Woke therapists and the unwoke
Here’s a long article on how therapists have become social justice warriors. I haven’t yet read the whole thing, although I intend to do so. But I’ll just point out that: (a) there have always been many bad therapists out there, although there are probably many more these days; and (b) the vast majority of therapists have been on the left for a long long time.
On a personal note connected with point (b), twenty or so years ago when I was newly divorced and newly conservative and wanted to discuss both issues with a therapist, I had an amazingly difficult time trying to find a therapist willing to deal with a client on the right. So this sort of ostracism is not a new phenomenon at all, although I’m virtually certain it is now far more common than it was back then, and it was already common back then. If anyone is interested, here’s a website which purports to list therapists willing to work with conservatives. I have no idea whether it’s reliable or not, however.
If anyone is looking for a therapist, I suggest being basically up-front about your politics when you first speak to each therapist on the phone. Explain that you are politically conservative and ask whether they’re comfortable working with a conservative, whether they come from an identity politics ideology, and that sort of thing. The therapist may be truthful in telling you yes or no. You can often get a good sense of this in even a brief conversation, and it doesn’t cost a cent.
But what a terrible mess.
Try finding a therapist who operates from a Christian worldview.
John Guilfoyle:
That doesn’t make the person a good therapist, for starters. But more importantly, it doesn’t make the person a good fit for someone who isn’t a devout Christian. In addition, many Christian denominations these days are plenty woke.
So no; not necessarily a solution at all.
That article is really good and long (yay Bari Weiss).
About 15 years ago I saw a therapist while dealing with a very perplexing breakup and she was a grad of a VERY left wing college (think Weinstein) but she was very good. She was also older and had returned to college after her kids were raised and I think that matters regardless of political beliefs.
It is the younger ones that seem to really be horrible and of course that is a bad sign for the future.
Therapy really helped me and I only did it for a few months and I wasn’t that messed up but I doubt I would even entertain the idea of doing it now.
Is there anything (any institution, organization, or system) which has not been infected by what Elon, borrowing from others, calls the “woke mind virus”? Many years ago, two brilliant Russian dissidents, both dead (V Bukovsky, who went to England and Y Bezmenov, who came here) described the process by which a culture in all its forms can be subverted over time, with the population indoctrinated and demoralized, and with a hostile elite firmly in control; too few listened to these Slavic Cassandras.
My view of psychiatry and allied occupations is that, as a rule, their activity should not be treated as medical care nor financed with insurance reimbursements. If companies want to set up EAP programs, that’s their business, neither encouraged nor discouraged by labor law and tax law. Psychiatrists who work with schizophrenics might perhaps be re-imbursed by insurance companies. Psychologists who work with obsessive-compulsive types or phobics might. Neither of these subsets are purveyors of the talking cure.
Re: “V Bukovsky, who went to England and Y Bezmenov”
j e:
I can always tell those who encounter the Soviets somewhat close to the source by the first name initial followed by the full patronymic.
Well done.
That wasn’t my point. My response was too brief to be clear…my apologies.
Seeking a therapist with a similar political worldview is a challenge but finding one who lives from a similar spiritual starting point is equally if not more difficult.
Not a question of “Christian therapist is better/worse” just if you want a therapist who understands your perspective that’s a tough find. The challenge is similar was what I was aiming to say and did so less than clearly.
I’ll just point out that: (a) there have always been many bad therapists out there, although there are probably many more these days; and (b) the vast majority of therapists have been on the left for a long long time.
neo is always spot-on in these matters.
Huxley,
Those are actual surnames, not patronymics. A patronymic ends in “-vich” for men and “-vna” for women and is used as a middle name. But yes, often in Russia people are referred to by just their first and patronymic names. E.g., Putin is a junior, so he would be referred to as Vladimir Vladimirovich. I dunno if he has any sisters but their patronymic would be Vladimirovna.
Marisa:
Sorry for the error.
But I take it, that the general First Name Initial followed by Full Last Name pattern applies.
Once upon a time I read a fair amount of leftist literature which followed the Soviet model. It has a weird sort of charm for me.
I read the Free Press article earlier today and was reminded of a very small but significant moment from the mid-’70s. At that time most of my hippie pals were finding some sort of place in “straight” society, and of course academia was a very congenial one. One of them was getting some kind of graduate degree in psychology/psychotherapy. He talked about having a patient (client?) who was “religious,” which almost certainly meant traditionally Christian. And he said he really didn’t know how he could talk to somebody like that. He wasn’t being malicious, though there was an implicit disdain. He just genuinely did not see how he could connect with a person who inhabited such a weird mental world.
Like I said, it was a small thing, but I remember thinking that was in some way a bad thing, a bad sign for the future. That’s why I’ve remembered it for so long. I’m not saying he was as fanatical and deranged as the people discussed in that article. But the sense of total separation, of having nothing in common with The Other, was there.
Pretty much everything we deplore about the current state of society was present in seed form in the radicalism of the ’60s. Up to and including transgenderism. Several of my friends, male and female, were fairly messed up sexually and were unhealthily fascinated by sexual tendencies that most people considered perverted. I remember one woman who seemed to think that cross-dressing and such were just the coolest things in the world.
I know a couple of folks in therapy for related but not identical issues. From what they tell me, the therapists’ side is giving good advice… “You’ve got to let that go. He was a jerk, after all, which you have accepted” sort of thing.
Both are far left but don’t mention anything of the sort in the infrequent descriptions of their therapy.
This issue was one that crossed my mind not too long ago, and after a little consideration I didn’t even bother to research it. The “Conservative Therapist” webpage lends credence to my expectation. The left coast really is a left-wing coast when it comes to therapists.
I’m surprised there are conservative therapists. The psych depth at my former employer was following the education dept in making sure the students had the “proper disposition “, ie not MotR or conservative. I’m sure that’s now common practice.
I graduated from a top-10 counseling school in 2018. We were told in our first semester, “You are social justice activists as counselors, you know.” 38 bobbleheads nodded in unison. My hand went up to ask how they would have empathy for 50% of their clients? Professor assured me that would be no problem. Bobbleheads nodded again.
Yeah, right.
I passed a guy this morning while walking who was wearing a t-shirt that read “Awake Not Woke.” Good slogan. I’d suggest that the opposite is true, as well–“Woke Not Awake.”
The problem with having any ‘conservative’ therapists in the future is that as the article points out if you stray even a little off the woke reservation in school or training you can be denied degrees or sanctioned to the point where you almost have to either go along with the cultists or basically lie the entire time.
And the Trans garbage is another factor as in many states psychologists can’t even come at it from any way other than ‘affirming’ the patients delusional mental state.
After my life changed moving from San Francisco to Albuquerque and making the transition to retirement, I saw a therapist for a while.
He was a decent fellow. A neo-Reichian, and certainly of the Left, but still Liberal enough that he winced at my stories of ostracism and harassment from the Left.
I never sensed that he had reservations about our relationship due to politics.
Then Covid hit. He wanted to shift our appointments to Skype or open air venues.
I was pissed off at everything and wanted to wait it out until Things Were Back to Normal.
Which didn’t happen.
No worries, Hux. Russian naming practices can be confusing. Nicknames can be confusing as well. I studied Russian way back in the day so was able to get a handle on it.
The problem with having any ‘conservative’ therapists in the future is that as the article points out if you stray even a little off the woke reservation in school or training you can be denied degrees or sanctioned to the point where you almost have to either go along with the cultists or basically lie the entire time. And the Trans garbage is another factor as in many states psychologists can’t even come at it from any way other than ‘affirming’ the patients delusional mental state.
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We have Republican legislatures. Commission an audit of the state licensing board and the clinical programs at the various state institutions. The goods are likely to be there. If they’re there, a new state law dismantling the licensing board, ending 3d party payments, and closing down the programs at state institutions.
‘We have Republican legislatures’
The problem is that with exception of Florida there have been hardly any red state legislatures willing to any thing close to this kind of thing.
They are weak cowards for the most part.
The problem is that with exception of Florida there have been hardly any red state legislatures willing to any thing close to this kind of thing.
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Well, they can start. It’s not as if it’s technically difficult.
I have a relative that is working on her Master’s in Christian Counseling. Probably have to work for a large church in order to maintain a conservative Christian world view. And I can see how a Conservative Christian Counselor is not going to be a good mesh for someone who rejects many of the key concepts of a conservative Christian worldview.
Does the year the therapist was born make a difference? When I was in therapy, my leanings were evident but certainly not central to any issue. As were the alternative leanings of the therapist. We got along fine and dare I saw we both profited from our encounters. Both born in the late 60s.
Growing up at that time, “don’t talk politics or religion” was de rigueur. It was normal to interact and befriend people with even slight intersection of values and interests without the idiotic notion that complete agreement was required. I cringe to think I will have to interact with woke medical professionals with a social morality inferior to mine. Whippersnappers!
I would have thought that having a therapist who had to listen to you while you demonstrated to them the error of their ways and generally annoyed them would be fabulous fun. Although possibly that’s not the purpose of therapy? It sounds pretty therapeutic to me.
I am not looking a therapist, but I did have to seek out a new medical doctor. My small town is operated by a collective feminists. A large family practice located in the local hospital has closed down. Now the only family practice within that hospital is staffed COMPLETELY by female 10 or 11 MDs. I think there are 8 or 9 of them. They do have one MD–an Asian man, and they also have 2 or 3 male PH.D’ specializing in social/family counseling and research! All of our neighborhood care centers are staffed by female MDs. I finally did find a male MD. Guess what? He is homosexual!
My law office is next to two therapists. One of them says, “See you next Tuesday. Hang in there.”
@cornhead, is that supposed to be the insult I think it is?
Schools of social work are all on the left because the profession depends heavily on tax dollars. It’s a pity, because medical doctors often aren’t that good with people. I did notice that most therapists are left of center as a matter of course. It goes with the urban/suburban college-educated “new class” thing, but therapists take it further than their peers in other fields. I wasn’t especially political and couldn’t ascribe my problems in life to political differences, but it did seem like there was something in the air that we couldn’t talk about. The bigger divide, though, wasn’t politics, it was still being “up in the air” and disconnected and trying to communicate with people who were more “grounded” in the real world.
About 15(+/-) years ago Seattle and thus the State of Washington had a serious expose of their flawed licensing program. Of course, the liberal media made it seem like simple recording errors, but the fact is that they had to re-issue nearly 1200 licenses for therapists, family counselors, etc. Many formerly licensed were required to take additional classes. It seems that there were too many complaints regarding fraudulent practitioners who had been certified by a corrupt school system !!
When my mother died, my daughter and I desperately needed help with grief counseling. We hired someone referred to us by one of the “administrators” at the hospice center. We met once a week for nearly three months and this expert never asked a question, never made a suggestion, never did anything except burn candles and tell us to close our eyes and relax. Too much of that type of fraud and even corrupt Seattle had to finally do something to make things a little better.
ey81 It sounds pretty therapeutic to me. LOL
Probably your best bet is to:
1 — utilize a priest/reverend
2 — ask a priest/reverend if he can recommend a congregant with the correct professional background. He likely knows one or two. If they attend church (unless the church is hopelessly leftard, like the episcopals), then they are likely not going to be leftards, even if they aren’t conservatives.
}}} That doesn’t make the person a good therapist, for starters.
True, but it does indicate that they are not starting from the position of batshit crazy and drooling sycophant, which is a Real Good Thing for any kind of counseling.
Anne: Have you thought of finding an attorney who is interested in a class action suit against them for sexual profiling? Seems pretty obvious that they’re using gender in hiring to have things that stilted.
I personally have a certain distrust of females as doctors just because I don’t think they (as a group, plenty of individual exceptions) are mentally as aggressive as men (as a group).
An example of this was some decades ago, when my mother wasn’t feeling well (she had been a smoker at one point, but not for 5-10y as of this) and the female GP, who came highly recommended, just wrote it off as bronchitis, and really didn’t do anything for it.
We took in the services of a male GP and he was much more open to the idea that it wasn’t merely bronchitis, and supposed that she had advanced symptoms from a flu, and prescribed something towards that end, and my mothers’ problems cleared up quickly from that.
That’s not the only example I’ve encountered, and acked, it’s certainly not a statistical universe.
It would be wonderful to actually see a study towards proving, disproving that, but we both know how it would be received in the current mileau if it proved it was accurate.
OBloodyHell:
Talking to a prospective therapist over the phone can also give you a rough idea if someone is “batshit crazy or a drooling sycophant.” I think pastoral counseling is fine if you’re an adherent of the religious denomination to which the counselor belongs, but otherwise it’s not necessarily a good fit.
}}} I think pastoral counseling is fine if you’re an adherent of the religious denomination to which the counselor belongs,
That’s why I mentioned option 2, Neo — if you wanted a professional, I would strongly suspect a good starting point would be someone who was a member of your church with that professional stature. As long as you weren’t part of the lunatic fringe churches (and if that’s the case, we’ve already partly identified your problem) (and yes, lunatic fringe on Either Side, for that matter), then you have a better chance of finding someone actually competent, I would strongly suspect. Certainly someone for whom ideology is not the be-all end-all of everything.
“Talking to someone on the phone” does not eliminate the issue of them fooling themselves about how significant ideology is to them, nor of them being shrewd enough to not talk about it with potential clients. Remember, one problem with leftards is their presumption that they are inherently superior, which means they are “clearly better than anyone who disagrees” with their ideology.
I never discuss politics or my political persuasion(s) with my therapist
One’s ideology should rarely if ever come up in a program of therapy. There may be instances where, say, one’s job is directly related to politics, etc., but even then specifics can usually be elided
My personal experience likely doesn’t reflect most of your readers (as I’m trans and conservative), but I have found that most therapists I have worked with don’t really reflect this view at all. Maybe I’m lucky?
Here’s a woman in NYC who is a therapist…and a Trump supporter. A very rare creature.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/12/life_as_a_trumpsupporting_female_in_manhattan.html#.XBgLAzjKYBM.twitter
Her problem is that she can’t find anyone willing to date her, because Badthink.
Any single NYC guys reading?
Neo — GOOD ON YOU! To plan on taking this topic
The alarming case of Leslie Elliott, squelched from completing her MA in counseling at Antioch University in Seattle… unless she joins the SWJ Activist fad FULL ON.
This story runs back 7 or 8 months online at YT and in various fora.
Here’s a summary by Sally Satellite at AEI from February
https://www.aei.org/op-eds/social-justice-shrinks-how-identity-politics-infected-therapy/
Leslie’s bio and link to her substack, through which she cried out for help last Autumn
https://theradicalcenterconsulting.com/about-leslie/
THANK YOU, Neo.
1. For religious people it’s not just about finding someone who understands one’s beliefs.
It’s about avoiding someone who thinks you must be cured of them… That religious faith is a symptom. An attitude that’s especially prevalent in youth counseling. Many religious Jewish organizations learned this the hard way.
2. The bias you report is true even in the most conservative, religious sectors of Israeli society. Waaaay too many Orthodox therapists and social workers here are on the LGBT bandwagon.
3. Therapists are especially susceptible to this because the field is pseudo-scientific – just like most Progressive True Believers. Both groups are low-mid level liberal-arts minds of no particular rigor – that think themselves scientists and philosopher-kings.
My medical school class was 1966, right in the middle of the 60s. Half of my class (33 of 66) went into Psychiatry. A couple were going to be good psychiatrists. One was the son of a German psychiatrist who had escaped the Nazis. Most were nuts or underachievers. The year I was accepted we had a psychologist as chairman of the admissions committee. I later learned that his ambition was to be sure no doctor’s son was admitted. One was but he became a psychiatrist.
I will say that a psychiatrist I worked with at a VA psych hospital was the most impressive MD I ever met. His name was David Harrington and he was the son of a lay analyst (a Baptist minister of all things) who had known Sigmund Freud in Vienna. He thought analysis was BS and said only psychotics needed treatment. I seriously was thinking of Psychiatry until I met other psychiatrists, especially the professors. His father was at Menninger and he went to U Kansas medical school for that reason. He had many funny stories about his experiences in psych hospitals. One of his residents at UCLA wrote a book about Harrington’s ideas. It is called “Reality Therapy” and is still in print. At one time it was recommended by the LAUSD for teachers. That was back when sanity was common in CA.
Mike K–
FWIW, a med school professor I knew as a friend said that the med students who decided part way or most of the way through their four years to go into psychiatry usually turned out to be good practitioners– it was the ones who came to med school hell-bent on being shrinks who were a couple fries short of a Happy Meal.
We have a plague of people who focus professionally on something other than ***their own jobs***. If they are retail CEO’s, they don’t want to just make and sell shoes and clothing, they want to save the planet. If they are therapists, then making patients better takes a distant back set to Social Change. If they are prosectors, their goal is not to carry out the law and make the streets safe, but to remedy all bad things of past history.
Part of this–a big part–is the desire to conform and be a Right-Thinking Person. Part of it is to make ‘bossses’–customers, shareholders, credentialing bodies–happy. But a big part of it, I think, is a search for meaning which is missing in their own lives.
Stuart Schneiderman writes a lot about the state of the Therapy industry at his blog:
https://stuartschneiderman.blogspot.com/
Onanymous:
These days, for many people, politics comes up in therapy. Just to take a few examples – the news is depressing them, family and friends have stopped speaking to them or are angry with them because of their political views, they are forced to lie at work about their beliefs, etc.
neo,
Not to mention as the article points out everything is political to these people.
Having marital problems? It’s your white male privilege.
Having problems at work? It’s your white supremacy showing again.
It’s identity politics all the way down.
YES to Mike K!
“ One of his residents at UCLA wrote a book about Harrington’s ideas. It is called “Reality Therapy” and is still in print. At one time it was recommended by the LAUSD for teachers….”
I read it and even re-read it in the 1980s. It was in some sectors widely recommended.
I see his ideas to be a call to responsibility, and self-responsibility. It served as a corrective to the flower power turn made in the ‘60s, that turned Carl Rogers into pablum.
I’m glad to hear that it’s still in print.
When it comes to the political situation these days, it helps if you can surround yourself with people with a similar world view and then NOT spend all your time focusing on politics.
I do find that Sunday Morning at church can help take focus away from the current depressing situation. My pastor tries to stay neutral on politics in general, although he has spoken against the lies about ” Truth”, directly warning the congregation that neither ” tradition” nor ” innovation” should be allowed to replace truth. He did warn, from the pulpit, the young people that the devil has their generation ” by the neck ” on this idea about changing one’s gender.
” .. “tradition ” nor ” innovation” ….” Spell check changed my statement to “not” .
It sometimes seems that a large percentage of people going into the psychological fields were attracted to the field think they would be able to figure out what is wrong with themselves. It seems over the last few decades they have mostly just voted to change the DSM to say they are ok and the rest of us have problems.
The therapists that refuse to have a conservative as a client are consumed with irrational hatred.
The hate manifests several ways. First, is the irrational, unfounded belief that conservatives are evil. Second, is the belief that conservatives are unworthy of healing. The therapists not only consider conservatives to be horribly damaged, they consider them not human enough to warrant counseling help.
This is hatred at its most extreme. This is nasty, malevolent stuff.
stan:
Actually, not exactly. Yes, they feel conservatives are evil. But they refuse to treat them because – at least this is the excuse and rationalization, but I think most of them actually mean it – they would probably be unable to be objective enough to be truly helpful to them, and the conservatives would be better served by a therapist who would be a better fit.
Therapists are not required to take on as a client everyone who contacts them. Many specialize. For example, a child molester might be a client a lot of therapists would refuse. There are lots of types of clients each therapist might refuse to take on and might refer out.
I see a therapist who’s strongly conservative. She’s mentioned amazing experiences with friends who’ve had to start their own chat groups after being thrown off of the usual ones. She’s horrified by explicit demands from professional groups that she browbeat her clients into adopting progressive political stances and attacking clients for their non-woke errors.
On the therapy front, she’s very good at sorting out interpersonal quagmires and providing useful perspective. She’d never try to politicize a personal problem by, for instance, blaming the patriarchy, or challenging me to own my privilege or any of that nonsense. If I approach a moral dilemma from a traditional Christian viewpoint, I need never worry that she’ll belittle it.
She does have a lot of like-minded allies, even if they’re pretty beleaguered at this point.
Martin 1:58pm: “It sometimes seems that a large percentage of people going into the psychological fields were attracted to the field think they would be able to figure out what is wrong with themselves. ”
I chuckled when I read this because my wife has been saying exactly the same thing for many years now, based I think on college friends who went into those fields.
It’s amusing, yes, but it’s really pretty sad in some cases, because they never quite get The Answer and live in perpetual agitation looking for it.
NS: No, that’s therapy.
I am a male consecutive who had two female therapists almost 15 years ago through what was a divorce and mid-life crisis. I can’t say what their politics were although I made assumptions they didn’t align with mine.
The first one bordered on Freudian therapy so she was not in the room at all but a blank slate for me to project onto, and politics was not my issue but existential angst. Although I follow politics closely I never brought it up any more than the weather, and if I did it would be me projecting on to a blank slate anyway.
The second one was more support therapy to the point she basically went along to whatever I said, sort of a blank slate with support. My partying, divorced-guy lifestyle at the time had me going through a woman a month, and I actually think she didn’t approve of my girlfriend plate spinning at that time, but I don’t know that for a fact.
I got through that phase and have been married and boring for over a decade now, so a long time since a session. I would say that if you pick the right modality – one where you are doing therapy and not getting advice, meaning the therapist is not bringing themselves into the room – you’ll do okay.
But that might hard to find 15 years later, I have no idea.
To be honest, I am not religious. However when I go to a church, it is often therapeutic for me because I am not fed diatribe and inundated with blame for crimes against groups I never committed. Merit, trust and respect are earned. I’m also a biker and have worn leathers and my earrings into service, and was still welcome! definitely not the intolerant hateful bunch they’re made out to be.