She Did Too Much Therapy

As I have been saying, lo these many years, too many people have had too much therapy. Thanks to Abigail Shrier the effectiveness of therapy and the influence of therapy culture are now being debated seriously in the media.

Also, we are starting to see parodies of therapy, filled with therapy-speak, popping up in serious media outlets. Consider this, in the New Yorker.

Its author was Meghan Indurti. The title of the piece is: “An Intervention for my Friend Who’s Done Too Much Therapy.” In fairness, it is not very funny and it is not even especially good. Tom Wolfe it is not. And yet, given its subject and given the nature of this blog and Substack, I feel morally obligated to report on it to you.

Indurti offers a series of concepts that her friend might have learned from therapy. They will feel utterly familiar. She begins with this:

Stop analyzing my life!

Not only did therapy provide her friend with a series of bad mental habits. It made her friend feel like a therapist. Considering how much she paid for the new concepts and the bad mental habits, she felt compelled to apply them to the lives of other people, to treat friends as potential patients.

Among the bad habits that therapy teaches, count this one: free association. Invented by Freud and imposed on patients, it says that if you are doing therapy you must say whatever comes to mind, regardless. No more filtering. No more tact and indiscretion. Speak like you spoke when you were a child.

It is a bad habit. It will make you insufferable. As will the tendency to offer therapeutically correct interpretations of everyone’s behavior.

As in,

But, since you started unlearning your patterns, you won’t stop theorizing about how Derek’s avoidant-attachment style keeps us in a toxic dynamic of short-term reconciliation. And how the generational divide between me and my co-worker requires patience, owing to our divergent ethics.

Next, Indurti counsels her sometime friend to:

Stop being so honest.

Therapy teaches people to be tactless and inconsiderate. It is the enemy of discretion. Most people do not want to know all of your opinions. Learn to keep them to yourself.

Indurti explains:

I’m sorry I listen to Beyoncé and drink cheap whiskey. I know, I’m basic as hell! I’m sorry I’m a left-lane gatekeeper. If I’m going to let someone into the fast lane, they’d better be on their best behavior. It’s a privilege. They’d best not embarrass me with student-driver energy after I so graciously let their Kia in. I think it’s only fair that I then cut them off. If you don’t like that, don’t carpool with me.

She adds that she finds it tiresome that her friend is so emotionally available. Hmmm.

Thanks for being more emotionally available, but can you be a little less available? There’s no mystery, there’s no push and pull—it’s all pull, and I’m suffocating. You can’t be hitting me up every day to hang out. We are lunch friends, not FaceTime friends. We are “send each other memes and recipes” friends, not triple-text friends. Don’t mess with the delicate forces of the acquaintance ecosystem. Be harder to get hold of.

She then recommends that her friend cease with all the therapy-speak. Stop pretending to be a therapist. Stop trying to make all human interactions into therapy:

I am certainly happy for you that you were able to label your self-absorption and lack of punctuality with a pseudo TikTok diagnosis. But the therapy-speak has gone too far. Watching reality TV 24/7 is not “self-care,” clipping toenails in the living room is not “prioritizing your needs,” cancelling at the last minute when I’m already at the bar wearing my bell-bottoms for disco night is not “setting boundaries,” and telling you that I’m gay is not “trauma dumping.”

She adds that her friend’s vulnerability shtick has gone a bit too far:

There was a time when Ariana Grande being called out for being a home-wrecker would’ve been the topic of an hour-long discussion between us. Now all we ever do is dissect your trauma. I’m sorry for everything you’ve been through, but now I’m going to need therapy to unpack your therapy. Is this your therapist’s goal? Is there some therapist M.L.M. I don’t know about? I can’t discuss how your pattern of dating Geminis is related to your childhood neglect every time we hang out. I need it to end.

The meaning is clear. A patient who has suffered too much therapy ends up seeing everyone as a potential patient. She believes that everyone is suffering from an unresolved childhood trauma. This renders her socially dysfunctional and it leads to the final point. 

People who have done too much therapy believe that all human interactions should be modeled on therapy. They do it because they want to help. In truth, they are being intrusive and rude:

Now all you want to do is ask me deep questions about my past. I feel like I’m at a press conference led by Brené Brown. I don’t want to examine my triggers or understand my coping mechanisms. Ignorance is bliss. Self-awareness is a mental prison. If I awake to our reality, I will have to acknowledge that I’m not doing enough to help people or this planet. That I’ve given up. For the love of God, please go back to stonewalling me until we order takeout. 

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