, but the nature of the relationship makes it more difficult. Often, in the past, clergy would also be in the role of helping and were pseudo-professionalized... but again, this service was generally hardly "free" and the religious perspective had its own confounds.