What's wrong with me?

The over-psychologization of modern society

As someone who is predisposed to self-reflection and the philosophical life journey, early on in my short life I found that I was struggling with deep, protracted emotional issues. I needed answers, I needed help. I felt that life wasn’t worth living if I wouldn’t be able to solve them. As someone also inclined towards solving problems empirically, I found there was a seeming harmony in psychology, my inclinations, and the problems I had. I had the problems, and they had the answers. With the normalization of going to therapy prevalent on my college campus, and fancying myself an intrepid individual focused on the best outcomes in my life, I began seeing a therapist after a brief search of the paltry options available options in my area.

Fast forward approximately three and a half years later and I have no doubt improved. I was able to address personal issue that had been eating at me for years with another highly trained individual with whom I grew a caring relationship of reciprocity and intellectual honesty to the best of my ability. Through many hour-long sessions in person, on the proverbial couch, and many more sessions that sometimes extended more than double that time, we talked through many issues; not just personal, but also spiritual and philosophical as well.

This was deliberate because the therapist I chose has a PHD in philosophy, which, as far as I can tell, is a rare thing in the field. During my search, this leapt out at me because I knew I needed someone who would be able to match my intellectual capabilities. I also wanted a mentor-type figure in my life to help me flesh out the many ideas floating around in my mind.

In my area the options also seemed limited because of my own lack of experience thereby lack of discernment about what type of modality and tradition I thought would best fit me. There are many branches of therapy; CBT, Psychoanalysis, 12-steps, Christianity based, somatic, psychiatric, primal, family systems, mindfulness … the list goes on. Many of these I only found out about through experience over time. When I first started, I was only vaguely aware of the process insofar as I knew that one goes into a room and talks.

Each discipline has their own tenets, precepts, blind spots and virtues. Each therapist is unique in how practiced they are, the quality of their own life, the education they received and many other variables. When one is constantly in intimate relations with someone, revealing and combing through another's most private world to process, it seems these variables are magnified. In many ways it is a very important primary relationship like a parent or significant other, to a strong degree, if a long-term relationship is established.

While I sought talk-therapy as a means of finding relief and resolution to my personal issues, I was also began practicing breathwork, had a robust journaling practice and was still working towards my outward goals – university, MMA, a healthy social life, exercise & writing among other things. However, in the domain of feeling better in my body, feeling better about my life, breathwork seemed to be the most efficacious.

The original reason that I thought it was an opportune time in my life to try therapy in the first place was because I did have a very solid foundation in the afore mentioned categories that anybody could objectively expect would give a human being enough satisfaction in life to not feel suicidal and depressed. This was not the case for me. Although I exercised regularly, had a good diet, had and have many friends, have traveled, did well in school, had hobbies; I felt a tremendously overwhelming sense of dissatisfaction.

I would also go through bouts of what I now is depression, loneliness, despair, shame attacks, anxiety, etc. I also struggled and felt uncomfortable with the amount of pornography I consumed, as well as the contents of the porn I watched. This imbalance, having many pillars of a positive life “going for me” whilst simultaneously feeling debilitating amounts of negative emotion in my life led me to therapy. As I said, not one to put all my eggs in one basket, I also began breathwork in earnest and continued to search for a modality that would bring me the resolution I was seeking.

By starting these two disciplines in tandem, I could simultaneously evaluate, to a degree, the efficacy of one vs. the other. I could also cross-pollinate their benefits and eschew their drawbacks. Ostensibly.

Being a good patient and actively engaged in my own salvation by reading widely in the subject matter I was involved in, I took on the precept whole heartedly that the great albatross around my neck was the weight of my upbringing and the trauma I’d gone through in my family life. This seemed not unreasonable given that my younger brother of 18 months had a significant battle with mental health issues growing up, which caused my home life to be fraught with episodic outbursts of violent and deranged nature, whilst chilling other aspects of a normal and healthy family life. I had also been abused by a babysitter when I was approx. 5 years old, an incident the babysitter lied about, sent me packing and had indeed deeply affected my inner life through the rest of my life. In fact, I had never even talked about it until I was 20 years old.

What I found in therapy that was extremely useful and cathartic that bears repeating and elucidating further was the ability to reveal deeply private, vulnerable and torturous issues to another human, in an enclosed space, without fear of judgement or reprisal. This fear is something that I believe holds back many people from truly allowing others in to help them. I know it was for me. Because it was vulnerability that originally left us open to being hurt so in the first place.

Therefor I had to relearn to open up around these topics so I could externalize, review and reflect upon them with someone else who had, at the least, a benign perspective. In actuality, my therapist had a genuine desire to help, as I’m sure many do.

This process led me to become more comfortable with accepting myself, predominantly my thoughts, emotions and feelings (in the sense of sensations) that allowed me to observe myself, giving me insight and eventually the freedom to choose to no longer participate in the narratives, become stuck in emotional reactivity, and suboptimal, indeed self-destructive behavior. This development is something that I believe anyone who’s gone through traumatic events in the past that unduly burden them can overcome with a competent therapist.

After some time though, likely after the first year or so, I found I began to plateau in feeling progress and seeing my ability to change my life. Granted, I do tend to “rush myself” (so my therapist says) which seems to be a manifestation of perfectionism.

That being said, I was constantly coming back to talk about the same thing, the same few stories at rock bottom. Re-hashing the same events I’d talked about, with little to show for in my ability to change my life. I still seemed to go through periodic episodes of intense negative emotions, seemingly triggered by disproportionate events. My porn consumption did not abate. My relationship with my family and with myself did grudgingly improve over time and it seems that my biggest achievement was a resolution with many of my family members over events of the past that still held strong emotional charge and manifested in arguments over seemingly nothing during supposed enjoyable family time. What was extant was that I was constantly talking about the same stuff. Granted, with an expanded and nuanced vocabulary, no doubt. My therapist would consistently direct me back to these event that held emotional charge for me whenever I would want to examine problems in my life, nearly all the time. This became frustrating for me.

Where I did find I was able to make more progress and find rapid catharsis and evolution of my own feelings was when I became triggered through a therapy session and I then on my own practiced breathwork while also focusing on simply becoming more aware of my emotions by consciously naming them within body then describing them to myself mentally while fully feeling them without trying to distract myself through intellectualization or a numbing behavior like porn, drinking, vapid socializing, social media, etc. In these moments is where I really could feel, moment by moment, the evolution of the pain I was feeling into some sort of lesson, resolution or perhaps simply changing into another emotion.

Through this process, the tandem and reciprocal relationship between my breathwork practice (which I also supplemented with meditation, yoga and journaling) traditional therapy I have become much more in tune with myself and over the years I have achieved a strong sense of satisfaction, integrity, joy and many other desirable emotions consistently because I follow my own path. I have doubtless done this in no small part through talk therapy and the recovery of my ability to have forthright, honest, reciprocally beneficial, intimate relationships through others. But I also have a strong sense that I could have made significant progress not only in this domain but in other dimensions, say work or a romantic relationship, if I took the same attitude of empirical development of quality and outcome over time.

This has nagged at me for some time, the sense that I was regurgitating my ‘story’ of what happened. It often felt oppressive and restrictive, truly like an albatross around my neck. In Admirable Evasions by Theodore Dalrymple, the bi-line struck a chord of truth that seemed to point back to this sense of counter-productivity. “How Psychology Undermines Morality”.

To further illustrate this point, throughout my research in psychology I’d always come across critics of the great psychologists like Jung, Freud, and their ilk. The unscientific nature of many of Freud’s theories is well known, as is his many fraudulent claims of originality and the fundamentalist temperament he maintained with his acolytes. Jung was also open about being mystical, especially later in his life. In addition the modern current cultural-political climate that vaunts the self-exculpatory search for trauma through micro-aggressions throughout all manner of public life which is nauseating and on face clearly narcissistic. Thomas Szasz, an eminent psychiatrist, has also written extensively on this subject, most notably in his book “The Myth of Mental Illness.”.

Lastly, my own experience with the medication of my brother in his youth, starting at the age of seven or eight by a psychiatrist, which increased his volatility for an extended time before permanently leaving him on “mood stabilizers”, gave me no short amount of skepticism to constantly monitor my own experience in this domain. All this to say there is fertile ground for critique of the psychologization of our society at large.

Indeed, in Dalrymple’s brief book, the first chapter levies significant criticism of Freudian psychoanalysis. Three of which can be summarized as follows: 1. The supposition that discovering the ‘root’ of psychological causality within the behavior within the individual on its own is curative, with no responsibility for the individual to enact change thereafter 2. The supposition that we’re victims of our past “trauma”, perpetuated by our parents most likely, in a ‘self-exculpatory’ manner & 3. Within psychoanalysis there is no criterion established by which to discern what is a true or false interpretation by the psychoanalyst of psychological material, let alone what is plausible or implausible in that vein, all according to Dalrymple.

As I’ve mentioned my therapist was not trained as a psychoanalysis, but as a LSW with a previous PHD in philosophy. Knowing this, traditional talk therapy still rests on many of the tenets of psychoanalysis, to a degree. Chiefly, seemingly, in free-association enquiry into whatever is ailing one. At least as I’ve experienced it.

In turn this seems to be putting the finger on the source of my frustration in the years that I’ve been with my therapist. In the many times that I expressed a goal that I wanted to achieve and was dissatisfied with not having my life (E.G., a healthy monogamous romantic relationship) or expressed concern with my own promiscuity and porn habit I was told I was “rushing things” or “you’re likely to marry your mother (symbolically, no doubt)”. In other words, my agency has nothing to do with the desire not being the dissatisfaction emanating from that lack, but instead was reframed as not having the proper patience. Yet every time these rejoinders were uttered, I was left feeling ever further dissatisfied after the session because I still had the desire, I was left only to question the validity of it and no sense of moving forward towards it’s manifestation even after questioning it. It may be useful to divulge here that my therapist is a single man in his 60s and has never talked about romantic relationships at all, though he has talked of friends and relatives in relation to my own difficulties in these areas of life as they came up organically in sessions. A fact that seems to hold influence over influence his position on the subject.

With this piece stretching on into 2,200+ words without getting into a broader critique of societal psychologization at large, it seems prudent to break this off into a multi-part post. In the next post I will contrast the wisdom promulgated throughout the ages that seems to be most important in recovering the lost wisdom of past ages, namely Aristotelian & Stoic cultivation of virtue, mindfulness, as well as the enlightenment philosophy of mastering the “passions”. Lastly, at a meta-level, the premise for our modern conception of psychology seems to stem from a split in Western Civilization between Aristotelian and Platonic worldviews of human nature. I will build up into this for the last post.

So, until next time everyone. Thank you for reading and best to you all.