Escape from Therapy Culture

 In an excellent New York Times essay, Michal Leibowitz reflects on why the millennial generation has become chronically childless. It’s a fair question, one that many have been asking. And Leibowitz offers a cogent and clear explanation. She blames it on therapy culture. 

That is, this generation has been raised on therapy and has had their minds marinated in therapy principles, to the point where they blame their parents for everything that went wrong in their lives and where they refuse to pass on the bad parenting to their own children.

Had she been doing a more extensive cultural analysis Leibowitz would have pointed out that the millennials are the children of the baby boomers. And she would have noticed that that unfortunate 

cohort was raised on principles adumbrated by a Freudian pediatrician named Dr. Benjamin Spock. 

While millennials were not likely to be brought up according to Spock, they were forced to endure child rearing techniques that tended to blame parents for everything that went wrong in their lives:

Over the past few decades, Americans have redefined “harm,” “abuse,” “neglect” and “trauma,” expanding those categories to include emotional and relational struggles that were previously considered unavoidable parts of life. Adult children seem increasingly likely to publicly, even righteously, cut off contact with a parent, sometimes citing emotional, physical or sexual abuse they experienced in childhood and sometimes things like clashing values, parental toxicity or feeling misunderstood or unsupported.

The key to developmental problems was quite simple. Children were suffering because their parents had failed them. It was basically an indictment, in the name of pseudo-science:

And there was also nothing special about the way I came to understand that suffering. I was one of the untold many who — with the help of counseling and the internet and therapy culture more broadly — came to see the story of my struggles as intimately tied up with the story of my parents’ failures, a lack of love, of acceptance, of foresight and help.

The principle is basic to therapy culture:

The belief that adult struggles, especially our psychological struggles, are rooted in the events of our childhoods is a longstanding tenet of psychology. Sigmund Freud, for example, posited that obsessive-compulsive tendencies could be traced to overly harsh toilet training. A popular psychological theory in the mid-20th century suggested that autism was caused by a lack of maternal warmth (refrigerator mothers). Over the past half-century, as the genetic and biological elements of mental disorders have drawn more attention in the field, parents have taken less heat for serious psychiatric conditions and developmental disorders.

Nowadays everyone is a trauma victim. 

Among the signs that you might be the victim of childhood trauma, according to these videos? You’re a people pleaser. You’ve been called an old soul from a young age. You procrastinate a lot. Having a hard time asking for help. Feeling awkward when people genuinely check in with you about your feelings. One video, with close to a million likes, cites introversion as a symptom that can be explained by flawed parenting: “Growing up is realizing that ‘strict parents’ are just abusive parents who robbed us of our childhood and turned us into introverts.” It’s one of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, on similar themes.

As for the flaw in therapy culture, Leibowitz does not quite use this term, but she is correct to suggest that its obsessive emphasis on what parents owe to children obscures the fact that children also have a debt to their parents. In another culture, it is called filial piety. It involves respect for parental authority, the anchor that allows children to feel that they are not in it alone.

Parental duties might include things like feeding and clothing their children, disciplining them and educating them in the tasks and skills they would need in adulthood. Children, in turn, had duties to their parents: to honor and defer to them, to help provide for the family or household, to provide grandchildren.

One is struck by the fact that when the adolescent Leibowitz was sent to see a therapist, said professional tended to do everything in her power to undermine the authority of the girl’s parents. Clearly, this is counter therapeutic.

As it happened, Leibowitz was raised in an orthodox Jewish community. Thus, she had a traditional religious culture as a counterweight to therapy culture.

Such is not available to all children.

And yet, one recalls the Tiger Mom, Prof. Amy Chua, who chose to bring up her daughters according to more traditional Chinese cultural principles. Escaping from therapy culture is doable, but it is not easy.