Good therapy is something I believe is important and valuable, even a biblical concept. But modern therapy has been hijacked.
The Apostle Paul tells Timothy, “God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and a sound mind” (II Timothy 1:7). Having a sound mind is a significant focus of my church, and it is a central element of my personal and professional life.
A Biblical understanding of therapy would have mental health practitioners value excellence (Luke 2:52), love and compassion for others (Matthew 22:38), appreciation for truth (John 8:32), and a balance between gentleness and wisdom (Matthew 10:16).
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But our contemporary training of therapists fails in all of these areas.
The way therapists are instructed is not only useless, but can exacerbate mental illness. I learned this in my graduate program in clinical mental health counseling early on. During my first semester, the professor for my “Counseling the Culturally Diverse” class said that our primary objective as therapists is to become political activists so that we can “burn it all to the ground.”
That objective might seem bizarre to outsiders, but in my program, questioning it would look morally and intellectually suspect. The theory goes that all mental anguish is caused by oppression, and if we can dismantle the systems of oppression (such as capitalism) then we can relieve their distress. Except that isn’t the real goal. In my program and in academia more broadly, social justice is the objective, not simply a means to an end.
Truth seems irrelevant to most professors. They push for so-called “gender affirming care” for minors and seem to have little if any knowledge about the findings in the Cass Review or the damning evidence in the WPATH Files. On one occasion, one of my professors went on a tirade about how terrible Texas is because the state limited “gender-affirming care” for minors. One woman in the class asked, “But what if a child changes their mind about transitioning later?” My professor responded, “Huh, I guess I’ve never thought about that.” The social justice answer is assumed to be the correct answer, no matter the evidence.
In one of my classes, we were broken into small groups to discuss the question, “How are you going to be a social justice warrior for counseling?” A younger woman in my group responded quickly, “I will vote how my clients would want me to vote.” I asked her: “How do you know how your clients want you to vote?” I could see the blood drain out of her face, replaced by a look of horror. “What if I get a Trump supporter as a client?” she asked in shock. We are taught to respect every conceivable identity, but the more than 77 million people who voted for Donald Trump were viewed as essentially subhuman.
Consider how antithetical this is to Jesus, who went out of his way to minister to people who would have been considered his political enemies, including Nicodemus the Pharisee (John 3) and a Roman soldier (Matthew 8).
In another class, my professor discussed how to furnish your therapy office. He said you should decorate the office with “inclusive” things but not “alienating” things. His example of something alienating was a Bible, but a Pride Flag was inclusive.
“But what if you have a Muslim client who doesn’t like the Pride Flag,” one of my classmates asked. The professor was stumped. There is no clear winner between Muslims and LGBTQ+ in an intersectionality standoff.
Graduate school for counseling often feels more like an adult daycare than any rigorous academic study. I have spent hours of class time on activities like playing with Play-Doh or using markers to color in a picture of a rainbow. My career counseling class spent an entire class period on arts and crafts. We used construction paper, markers, and stickers to represent how nonbinary therapists can experience microaggressions. For my group’s project, we had a big sticker in the center of our paper that read, “Make it GAY you cowards!” No one seemed to think this was out of place for a graduate degree program.
An underdiscussed part of social justice activism is how lazy it tends to be.
One of my professors lectured for less than twenty minutes total the entire semester, instead choosing to break us up into small groups so we could “discuss the material amongst yourselves.” My professor for abnormal psychology never lectured either. All she did the entire semester was play YouTube videos – I learned about mental illness by watching footage of Kanye West or Britney Spears giving interviews. During another class, we watched a video that was more than an hour long featuring a woman applying make-up while talking about serial killers.
Social justice ideology is built into every fabric of how we train therapists. The syllabus from my family systems class said that students would learn skills required of a counselor such as “Advocates for policies, programs and services that are equitable and responsive to the unique needs of couples and families.” Such requirements are often mandatory to be accredited as a graduate-level counseling program.
If it seems strange that pushing for “equitable” policies and programs pertains to therapy, understand that this is a logical step in social justice ideology overtaking the counseling profession. The more nefarious aspect is that clients getting better is often not part of the equation. In fact, mentally healthy and stable clients contradict the social justice worldview.
Critical Theorist Herbert Marcuse realized in the 1960s that happy people make poor revolutionaries. He saw Americans as prosperous and free, thus seeing no need for Marxism. That is a problem if you are a Marxist. The key, Marcuse understood, was to breed discontent. He called this “the power of negative thinking.” Rather than gratitude or appreciation for one’s life, it is vital to view the faults in every situation to uncover hidden oppression.
In counseling, this manifests as a tedious obsession with anything that might be deemed “problematic,” with a hyperfocus on “microaggressions” and “interlocking systems of power.” Such a fixation often borders on paranoia. Cognitive behavioral therapy teaches us to reality test our assumptions to see if they line up with reality, but this is considered horribly offensive in the new therapy paradigm. Even if a client’s sense of oppression is not factually true, it represents a higher truth: it is building motivation to overthrow the system. And therein lies the real point. The client’s discontent is the means to that end.
While the Bible calls us to excellence, social justice-centered therapy replaces rigor with fluff.
God’s Word calls us to acknowledge objective truth, while social justice centered therapy tells us to speak “your truth.” Rather than gentleness and wisdom, we are being trained to hate those who think differently and reject a better understanding of the world.
Rather than living with a sound mind, we are being led to the insanity and paranoia that stems from believing that the world is always out to get us.
Social-justice-centered therapy fails the biblical mandate on all counts.
Ryan Rogers is a clinical intern finishing his master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling. He is host of the Reality Therapy podcast and author of The Woke Mind: The Twisted Psychology of the Social Justice Movement. He lives in Austin, Texas.
