Beware of bad therapy; and a book by that title
Abigail Shrier warns us in her book Bad Therapy, against the dangers of turning our children over to the “experts” that are supposed to know better than parents what is best for children. I couldn’t agree more with this warning. As parents, we have abdicated our role to the “professionals”. We think the teachers know more than us, the doctors know more than us and the therapists know more than us. In essence, we have allowed ourselves to be marginalized as our children’s parents. We’ve been told that these supposed experts know so much more than we do and that it’s in our child’s best interest if we just listen to them and let them do the heavy lifting. I found myself nodding affirmatively with so much that she had to say, much like I did in her book Irreversible Damage in which she calls out the transsexual movement for what it is… child abuse. In short, I like her. I think we agree on much. She’s witty, candid and intelligent! However, I found much of her reasoning reductionistic and misguided, and this misguidance actually matters a great deal.
Because the culture tends to vacillate between two extremes, we are greatly divided between the “good guys and bad guys.” We think everyone on the other side of aisle from us is a bad guy. So in this context, the therapists either know it all or they know nothing. Shrier seems to think therapists are definitely the bad guys and anyone who cares about their children would certainly steer clear of these professionals. Sadly, a lot of therapists see parents as the bad guys as well. But as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, “The battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.” We should be slow to surmise that the “other side” is always the enemy and/or full of fallacy.
She seems to think the other side is so potentially dangerous that unless you are having a truly psychotic breakdown you should avoid seeking help from a therapist. This is equivalent to her writing a book entitled Bad Christianity where she examines all the craziest professing Christians. You know… the ones who fake healings on stage, swindle people out of their money, sexually abuse women in their church, declare they know exactly when Jesus is coming back, cover up years of child molestation, etc. Then she tries to convince you that this is just what Christianity does. So unless you literally need an exorcism, you should probably avoid ever stepping foot in a church since the potential for harm, or as she likes to say, itrogenesis, is so great.
I agree that the therapeutic era has gone too far. We have taken a good thing (emotional health and wellness) and turned it into an all encompassing idol that is now hurting a great deal of society. We rightly noticed a problem but we over corrected. This is what happens when you don’t have good guard rails in place. The guard rails are essential but tricky because as a society we no longer agree on what those are. We have never totally agreed but we now find ourselves in a place where stark contrasts of moral ideals are competing. So how did we get here and where did it start? Shrier seems to think the problem lies in the world of therapy. I can’t disagree that psychology got its start on a secular foot and has been moving in that direction ever since. Of course it has. That’s what secularism does in all arenas. There is no absolute truth (guard rails) but only a relative truth guided by the consensus of the current culture. Psychology, just like medicine, education, media, etc. takes its cues from the culture and is governed by the consensus there. As one of my favorite cultural commentators, John Stonestreet says, “Politics is downstream from culture.” In other words, as culture goes so will our politics, education, medicine, media. Consider the LGBTQ+ issues we face today. No doctor or therapist 20 years ago would have thought it necessary to ask for someone’s preferred pronouns. That wasn’t even a phrase in our vernacular. So how did we get here? Is “therapy” really ruining our children (culture) or are the therapists simply taking their cues from the culture like every other industry? If we follow her advice to stay away from therapy, we would also need to stay away from medicine, schooling, media, religion, etc. I actually think that what she is describing is a disease that has infiltrated all these systems. These therapists she accuses of indoctrinating our children with terrible ideas are just giving the people what they want. But she is right… this is definitely a problem. So how do we untangle the web that has been weaved into the current climate in which we find ourselves? This is unfortunately where the book falls terribly short. Shier has no good ideas for how things should be besides romanticizing the past with a her very humanistic worldview. She seems to think a knee-jerk reaction is in order. Get back to the “good ole days” as if there were ever really such a thing since the fall of mankind.
Is swinging the pendulum back to a time when everyone picked themselves up by their own boot straps and never admitted weakness or vulnerability really what we need? If “trauma” has become a household word, does that mean we cut it from our vocabulary? Should we go back to a time when children were seen and not heard, or when they swept chimneys and sidewalks? Afterall, her own grandmother had a horrific childhood and she turned out just fine, probably healthier than most according to Shrier. She comments that when she was growing up she and her brother were seldom, if at all, consulted about their feelings as if this is something to be proud of. She speaks with not so subtle an undertone throughout the book that feelings are silly, unreliable and mostly something we just have to put up with and get over while we pursue a more tangible life of personal achievement. I can’t help but think that while she is pushing back on some of the most exaggerated and ridiculous forms that the therapeutic field can take, she places very low value on emotional/ spiritual health altogether and hardly thinks that we need professionals in this field at all. So while I agree with her concerns about the former, I couldn’t disagree more with the later. The problem goes back to a more foundational and fundamental element. Who has God called and privileged to cultivate and curate creation? Only those with the correct theological cosmology and anthropology can hope to understand the workings of the mind, body and spirit that were created in the image of God. Shrier entitled her book Bad Therapy but she never distinguishes it from “good therapy” because as the book makes clear, she doesn’t really think there is such a thing.
She does give a few kudos to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) which is apparently the only treatment modality she believes to have any credence. Most of the professional therapists she interviewed to add credibility to her theory are from this school of thought. This is not surprising because it relies heavily on thoughts/beliefs which can easily be corrected with the “proper education.” This theory treats humans more like computers that just need the right input of data so that we get the right output of behavior. This is one of the most concerning parts of the book. As CBT certainly has its place in the field of psychology, it is far from being a sufficient way of thinking about and treating the whole person. Protestants tend to lean more heavily toward this line of thinking because it gives us a sense of control. If we are just “brains on a stick” as J.K. Smith says in his wonderful book, You are What You Love, then all we have to do is make sure we believe the right things and we will be fine. But obviously we aren’t fine because most of us struggle with practicing what we say we believe on a daily basis. Contrary to popular belief, feelings actually precede thoughts. We feel long before we have language and can articulate what we think. Infants feel safe or unsafe, secure or insecure, full or hungry long before they can tell you these things. Just investigate the research of orphans that have never been touched, held or soothed and how they subsiquently develop.
Shrier weaves so much personal opinion in with a little said research and a heavy dose of sarcasm. She is, after all, an opinion columnist. She makes us laugh with her satire and mixes this in with just enough half truths to be dangerous. While reading I often would find myself nodding in agreement only to be biting my lip in utter horror the next paragraph down. Chapter three and six were probably the worst examples of true journalism. Every professional she quoted happened to agree with her obviously biased opinion. She never seemed to interview any of the scores of respected professionals in our field that would disagree. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis reminds us that the devil likes to confuse us by sending out lies wrapped with just enough truth to pull us in. In that case, half truths can sometimes be worse than whole lies. Ray Ortland says it this way, “Left to ourselves, we will get it partly wrong, but we won’t feel wrong because we’ll be partly right. But only partly.” It turns out that being partly wrong can be a big problem. We cannot afford to have phrases like “trauma informed”, “family of origin issues” or “family dynamics” become fighting words. Properly understood (emphasis on properly) these phrases should not be troublesome. As believers we need to be listening to other believers that have been doing this work and are worthy of our trust. Many professionals like myself have spent their careers diligently studying how our emotional health develops and how it suffers, in an effort to truly help and not harm. She disrespects us with her ignorance, arrogance, and condescension.
My biggest concern about this book is the number of Christians I have heard raving about it. We are not her target audience! The ones who could benefit from the warnings found in Bad Therapy are sadly not the ones reading it. My fear is that those who are reading it, and soaking in its ideas, are perhaps looking for a reason to dismiss therapy and move back to a mentality that says repentance is all you need. Protestants in general don’t need much help in denying emotional issues. For too long we have been little more than practicing gnostics with our radical separation between the spiritual and the physical. No mind-body connection here… that might mean the body could keep a score. And that just sounds hokey and mysterious, so that can’t be right. Just give me the facts please, preferably ones that I can memorize, recite and use as a weapon against any emotional discomfort. See, I can do sarcasm too.
Shrier sounds an alarm on a major problem in our culture. I’ll give her that. There is a major problem with the over medication of children and the hyper focus on personal pleasure. But problems need solutions and as I said before, that is where she comes up painfully short. In all the bath water that she throws out, there is a baby that needs to be protected and cultivated by the church. I’m actually disappointed that this book was written by someone without the correct worldview to fully understand the problems she is raging against. The opposite of bad therapy isn’t “no therapy” but rather good therapy.
The church should have taken the lead on exploring the emotional development of humans based on a theological anthropology but sadly we abdicated our responsibility to the secular community assuming psychology to be a pseudo field of study. So it’s not surprising that things are in the shape they are in. It’s past time that we reclaimed all the domains that God gave us to cultivate. My fear is that for some, reading books like this furthers a truly false dichotomy which should not exist. As Balswick, King and Reimer state in the second edition of their book The Reciprocating Self (now there’s a book worth reading), “A Christian theological anthropology provides a worldview in which psychological theory can be critically engaged and shaped. Psychology alone does not have the epistemological tools to address issues of teleology.” But the church does if we will learn to use these tools. For too long we have relied on simplistic tools that are necessary but not sufficient for real, lasting, holistic growth.
If you really are interested in why the kids aren’t growing up, there are much better books out there. The Coddling of the American Mind by Lukianoff and Haidt, The Anxious Generation by Haidt, and Ten ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child by Anthony Esolen are just a few that I found to be very enlightening.