How Therapy Culture and Socio-Emotional Learning Curriculums Can Harm Our Kids
Bad Therapy, victimhood culture, and creating "trauma" where it doesn't exist.
Hello Bar-Setters!
Abigail Shrier’s new book, Bad Therapy, is finally out and I can’t put it down!
Here is a great summary by Bari Weiss:
(Bad Therapy) makes the case that the advent of therapy culture, the rise of “gentle parenting,” and the spread of “social-emotional learning” in schools is actually causing much of the anxiety and depression faced by today’s youth.
This is a primary theme in my book, Setting the Bar. But it goes a long way to have a journalist of Shrier’s stature making the argument, and boy does she make it well! (Check out this excerpt and this phenomenal conversation to see what I mean).
Is it Trauma or Discomfort? Social Phobia or Shyness?
For years, our schools and mainstream society have not been so interested in the principles of psychological wellbeing as they are in diagnoses. As Bari Weiss explains in the intro to her podcast interview with Shrier:
Kids today are no longer sad, they’re depressed. They’re no longer worried, they’re anxious. They’re not going through a hard time, they’re going through “acute trauma,” or even, as many say, PTSD. This medicalization of normal human emotion has left our kids in the lurch.
Shrier makes a similar assertion in her book, as she looks at how parents have begun seeking a diagnosis to explain every weakness and challenge their kids face:
We needed our kids and everyone around them to know: our kids weren’t shy, they had “social anxiety disorder” or “social phobia.” They weren’t poorly behaved, they had oppositional defiant disorder.” They weren’t disruptive students, they had “ADHD.” It wasn’t our fault and it wasn’t theirs. We would attack and finally eliminate the stigma surrounding these diagnoses. Rates at which our children received them soared.
Shrier is careful to point out that there are those for whom therapy, diagnosis, and treatment is crucial and, potentially, lifesaving. But for a much larger majority, therapy culture is unnecessary and destructive.
What’s the Big Deal, Really?
It is common for adults to mock socio-emotional learning and the gentle, therapeutic approach that dominates youth culture. I’d imagine most adults presume we’ve gone a little too far. They may even say things like, “we’re just making the kids softer.”
But the general assumption is, oh well. So our kids talk a lot about their emotions and they are a bit sensitive. So we take our kids to therapy when the dog dies. What’s the harm?
As Shrier admits, she assumed the same, at first:
I realized something that I didn’t know myself at the time, but I came to learn. Parents had no idea that therapy for their children came with any risks at all. They assumed signing their child up for therapy could only be good.
That is what our culture teaches. How many times have you heard something to the effect of, “We could all use a little therapy”?
The problem is that when you train people to be more sensitive and to presume minor discomforts are actually traumas, those people actually come to feel more pain in each slight. As I write in my book:
The rise of safety culture, the self-esteem movement, and the subsequent demands for “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” have deluded many into believing that any painful experience leaves us irreversibly traumatized—that major hardships (however loosely defined) imbue us with an intractable pathology, which infects every future thought and action. This sentiment took purchase long ago. As psychologist, Daniel Gilbert, explains in Stumbling on Happiness:
“For at least a century, psychologists have assumed that terrible events—such as having a loved one die or becoming the victim of a violent crime—must have a powerful, devastating, and enduring impact on those who experience them…. But recent research suggests that the conventional wisdom is wrong, that the absence of grief is quite normal, and that rather than being the fragile flowers that a century of psychologists have made us out to be, most people are surprisingly resilient in the face of trauma.”
We’re adaptive beasts, whose biology anticipates inevitable hardships. And we aren’t just capable of overcoming stress, we need it. People who don’t allow themselves to face hardships don’t feel better, but are, in fact, more sensitive and more afflicted by each minor inconvenience.
Finally, this reality is getting the press it deserves. In November, I was shocked to come across this New York Times piece, which exposed the harms caused socio-emotional learning curriculums and therapy culture:
… by focusing teenagers’ attention on mental health issues, these interventions may have unwittingly exacerbated their problems. Lucy Foulkes, an Oxford psychologist, calls this phenomenon “prevalence inflation” — when greater awareness of mental illness leads people to talk of normal life struggles in terms of “symptoms” and “diagnoses.” These sorts of labels begin to dictate how people view themselves, in ways that can become self-fulfilling (bolding is mine).
Teenagers, who are still developing their identities, are especially prone to take psychological labels to heart. Instead of “I am nervous about X,” a teenager might say, “I can’t do X because I have anxiety” — a reframing that research shows undermines resilience by encouraging people to view everyday challenges as insurmountable.
Adolescents, in particular, are being programmed with a mind-virus that teaches them to pathologize every feeling and experience. They’ve learned to filter every normal human experience into a lens of trauma and disorder. More still, they are taught that it is a virtue to presume an insulting degree of fragility in each person they encounter.
These trends have been exacerbated further by social media, where conversations about mental health have been, as Freya India explains, “…cheapened, monetized, and often trivialized into TikTok trends and fashion accessories.”
Among younger generations, having a list of mental disorders has become just a normal part of trying to fit in.
Making Us Less
Therapy culture does more than just to harm mental health. It also creates an environment where people are less likely to become admirable. As I write in chapter 7 of my book:
When victimhood and safety are trump cards, the majority of individuals will, consciously or subconsciously, learn to manipulate the concerns of well-meaning people. They’ll be able to evoke sympathy that breeds learned helplessness. It is natural.
At age three, my son Ace would do this to any adult who let him. When he didn’t want to do something, he’d say he had to pee. When he didn’t want to eat something, he’d say his stomach hurt. I’d say put your shoes on and he’d walk by Grandpa with the shoes that he put on every day by himself and begin grunting and grimacing as if he couldn’t do it. He knows that Grandpa is always inclined to help.
In a youth development culture like ours, children are trained to find whatever disadvantages they face. They naturally learn to exploit well-meaning authorities. This breeds entitlement and prolonged dependency. It teaches them to hold other people responsible for their emotions and their success. And, most devastatingly for them, it creates a social apparatus that promotes socially-destructive behavior.
Our obsession with fairness and compassion often eliminates the need for our children to develop ingenuity and grit. Few things could be more harmful.
Thank you for reading and sharing!
Bad Therapy is one of three landmark books that will publish this year. I highly recommend picking it up, or at the very least, checking out this excerpt and this Shrier podcast interview. Consider this required content for any parent, educator, or conscientious citizen.
The other two landmark books are Troubled, by Rob Henderson, which came out last week, and The Anxious Generation, by Dr. Jonathan Haidt, which releases at the end of next month. I’m optimistic these might spur real change.
Carry the fire!
Shane
I am so amazed at how well you articulate the myriad of emotions I face as a parent. I have 4 teenagers and once again this morning I was inundated with yet another emotional crisis that one of my teenagers was unable to face. THANK YOU for putting words and communal support to this topic. I feel supported as a parent in the stance I am trying to maintain.