Therapy Culture Tyranny

Over the years I have been warning against therapy’s cultural encroachment. We no longer live by traditional values; we live by therapy culture values. Obviously, this has been going on for some time, but of late it has become more pervasive, more open and more damaging.

All the talk about feeling, all the talk about triggering, all the talk about sensitivity, all the talk about vulnerability, all the talk about suffering -- it comes from therapy. And it represents a grotesque imposition on American culture. 

Among the cornerstones of this mass delirium is the notion that your truth is your suffering. Heck, even Jordan Peterson has declared that life is suffering. From there to defining yourself by your injuries, real or imagined, is not a great leap. From there you can define yourself by your victimhood. Then you can put your victimhood into a narrative context and render it meaningful.

Naturally, many people believe that Peterson is pointing the way out of therapy culture. In truth, he is pretending to point away from it while he shows you the door into it. 

When a dimwitted Brene Brown preaches the gospel of vulnerability to corporate honchos who should know better, people choose to express their feelings, regardless of how this makes them look to others, regardless of whether or not this promiscuous display makes them better and more efficient executives. 

In truth, if you put your vulnerability on public display, you will lose the respect of others. If you define yourself by your suffering, by your feelings, by your vulnerability, by your pathos, by your empathy-- you are saying that your actions do not matter, that your reputation does not matter, that you can excuse your derelictions by saying that you were expressing how you really, really feel.

Among the other signs of this cultural degradation is the current obsession with trauma. You may have noticed that when people define themselves by their suffering they are defining themselves by their traumas. If the meaning of life is trauma and its attendant suffering, that means, for Americans, that it is no longer about success, accomplishment, achievement or even winning. 

Trauma is about victimhood. It is about suffering. It is about being wounded. It is no longer about winning. It is about feeling deeply about losing. And, to be clear, it does not accept that you can win. If you won, you cheated, or you oppressed or you victimized others. If you won, other people lost, and this makes them feel badly. And we can't have that.

Christine Rosen explained the current mania in Commentary:

In a culture that once avoided talk of mental health is now openly celebrating people who speak candidly about their psychic wounds—even or especially when they are the type of people who are known to us all because they perform labors that seem somewhat superhuman.

It’s not just that trauma defines who we are. Trauma has become the basis for the go-to narrative about a country that supposedly is an organized criminal conspiracy, a country whose successes were bought at the expense of oppressed minorities. 

You will note that this represents a cultural assault on our pride. And, dare we mention, since pride is the cure for despair, we are now in the business, culturally speaking, of producing more depression:

Today, trauma diagnoses have moved far beyond the realm of individual clinical expertise to take on outsize significance as an explanation for a broad array of social, cultural, and political problems.

So, everyone must redefine himself by his traumas. If he does not belong to a victim class, well then he will be called on to empathize with the victim class. Those who have won, who belong to families or even to a nation that has enjoyed great success, must feel guilty about their success and must inflict constant punishment on themselves:

Once identified as victims, these people are then seen as “needful of care and protection” by those in power. This is not a sign of increased empathy or moral progress. Rather, as Haslam notes, “by increasing the range of people who are defined as moral patients—people worthy of moral concern, based on their perceived capacity to suffer and be harmed—it risks reducing the range of people who see themselves as capable of moral agency.” Trauma becomes exculpatory for its supposed victims, and evidence of the moral superiority of their saviors.

Note the phrase, incapable of moral agency. That means, if I may, that your actions are irrelevant; the only thing that matter is your feeling, that is, your suffering. The politicization is clear and present:

The supposed daily trauma (or violence) inflicted on people by the enemies within (racists, Trump supporters, free-speech advocates, landlords) justifies the creation and enforcement of stronger protective measures for the victimized groups, which requires more intervention by the government, ad infinitum. In this world, victimhood serves as a kind of privilege offset for elites who are keen on believing they understand the needs of the masses, just as carbon offsets work for private jet owners who want to see themselves as environmentalists.

Now, Leor Sapir, of the Manhattan Institute, takes these basic ideas and explains how they have infiltrated and infested American schools. Children are not taught to compete in the world economy. They are taught an oppression narrative. And this teaching leads them to want to be other than what they are, to cease being proud of being boys and girls, to refuse to be proud Americans, the better to join a victim class. The teaching has been producing a massive amount of  gender dysphoria, among other aberrations. If you dispute it, you will be canceled:

I have since spoken to more than a dozen ROGD parents and parent-group leaders who tell a similar story. Their schools compulsively tell their children how awful it is to be white, how white people enjoy unearned “privilege,” how they benefit from “systems” put in place by and for white people for the sole purpose of oppressing “people of color.” Plagued by guilt, the children—almost all of them girls—rush to the sanctuary of “LGBTQ+” identity. Once there, they are catapulted into hero status. According to Charlie, some teachers at her daughter’s school are more forgiving toward “queer” and “trans” kids who hand in their homework late.

Girls, in particular, are the victims of this brainwashing. If they declare themselves to be lesbians or transgender, they are rewarded. This war against girls is going on under the noses of our feminist leaders, who seem not to give a damn.

The students, especially the girls, absorb this messaging. They are acutely sensitive to how identity affects their social status and academic fortunes. They want the warmth that comes with queer/trans identity, but above all they don’t want to be thought of as vicious oppressors. Lacking maturity and self-confidence, they fail to put “anti-racist” indoctrination in its proper context…. Being white is not something these teenagers can escape, but they can mitigate its social costs by declaring themselves part of an oppressed group.

Strangely enough, these newly minted lesbians or transgender children do not seem inclined to act on their new identities. Cognitive dissonance, anyone. If your new being does not correlate with your desire or your behavior, you are going to be suffering from a mental condition, and will be beset with incoherent thinking:

Several of the parents I spoke to told me that their daughters’ friends all identify as non-heterosexual, despite none having ever kissed another teenager or been in a romantic relationship. LGBT identity is, for them, not related to sexual attraction or behavior. 

The recent explosion in LGBT identification among Generation Z seems to be driven mainly by young, white, very liberal women who self-identify as lesbian or bisexual but who do not necessarily have female partners. LGBT identity has become divorced from sexual behavior or erotic feeling, allowing anyone to belong on the basis of little more than a generalized dissatisfaction with contemporary sexual mores.

As you well know, parents are not allowed to dispute these new identities. Children no longer belong to their parents. They belong to the state. (For the record, this notion dates to Plato’s Republic.) So, educators and social workers and health care workers are now doing their best to help children transition without allowing their parents have a say:

Once a child embraces a new “LGBTQ+” identity, her parents will find themselves powerless to stop what can easily become a swift decline in her mental and physical health. Her school, in addition to fueling her desire to escape “white cis” status, is almost guaranteed to have “affirming” and “inclusive” policies, meaning that it will unquestioningly use her preferred name and pronouns and, in many cases, hide that information from her “unsupportive” parents. An adult at Josie’s school encouraged her son to leave home and take up shelter at an LGBT center. 

Examples of teachers actively coaching students on how to “socially transition” without arousing suspicion at home, even providing them with chest binders, are not unheard-of. While this may not have the pedophilic connotations of “grooming,” it comes close in its deep antipathy for parental authority and its unilateral usurpation of parental responsibility for sexual education.

Any parent who objects to this brainwashing, will be reported to the authorities. And risks losing their child. This will scare you half to death:

What terrifies California parents above all, however, is that openly questioning their child’s trans identity may result in a visit from Child Protective Services. The school itself can call CPS if it believes that a student’s parents are “abusive.” One Bay Area parent recounted how an acquaintance with a ROGD child had to flee the state quietly in order to find non-“affirming” mental-health treatment for her daughter.

How bad is it? Very bad, indeed:

If there was a common emotional denominator to all the parents and parent-group leaders I spoke to, it was an overwhelming sense of despair. There was no one to talk to except other parents facing similar situations, and they couldn’t even do this without an almost paranoid insistence on keeping their true identities under wraps. They knew that they would face vehement denunciations from friends and peers, some of whom have “trans kids” themselves, and almost all of whom are left-of-center. “It destroys your self-confidence as a parent,” one mother said. 

“Friends will turn on you in a second, stab you in the back to appear progressive to other people.” The scene is reminiscent of a political dystopia in which a police state effectively delegates to citizens the task of keeping watch over one another.

A nightmare scenario, a political dystopia, where children are subjected to the worst abuse while parents are not allowed to have any say in the matter.

If you think that this is going to end well, you have another think coming.