The Christian in a Therapeutic Age

There have been numerous pieces published by secular media outlets and influencers lately warning of the rise of “therapy speak.” While hard to define, you could loosely say that it is the prescriptive use of psychological and therapeutic terms in everyday language to describe one’s experience, identity, and the various situations in life. You hear it most in the overuse of words like “trauma,” but it shows up in many other places. Shame, attachment, inner child, trigger, holding space, gaslight, anxious, depressed, narcissism, boundaries, vulnerability, PTSD, OCD, self-care. The list of these words and phrases seems nearly endless and, more importantly, suddenly ubiquitous in the lexicon of the average Millennial and Gen Z person today. 

The important thing to say immediately is that all of these mental ailments are real, which is why it’s almost impossible to write a critique of a therapeutic culture without sounding like you’re diminishing the reality of these experiences. In no way do I wish to say that these things aren’t legitimate. They are. But the fact that these things are real is almost the point. The “prevalence inflation,” as Derek Thompson at The Atlantic called it, leads to people who don’t actually suffer from clinical mental health disorders seeking help they don’t need and drains resources from those who actually do.

Take one example that was reported by The Verge—the rise of self-diagnosed Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID; previously known as multiple personality disorder) on TikTok. Doctors across the country realized that they were beginning to see patients who were seeking confirmation for a self-diagnosis regarding the disorder after they had learned about it on TikTok. Many of them didn’t have it. One doctor said, “I’ve had people cry in my office because I told them that they do not have the diagnosis that they think they have.” The patients were sad when they realized that they didn’t have dissociative identity disorder. You would think it would be the other way around.

This led the doctors to worry about the patients who had convinced themselves that they had a mental health issue that they didn’t actually have, but also to worry for those who did have it. Harvard Medical School’s largest psychiatric facility, McLean Hospital, said about this phenomenon, “We are sincerely concerned that this trend on social media will further marginalize individuals living with DID, while also doing a disservice to those who are living with another treatable but misidentified disorder.” Self-diagnosis of mental health disorders on social media is a lose-lose for both the person who has self-diagnosed and for the person who actually has the disorder.

While I imagine that most of us don’t know someone who has self-diagnosed with DID (though maybe you do), the prevalence of therapy speak as a native language has become an increasingly live issue for many folks as they talk with their children, siblings, friends, coworkers, and church members. For many, psychology culture is becoming their defining social narrative. Going to therapy is a sign that someone is “doing the work.” “Healing from trauma” means that someone is finally “getting healthy.” But is this producing the results that people are hoping it is? It doesn’t seem like it is. Not because therapy is bad or it doesn’t work, but because the ideas of what therapy is and is supposed to do have changed. It’s become more important to appear as if you are “doing the work” than to actually do it.

From Derek Thompson, quoting Darby Saxbe, a clinical psychologist at the University of Southern California, in The Atlantic again:

“That’s a big problem because this modern idea that anxiety is an identity gives people a fixed mindset, telling them this is who they are and will be in the future.’ On the contrary, she said, therapy works best when patients come into sessions believing that they can get better. That means believing that anxiety is treatable, modifiable, and malleable—all the things a fixed identity is not.”

That, in a nutshell, is the shift that our therapeutic culture has caused. The shift from mental health disorders being largely “treatable, modifiable, and malleable” to being an “identity” that “gives people a fixed mindset, telling them this is who they are and who they will be in the future.”

The Effects of a Therapeutic Culture

In light of all of this, the first question we have to ask is: Is this shift making us better? The rising consensus from mental health professionals seems to be a resounding “No.” The same article in The Atlantic cites a study of more than 8,000 students in the U.K. who participated in a mindfulness program only to find that their anxiety became worse. Because therapeutic culture constantly turns us inward, we become overly aware of every uncomfortable situation we are in and the negative emotions we feel. 

Not only that, but it trains us to believe that because we are experiencing something uncomfortable or negative, there must be something wrong—either with us or with them. Not only have we begun to diagnose ourselves, but we’ve also started diagnosing others. Armed with only what we’ve seen on a handful of TikTok videos or a graphic from a therapeutic influencer’s Instagram—without any training, experience, credentials, or professional understanding—we label other people with therapeutic labels and mental disorders because they loosely match a description of something we heard someone say one time. Either we’re anxious, or they're a narcissist. Either we’re OCD, or they’re shaming us. Either way, it creates the perception of being a perpetual victim of either your own psyche or other people’s neuroses. 

Being a perpetual victim not only increases anxiety out of constant fear of being triggered, but it also erodes your relationships and isolates you. Because you’re constantly protecting yourself from triggers, whether from your own or from what you perceive in others, you don’t allow yourself to foster the necessary connections to develop deep relationships. Every interaction is a potential threat that could trigger discomfort, so it just seems better to stay away from as much interaction with other people as possible.

Esther Perel, Belgian American psychotherapist and host of the podcast Where Should We Begin?, said in an interview with Vanity Fair:

 “There’s a paradox. There is such an emphasis on the “self-care” aspect of it that is actually making us more isolated and more alone, because the focus is just on the self. The focus is not about the mutuality of relationships—the reciprocity, the way that you weave fabric, you know, between people who are relying on each other. On one hand, there is an importance in gaining clarity when you name certain things. On the other hand, there is a danger that you lose all nuance, that you’re basically trying to elevate your personal comments and personal experience by invoking the higher authority of psychobabble. What you call therapy-speak, we used to call psychobabble—it’s a new word for an old concept.

In the past, you could have said, “I think this, and so does the rest of the community.” So does the family, so does the church. Today you say, “I think this, and so does the DSM-5.” I don’t like what you do, so I say you’re gaslighting me. You have a different opinion, and I bring in a term that makes it impossible for you to even enter into a conversation with me. Labeling enables me to not have to deal with you.

But in the end, it creates more and more isolation and fragmentation. That is not necessarily a good thing for the community and for the social good.”

While we turn to therapy in order to heal our inner wounds, more and more people are finding themselves even more anxious and isolated than they were before. As they turn inward, they damage relationships with people who would otherwise be there to help them through difficult circumstances. This isn’t necessarily because therapy is broken but because of how we have begun to use therapy as a buffer between us and the uncomfortable realities of life when it was never meant to function that way. The more we avoid the hard knocks of life, the more we’re hurt when we’re hit by them. So, the very thing intended to help us become more resilient in a difficult world ends up making us more fragile.

Mental Health Disorders as Status Symbol

There is a second important question we have to ask about our therapeutic culture: why would self-diagnosed mental illnesses be viewed as an attractive status symbol? It almost sounds perverse to say. Obviously, those who experience mental distress don’t consciously compute it as a status symbol. And for people who sincerely have mental disorders, it isn’t. Again, this is a difficult topic to critique when you’re discussing something that is both real and distressing. Yet, that’s exactly how Dr. Saxbe characterizes it in her interview with Derek Thompson in The Atlantic. 

Darby Saxbe, a clinical psychologist at the University of Southern California and a mother to a high schooler, told me she has come to think that, for many young people, claiming an anxiety crisis or post-traumatic stress disorder has become like a status symbol. ‘I worry that for some people, it’s become an identity marker that makes people feel special and unique,’ Saxbe said.’

In a therapeutic culture, it seems like everyone has a mental health disorder. And if everyone has one but you, then you’re the weird one for being “normal.” They endow an identity to someone who otherwise doesn’t know who they are without it because they have nothing else to identify with. Even while you might feel intense mental distress, you can’t imagine your life without it. 

There is just a certain vibe—if you allow me the use of some therapeutic language in my critique—that something should be wrong. It’s not that the people who claim to be having these experiences don’t actually have them. I believe they are. It’s that the cultural narrative they have bought into and organized their life around creates a self-fulfilling prophecy—a catastrophic feedback loop—that creates the circumstances for the very thing they go to therapy to seek relief from.

Esther Perel in Vanity Fair again:

“In the past, you would have said, “I’m a member of this party,” or “I go to this church.” Now you say, “I’m a member of this attachment group.” I think that putting people in boxes and reducing their complexity is problematic. If you start to name yourself by one little thing, you know, like, “I have insecure attachment,” what are you saying about yourself? Why do you want to reduce yourself to one over-important label?

Also, what this does is put clinical terminology into the hands of nonclinically trained people who then weaponize it. There’s a reason we go to school for umpteen years and continue to be trained until we drop dead, because we still don’t know it all. It’s very important to show that therapy is a highly relational, nuanced, and contextual conversation. That is very different from what you get on TikTok or IG or your friends in armchairs.”

Part of this has to do with the fact that suffering and struggle are unavoidable parts of life and are some of the primary ways we find meaning and purpose and form our identity. Yet, in a decadent society, many people exist insulated from substantial external suffering and struggle while actively seeking to mitigate it in their lives. People work more with their minds than their bodies, have instant access to near-infinite knowledge in their pockets, and are encouraged to look within and find themselves by participating in wellness capitalism, all while shunning traditional meaning-making roles and responsibilities. This means struggle is primarily experienced in the mind without the traditional means of alleviating the struggle, such as physical work, meaningful community, loving familial relationships, and faith in God who uses, redeems, and is sovereign over our suffering.

The breakdown of our families, communities, institutions, and faith has led to us having an identity crisis, as everything that we traditionally found our identity in is liquidated by individualism, secularism, globalism, and the digital age. With nothing left outside of us to give us an identity, we have nothing left to identify with except for what is inside of us. And when many turn inside to look for their “true self,” what they find is despair. The human soul was never meant to be alone, and it cannot be found apart from a loving connection with God and others. 

Everyone experiences despair, not only those who are disconnected from God and others. Even Paul said that he “despaired at life itself” at one point (2 Corinthians 1:8). Yet despair was not his only or the defining emotion even under the most tumultuous of circumstances. He saw the trials as sharing in the suffering and comfort of Christ (1:5), sanctifying (1:9), and temporary (1:10). He set his hope on the Lord (1:10) and knew he could count on others to help carry his burdens (1:11). While everyone feels despair, Christians have a different experience of despair from the rest of the world. But if despair is all that’s found and there’s no loving connection with God or others to form an identity, then despair itself becomes the identity and is given the label of however it manifests itself in the person's life.

But that’s not all. Because one is pushed to find their identity in their inward despair by social isolation in the first place, finding people with the same self-diagnoses on the internet creates a pseudo-community that fills the space where family, friends, and the church would have traditionally been. People find others who have the same experiences as them. Online communities form around shared lived experiences. Each post for the community serves as a reinforcement of the identity and perpetuates both the disorder (in its unmitigated acceptance and celebration) and the isolation (in drawing people out of IRL relationships and into online relationships with people who “get them”). The more someone owns their identity and produces content around the identity, the more they are rewarded by the community and gain status among the group. 

That’s how you end up with social media influencers with millions of followers who make content exclusively about ADHD, OCD, DID, anxiety, and pretty much everything else. This dynamic creates a feedback loop where someone spirals into a worsening condition than they were in before. The pseudo-community provides just enough taste of the real thing that it keeps them from realizing they’ve been sold a counterfeit for real, loving, trusting, deep friendship. 

The Potency of Therapeutic Culture

This cocktail of individualism (read: crippling isolation) and social media is what makes therapy-speak so potent. With no way to find our identity outside of ourselves through faith, community, institutions, etc, and with the epistemological horse-blinders of social media, the only way for us to find a recognizable identity is by identifying with the despair in our minds as reinforced by the messages we see on social media.

In Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World, the children are educated through a new technology called “hypnopædia.” Hypnopædia, in the novel, is a method of education where a series of phrases and ideological axioms are repeated incessantly through speakers placed under the children’s pillows while they sleep. They are meant to learn and accept the axiomatic assertions as unquestionably true. The mindless, unconscious repetition of the “truth” is the point. As Huxley writes one scene where students are listening to a government official, 

“Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, everywhere a focussing of interest, a narrow channeling of impulse and energy. ‘But every one belongs to every one else,’ he concluded, citing the hypnopædic proverb. The students nodded, emphatically agreeing with a statement which upwards of sixty-two thousand repetitions in the dark had made them accept, not merely as true, but as axiomatic, self-evident, utterly indisputable.”

Earlier in the scene, the official says that hypnopædia is “words without reason” and “the greatest moralizing and socializing force of all time.” The goal of hypnopædia isn’t an intellectual education but a moral and social education—a moral and social education void of reason. Its effect is described as, 

“Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob. ‘Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too—all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides—made up of these suggestions.”

The highly online life is akin to being educated by hypnopædia. Scrolling TikTok for hours alone is qualitatively no different than listening to “sixty-two thousand repetitions in the dark.” The same messages are being algorithmically served to us based on our interests—or let's be real: based on our neuroses—and are consistently reinforced through short, quippy videos on auto-play that are designed to capture our attention, stir intense emotions, and provide easy answers through axiomatic truths that are presented as self-evident and utterly indisputable. This happens until your mind is made up of the axioms, and the axioms make up your mind, and sound reason can no longer penetrate to discern what is true and what is false anymore. This is why social media is a distortion zone. The result of social media being the chief architect of someone’s plausibility structures is best understood as a kind of “internet brain.”

Unfettered, isolated, and vulnerable social media use liquidates meaning, purpose, identity, community, and moral reasoning and replaces it with moral words without reason that undermine “Family, monogamy, romance. Everywhere exclusiveness, everywhere a focussing of interest, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy”—the very things that give us meaning, purpose, identity, and community. All in the name of freedom and fulfillment that it simply can’t deliver.

Christian Life in a Therapeutic World

What are ways that Christians can live, witness, and navigate the complexities of a therapeutic culture? I believe there are at least three. 1) Occupy a different existential space, 2) Embody a different story, and 3) Cultivate a different quality of life.

Occupy a Different Existential Space

While the therapeutic culture insists that we are the center of the world and our identity is something we create, Christianity insists that God is the center of the world and our identity is given to us by him. The explicit retrieval needed here is the Creator-creature distinction. 

When we view ourselves as a creature who is in creation and under the creator God, we’re relieved from the pressure to embody God’s incommunicable attributes. We are able to embrace our natural limits and not feel the need to consolidate all power, knowledge, and presence in our small human frame. We can rest in the God who is over all things, sustains all things, and cares for all things. When life spins out of control, we have a God who we can trust, who isn’t scared of the things that scare us, and who cares for us enough to carry us through all of our struggles and suffering. 

Not only that, but instead of creating our own identities by trying to find value and worth through achievement, technique, and our unique neurosis, we receive our identity as royal image bearers, beloved sons and daughters, and coheirs to an eternal inheritance from him. No matter what happens in our lives or brains, we know that those things are not the truest things about us. Our value, worth, identity, meaning, and purpose are not things that we can find or achieve on our own but are gracious gifts from our Creator that we receive through humble, restful trust.

Embody a Different Story

The therapeutic world tells us a story for us to live in. It tells us that the goal of life is to find peace, that the problem in the world is whatever causes us pain or discomfort, that the world is a dangerous place full of exploitation and trauma, that the way to find peace from those things is purely utilitarian—whatever works for you is fine, and that the best thing we can do is to minimize as much discomfort as possible. The path to the good life is through “doing the work,” and if you do all the things you’re supposed to and don’t find peace, then it’s simply because you didn’t master the right technique and should try something else.

On the contrary, the Christian story is one of Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration. It tells the story of a good creation that God delights in, people made in his image with a royal vocation to lovingly represent him to each other and care for his world, but people have fallen and experience brokenness and distress because we failed to trust him and sought glory for ourselves, yet in our sin, he has given us himself out of love to restore us to the good creation we were intended to be. Our lives and this world are not dependent on our perfect techniques because he will one day make everything new and establish perfect justice and righteousness forever and ever.

We are not the center of the story, the point of the story, or the writers of the story—we are participants in the story that God has written and is writing. We have a purpose and a role to play, and God has provided a way for us to fulfill our role through the healing of our souls and adopting us into his family, the Church.

Cultivate a New Life

Jesus told his disciples before his crucifixion, “Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Don’t let your heart be troubled or fearful” (John 14:27). While the therapeutic world offers various kinds of technique to find peace, Christians recognize that peace is something Jesus gives us through his Spirit. It’s impossible—a contradiction even—to achieve peace; peace can only be received. 

Christians are people who bear a yoke and a burden, but it’s an easy yoke and a light burden (Matthew 11:30). We can’t carry the heavy burdens of the world. We aren’t meant to find our belonging or affirmation in our achievements, perform our unique idiosyncrasies as our identity, and let our lives be guided by the latest trends on social media. We find belonging in thick relationships and commitment to the people of God. We receive peace through prayer, worship, silence, solitude, confession, and the sacraments. We cultivate wisdom for life through scripture, spiritual reading, and the counsel of trusted friends. And yes, we go to therapy to work through deep wounds that need careful attention. But we have hope that God is at work in those deep, dark places and doesn’t waste any struggle or suffering that we have experienced for the healing of our souls, our transformation into Christlikness, the good of our community, and the restoration of the world.

In short, Christians live from a fundamentally different existential map. We see beyond the band-aid fixes of our modern ailments and root ourselves in something that is simultaneously ancient and eternal. We order our lives around the truth, goodness, and beauty of God revealed in Christ and embodied in his church. 

The therapeutic culture is trying to solve real ailments. We’re more fractured, isolated, and devoid of meaning-making roles and institutions than ever before. The digital age has raptured us from our bodies and communities and drained us of the very things that make us human. But the good truth for our time—and all eternity—is that the God-human, Jesus, has made a way for us to recover our humanity. In Christ, we are made more human. We are united to divine love and given eternal rest. In the midst of the chaos and uncertainty of our modern world, Christ offers us peace. And in Christ alone—our comforter, our all in all—our fears are stilled, and our strivings cease.