What Went Wrong With Therapy
My conversation with Abigail Shrier
When Irreversible Damage came out five years ago, I was working with parents and it was such a game changer. Abigail Shrier changed everything for everybody interested in gender. Finally someone had documented what so many of us were seeing.
Then she wrote Bad Therapy and I remember reading it and thinking she’s almost looked into my soul. It was exactly where I had ended up as a therapist. I was like, she’s right. We’ve lost our way as a society as well as a profession. It was very moving for me.
That book gave me a lot of confidence to say something I’d been feeling for a while: your kid doesn’t need therapy. Parents are banging my door down sometimes, and I find myself thinking, I know, I know, but from everything you’re telling me, I don’t think therapy is what this kid needs. Less tech. That’s something they need. But it’s not therapy.
It made me think that perhaps therapy has slid into affirmation all over the place. It’s not just gender affirmation. Therapy has become an affirmative process. As I often say, we’ve moved from a therapeutic process to therapeutic support.
I recorded this conversation with Abigail for Genspect’s Bigger Picture conference in Albuquerque, and we explore all of this. Abigail talks about how when she was researching Irreversible Damage, she noticed that in virtually every case where a young person’s life went badly off course, there was a therapist playing railway signalman, pulling the switch. And these weren’t gender therapists or ideologues. They were just regular therapists affirming everything coming out of a very confused adolescent.
We talk about why the most therapised generation is also the most distressed, and how schools started delivering mental health interventions to entire classrooms. Abigail makes the point that we treated therapy like fluoride, dumping it in the drinking water for every kid, and then we were surprised when there were side effects. I like that analogy.
We also talk about something I see constantly: young people saving their problems for the paid therapist instead of confiding in their friends. As Abigail says, they saved the good stuff for the therapist, and their friendships became shallow as a result.
I know the terror of your kid not being happy. I’m a parent too, and I feel for these families. So many parents have lost confidence in themselves, and it’s so demoralising. Abigail has an important message for them: don’t give up your authority too early. Your kids are still looking to you, even when it doesn’t seem like it. Very often they keep coming back to mum because they’re not confident. They’re checking in. They want to know if they’re right.
There’s a lot of hope in this conversation, even when we’re talking about hard things, and I think that’s something parents really need right now.
I have been working for about four years with young gender nonconforming youth who are considering transitioning. Their parents invited me into their children's lives with the specific intent to interrupt the dangerous vortex these youth have fallen into due to indoctrination by schools and teachers, friends encouraging transitioning and idiots on TikTok where they get their erroneous medical advice. I started doing this when a neighbor asked me for help with her teenager. That family incorporated me into family events, from dinners to gardening together, fishing and kayaking and even camping trips. They then recommended me to other families and now I have helped over 25 young people. That's not a lot, but I'm not even a mental health professional. Which means anyone can do what I do if they're mindful, clever, compassionate and dedicated. In fact, I suggest the parents do NOT take their child to a counselor or therapists as my state calls affirming someone's innate gender expression and sexual orientation “conversion therapy.” An ethical therapist is prevented from helping a proto gay boy or proto lesbian accept themselves for who they are. But I'm not.
I have a 100% success rate and some of the older teens who are now adults have come back to tell me, “Thank god I met you before I went down that path and wrecked my body.” However, I've never worked with anyone who has already started transitioning by taking puberty blockers or opposite sex hormones. I don't think I can help those kids. They and their parents are too far into the gender identity fantasy world. Nor do I work with youth who have a serious diagnosis such as schizophrenia or other mental health issues that require professional treatment and medications. What I do can't be classified as therapy, but counselors and therapists might be able to use some of my ideas and techniques. I rarely work with a family that has one parent who thinks they're being affirming by accepting dangerous sex mimicry treatments because that parent is a huge barrier if they undermine the work I'm doing.
I'm currently starting up with one new family and have three more requests waiting. I won't publish what I'm doing because these kids don't know until later that their parents deliberately incorporated me into their lives with the specific intent to undermine the forces driving them to reject their true being.
Stella, Abigail, I truly appreciate the work women like you are doing to help youth. I'd be happy to talk to either of you offline to discuss my methods that have worked and some that are not as effective.