Resentment and Therapy Culture
tldr: Therapy culture teaches us to see hardship as something that should not be. It is a belief that breeds resentment. Resentment at life and its terms. And this resentment keeps us fragile.
Note that this missive can stand alone, but it is also part of the From Fragility to Fortitude series.
I don’t like to play the critic. I know it gets more “likes” and “shares” and “views.” But it contributes to a culture of cynicism. And cynicism allows us to close down our hearts. It allows us to give up hope while we are playing “smart and cool”.
I want to take a close look at the limitations of therapy culture. At its impact. At the fragility it generates. I want to do so without tearing down therapy itself. Because therapy is one of the most important innovations of a culture that desperately needs connection and introspection.
What I’m really concerned with is:
How do we nurture psychological and emotional awareness without falling into a fragile sensitivity that keeps us from becoming mature adults?
There is an important critique of therapy culture that comes from the left:
Therapy tends to individualize structural problems.
I often remind my clients that depression, anxiety and loneliness are produced by the culture. That these are not personal shortcomings or failures. I encourage them to develop the capacity to meet the challenges of our emotional turmoil. But I also ask them not to pathologize themselves. Not to blame themselves for something that is sown and bred by a culture that is not well.
Everything we do, and all the ways we feel, happen within a tidal wave of culture.
Here it is good to remember the quote paraphrasing Jiddu Krishnamurti:
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
But it’s not as simple as that either.
We have to do two things at once. Acknowledge that the culture is sick and own that we are responsible for our maturation. Whatever context we are born into.
We live in a world where lots of people are jumping into social and political action without taking stock of where they are in their own process of maturation.
I am concerned with the way some of the core assumptions of therapy culture have come to shape what we expect of our friend groups, what we want from our organizations, what we think we need of our shared spaces and especially of what we demand from a society that continues to fail us.
At the heart of my concern is the pathologizing of the human condition.
I am concerned by the way in which loss, hardship, conflict, stress and trauma are seen as things that should not be.
Because once we get caught by the belief that hardship is something that should not be, we begin to harbor anger and resentment at the inescapable facts of life and its terms. We become resentful of life itself. Resentful of a deal we were born into. Of this deal we did not make.
We become resentful of the very conditions, the very terms, that make us human.
And resentment makes us look for someone to blame.
We take that resentment and we turn it back upon ourselves. And onto other people, onto groups and systems and beliefs and institutions. We get to project all of our very human pain. We get to offload it and turn it into blame.
What exactly is resentment? And how does it make us fragile?
Resentment is the sustained, re-felt experience of a past wrong, whether that wrong is real or perceived. It is tightly held by a protective part of ourselves that is afraid to release it.
The very etymology of the word resentment is:
re-sentire, to feel again and again.
It is not the original wound but the compulsive return to it, the interior rehearsal of an injury. It keeps the offender alive. It keeps the one who hurt us strong even long after the event has passed.
Resentment is a moral emotion, and this is a very important part of the argument we are developing here.
It arises from a felt sense of injustice, violation, or disrespect.
Unlike grief, which moves toward acceptance.
Or anger, which seeks expression and discharge.
Resentment holds and hoards.
It is anger that has chosen memory over resolution.
It is different from pain or frustration precisely because it carries a reactive moral charge: it holds someone indefinitely accountable.
Nietzsche goes farther. He says it is something more corrosive. It becomes part of the psychology of the powerless:
“Unable to act outwardly on injury, the wounded self turns inward, ferments its suffering into a worldview, and makes a virtue of its victimhood. The resentful person cannot overcome the injury, so they find a way to give it value. The wound becomes an identity, the oppressor becomes the source of all meaning.“
I keep seeing this play out. This is exactly what it looks like to fall into the trap of an identitarianism that is held together by a “justified” resentment. We think we are standing against something, but we are instead building a false and all powerful idol.
What are our politics today if not the politics of identity and resentment?
We say we are centering the victim. But we are centering the oppressor. We are not tending to our own maturation. We somehow come to believe that our resentment is what gives life to our quest for justice. To our desperate desire to make things right.
But that is the wrong turn.
It is essential that we orient towards justice. And even towards reparations. It is a sacred vow to live to alleviate the suffering of all beings. This is the way of wisdom. The way of the initiate. The very process of maturation. The way we develop the fortitude that is necessary for us to meet life and its terrifying terms.
It is the very opposite of resentment.
What does this have to do with fragility?
Therapy culture is defined by a pathologizing of life and its terms. These terrible things should not happen, they should not be. And so we get a moral pass. They are wrong and we are right. We get to be self-righteous and resentful about the things that happened to us. About the way our parents, our caretakers and our society came up short.
About the things that are still happening to us.
We get to blame, to blame and to blame.
We forget that we have no other option. That we are here to contend with an inescapable set of facts that define our existence: The fact that things are often unfair. That there is harm that is unjustifiable. That no one has ever been completely safe.
Awe and wonder, love and togetherness are at the heart of this glorious experience of aliveness.
But suffering is part of the deal, suffering is part of the terms.
And when we pathologize suffering itself, that’s when we become truly fragile.
We interpret difficulty as damage. We lose confidence in our own coping capacities. We forget that our communities have inherent and time-tested ways to contend with and to cope. To resist and to rebel. To steal moments of freedom even from the hardest times.
Therapy culture is at its worst when it turns us into patients before we’ve had a chance to discover that we have what it takes to be alive. To be alive here, today, creatures born to face our times.
It forgets that deep within each one of us, and at the very core of who we are together is the wherewithal to face forward toward life and ALL that it takes.
Therapy culture leaves us with the fragility that comes with pathologizing hardship and other essential aspects of the human experience.
This misreading of hardship doesn’t stay private. It travels with us into every room, every organization, every attempt to build something together.
It blinds us to the fact that all around us there is the wisdom of the ages. In books, in elders, in peers who are seriously doing their work, in the spirit world, in the old songs, in the old stories, and teeming through the aliveness of the more than human world.
When we neglect ancient wisdom and fall into therapy culture itself, that’s when resentment wins the game and our fragility sets these losing terms.
We’ll get deeper into this next week, when we talk about
Therapy Culture and Fragility.