Do you think it's selfish to be in therapy?

I think it could be selfish if instead of feeding your children you let them go hungry and spend money on therapy, then yes. But otherwise no.

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Obviously the way it's set up right now, everybody, in North America where I live, has the legal right to go for therapy if they can afford it and want to go. When we talk about what's selfish, we're making more of a moral kind of judgement I think.

Think of the example of a wealthy/successful actor who is also a father. He spends most times away from his child for acting and now also decided to go for therapy to be able to reach a new level of performance and remove any inner inhibitions. And if you ask him about his child, he could not tell you the child's favorite toy. That's the kind of example that's a clear case of selfishness in my opinion. Either don't have a child or if you do, honor your commitments to the child in addition to your commitments to work and reaching higher levels of performance. Time is limited, so maybe it means less therapy for him or more time-limited therapy (not psychoanalytic forever therapy).

Selfishness is a triggering issue for me because over the years when I've been in therapy it's come up both about me being selfish, me being selfish for coming for therapy, my parents being selfish for not spending more of their time and energy listening to me and taking care of me and basically getting to know my wants and desires. Even when I got older, in a lot of ways I was in their boat, going where they wanted to go, even when I knew better but nobody listened. I had reacted to that and had become real life selfish person. I was very unhappy about my past and being a selfish person in present. Therapy helped me with that...to some extent.

So it's key for me to emphasize we all have responsibilities to other people, we all have commitments. It's wonderful if you're a person who is wealthy and happy and go for therapy everyday and also honor your commitments and act generously. Many people do. But some people use therapy as excuse, or go to a therapist that is happy to sit there and here them complain about trivial things, the therapist happily collecting money from a client who wants an equivalent of a king's "yes man," a person to tell them they're whatever they want to hear, for no purpose other than to make them keep coming and keep paying them.

But when I do say such things here or elsewhere, some people react to this because they already feel extremely selfish and guilty for seeing a therapist and my post triggers them, feeling that nobody should tell them such things or judge them. But it's funny how life works, because I think if you actually do feel selfish or even think about being selfish, it's quite likely that you're not selfish. Many great mothers feel selfish when they take a "me day" to go to the spa, or hard working fathers who turn off their phones and go golfing on the weekend with their buddies.

Therapy is selfish by nature only in the sense that it's all about you when you're in the session. But most people when outside the session work on their relationships with people in their lives. They go to therapy to improve something, to work on something. Not to create or reinforce a narcissistic cocoon of "I'm always right, others are wrong and don't matter."

I wasted over 6000 dollars and 750 hours and also hours in between sessions thinking about things and feeling woe is me and focusing on me. I could have put that money in a college fund for my kids and I could have spent that time with them as well. Such a selfish , evil waste that totally wasn't worth it in the end. Horrible.

That isn't even counting the many times I was hospitalized and how expensive that was and how much time that took me away from my family.

Do you really feel it was a waste?

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The stbx tried to convince me that it was. Of course, the stbx is a narcissistic POS, so anything I did that wasn't about him was selfish as far as he was concerned.

I think Stopdog's signature applies here. Living as one chooses to live is not selfishness.

What if you choose to ignore/neglect, abuse, and hurt people around you, directly or indirectly? Obviously choice is important (if you have a gun held to your head, you can hardly be called selfish...or selfless, no matter what you do), but if you have freedom and make the choice to ignore/neglect, hurt, and abuse people around you, that's selfish in my book.

I like the earlier example by SoupDragon. Put your oxygen mask on first. Why? Cause, well, your life matters and you're first and foremost, responsible to yourself. As an adult you should take care of yourself, not expect others to do. But secondly, also as a caring compassionate person, how can you help others when you ain't got enough oxygen yourself?

Of course, only if this was as simple as oxygen. Heck, some people could go for therapy 4 times a week for 50 years and still not feel they're done or even close to having enough...oxygen. Maybe their body needs more oxygen than the rest. Maybe they haven't had oxygen for so long they don't know even know what it feels like. Maybe what they see as oxygen is not the same as how another person defines it. Now I remember why my friend once said he not ever wanna do therapy cause if he starts he will never stop. I don't agree exactly, but I think this whole thing is messy, this therapy business.

I probably should have quoted Stopdog's signature in its entirety:
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

Abusers steal other people's lives and dreams because they are not satisfied with their own.

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Yes. It was absolutely a waste for me. Therapy is not the only way to heal and to find better ways of coping and living. I wish I could have all that time and money back and never have known that man.

Actually, the reason I started therapy at all was that I realized, with some tough love from my then-boyfriend now-husband, that it was selfish of me to NOT at least attempt to treat my depression, and instead pretend that it wasn't affecting the people closest to me.

Sorry for making so many posts in this thread, I think it's partly due to it having relevance for me, as I said earlier, about parent/child relationship.

But reading the last few posts I had another thought: What if the result determined if we labeled something selfish? Seems unfair in some ways, but I think it might. Even in example I used, about the actor who spent all his time and money on his career and undergoing more therapy during his free time for purpose of advancement in his career: Were his little boy to develop a serious illness to require a surgery that cost a quarter of million bucks, a few years later, somehow him being able to pay for that could completely challenge the "selfish" label. It would be almost like there was a purpose to his therapy, so he could advance and be richer and be able to help his family if need be, even if it meant not seeing his son but the weekends or not knowing much about his day to day life at all.

puzzle_bug1987 talks about therapy being a waste of time, SallyBrown saying it's selfish not to go for therapy to improve our relationships that are affected by mental illness. And I think in both those cases the results of therapy play a role. If you spend 50k and over a thousand hours of your life during 3-4 years for going for therapy - a fraction of my experience with therapy - including doing homework assignments outside and reading about therapy too (let's say the numbers work out), and somehow come out way more stable, stress-free, mature, confident, loving, generous, etc, at the end, would it not be easier to justify it even to your biggest critic, which is sometimes yourself?

I mean even if at the time people in your life thought you were wasting time or being narcissistic or whatever. Heck, even you yourself may have thought that (as I did). But then it's easy to argue it wasn't. You can tell yourself that if anything, it was brave and selfless of you to go for therapy, being willing to face the ego-crushing shame of therapy and admitting to needing help, commitment to a painful process that would lead to you emerging as a greater human being overall, in addition to personal benefits of you feeling better and happier.

Reminds me of many years ago me watching those stupid Maury shows when he would send the oversexed teen girls and aggressive teen boys to boot camp, something I found abusive and just stupid, but in at a later episode the kids would come back all well-behaved and all. I always wondered what would happen if it didn't work and the kid came back traumatized. But none seemed to.

But anyhow, I always figured those parents could explain them sending their kids there, to them, years later, as something was actually selfless on their part, having to undergo national humiliation on a talk show on TV so they could get some free help for them. It wouldn't work for me of course, cause I would find that experience abusive and selfish of those parents. But I can totally see the strong arguments that can counter mine. So in short, intent matters but results often make a difference, when you reflect back on something and if it was selfish. Which is weird because I often thought of selfishness as intent.

No more selfish than it is to get a massage or go to the spa or hire a maid...
I don't think it's selfish at all.

I think I read the question in a different way - that it feels sort of selfish and self- centered to be sitting there talking about me me me.

I think it's exactly the opposite of selfish. If you are think of it in terms of its impact on your life and relationships with others- you should hopefully be in a better place to relate to others because of therapy. I'm glad I'm in therapy because it gives me husband the best chance of getting the best of me. I hope that sort of makes sense. I'm not very eloquent!