How an inverted world view has impacted my work as a psychotherapist.

How politics, our legacy media and social media have promoted binary, simplistic thinking about the issues we all face as human beings.

Over the last few years I’ve been increasingly concerned about how politics, our legacy media and social media have promoted binary, simplistic thinking about the issues we all face as human beings.

As a result of reading a post by Daryl Chow and in conversation with Scott D. Miller, both valued colleagues of mine who I’m honoured to say are also my personal coaches, I was inspired to write about how I as a psychotherapist have been influenced by our political environment in my work with clients. Sadly, I admit that I have been impacted. And these impacts involve not only my interactions with clients, but also those with my supervisees and fellow therapists.

Daryl was pondering about democracy and pointed to Emerson’s ideas about preferential voting with a points system. My thoughts were that changing any evolving system or organisation, including democracy, takes time and much persistence against resistance.

Nevertheless, history has shown that democracy, despite its faults, is the best political system there is. This often cited quote from Churchill says it well “democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…” Steven Pinker echoes this by saying that "no one has ever developed a democracy that works particularly well if judged in absolute terms. Democracies are always messy, they’re always unequal. They always involve lobbying and power grabs. But all the alternatives so far have been worse.” And one of my heroes, Thomas Sowell quips “In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.” After all, they’re the ones who propose the questions on our voting ballots and who make decisions and policies in government, organisations and businesses.

How all this relates to my clinical work and our psychotherapy field is evident during discussions about the issues that my clients (including supervisees and fellow therapists) bring up. The particular issues which are raised are irrelevant. If any of the following topics come to the fore: free speech, our government, the current Hamas/Israel war, the Voice referendum, power, climate change, cancel culture, identity, sex and gender, religion/spirituality etc, I’ve found similar patterns arise based on which of the two “sides” the speaker has oriented themselves.

If the speaker identifies as more politically left-leaning as defined by Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind, I’ve noted an increase in reports of feeling victimised and fragile, complaints about not feeling “safe” in their relationships and the world in general, and a greater sense of hopelessness about the future. This is often coupled with a righteous indignation about the unfairness of life and their experience of powerlessness and impediments to personal freedom due to the oppressive systems in our culture.

If they’re more right-leaning, clients express feeling worried about the breakdown of established systems, concerns about the growing distrust for legitimate authority, and worries about the increased lack of cohesiveness within our institutions. Haidt’s research found that people's sensitivities to the six moral foundations correlate with their political ideologies. He identified that libertarians are most sensitive to his proposed “Liberty” foundation, liberals (Labor and Greens in Australia) are most sensitive to the “Care” and “Fairness” foundations, while conservatives (Liberal and National coalition) are equally sensitive to all six foundations.

In the last few years, I find myself being much more careful about how I respond when political issues arise. Yet I’m also discomforted, as the narrow side-taking perspective on important human issues omits a large amount of data showing that the world has never been freer, safer and with so many more improvements in our overall quality of life, than at any previous time in history. After addressing the psycho-emotional meaning to the client to explore why this is distressing for them, if and when it’s appropriate, I may tentatively introduce the idea that things are generally better, while also hastening to stress that they’re not perfect, especially given the setbacks caused by Covid and 2023’s global resurgence of armed conflicts. More often than in previous years, I notice a type of recoil, as if I’m criticising them rather than proposing possible alternatives to their views. More than in the past, I’ve experienced that expressing any of my views which do not conform to the dominant narratives promoted in our legacy media, social media and in major psychotherapy journals here and in the US, is as if I’m displaying my moral failure. Evading debate, and frowning upon exploratory discussion of issues is now the norm.

And it’s glaringly obvious that many of our institutions, media and social media excel in silencing critics of the dominant narrative and crushing dissent by public shaming or cancellation. This has been the insidious outcome caused by the postmodernist-informed Critical Social Justice (CSJ), succinctly described by Helen Pluckrose, and its offshoot Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) explained by Jonathan Haidt. Politics has indeed invaded psychotherapy. It’s difficult to find anyone in our profession critiquing CSJ. It’s not hard to understand why as dissent comes at a significant professional cost. Even a straightforward question about it, let alone an expression of opposition, may expose the person to attacks on her character and professional practice.

I see part of the process of effective therapy (and supervision and psychotherapy education) is to explore people’s  familiar, “comfort zone” comprising thoughts, feelings and behaviours which contribute to their presenting issues, so they may, in their own time venture into their learning zone. Done within the context of a supportive, yet appropriately challenging therapeutic relationship, clients can be exposed to and experience alternative perspectives on the issues that we all face as human beings. What I’ve noticed is that politics, our legacy media, social media as well as the way therapy is being taught and practiced, seem to subvert the expected cognitive, socioemotional, identity, self and moral developmental processes articulated by Kohlberg, Gilligan, Erickson, Marcia, Kegan and Haidt.

As a consequence, I encounter adults who are locked into a foreclosure state of identity formation, historically more applicable to teenagers. This manifests in part as more anxiety about stepping into their learning zone and also more hesitation about questioning whether the identity, social or political choices they’re adhering to are ones they’ve arrived at by conscious examination rather than simply choosing to conform to the dominant narratives of their tribe, culture, or in the case of supervisees and other therapists, their therapy training and institutional recommendations. They’re choosing to avoid the discomforts inherent in growth and change. They’re avoiding grappling with alternative narratives, evading debate, blocking out viewpoint diversity, silencing critics of their views and instead choosing to conform to views promoted by the CSJ rhetoric which has saturated Western culture.

As Bari Weiss so clearly articulates, this has been going on for decades in the USA. Australia as well as many Western democracies have closely followed suit. What Weiss calls an “inverted worldview” has been consuming “all of the crucial sense-making institutions” of Western democratic life. In the USA and Australia, though it started with universities about two decades ago, it’s progressed to museums and galleries and media companies. It’s in almost every major corporation (note how many were behind the Yes vote in Australia in an attempt to introduce race into our constitution which would have divided our nation against itself), businesses and HR leaders, the Australian Public Service and many workplaces. It’s inside our high schools and even our primary schools. This appropriation is so extensive that we’ve become blind to it. But its consequences are visible in our social and political divisiveness, as well as in the oft-reported decrease in our mental health, especially of younger people as reported by Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch.

The outcome of this appropriation has been a steady promotion of strict adherence to the tenets of CSJ with an authoritarian drive aimed at silencing dissent. Opposing views are seen as dangerous because nothing less than ideological conformity is accepted.

If this sounds alarming for the field of psychotherapy, its teaching institutions and credentialing boards, it should be. Val Thomas writes about the impacts of CSJ in the UK and suggests that we talking therapists need to be alert to the existential threat posed to our profession. “Instead of proffering intersectional theory (part of CSJ) as one of several potentially illuminating interpretative frameworks, the BACP (British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy) appears to be championing it as the most vital one. When did the BACP shift from its long held nonpartisan position to advocating for CSJT?” She argues that psychotherapy is being derailed because therapists are being trained to be “psycho-activists” stating “New generations of practitioners are being trained to accept not only a different way of achieving social justice, but also that achieving social justice is the job of therapy.” She says it’s urgent that we break the prohibition on critiquing CSJ, not to allow ourselves to be silenced by an authoritarian ideology and that we start to have open and honest debates about its impact on psychotherapy and psychotherapy education.

In the USA Valerie Tarico is also a strong voice opposing CSJ’s capture of our field. She shows that psychotherapy and social activism are totally different endeavours by cleverly contrasting how an evidence-based therapy approach and a woke social justice approach would deal with the following presenting issues in therapy: emotions and reason; identity; agency and causal attributions; conflict and disagreement; relating to other people and outside tribes. All this is the stuff of lifespan development that psychotherapists are trained to deal with. In her longer article she writes how mental health and relationships are harmed by woke CSJ thinking, saying that “…Lukianoff and…Haidt make the sobering case that some pathogenic habits of thought are becoming endemic on college campuses. Columbia linguist John McWhorter examines how group dynamics can mimic totalizing religious movements like Evangelicalism.  These patterns not only trap individuals in depression or conflict, they weaken civil society by feeding mutual mistrust and recrimination, in-group conformity, out-group alienation, and widespread cynicism or despair.”

In my home country Australia, our leading professional credentialing bodies have also succumbed. The language used by the Australian Psychological Society (APS) explicitly states “We are focused on community wellbeing and social justice, advocating to governments, stakeholders and the community about the role psychology can play to help improve lives”.  The organisation to which I belong, the Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia (PACFA) claims that that the Diversity in Gender, Body, Kinship, and Sexuality Interest Group “…focuses specifically on ensuring that those forms of gender, body, kinship, and sexuality lived experience that have been excluded or marginalised can achieve ongoing and equitable inclusion” as ”there has been a shift away from speaking in generalities and lumping together lived experiences under Anglocentric and Eurocentric umbrella categories like ‘LGBTQIA+.’ ” In one fell swoop that last sentence denigrates the entire Western world via the politically correct terminology of the CSJ elite. Refreshingly, I haven’t found any mention of DEI or any CSJ terminology on the Australian Counselling Association (ACA) website.

I’m concerned that antifragility, a term originated by Nassim Taleb, is not being taught, practiced and encouraged in our profession. What happened to the old-fashioned concept of taking personal responsibility as a means of building character and strengthening resilience? These values, which were interwoven into past education from K-12 and upward, have steadily been subverted. I noted above that Haidt & Lukianoff show how this “coddling of the American mind” has been happening on university campuses. This has been impacting us in Australia as well.

Wiser people than I have been saying that our democratic principles and Western values of free speech, tolerance and respect for difference are being undermined by ideologies that have been an increasing part of our culture, government, corporations, institutions and educational systems for more than two decades.  As Michael Shellenberger states, without free speech we can’t work against the authoritarian cancelling that’s been happening. We must speak up about these illiberal cultural forces set on destroying our freedom.

Each of us is prone to making mistakes, and those championing social justice are not exempt from this human characteristic. However, individuals who ardently believe in their cause tend to be unswayed by barriers, evidence, or even perilous risks. This currently characterizes much of the Western world. The crucial question is whether we will blindly persist, surpassing a point beyond which there is no turning back. As Thomas Sowell argues in “Social Justice Fallacies”, “…consequences matter – or should matter – more so than some attractive or fashionable theory”. The consequences of CSJ’s crusade against merit, which I’ve noticed in my clinical practice, are an increase in victimhood and the concomitant fear of speaking out with a diverse viewpoint.

I’d like to end on two optimistic notes.

Firstly, we must take very seriously the fact that woke CSJ & DEI culture has been doing great damage to the core liberal (in the sense of Enlightenment) values which underlie western democracy and free speech. We must reignite the positive vision for our civilisation that CSJ has undermined with its ongoing problematising, denigration of the West and strident demands that we all must be punished for the sins of our ancestors. We must pay attention to the fact that this has promoted an increase of self-hatred, anxiety and depression in the West, despite all the progress democracy and free speech has achieved for the world. As Konstantin Kissin points out “There is no greater return on investment than to protect and preserve our civilization…We are in the fight of our lives.” I highly recommend his book “An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West” in which he claims “…if you want to make something of yourself, whatever your skin colour, whatever your sex, whatever sexuality, whatever your background, the best place to do that is in a Western anglosphere country. That's the best place to succeed, to thrive, to get better, to raise your children”.

Secondly, this is a hopeful statement by Rikki Schlott about her and Greg Lukianoff’s new book which argues that Generation Z is both the problem and the solution to American (and our Western world’s) illiberalism. “Our culture just has not given the next generation the tools they need to get out of this mess, but there’s such a hunger for it,” she explains. “I think the more we can kind of call attention to the free speech culture and the restorative values that we talk about in our book, the more people will actually grab onto that as something that could fix this mess rather than kind of slipping into nihilism.”

Let us hope that this ethos is taken up as a template for how psychotherapy is practiced and taught in Australia, without us needing to resort to becoming pro-West activists, so that it reverses the illiberal, self-hating effects of CSJ and DEI.