Late last week on his Substack Jemar Tisby shared with his readers some simple counsel:
You, presumably all of you, need to go to therapy:
You need to go to therapy. This is your gentle but firm reminder that mental health is part—perhaps the most crucial one—of your overall health. Physical exercise, a healthy diet, getting enough sleep--all of those matter and impact your mental health. But there is nothing quite like talking to someone who is trained in all the ways our mind can help and hinder us.
Tisby continued,
People seem to think you need to be having a manic episode, clinical depression, or a private trauma or tragedy to need therapy.
You don’t. You can actually just be a regular human person going about life and have plenty of reasons to go to therapy.
Mental health therapy isn’t a type of “in case of emergency, break glass” treatment. It’s more like regular maintenance to prevent or soften a breakdown.
Trust me, if you’re not sure what to bring up or you feel anxious because you don’t have a current crisis going on, a good therapist will draw something important out of you. Just start talking.
If you've read Mere O for any length of time you'll know that objecting to this sort of careless speech has been a long-time concern of ours. It's not that therapy is bad, of course. Tisby is correct that there can be value in talking to someone with a particular sort of expertise who will help you think through a problem, make better sense of a painful experience, or develop new ways of understanding or handling complicated relationships. That is certainly true.
Yet to suggest that everyone needs therapy is an excellent example of the very thing that both Samuel James and I have written against in the past in which therapeutic concepts effectively become our doctrine of sin. (We'll have a longer essay on this issue coming in our next journal from Ian Harber.) If you can't think of anyone who does not need therapy or any time when someone might not need therapy, then you've elevated therapy to a place it oughtn't occupy.
You can observe a similar sort of elevation of the therapeutic in a recent ad from BetterHelp in which the narrator explains her reasons for going to therapy:
I have been in therapy since I was six. My parents said 'we want her to be emotionally intelligent.' And that I am. I never stopped going to therapy. I'm a therapy dabbler. I like to go back into therapy at certain points in my life. Here are some of the reasons that call me back into therapy:
When I'm genuinely struggling and needing unbiased support.
When I'm in the middle of a life transition and I'm kind of wobbling around without a cause and I feel this desperation: 'what do I do?' Therapy.
When things are going well. So I can make sure that I am maintaining what I was able to attain in my integrity.
I wish there was an app that made sampling therapists easier. There is!
To put the matter in terms of Mark Sayers's sin chart concept, we might say that people who speak in such absolutized ways about the necessity of therapy seem to be operating out of a therapeutic sensibility about the world. The world is, at bottom, dangerous and traumatizing and overwhelming. You deal with that through therapy, which gives you the tools you need to find inner peace.
That being said, I want to make a broader point here beyond the therapy discourse. Because what we are encountering at bottom with the conquest of the therapeutic in more progressive spaces is actually not unique to those people; it is actually something more basic and common across a variety of different sub-cultures.
The nature of our cultural moment is that we tend to assume there are technical solutions to life problems because difficulties we encounter in the world are ultimately fixable if we apply the right technique to the problem. All that changes is the way we define the problem and the techniques we pursue to fix it. But the underlying assumption that life is a kind of problem that is fixable or solvable exists everywhere.
To take what might initially seem a wildly different example, consider the role that weight lifting plays in Christian nationalist discourse. Stephen Wolfe dedicates extensive time to the priority of weight training in the final pages of his book, for example, as Kevin DeYoung noted in his review:
Christian nationalism should have a strong and austere aesthetic. I was dismayed when I saw the attendees of a recent PCA General Assembly—men in wrinkled, short-sleeve, golf shirts, sitting plump in their seats. We have to do better. Pursue your potential. Lift weights, eat right, and lose the dad bod. We don’t all have to become bodybuilders, but we ought to be men of power and endurance. We cannot achieve our goals with such a flabby aesthetic vision and under the control of modern nutrition. Sneering at this aesthetic vision, which I fully expect to happen, is pure cope. Grace does not destroy T-levels; grace does not perfect testosterone into estrogen. If our opponents want to be fat, have low testosterone, and chug vegetable oil, let them. It won’t be us.
The technician's solution appears again.
DeYoung rightly asked in reply,
Is this the civilizational answer we’ve been looking for—living off the grid, complaining about women, complaining about the regime, complaining about how hard it is to be a white male, warning about the globalists, calling out the dangers of vegetable oil, and chastising Presbyterians with dad bods?
More recently, Colin Redemer posted this on Twitter days after the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump:
Let's run the same Sin Chart style analysis on the Christian Nationalists that we just did on the therapy-obsessed post-evangelicals: For the Christian Nationalists, steeped as they are in Bronze Age Pervert's work, the world is not primarily dangerous or traumatizing, as in the therapeutic discourse. Rather, the world is dominated by a regime of technocratic elites who desire to be sovereign, to control everything. That regime is threatened by independent male strength.
Therefore, the regime ("trash world" as Andrew Isker refers to it) is dedicated to neutralizing strong men—it quite literally wants to neuter them, to emasculate them through techniques of implicit control that suppress male strength and turn men into "bug men." To resist the regime, you need to avoid seed oils and lift because that will make you strong and fit and powerful so that you can't be controlled like all the bug men.
Call it "the agonistic view" and line it up next to the others Sayers listed, such as the therapeutic, hedonistic, or nihilistic views. The more progressive coded therapeutic view centers the internal world while the more right-coded agonistic view centers the external world. But in both cases identity is a problem which can be solved through the appropriate technique.
It is important, of course, to recognize that neither of the prescribed activities are wrong or bad in themselves. Therapy can be immensely helpful at times, as I said above. Likewise, a good workout regimen can be a very beneficial thing. This point is latent, of course, in Professor Kinghorn's recent essay, and it is also something I recall John Piper returning to sometimes in his work. In When I Don't Desire God Piper made the point that what a person thinks is some kind of spiritual malady may simply be a result of insufficient sleep, a lack of exercise, or a bad diet. There might be, as Dickens once said, more of gravy than the grave about our struggles and pains.
The trouble comes when "wise prudential counsel about how to live well in an uncontrollable world" becomes a technique that we rely on to help us cope with the world with the false promise that the technique itself will deliver us, such that we suggest mandatory weight training will prevent people from becoming mass shooters or such that we can't imagine a healthy person who isn't going to therapy.
Here, again, Tisby's words suggest a dangerous category confusion:
The second reason you need a therapist is because we are all likely going through some form of trauma just by watching the news.
It’s called secondary traumatic stress.
“Secondary traumatic stress is the emotional duress that results when an individual hears about the firsthand trauma experiences of another.”
It also goes by others names such as: compassion fatigue, collective trauma, or vicarious trauma.
Paying attention to current events, especially in a presidential election year, can wear on your mental health.
The news seems to go from bad to worse and it is unrelenting.
With news apps, social media, alerts on digital devices, and more, we have almost no buffer between what’s happening in real-time around the world and our minds.
But it’s all too much to bear at once.
Even if we grant all the above (and I'm quite reluctant to accept the remarkably promiscuous use of "trauma" in the quoted passage) a properly Christian response to the experience captured by the phrase "it is too much to bear," is first and foremost to pray. That isn't to say therapy is wrong or that we shouldn't consider it. It is merely to note that Tisby's centering of therapy and total neglect of prayer seems to suggest his own version of the moral/medical divide which Professor Kinghorn rightly criticized.
There is a utopian streak to all of this, of course. There is an assumption, usually left unspoken, that suggests to us that salvation from our problems is possible, and that it is within our own hands—or it could be anyway. Yet this hope is not Christian hope; you might call it a Promethean hope, I suppose, or a Pelagian hope. But whatever it is, it is something less than Christian. For Christianity tells us that our greatest need and longing is to know God and that we do this through responding to His word, through receiving the sacraments, through seeking friendship and counsel and aid in the community of believers. Both therapy and fitness regimens can belong to that final category, of course, but that does not negate or eliminate our need to hear God's Word and respond in faith, coming to his Table to be fed and nourished.
We have this treasure, St Paul tells us, in earthen vessels. Those vessels will age and decay (despite the best attempts of technocrats to prevent that). Even beyond our bodily maladies, we ourselves are wavering and uncertain creatures. We are all too often, "proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at (our) beck than (we) have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in."
Our hope, then, is not and cannot be this worldly. We need help from beyond the reaches of the world.
During my academic days I wrote my honors thesis on Kwame Nkrumah, the first democratically elected head of state in sub-Saharan Africa after the end of colonialism. During one of his campaigns in Ghana Nkrumah ran on the slogan, "seek ye first the political kingdom and all these things shall be added unto you." What was wrong then, of the political, is wrong today of the therapeutic and the agonistic.
It is a pity that Christian people seem to have forgotten this.