Therapy Hell
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Avoiding the Toxicity of Blue Pill Psychotherapy
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Recently, my friend Tom Golden did a video on blue pill psychotherapy talking about the biasing effect of gynocentrism on the practice of therapy.
His talk reminded me that gynocentrism doesn’t just shape the rules and expectations about how men and women should interact, it shapes virtually all of the narratives we live by.
Now, over the years I’ve beaten a lot of horses to death on the importance those narratives because they are that important. They shape our beliefs, guide our decisions and often narrow our thinking.
Getting married is a good example. When men make that decision, frequently at an age where they are ill prepared for it, they are guided by their narrative — by their story of what marriage is. The mythology is similar in most men; they meet the woman they want to share life with and set about working toward a shared future. They understand that marriages require work, but in their story the characters are willing to do it, willing to suffer each other’s differences with enough grace to hold things together, and move on to children and a generally happy-ever-after life.
And they go all in, fully vulnerable, blindly assuming that their story has one conclusion; that it can’t or rather won’t be denied the generally happy ending.
However, when reality sets in, and the ugly end is upon them, they are often flattened by it because their story has left them unprepared for darker twists and turns. They deny that it is happening, bargain and often plead for a reversal of misfortune, for the real story, the true story they believed in, to magically set itself right.
It’s not just the loss of the marriage, or the love, or the property. It’s the shock of their sacred story guiding them directly into a brick wall, crashing a belief system into rubble.
It bewilders them, leaving them unsure of who they are and where they are going.
While there is no such thing as painless demolition of a family, much of the destruction could have been avoided with a different, truer story of what marriage is, one that reads more like a Greek tragedy than a Grimm’s fairy tale. Ideally, it would be a true enough story to avoid the marriage in the first place, but even if not that, at least true enough to guide men toward a lot more self-preservation and less naivety. At least enough truth to quit viewing divorce as something that only happens to someone else.
Marriage isn’t the only thing in our lives where a scripted narrative dictates our beliefs and expectations. There are thousands of these stories that touch on every area of our lives. We have them for everything we do, from school to work to recreation, to seeking medical help.
And of course, we have one for the business of mental health. Most red pill thinkers will have already debunked this one and replaced it with a better story. So, I am writing this article to reach people who are relatively new, and for those who are considering mental health services of any kind.
You almost certainly have a story, a narrative about what the mental health field is about. And it is almost certainly as wrong as the most gullible fairy-tales about marriage. You may imagine that mental health professionals are a product of the finest education we can produce; that they are well-trained by seasoned professionals who instill in them a high standard of objectivity and thoughtful approach to their work.
You may see them as possessing secret information about pathways to better living, as though their training and education lets them in on life’s secrets. And that their motive is to share that with you, guiding you to a better life.
And it makes sense that that’s your story about them, because it’s also their story about themselves unless they have corrected it, and precious few have. At any rate, that’s the story that lives in the collective consciousness; that the mental health field is populated by altruistic geniuses, improving the state of being those they work with.
I am going to do my best to disabuse you of those faulty ideas.
Tom Golden’s talk about it was short and on the mark. He and I both have been in the mental health field long enough to see the study of human psychology morph from a logical, masculine discipline into dishonest scholarship designed to serve a political agenda. Outside the insulated walls of the academic asylum, and into real world practice, that corrupt shift in purpose this has resulted in the most egregious professional betrayal of the public I’ve ever witnessed.
Practitioners have created a web of destructive lies and are peddling it under the auspices of mental health. We see it in the domestic violence issue, where abused men and their children literally have nowhere to go because to the mental health profession any male victims, and by extension their children, don’t exist.
Mental health professionals are sentencing children to life with abusive mothers, and ridiculing the fathers who seek help for good measure. As Cassie Jaye pointed out in the Red Pill Movie, there are over 2,000 shelters in the U.S. for women, and one for men, despite the near equal incidence of male and female victims. This insane disparity was created largely by professional social workers in direct violation of their code of ethics.
This is what our schools of social work are churning out. Biased, bigoted students who go out into the world and practice biased, bigoted social work. Their peers won’t stop them, nor will any sense of concern or remorse about the domestic and child abuse they are enabling.
How does that fit in with your story about the mental health profession?
Our licensed marriage and family therapists aren’t trained any differently. Armed with delusions of patriarchy and the oppression of women, they are the new age spearhead; postmodern, gynocentric crusaders with one simple message for men who set out to repair broken marriages. Submit or perish.
Just like social workers, they minimize, rationalize and excuse abusive women. They cling dogmatically to the man bad woman good model of marital strife. They encourage couples to view the man as the identified problem in the relationship, and frame all possible positive outcomes as dependent on men’s willingness to yield to the desires of their wives – and to the desires of the therapist.
Again, this is a huge violation of public trust, profiting from the misery of their clients and increasing it with divisive misinformation and lies. They don’t save marriages, they just grab whatever cash the lawyers don’t get when the marriage is on its way out. Despite this, and despite their utter failure to have any positive impact on the divorce rate, the family therapy industry is projected to have explosive growth.
Marriage and family therapists aren’t much better on the family side than the marriage side. During the 1980’s they were dead in the center of the great false memory hoax. They turned uncounted families against themselves by exploiting emotionally unstable women, steering them toward the false idea that they had been sexually abused.
All it took was one book full of unscientific, ideological conjecture, to get the ball rolling. It was called Courage to Heal.
One book. That is how easy it was for these people got swept up in a wave of professional quackery, guiding girls, young women and mature adults into making false allegations of incest. Cutting deep, often fatal wounds into the heart of the family.
Of course, the coercion of false claims from clients isn’t limited to family work. It has had criminal implications as well.
In March of 1984, six people, half of them family members, were put on trial for 115 counts of child sexual abuse in the McMartin preschool trial.
The children at that school made an array of increasingly bizarre allegation against the owners and staff of the school after seeing a number of psychotherapists. Wikipedia provides a good summary of the case:
Several hundred children were interviewed by the Children’s Institute International (CII), a Los Angeles abuse therapy clinic run by Kee MacFarlane. The interviewing techniques used during investigations of the allegations were highly suggestive and invited children to pretend or speculate about supposed events. By spring of 1984, it was claimed that 360 children had been abused. Astrid Heppenstall Heger performed medical examinations and took photos of what she believed to be minute scarring, which she stated was caused by anal penetration. Journalist John Earl believed that her findings were based on unsubstantiated medical histories. Later research demonstrated that the methods of questioning used on the children were extremely suggestive, leading to false accusations. Others believe that the questioning itself may have led to false memory syndrome among the children who were questioned.
It was an incredibly destructive affair, ruining the lives of the six defendants and likely doing significant harm to the children who were manipulated by the therapists. The trial lasted 7 years and cost 15 million dollars. Ray Buckey, one of the defendants, remained in jail for 5 years without ever being convicted of a crime.
This is what mental health professionals are capable of. You see remarkably similar, truer stories of the mental health field, playing out today in courtrooms across the western world where domestic violence and so-called children’s advocates hold great sway over the outcome of contested divorces. These people, who provide assessments and counsel the court, have their own story of divorce that guides their actions. It’s a narrative of male sinners and female saints, of demons and damsels, of children who must be saved from the influence of the father and of women who merit privilege by virtue of the court. In their story, the interest of the woman IS the interest of the child, even if it puts the child in harm’s way. And it does with alarming regularity.
They are psychologists, social workers and psychotherapists, the very definition of mental health professionals. They are the creators of false memories, or in other words, false stories. They are the ones who urge us to practice radical acceptance with borderlines and other abusive, tyrannical women. These are the people who create and perpetuate the myth of male only domestic violence perpetration, the lie of rape culture and the falsehood of women’s oppression. These are the people manufacturing all the ideology-addled data to support their eff’d-up narrative.
And if they are not the people doing these things, they are for damned certain the people who are keeping their mouths shut about it. They’re the ones whistling and looking the other way.
It would be a mistake, however, to attribute all this corruption and incompetence to the power of ideology or to the perilous road to hell being paved with good intention. There is something more fundamental at play here.
To put it bluntly, the people who populate the mental health profession are not the sharpest pencils in the box, intellectually speaking.
As shown by research on estimated IQs by college majors,1 the helping professions could use a little help with intellect. Social work, coincidentally the most egregious offender in pushing misinformation, debunked theories and ideological bias, is at the very bottom of the bottom of the barrel.
Social work, in terms of the average intellect of those involved, sits just below studies of early childhood and fully four slots below home economics.
The field of psychology isn’t that much higher. In fact, a cursory glance at the rankings for each major point to a rather disheartening fact. The more college students gravitate toward social work and psychology, the less intelligent they are. It’s not exactly inspiring of images of flowing robes and curative wisdom. In fact, it is just the opposite. And you’d do well to adjust your narrative accordingly.
This means that mental health professionals may be too intellectually stunted to identify the narratives guiding their therapeutic interventions, or to accurately recognize and work with unconscious narratives in their clientele.
And still another part of the story is about the personalities involved. The helping professions are flooded by people who themselves need help. It doesn’t take a nuanced understanding of human nature to deduce that the study of psychology attracts a lot of people who pursue the field because they are trying to sort out their own problems.
I recall meeting a therapist once who specialized in working with women who suffered eating disorders. She was an emaciated wisp of a woman who trembled constantly and wore sleeves to cover as much as her coat hanger thin arms as possible. She was also a neurotic mess, whose every open thought seemed to be about men. Most of her statements about them were peppered with pejoratives.
Then there was another woman, a psychotherapist about 5 feet tall and easily 200 pounds. She specialized in working with adolescent in-patients. She visited a program I worked at regularly, bringing up grocery bags full of sugary treats for the kids, many of whom were hyperactive with poor impulse control. She waddled onto the unit, huffing and puffing down the hall, candy bars and gumdrops in tow.
We could literally watch the kids start escalating after she left, bouncing off the walls, and off each other. She dumped a mountain of sugar on kids who didn’t need it and then left us to clean up the mess. She was regarded as a brilliant therapist by our administration, which is code speak for therapists who refer a lot of patients to the program.
Here’s the rub. Though I honestly, genuinely wish it were not so, I am compelled to remind you that when you seek mental health services of any kind, this is the cesspool into which you are diving.
I get emails on a fairly regular basis from people who are looking for a therapist they can see in person in their local area. They want referrals. This being a red pill crowd, I have never had anywhere to send them. All I can do is urge them to screen the heck out of anyone they engage, knowing that the field has plenty of people you would not trust to walk your dog across the street.
That is not to say there is not good practitioners out there. There are some old timers who learned their profession before it was taken over by crazies. And there are some with such naturally remarkable balance and competence that they weathered the indoctrination that passed for their education and emerged with the ability to help. In other words, there are some unicorns.
It also must be said that if you are a staunch blue pill resident of the plantation, there is probably little damage they can do that you are not already doing to yourself. If you are hopelessly mired in the prevailing narrative, they can probably make you feel better about doing it until the consequences of that are visited on your life.
But if you are red pill and seeking mental health support, let the facts help shape your story about what it is you are doing. Know that you are entering a minefield, not a refuge. Know that mental health professionals are not altruistic, uncompromised geniuses. Know that at best you are going to have to screen like you’re looking for diamonds, and that you will likely have to train even the best of candidates to help you. You’ll have to red pill them just enough to do you any good at all, if they are capable of receiving it.
The good news, and another way you can repair your story, is to realize that the red pill is better therapy than you will ever likely get from a therapist.
And of course, it is very important for me to say when times are dire and life is at its worst, reach out anyway. It’s (probably) better than doing nothing. Just be sure you understand the great fable into which you are walking. Who knows, with some solid red pill perspective, a narrative that makes you a hero to your own cause, and some ballsy determination you might just see a therapist, talk a while, and see them get better.