Meditation doesn't fix everything.  When is therapy more helpful than meditation?  

Before you start

Therapy and medication is helpful for people who are ill, who have any number of mental illnesses or conditions that cause them pain and suffering. There's no point in cataloging them all here. Meditation is not for those people. Meditation as I've experienced it requires a pretty healthy (mental health-wise) relationship with yourself. The ability to adopt a sort of third party view of you and your mind. Meditation is helpful to people who are curious about what they are, how their reality is knit together, and who are willing to address their foibles and mental processes in a deep way, even though this can mean facing their so-called demons.

Basic sanity is the aim of therapy and, at least in part, of mediation, but at different levels of mental functioning.

Insight meditation is needed to heal the grab/reactivity that occurs moment by moment in visceral experience.
Awareness mediation is needed to heal the fundamental duality between subject & object moment by moment in visceral experience.
Attachment/EMDR therapy is needed to heal the early nonverbal self structure age 0 - 2.
Psychodynamic/IFS therapy is needed to heal the childhood structure age 3 - 10.
CBT/REBT therapy is needed to heal the early adult structure age 11 - 17.
Ego development studies/perspective-taking practice is needed to take a healthy adult & progress them through stages of super development beyond healing.

Freud said the purpose of therapy is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so they can be normally unhappy.

I was listening to an interview with someone (forget who) who said that the purpose of meditation is to take a normally unhappy person and bring them to a happiness without condition. 

Happiness is a very strong word.
If you help other beings then you can be happy, that is the condition, regardless of if you are a worm or enlightened being.

Just without conditions you can at most experience zero suffering and instead experience constant physical/mental bliss. It might seem like happiness when you suffer but actually it is just no suffering and bliss. Past some point of knowing your mind it is cheaper than potatoes. Happiness however require putting actual effort and meditation might at most make you want/be_able to put the required effort.

Maybe so, but lots of meditators go into therapy after many years of intensive practice.  Two well known examples that come to mind are Jack Kornfield and Shinzen Young.

Hi Noah, I was going to send you a message but I was not able to do it by clicking on your name.  Try sending me a message and maybe I can reply.

To make it short, meditation is good for people who are at least vaguely aware that they have neurotic defense mechanisms. People with mostly pathological or immature defense mechanisms or who are completely embedded in neurotic defense mechanisms probably won't get much out of meditation. See:
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_mechanism

That said, none of this is simple/clean and we all can have knots of pathology that are resistant to awareness. That's why we need practices and/or peers and/or teachers and/or therapists to help us become aware of unconscious habits/worldviews.  

Out of curiousity Tom, why are you asking?

Good answer!

I've been meditating pretty regularly for over 30 years.  I've seen some great changes, and the experience of meditation is often wonderful.  I am more likely to feel happy joyous and free on the days I meditate.

Some problems have not changed much.  Occosional intense anxiety is a big one for me.  And observing friends who have spent lots of time in meditation, I see some problems that have not changed much.

I have been in therapy before and am thinking of starting again.  I thought I might get some good insights by asking this question here, and I have.

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Me too. I'm wondering how much of my stuff may drop away after the next milestone, but also wondering if working on that with a therapist may be worthwhile.

Great thread. Thanks for posting it.

~BTG

Noah that's very cool. Would you mind sharing how you came to that knowledge?


~BTG

If you have a problem and you are waiting for meditation to fix it, then if you are open to therapy I think it woud be smarter to try therapy in the present rather than wait for meditation to maybe fix your problem someday in the future.

If you are dysfunctional (having problems keeping a job, maintaining relatinships, etc) you should seek professional help. 

In my opinon if you are functional but having a difficult time with emotions you should see a doctor to determine if there could be a medical cause.

Meditation is at it's best when your problems have cognitive causes, when your thinking is causing the problem.

If you have a lot of suppressed emotions, meditation can be great at bringing them out into consciousness. Some people can handle this on their own. However it can be a problem for some people who get overwhelmed and they really need to do this with the help of a therapist.

I think meditation is a bad first choice if your problems have biological (genetic or developmental) causes. You should try to find a biological solution: changes in diet, different types of exercise, more sleep, less stressful life style, avoiding alcohol, caffine, tobacco, and other intoxicants, might help. For example it is not a good idea to treat a nutritional deficiency with meditation. No one expects meditation to cure schizophrenia, and there may be exceptions but I don't think it is likely to cure, for example, severe anxiety or depression that has genetic causes either.

However, even with biological causes, meditation can help you cope.

If you are aware that you have some emotional problems it is probably not a good idea to go on a meditation retreat unless you already have a lot of experience meditating with your issues.

It can be very hard to distinguish the cause of emotional problems. And in my opinion it is not a good strategy to try to think your way out of a problem caused by your brain not working right in the first place.

If meditation is not helping, therapy is probably worth trying.

Excellent, best wishes Tom!

Noah posted this yesterday.  Several people asked where he got the  info but he hasn't replied.   I would also love to know the source of this.

That raises a basic technical question.  When you reply to someone's post, it  goes right under that  post rather than at the end of the thread.  So it is easy to miss a reply to  a post if it was  several posts back in the thread.  Is there  any way to change that and see all posts in the order they were posted?

I made this a reply to the original post so it would show up at the end of the thread.


d

There are three buttons on the top of the page, below the title of thread and to the right side of the page, which change the appearance of the posts. If you click the first one from left (which has the tooltip "Combination View", if you point your mouse on the button, you can see this tooltip), then you can see the latest post based on its date at the bottom of the page, and you can still see the parent child relationship of posts at the top of the page.

Thanks for the technical info.  That will make it easier to navigate here.