Do I need Therapy?
Exploring Social Support as Therapy
The mentally stable and alcoholics tell me I don’t need therapy. The traumatized and therapy-experienced tell me I do.
I realize understanding yourself is like understanding a country—sometimes, you need to look from the outside in. However, I can’t shake the school of thought that we have friends and strangers for that. As Tomas from Caffeine Enlightenment mentions:
Putting all of it on the shoulders of the therapist, you allow another person to tighten their grip on the wheel of your life. You assume that someone knows you way better than you. You create a dependency link.
Of course, this depends on how sales-driven and ethical your therapist is, but for the moment, let’s pretend (agree?) that you know yourself better than anyone else. Maybe you’ve managed to look from the outside in through meditation, psychedelics, or what I’m concentrating on for today’s article—social bonds.
Receiving sufficient social support has been shown to play a key role in coping with psychological distress and is associated with various physical health benefits both within and across cultures. The difference is that the type of social support can vary vastly depending on the culture.
For example, European-Americans are far more likely than East Asians or Asian-Americans to actively seek social support from others, such as telling a friend about their problems. At first, this may sound surprising, given that Asian cultures are much more interdependent. This means people view themselves as inherently connected with others and prioritize collective goals over personal ones. However, this cultural difference in social support seeking appears largely because East Asians are more concerned about how seeking social support will disrupt their relationships with others.
East Asians tend to seek social support from those close to them, but unlike Westerners, they are more inclined to use implicit social support—they find emotional solace by reflecting on their close relationships.
Research indicates that European Americans experience reduced physical stress responses when they can seek social support directly, like asking for advice or assistance. In contrast, Asian Americans exhibit a lower stress response when they contemplate their close relationships.
Similarly, European Americans show more noticeable health benefits when they perceive that they have much social support. In contrast, those same health benefits do not increase alongside perceived support for Asian Americans. Furthermore, Asian Americans experience greater stress relief from unsolicited social support compared to solicited support due to their worries about the social costs of seeking help. In contrast, European Americans find social support equally effective in reducing stress, whether they have requested it or not.
In addition, the kinds of explicit support people offer their friends vary across cultures. North Americans typically offer more emotion-focused support (such as encouraging or comforting words). If you hear the words “You go, girl/You’re amazing, man/Go get ‘em, tiger,” I’ll bet my savings it’s coming from an American or Canadian.
In contrast, East Asians, Russians, and, from my experience, Poles and Ukrainians tend to offer more problem-focused advice, which I jive with more. Why? Who the hell knows? As a Chilean-born Belgian raised in Canada, I’m a Westerner with a sprinkle of Latino. Yet, I’d rather have someone say, “Nolan, get your head out of your ass and go into the mountains for a day without a cell phone,” than “You’re awesome, don’t let anyone tell you differently, bud.”
Yet, I don’t have a culture-bound explanation as to why the mentally stable friends and alcoholic friends tell me I don’t need therapy and why the traumatized and therapy-experienced tell me I do. It comes down to the fact that we don’t see the world for what it is but as who we are.
My mentally stable friends reflect my strength and autonomy. They’re likely to take me into Mother Nature for a day of intensive sport before recommending a therapist. The alcoholics in my life are liable to lie to themselves by saying, “Alcohol makes a man honest—let’s drink and talk it out,” not realizing that a lack of inhibition is not synonymous with the truth. They don’t realize that initial thoughts are often wrong or, more often, incomplete.
Those with trauma and experience with therapy can often complete my thoughts with phrases that capture feelings I didn’t know how to express. Some of them speak my academic language with the rational compassion I seek. Others speak the language of how the moon and planets dictate our emotions—a language that my heart tries to appreciate as play and art, but my mind understands as harmful pseudoscience (probably because of my academic cultural conditioning).
Whether it’s as well-studied as cognitive behavioural therapy or as spiritual as Astrology, your cultural background affects the type of therapy that works for you.
Next week, I’ll release my research and experiences with culture-bound therapy. I’ll show you what kind of therapy works, depending on the culture.
For now, I’m happy to be in Poland with my students, who have treated me like a family member.
If you’re new to Born Without Borders, you might not know this season is about exploring slow travel's therapeutic effects as I quest to the North of Sweden.
Thanks to travelling the world, interviewing people across cultures, doing deep dives and transparently providing links to thorough cultural psychology research, Born Without Borders is like your own cultural consultancy (but better because you can bring it with you in your back pocket for a fraction of the cost).
I don’t sell what you can find in a theory book. This is about talking to and about people from all walks of life, not just those in the corporate world.
Through my stories, articles, interviews, and community, I can help raise your understanding of the world, culture-bound mental illnesses and therapy, and how to step outside your comfort zone through the power of quests and stories.
Together, we can decrease polarization, help people look from the outside in and the inside out, and create a community for those whose sense of home isn’t tied down to geography.
So, if you want to raise your cultural competency and engage in first-hand stories, consider upgrading TODAY. I’ve got a hard deadline in September to make this a profitable turnaround… Otherwise, I might just have to retire to regular cultural consulting at $150/hour, which neither you nor I would want.
For $6/month or $50/year, you can help ensure that Born Without Borders stays afloat. Your support gives me the time to research and write my best work on a platform not controlled by ads. You can also support me through Buy Me a Coffee.
At the end of every journey, I write a book. My first one, Living with the In-Laws, is available on Amazon. Paid subscribers get a free Kindle or PDF edition, and founding members get a signed paperback.
Nolan, very intriguing article, thanks. The whole idea of psychotherapy, introduced, as it was, by Freud, naturally reflects a 19th century western Austrian-German cultural bias toward an objective scientific rationalism as the solution to mental health challenges. Modern research subsequently has also validated the benefits of eastern meditation as a way “in” to managing the unknown emotional landscape. Both the eastern holistic meditative path and the western analytic deconstructionist path can be helpful, in different ways, for different conditions, and ironically, reflect the major philosophical universal binary of yin/yang, Dionysus/apollo, heart/mind, male/female, nature (DNA)/nurture (culture), etc. But all of our human challenges, mental health included, might best be addressed by first admitting to the failure of this fundamental binary, and to finding methods that allow the full spectrum between the binaries.