According to Abigail, despite the popularity of therapy, she is a firm believer that therapy overall is not effective and people are better off without therapy. This is pretty controversial considering how popular therapy is and how widespread it is, with an estimated 37% of millennials having gone to therapy at one point in time. She is the author of two books, irreversible damage and bad therapy: why the kids aren’t growing up. As Oscar Wilde said, everything popular is wrong. I guess therapy could fall into that too. The issue I have with all help-based professions is the principal agent problem. The agent is incentivized to continue to keep the principal or patient as long as possible to continue to derive income and benefits from them. That amongst other things could show why therapy is harmful, as well as the tendency to focus inwards rather than outwards on a greater purpose involving society and others.

-kids now get more therapy and therapy does more harm than good

Bad therapy: Family alienation, depression, isolation, lack of agency, external locus of control

-more therapy actually makes mental health worse

-therapy often treats people who are already “well” and with minor issues

-women who hit puberty then have more negative emotions on average for the rest of their life

-men who experience negative emotion focus on comparative social status

-women who experience negative emotion focus on body status

-therapy makes people identify with their diagnosis and stick with that identity

-since the 1950s mental health is in decline, particularly for youth. And social media is only a small influence on that

-kids now use mental health as a status figure because it incentivizes them to do so now

-therapy causes constant rumination over negative emotions and a focus too much on feelings, and overthinking of everything

-parents not being assertive in the home allowed therapists to come in and be the authority; parental authority is important

-people with borderline personality disorder will manipulate others to get attention, even with false compassion

-asking kids how they are feeling induces depression

-happiness does not stem from self actualization

-you can’t be happy in a miserable marriage

-the more you think of yourself the less likely you are to think about and form reciprocal relationships

-the role a person plays in the world is out of the hands of a therapist

-therapy instructs people to be narcissistic and focus on own feelings rather than the outside world and making a positive impact

-self-esteem movement is a failed movement. Self esteem is associated with positive or negative emotions, not self-esteem

-therapy fosters dependency like a devouring mother

-competition has been removed to prevent losing and the emotions of it. Now kids don’t know how to deal with failure and don’t have resilience. We are fearful of trauma, that losing could lead to trauma

-we are in a landscape of the devouring mother

-half of women will not have kids, they are transferring the maternal instinct into education and babying the new generation in all areas

-liberal women are less likely to get married and have kids

-women first year have to take care of the kid 100% then have to let them be free (where the father comes in)

-narcissistic devouring mothers is the biggest impediment to human development

-we’ve stopped raising kids to be strong and decent and instead soft and worried about feelings

-with less kids we over focus on them and spoil them to their detriment

-we’ve become lonelier and more atomized and lost intergenerational wisdom

-other cultures don’t treat kids as fragile

-we have become surveillance helicopter parents

-resilience is the norm, not trauma

-obstacles that can’t be overcome leads to trauma, I.e. negative emotions. If it can’t be overcome or a new sufficient path, the negative emotions leave a permanent hole. If a successful path happens, then recovery happens

-we removed all worries and chance of failure from kids lives

-overbearing mothers are actually cluster B personality types: narcissistic, prideful caring for the children for the status

-80% of gender dysphoria cases is solved by puberty, as are other issues

-parents have now become a child’s slave

-there is nothing more existentially hopeless as a 3-year-old getting what they want

-kids want a good relationship with their parents

-feminism telling women career is the most important is a lie

-men who do well as they age tend to be interested in mentoring

-we have a limited capacity to what extend we can give out maternal love

-encourage kids to independence when young