Is Therapy Tearing Us Apart?
A patient recently came to me, telling me she was furious with a friend. What had started as an ordinary disappointment – a canceled dinner and a text message returned too late – had become something much bigger and more fraught. The friend was now “toxic.” The exchange had become a “border violation”. The injury itself had been elevated to the status of “trauma”. She had screenshots and a neat story about what the episode revealed about her friend’s pathology.
What she didn’t have was introspection. She no longer asked the most psychologically useful questions: Could it have been negligence rather than bad intent? Was the reaction intensified by other events that may have occurred? Had she contributed in any way to the conflict? The language she used in the play 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 is central to the argument of my next book, Therapeutic Nation: Too much modern therapy culture keeps people stuck, reinforcing grievances, externalizing blame, and turning everyone into the reason their lives are so miserable.
The problem starts in my own domain. For years, my profession has trained clinicians to value validation over challenge, affirmation over interpretation, and emotional fluidity in the face of the more difficult work of behavior change. What followed was the rise of a culture of grievance disguised 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 anywhere but at home. Of course it’s your boss’s fault. Of course your coworker is toxic. Of course your ex is a narcissist. Of course, the world keeps hurting you. In this softened therapeutic framework, frustration is rarely a subject to examine; it’s something to be attributed.
