Cartoons Hate Her: The Rise of the Therapy Jerks

Just the memes:

Full post:

This week, actress Anna Kendrick went viral for saying that she wouldn't get involved with any man who hadn't been to therapy. Twitter promptly rushed to dunk on her, pointing out that men who go to therapy are, well…this:

Anna Kendrick's story is a bit more complicated than her randomly deciding to rule out men who haven't seen a therapist, which I know sounds enticingly cringe to the cohort of people whose worst nightmare is an "affluent white female liberal" or AWFL (I just found out about this today, I'm obsessed.) Apparently, for the past seven years she was in a relationship (privately, with an anonymous ex-boyfriend) who was emotionally abusive. But—and this feels almost too on the nose—she also said that her couple's therapist sided with her abusive ex through most of their sessions, up until the end of their relationship.

Anna Kendrick is also not alone in this belief. I've seen countless tweets and posts saying that only when someone has "fully healed" and been in therapy for some period of time (not clear how long) are they worthy of love. As someone with OCD, which I'll always have: lol.

I get where the fiercely pro-therapy contingent is coming from. When I was growing up in the '90s, therapy was kind of taboo. It was assumed that the only people who saw a therapist had serious mental illness. I was around seven when my parents took me to a therapist (the impetus was some uncharacteristically bad behavior on my part—I TP'ed the bathroom at a restaurant, which they saw was a cry for help) and I remember telling everyone at school that I had to go to the "eye doctor" instead. Arguably this made me seem even weirder—what could possibly be so wrong with my eyes that I needed to see a doctor for them every week? But a psychologist seemed much more embarrassing. When my mom told me it was nothing to be ashamed of, I said, "The word psycho is literally in the name."

Like many relics of the '90s—prioritization of carbs over fats, glorification of small butts, Trump being a funny and unthreatening media personality—we have overcorrected. Therapy went from being a shameful secret to a requirement for full humanhood, at least for a sizable chunk of people. This trend began with some normal and probably necessary shifts in perception. We started telling teenagers, a notoriously self-conscious and mentally ill cohort, that it was okay to talk about mental health. Celebrities began opening up about their anxiety and depression. OB-GYNs started talking to moms about the warning signs of postpartum depression. You could argue that this version of "mental health awareness" was overly sanitized and only accepting of "cute" mental illnesses (I've seen how people react to some of the more taboo OCD intrusive thoughts, or personality disorders, and it's not very accepting!) But in general, this shift was needed. People thinking too positively about therapy isn't as big of a problem as other people—especially young men—being afraid to seek help.

But there were, of course, downsides. One thing I noticed was the potential for dangerous social contagion as we "raised awareness" about various mental health struggles. When I watched Degrassi in the mid-2000s, there was a very dramatic plotline where a scene-girl character grapples with self-harm. She was hardly the only representation of this stereotype, but somewhere along the line, being "emo" or "scene" became synonymous with cutting yourself. All of the "raising awareness" seemed to create awareness in kids who otherwise wouldn't have considered doing this. At my school, there was a trend among the more "alt" girls to lightly imply self harm by hiding their arms in particularly conspicuous ways. Most if not all of these girls were not actually cutting. I have to ask: was it actually beneficial that Degrassi and similar teen media had this plotline? What was the ratio of "kids who got help for cutting" versus "kids who started cutting because they saw it, or were friends with someone who saw it?" I don't know! But it's worth examining.

The other downside, of course, is the fact that as therapy became more acceptable for people as part of "self care" instead of treatment for a specific diagnosed mental illness, it attracted people who previously would have just yapped the ears off their hair stylist or bartender. And the "therapy man" who accuses you of gaslamping for asking him not to text his ex-girlfriend is a prime example.

As you might be aware from reading my other articles, I have diagnosed OCD, which wasn't diagnosed until about seven years after I started experiencing symptoms. This was in part due to the fact that it took me that long to see a behavioral therapist. Perhaps I'm a little biased, because straightforward CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) especially paired with ERP (exposure response therapy) is the only thing that's ever helped my OCD, including medication (which did nothing, unless you count s*x drive suppression as "something.") Perhaps it's a radical (or, dare I say, "crazy") belief, but I actually don't think therapy is that helpful if it's not behavioral, or otherwise formulated to target symptoms of a particular mental illness. I don't see a lot of benefit to therapy that basically exists as a series of long expensive conversations.

I've known people who were very pro-therapy despite not actually suffering from a mental illness, who treated therapy like a regular part of self-care, akin to haircuts or workouts, and while I'm happy they aren't ashamed to seek therapy, they also (and I'm speaking generally here) tend to use therapy as an outlet for venting about their various nemeses, and concluding that they are the victims of every social interaction.

I say this as someone who is a bit narcissistic—there's something extremely enticing about a narrative in which you are the innocent party whose only fault was being too nice to people who wronged you. As Trump would say, "I've been treated so unfairly." I don't think Trump and I are alone in this. There's a reason that lots of people will talk about how they "always date buttholes" or "always date crazy girls." Usually, when someone says this, it's clear that they are, in fact, the problem. But I think this sort of subclinical pop therapy—which I'll call "green juice therapy"—is extremely tempting to people who are vaguely dissatisfied with their life, but who would probably derive more benefit from tedious manual labor in Siberia than continually examining their relationships on a CB2 couch in San Francisco.

Of course, if someone doesn't have a mental illness, they shouldn't be barred from seeking therapy. Perhaps therapy can help people become better communicators and develop more confidence, even if they aren't mentally ill. I know several couples who successfully attended, and graduated from, couple's counseling for some minor issues in their marriages. But whenever I hear someone talking about how therapy has worked out so well for them, and yet they have been in therapy for multiple years with no actual mental illness or any plan to stop—I'm sorry, I just don't think that's a success story for anyone except the therapist's new beach home. This dynamic creates a very tempting niche to fill. If you're a therapist, it's a pretty sweet gig to "treat" a patient who isn't actually sick, who just wants to talk about all the people who have wronged them and have you nod along with their narrative. And what's even more tempting isn't just to treat this type of person, but to keep this sweet deal going indefinitely.

It's also worth noting that there are many people who count as "therapists" who are not psychologists. This can be fine; one of my best CBT therapists was actually a clinical social worker. But I also think that all the various paths to becoming a "therapist" attract certain grifters who might otherwise become a life coach or dog chiropractor.

This type of therapy also enables the aforementioned "therapy men." No person better exemplifies the idea of a manipulative therapy man than Jonah Hill, who went viral after a breakup with his girlfriend because of the following texts he sent, using what many refer to as "therapy speak" to basically tell her he didn't feel comfortable with her posting photos of her in her swimsuit, as a professional surfer:

I'm not going to write about Jonah Hill very much, because he's hardly the only person to do this. It seems that if you sprinkle words like "boundaries" or "vulnerability" or "trauma response" into your comments, you can kind of justify anything. Take, for example, the viral tweet (now deleted, and I can't find it) about how autism and missed social cues are responsible for repeated infidelity (look, if you can find an neurodivergent guy who has enough rizz to pull multiple hoes by accident, I'll be very impressed.)

Because these buzzwords often mean nothing, they can be interpreted however anyone wants. I saw an interesting conflict go down on Twitter when someone referred to the trauma caused by being cheated on, and they were told that this couldn't be traumatic for anyone because "nobody owns another person's sexuality." Major undertones of "I don't want something to be traumatic if it conflicts with my particular beliefs about what is and isn't acceptable." All over the Internet, it seems like trauma is selectively used as a trump card to condemn or excuse behavior, usually behavior in which you have some kind of invested interest. I can't say how often this happens in real life, though, because I think the people who employ this tactic are rarely spotted outside. But I did have a coworker who described "finally escaping a toxic relationship with the help of my therapist," only to, after a few drinks, refer to her ex-boyfriend as having broken up with her.

But anyway, this is how you get people who, with the help of a particularly compliant therapist, start leveraging "therapy speak" to excuse all their bad behavior and condemn bad behavior from people they don't like. One minute it's, "I need to seek therapy for my self-esteem," and the next minute it's, "Babe, my love language is receiving feet pics from OnlyFans girls."

I actually think this type of self-indulgent therapy is more popular with women than men, even though men get teased for it. That's not because women are more narcissistic or manipulative, but rather because therapy is more normalized among women in general so there's a larger sample size of women who seek therapy at all. As a result of this reality, men who behave this way may stand out more. But I do think that certain men discover this secret code language of boundaries and trauma responses, and use it to their advantage.

But where does that leave us—people who (at least I hope) care about mental health, including that of men? Therapy, even if you include the green juice stuff, is still a net positive overall. Some men view the ridicule of "manipulative therapy men" as ridicule of all men who go to therapy, and that's certainly not right. If you forced every man in the world to see a therapist for a few weeks, things would probably be better for men overall, and not because they got better at manipulating women into doing threesomes. But therapy is not mandated (at least not yet- just wait until Komrade Kamala takes office and forces men into therapy while she does transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison!!) so it feels especially silly to make blanket statements about how therapy "helps men become abusive," as many jeered at Anna Kendrick this week.

The answer to the manipulative therapy men isn't to condemn therapy, or to say that men who seek it are inherently worse. Some certainly are, but many others are doing the right thing for their mental health. And honestly, I don't even think that consumers of green juice therapy are necessarily doing anything wrong, even when they emerge from therapy with insufferable victimhood narratives. If anything, the therapist is to blame. The problem is that a lot of these people literally just need a group of friends, or even one friend. But the thing about friends is that if they're actually decent, they'll tell you when you're being an butthole. Ironically, sometimes people like this will cut friends out of their life if their therapist, who suspiciously agrees with everything they say, believes their friend is "toxic." And the self-perpetuating cycle continues.

There isn't much to do about this problem, but I don't think shaming men for seeking therapy is the way to go (yes, I joked about it, but I did clarify in my next tweet that I was joking! Hopefully that counts!) And anyway, even if I wasn't just joking about men who get therapy, humor is literally my trauma response and criticizing me for it is violating a really important boundary.