The end of therapy stigma
“Have you been single lately? Online dating has become a strange kind of matchmaking based on trauma and disorder compatibility.”
This from a female acquaintance who finally gave up on finding a mate through shared therapy stories and resorted to the old-fashioned approach of seeking shared interests beyond wound collecting. I’m happy to say she’s now dating quite a nice fellow who enjoys walks on the beach and sharing laughter more than confessing his self-doubt and itemizing the ways he feels anxious.
Apparently it’s not much different for men. My male friend has numerous stories of women’s dating profiles, and actual conversations, first conversations mind you, that are focused entirely upon “the work” they have done on themselves, plus a handy checklist of requirements for any potential partner: must tend to your inner child, be integrating your shadow, meet with a conscious men’s group, know your attachment wound and style and be actively working on it, journal daily, do breath work, know your personality type and astrological sign (bonus points if you know your full chart), commit to daily intimacy practices, heal your mother wound, use psychedelics in a therapeutic setting at least twice a year, and be committed to a lifelong healing journey.
And this is just the world of dating.
Before I cancelled my social media accounts last year, I was subject to a constant stream of ads for therapy apps making broad and sometimes bizarre claims about connections between trauma, ADHD, procrastination, relationship conflict, anxiety, and, of course, belly fat. Most of them included some kind of questionnaire to determine your “trauma type”. They seemed a lot like those sensationalized quizzes that used to be in magazines at the checkout line, “What kind of lover were you in a past life?”
Meanwhile, hardcore rappers are referencing therapy in their songs. TV and movie producers are scrambling to portray trauma-informed characters and dialogue, and school-age kids are openly speculating with each other about what kind of diagnosis might be on their horizon.
All of this points to one conclusion. Any social stigma attached to therapy has been absolutely, completely, thoroughly erased. When the baddest-assed rapper on the block is spitting therapy verses, we can be sure the stigma is gone.
The opposite effect has actually been achieved, and quite quickly. Not only is there no shame in therapy anymore (a good thing, obviously) there is now status and even virtue in it, and this has created a monster.
The spread of therapy culture
To understand what I am about to say, you must understand that therapy has spilled into something much, much bigger than something you do for one hour each week with your therapist. Therapy has become a mindset, and as this mindset has spread among individuals, it has morphed into a bona fide culture.
Therapy culture comes with its own rituals and rites, its own language, rules, and hierarchies. Importantly, in therapy culture it is taboo to thrive too much, or for too long. Brief forays into ecstasy are permitted, but a predictable, cyclical fall must follow.
The bonds made between people in therapy culture are based on wounding and struggle, and on validating one another’s wounds and struggles, even seeing them as “sacred”. Gaining full membership in therapy culture hinges upon your ability to express a full range of emotional upheaval and chaos; this is viewed as being authentic and vulnerable, two of the most cherished qualities in this social arena.
I have been at workshops and retreats where participants are encouraged to “break themselves open”, allowing their grief, their doubt, their disappointment, their rage to spill forth and be witnessed. Some people at these retreats, I discovered, have been coming and doing these rituals of personal catharsis and collective bonding for twenty or thirty years or more, with no observable improvement other than perhaps in performative flair.
It is not uncommon to hear it proclaimed that this work – this healing work, this trauma work, this integration work, grief work, shadow work… there are many names for “the work” – is never over, is never done, and is not only endless for those living today, but has been passed along and will continue to be passed along from generation to generation. I am not making this up. This a strongly felt and clearly articulated belief in the culture.
At these same workshops and retreats, which perfectly reflect the therapy culture I am talking about, anyone who does not participate enthusiastically in the rites and rituals of emotional purging, or who offers or embodies something different, like an easy-going joy or optimism for example, is visibly ignored, condemned or marginalized by the group and labelled as armored or shut-down or avoidant, or accused of spiritual by-passing or being in denial or disconnected from their feelings. Those who suffer most loudly and convincingly are given the most attention and receive the highest status.
These intentionally designed immersive experiences provide a rather extreme example of the therapy mindset and therapy culture, but we also find the same basic intrapersonal and interpersonal dynamics, perspectives, values, and practices in everyday life in chatrooms, support groups, coffee shops, workplaces, schools, politics, and, apparently, dating sites.
Too much of a good thing
How did we get here? How did a fascination with struggle and unwellness capture the hearts and minds of so many, so fast?
It’s a simple answer: too much of a good thing, taken too far.
Doing therapy, for many people, is the introduction to a rich inner world of feeling. Formerly suppressed, repressed, denied, minimized, or ignored emotions are brought out of the “shadow” and into awareness. With a shock equal parts ecstasy and agony, comes the revelation: “I can feel!”
For some, this is only the beginning. A person comes to therapy with an issue or a problem, and like Jacques Cousteau they become enchanted by a fascinating colorful world, previously hidden but always there beneath the surface.
The world of feeling is visceral, vast and varied. Once it is uncovered, there is a desire to find others who are also exploring it. Stories are shared, bonds are made, communities built, and out of this, a culture is born.
Because therapy is the context from which the inner world of feeling has been discovered, and because problems and “issues” are the primary material of therapy, the inner world of emotion becomes associated with ongoing struggle.
To maintain the depth of inner experience and collective bonding that is desired, ever more traumas, doubts, conflicts and turmoil must be forever excavated. Today’s therapy culture has created for itself an infinite trauma-verse, where members have instant access to a never-ending stream of potential triggers and transformations.
All of this can bring great satisfaction, at least for a time. The intensity and exhilaration of touching raw emotional nerves, the sense of acceptance as painful experiences are validated by others; this is powerful stuff and it has become many people’s idea of intimacy. Therapy culture provides, like any culture does, a sense of purpose, of identity, of coherence and belonging. It’s no wonder that people get a taste of that and want more.
Feeling good about feeling bad
But ultimately therapy culture can only help you feel good about feeling bad. It gives you company and validation in your grievance and your grief. Therapy culture cannot deal in straight up joy, because it is fundamentally mired in dilemma and ambivalence, reflecting the origins of modern psychotherapy. Freud and Jung were both committed to a fascination with the conflicting, often sado-masochistic, instincts and desires of human beings, and, at least in Jung’s case, to using these “oppositional forces” to facilitate some kind of “alchemy” or growth for the individual and the collective.
Today’s therapy culture has taken this premise to the extreme, and embellished it with all sorts of newer trauma and attachment models. Intersectional theory, social justice, climate grief and eco-anxiety are the latest additions. Endless dilemmas, wounds, and wrong-doings are conjured in order to provide some coherent sense of connection, understanding, poignancy, and meaning.
No end to the healing, no bottom to the wound
It’s true that a healing journey may never end because there is no end, no bottom to the doubt and struggle, the dilemma and ambivalence, the painful memories and imagining that you might repeatedly choose to activate in yourself. There is no resolution if you do not actually seek resolution, or believe that resolution is possible, or for that matter, that resolution is desirable. After all, if you were actually healed, what would you talk about?
You can always find another pain-point, another dissatisfaction, another conflict or unwanted experience. The trauma-verse is indeed infinite and endless, and while any actual therapist worth their salt seeks to help their clients find some kind of resolution or relief, therapy culture has run amok with an unchecked appetite for emotional difficulty and problematizing.
Adventures beyond the trauma-verse
But all of this is optional. Trauma and wounding do not offer a full and accurate picture of the world or of human history and life. It’s been said that we do not see the world as it is, but as we are. A vision of a wounded world in need of healing is not a vision of the world itself, it’s a vision of the perceiver, and perception is, mercifully, subject to change and growth.
I worked as a therapist for over ten years, and one day I made an incredible discovery with one of my clients, a discovery that sent both of us on a new trajectory.
We had been working on an endless litany of problems and issues: family conflicts, procrastination, uncertainty about where to live, interpersonal frictions and misunderstandings… pretty common stuff, all framed within the search for some hidden causality lurking in the shadows, needing to be discovered and sufficiently understood, integrated, processed, or healed.
Our approach was firmly rooted in a therapy mindset, which is appropriate after all when you’re doing therapy!
And then I got a bolt of clarity. In a moment I knew: there was nothing wrong with this person. They were just figuring out what they wanted next, and at some level they believed they should already know the answer, so they were making it hard on themselves. There was no mystery to solve from their childhood or psyche that would unlock some special understanding or integration or healing. And no amount of emotional processing or inquiry, no matter how skillful or compassionate, was ever going to deliver real satisfaction because it would not touch the deeper desire emerging, which was simply to feel good unconditionally.
I could see in a flash that if this person just let themselves be, and stopped poking at sore spots, things would get clearer, life would get easier and more enjoyable, and the next step would always reveal itself in good time. Of course, I might be out of a job if I took this insight too far, but what the hell, I would find something else to do (I actually did).
I acted on my intuition and started asking new questions:
Are you ready to give up on finding the source of your unhappiness? Will you entertain the idea that there is nothing wrong with you?
And this one:
What if you just trusted your desire to feel good and let that guide you in each and every moment?
Boom. That was it. I could feel the shift.
My client had done hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of therapy with a variety of therapists. She was fully immersed in therapy culture, doing workshops on trauma, inner child work, authentic communication, grief, and every kind of popular method and model you can imagine. In some ways she knew my field better than I did!
And yet all that knowledge, all that work, all that processing and learning, while providing some good and satisfying experiences, did not ultimately hit the mark because it all unwittingly reinforced the message “There’s something wrong with me.”
When this person decided to accept my invitation and trust their desire to feel good and let that desire guide them, everything changed, and far from our work together being over, we both realized that a new chapter had begun. Years later, she still does sessions with me.
Beyond therapy and into thriving
That day both my client and I evolved beyond therapy and into thriving. That was in 2021, and I have made enormous discoveries and refinements to my methods and my understanding on a daily basis ever since. In short, I no longer help people heal, I help them thrive. And it turns out, both are never-ending journeys. One is just a lot more fun than the other.
As I re-imagined and reshaped my therapy practice to reflect my discoveries, I quickly realized that you can’t be focused upon healing and upon thriving at the same time. You have to choose. Each comes with its own unique mindset, and they are distinct and exclusive to one another.
Personal growth follows a basic three step trajectory. It’s worth explaining because it’s worth understanding. See if you can identify where you are in these three stages:
First, there’s emotional suppression. At this stage you rely mostly on thinking and doing to sustain you. Feelings are not very welcome or useful to you, and they might even seem like a nuisance. Remember Tony Soprano from the HBO series?
Then there’s emotional expression. At this stage, you’ve discovered your feelings and you embrace them. You’re always exploring new depths of feeling, and you don’t judge any feelings to be better or worse than any other feelings. All feelings are welcome. Therapy and therapy culture are products and promoters of this stage.
The third stage is emotional discretion. At this stage you are far beyond emotional repression. You are comfortable with a full range of emotional expression, but you have also developed preferences about which feelings you want to experience, and you have discovered that you have creative power in determining your own emotional experience.
Emotional suppression, emotional expression, emotional discretion: three stages of personal development, each building upon the former.
The client I was talking about had reached the limits of the emotional expression stage, and frankly so had I. We’d outgrown it, squeezed every last bit of satisfaction out of it. Together we chose to move forward, and in our move forward we discovered emotional discretion. We both had clarity about how we wanted to feel, and we were ready to trust this clarity and begin self-aligning with it.
In truth, I was a bit farther along this path than she was, and so I was able to offer some guidance and mentorship from a place of experience, but it’s also true that my most potent discoveries and developments come from my conversations with clients, and I’m always working with clients right at my own personal leading edge because this is where liveliness and exhilaration are found.
By the way, you can listen to this client describe her experience of working with me in her own words on my website here.
Moving into thriving
The move from a therapy mindset to a thriving mindset is a developmental move from the emotional expression stage to the emotional discretion stage. It marks the discovery of preference and of choice.
Personal growth is always characterized by an increase in choice, because growth means expansion, and part of what is expanding is perspective. An expanded perspective results in greater choice. This is self-empowerment defined, and it is the beginning of thriving.
To thrive means to fully befriend your desire to feel good, and to let this desire guide you in each moment. Consider the implications: if you were to really do this, you would have to change how you think about yourself, how you feel about yourself, and, of course, how you behave in the world and create your life.
None of this happens overnight, but there is a noticeable tipping point, a single moment when you decide “I want to feel good. I deserve to feel good. I am capable of creating a life experience that feels good.”
If this sounds selfish, you’re right. Thriving is selfish in the best possible way. You can only choose thriving for yourself, not for anyone else. You can invite and encourage others to thrive, as I am doing here with you, but you actually have no real power in this regard. Also, your refusal or reluctance to thrive helps no one, ever.
If you choose thriving it’s because you decide that feeling good matters to you, and that it matters more than all the obstacles to thriving that you’ve inadvertently placed in your way along the course of your life.
When you stick with your desire to feel good, and you let it guide you in each moment, you discover something surprising: everything that you want is for the same reason. You want it because you believe it will make you feel good. You want this and you want that, and all of it in the hopes of an emotional reward. This is a wonderful and illuminating discovery, and it will take you on a very satisfying journey if you let it.
Describing the details of this would be too much for this short introduction, and besides, they’re for you to discover for yourself first-hand.
I’m sharing all of this with you because I want to invite you to begin thriving. I’ve been on my own journey of thriving and have been leading others on it for a few years, and I can you tell you, it’s a magnificent adventure.
Wherever you seek your satisfaction is absolutely fine. It’s actually finding it that matters most. If you’re finding your bliss in the ouroboros of the wound and its healing, then by all means continue with all my blessings and encouragement. If this ever gives way to a new desire that matches my description of thriving, you have in your hands, in my words here, a bridge, and I’m so happy to be able to provide it.
I’ll leave you with these closing thoughts:
Thriving is often seen as a physical state, and it is to some degree, but it starts as an inner state, as thought and feeling, energy and vibration. That’s where you cultivate the ground of thriving, not in outward behaviors or activities. Those outward expressions flow naturally and effortlessly once the inner environment is stable. Focus on your thoughts and feelings, bringing them into alignment with your desire to feel good. Get your vibe right. If you simply stop activating those old patterns of thought and feeling that lead you into doubt, they will begin to fade.
The therapy mindset encourages you to get to the bottom of those same patterns. The thriving mindset says there is no bottom; leave them alone and focus on your natural desire to feel good. If you let your desire to feel good guide you, not your trauma or pain or discontent, you will move quickly into the leading edge of your growth. It feels so good.
The evolution from a therapy mindset to a thriving mindset is often made first in solitude, but it need not feel lonely. This is a time to connect with your essential self more deeply than ever before. Your essence is not emotional turmoil, it is emotional clarity and discernment.
Make a practice of actively appreciating and enjoying your emotional clarity and discernment. This can be as simple as speaking kindly to yourself: “I love feeling my clarity about wanting to feel good. I enjoy feeling good for no reason at all. I love knowing that I deserve to feel good, and that my capacity for joy grows as I grow.”
This is a solo journey because you cannot bring anyone who is not ready, and if you have been firmly embedded in the therapy mindset and culture, most of your friends probably are as well. Don’t try to convince anyone else to thrive. First you must actually embody the qualities of thriving, aligning the desire to feel good with the belief that you deserve to feel good, and that you are capable of creating a life experience that feels good. Once this is stable in you, you become a living expression of it, and you will naturally bring it forth in others. This is an organic process, don’t try to force it or rush it.
All of this is the tiniest snapshot of an idea so big I could fill many books. Please use whatever is resonant and useful, and put anything else aside, especially if it activates resistance in you. Make it easy for yourself. The therapy mindset is about hard work and struggle; thriving celebrates the natural ease that comes with recognizing and embracing who you really are.
One more thing, if you know someone who might benefit from reading these words, give them the gift of sharing this with them.
And of course I provide one-on-one coaching, mentoring, and consulting on this topic in a style unlike anyone else, and I serve clients worldwide.
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Interested in coaching to help you complete your healing journey and start thriving? Email justice@justiceschanfarber.com to request a client info package. Please include your country of residence. Distance sessions worldwide. Learn more: www.JusticeSchanfarber.com
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