Trauma/ Therapy Culture

 

Jonathan Alpert, "Is Therapy Tearing Us Apart?"

Therapy promised Americans greater agency and insight. Instead, it delivered a more satisfying story about why someone else is to blame.

A patient recently came to see me, saying she was furious with a friend. What began as an ordinary disappointment—a canceled dinner and a text returned too late—had become something far larger and far more charged. The friend was now “toxic.” The exchange had become a “violation of boundaries.” The hurt itself had been elevated into “trauma.” She had screenshots and a polished story about what the episode revealed about her friend’s pathology.

What she didn’t have was introspection. She was no longer asking the most psychologically useful questions: Could this have been carelessness rather than ill intent? Was the reaction intensified by other things that may have been going on? Had she contributed in any way to the conflict? The language she brought into the room gave her something powerful: certainty. But certainty is often the enemy of insight.

This scene has become one of the defining features of my work as a psychotherapist, and it sits at the center of the argument in my forthcoming book, Therapy Nation: Too much of modern therapy culture keeps people stuck, reinforcing grievance, externalizing blame, and turning everyone else into the reason their lives are so miserable.

The problem begins with my own field. For years, my profession has trained clinicians to elevate validation over challenge, affirmation over interpretation, and emotional fluency over the harder work of behavioral change. What has followed is the rise of grievance culture dressed up as psychological sophistication. Too many therapists now function less as clinicians than as reinforcers of the most self-protective interpretation available, teaching patients to locate the problem everywhere but themselves. Of course it is your boss’s fault. Of course your colleague is toxic. Of course your ex is a narcissist. Of course the world keeps wounding you. In this softened therapeutic frame, frustration is rarely something to examine; it’s something to assign.

The patient doesn’t gain greater agency, but instead, a more polished story about why someone else is to blame. If you feel injured, the injury must be real. If you feel unsafe, the threat must be there. If a relationship creates discomfort, the relationship itself becomes the problem.

I recently saw the aftermath of this in a new patient who came to me after months with another therapist. Every difficult interaction at work had been interpreted through the same frame: the boss was toxic, the co-workers invalidating, and the environment unsafe. By the time we met, the patient could describe every slight in flawless therapeutic language but had never once been pushed to consider whether avoidance, defensiveness, or fear of criticism might be part of the pattern. And she was never given constructive advice on how to bring about changes. The therapy had made the story clearer without making her stronger.

Too much of modern therapy culture keeps people stuck, reinforcing grievance, externalizing blame.

This is how therapy can quietly become an engine that keeps people stuck. Patients leave not more capable of tolerating frustration, ambiguity, or ordinary disappointment, but less. They become more fluent in explaining why they feel the way they do while becoming less practiced at changing what they do next. And therapists are largely responsible for this phenomenon.

While it may feel like growth, it functions as avoidance. And that is corrosive. The patient becomes good at explanation, more sophisticated in the language of harm, and more certain about who is to blame, but no closer to actual change. Grievance becomes part of identity.

That same emotional habit doesn’t stay confined to the therapy office. People carry it into marriages, friendships, workplaces, and, eventually, politics. Ordinary frustration becomes proof of mistreatment. Ambivalence becomes danger. Disagreement becomes evidence of harm. Once enough people are trained to interpret discomfort this way, coexisting with others starts to feel impossible.

The political consequences follow naturally. A citizen trained to experience ordinary conflict as evidence of harm will eventually bring that same mindset into public life. We’ve seen this dynamic play out vividly in the Donald Trump era, when members of my profession moved from helping people navigate political differences to legitimizing family estrangement as a sign of psychological health. On national television, prominent therapists and psychiatrists suggested it might be essential for mental health to avoid Trump-voting relatives during the holidays.

The same therapeutic scripts that encourage patients to pathologize difficult bosses and disappointing partners now teach citizens to reinterpret ordinary democratic differences as evidence of danger. The result is a society less capable of living with differences, less able to tolerate friction, and more likely to retreat into emotionally curated silos and echo chambers.

This is where therapy culture ceases to strengthen people and starts quietly weakening them. The person becomes increasingly protected from scrutiny, and increasingly fragile as a result.

Social media has been uniquely fertile ground for this corruption. The algorithm doesn’t elevate the most psychologically accurate interpretation. It elevates the most emotionally satisfying one. Hence the ecosystem of so-called mental-health influencers: Endless posts diagnose narcissists, decode toxic bosses, and turn ordinary disappointment into proof of pathology. Social media rewards certainty, speed, and self-protection—precisely the instincts real therapy is supposed to challenge before turning them into conclusions. The result isn’t a more psychologically sophisticated society. In many cases, it’s quite the opposite.

We are becoming emotionally articulate while growing psychologically brittle.

My own field should be willing to say this plainly: We helped create this culture. The original promise of therapy was never that life would stop hurting. It was to help people become stronger in the face of pain, clearer in the face of conflict, and more honest about the role they themselves play in the conflicts they keep re-creating.

Real therapy should make people more capable of dealing with reality, not less.