Progressive “therapy”
I wrote a post yesterday about the preponderance of “woke” therapists, and today at Instapundit I see a piece with a link to this article in Commentary about social justice couples therapy.
Of course.
The Commentary piece refers to this article in The New York Times Magazine that quotes a clinical psychologist and professor named Orna Guralnik:
“In my practice, I’ve found that engaging with these progressive movements has led to deep changes in our psyches,” she writes. “My patients, regardless of political affiliation, are incorporating the messages of social movements into the very structure of their being.”
Oh, we on the right have incorporated knowledge of these messages into our being, all right. We just reject them because we find them pernicious and destructive.
She adds:
“Coming to see the working of implicit biases on us, grasping that our views are contingent on, let’s say, our gender, class background or skin color, is a humbling lesson,” she writes. “It pushes us beyond assuming sameness, opening up the possibility of seeing our partner’s point of view.”…
Then there’s the mixed-race couple, James and Michelle, who came to Guralnik because they were fighting during the pandemic. She writes, “Her husband wasn’t consciously aware that whiteness was a perspective that was constricting what he could imagine or comprehend.” Fear not. His thinking was corrected. “Engaging with the question of systemic racism did not polarize Michelle and James but rather helped them do the important psychological work that I doubt I, as their therapist, could have inspired in them on my own.”
Being a therapist is hard, and working with couples is really really stressful and often unrewarding. How nice to have a slogan-filled political solution that some of your clients will buy, especially if they live in a blue city or state. It will make your life as a therapist easier. But as the author of the Commentary piece points out, that’s not therapy, that’s DEI training.
To give a little background, though, therapists have often come to the field with frameworks through which they view the world, and some of those ideas inform their work with clients. There are many many different approaches to therapy, some more touchy-feely-warm, some sterner attempts to emphasize “reality-based” thinking in their clients, some far-out, some psychoanalytic and Freudian (not at all popular these days, but which had its heyday), some what’s called “solution-focused.” When I was in family therapy school I had to write a lengthy paper – really, a thesis – on my own approach to clients and my own theory about how people change. Politics had nothing to do with it, but obviously we all choose approaches with which we are comfortable for a variety of reasons, and no one is immune to biases of various kinds.
My own approach was rather eclectic. Maybe some day I’ll dig the paper out of my ancient files and offer a few quotes from it.
Guralnik is a fraud, like many “therapists”. She uses her “therapy” as a Leftist indoctrination, as so many of her ilk also do.
There are things licensed professionals do which should, by law, be placed outside the boundary of ‘medical care’ and excluded from the services covered by compliant medical insurance. That includes psychiatric supervision (and associated pharmacology) for aught but schizophrenics, dements, and a few others; talking cures of any kind, plastic and dematologic surgery for anything but the removal of growths and the repair of injuries, cosmetic dentistry apart from orthodontics, eyeglass frames, contact lenses, ‘gender affirmation’, and abortion [!]. People who want these services pay out of pocket where they’re even legal.
James should have fled from Michelle. He has an unhappy life ahead of him, otherwise.
I don’t think I’m unusual. I seem quite self-centered in that I think of myself a lot, and many of my waking hours are dedicated to thinking about me, myself and I. Yet I’m often astounded at how much navel gazing some people do.
Neither my wife nor I would accept or tolerate this type of talk from the other. There’s work to do, bills to pay, children to indoctrinate ( 😉 )… Where do these people find time to create additional, irrelevant drama to focus on?
ABOVE
The very definition of “First World” problems.
Lost sheep, blindly turning to secular Elmer Gantrys for salvation.
I see that no one has yet mentioned the Jungian school of therapy. There were a number of Jungian therapists in the Northeast during my early years of grad school– I expect that happened because Jung’s system (if one can call it that) was congenial to people caught up in the New Age movement of the 1970s. I had a friend back then who made weekly trips to NYC for therapy with a Jungian analyst, and from what I could glean from the friend’s reports, Jung’s ideas are nonsense on stilts. So I decided to read through a few volumes of Jung’s works as published in English by the Bollingen Foundation, and saw no reason to change my opinion of the man. A full-length biography of Jung confirmed my impression of him as a troubled man who did real harm to many of his patients; he had sex with some of them, and encouraged married couples to practice spouse-swapping, among other things.
I then came across Philip Rieff’s 1966 book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud, in which Rieff (a sociologist, not a psychologist or psychiatrist) dissected the growing influence of the therapeutic mindset in general on the high culture of the West. He tackled Wilhelm Reich and D.H. Lawrence as well as Freud and Jung in the book, and his takedown of Jung is the best short treatment of the man that I’ve come across. The book was republished in 1987, and again following Rieff’s death in 2006. The 2006 edition includes two essays by other writers on the significance of Rieff’s work. In general, Rieff attributed the widespread contemporary abandonment of traditional notions of self-control and moral standards to the relaxed attitudes and permissiveness encouraged by most therapists. Even though Triumph of the Therapeutic is an older book, it still has much to say to anyone concerned about the current relationship between psychotherapy and progressive politics.
Interesting side note: Rieff was married to Susan Sontag for eight years in the 1950s; his child with Sontag was born in 1952.
Triumph of the Therapeutic is one of the most important books of the latter 20th century. I consider it essential for an understanding of what is currently happening in our culture. Well, if you can understand it–it’s not an easy read, to put it mildly. Rieff was brilliant and prophetic in recognizing and diagnosing it long before it became the cluster of pathologies which it has become. If I may:
https://www.lightondarkwater.com/2022/08/rieff-was-right.html
However, one may imagine situations where a political analysis of a psychological problem might be useful.
Say, if one were a real black slave who, hypothetically, consulted a therapist about feelings of anger and depression.
Or a concentration camp guard with feelings of sadness and depression.
Or, perhaps, closer to home, conservatives with feelings of sadness, anger and depression about America’s decline and its real effects on their lives.
I don’t mean to be contrarian here. I’m happy to grant that most people’s problems don’t reduce and shouldn’t be reduced to politics.
Then there’s also the issue that some political analyses are more useful than others.
I was pretty screwed-up by the time I was shopping for therapists and therapeutic approaches.
For me, then, talking to a standard counselor, therapist, psychiatrist, religious advisor was out of the question — I had seen enough of those people — and I doubt would have helped unless I was very lucky.
So, I headed off into less orthodox approaches. That could have gone badly too.
Fortunately, I was attracted to “tough love” approaches — Gestalt Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and wildly dissimilar cult teachers like Ayn Rand, Stephen Gaskin, Werner Erhard and Tony Robbins — emphasizing personal responsibility.
That’s still the bedrock for me. And why I find the the Woke approach, in which everything reduces to identity and victimization, to be not just wrong, but crippling.
I should that anyone seriously trying to examine what was going wrong in his interactions with others, or why his life was deeply unsatisfying, might have to consider any number of issues that might be called “woke” if “woke” hadn’t become so cookie-cutter, so manipulative, and so authoritarian. Clearly an interracial couple would do well to try to have some empathy with each other’s different experiences, just as a husband would do well to take his wife’s childhood abuse into account in trying to understand her, or a wife should be aware of her husband’s tendency to overreact to loss because she knows his whole family was killed by terrorists when he was 12 years old. They can very well get on with this without labeling each other oppressors and shouting slogans in the home.
People have experiences, some awful. They also have duties to behave well, even if behaving well in some contexts is especially difficult for them because of past trauma.
I have worked with five therapists. Three of them helped me by sitting and listening to me pour out my grief over our son’s death. They were listeners who only offered suggestions for my grieving process. All three were men. They helped me by listening to things no one else wanted to hear.
The fourth therapist I worked with held group therapy sessions for couples. My wife and I were coming back together after a separation that was primarily fomented by our grief and the different ways we processed it. Again, this therapist was a facilitator who mostly listened and offered suggestions. Group therapy’s value lies in hearing other people talk about their issues and realizing that relationship difficulties are not unusual or rare. Listening to others talk often led me to insights about my own issues.
One night, I made a breakthrough. I had been cramming down a lot of anger for years related to the way we had abandoned the South Vietnamese when my friends had died there. The futility of their sacrifices had really cranked my chain. Something set me off. I don’t remember what. I went into a rant about the unfairness of life, how awful it was that good men died young and left their grieving families, and how duplicitous politicians could be, etc. etc. I got pretty heated, and after ten minutes of ranting, I shut up and looked around the room. It was stone cold quiet. A couple of thew wives were sobbing. We sat there for some time before anyone spoke. Then our therapist said words to the effect that we had just witnessed a breakthrough.
That knight she referred me to a therapist who specialized in anger management. He was the man who helped me bring all the stifled anger out through specialized sessions in a padded, sound proofed room. He guided me, I did the work. I learned how to get in touch with my anger, to express it safely, and to work it out of my system. That was 37 years ago. I still use what I learned from that therapist today.
Maybe I’m a psycho, but I needed help, and fortunately I found it. So, I’m a believer in therapists, but you need to find the right fit. It’s not a sign of weakness to look/ask for help. A therapists will not solve your problems. They can guide you to helping you solve your problems.
All that said, I don’t doubt that there are some bad therapists out there. Politics has invaded every facet of our lives. It’s sad.
JJ,
Thanks for sharing your story and so glad to hear you found a path away from your pain.
It’s hard to imagine that any “therapist” would bring up “systemic racism” for an interracial couple in couples therapy. A lot of black women are angry that black men marry white women. That may have affected the OJ jury among other things and may even be an example of “systemic racism” but I can’t see any benefit, except to OJ, of course.
“Oh, we on the right have incorporated knowledge of these messages into our being, all right.”
Yeah, assisted by having them shoved down our throats by the media for much of our lives. I told my children that I would happily support them through any degree they chose… except journalism. They chose wisely.
Neo, as a recovering lawyer who then went to get a Master’s in Counseling, I’d love to see your paper. I never did enough couples work to have a solid grasp of it, myself.
I never could make it as a therapist.
“My diagnosis is that you’re nuts.
My recommendations is to stop it right now”.