Bad Therapy by Abigail Shrier

I was at Chandler's house when I saw this book on her shelf. I love Abigail Shrier and so I asked if I could borrow it. Turns out I bought it for her in the first place! I cannot say enough for Bad Therapy by Abigail Shrier. Anyone who knows a child, has a child, or was a child needs to read this book. Although I really liked her conclusions, the sheer scope and scale of the problem depresses me. It's a behemoth. 

She starts with therapy itself. Shrier quite persuasively makes the case that therapy, the way it is done today, is actually iatrogenic, that is it harms more than helps. In this section she outlines exactly what "Bad Therapy" is:

"What does bad therapy look like, I wondered. If a sadist wanted to induce anxiety, depression, a feeling of incapacity, or family estrangement, what sort of methods would she employ? How would a malevolent mastermind induct a generation into a tyranny of feelings? Like this.

1. Teach Kids to Pay Close Attention to their Feelings...

2. Induce Rumination...

3. Make 'Happiness a Goal but Reward Emotional Suffering...'

4. Affirm and Accommodate Kids' Worries...

5. Monitor, Monitor, Monitor...

6. Dispense Diagnoses Liberally...

7. Drug 'Em...

8. Encourage Kids to Share Their 'Trauma'...

9. Encourage Young Adults to Break Contact with 'Toxic' Family...

10. Create Treatment Dependency..." (p. 42-63). 

We have created hypochondriacs who experience the same pain as everyone else, except they fixate on every sign or symptom. They make themselves sicker by worrying about getting sick.

In the next section, "Therapy Goes Airborne," she discusses the ways in which Bad Therapy has migrated into the schools. This is the most depressing part because there are literally millions of teachers, almost none of whom are trained therapists. If they were, they would have to follow the ethical guidelines and best practices of therapy. Even though therapy has a lot of problems, they can fix them as a licensed group and hold their members accountable. But they hold no sway over teachers. And teachers are an ornery bunch, much like herding cats. Many simply are not that smart and whatever sounds good is taken as gospel truth. Even the smart ones are not reading the latest studies and diving deep into the latest conversations on the best way to help children struggling with mental health. It's like giving teachers access to the latest in chemotherapy treatments and so, "just in case," they administer a small dose to each student every day. Here's where the iatrogenesis leaps into the general population. 

In the classroom, it starts with "Social-Emotional Learning." This is the latest fad and every teacher from kindergarten on up is asked to evaluate their students social and emotional "temperature." This can be emotional check-ins where students are asked daily how they are doing. Often, one student's sadness can infect the entire class and an emotive, therapeutic trauma session ensues. Much crying and flagellation are signs of a good check-in despite the complete lack of academic purpose or even therapeutic progress. These amateur group therapy sessions teach students that they are emotionally fragile and probably broken. Students are then coddled and those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds lose out the most. Rather than being held to high standards and given the tools needed to better their situation, the students are excused, accommodated, and unmotivated to succeed. Schools are on the hunt for trauma and it's surprisingly easy to find. Figuring different traumas stack up and believing "the body keeps the score" (a debunked, but highly popular theory), the children are poked and prodded until the slightest trauma can be unearthed and "dealt with" whether or not parents agree to any of this. In fact, since most of the trauma is apparently a result of parental action, it's best to keep parents out altogether. Therefore the students are endlessly surveyed and inculcated with the idea that something is wrong with them. Their teacher and school counselor just need to figure out what. 

Not only is all this poking and prodding hurting the students and introducing trauma where none existed, it has led to a type of toxic empathy. Anyone, anywhere can claim to feel "unsafe" and she is automatically the victim. Regardless of the motives or even the actions of the "perpetrator," all empathy channels toward the aggrieved. This has led, apparently with no recognition of the irony, to the most bullying of environments. Shrier calls this "The Tattletale Generation." Victims are virtuous and the perpetrators beyond the pale and without redemption. This simultaneously reinforces the victim narrative and introduces new "trauma" to the "perpetrator."

In exasperation, Shrier asks, "Who raised these children?" She answers her own question with "Gentle Parents." This is the other side of the coin where the teachers playing therapist are one side and the parents playing therapist are the other. Rather than a simple (and time-tested) "Knock it off," children are indulged and analyzed and their feelings held up for endless examination. This has produced a generation of tiny tyrants who scare their parents. In our desire to avoid becoming authoritarian parents, we have neglected to be authoritative parents. But something has to keep these tiny tyrants under control. So we turn to drugs. Shrier has a lot to say on the drugging of our children that has replaced old-fashioned discipline. TL;DR: She's against it.

Finally, in the last section, Shrier proclaims, "Maybe There's Nothing Wrong with Our Kids." She advocates that parents disregard the "experts" and allow their children to be children. When they mess up, discipline them. Provide them with love and independence. Don't coddle them but encourage resilience. Invite extended family to speak into their lives. Don't treat your child as the center of the universe, to the detriment of all others. 

She ends with, "Remove the [harmful interventions]: the technology, the hovering, the monitoring, the constant doubt. The diagnosing of ordinary behaviors as pathological. The psychiatric medications you aren't convinced your child needs. The expert evaluations. Banish from their lives everyone with the tendency to treat our children as disordered. You don't need them." (p. 250)

I think she's right.

Bags by Chris Sasser

 My headmaster, Mr. Hinton, likes to send home "summer reading" which encourages us teachers to get in the minds of our students and see how we can best love them. This summer one of the books he sent home is Bags by Chris Sasser. The "bags" refers to the "baggage" we all carry as a result of childhood disappointments. Sasser is speaking primarily to parents, encouraging them in ways NOT to give their children things to pack in those bags. 

The book is a good reminder that children are always trying to make sense of the world, and in doing so, they often interpret events in ways detrimental to their development. Whether it's not making the team or trying on different identities, young people can often believe lies about themselves and their capabilities.

Sasser lists some specific "bags" that children fill: the relational bag, the performance bag, the identity bag, the comparison bathe authority bag, the rejection bag, the guilt and shame bag, the disappointment bag. All are interrelated and can be getting filled at the same time. Rejection by peers fills the rejection bag and the relational bag. As parents, and teachers, out job, then, is to help our kids reframe these events and "lighten the load."

While Sasser's book is a good reminder, it struck an off-chord note with me. While I'm sure that parents (and teachers) can help young people to not pack or to unpack those bags, I think it's only at the margins. Kids are notorious for hearing and believing things that shock adults. (Regan once believed her dad would be so old as to be in a wheelchair by 35!) Most of the time the adults have no idea how the child is processing a particular event. Sasser doesn't really acknowledge this. He seems to assume that the events will be obvious and our response just needs to be trained to redirect and speak truth. 

While his advice is helpful when the circumstances are obvious, I think a missing part of the book is teaching kids resiliency. We need to teach kids how to redirect and reframe those negative thoughts before they get packed in the bags. The most helpful part, therefore, was his insistence that we constantly speak truth into the child's life. We constantly affirm that they are loved and valued and a child of God. We tell them of our pride in their specific characteristics and actions. We offer shield for the flaming arrows that life will throw at them. 

I appreciate the way he pointed out the fiery darts, but I think more emphasis on building the armor would be helpful. 

Excused Absence by Douglas Wilson

 Excused Absence by Douglas Wilson asks the question, "Should Christian kids leave public schools?" He answers it with a resounding, "Yes." As Martin Olasky points out in the Forward, "When God is excluded from the classroom, we are not merely remaining silent about God. We are teaching children that they may safely disregard Him" (11). It is this "disregard" of God that proves fatal to public education. Not only can public schools not acknowledge God, they are incapable of acknowledging the truth about human nature and even truth in general. For this reason, secular education will always fail. 

Wilson begins by making the case that all schools are religious schools. Being public simply means they are teaching a religion that is not Christian. But they are teaching a religion. Education itself is predicated on transmitting values and beliefs to the young. Public schools may not be teaching Christian values and beliefs, but they are teaching values and beliefs. 

Wilson then proceeds to go through the history of public schools to show exactly how we got here. Although America was initially peopled by those with a strong faith, it did not take long for Christianity itself, as practiced in the colonial period, to devolve into a universalist, humanistic theology. While the early schools were explicitly "Christian," they embodied a form of Christianity which "bore no fundamental difference" between it and secular humanism (23).

This implies the problem began, not with schools, but in the home. Wilson blames "countless acts of disobedience in the living room and around the dinner table" for the godlessness of schools (31). Failing to practice "covenantal headship," the people allowed the schools to become places in open rebellion against God. He goes on to state, "If government schools reject the revealed character of God in the Bible as the basis for the ethical instruction they provide to children, then the  only option open to them is to teach on the basis of the character of their new god, demos (the people)" (44). It is at this point that schools became incapable of teaching the good, the true, and the beautiful; without God, none of that is truly accessible. The people, in their failure to repent and practice godly parenting, are reaping what they sowed.

Wilson emphatically states, "Only a Christian education can provide a standard for fixed and absolute truth, and only a biblical course of instruction can set a standard for distinguishing right from wrong" (49).  But once again, Wilson makes clear this begins in the home. Parents must be marked by their own character and courage. True education begins with godly parents instilling their beliefs and values in their children. He quotes the Shema in Deuteronomy 6 as the model for parents (58). Children are to hear the word of the Lord when they sit, stand, walk, lie down, and rise up. The Word should be on the door posts as they go enter and exit. It should encompass the totality of a child's life. Without a Christian education, this is simply impossible.

Christian parents must wake up. "The big lie is that education can be 'religion-neutral'" (67). Yet education is simply "the processor learning how to think God's thoughts after Him" (68). An education which fails to make it clear that our job is to discover what God has already declared "true," is an education based on a false idol. As a society, we are reaping the results of our rebellion. God uses our godless rulers to bring us to repentance. We miss out on blessings, we see a rise in "unnatural passions", we become victims to crime and bad laws, we embrace relativity and cannot experience the joys of men and women serving in their God-given roles. But hope is always at hand. Repent. 

Finally, Wilson addresses some common objections: many Christians were raised in government schools and they are fine, Christian schools are expensive, religion is part of the spiritual sphere of "home" and education falls under the physical realm, a child may be mature enough in his faith to handle it, the local Christian school does not have an adequate athletics program, other adult influences are not Christian, the children require special programs not offered at the Christian school, Chistian school is not "cool," and many of the teachers in the public school are Christians themselves. One by one Wilson demolishes these arguments. Time and again he brings it back to the Lordship of Christ. Either Jesus is Lord and we submit or He is not and we don't. 

Wilson ends with his prescription for Classical, Christian education. He believes this model fully incorporates the kind of education outlined in Scripture. He gives advice for the practicalities of this kind of school. He offers advice on pitfalls to avoid. Overall, Wilson makes a solid case for avoiding government schools and educating children according to the precept found in the Word and embodied in Classical, Christian education. 

Doing Life With Your Adult Children by Jim Burns

I decided to read Doing Life With Your Adult Children by Jim Burns because, well, I have adult children. And it seemed an appropriate read. 

Ever since first becoming a mother, I would say my main identity was "mom." Once it hit me that my oldest would be going off to college, I wondered if I counted as "mom" anymore. Was there still a role for me going forward? Turns out there was, but it was different. It was mostly limited to scheduling flights back and forth to college over breaks, and writing tuition checks. Check-ins over the phone provided a connection, but it was not the same.

Then came marriages and it felt like the final tie to "mom" was severed. I know, I know. I'll always be a mom, yada, yada, yada... But not really.

So how, after 20 + years of being "mom" does one become someone's "mother"?

Burns response is to "keep your mouth shut and the welcome mat out." Welp. 

Burns is highly encouraging for moms like me struggling with the next stage. One of his most helpful statement is that we didn't screw up our kids! We need to see them as differentiated adults; they are not simply reflections of us. 

"But what about..." I hear some saying. Burns has a chapter for that. Whether its children who walked away from the faith, are making bad financial and personal decisions, have in-law troubles, or have generally failed to launch, Burns has words of wisdom. It makes me grateful that the worst thing I can say about my kids is that they grew up to become independent, fully-functioning adults. 

It's a good reminder that we as parents are only on the job full-time for a season. Our job, as I often told my own daughters, is not to raise children, but to raise adults. 

It doesn't mean I don't miss the "Mom!!!" cry once in a while.

How We Love Our Kids by Milan & Kay Yerkovich

A friend had recommended this book after the original, How We Love had made such a difference in her marriage. This companion book on parenting, How We Love Our Kids by Milan & Kay Yerkovich, also helped in her relationship with her daughter.

It was an easy read, and well-worth reading. I would not say it changed anything in my life, but it did help me recognize my parenting pattern and the possible pitfalls. 

Milan and Kay Yerkovich have identified five styles of loving others: 

The Avoider

The Pleaser

The Vacillator

The Controller

The Victim

Each of these stem from what the parent, herself, was raised with as well as her own experiences. These styles in turn influence the behavior of the child. In many, if not most, cases, the Yerkovichs believe that problems that children are exhibiting are actually a reaction to one or more of the parenting styles. How we parent is rarely a conscientious choice, it is rather, the confluence of events that make us who we are as humans. However, the Yerkovichs believe we cannot end the story there, but must identify our personal style in order to address the resulting issues that arise between the parent and the child. 

Directly from the book:

AVOIDER ASSESSMENT 

• It seems my spouse has more emotional needs than I do. 

• What is upsetting to my spouse or kids seems like no big deal to me. 

• My childhood was fine, but I don't have many memories from my upbringing, let alone positive ones of receiving comfort. 

• I'm independent and self-reliant, and those are values I've worked to pass on to my kids. 

• I would rather work on a project alone than sit and have a long conversation with someone. 

• I've been told I don't show enough affection. 

• When something bad happens, I get over it and move on. 

• If a kid is upset, I reassure her with, “You're fine." 

• I tend to guard my space and feel annoyed when I'm required to spend a lot of time and attention on family matters. 

• I like to make decisions on my own. 

• When someone is very emotional, I find a way to escape, especially if they think I'm supposed to help. I don't like tears and lots of emotion. 

• In my family growing up, everyone pretty much did his own thing and kept to himself. 

• I have siblings with whom I have little or no contact today. 

• I have never felt particularly close to my parents. 

• Nothing gets me too bothered or upset. 

If you identified with this assessment, congratulations. You're that much closer to being a better parent. And you might want to thank your kids for helping you to grow and recognize yourself better. But let me assure you, avoiders have positive traits too. They raise responsible kids who are often extremely accomplished and uncommonly resourceful. You can learn to balance your focus on achievement as you expand your ability to connect emotionally. Your kids will benefit and so will you. 

PLEASER ASSESSMENT 

• I'm usually the giver in relationships. 

• I'm a peacemaker and peacekeeper. 

• I anticipate my spouse's needs and meet them. 

• Sometimes I'm dishonest to avoid conflict. 

• I fear making my spouse or kids upset or angry. 

• I tend to give in to get conflict over with. 

• I don't like to be alone. 

• It really upsets me if someone is mad at me. 

• When someone requests help, I usually say yes and get overcommitted. 

• I tried hard to win a critical or angry parent's approval. 

• Sometimes I get mad, but I don't show it, and I smile a lot. 

• I had a parent who never stood up for himself, but passively  accepted poor treatment.  

• When I sense others distancing, I try harder. 

• I'm on the cautious side; I definitely wouldn't call myself a  risk-taker. 

• I had an overprotective parent who worried a lot. 

• I crave reassurance and affirmation from others. 

VACILLATOR ASSESSMENT 

• No one has ever really understood what I need. 

• I fall in love instantly, and my relationships are initially intense and passionate, but they never last. 

• I always hope for great relationships, but everyone disappoints me. Some people try to make amends, but it's always too little, too late. 

• I'm a very passionate person, and I feel things more deeply than others. 

• I know far more about being a good parent than my spouse does. 

• I could describe many examples of how I've been hurt and disappointed, and I often feel unappreciated by my spouse and kids. I can always sense when others pull away from me. 

• I want far more connection than I have currently. 

• I love the feeling of making up after a fight. 

• When people hurt me long enough, I write them off. 

• If my spouse would pursue me more, things would be better. 

• I don't like to be alone, but sometimes having people around makes me worse. 

• My parent(s) still drive me crazy. 

• Sometimes I pick fights, and I'm really not sure why. 

• I make it obvious when I'm hurt, and it's only worse when no one asks what's wrong. 

• I'm always waiting for people to be available, and I wonder if they've forgotten me. 

• I'm convinced I have the ability to read people really well and quickly judge their motives and intentions before they even speak. 

CONTROLLER ASSESSMENT 

• Growing up, a parent or sibling threatened me, intimidated me, or was violent with me. 

• No one protected me when I was growing up; I was on my own for the most part. 

• My spouse and kids do things behind my back and that infuriates me. 

• I dislike authority and feel angry when others tell me what to do or ignore what I tell them to do. 

• I tend to use alcohol, drugs, pornography, gambling, or overspending to feel good. 

• My life has had its share of problems, so I'm under more stress than most people. 

• I try to control my temper, but it's hard not to let it out. 

• My spouse does things to make me jealous. 

• I know my family doesn't like me losing my temper, but they shouldn't make me so angry. 

• I have hit, slapped, or pushed my spouse or kids, or I have come close to it. 

• I've changed jobs frequently. 

• By the time I was a teenager, people knew not to mess with me. 

• I left home early, and some family members were afraid of me. 

• My spouse and kids don't listen when I ask them to do things. 

Controllers enter adulthood believing childhood is behind them, but therapists call these “unresolved issues” for good reason. Most chaotic adults don't want to touch their childhood memories with a ten-foot pole. And who can blame them? How do you begin to resolve the enormous amount of unresolved, unprocessed hurt and pain when there's little to no feeling left? It's all been stuffed down—all the powerlessness, fear, grief, and shame—and they're completely out of touch with what's now happening to their own children. 

And so the nightmare continues. 

If there is to be growth, hope, and real change, the controller needs someone with a lot of compassion, persistence, and courage. The kind they've never known, likely never even seen in real life. This is often the only way to get at the heart of the issue. If it takes the help of a spouse, a therapist, or a psychiatrist, the controller with the best chance is the one convinced he needs to compassionately face his past. 

VICTIM ASSESSMENT 

• People in my family struggled with outbursts of anger, violence, addictions, and abuse. 

• I try to keep my mate from knowing certain things, to prevent him from becoming angry. 

• I have been in and stayed in destructive relationships. 

• I get depressed and anxious, which makes it hard for me to cope as a parent. 

• I'm loyal even when others are probably exploiting me. 

• For most of my life, I've felt unworthy and unlovable. 

• Sometimes I'm far off, and I feel detached and disengaged. 

• Sometimes I find myself not paying attention to my children. 

• My parents had drug and alcohol problems. 

• One of my parents was abusive, the other passive. 

• Growing up, I functioned as the parent. 

• My spouse mistreats me, but I stay because it would be horrible to be alone. 

• I was physically, emotionally, or sexually abused during my childhood—or saw these things happen to other people. 

• I get nervous when things are calm, and I anxiously wait for the anger to come. 

• When my spouse is unkind to our children, I feel powerless to do anything about it. 

• Sometimes I feel life isn't worth living. 

• I don't let myself cry, because if I started, I'd never stop. 

If you see yourself or someone you know in this assessment, be encouraged. There's hope for recovery! Some of the nicest, most wonderful people in the world are victims, and we have met and known many such people. Incredibly sweet and compliant, there are few who try harder than the victim to do things right. 

While the Yerkovichs acknowledge that no one fits neatly into any single category, we all have styles to which we tend to default. For me personally, I think I fall most into the Avoider, with some Vacillator thrown in. This was helpful to me because I realized that there are things I am doing as a parent, that my children pick up on, and therefore respond in certain ways. By being an Avoider, it means the hard conversations never happen and so a child can feel misunderstood and unappreciated. 

I'm glad I read the book, but I think it would have been even more helpful when I first became a parent.