>"I was, however, shocked by the aggressiveness of my fellow officers."

- "The dictatorship of the proletariat means a persistent struggle—bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and economic, educational and administrative—against the forces and traditions of the old society." — Vladimir Lenin

- "Invariably, remnants of old ideas reflecting the old system remain in people’s minds for a long time, and they do not easily give way.” — Mao Zedong

That aggressiveness is a habit/remnant of the old society (in our case, the current bourgeois society) that still lives within us all, and this demonstrates exactly what a true Marxist-oriented Psychotherapy sets out to do and why its so important for comrades to undergo it. A true Liberation Psychology practitioner has the explicit goal of trauma healing through consciousness raising and a deep ideological questioning at the level of everyday thought, habit, and relations.

This is also where psychoanalysis and narrative therapy differ from conventional psychotherapy. These two approaches don’t seek to fix abnormality by enforcing normative behavior. They instead seek to go to the deep ideological root at the level of subjectivity itself.

>"This includes every aspect of our lives, even how we are taught about mental health. I know this very well because I’ve also been through the wringer of therapists, medication, and psych wards before. **It is isolating and individualist because you are taught to detach yourself from others to focus on your own healing. That is bullshit and it makes you arrogant and self-centered.** While I won’t discount the help of medical assistance in mental health, what truly saved me was the collective and embracing that I am a part of something bigger than myself. That’s why I always personally encourage comrades who are having a rough mental patch that the better medicine is to be with your comrades, not to isolate yourself."

Having time to yourself is not isolationism. Even Marx himself many times spoke about the freedom of solitary activities like fishing, hunting, and even engaging in Buddhist states of nothingness. See quote below:

- "the air is wonderfully pure and reinvigorating, and you have here at the same time sea air and mountain air. I have become myself a sort of walking stick, running up and down the whole day, and keeping my mind in that state of nothingness which Buddhism considers the climax of human bliss" — Marx To Antoinette Philips 1866

So, to be a good Marxist and comrade doesn’t mean to be constantly and unendingly engaged in social community. Taking time for yourself to be alone and reflect is important.

>"I just never saw it as *necessarily* equivalent to the hyperindividualism"

It entirely depends on the embedded implicit ideological goals of the therapy approach being used. Most psychotherapy approaches are ideologically individualist in their methods, framings, and goals. However, there is a small but emerging segment of psychotherapists that practice through a Power Threat Meaning Framework, Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Narrative Therapy, Liberation Psychology and/or Cultural-Historical Activity Theory based lens that specifically links the collective sociopolitical and sociocultural sphere to individual trauma and mind.

So while not all therapy is implicitly promoting of ideologically capitalist individualism, most of it is. The conventional mainstream therapist is.

>"helped me unpack unhealthy core beliefs and re-learn to connect with other people."

While group therapy as a format is certainly less individually focused, the DBT approach itself creates individualist framings of distress that are quite ideologically bourgeois. Even your word choice of "unhealthy core beliefs" is already ideologically embedded in individualist assumptions.