Therapy Speak
Why is the language of therapy our lingua franca?
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Are you okay, reader? No, no. I mean, are you okay? It’s okay to not be okay. Okay? Do you feel seen and feel heard? Perhaps you’ve endured a recent breakup. Was he toxic? Was she a narcissist? Did they have an anxious attachment style? Perhaps they gas-lit you? Indeed, perhaps I am gaslighting you.
Perhaps I’m projecting. But I’m asking because I care. I’m here to validate your lived experience, to expunge your generational trauma. Perhaps I could unpack that for you.
Such is the parlance of therapy speak. Asking if you’re okay is what we do now. But whom do we do it for?
Is it any of my business as to whether you are okay? If you were to reply, “No, actually, Christopher. Last night, as I came off my nightshift, I caught my wife indelibly attached to her co-worker, Brad—the one with the sleeve tattoos.” ‘Oh, well, maybe you should explore that further,’ is hardly the answer you wish to hear.
After ingesting Prince Harry’s latest troubles, that is, the poor sook works for an entire sixty minutes per week and pulls in a fair chunk, I wondered whether I too suffered from the lucrative affliction of ‘generational trauma.’ Such an ailment serves Harry rather nicely.
I’m out of luck, reader. My upbringing was more than good enough. Contrary to modern perfectionism, sane psychologists insist that one’s upbringing merely meets a minimum ‘good enough’ standard. Spoiler: your parents can do a decent, wholly imperfect job, and you’ll be fine.
The concept of ‘good enough’ parenting assumes one’s parents make the necessary effort and allow you to confront the realities of living. (This theory, once known as common sense, dissolves much of our modern therapy culture, but that’s for another essay.)
Anyway, to correct this transmitted trauma (a concept I’ve just made up) I sought to win a packet the best way I know how: gambling.
At current, my football team are playing like a platoon of asthmatic lepers. A perfect chance, then, to cash in. Specifically, I had a premonition that Nayef Aguerd, a defender of ours, would score a goal.
Fizzing with the conviction of Nostradamus, I logged into my betting app eager to wax a tenner on Aguerd to score at a handsome rating of fourteen to one. I looked at the score to find West Ham struggling at nil-nil. So far, so good. But I had to act fast. The laws of nature would suggest time was on my side. But this is West Ham, who defy all natural laws.
My gambling app asks me to ‘check in’ now. Every hour. Like I’ve just earned my 30-days-sober button from The Priory clinic and I’m at risk of falling off the wagon. There’s a mechanism to ensure I, a man in his thirties, am safe and looked after and seen and heard.
Anyway, after assuring an algorithm that I, a sentient and superior being, was okay, it was too late. Aguerd had already scored. He scotched my bet, and the winnings and the wine on which I was planning to spend the loot.
Am I okay? No. I’m bloody well not okay.
Perhaps this little cosmic irony is the epitome of our therapeutic culture. By asking me if I was okay, and whether I needed a hand in being alive, my gambling app, the nosey parker which it is, actually made me feel worse.
Since the 1990s, our culture has encouraged this emotional exhibitionism. Our founding belief, it seems, is that everything inside must be exposed to the outside lest we ‘bottle it up’ and invite emotional havoc.
Everywhere one looks is the parlance of therapy. Any state below that of bliss is a state of despair and in need of correction. A Martian observer would assume therapy to be our religion, therapists to be our priests, and therapy-speak to be our catechism. The main commandment: Thou shall always express one’s feelings.
But what has this culture achieved? After three decades, are we better off or worse?
Studies show that our culture of making sure everyone feels seen and feels heard and feels good often has the opposite effect.
Indeed, when parents and teachers lavish their children and students with unwarranted praise, the children often feel worse. Positive affirmations work only for those who already believe what they’re telling themselves. For those with lower self-esteem, such affirmations only confirm the immiserating contrast between reality and pretense.
Why? Researchers think correctly that school children, like the rest of us, aren’t stupid. We all know the difference between the said and the felt. Praising little Johnny for his ‘excellent’ cookery skills, despite the fact he routinely burns water, doesn’t convince Johnny that he is the next Marco Pierre White.
Heaven forfend, little Johnny may not be the next great cook. But what if he’s good at something else?
In our culture of flattery, that is of civilised lying, the all-too-common tragedy is that little Johnny won’t discover what he is actually good at. Our culture of playing pretend refuses the essential process of discovery and elimination lest it harms little Johnny’s self-esteem.
The real tragedy is we get backwards the notion of self-esteem. The process is internal, not external. Building healthy self-esteem relies upon developing competence. Developing competence requires regular doses of failure.
As Samuel Beckett put it: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
In his work, The Courage to Create, psychologist Rollo May discovered the corrosive link between the spoken and the unspoken.
In a study of abandoned young women, May found the working-class women who were explicitly abandoned (that is, their parents told them they were unwanted and booted them out on the street) fared much better than their middle-class counterparts whose parents rejected them but pretended to love them.
“The proletarian mothers rejected their children, but they never made any bones about it. The children knew they were rejected; they went out on the streets and found other companions. There was never any subterfuge about their situation. They knew their world—bad or good—and could orient themselves to it.”
May said the original source of anxiety was not the mother’s rejection, but the rejection that is lied about.
As May had it, much anxiety stems from not knowing the world you’re in and therefore lacking the skills necessary to navigate your own existence.
For the middle-class girls, such anxiety stemmed largely from the remorseless contrast between the said and the felt.
After decades of this therapeutic culture, why are we no better off than before?
Is it because—deep down—we know so much of what we tell each other and ourselves just isn’t true? Perish the thought.
Positive affirmations also work for dogs.
This is a fine delivery of the bad news. Plus, I share your belief in the 'good enough' standard, whose corollary is 'better than you'd get on the street' standard, which is just above, "Don't let the door hit you in the ass." :)