Consolation Tropes

Therapists, older generations, and well-meaning friends can fuck you up worse than you were to begin with. In the place I grew up, I saw a lot of this happening to people close to me, and I saw how it all went wrong. People were going to therapy, going to church, trusting their friends and family to not lead them astray, and shit was FUCKED. And here is why.

The Stigma - this had complicated reasons to exist. No one wanted to be called crazy because it would indicate that somehow you were "less than;" not a prime human specimen or an Alpha male or whatever. Also most of the population wanted to rationalize their laziness so that they didn't have to take care of anyone who was invisibly mentally ill. Autism "could be fixed" with gluten free diets and avoiding vaccines. ADHD and ADD could be drugged and then ignored. Depression was something you faked that you didn't have so that people wouldn't tell you to "just snap out of it." It seemed easier for people to pretend that mental illness was something people brought upon themselves because they just were inferior humans than to actually get them real treatment and this misconception was also shared by people with M.D. after their name. Crazy person? Any whiff of mental illness? Okay, then they are done for and the doctor will not deign to help the inferior one that brought it upon themselves. Or, in the case of a female, it was "hysteria." Mental illness still has such a stigma that even in most places in the US if you go to a doctor's office with a real physical issue but also mental illness of some sort, they'll often refer you to a psychiatrist without treating the physical problem. I wish I was kidding.
Invalidate All Feelings But The Most Socially Acceptable One - Oh yes, therapists are prone to this problem too, particularly in getting patients to stuff down, repress, or deny unpleasant emotions in an effort to superficially "heal." In much of the US's history this was happiness, particularly the 90s. If you weren't smiling most of the time there was clearly something wrong with you, and happy-go-lucky was the most acceptable state. Everything else was "bad." In the 2000s it was "calm." You couldn't be angry, depressed, anxious, or even joyful, because you had to be on an "even keel," whatever the fuck that is. Unhealthy as fuck! I'm pretty convinced this had a lot to do with emo's ascendancy.
Trends Are The Answer - yes, going gluten free will solve your crippling depression. Yes, following the crowd will help you. No of course it won't help you nitwit, you'll just lose a lot of money! Unless of course you've got celiac disease in the case of this example but you get my point.
Cults Are The Answer - because joining a MLM like a certain essential oil brand can certainly solve the repressed trauma and anxiety. Fandoms, unfortunately, still count as cults.
My Drugs Are Not Actually Drugs - caffeine, extreme amounts of sugar, fast food, TV, video games all day, buying worthless junk just to shop, internet all day, Tylenol, antidepressants, alcohol, tobacco. Yeah sure, you're "drug free." Get the fuck over yourself.
Medicine Will Fix Everything - most of my classmates growing up were in a drugged-out apathetic haze. Because they had problems in their lives, their parents took 'em to the doc, medicated 'em, and zonked 'em out so they didn't have to feel anything. No happiness, no depression, no anxiety. Kind of like comas where they still walked around and did their homework but hey, they got A's, so who cares right? Yeah that's not okay. Nowadays I know that this is malpractice and the right kind of medication gives you emotional balance without slugging out your higher brain functions so you can think more clearly, not less clearly, and so you can fight back against mental issues while thinking with a full deck, but back then it made me terrified of all psychiatric medication.
Presentation Will Fix Everything - People with manners, good looks, professional clothing, a high level of conformity to the local social norms, and a high social standing were seen to have good mental health and those without it were treated as insane. This misconception extended to all authority figures, including medical professionals. So if you could present as having perfect manners and appearance, you were clearly mentally well and your doctor or therapist pronounced you good to go. The opposite was also in play. Specifically: if you were ugly, sick, an oddball, disabled, had bad manners, and were unpopular, then you were also assumed to be crazy, and ironically then the doctors and therapists would give up on treating you for anything because you were "hopeless."
Radical Acceptance source: Dialectical Behavioral Therapy There is a good way of doing dialectical behavioral therapy, such as the methods developed by David Burns, M.D. And then there's the method of gaslighting yourself caused by some unscrupulous practitioners. For instance, the notion you have to "forgive everything done to you" no matter what the atrocity or you'll "never heal." And where I grew up, "radical acceptance" did not mean accepting what you could not change but pretending that you could not get justice on those who had committed crimes done to you because you had to show "grace" to the abusers and "turn the other cheek." Again, because supposedly if you didn't you would "never heal." Indeed they provided the perfect conditions to give their patients a permanent victim mentality. People followed these directions and then took their suppressed anger out on the innocent.
Catharsis - aka telling your sob story that includes traumas - a technique used in most talk therapy. As stated in Mental Health, the therapists I saw had me do this repeatedly and then say "see you next week," which retraumatized me and made me poorer. There is much doubt that this technique even works at all.
I Don't Need Therapy When Prayer Will Fix Everything - the most common excuse for laziness and evil in my hometown. People were more than happy to use God as their crutch, their servant, and their reason for avoiding everything even remotely uncomfortable. Why get off the couch when you have faith? Why worry about anything when heaven would ensure your every last whim was catered to after death? Why bother being a good person when you're already guaranteed a ticket through the Pearly Gates? After all, with faith and belief, nothing else matters, because you're all set.
Group Therapy, Beer Nights, Workplace Hivemind and Religious Social Overinvolvement - you don't need to look within to fix anything if you're addicted to groupthink
Conformity Will Fix You - Well, it might help you with things here and there, but there's always the wall you run into. Specifically the "wait a moment, no one else is living my life and no one else has my soul or my mind" wall. Even Darwin said that variation drives natural and sexual selection, and that random genetic mutations are what cause evolution and adaptability. Therefore, according to science, the likelihood that you are exactly like someone else and therefore need exactly the same things as them, or even as the majority of people, is nil. To say nothing of all the arguments against this conformity crap presented by a belief in the soul, in humankind's right to freedom, and so on.
Religion Will Fix You - if you weren't in the religion you were a terrible person and if you were in it all your problems were solvable and you did the right thing. Never mind any crimes being committed by you; all was forgiven when you converted by everyone in the town and you'd forever be forgiven for anything by everyone
Worksheets worksheets worksheets paperwork thought processes - Much as I wish it weren't true you cannot solve internal issues solely by working them out on a sheet of paper or even reasoning them out in your head. It can help but if that's all you're doing, you really should be questioning why. We do not operate solely on logic.
Lack Of Common Sense Coupled With Dangerous Egotism - It doesn't take a genius to figure out that a lot of therapeutic methods being done today are more harmful than helpful, or more commonly just a waste of time. Keep your noggin screwed on right and use critical thinking to determine if a therapeutic method has any merit at all. Just because a therapist has a Ph.D. doesn't make them more privy to the truth than you or better than you. Good old horse sense isn't all bad. Instinct. In particular any therapist that tells you to ignore your instincts or otherwise put yourself down/lose trust in yourself is extremely toxic, run.
Pretending Parents Always Love Their Children - spoilers: where I lived they sure didn't
Grief Has Predictable Stages In A Predictable Sequence - the hell it does
You Get Over It Eventually - it depends
TV Has All The Answers - Ok, boomer.
Watered-Down Buddhism or Christianity - like a lot of other culturally appropriated stuff, this loses a lot in translation. Too much. Yes, even with Christianity, which is so little understood these days that what passes for Christianity is often little more than a pageant. If you're going to be using something in an effort to gain the gains from that tradition, you'd better be giving it a full, fair trial with all the bells and whistles or you run the risk of mistranslation and corruption of the original thing. At the very least if you're gonna bring something in, be sure that someone in that tradition (even if that someone is you) gives you the okay and looks it over to make sure you didn't fuck it up.
Everything Happens For A Reason - really? That just sounds like New Age garbage to me. Speaking of which, just about everything New Age can go fuck itself. It's just another slightly less toxic version of QAnon. People wanting to believe in magical bullshit so they can pretend they don't have to exert any kind of real effort.
Henceforth this list will be the New Age and Occult portion. Let's start with the victim blaming. Specifically, everything that happens to you is a result of your karma, or your negativity, or the lessons you have decided to learn before incarnation, or the fact that your soul chose to incarnate in your family, or your low vibration, or some version of all of these. This is an evil and insidious form of propaganda because it makes people in the Occult or New Age movements a. believe that they have more power than they actually do if they're not suffering misfortune and worse - that they are entitled to their positive fortune bestowed on them by sheer luck because surely they "earned it," and b. to blame for all of the stuff that has befallen them no matter how outrageous or undeserved. Yeah, karma plays a small role, but as for the rest, thanks to random chance, chaos, and free will: It's bullshit! It's all bullshit!
Just Be Positive. Oh dear. These three words are loaded with so much toxicity it would take an entire planetoid to offload it all. But let's try to unpack some of it. Firstly, it directly implies that every emotion that is not happiness is bad, evil, incorrect. Secondly, the Pollyanna viewpoint, while great in many circumstances, can and often does put rose-colored glasses on people which then absolutely refuse to see the truth. Thirdly, it negates the fact that we are human and we are not just strictly happy bubbly people all the time so it makes everyone wear masks. Brazil by Terry Gilliam is a great example of this. Ditto the Stepford Wives. Just Be Positive is really another way of stating that you're terrified of everything that's even remotely uncomfortable and what kind of life is that? It's a baby's life, and ultimately far more painful than the alternative, a life that's real. Where I grew up, if you weren't strictly positive all the time, you became a pariah, but it was one of the most miserable places I've ever been because no one could be honest with themselves and they lashed out in unpredictable, chaotic, and often abusive ways. Not fucking healthy.
Life's true purpose is one of these: to let go of your ego, to become enlightened and/or stop undergoing rebirth and karma, to learn lessons and become a better person, to become in better communion with your Creator. Where's the fucking evidence? More importantly, is there any evidence whatsoever that any of these paths fit every single person all the time in every situation? Ughhhh
Everything that's not MY particular flavor of the Occult is wrong and bad and evil and those who do it are seriously misguided/on the path to doom. Yep, that's right, there are Occultist fundamentalists, and they're just as sanctimonious and holier-than-thou as your garden variety jerk.

Home

Mental Health