He Fired His Therapists

Futurist Foster Kamer has fired his therapists. Not one, but more than one therapist. As we shall see, he did not fire all of them, but firing some of them must count as a sign of good mental health.

Now, he has written all about it for the Washington Post. It is a welcome respite from the slew of reports telling us that we all need therapy or that a little extra therapy will solve the nation’s mental health problems, not to mention its addiction problems.

So, someone has discovered that his therapists were scamming him. They were telling him what he wanted to hear, cheerleading and rationalizing all of his problems. They were monumental suck-ups, and such an attitude is obviously dishonest.

Kamer opens with this enlightening fact:

My therapists were in my corner on every single issue. Every doubt was reassured. In every conflict I faced involving colleagues, friends, family and romantic partners I felt wronged by, they sided with me. They were my best cheerleaders, my biggest fans.

Which is why I fired them.

Of course, he continues, everyone nowadays is in therapy. Everyone believes, to the roots of his marrow, that therapy will help him, will free him from whatever self-misinformation is tormenting his psyche. 

He does not mention-- leaving it to me-- that therapy has increasingly become a woman’s profession. And that women seek to avoid conflict and contention. So, it is not surprising that a female therapist would normally be more likely to avoid confrontation. Then again, he chose female therapists. What exactly was he expecting?

Kamer continues:

We’re now fully entrenched in the era of the theraposeur: a moment when a few swipes of a dating app will show you a bunch of people brandishing their therapy bona fides and/or naming it as a prerequisite for dating them. It’s a time when a dumbscroll through TikTok will have you hearing about attachment theory or enneagram typing or Myers-Briggs parsing from strangers often (at best) wildly unqualified to speak on it. More than ever, there’s a noxious tang in the brandishing of “self care” and all the supposed life optimization and enlightenment that comes with it. To err is human, but to go to therapy and talk about said error? Supposedly, divine.

So, Kamer has a solution. He tells everyone to find a new therapist, one who is not a cheerleader or an advocate or a rationalizer, but one who is happy to crush his or her patients’ egos.

Too many therapists assume the role of advocate — possibly rendering them worse than no therapist at all. Their patients should dump them and find replacements who are brutally unafraid of crushing their egos.

Obviously, this might work for some patients. It might not work for all patients.

And yet, Kamer has taken serious offense at therapists who seemed more like advocates than like healers. One might notice that this took place over a fourteen year span, so apparently it took him quite some time to discover that he had chosen the wrong healers:

Over the course of the past 14 years, I’ve left two therapists after they veered into latent, head-nodding advocacy — cheering me on, validating my complaints about the world and losing their analytical edge (to say nothing of the power patients give them in allowing this). I’ve pointedly told them: "Why are you agreeing with me on something I’m plainly wrong about?” They were surprised, maybe put off. At moments, it has gotten heated. But it has also taken us to places that would otherwise take far longer to reach.

Kamer’s larger problem is his own embrace of therapyspeak. What would you call it when he is tormenting his psyche over how self-aware he is. If he were really as savvy as he pretends to be he would have found a therapist who wants him to get out of his mind and into his life.

Such is not his case. He wants to discover self-awareness:

Shortly before finishing this essay, I asked my own therapist: Am I as self-aware a client as I think I am?

She laughed in my face. And then explained: Of course not. But no one is. Not even, she said, herself. Because, she said, she’s imperfect. But by working to evolve, and listen, she can help move her own life (and ideally, other people’s lives) forward in meaningful ways.

Everyone is imperfect. How long did it take his therapist to provide this little nugget of pseudo-wisdom. In any event Kamer thrilled to this insight and will happily continue with his new therapist. 

As for the larger question: what is a futurist? I will leave that to heartier souls.

Evidently, the man needs help.

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