Therapy, the Oversold and Oversocialised Sacred Cow

Have you thought about seeing a Certified Mental Health Professional™?

This post has been ticking away at the back of my mind for years. Over time, there have been various addendums, preambles, and disclosures I have mentally added and since removed. I could outline my own experience with therapy, I could state that there are many anomalous situations where contextual therapy appears to be required, and I could cite various studies showing the inefficacy of psychiatry in general. Yet, each of these would be a hypocritical appeal to a form of therapized thinking that I seek to question in this post. Firstly, the appeal to self would covertly state that because I’ve had my own experiences of such, I am somehow a semi-authority on the matter. Secondly, the appeal to situational therapy would treat the reader as a fool who can’t see the forest for the trees. And, third and finally, the appeal to science to show the falsity of science…well, that’s pretty self-explanatory. And so, as usual, I seek to focus on the lived experience of ‘therapy’ as a floating term, that is, how it appears and presents itself via the mouths of others, media outlets, and society in general, as opposed to reducing it to technical, archaic, or idealised definitions. As such, I wish to state that — Therapy is the modern world’s sacred cow.

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Therapy, everyone’s doing it, and yet, no one seems to really know what it does, what it’s meant to do, or if it’s done. If one is to catch up with old friends, attend a party, or just go to the store, there’s a high chance one will overhear someone mention therapy, or perhaps even lightly pressuring someone else into getting therapy themselves. If someone is noticeably more spry and smiley, they’ll likely put it down to having a really good therapist, stating that they’re really getting in there now. Likewise, if someone is melancholy, anxious, shy, or perhaps they just said something the other person doesn’t quite like, then they’ll hastily—with that passive aggressive forced, nice, HR tone—be told that maybe they should go to therapy…have you given therapy a try?…you need therapy…somebody needs therapy…somebody has got some issues to work through, oh boy, therapy for you Mr actually-has-character! etc.

Yet, much like how Think and Grow Rich has sold 100 million copies (Where are all the millionaires?), The Power of Now has sold 16 million copies (Where are all the present people?), How to Win Friends and Influence People has sold over 30 million copies (Why is everyone so lonely?), 15% of the UK is on antidepressants (Why is everyone so miserable?), and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck is fast becoming our hot self-help book (Why does everybody seem to really give a fuck?), therapy too is an oversold, overpromised, and oversocialised sacred cow, that promises so much, and delivers so little. With 35% of people in the UK (30% in the US) having counselling at some point in their lives, one wonders just where these people are who have been therapized? Where are the actualized, individualized, and selfized harmonious citizens of tomorrow? Where are the results? (It is a science, after all…wait, it isn’t, now?) What changed? Anything? You might answer, well, what did you expect, James? To which I would reply…something? If psychiatry, and therein therapy, is what it says it is, then as Aspirin takes away a headache, therapy should take away…wait, what’s it meant to be doing again? And here is exactly where I want to start, the vagueness of it all.

Psychology Today defines therapy sessions as structured meetings between a licensed provider and a client with a goal of improving some aspect of their life, with a more general definition being treatment intended to relieve or heal a disorder, or the treatment of mental conditions by verbal communication and interaction. So, in short, something is wrong/bad/broken, and the purpose of therapy is to make things right/good/repaired. Except, it’s rare to hear of someone going to therapy for such specific reasons, usually the process entails a felt sense of purposelessness, that in turn (retroactively) reasons that various events, mental correspondances, or reactions could be the reasons as to why we are the way we are, which, of course—the person in question is in therapy, after all—isn’t necessarily good. So the long and short of it is, people go to therapy because something just ain’t right, something is up, life just isn’t bloody working, and I need…something, and as it turns out, apparently, what they really need is a licensed professional.

The term therapy, then, is vague. Not so plastic as to stand for nothing at all, but equally not so rigid as to take responsibility for itself. It’s the perfect, socially acceptable, conversational non-sequitur for when an answer falls just outside the bounds of what has been unspokenly deemed acceptable. If you put a toe too far on either side of the socially contextual overton window…Ew, you should look into therapy. Mention a faux-controversial book like Lolita, American Psycho, or Decline of the West whilst gassing with old pals…Umm, I think you need therapy. Attempt to have a moderate and balanced ‘debate’ regarding all sides of the political spectrum…Yikes! Umm, therapy much! Happen to not fit into the mold of the modern, amorphous, character-neutral, quip-toting, lifeless, defacto-liberal, consumption-defined, unlifed machine…He gives me the ick, he needs therapy, stat! Or maybe you read a blog post that puts forth an opinion you don’t agree with, the author sounds kind of angry, they should see a…

Where once the word fascist (and its right-wing equivalent, ‘demonic’) was used to ostracize any individual who hadn’t kept up with each inch-wide socio-political change, soon enough it became apparent that this practice meant an ever-dwindling supply of socially acceptable friends and frequents. The word—and demand—therapy became the catch-all term to signify both that something wasn’t right (whatever the hell that means) and it’s that person’s responsibility to get it sorted. You’re wrong, and no, I’m not going to tell you why, you should just know, okay? In this, socially overnormalized setting (in my opinion, the most common place to hear about therapy — I’ll get to this later), we can see that what the term ‘therapy’ comes to stand for is a secularized form of penance, the goal of which is a form (and to form) of contemporaneous infallibility. Or, in simple, idealistic terms, ‘therapy’ seeks to keep someone on the normal, progressive straight and narrow. For these people, it is as if every single minor violation against a supposed, idealised idea of how someone should be is not a unique part of that other person’s character, but an error arising from their apparent lack of therapy. As if, because someone is deemed to be different, more or less emotional, over or under feeling, dumb or smart, radical or apathetic, or anything in between that doesn’t fit whatever socio-politically acceptable armor is floating around, then that person is, themselves—in themselves—wrong. In the world of therapy, it is no longer the case that someone has character, eccentricity, vitality, values, or principles, but that they have mental health problems that need to be therapized!

Where this all appears to begin (and for his faults, Foucault was on the money here) is school. Though not so much school in terms of locale and place, schooling as a given. The idea that there is, and ever shall be, some authority to go to in times of trouble. Reason finds itself perceiving that for homework there is a teacher, for teeth a dentist, for aches a doctor, for brakes a mechanic, and for cakes a baker, and so why not have an authority for this pain I feel inside? Will someone please just tell me what to do, where to go, and when to do it! I’ll pay you! All rolled up into the ball of modern authority is everything a good therapist makes: Institutionalisation, accreditation, and medically adjacent lingo—it just all sounds so, so…professional! Yet, after all their time in education, maybe this, unfortunately, is what people need: someone in a proverbial lab coat to just tell them everything is going to be okay. But that’s not exactly what’s being sold, is it?

What’s being sold is a cure never questioned. A cure for an ill, as-of-yet, defined. Perhaps, after a few sessions, the ill in question, the mental health problem, will find a label and become a new identity—and what, dare no one ask, it seems, is depression prior to the label? Anxiety prior to the label? Bipolar prior to the label? Feeling? Life, perhaps? That feeling needn’t matter for now, for we need to therapize, enough talk of the term, what does this all entail? Well, as far as I can see—and have experienced—it entails sitting in a room, stating obviously shitty things that happened over and over again, all the while having a Certified Counsellor, or some such, validate that those obviously shitty things were obviously shitty over and over again, all whilst charging you for the pleasure (though they’re usually distacted) of doing so. This recursive ending to therapy (one that many people find themselves in for years if not decades) is not healing, it’s not therapeutic, it’s not cathartic, it’s masturbatory entertainment. Returning again and again to a self-congratulatory excuse or justification is nothing more than socially approved, pain avoidance. The feeling that each time one rides this ever dwindling sine wave of misery and reason-for-misery, they somehow get one over on the past, all the while life passes them by and they remain exactly the same, except clutching a rather flimsy got ya! in tow.

What most therapy appears to amount to, then, is little more than noticing—time and again—that various events in one’s life may or may not have affected how said person is now, and that itself is the conclusion, and this is key. See, it never seems to be the case that someone finds out that X event in their childhood caused Y habit in their adult life, and from that finding there is a further resolution, no. What seems to happen is that a possible correlation is found and is then, henceforth, used as a justification and excuse for said behaviour. In day-to-day life, this is all condensed down into pithy retorts and subtly condescending replies such as the increasingly popular, Sorry, it’s my [insert psychiatric diagnosis here], or the ever refreshing, Forgive me, I’m [again], and who could forget the maddeningly easy I’m autistic. Or, if ‘therapy’ amounts to little more than noticing habits and identifying with diagnoses, and yet no effectual, personal change, then not only is it useless, but it is in fact socially corrosive. Normalizing both the avoidance of responsibility and the offloading of that burden onto those deemed ignorant. Alas, nothing is my fault, but it may well in fact be yours!

However, that ability, the one given via therapy attendance, to say I am X, is of paramount importance. For so many, the question of purpose and meaning has been answered by way of consumption and consumer identities, and yet, the empirically perfect reality of both of these things (they have no depth), means that this meaning, complete with its treadmill of desire-lack-purchase, isn’t meaningful enough to fend off that felt sense of purposelessness. In this sense, therapy comes to the rescue in a rather elusive, three-pronged Ouroboros. First, there is a felt sense of meaninglessness in one’s existence, which doesn’t necessarily come across as some stark, Kierkegaardian tragic dilemma, more so a ‘What the hell am I doing?’ From here, given their indoctrination and, above all, trust in modern institutions to know what to do, they go running to the nearest, contextually relevant authority figure (in this case,e a therapist) and get advice. The authority figure in question relays to them what they already know and, more importantly, feel—that they have no purpose—and suggests continuing therapy to get to the bottom of it. Now, either the therapy continues on until there is some intellectual reasoning rigorous enough to afford temporary catharsis (rare), or, as is usually the case, the very act of attending therapy becomes the meaning of the life in question.

This is to say, for those beholden to appeals to authority, their continued purpose in life is to relay their own experiences to another person to get their thoughts on the matter. A life of second-guessing, responsibility avoidance, and existential insecurity. And yet, this story, this narrative, the one where the person in question is the kind of person who ‘goes to therapy’ is the very meaning so many are after. The content doesn’t matter, the original point (healing…?) doesn’t matter, the results don’t matter, what matters is the knowledge that one now has a narrative, a story, and, like so many others, is now the type of person [read: normal] who goes to therapy.

Following this, the therapeutic language sweats out from their pores as Gospel does from an evangelical. They stand, waiting for a single sentence to fall out of line, waiting for the slightest whiff of familial, social, or mental variety that could be deemed odd, weird, or strange, and before you know it they’re giving you that look, the one that is feigning care but really just wants you to join the cult of therapy. They stand around, just like everyone else, except they’re waiting for their next hit of Mr Certified Mental Health Professional's generic advice: Have you tried looking at the positives of the situation? Be nice to yourself. Don’t compare yourself to other people. Look how far you’ve come. Treat yourself. Time heals everything. The kind of doe-eyed, fortune cookie, motivational poster junk quotes you’d expect from a high school teenager in love. And, like those that travel (Oh, you just have to go!), those that smoke weed (Remember that time we got high?), and those that worship football (Watch Match of the Day last night?), the therapized no longer talks about feeling or experience in itself, but filters everything through the socially approved, vitally-neuteured, uncaring, hospital-cool, HR sighing gauze of ‘therapy’. Before any thought, emotion, or feeling has even a moment to take shape, it’s quickly shipped off to the Appeal to Authority threshed and triple-checked against what Dr Normal and Right said. How do I feel? I’m not sure, I’ll have to ask my therapist, he deals with that.

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I rarely ‘give' advice [1], but, if you’ve found yourself in a position where you’ve got to the intellectual root of your mental issue, witness it rise time and again in your psyche, caught in a loop of guilt, shame, or fear, then perhaps the case is that you’re mentally jerking off. You’re entertaining yourself. Each time that limit memory or event arises, you get a hit, maybe not even a pleasant hit, but it’s something, right? And something is better than nothing. My advice, which I’m not really giving, is to have suffered enough, and the chances are, you haven’t suffered enough. But, I can’t put it better than the man himself:

Are you being true in your life? Really being true? To yourself?

• Are you living with someone who makes you unhappy?

• Are you keeping someone who uses you and doesn’t love you?

• Do you long for love, but are no longer vulnerable to love because you’re frightened of being hurt?

• Do you dislike or hate your job?

• Do you ache to be free?

• Are you living with a partner you don’t love and making the best of it for the sake of comfort, convenience, or the children?

• Are you putting up with whatever is depressing your joy of life because you’re afraid or scared of change?

If the answer is yes to any of these questions, you are not being true. You’re not being true. You’re not being true to yourself, to life, and even if things do change, you won’t be happy for long.

Everyone is trying to be true in their way—true to somebody, an idea of something. And it doesn’t work/ All it does is lead you to not being true to yourself. And that is unhappiness.

Why doesn’t it work? Why can’t it work? Because it is impossible to be true to anyone or anything until you are true to yourself. Then you are true to everyone and all things. And then your problems begin to disappear.

Only Fear Dies, Barry Long

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[1] People, especially those who ask for it, don't want advice; they want their existing emotional position to be validated. There are only two ways to 'give' advice: Slowly, over the course of a week/month, convince the person it was their idea. Or, find that almost imperceptible window of openness when said person hits absolute rock bottom. Pride or hell, basically.