they will also point to the many real people responsible for committing those crimes, and tell you that the suffering is not all in their head; there is someone external responsible for it.
but even from a nondual view, trauma creates real neurological changes and body-stored patterns. there's visceral, somatic reality to trauma that nondualism, attention, and awareness can point to, but often also come across as too hand-wavy, negating the specific while preaching the generic.
perhaps, you need to reach certain ego-development stages before transcendent insights become useful rather than destabilizing.
this is not to say that there aren't prisoners, addicts, and trauma survivors who've had spiritual insight precisely in their darkest moments. sometimes rock bottom is exactly where the inquiry begins. but it's harder, because the wounded self and ego constantly interject.
there might be some therapeutic modalities that do actually point beyond the self-structure. not all therapy is ego-reinforcement, but i have difficulty seeing how a therapist who themselves has a strong self-concept and operates within a tight professional framework can bring about such a transformation.
i'm talking about the existential suffering that comes from being a self, not the acute pain of trauma or depression. therapy can absolutely help with those, just not with the fundamental human predicament.
The reluctant case for therapy
I used to argue, quite vehemently, that therapy doesn't help anyone become free from their suffering. I still believe this is largely true. Therapy, at its core, attempts to reinforce and rebuild the very structure — the self — that is the root cause of psychological suffering. It tries to give you a healthier ego, a more integrated sense of identity, better coping mechanisms. But it doesn't question the fundamental illusion: that there is a “you” who needs to go in the first place, that the self is not something to be repaired or strengthened; it's the very thing creating the drama, the endless internal dialogue that keeps you trapped.
The therapist says, “Let's build you back up.”
The master says, “Let's see through the illusion that there's anything to build at all.”
And yet, I've had to eat crow on this one: therapy has its uses. It may not be a highway to nirvana, but as basic triage for those too broken to even crawl toward the starting line.

The problem with spiritual bypassing

Imagine someone who has endured severe trauma like narcissistic abuse, sexual violence, profound betrayal by those who should have protected them. Their sense of self is shattered. They don't suffer from excessive self-concern in the way a narcissist does, with delusions of grandeur and invulnerability. Instead, they suffer from what we might call "reverse narcissism": an obsessive self-focus that manifests as self-hatred, worthlessness, and despair.
“I don't deserve to live.”
“I can't do anything right.”
“Everyone is a threat.”
“I am fundamentally broken.”
Now imagine telling this person:
“There is no self. Your suffering is self-created. Take responsibility for your mental state.”
They will most likely find it cruel and recoil.
Yes, technically, from the highest perspective, their suffering *is* psychological, self-generated, maintained through thought and identification. Yes, ultimately, there is no separate self to be wounded. But delivering this truth to someone in acute psychological crisis is like telling someone with a compound fracture that “Pain is just neural signals. Transcend it.”
It's not wrong, exactly. It's just utterly useless and may even be harmful.
The patient is like a wounded animal — a cat with scars, feral and defensive, seeing the entire world as a threat. You cannot reason with a wounded animal. You cannot philosophy it into healing. It needs safety first, then gradually, trust.

You cannot deconstruct what was never properly constructed.

The insight that the self is illusory, that psychological suffering is self-created, that freedom lies in seeing through identification... this insight is liberating when you have a coherent self to let go of. But it's devastating when you're already fragmented, already struggling to maintain any sense of continuity or worth.
The Buddhist teaching is about seeing that the building you've spent your whole life constructing — your self-image, your narrative your psychological identity — is ultimately a prison. The walls you thought were protecting you are actually confining you. True freedom comes from stepping outside entirely, from realizing you were never the building at all. But what if the building was never completed? What if it's just rubble and exposed foundations, unable to provide even basic shelter? You can't tell someone living in ruins, “The problem is that you're too attached to your house.”
Therapy, then, is about helping someone construct a functional self, not an ultimately free self, but a working psychological structure. One that helps them say no without the paranoid certainty that everyone's plotting against them, trust another human being without constantly scanning for betrayal, feel things without getting swamped and going under, and keep people in their life without every interaction becoming some exhausting drama. Which is basically helping someone crawl out of pure survival mode, helping them go from barely hanging on to actually having a shot at living a regular life.

When you're in psychological scarcity, you cannot afford the luxury of spiritual inquiry.

Only when you've reached some degree of psychological abundance — when you're not in constant crisis, when you have basic functioning, when the worst of the trauma has been processed — only then can you start to see past the bullshit you call “the self.” Because now, when you're told “You create your own suffering,” you can actually hear it without feeling gaslit. You can recognize that everything in your life is good, and yet there's still this underlying anxiety. This sense of incompleteness. This constant concern with you and your problems.
Now, the same nondualism lands differently, where it is not invalidating your trauma or denying reality, but pointing to how even a healthy ego structure still creates a subtle suffering through the very act of self-concern. You've exhausted the solutions offered by a well-functioning self and are ready to question the self-structure itself.
So yes, I'm making a case for therapy. But let me be clear about what I'm *not* saying:
I'm not saying therapy eliminates suffering at its root. It doesn't.
I'm not saying a therapist can do what genuine, sincere enquiry and exposure to truth can. They can't.
Therapy operates within the framework of the self. It can make the self healthier, more integrated, more functional. But it never questions whether the self is the problem. At best, it gets you to a place where spiritual inquiry becomes possible.
For someone drowning in psychological chaos, that self-validation therapy can provide could be everything. And dismissing it because “we need to transcend the self” is like refusing to throw a rope to someone drowning because “they need to learn to swim.”
Therapy doesn't free anyone from suffering. That much remains true. It operates within the dream, rearranging furniture in the prison cell, making it more comfortable. It never questions the prison itself. But for someone who's just trying to get through another goddamn day without falling apart, therapy can be the thing that keeps them from going under completely. It can build the psyche-scaffolding needed for any real work to start.
Sometimes wisdom looks like saying, “First, let's help you stop bleeding. Then we can talk about whether you're the one who's wounded.”
Freedom has prerequisites, and one of them is having enough psychological coherence to actually inquire into what you're free from. Therapy won't make you free. But it might make you stable enough to begin inquiring into the nature of your suffering.
Ultimately, any real help has to start with where the person actually is, not some ideal place where the helper wants them to be.
this is the nondual perspective. traditional psychology would argue suffering comes from dysfunctional patterns, not the self per se.
often, this safety comes from you acknowledging the specific crimes they have suffered, not pointing out the ultimately self-inflicted nature of psychological suffering itself.

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