therapy culture
Article
therapy culture is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 15, 2024 and August 28, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Both the Atlantic’s critique of polyamory and my defense of it shared the same villain - “therapy culture””; “People complain a lot about “therapy culture”, but usually without explaining it or giving examples”. It most often appears alongside alexithymia, food preferences, Freddie de Boer.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: March 15, 2024
- Last seen: August 28, 2024
Appears In
- In Partial Grudging Defense Of Some Aspects Of Therapy Culture
- In Defense Of “I’m Sorry You Feel That Way”
Related Pages
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- alexithymia (1 shared issues)
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- food preferences (1 shared issues)
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- Freddie de Boer (1 shared issues)
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- The Atlantic (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Both the Atlantic’s critique of polyamory and my defense of it shared the same villain - “therapy culture”, the idea that you should prioritize “finding your true self” and make drastic changes if your current role doesn’t seem “authentically you”.
Inline links: my defense of it
(I don’t think any of this is too related to specific therapies for specific mental health problems, like exposure therapy for panic disorder - but real-world therapy is at least as likely to be the generic “therapy culture” type as the specific types, so I think it’s fair to use the phrase “therapy culture” to describe this. None of this applies to the more specific and targeted stuff.)
I think I previously made fun of therapy culture because the people who go through it always sound so smug about it - “I’ve advanced beyond the rest of you squares and discovered my True Self; you probably can’t imagine a spiritual journey like mine”. But nobody necessarily knows where they are relative to anyone else on the spectrum of more vs. less advanced psychological development. Maybe “finding your true self” just means “being able to access your preferences, the same way non-alexithymics do as a matter of course”.
Inline links: nobody necessarily knows where they are
People complain a lot about “therapy culture”, but usually without explaining it or giving examples. Freddie de Boer does better here (see the list of bullet points halfway down). What do all of his examples have in common? They all overfit social norms to benefit you in the exact position you’re in at any given moment.
Inline links: here
I think the hostility to “I’m sorry you feel that way” comes from the same place. It’s somebody in therapy culture imagining the overfit norm that they would want if somebody offended them. Then that other person shouldn’t be allowed to say anything except “I 100% admit that I was wrong and you were right, and I’ll change everything about myself immediately”.