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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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Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
Said another way:
“If everywhere you go smells like crap, check your own shoes”
“Kids growing up in dispensationalist households would need therapy as focusing their life on an imminent, catastrophic pre-tribulation rapture (which isn’t biblical) requires a psychological endurance that typically leaves one in dire need of professional help to process the resulting chronic anxiety.
Eventually, that left behind fear will demand a therapist’s intervention to untangle your disillusionment.”
Z28 asked why.
That’s a very good question Z and I’m glad you are asking this.
The “catastrophe” is the systematic dismantling of the Church’s hope whic lies in Christ.
Dispensationalism shifts the focus from Christ’s established Kingdom to a future of global chaos, terror, and the abandonment of the world to the Antichrist (Matthew 24:15-21, 2 Thessalonians 2:3). This creates chronic anxiety by defining the “blessed hope” as escaping death rather than the resurrection of the dead and the transformation of the world (1 Corinthians 15:51-54, Romans 8:19-22).
Scripture teaches that the gates of hell will NOT prevail against the Church (Matthew 16:18), whereas the “Left Behind” theology necessitates that the Church is defeated and fleeing, forcing children to interpret the beauty of creation and the future through a lens of inevitable, apocalyptic doom.
This creates a paralyzing, fear-based obsession with “signs of the times” that contradicts the clear biblical mandate to live with hope, service, and stability (Matt 24:42–51, Luke 12:35–48).
True biblical faith centers on the Second Coming in glory (Matt 25:31), not a secret evacuation that leaves the world to burn (John 17:15, 2 Pet 3:10–13).
Billable hours.
Like attorneys, the money isn’t made in the solution, it is made through billable hours.
Phycho
The
Rapist
..
It’s one word
Oh my that’s a bunch of crap!
...have you considered therapy?
Just wow - calling for mass murder of a group of people because they have a mental health condition.
Which ironically is an indicator of mental illness, the same thing you're calling for death for.
Is it?
I had a traumatic and abusive upbringing. With the help of a psychiatric therapist, I was able to understand what happened to me, and I now recognize manipulation very easily.
As an adult, I was in therapy for 12 years, unwinding what I went through. Peeling layers off. Guilt and shame for all the wrong reasons. I thought everything was my fault, because that’s what I was told day in and day out, for longer than I care to say.
I got better.
So to you, that’s a scam.
Cool.
Not really. If you haven’t been there, then you don’t know WTH you’re talking about.
For some people, like myself, therapy gave me a chance to live a better life.
Don’t be so cocky.
You have a problem, you are given tools and taught methods to deal with that problem, you use them. The problem might or might not be solved but it is now handled.
Maybe in the future you might need more help but likely not.
There is nothing wrong with therapy until you make it a chosen lifestyle.
It sounds as though you found one of the actual providers who could help.
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