This book was eye-opening and enlightening, but also somewhat off-putting in its delivery.
I’ve had an inkling that therapy was doing more harm than good in more cases than not, in adults as well as children, though I couldn’t articulate the reasons for this nor prove it. I’m not a counselor, but I am a naturopathic doctor, and it seems that while most people who go to talk therapy for years *say* that it’s helping them, I don’t usually see evidence that it actually is. In fact, it seems they circle the same mountain over and over again, constantly digging up past trauma, meditating upon it, and reliving it. They never seem to truly heal. From a biblical standpoint, this makes sense to me… “as a man thinks in his heart, so is he.” What we spend our time meditating on shapes who we are. The Apostle Paul tells us that we should think about “whatever is good, true, holy, and praiseworthy”–which seems to be the exact opposite of talk therapy. On the other hand, stuffing our emotions is likewise unhealthy… the truth seems to be somewhere in between. We need to acknowledge and process, but then accept and move on, in order to truly heal (and I quite frankly don’t know how anybody can really do this without the help of the Holy Spirit, but at least Cognitive Behavioral Therapy seems to be useful enough to give people coping tools that don’t involve constant rumination.)
Shrier points out a lot of this, and argues that kids are even more susceptible to becoming traumatized through the act of such therapeutic approaches themselves, because they are at an impressionable age. They’re also in a power imbalance with an adult and a professional, which makes them more impressionable still. Meanwhile, adults who are now of their parents’ generation seem to have almost universally decided to give their children as conflict-free a childhood as possible, avoiding all negative emotions as if that is the goal of life. At the least sign of a negative emotion, they put them in therapy–and this, combined with the messaging kids get from their therapists, leads them to believe that they cannot handle the normal adversities of life. In Gen Z, she argues, it’s become almost a badge of honor to have one or more psych diagnoses and medications for coping. This also reinforces lack of agency–if kids (or really, anyone) believe that they are victims of their trauma, their diagnoses, or their biochemistry, they have no hope for growth or change. What they really need, Shrier argues, is to learn that they are capable, to face their fears, and to take responsibility in incremental amounts. She quotes Jordan Peterson on this, and I believe she also quoted Viktor Frankl as well, whose logotherapy espouses exactly the same thing. Face the tiger, and you may find that it was made of paper all along. But if you don’t face it, you’ll spend your whole life in hiding, your life becoming smaller and smaller to manage your fears.
I listened to the book read by the author, and she was so often dripping with sarcasm… which I like, to a point, and I largely agreed with her. Even so, it was the type of sarcasm that was not so much funny as it was scathing and derisive. While I get that this was a backlash against the coddling that she feels is the problem in the first place, I think there could have been a happy medium. I’ve certainly had the experience of realizing that, in certain cases, I was my own worst enemy. Fortunately I realized this with the help of the Holy Spirit, who is kind, and who never condemns. The book could certainly have benefitted from a healthy dose of grace, in my opinion.
My rating: ****
Language: none
Violence: none
Sexual content: none
Political content: heavy, and interestingly enough on both sides… the premise of the book is very right-leaning, and yet she simultaneously holds several left-leaning ideologies that she states throughout the book as though they are indisputable.
Leave a Reply