Therapy Culture Fails

By now everyone knows that therapy is largely ineffective. If your therapist has helped you, consider yourself fortunate. And yet, another question remains open: to what extent does therapy produce the ills it pretends to treat? 

My reasoning is frighteningly simple. If therapy and especially its culture teaches poor social skills and if socialization is the basis for emotional well being, therapy cannot but detach you from your friends and family. It will make you socially dysfunctional, incapable of conducting a relationship. And this will set you on the road to more therapy. 

For those of us who are no longer young, the antics of the young seem almost caricatures. Who functions this way? At the least, we know that if people do function this way they do not not make many friends, or influence people.

Having suffered the influence of therapy, they come across as bundles of grievances, wanting to turn every connection or disconnection into an occasion to explore their feelings.

Writing in Bustle Rebecca Fishbein asks whether therapy culture makes people selfish. If, by selfish, you mean, detached from other people, rude and crude and lewd, discourteous and tactful, more concerned about one’s personal feelings than about the other person, then we can accept the term. 

Fishbein offers this example of a chronic whiner, a casualty of therapy, showing how not to deal with a friendship break up:

Last summer, Anna, 24, was dumped by a longtime friend over text. While making plans to meet up, the friend pivoted and told Anna she wanted to end their five-year friendship. When Anna asked if it was something she did, her friend told her she wasn’t comfortable answering, and that there was no more room for discussion.

“I’m in a place where I’m trying to honor my needs and act in alignment with what feels right within the scope of my life, and I’m afraid our friendship doesn’t seem to fit in that framework,” the friend wrote. “I can no longer hold the emotional space you’ve wanted me to, and think the support you need is beyond the scope of what I can offer.”

Even if the friendship couldn’t be saved, Anna says, she would have at least liked to have had the opportunity to respond. “Let it be more of a discussion. Let me say, ‘OK, this is what I need; this is how I’m feeling; this is how you’re feeling; let’s actually talk about this,’” she says. “It felt super one-sided.”

All things considered, and examining Anna’s bad behavior, her rude and intrusive reaction, why would anyone want to hash it all out with her. Perhaps Anna should have just let it go, like an adult.

The best example of the deranged quality of it all comes from a Millennial, Kate Hakala. One of Hakala’s dinner guests arrived significantly late for a birthday celebration. Guess what, the guest did not feel well enough loved. She took offense at the behavior of the other guests, while not apologizing for the simple fact that she had broken the norms of etiquette herself.

Here is the story:

Kate Hakala, 34 and from New York, once invited four of her friends to an intimate dinner at a pizza restaurant to celebrate her birthday. One friend showed up 25 minutes late. “It was a little rude, a little annoying, but not the end of the world,” Hakala says. “I felt like I was still super polite to her and warm.” After dinner and a low-key bar visit, the night wrapped early and Hakala went home. Close to midnight, the late friend called Hakala.

“She says, ‘I need to address this. You made me feel unsafe and unloved tonight,’” Hakala says. “I went, ‘Excuse me?’ And she’s like, ‘Yeah, your demeanor was a little off and this has been building for a while and you made me feel really left out.’”

Hakala had no idea what prompted this outburst — and on her birthday, no less. “I’m wracking my brain to think, what did I do other than to invite you to a really intimate dinner with my closest friends and hug you and have drinks with you?” she says. “Of course, I got off the phone and immediately cried and felt like sh*t.”

There you have it. Bad behavior institutionalized. Therapy run amok. Relationships broken. Friends offended. And, more business for the local therapists.

This might not totally prove my point, that most therapy is in the business of producing the ills it pretends to cure, but surely it is a compelling piece of evidence to sustain my case.

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