7 Pitfalls of Modern Therapy

Therapy has gone mainstream. Sometimes, it’s even seen as a virtue to be in therapy. If you are receiving mental health counseling, you are often viewed as more evolved than someone who has never sat in a therapy session.

While I think it’s positive that we’ve reduced the social stigma around mental health issues such that people who are truly suffering feel comfortable getting the help they need, I do not believe it’s helpful to normalize and romanticize therapy to the degree that we have.

It’s true that good therapy has improved lives. However, I’m here to discuss what most people don’t acknowledge—the potential harms of therapy.

Here are seven pitfalls to be aware of.

Negative Relationship Replacement

One common goal of therapy is to help someone build or strengthen relationships in their life. Counseling can help someone learn how to take healthy social risks and meet new people, build communication between family members or spouses, learn better social skills, or make general behavioral shifts that will improve the person’s interpersonal connections.

However, sometimes a therapist becomes a “rental friend” or a “surrogate mother” instead. As a result, the patient relies too heavily on the therapist for emotional support, rather than seeking connections in his/her life.

Oftentimes with families, a parent will hire a therapist for their child and then the therapist will insert themselves between the parent and child, undermining parental authority. This is an unhealthy dynamic and in certain situations, like when therapists promote secret trans identities, can be dangerous.

Navel Gazing

People spend a lot of time thinking about themselves in therapy. The purpose should be to gain insight and practice self-expression. However, the line between self-actualization and navel gazing is pretty thin. Perpetual therapy patients run the very high risk of becoming self-involved and even narcissistic.

A common therapy technique is to guide a patient through recognizing their internal emotions, doing a body scan, and naming these feelings out loud. This technique can be helpful for those who are cut off from their emotions or have harmful outbursts.

That said, it can easily cross over into an excessive focus on the self, sometimes to the point of obsession. Emotions can be wrongly interpreted as facts, which is dangerous territory. No therapy technique is right for all patients—some people benefit from focusing LESS on feelings. However, since therapists are trained to help people express emotions, they are quick to take this approach, even when it isn’t the right fit.

Too Many Labels

Therapists tend to be too quick to pathologize normal experiences. Both in therapy offices and in our culture at large, people slap long-term clinical labels onto everyday challenges or problems that would otherwise be temporary.

Depression, anxiety, and trauma are all words that are thrown around far too casually. Just because someone is sad, lethargic, or lacking motivation at a given time, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re clinically depressed. The same goes for anxiety and trauma—too many people incorrectly identify themselves as having an anxiety disorder or PTSD based on a superficial understanding of common symptoms.

Jumping to these labels shifts responsibility off of the individual or the family and transfers it to some amorphous “disorder” instead. If the problem is deemed to be out of the patient’s control, then the therapy process will be futile. To make matters worse, hasty mental health diagnoses often lead to unnecessary medicalization, which can trigger a cascade of other problems.

Too Much Affirmation

Therapists used to be the people who would give it to you straight because they weren’t your best friend or spouse. They were there to give you the insight and advice you needed to hear that the people close to you didn’t feel comfortable saying out loud.

This has since shifted, with far too many therapists performing affirmations rather than doing real therapy. You’re probably familiar with how therapists are being trained to blindly affirm gender identities, but that’s just one particularly striking example of this toxic culture of affirmation. Since feelings have supplanted objective truth, therapists feel compelled to affirm anything their patients bring into the session without further exploration.

Let’s face it—therapists want to be liked, so they will say what their patients want to hear, rather than what they need to hear in order to make better life choices.

Lack of Faith

Traditional therapy doesn’t usually include faith. Most therapists are trained to leave religion out of the counseling room. They are academically minded, and academia does not hold a lot of respect for faith.

To be clear, no therapist should evangelize to a patient. However, too often a patient’s faith is overlooked or even intentionally downplayed. Sometimes the support of a church and a strong belief in God is more emotionally healing than traditional therapy. The incorporation of faith in the therapeutic process is a powerful healing tool that should not be ignored.

Radical Progressivism

Mental health training programs lead with destructive radical progressive ideology. According to Psychotherapy Networker, 68% of therapists are self-described liberals and only 6% are conservative. Almost every American graduate school has been captured by radical leftists, so this isn’t exactly shocking.

What does being progressive really mean in this context? It means counselors apply critical theory in the therapy room. These therapists believe all men are toxic, all white people are born carrying the original sin of systemic racism, gender is fluid, polygamy is healthy, traditional families are not sacred, and Christianity is evil. They believe that distress comes from oppressive systems, not individual circumstances—unless you are a white male, of course.

Progressive therapists believe in subjective truth and overemphasize identity, setting up patients for a lot of pain in the future. Patients tend to feel more depressed and anxious as they are given the message that the world is working against them and all of their pain is from “minority stress.” All of these ideas encourage patients to maintain an external locus of control, rendering therapy useless.

Bad Apples Are More Common

Patients tend to falsely perceive therapists as wiser, more insightful, and more compassionate than the average person. Sometimes this is true, but too often this assumption is unearned. In fact, there are far too many therapists who entered the field because of their own unresolved issues. These therapists fixate on their personal issues and transfer them onto their patients.

In the past, most of these bad apples were weeded out by elders in the field. Nowadays, however, the people with personality problems are the ones leading the institutions, and training standards have declined accordingly. I caution you against assuming that just because someone is a therapist, that means they hold the appropriate wisdom to help you with your life challenges. This is simply not true anymore.

Therapists have helped so many people, but they have also done a lot of damage. If you’re seeking mental health care for yourself or for a family member, proceed with caution.