Thank you very much for describing so well the situation you work with, which I have encountered many times in life. I am not a therapist, but I report a similar great frustration with people who have been important or even very important in my life (until I got tired of it). A crazy inability to understand what on earth was going on in their mind or heart. Illiterate about emotions, and, consequently, childish.
How on earth can you be an adult if you are in the midst of adolescence? A mass of confused emotions inside, and no ability to recognize them, let alone manage them. Reactive, thoughtless. The icing on the cake was when it came to talking about feelings, and they didn’t know what to say.
Dumbfounded looks because they had no idea what they felt in their hearts. The fundamental questions who are you, what do you want and why, and what do you feel now, were not part of their experience, except superficially, stereotypically. Then stories of conspiracies, complaints, etc., etc., to justify that things were not going well. It felt like being in middle school.
I report that other psychologists I know are similarly tired and fatigued by the emotional immaturity of the people they see. Many give up because they don’t have the material to work with and, as Caneba says, they have to start from scratch with people who even resist. Who would want to do that? Someone I know has founded a company and tells me that it is much, much more relaxing than listening to the complaints of people who are of this kind.
Reasons? I don’t know. A consumer-based society makes everyone more superficial. But it is shocking to see people who have a good job, etc., etc., start working on themselves at 50.
More than half of their lives spent as adolescents. It’s not that they are bad people. Maybe they are very good people. But they are really uninteresting, and often completely egocentric, as adolescents are (and it’s right for adolescents).
Caneba works there, and has to put up with them. I, I’m leaving (feeling praised or not). Life is too short. Greetings, Vale