Bad Therapy, (Mostly) Good Books
In praise of reading, redemptive suffering, and the good kind of therapy.
One of the perks of being a writer/editor is getting free review copies of books. Sometimes, they arrive unsolicited. Other times, you have to request them.
This spring, there were just so many interesting-looking books coming out that I knew I wouldn’t have time to actually review them all, so I decided to pony up and order most of them. (I’m a big proponent of supporting authors whose work you enjoy, particularly through preorders. Plus I’m totally going to write off all those books on my taxes.)
I did manage to write a full review of Bad Therapy, by Abigail Shrier. You can read the whole thing over at the Institute for Family Studies, but here’s a taste.
When I was in college, one of my best friends used to playfully adopt a rather unusual alter-ego. We called her “the cognitive distortion fairy.” Whenever one of us was caught up in rumination—obsessing over the awkward, incredibly embarrassing thing we’d done or said—she would, with the air of a benevolent fairy godmother, bop us on the head and pronounce the magic words. “That,” she would say, “is all-or-nothing thinking” (or “catastrophizing,” or whichever unhelpful thought pattern we were currently trapped in). Somehow, naming our distorted thinking really did help us snap out of it and move on with our lives.
Contrast that with the dynamic described in Abigail Shrier’s new book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. When my friend went to therapy (circa 2007), she was taught how to keep her emotions from ruling her life. Then she shared the techniques she had learned with her friends, teaching us to become more resilient, too.
According to Shrier, that’s not the kind of therapy most kids today are getting. Instead of teaching kids to overcome their negative emotions and face their fears, she reports, parents, teachers, school counselors, therapists, and doctors are accommodating those fears and challenges, creating a feedback loop that makes kids more anxious and depressed.
I generally find therapeutic frameworks and tools really helpful, both as a parent and as a person, but Shrier’s book opened my eyes to how widespread truly bad therapeutic practices are. It also made me stop and reflect on the ways the popularization of medicalized frameworks and diagnoses—from sensory processing disorders to ADHD—can change the way we view our kids.
One thing I wish Shrier had explored more is the way that transcendent religious and ethical systems have been replaced by therapeutic ones (paging Philip Rieff). Good psychological frameworks—like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy—stress the need to confront and accept suffering as a fact of life. Bad ones—like the “trauma-informed” pedagogy Shrier debunks—try in vain to shield us from pain.
On a purely human level, it’s clear that facing our fears can make us stronger and less anxious. This is backed up by a huge amount of empirical research, which is why it’s so troubling that schools are performing what Johnathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff dubbed “Reverse Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.” It’s trickled down from colleges into elementary schools. We should know better.
I think a big reason why we’ve fallen so deeply into this faux-therapeutic trap is that, on a cultural level, we’ve lost a conception of redemptive suffering. Christianity teaches us that suffering has the power to change us for the better, if we let it, and that God can transform sin and brokenness into conduits of grace. It trains us to look at this world through the lens of eternity.
I think often of my English professor during my semester abroad in Rome, who taught us tragedy and comedy. More specifically, I think of the question that made up our final exam: “What is the nature of reality—tragic or comic? How, then, should a life be lived?” When you know, deep in your bones, that all our pain will turn into dancing, then you know that if it’s not happy, it’s not truly the end. And if you know that earthly happiness is not the goal, you’ll end up experiencing a heck of a lot more joy along the way.
What I’m Reading
Here are just a few of the books on my nightstand (or kindle/audible account) right now. (Anybody else have a bad habit of reading lots of books at once… and only actually finishing about half of them?)
The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt
Family Unfriendly, by Tim Carney
Hannah’s Children, by Catherine Pakaluk
Troubled, by Rob Henderson
Essential Labor, by Angela Garbes
Eat, Fast, Feast, by Jay Richards
Before and After the Book Deal, by Courtney Maum
The Mother Artist, by Catherine Ricketts
We’ve also been listening through the Harry Potter books as a family, and we’ve finally gotten to book three, which is my favorite. I haven’t decided yet whether we’ll keep going after that or wait til my kids are older. I remember book four being really scary!
Although I can’t really recommend it, I’ve also got a copy of Judith Butler’s new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender? I used it to fact-check a fabulous review essay by MIT prof Alex Byrne, who uncovered plagiarism (!) and came up with such an awesome image we had to use AI to generate it.
Have you made it through any of the books above? What did you think? Let me know in the comments.
Calling all Philly folks
I’ll leave you with a quick announcement for what looks like a great event, taking place next Saturday: a kid-friendly book launch party for The Mother Artist. My friend Jess Sweeney of Wellspring will be hosting “a pop up space for children and their caregivers to make art, learn about mother artists from history, read stories, and relax together.” I can’t wait!
I cannot help but always think of childbirth as the perfect example of suffering as a conduit to grace, and it is by design. That’s a fairly obvious example but it really is the beginning of a series of suffering, for both child and mother (so, literally everyone), suffering that is almost always matched or surpassed in joy. I appreciate this perspective on this topic in reference to therapy and children especially.
I just bought Hannah’s Children as a birthday gift for myself, and hope to join the ranks of women with more than five children in the coming years myself! The Mother Artist also sounds really good!
Also- team HP #3 is the best one over here too!
Read Troubled and enjoyed it. His voice feels important for the times we’re living in. In the middle of Family Unfriendly. Loving it. It honestly feels like reading paragraph after paragraph of my own thoughts!
A few months ago I finished reading aloud books 1-3 of HP with our big girls (ages 6 and 8)! I wanted to keep going but my husband put his foot down haha. So fun re-reading w your kids🥹🙌🏼 Also love book 3 but I remember loving 4 and 6 a lot too.
I’m honestly not loving the discourse around Abigail’s new book. Haven’t read it but hearing her talk about it something isn’t hitting me right. Like this part that you quoted in your article:
“For thousands of years, until the therapeutic turn in parenting, societies took it for granted that parents’ primary job was to transmit their values to their children…. Once parents decided the goal of child-rearing was emotional wellness, they effectively conceded that the actual authorities were therapists.”
I feel emotional wellness of my kids is the main goal of my parenting… it’s a value of mine, along with other values. (It isn’t emotional wellness or pass on your values; what a weird dichotomy to set up?). I look around and see that the majority of people are not self-aware and struggle in relationships (including the one w themselves). I don’t want this for my kids. I do not see therapists as the authorities in this area; I simply parent with my relationship with my kids as priority number one and as I work on myself I’m able to pass that onto them. I can get behind her central thesis but I guess I feel that her characterization of gentle/respectful parenting is wrong and harmful. As Marianne Williamson says, “There is no single effort more radical in its potential for saving the world than a transformation of the way we raise our children.” This is a big topic but wanted to share a few of my thoughts!