Bad Therapy Quotes

“a therapist should treat a kid’s anxiety by treating the kid’s parents. Parents often unwittingly transmit their own anxiety to their kids. And parents are in the best position to help a child deal with her worries on an ongoing basis.”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“We beg doctors to give our kids antianxiety medications, teachers to give them untimed tests. We purchase plastic visors so bathwater never runs over our toddlers’ eyes, and carefully remove sesame seeds from their hamburger buns.[13] We aren’t just driving ourselves insane. We’re making our kids more fearful and less tolerant of the world.”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“We all need practice sitting with discomfort”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“This is a remarkably sturdy research finding: kids are happiest when raised in a loving environment that holds their behavior to high standards, expects them to contribute meaningfully to the household, and is willing to punish when behavior falls short. And it flies in the face of virtually everything therapists and parenting books now exhort.”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“I often hear parenting experts talk about the “decision to have children” as if having kids were a bit of consumerism, akin to opting for a moonroof or heated steering wheel. It isn’t like that at all. It’s a calling, the shedding of an old skin, the forming of a new one. You don’t have kids because you think it’ll be fun or because you’re looking for a new hobby. You don’t become a Navy SEAL because you have nothing better to do. You have kids because you feel that, for you, a full life requires it. That level of self-sacrifice and continuity with the future, the tumbling joy and punch-drunk love, are not even on the menu anywhere else.”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“You have kids because you feel that, for you, a full life requires it. That level of self-sacrifice and continuity with the future, the tumbling joy and punch-drunk love, are not even on the menu anywhere else.”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“If you want to, let’s say, climb a mountain, if you start asking yourself after two steps, ‘How do I feel?,’ you’ll stay at the bottom,”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“Exposure therapy” is CBT’s escalating method of encouraging patients to confront things that make them uncomfortable. It is among the few therapies with an evidentiary track record of benefits. Although a great many therapists claim to use CBT methods, a fraction of them are trained in its rigors or practicing its evidence-based methods.[10]”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“As therapeutic points of view and practice gain general acceptance, more and more people find themselves disqualified, in effect, from the performance of adult responsibilities and become dependent on some form of medical authority.”[”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“Researchers often graft onto the young whatever explanation seems most rational to them, based on their own political biases.”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“is the best we can offer kids affirmation of their fears?”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“When you start a child on meds, you risk numbing him to life at the very moment he’s learning to calibrate risks and handle life’s ups and downs. When you anesthetize a child to the vicissitudes of success and failure and love and loss and disappointment when he’s meeting these for the first time, you’re depriving him of the emotional musculature he’ll need as an adult. Once on meds, he’s likely to believe that he can’t handle life at full strength—and thanks to an adolescence spent on them, he may even be right. If you can relieve your child’s anxiety, depression, or hyperactivity without starting her on meds, it’s worth turning your life upside down to do so.”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“We all need practice sitting with discomfort, Ortiz emphasized—emotional as well as physical. If we get the necessary practice, we become better at tolerating it. If we don’t, we may become worse at it. And yet so many adults are intent on deleting all irritation and inconvenience from children’s lives as if they were toxins.”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“A core tenet of therapies like CBT is that a kid’s extreme aversion to, say, dirt may be based on the false belief that dirt is harmful. The best way to demolish this maladaptive belief is for your kid to have direct and repeated contact with precisely the thing she is afraid of.[8] If your kid is afraid of dogs, you prompt her to pet a dog.[9] For a germophobic patient with obsessive-compulsive disorder who is washing his hands a hundred times a day, the therapist might insist the patient touch a toilet and, eventually, stick his hand into a messy toilet bowl. Ortiz once led a patient to do this and then wipe his hand on a pillow and sleep on it. “Once they can do these pretty outrageous kinds of exposures, then the regular fears that they typically worry about don’t seem so big. Touching your own door handle once you’ve stuck your hand into a toilet bowl pales by comparison.” “Exposure therapy” is CBT’s escalating method of encouraging patients to confront things that make them uncomfortable. It is among the few therapies with an evidentiary track record of benefits. Although a great many therapists claim to use CBT methods, a fraction of them are trained in its rigors or practicing its evidence-based methods.[”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“Therapists typically point to three: smartphones, COVID-19 lockdowns, and climate change.[34]”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“Sometimes love is not enough and the road gets tough I don’t know why —Lana Del Rey”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“When you affirm kids’ natural inclination to regard their challenges as sui generis and all important, when you fail to tell them that their own grandparents survived hardship, you strip them of the ability to place their own suffering in context. You divest them of the one bit of empirical proof they have that their genetic material is resilient. You cut them loose of the familial web, one of humanity’s greatest sources of meaning. You force them to see their problems in isolation and to face hardship, alone.”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“professionals would blunder in, lodging themselves between parent and child: therapists, teachers, educational and parenting experts, psychiatrists, and even activists—anyone with an opinion about a child they may have just met and for whom they have neither love nor responsibility. None of whom bears the slightest consequence of their bad advice.”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“Mental health experts have earned a hearty dose of skepticism that they know how to help a child thrive. They are famously slow to acknowledge even their disastrous errors.[15] If anything, the past two decades suggest that today’s mental health experts ought to take a hard look at all of their advice and consider the possibility that much of it is dead wrong.”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“There is more parental estrangement today than in generations past. And the young adults who are cutting off their parents in record numbers are often those raised by the most indulgent and devoted parents.”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“Empathy invariably involves a choice of whose feelings to coronate and whose to disregard. Overreliance on empathy as a guide to mediating human affairs leads to precisely the injustices we see today in schools: phony show trials allegedly in defense of marginalized students, alongside breathtaking cruelty to undesirables. Empathy supplies a narrow aperture of intense caring.”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“Feelings fool us all the time. Adults should be telling kids how imperfect and unreliable their emotions can be, Chentsova Dutton says. Very often, kids should be skeptical that their feelings reflect an accurate picture of the world and even ignore their feelings entirely. (Gasp!) You read that right: a healthy emotional life involves a certain amount of daily repression.”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“How could the experts have missed a mental health calamity so obvious and foreseeable? Parents protested; they were largely ignored. The mental health–expert complex, with all its institutional heft, declined to offer so much as a public warning to policymakers about the impact on kids.[48] Perhaps they didn’t know the lockdowns would be devastating to the young people they were uniquely responsible to help. Whatever the reason for this colossal failure, there’s something perverse in their subsequent attempt to use the pandemic lockdowns to wave away the treatment-prevalence paradox, or—worse—to argue for their greater role in public policy development and the lives of American kids.”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“Try removing the spoon. If the doctor in the joke had been a little less ethical, or had just an ounce less sense, he would have prescribed painkillers, ordered an MRI, and charged for a full eye exam. What was necessary was simply a negative: the elimination of the obvious thing introducing the harm. We’ve allowed our kids to drink from mugs full of such spoons: the iPad when they were little, then the iPhone, which was worse. Each began the process of vitiating their attention, leaching away their joy in the world around them, which could only pale in comparison. When they stayed inside, alone, they hardly even knew what they were missing.”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“Your smartphone caters to your every whim, which seems great, but then it’s made it so much harder to adjust to the unclickable world. Everything real is also disappointing. No friend is as funny as a video you can pull up on your phone. No girl as hot as the endless catwalk in your pocket. You could meet someone for pizza, but with a swipe it arrives at your door; “contact-free delivery” means you don’t even need to talk to the pizza guy. Sometimes with a classmate you let your guard down and trade messages you shouldn’t. It was only a joke, but it’s never only a joke. Friends preserve everything you say in screenshots. You do the same, so that the deterrence of mutual assured destruction applies, enforced by teachers and administrators and college admissions committees. You’ve rarely spent a whole afternoon with a friend who lent you her full attention. You don’t know most of her secrets, and she doesn’t know yours; she’s already divulged her most intimate worries to a therapist. Rehashing it all again seems so pointless. You don’t really have time for friends, anyway. Your full-time, unpaid internship consumes every extra minute: five, six, eight hours a day—the settings don’t lie—staring at your phone. “My mental health sucks,” you tell the group chat. The others say theirs does, too. You can’t believe your dad had an actual job at your age. You don’t feel ready for anything like that. You’ve only ever known this overmanaged, veal-calf life. Occasionally it occurs to you to wonder: What if taking the risk is the only way to feel ready? What if the solution to adolescent mental health problems is to outgrow adolescence? That may explain why the unending parade of accommodation and intervention, which stretch childhood out like taffy, has only prolonged your torture.”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“For good reason, your parents and teachers are frantic over your mental health. Half of your friends are seeing shrinks or on psychiatric drugs or both. Your parents are concerned enough to hire a therapist to talk to you each week. “There are no wrong answers,” the woman in stretchy black pants and plastic glasses assures you over the soft tinkling of a prefab indoor water fountain. But, it turns out, there are lots of wrong answers—some of which trigger a diagnosis. No matter how good of a week you’ve had, or how well you followed the therapist’s advice, she never says: “You’re fixed! No need to return.” You’ve had a diagnosis for at least a year; it’s begun to feel as much a part of you as your own name. Your parents are obviously relieved to have a label for what’s wrong with you. Most of your friends have a diagnosis, too. It functions as an amulet; you begin to suspect it may be the most important thing about you. But also, it makes you feel like a glass with a starburst crack—damaged in a permanent way. You’ll never be a load-bearing object, strong enough to carry others. Your therapist suggests medication might help, and the pediatrician is happy to oblige. The drugs make you calmer and keep you from crashing, but sometimes you wish the training wheels weren’t welded on. Who knows what you might be able to do without them? You’ve been on SSRIs for so long, it’s hard to know. You’ve packed on pounds. You can’t help it; the drugs make you less inhibited around food. They’ve killed your sex drive. You’re not even sure if that matters. You spend a lot more time on the sofa. You no longer feel bad about that, but you’re also far less inclined to budge. Whenever you have to wait for anything—food to arrive, a show to start, your friend to speak—your skin starts to itch. You’ve been conditioned all your life to find waiting unbearable. You carry an accommodation machine in your pocket, which might as well be called a rumination device. It drives you deeper into the forest of your own mind to be haunted by shadows: the ex-boyfriend who didn’t want you, the party you missed, the numberless ways you don’t stack up.”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“Your parents attend every practice and game and communicate regularly with your coaches and teachers. Outside of the internet, there is no place for you to mess around or experiment without their knowledge, encouragement, cheerleading, and feedback. Your grandparents live far away. You don’t know them very well, and chitchat, never practiced, isn’t easy. Your parents obviously prefer you to get your direction from the adults they’ve hired, who report to them. Each day is activity-jammed, presided over by a series of adults who judge your progress. They tell you when you are improving and also when you are not. They communicate the delta to your parents: “Her handsprings are crisper, but we still need to work on the balance beam.” You are always, in everything you do, monitored by anxious adults. You get less sleep than any previous generation of teens—far less than you need.[2] You are so tired some days, it feels as though you are missing a layer of skin. Worries invade unresisted. Many of your friends have tried cutting or some other creative form of self-harm. Whenever you’re down, self-harm surfaces as an option. It’s part of the vernacular: a way of saying, Ask me how I’m doing. Suicide hotlines are advertised more conspicuously around your school than prom. It’s painfully obvious that the school counselor is always sniffing kids for suicide like a German shepherd on the hunt for plastic explosives.”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“If you are a teenager today, you hang out with friends far less in-person—up to an hour less per day—than the previous generation.[1] You’ve heard less in-person laughter, fewer in-person jokes; seen fewer in-person tears, but also had far fewer occasions to touch—far fewer kisses and hugs than any teenager since researchers started recording these things. Far fewer in-person opportunities to make a mistake, feel bad, apologize, grow. Your parents observe every aspect of your life unfolding on social media and—if anything happens to you or your friends—they know about it as soon as you do. There is no private kids’ world of low stakes: your parents, plugged in always to WhatsApp, know about every kid caught vaping on the school overnight, hours after it occurs. They guide you through every squabble, every conflict with a teacher, every misunderstanding with a friend. By default, your parents are your best friends.”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“Humor was another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation,” Frankl observed of his time surviving Auschwitz. “It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and ability to rise above any situation, even only for a few seconds.”[21]”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up

“I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium . . . a tensionless state,” wrote the great Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. “If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together.”[20]”
― Abigail Shrier, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up