Should More Men Do Therapy?

It’s good to go to therapy. It makes you a more upstanding member of the community. It is especially imperative for males, and there exists, according to Zachery Siegel, constant social pressure on men to go do some therapy.

As it happens, men resist. Those who think that men must be therapied become weird about this. In a world where gender is in constant flux, where the eternal feminine is taking over for the patriarchy, only the right amount of therapy will allow men to join the party. Leave your manliness at the door. Get in touch with your feminine side, take some warm baths of empathy, and you will learn to function in a gynocentric culture.

Behind the rage to induce men to do therapy lies an agenda. The agenda involves cultural transformation. It seeks to unman men. Those who want to do it can do it. Otherwise, walk away. 

As Siegel explains, the kind of useless therapy that is on offer in American today, involves managing feelings. Speaking of a film character undergoing therapy, he says:

But the film, he eventually comes to realize, is like therapy itself: It can’t work unless he is willing to be vulnerable and share his own grief, fear and insecurity. The movie’s breakdown, however contrived, is meant to replicate a breakthrough — an opportunity to take a risk, connect with others and move forward.

These are all the girlie buzzwords-- be vulnerable, share your feelings:

Obviously, the story is directed toward men:

Psychology is often used, especially online, as a way to collectively press others. In some corners therapy has become a kind of social imperative, something anyone can urge strangers to engage in — not so they can explore their own experiences, but so their psychic toxicity can be contained before it spills onto others. Social media is filled with memes and jokes in which people “beg” men to get therapy, or deploy variations of the formula that “men will literally do anything but go to therapy.” On dating apps, being in therapy can vouch for your emotional soundness, while not being in therapy may be considered a red flag.

It’s about exposing ourselves, making a spectacle of our emotions, becoming decidedly unmanly. Then again, don't you think that keeping your private matters, to say nothing of your private parts, out of the workplace is a good thing:

... by revealing the parts of ourselves we often hide, it suggests, we come to know ourselves more deeply and live our lives more fully.

Obviously, it’s about making your life into a cliche:

The real action is found in the sui generis nature of the patient-therapist relationship itself — one that is vulnerable, endearing and genuinely moving to watch. Those of us doing the watching are mere viewers engaged in a risk-free parasocial relationship, connecting to someone else’s connection. … All the therapy content online helps to demystify something that long operated behind closed doors, but it also underlines a new problem — that many of us are facing these challenges alone.

Siegel himself seems to believe in the magical, mystical transformative power of therapy. He would have done better by keeping it to himself. If people like him are pounding the drums and trying to recruit men into therapy, most men will understand it to be a poisoned gift.

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