Therapy Culture Unleashed

Consider this post to be an addendum to my prior post, the one about how therapy fails. Novelist Caitlin Macy has offered a concise and astute analysis of America’s therapy culture. Thus, she does not dive deep into the morass of today’s therapy practice, but expands the scope of the analysis to include the culture at large.

What happens, she seems to be asking, when a culture becomes so infested with therapy that feeling becomes a primary social good? And what happens when everyone feels compelled to expose and exhibit all of one’s feelings, to friends, family and to the public at large?

If we wanted to be simple minded, we would say that there is a reason why certain matters are private and personal. And that one does best to keep one’s private matters private and one’s personal matters personal. Keep in mind, once you declare that it is socially and therapeutically beneficial to expose your private feelings in the workplace, it will not take very long before some people will be exposing their private parts in said workplace.

One understands that there is far too much workplace harassment going on these days. One might say, as our culture has it, that we need more sensitivity training and policing and lawsuits. Did it ever cross anyone’s mind that the problem can be addressed, though perhaps not solved, by having more people choose to keep more of their private matters to themselves. A return to formality and propriety would certainly be a positive step.

Even if, as happens to be the case, impropriety seems today to have the upper hand.

Keeping your personal feelings to  yourself, not regaling the world entire with your adolescent emotions, constitutes what it means to be an adult. So says Macy, and surely she is correct:

The essence of adulthood, I suddenly grasped, was internalizing understatement. It meant sublimating one’s raw, emotional insides to something drier on the outside, something more even-tempered and hence more sophisticated. To put aside childish things, one had to ditch not only the tantrums of the toddler years but the gushing of the early teens.

And yet, if you were brought up to present the most decorous public face, you will feel out of sync with the ambient cultural deformity. Consider, Macy suggests, the matter of college applications. It is no longer just a question of achievement. What matters is how deeply you feel, or what your true passion is.

It’s not enough to be an all-state musician or varsity athlete, with the years of commitment that represents. Now applications all insist that you “tell us about your passion.” As with teenage Instagram posts, the pressure to be passionate encourages the applicant to flaunt and exaggerate, to make grandiose claims—to remain, in other words, a hyperbolic adolescent rather than taking a step toward becoming an adult capable of seeing one’s own life in a broader context.

Of course, what happens if you are working in an office and develop a passion for the comely lass in the next cubicle. Ought you to profess your passion? Ought you to act on your passion? Or ought you perhaps to keep it for yourself?

Naturally, American businesses, being suckers for the latest trend, have filled the airways with mindless drool about their passions:

Companies, too, as we are continually reminded, are passionate—about client service, retirement portfolios, lawn care. Never mind that what’s actually wanted is competence. 

And when you think about it, a corporation bragging about its passion for the service it’s providing suggests unstable—maybe even unhinged—leadership: Passion by its very nature is short-lived. It flames, and then, presumably, the fire in the loins for supply-chain optimization goes out.

Yes, indeed. What you want in a company you do business with is competence. And that does not even consider that passion has to do with pathos, with suffering. Of course, it leads one to cultivate the perfectly useless feeling of empathy. And it produces people and companies who are bordering on the pathetic.

And, of course, considering one of my favorite topics, incivility reigns in a world where people have no filter, where they feel compelled to advertise their emotional incontinence:

For I can’t help but notice that while declarations of “love” are standard in ever odder contexts, incivility—and much worse—is on the rise. Since the Covid lockdown in 2020, episodes of rudeness and public rage have become daily news. Otherwise trim and tidy houses fly “F$%@ Biden” flags. 

Of course, the more you whine on about your loves and your passions, the more you trivialize them. Loving someone no longer involves making a commitment to said person. The word "love" has been so completely beaten into submission that it no longer means much of anything. 

There is something about today’s emotional exhibitionism that makes one long for a more restrained time—whether real or fictional—when love came up in conversation once every 25 years or so. As the great works make clear, the act of discretion around intimate relationships is how one honors these relationships. You explicitly don’t put on a PDA parade because they’re too important—too deep, too private.

Are today’s more aggressively overt claims of love merely an elaborate social ritual? Are they an attempt to control others—to keep people close? Are they simply the triumph of cheesiness and the idea of “niceness” that lies at the heart of Americans’ conception of themselves? While I find that on average it lowers my blood pressure to see lots of hearts—to both heart and to be hearted—I can’t seem to lose the feeling that it’s all a crock. 

Perhaps if we weren’t so quick to love, we’d be slower to hate as well. In both cases, less just might turn out to be more.

A useful point. Once you open the passion box, you do not know what you are going to find. And apparently, if you exhibit your amorous passions too promiscuously you will lose your self-discipline-- then, you will have no way to refrain from expressing other-- and that includes hatred.