can therapy backfire on men?
You’ve been asking me to comment on Jonah Hill, but I can’t give my opinion about him because I don’t know him! But while I’m not sure if the leaked texts with his ex-girlfriend are emotionally abuse, the infamous screenshots give us an opportunity to discuss how therapy can be used in the service of it.
As I’ve written about before, I believe that when it comes to therapy, there is such a thing as having too much of a good thing. Therapy is more popular than ever, and the erosion of this stigma is a stupendous achievement, but it’s also come with new found overconfidence from a large number of us in our capabilities as armchair psychiatrists.
We’ve recently seen the rise of something called “therapy speak,” otherwise known as “psychobabble,” which is the misuse of certain buzzwords like “boundaries” or “trauma” to describe everyday experiences. While labelling intimate and personal experiences might be immensely helpful for some, it can veer into self-diagnosing ourselves and others with an air of incorrigible arrogance.
I’ve seen the pop psychology mindset manifest in my life, where instead of moving on from a relationship that wasn’t working for me, I spent hours of my precious time researching treatment options for a mental illness he did not have. Armed with a bunch of psychology today articles and instagram carousels from supremely unlicensed therapists, I gasped upon the realization that perhaps I was the crazy one. I’ve also been on the receiving end of it with a partner whose uncontrolled bursts of anger would become more acute when he would return from sessions with his therapist. Instead of making him more patient and understanding of others, therapy seemed to make him more emboldened and intolerant.
I used to think if someone was in therapy, it meant that they were healthy, but for abusers and manipulators, therapy is just training. If they warp the truth with you, you can bet they’re doing it with their therapist too. A very talented mental health practitioner may be able to read between the lines, but it’s rare that they will keep working with someone that they don’t like or trust. And an abuser might simply change therapists when confronted or challenged, until they find one who won’t.
But for abusers, it’s not just that therapy becomes an echo-chamber for them, it’s that it can become a site to practice feigning empathy and expanding their intellectual understanding of emotions to further manipulate others. Therapy can become a space where they sharpen the tools they use to exploit others.
Remember that abusive people are not existing in a vacuum. They’re reading the same instagram posts about how to spot a narcissist and consuming the same kind of mental health-related content about “gaslighting” as you, so like any virus, they will adapt and come up with different ways to become more resistant. I believe that all of this free content about narcissists or sociopaths makes abusers more sophisticated in their methods and can make it harder to recognize.
This is why I think we have a new strain of abuser, who is deeply aware of how not to be perceived as one. This can look like using healthy terms like “boundaries” at the service of coercive behavior like controlling what your partner wears or who they spend time with. The words are soft, but the actions are violent. I believe this kind of abuse can be much more damaging to its victims, especially when it happens to women. A manipulator who goes to therapy become a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and the woman he is controlling much less aware of the fog of manipulation that slowly encircles her. The cognitive dissonance will make her stay as her abuser uses all the right words to justify doing all the wrong things.
I used to think if someone was in therapy, it meant that they were healthy, but for abusers and manipulators, therapy is just training.
Most men are not abusers, and plenty of abusers are women. So while I love a good gender analysis, I’m also trying to approach this conversation carefully. Therapy can be weaponized by anyone, regardless of how they identify.
That being said, it’s undeniably clear that boys have been raised differently than girls and that teaching men to repress their emotions has lasting impacts on their emotional health and capabilities. The way we socialize men poses so many risks to them that I wrote a whole book about it! And while therapy can be immensely helpful to men who struggle with emotional repression, I believe that it can also backfire. If they’re just *talking* about their emotions, but they’re still not actually *feeling* them, this deficit can turn a man into someone who may not want to be an abuser, but may start to sound a lot like one. For instance, instead of feeling the discomfort of jealousy about their partners’ close friendships, they try to control who their partner spends time with while peppering in terms like “boundaries” to make it sound healthy to them. Therapy and the language it affords them, can become another device to avoid the feelings that some men have often not been taught to express.
I’ve written about this before, but talking about emotions can be a great way to avoid feeling them. While women are prone to this too, I wonder if men can be more susceptible to it given the societal expectations placed upon them and how they’ve been brought up. No matter what, this does not mean that you should stop seeking help for mental health struggles! We live in a broken society and all the parts of our bodies deserve to be supported, and that includes our minds. But just like anything we do, it’s worth examining. Therapy and the kind of self-help that we seek, included.
I’m still trying to piece together my thoughts around all of this so I would love to hear yours.
I hope you are having a nice week!
x
Liz
Well said! I felt your "No One Robs An Empty House" post so deeply, as the crux of it is what I've been doing a lot of work around this year with codependency.
While I don't have an opinion on the Jonah Hill situation, one thing that I've been hearing and reading a lot about, particularly involving codependency, is that among the challenges is that when starting that work, or therapy in general, there can be this huge pendulum swing. So a person who historically has no boundaries and intellectualizes everything (*raises both hands) can all of a sudden be like a "boundary bully," as I heard Brene Brown discuss it. And so there can be the use of all these therapy words and perceived changes for the sake of saying that "the work" is being done without actually acknowledging and feeling into emotions and meeting needs that need to be met. It's performative, and just like checking off the box. And speaking as a man and doing a lot of work around healthier masculinity, I think this is especially a challenge for men who are so boundaryless and who've been so conditioned to suppress their emotions
Modern talk based therapy is far more suited to women than men. Men seem to prefer to work through emotions as part of some kind of activity. Also men are naturally protective of women and so will tend to suppress any emotion (such as anger, frustration, sorrow) that would make women uncomfortable or disappointed in him.
This means men are most likely to open up in some sort of outdoor retreat with other men (and no women) where they get to actually do something constructive/ physical/ practical. This side-by-side approach is quite different to the more face-to-face approach that has become the standard.
In the past men had far more opportunities to be with other men (out logging, harvesting, fishing etc) where they could work through their feelings, but these days they tend to be cooped up in feminised workplaces full of women which makes them feel they must always tread on eggshells.
"I used to think if someone was in therapy, it meant that they were healthy, but for abusers and manipulators, therapy is just training."
It works the other way too. Therapists are increasingly using therapy to impose their ideological world view on the client (see also: teachers), which is unprofessional with adult clients and abusive in the case of younger clients. In fact there is now a growing movement within the therapy profession to push back against ideological material being inserted into training and being made part of 'standard practice' for therapists.