Posted on 05/22/2026 5:40:11 AM PDT by Twotone
A patient recently came to see me, saying she was furious with a friend. What began as an ordinary disappointment—a canceled dinner and a text returned too late—had become something far larger and far more charged. The friend was now “toxic.” The exchange had become a “violation of boundaries.” The hurt itself had been elevated into “trauma.” She had screenshots and a polished story about what the episode revealed about her friend’s pathology.
What she didn’t have was introspection. She was no longer asking the most psychologically useful questions: Could this have been carelessness rather than ill intent? Was the reaction intensified by other things that may have been going on? Had she contributed in any way to the conflict? The language she brought into the room gave her something powerful: certainty. But certainty is often the enemy of insight.
This scene has become one of the defining features of my work as a psychotherapist, and it sits at the center of the argument in my forthcoming book, Therapy Nation: Too much of modern therapy culture keeps people stuck, reinforcing grievance, externalizing blame, and turning everyone else into the reason their lives are so miserable.
The problem begins with my own field. For years, my profession has trained clinicians to elevate validation over challenge, affirmation over interpretation, and emotional fluency over the harder work of behavioral change. What has followed is the rise of grievance culture dressed up as psychological sophistication. Too many therapists now function less as clinicians than as reinforcers of the most self-protective interpretation available, teaching patients to locate the problem everywhere but themselves. Of course it is your boss’s fault. Of course your colleague is toxic. Of course your ex is a narcissist. Of course the world keeps wounding you. In this softened therapeutic frame, frustration is rarely something to examine; it’s something to assign.
The patient doesn’t gain greater agency, but instead, a more polished story about why someone else is to blame. If you feel injured, the injury must be real. If you feel unsafe, the threat must be there. If a relationship creates discomfort, the relationship itself becomes the problem.
I recently saw the aftermath of this in a new patient who came to me after months with another therapist. Every difficult interaction at work had been interpreted through the same frame: the boss was toxic, the co-workers invalidating, and the environment unsafe. By the time we met, the patient could describe every slight in flawless therapeutic language but had never once been pushed to consider whether avoidance, defensiveness, or fear of criticism might be part of the pattern. And she was never given constructive advice on how to bring about changes. The therapy had made the story clearer without making her stronger.
This is how therapy can quietly become an engine that keeps people stuck. Patients leave not more capable of tolerating frustration, ambiguity, or ordinary disappointment, but less. They become more fluent in explaining why they feel the way they do while becoming less practiced at changing what they do next. And therapists are largely responsible for this phenomenon.
While it may feel like growth, it functions as avoidance. And that is corrosive. The patient becomes good at explanation, more sophisticated in the language of harm, and more certain about who is to blame, but no closer to actual change. Grievance becomes part of identity.
That same emotional habit doesn’t stay confined to the therapy office. People carry it into marriages, friendships, workplaces, and, eventually, politics. Ordinary frustration becomes proof of mistreatment. Ambivalence becomes danger. Disagreement becomes evidence of harm. Once enough people are trained to interpret discomfort this way, coexisting with others starts to feel impossible.
The political consequences follow naturally. A citizen trained to experience ordinary conflict as evidence of harm will eventually bring that same mindset into public life. We’ve seen this dynamic play out vividly in the Donald Trump era, when members of my profession moved from helping people navigate political differences to legitimizing family estrangement as a sign of psychological health. On national television, prominent therapists and psychiatrists suggested it might be essential for mental health to avoid Trump-voting relatives during the holidays.
The same therapeutic scripts that encourage patients to pathologize difficult bosses and disappointing partners now teach citizens to reinterpret ordinary democratic differences as evidence of danger. The result is a society less capable of living with differences, less able to tolerate friction, and more likely to retreat into emotionally curated silos and echo chambers.
This is where therapy culture ceases to strengthen people and starts quietly weakening them. The person becomes increasingly protected from scrutiny, and increasingly fragile as a result.
Social media has been uniquely fertile ground for this corruption. The algorithm doesn’t elevate the most psychologically accurate interpretation. It elevates the most emotionally satisfying one. Hence the ecosystem of so-called mental-health influencers: Endless posts diagnose narcissists, decode toxic bosses, and turn ordinary disappointment into proof of pathology. Social media rewards certainty, speed, and self-protection—precisely the instincts real therapy is supposed to challenge before turning them into conclusions. The result isn’t a more psychologically sophisticated society. In many cases, it’s quite the opposite.
We are becoming emotionally articulate while growing psychologically brittle.
My own field should be willing to say this plainly: We helped create this culture. The original promise of therapy was never that life would stop hurting. It was to help people become stronger in the face of pain, clearer in the face of conflict, and more honest about the role they themselves play in the conflicts they keep re-creating.
Real therapy should make people more capable of dealing with reality, not less.
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Therapy.. for those who can’t handle life.
Back in the 1960’s us kids had a remedy for this problem and it went something like this sung in chorus: Baby, Baby, stick your head in gravy. Repeats until kid runs home to mommy.
The last sentence in the article is powerful.
Therapy” is a complete scam.
Yeah, deny the causes by belittling the treatment. That'll help.
Denying the problems exist doesn't make them go away.
The root of most of the need for therapy is from children being forced to "handle life" that adults refuse to because those adults are perpetrators and/or stunted children themselves.
“This is how therapy can quietly become an engine that keeps people stuck. Patients leave not more capable of tolerating frustration, ambiguity, or ordinary disappointment, but less. They become more fluent in explaining why they feel the way they do while becoming less practiced at changing what they do next.”
Well, sure - if I actually help the patient, she won’t be my patient anymore, and where does that leave ME?
Far better to keep her dependent on me so I don’t have to get a real job.
Destroy the family unit, attack Christianity and its tenets, segment society via race & ethnicity, etc. and this is what arises. The foundational underpinnings of a successful society have been and still are under attack, and supporting “leaders” who are too weak or compromised by their own hubris to do what is necessary always leads to collapse. Those who feel rudderless will seek help through legitimate or fake “therapy. Social media has been gas on the fire.
Therapy has helped me tremendously, far more than meds (I’m not even on any psych meds anymore, just stuff to manage my sleep and energy levels). After years of therapy I’ve finally reached the point where I don’t need it as often. You can’t claim to know the circumstances of everyone else’s lives and the traumas and abuses different people undergo.
My wife’s therapy for the kids: buck up buttercup.
“Every difficult interaction at work had been interpreted through the same frame: the boss was toxic, the co-workers invalidating, and the environment unsafe...”
If everyone around you is a jerk, guess what? YOU’RE THE JERK!
Bob Newhart’s character Dr Robert Hartley actually helped a patient once by essentially telling him this.
Just like any for profit industry, therapy needs to grow so it constantly markets itself and finds needs even where there isn’t one. Just like the drug industry and the transgender surgery industry. Everyone needs to be talking to a therapist and on some pill.
My mother would recommend “a swift kick in the pants” to straighten out this person. I go along with that.
There are very few things in life about which we can really be "certain".
I think part of the problem goes back to government schools which no longer teach children how to think. They teach what to think. In all cases the teacher knows the precise answer -- and you better know it too. This works fine for math -- 2+2=4 (although this can be racist). Children are taught to parrot the "correct" answer. Don't question climate change, don't question evolution, don't question whether men can give birth. The answer is always very clear and your teacher will drill it into your head.
But in most other subjects, certainty is not guaranteed. You have to think about multiple viewpoints and diverse possibilities. What was the cause of WWI? What was the cause of WWII? In Asia? In Europe? What year did WWII start? 1937? 1939? 1941? Anyone who thinks that they "know" the right answer is deluding themselves. These are complex questions and it depends on viewpoint. If schools taught children to think in a flexible way, I think a fair number of psychological and interpersonal issues might be resolved more easily.
Therapy = gym, range, or anything with a horse.
My ex wanted to go to therapy. I said unless he/she is willing to write me a big check to pay off the debt you have rung up then it is worthless.
Sort of like the medical ‘docs’ ... keeping their patients on a string with meds that will (knowingly) cause OTHER *treatable* issues, down the line.
This guy doesn’t sound like one of those, fortunately.
I think part of the problem goes back to government schools which no longer teach children how to think.
The article mentions this ... as ‘introspect’.
Something definitely lacking in our schools/parenting, these days.
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