How We Might Be Weaponizing Therapy

Therapy is a long and grueling process. It shouldn’t be thrown around as a way of getting someone to do what you want. Maybe those who are telling others to get therapy, need it more than anyone else?

I couple days ago, I stumbled onto this article entitled: Why Will Men Do Literally Anything To Avoid Going To Therapy?

Tonally, the article starts out pretty poorly, seemingly making light of men’s issues with therapy and mental health:

Oh men — poor men with their pathetic, unexamined lives! Though men are the main perpetrators of toxic masculinity, they are, too, the hapless victims of it, and that is perhaps never more apparent in their willingness to, as the saying goes, do anything but go to therapy

Then later needing to clarify that they aren’t unsympathetic to mens’ plight but think that tweets are decent evidence to show that men elevate avoiding therapy to an art form.

To the article’s credit, it does feature some research about the prevalence of mental health treatment within certain demographics that report on the difference between men and women’s rates of receiving treatment, white men and men of color, cis men and gay men, and transgender people.

But that’s interlaced with blaming men for their own issues and using toxic masculinity as a catch-all for the primary reason for men’s reluctance to go to therapy.

But putting all that into focus, this article seems to be intent on highlighting 1) that men don’t go to therapy enough, 2) that men should just go to therapy to solve their problems, 3) it's pretty laughable how resistant men are to therapy.

While I am all for encouraging men to go through therapy, I don’t find it funny nor laughable why men don’t want to go. Therapy is a grueling process and shaming men who don’t want to/avoid therapy is not an effective way of opening up men to therapy. Furthermore, this shaming and flippant use of therapy is part of a condescending narrative that treats men and male emotional issues/insecurity as laughable, easily fixable, and that the issues men face all “all in men’s heads”. This leads to sexist, misandrist (and consequentially misogynistic) messaging that belittles men’s experiences and shames men into receiving help:

For example, the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has had several programs aimed at encouraging men to go to the doctor for preventive screenings and routine treatment such as “Real men wear gowns.” Perhaps they have had no more poignant slogan for a men’s health campaign than the ad from a few years ago that asserted that “This year thousands of men will die from stubbornness.” Rather than highlighting differential rates of unemployment, gender differences in patterns of care over the life course, or the limited infrastructure of men’s health programs and services, these and other efforts have suggested the problem is in men’s heads.

Instead of going beat by beat and showing how pervasive this problematic narrative is in most parts of academia: I think it's time we got a bit personal and show how this type of sentiment can show up in men’s personal lives.

“I’m Not Your Therapist”

Last year I decided to go to therapy. Why?

Because my fiance demanded it.

I can’t go too much into detail, but my ex-fiance and I had a plethora of significant issues, especially when it comes to communication. She had no problem communicating how she felt, but when she did, it was often insulting, aggressive, and sometimes physical. She often targeted my manhood whenever I wasn’t able to keep up with her standards, or agree with her opinion. Some of the shaming happened in public. I, on the other hand, was very very avoidant. Sometimes, I would avoid issues for days before bringing them back up. My justification was that I needed time to process it and calmly talk about it, but looking back, I think that was a story that I told myself to justify my fear of confronting my fiance.

When I did bring up an issue, it tended to be met with lukewarm care and was dismissed out of hand as being “too sensitive”, “stupid” or “needing help”.

Often, I would simply never bring the issue up, and just bottle in the emotion only releasing them on the rare occasion where I’d bring up every single slight that plagued and built-up resentment. The second time I allowed the resentment to pour out of me, we ended up in a pretty drastic argument in which she claimed that she was “not my therapist” and couldn’t “help me through my insecurity because it was not her job.”

So I went to see a therapist.

What Therapy Was Like

First off, my therapist was extremely surprised to see me. He said that it isn’t often that young black men come into therapy because of the stigma around mental health in the black community. We were able to connect on that note for a couple of minutes before we drove straight into why I was there in the first place.

When I told my therapist about the situation and he was shocked that I was still in a relationship with her and then promptly asked why I stayed with her. I told him that I didn’t think the relationship was worth throwing away because though we had our disagreements, the vast majority of the time, I’ve enjoyed myself more than any previous relationship and that for the most part, that has only been getting better with time. He respected this and pivoted to what I could do to overcome the issues with communication.

3 sessions later, we both wondered why I was even showing up to therapy anymore. What he told me wasn't very groundbreaking or really super beneficial. It was to simply communicate how I felt quicker without anger/resentment. That was just as easy said and done though when I did, the relationship didn’t get much better nor did it improve.

So, dissatisfied with my experience, I went to another therapist. The same thing happened: icebreaker, talk about issues, learn to communicate. It happened again a third time for a single session when I decided that I’m not sure I really needed any more therapy.

The Break-Up

The week before I decided to end the relationship, we had our largest argument yet. It came with all the bells and whistles relationship-ending arguments do, the yelling, screaming, the name-calling, crying etc. In the middle of the argument, she yelled the same demand: “You should go to therapy to work that out because I’m not your therapist”. After calming down and dropping her off home for the night, I decided to call my mom to talk to her about the incident.

For context, my mom was a professional social worker and therapist. She tended to be right on a lot of interpersonal issues and even when she’s wrong she provides useful insight. After recapping the issues that created the argument and what was said, my mom went silent. After an eternity-minute she said:

She doesn’t actually care about you going to therapy. She just doesn’t want to deal with your emotions. You’ve already been to therapy for those issues and you didn’t get much out of it. You’ve already put in the work, why is she asking you to do it again? Is this the type of person you want to be in a relationship with?

This hit me like a truck and felt so obvious that I was surprised I hadn’t seen it before. Therapy was used as a more modern sophisticated “hand-wavy” dismissal. She didn’t care about my progress in therapy, she only cared about avoiding taking responsibility.

It's Not Just Me

I couple of days ago, I stumbled upon this thread from MensLib which linked the aforementioned article. Under it I found a comment that resembled my experience especially with this line:

In my own personal experience, many of the women in my own life would use the “go to therapy” line as a way of dismissing any emotional issues that their loved on might have. It tends to signal: “You’re emotionally burdening me and I don’t care enough about you to help you deal with it. Go to therapy and come back when you’ve gotten better.” And while there might be actual things that require significant professional attention, when we say “go to therapy”, it should come from the most compassionate place possible as if to say “let’s go to therapy and work on this together.”

The bolded part is worded perfectly. A lot of the time, we don’t want to put up with our partner’s distress and in an age where men’s emotions are viewed as burdens that they alone should carry, this type of attitude is patronizing, harmful, and sometimes downright deadly.