The Patriot Post® · Therapy as Politics

A recent op-ed in the Washington Examiner began this way:

Forty years ago, Americans were more likely to talk about character, duty, responsibility, self-discipline, and resilience. Today, they are more likely to talk about trauma, validation, boundaries, emotional safety, and self-care.

This is more than a change in vocabulary. It reflects a deeper shift in how Americans understand themselves, their relationships, and their obligations to one another. The language of therapy, once largely confined to the therapist’s office, has become one of the dominant moral languages of American life.

That introductory statement by author and psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert really hit home for me, as it immediately reminded me of something I wrote nearly a decade ago on the occasion of Donald Trump winning the presidency for round 1. Back then, “On college campuses around the nation, horrified students stayed up into early Wednesday morning and stared in disbelief at the fate that had befallen them: Hillary Clinton would not be the president to make their college free and enforce political correctness on the non-campus ‘real world.’ Many who desperately sought a ‘safe space,’ though, were accommodated in other ways by faculty and administration who shared their angst.”

If you consider that college students a decade ago were products of parenting in the late 1990s and early 2000s, you can see that Alpert’s timeline isn’t all that far off. There were already early signs of this lack of coping ability as the Millennial generation was growing up, and now that those insecure parents have, consciously or not, overcome the stigma about having children, we’re into the second generation of children who crave safety and lack the self-esteem to put up with adversity or differences of opinion stronger than liking rival NFL teams. Hence, the Trump election became the cause for a meltdown among sensitive young adults.

But it’s not just about politics. Alpert’s point about our adoption of the “language of therapy” makes perfect sense now that we have more access than ever to what was once considered “pop psychology,” thanks to the internet. What used to be “feeling blue” is now considered cause to watch for thoughts of suicide, with the prominent advertisement of the 988 hotline for “mental health and crisis support.” It’s good to have that available for the public, but the question becomes, at what threshold does one need that sort of help? People will experience setbacks all the time, but that’s also how they develop coping skills — unless their mental self-defense growth is stunted by the constant need to regain their self-esteem and their obsession with culture and politics.

Alpert also contends, though, that education has been affected. Quoting Alpert once again:

Learning involves discomfort. Students encounter arguments they dislike and evidence that challenges deeply held beliefs. Those experiences are central to education. A student who never learns to tolerate intellectual discomfort is unlikely to become an intellectually confident adult.

Yet many institutions struggle to distinguish between discomfort and harm. Students are often encouraged to view emotional distress as evidence that something is wrong with the environment rather than a normal part of intellectual growth. The result is a generation that has become highly fluent in the language of mental health while often becoming less comfortable with the uncertainty and discomfort that serious learning requires.

In other words, anything an educator says that challenges their preconceived notions of the world is not just wrong, but dangerous. Because of that, teachers who believe in the old ways either learn to go with the flow and avoid topics that may offend or simply leave the profession to those who are considered more politically correct, thereby buttressing these students’ worldview.

In a school setting, this lack of maturity also makes things personal for those who haven’t been forced to deal with the small adversities, such as failing a test or not making a basketball team, once larger setbacks arise. But that’s not the way things are supposed to work — otherwise, we would constantly be at each other’s throats for the slightest offense, with the biggest problem obviously being the willingness to escalate directly to violence in order to settle the perceived score. Karmelo Anthony was a perfect example.

Yet for all the rhetoric Alpert put forth in his bid to promote his book, there’s one important ingredient missing: faith. Data suggests that those who are religious and active in their faith are less likely to suffer depression, and on a personal level, I can vouch for that because I became more religious in middle age. It’s changed my outlook on life and the everyday.

With the encouraging trend among Generation Z of becoming more religious than their parents, perhaps the trend line Alpert worries about may self-correct over time. Maybe we can find a balance between the stoicism of the Silent Generation and the dependence on dopamine hits from social media interaction that plagues our youth.

As my colleague Roger Helle often says, it’s something to pray about.