Going to Therapy Might Have Been the Best Thing Kourtney Kardashian Could Have Done for Her Fans
Kourtney Kardashian has obviously been going through some things with her family lately. There have been arguments and even physical fights, and she made the decision to step away from being on Keeping Up with the Kardashians for a little while. It’s also well known that Kourtney is a believer in therapy, and she’s been seeing a therapist for years. Getting support for her mental health may not have fixed her relationships with her sisters, but fans say that it’s still done a world of good — for them.
A change in Kourtney Kardashian
Kourtney has talked about the fact that she’s been going to therapy for the past three years. The practice has helped her cope with anxiety and find meaning in life’s struggles. Those are all healthy goals, and you would expect they would help her find more peace. And yet, around the same time, Kourtney started having increasing amounts of conflict with her family, especially her sisters Kim and Khloe.
Tension has been building between the sisters over the course of the past few years, with Kourtney expressing increasing unhappiness about being on KUWTK and her sisters getting more and more frustrated with her for not fulfilling her duties. The drama was great for the show, with scenes like when Kim called her the least exciting sister to look at and Kourtney saying that their family is disgusting.
Eventually, all that tension had to go somewhere.
It built up to a blowup
During the season 18 premiere episode of KUWTK, Kourtney and Kim were shown getting into a physical fight. In the end, Kourtney was bleeding — and she was done. She officially stepped away from the show for a while. But if therapy is supposed to bring inner peace, what’s with all the conflict in her life?
According to one school of thought in the mental health care field, this kind of up-tick in problems between family members is not unusual when one person tries to change their behavior. It’s known as the Family Systems Theory, and it says that a family functions as a system, and within that system “people are expected to interact with and respond to one another in a certain way,” according to Regain. When one person changes their behavior, it can make the other members of the family uncomfortable and even angry.
That seemed to be the case when Kourtney started going to therapy. On one episode of KUWTK, Khloé, Kim, and Scott Disick complained that seeing a therapist hard turned Kourtney into a “bitch.” Kim said the therapist was a lunatic, and Khloé called her psychotic, according to Popculture. But while the family isn’t a fan of Kourtney going to therapy, fans love it.
Best thing ever?
In a conversation on Reddit, fans discussed the changes in Kourtney. “It is very clear she has changed completely since she started seriously seeing a therapist,” one said. “I think possibly her shift in her relationship with her family comes from some things coming up she never truly could deal with before and the resentment that follows.”
“Maybe Kourtney has a much more toxic relationship with her family now (which we see) because therapy has brought up some things she could never let go of and never got support for,” another agreed. “She’s learning that certain ‘normal’ Kardashian things aren’t normal at all.”
Another viewer remembered Kourtney saying that she “was told to shut up so much as a kid that she was unable to let out her emotions as an adult. Considering how she fights with her sisters in recent season, she’s definitely found her voice. Good for her!”
Fans also talked about how Kourtney’s changes encouraged them in their own struggles. “I know that for me I feel like it’s been so long since my trauma that I can never bring it up to the people around me cause it’s like ‘come on, its been so long.'”
“It took me years of therapy to figure out why I reacted that way to confrontation,” another agreed, “and then it took additional years to figure out how to rewire my brain.” Although things have been tumultuous for Kourtney over the past few years, it looks like she’s finally getting the life she really wanted. To make it even sweeter, she seems to be encouraging her fans to do the same.
