Questioning Therapy’s Premise

We have a saying in the therapeutic community: before you diagnose someone with depression, make sure they’re not surrounded by assholes. Pretty much everything we call mental health problems are actually very reasonable responses to hell. And that hell typically has one throughline: capitalism. Our entire economic infrastructure kneels at the altar of the almighty dollar, and because it’s the water we swim in, like Dory in Finding Nemo, we just keep swimming.

I hear from parents who – in the aftermath of a stabbing and lockdown at one of their kids’ schools – agonize about whether to homeschool. Clients in leadership roles at work recount pouring over spreadsheets to determine which teammates to layoff in the latest downsizing and suffering backlash from above when they covertly alert people to begin to circulate their resumes. People experiencing infertility hear from their family that they need to pray harder. College students addicted to their phones sometimes surface long enough to schedule a therapy session and then sink right back into the cybervoid. An adult child caretaking a parent who is disappearing into dementia. A 30-something who is accompanying a partner to treatment for brain surgery.

The list is endless, and it crushes my heart. There’s a seemingly endless parade of people who show up to therapy with wounds and a profound sense of loneliness and isolation. Of course, all of these people have family and friends and colleagues and neighbors and faith communities – people standing at the ready to offer solace, do laundry, and mirror common humanity back to those who are struggling. Yet, when we’re struggling, we almost instinctively turn inward rather than ask for help. Suffering in silence feels easier than risking rejection or judgment when we’re raw.

Okay, maybe capitalism isn’t wholly to blame. There’s the hard wiring of our nervous systems to scan for threats and fixate on false positives. The easy dopamine hits that stem from social media likes and Snickers bars, and then change our dopamine baseline so that we’re constantly chasing another hit. Fake news and manipulation of digital algorithms that supercharge our schisms and threat centers in our brains. Wait – all of that can actually be traced back to capitalism. So: capitalism it is.

But the point I’m making here isn’t that we need to topple our economic infrastructure (although that won’t hurt). It’s that we need to stop trying to fix ourselves like we’re broken when it’s the system that’s broken.

Almost universally, people indicate two things on their intake forms for therapy: overwhelm and irritation. Amen to that. That doesn’t mean you’re broken. It means you’re paying attention.

Like the small town community members who visit their general practitioner with chronic migraines and digestive ailments, the cure to our collective mental illness comes in addressing the factory upstream that’s pumping toxic sludge into the town’s water supply, not in dispensing more pills and chemotherapy treatments. And yes, I’m the equivalent of the GP here, a therapist who hears the same threads over and over and again and is ready to set up a picket line at the factory upstream.

Here’s a quote from Carl Jung: Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge. What he didn’t say is that most of the judging ultimately becomes self-judgment and that turns into a very, very subtle form of internal violence, of wishing we were different and perpetually questing to re-invent ourselves.

So, instead of doubling down on sacrificing more and giving up more of ourselves to fit inside a broken system and then berating ourselves for not having the discipline to stay inside the allocated tiny space, it’s time to call the box what it is: fucked up. It’s fucked up that we live in a society where we’re afraid to send our children to school. It’s fucked up that we’re expected to do more with less at work and then scramble to find sanctuary within an economic system that will always squeeze us for more, more, more. It’s fucked up to expect ourselves to be stalwart when people we love are slowly disappearing, are in physical and emotional pain, or lost to us. That calls for coming apart, not marching forward. It's fucked up to think that we just have to get ourselves together and set better boundaries around our tech use when an entire army of engineers is paid extremely well to seize our attention and choke more money out of us.

Here’s your prescription: yes to therapy, not to fix yourself but to immerse yourself in the sweet bath of focused and loving attention for an hour. Yes to co-regulation with grounded people, with Mother Earth, with cherished pets. Yes to pausing and re-orienting. And yes to naming at the collective level the toxic sludge that’s contaminating our drinking water. Yes to rebuilding our political infrastructure (hello, Ranked Choice Voting) and our economic world (hello, B corporations!).

Instead of hustling, doubling down, fixing, striving, going on a quest to find the missing piece of our own discipline, maybe it’s time to rest and replenish and nourish and treat our bodies like they’re the sacred terrain that they are. Instead of scrolling until we find just the right meme, clamoring to find a cure for ailments that are simply very reasonable and fitting responses to the chaos and friction and ridiculous emphases on things that simply don’t matter, how about we listen to our own hearts and then share what’s in them with people we trust?

And because we all need more people to love and to trust, believe that people want just what you want. Here’s a guarantee that I’ll make: everyone you meet wants more honest and deep connection. So cultivate that, and we’ll all be better off. You have your marching orders. Fan out. We got this.