#137 - Rumination Nation: The Therapy Trap

Howdy kids, and welcome to another episode of Escaping the Cave. It is the Tonzilla X-Pod. I am your friendly, congenial, sometimes menstrual host, Todd. Hey there. It's episode number 137. Alrighty. Coming up on number 140, I guess, right? Record date on this one is June 11th, 2024. I think it's a Tuesday, right? Yeah, sounds about right. Missed you last week. Hopefully you missed me just as much. Know how that goes. Didn't feel like doing anything.

Plus, I wanted to get back, I think, on the early week schedule. I had kind of shifted everything towards the end of the week. And it's just, I don't know. I don't like releasing episodes. Going into a weekend, you know? You guys listen to podcasts on the weekend? Aren't there better things to do with yourself, with your time, than listen to a podcast on the weekend? I don't know. Anyway, so I guess this one will be ready to go Tuesday.

Other than that, not a lot going on on this end. Hope you're good. I did watch Bill Maher last week. I watch it every week. I'd like to tell people that Bill Maher is pretty much the only show that I watch outside of baseball with any kind of regularity. It's just about the only sane thing left on television that's not just ideological slop. op, produced for one tribe or the other. He's really good about calling his own people out. He's still a liberal.

He still hates Donald Trump. He's going to, you know, no matter come hell or high water, he's going to vote for Biden this year. But he's been willing for a number of years to call out his own tribe on their bullshit. My father-in-law caught him, I think, two weeks ago.

He's, you know, he's a conservative guy, Republican guy There's no way in hell he's ever going to vote for Joe Biden I suggested he give him a try, Apparently he did He's like, wow, this guy is actually all right I mean, I don't agree with most of what he says But calling out the woke bullshit, yeah Good for him, yeah, good for him, Kind of scolding the lunatic fringe of his party If you'll pardon the borrowed expression from a famous broadcaster Thank you, Pastor.

So anyway, I watched him on Friday, as usual. He had John Fetterman on his show. I owe John Fetterman a huge apology. I don't think I was podcasting too much during the election when he was actually running against Dr. Oz there in Pennsylvania. And I really liked Fetterman before his stroke. And I gave him a lot of shit for not dropping out of that race.

Because it seemed, you know, he seemed to be cognitively impaired, affected by the stroke, and it turned into an election between somebody that I saw or assumed was cognitively diminished against Dr. Frickin' Oz. Has the political landscape changed so much that these were our choices? This is what I was saying a couple of years ago, and I just couldn't believe it.

I wanted him to drop out and make way for somebody else, but I'll tell you, since October 7th, he's the one guy in the Democratic Party that has some clarity, has some actual moral clarity on this issue. He is staunchly anti-Hamas, pro-Israel on this, and unapologetic about it. And I follow him on Twitter. I'm back on Twitter, by the way, at TanzilaXPod, if you want to follow me, have fun with that.

Anyway, I've been following him on Twitter, impressed with his ability, his willing, not ability, his willingness to stand up to the bad shittery from his own party. Again, this is going back to Justin Amash. This is going back to people like Kinzinger back before he was just a sellout when he was willing to stand up to Donald Trump. Justin Amash paid the price, right? It's not courage to stand up and say something when you know that you're going to be cheered and egged on by your own people.

It takes courage to stand up to your own people and tell them when you think that they're wrong. Well, Fetterman is showing that. He's been doing it on Twitter since I went back on there a couple months ago. I've been depressed with it. And he's taking a lot of heat, just like Bill Maher has been taking a lot of heat from his own people, the same people, the familiar suspects. I appreciate that. We need more of that on both sides, really.

Anybody who dares stand up to these people typically are brandished or branded as an apostate, a blasphemer, a heretic. You've heard me talk about this before, all the tribalism, the religious mind. It's almost like a cult where if you don't follow the doctrine, the scripture, lionize. The avatars within your religion, within your congregation and your cult, you will be tarred and feathered. You will be burned at the social stake.

And it's really refreshing to see people like Marr, people like Fetterman stand up and do this. I appreciated Kinzinger a few years ago, but he turned into this sort of like the Bill Kristol guy. He just sort of rebranded himself. self. Anytime I see him on television, he's just a party hack. He switched parties and decided to go against Donald Trump. That's all he is. He's just a never Trump guy. He doesn't have anything else.

Steve Schmidt, remember him? Same thing. These Lincoln Project guys looking for an end, looking for an opening, looking for fertile soil in which to spread their seed. And I have a lot of respect for that. Justin Amash is back in the political race here. Here, mention him again, because, again, he paid the price for doing what John Fetterman and Bill Maher had been doing for a couple of years. He's in the political arena. He has more to lose than Bill Maher does, anyway.

And he paid that price. But he's back in it. He's running, I don't know if it's Senate. I think it's Senate up here in Michigan. One more time, trying to get back at it. And I really hope he wins. I really respect that guy. For what he said, what he did as far as the impeachment vote in the face of his own party. Then the price he paid, he knew he was going to pay that price. He paid it, and then he stayed in. Pete Meyer, I think he was running,

I think he got beat in the primary. I don't know what he's going to do. I respect that, and I respect anybody who will stand up to the orthodoxy within their own party and pay that price.

Anyway that was uh on mar on friday that was the opening segment he had fetterman on for 20 minutes and fetterman he did a pretty good job he seemed a little uh uncomfortable a little out of his element there on television but i was glad to see him there and i do owe him an apology i think that's how this whole thing started i owe because what i was saying a few years ago he's recovered Covered nicely.

He doesn't look like the same guy, the same affected guy we saw running back, I guess, a few years ago. And it could have been just selective information we were given to agenda clips. So I want to give really a public apology. I don't know if anybody's ever going to hear it other than a handful of people listening to this podcast. But I want to come out and say that I owe him an apology. There it is.

Sorry, Mr. Fetterman. I'm sorry for the things that I said about you a few years ago And thank you for the moral clarity you're showing on the Israel-Gaza thing In the face of the bent shit fringe of your party He also came out and said He told Mari this isn't the first time he's said this But he doesn't consider himself progressive He's a democrat and he's a solid democrat And everything else but Gaza-Israel He doesn't consider himself

a progressive And I think what that translates to is, you know what? I'm not woke. I'm a liberal. I'm left of center. But you guys, he said this. He echoed Bill Maher again. He said, I didn't leave the Democrats. I'm not leaving the Democrats. I haven't changed. They have. They have lurched so far to the fringe left that here I am, a normal Democrat. And now to them, I look like I'm moving, relatively speaking, like I'm moving toward the right. Like I'm becoming a Republican or a fascist.

He didn't say that. I'm saying that. I'm adding all of that stuff. But that's exactly what he said. I didn't leave you. You guys are leaving me. And this is a refrain that's been repeated over and over and over again since the Green Tea Party hatched in the wake of Donald Trump's election right about Inauguration Day in 2017.

So everybody, I don't even want to call it a minority, but this chunk of Democrats started to call them Manchurian communists because a lot of these kids, a lot of these people, a lot of these Democrats, I think are Marxists. But they're not lying when they cringe and say, no, we're not. I don't think they're lying. I don't think they know they are.

I think it's one of those things. That shit leftists learned their lesson sometime between 1969, sometime between Kent State maybe, and today, where they learned that they could not actually pull off a legitimate revolution in this country. They had to subvert everything. Now, this is Christopher Ruffo. Again, I'm borrowing from him a little bit, but I think what happened is they kept all of the Marxism, all of this social revolutionary stuff in their doctrine.

But they just stopped saying they were communists. Instead of being up front, having the courage of their public convictions, instead of saying the quiet part out loud like they used to, they're like, yeah, we're not communists. We're just socialists.

We're social democrats. crazy right i think they are i think that's exactly what they are and i think that they are the manchurian variety commie and they don't realize that what they believe and what they want is actually narcissism what do you do with that i'm going to talk about social momentum here in a little bit maybe today i've got a stack as i haven't really uh figured out what i'm going to do with all this crap yet. I've got a bunch of it.

But one of these pieces talks about social momentum. This is going back maybe four or five years when I first started thinking about this stuff, about the things that you say and the things that you do and how later on, even if you second-guess it, even if like subconsciously, deep down inside your brain, you second-guess yourself and you start to wonder, did I have this right? Should I have said that? Should I have believed this? Should I have done this in my zeal?

My political ideological zeal. Maybe I should, well, you can't do it. That thought will be aborted in the first trimester. Because you can't, people typically, I don't want to generalize too much. Some people can do it. I've done it. Toot my horn. But most people will not allow that seed to germinate. Ego-centric reasons, rationalizing, justifying, subconsciously rationalizing, therefore justifying what we do.

We take that cognitive horsepower that I talk about, that RAM, that mental RAM, and we use it to justify and rationalize our actions rather than re-evaluate and admit even to ourselves that we are wrong. And this gets complicated when you've done something. Well, maybe you've done something in your zeal, in your fanaticism, that you really know you shouldn't have, that has consequences. Maybe you've destroyed relationships, written people off because of what they think or what they believe.

That's an epidemic in this country. It's been an epidemic in this country for years. Everybody putting their unedited thoughts online and people are sitting there, I don't like that guy anymore. He worships the wrong God. I'm done with him, unfriend. And what if you do that and you do that to enough people? Are you going to let yourself? Honestly, think about it. Don't tell me. But honestly, ask yourself this in the quietness, the silence of your own mind.

If you've If you've done that enough times and you find out or figure out or decide, reconsider things and come to the conclusion that maybe you were wrong about it, are you going to go back and apologize? Are you going to try to repair the friendships, the relationships? Or are you going to use that mental ram to justify and rationalize and double down?

The answer, for most people, maybe you're a special unicorn I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, but for most people, They will never admit that, even to themselves They will spend that reason, that's what's mistaken for reason most of the time Is rationalization and justification They will use their cleverness, their clever mind The ability to self-litigate, Emerson's retained attorney will be deployed to rationalize and justify Doesn't matter Being right We are not truth seekers Again,

we are storytellers And that is the storyteller litigating in our minds to ourselves And if we're challenged To other people. That's what people do. So what are you going to do? I forget completely now how I got off on that tangent. Last thing I knew, I was talking about Bill Maher, John Fetterman. That's all right. Anyway, second thing that happened on the Bill Maher program last Friday. If you haven't seen it, it's excellent, man. It's really, really good. I think it was Matt Walsh.

No, it's not the anti-trans guy, Matt Welch. Maybe it's Welch. It's not the Walsh guy. It's not the what is a woman guy. But another guy who's a very frequent guest on Marr was there. I always enjoy him. He's got a podcast. I forget the name of it now. He was excellent. He's always good. Fetterman was pretty good. My favorite part of this, and the reason that I'm mentioning this primarily, is Abigail Schreier. I have a crush on this woman.

I think she became famous. is she released a book called Irreversible Damage, about the damage being done to gender-confused children, when it comes to gender-affirming care, which is child mutilation in the name of gender ideology. She wrote a book about this and drove people crazy. I think her book was taken down, taken off of Amazon. Censored. Or burning books digitally. Because it caused such an uproar.

Well, now Europe, the rest of the world, everywhere but the United States, is catching up with Ms. Schreier. I first became aware of her when she released that book, and I started hearing about how the wolves were coming out, the packs of wolves were coming out to devour her and her career, cancel her because of her blasphemy against gender ideology. Never bought the book, never read it. I thought about it a few times. It's still in my Amazon queue.

I'm not really interested in reading the book, to be honest with you. I don't know what I'm going to learn or how it's going to apply to anything. I'm pretty much on board with her already, but I wanted to support her. Because of what she went through with these nutjobs. She has another book now, and this one I did buy. It's called Bad Therapy, Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up. And she got into quite a bit of this on Mars program on Friday.

And this woman, I'm telling you, if we were a rational society, this woman would be a superstar. star. And she's pretty famous as it is, but she should be way up there when it comes to social commentators. She should be on every program everywhere, as far as I'm concerned. I have not gotten far into this. I ordered it after seeing her on Mara, kind of reminded me. I've only gotten a few pages in. I've got another book that I've been working on, but I did, I did crack it last night.

Yeah, through, I don't know, first 30 pages or so. And it's, It's fantastic. Why the kids aren't growing up. Bad therapy. And it triggered some pretty fun connections. At about 3 o'clock in the morning, I was sitting here in bed with my wife, I read. Oh, she's over there sleeping. Like, oh, yeah. And I think I woke her up a couple of times. But it connects back to some other stuff that I've already talked about. And that's what I'm going to start with. Music.

Well, I was talking about Abigail Schreier. She was on the latest episode of Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO last week and was talking about her book, Bad Therapy, Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up. I have not finished this book. I want to make sure you understand that. I'm only a few pages into it, maybe 20 or 30 or so. But it got me thinking last night. When I was lying there in bed, I had my phone out poking things into my notepad.

And I'm going to share a couple of things with you that I found in the book that sort of provoked some thought that I think tie into many of the things that I've already talked about on this show over the years. And one of the first things she has in here, I think it's on page 7 or 8, I'm sorry, page 8, and the heading of the chapter, the little section of the chapter, rather, is Psychotherapy Needs a Warning Label.

And her promise is that psychotherapy isn't a cure-all. It's not for everyone, and it sometimes does more harm than good. Despite everybody being in some kind of therapy, especially children, she kind of gets into how much therapy or therapy-type treatment these kids get in school. Everything's about the feelings and how are you feeling, how's your self-esteem. This ties into William Storrs' books as well, especially Selfie.

I really wish I could meld these two together tonight, but I haven't finished this book yet. I need to do that. But talking about self-esteem, saying that every child's self-esteem needs to be exceedingly high and that the one thing, the most important thing about a child's education or a child's experience being raised is how they feel, how they feel about themselves. No trauma. And, oh, these are some very, very dubious definitions of what's traumatic.

And her point here, you're raising a bunch of fragile children. The anxiety, levels of depression, this stuff's been talked about ad nauseum. This is the frail, fragile generation. Because they've been coddled, nod to Jonathan Haidt, Lukianoff, they've been coddled since birth because their parents really wanted them to have a pain-free existence while they were growing up. Maybe they had the best intentions. They probably did.

Not faulting the parents for wanting their children to be happy and well-adjusted. But there's an article this week about how 20% of this generation now who are getting out of school, 20% take their parents to a job interview. 20% take their parents What would have happened? I'm solidly Gen X What would have happened? What would our friends have said? You talk about emotional trauma It would have come from our peer group Had any of us gone to a job interview with mom or dad.

And 20% of them now apparently take their parents To a job interview because they don't want to to experience the anxiety. They need the support. These children are frail and fragile. Any kind of discomfort is trauma. Because they have been basically in therapy, some kind of therapy, pseudotherapy, pretty much from birth. Anyway, this is the theme of the book, that all of this therapy, it's called bad therapy, all of this therapy may not be such a great thing.

And in this chapter, the headline psychotherapy needs a warning. The first flag I put in it goes something like this. She says, well-meaning therapists often act as though talking through your problems with a professional is good for everyone. That is not so, says Mrs. Schreier or Miss Schreier. I don't know if she's married. I hope not.

She should be single. I don't think she is. Anyway, nor is it the case that as long as the therapist is following protocols and has good intentions, the patient is bound to get better. Let me repeat that. Nor is it the case that as long as the therapist is following protocols and has good intentions, what is that about good intentions? That the patient is just bound to get better. Any intervention potent enough to cure is also powerful enough to hurt.

Therapy is no benign folk remedy. It can provide relief. It can also deliver unintended harm and does so in up to 20% of patients. Did you know that? Did you have any concept that when you went into therapy, any kind of therapy, that there was a 20% chance it was going to do more harm than good? I have never heard that in my life. I had state-ordered therapy. I had mom-ordered therapy when I was a teenager because I was a delinquent, and she couldn't figure out why.

So I had to go to talk to some dude. I hated him, didn't tell him anything. And then with my alcohol history, we'll call it, I had to go to alcohol therapy back in the mid-90s. That actually kind of did me some good. But this started to trigger some things in my mind, just in my own history. I don't know how much of that I want to share here, but I know where she's coming from. I know exactly where she's coming from.

That it has the potential, going into therapy, dwelling on your problems, dwelling on how someone else may or may not have victimized you, how you're always focusing on what's happened to you. Takes away that resiliency. Does this sound like anything else that you've noticed culture-wide, the victim culture? Do these two things go hand in hand? Maybe. I'll continue on. Therapy can lead a client to understand herself as sick,

as ill, mentally ill, and rearrange her self-understanding around a diagnosis. This is huge. And rearrange her self-understanding around a diagnosis. What are we talking about here? That sentence, rearrange her self-understanding around a diagnosis. That is the internal narrative, the story. It changes the internal story that we tell, the self-perception. The internal story that we tell ourselves about ourselves and our lives. This happened to me 30 years ago. A little bit, just a little bit.

But as I lay in bed reading this last night, Like, yeah, I can see how this works. This makes perfect sense to me. I'm ill because of what happened to me. Look what was done to me. Of course, there's some legitimacy to this in a lot of cases. I'm not diminishing every single case of this, believe me. But to some degree, to some extent, therapy can become all-encompassing, all-consuming, self-regard, and self-pity. To some degree, it can happen.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how, does it? She continues on to say that therapy can encourage family estrangement. This again. I'm telling you. Therapy can encourage family estrangement, coming to realize that it's all mom's fault and you never want to see her again. Look what mom did to me. Look what dad did to me. Look what so-and-so did to me. I never want to see or talk to these people again. They are out of my life. It's all.

Whether or not it was mom, dad's, or whoever's fault, if they were in the right or in the wrong, whatever. What if they weren't? What if this is a misdiagnosis? What if you've gone in and given maybe a slightly bullshit story? Or maybe you've misremembered something. It happens if you're talking about childhood. It happens all the time.

Suddenly, you've cut somebody out of your life permanently. Broken up a family unit for what? Again, I have to put this disclaimer in there because people are ridiculous and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Of course it happens. And of course, maybe in some cases, believe me, I'm sympathetic in the appropriate circumstances to this. And I'm not saying that this should never happen. There are some cases,

I'll tell you. Yeah, there are some cases that you should absolutely sever relationships, even with your family, if it comes down to that. But as an excuse, as a sort of an ejection seat to your own self-accountability, that's dangerous. Learning to see yourself as being victimized by your family, by everyone, when that's not the case.

Let's go back to what I was talking about earlier, rationalization and justification, justifying your actions, justifying your own behavior, your own delinquency, whatever it is, maybe that happened 20, 30 years ago, justifying and rationalizing that in your head so as to not be accountable, personally accountable, and applying blame to someone else.

Diagnosing yourself as being traumatized by person A or person B Cutting them out of your life And never, never, ever looking in the mirror and taking accountability for yourself. And where you are in your life You can climb in the rocket ship right now And you can ride it up a few levels into the atmosphere Into the sociological stratosphere and perhaps, maybe, you'll see a bigger application to this.

Maybe. She continues, Therapy can exacerbate marital stress, compromise a patient's resilience, render a patient more traumatized, more depressed, and undermine her self-efficacy so she's less able to turn her life around.

Kills resiliency, Makes the patient less resilient, more fragile, more frail, unable to grasp the wheel of their own lives Turn their own lives around Agency, Therapy may lead a patient by degrees, sunk into a leather sofa, well-placed tissue box, close at hand, to become overly dependent on her therapist. Led by degrees to become overly dependent on the therapist. The focus of her book is primarily, again, it's like Jonathan Haidt's focus on primarily on children.

Okay, fine. This also applies to adults. I promise you. I promise you all the stuff that they're talking about with social media and children and blah, blah, blah. All of this stuff. That's great. I'm glad they're focusing on children. And I understand the marketing aspect of it, why they're doing that. But I promise you, I guarantee it. I bet everything I have, which isn't much, but I bet it that there's a hell of a lot of bleed over into the adult world.

That this is not just a problem experienced by children. There's bleed over into the adult world. There has to be. We are exposed to the contagion too. Second, third hand, whatever. We're exposed. And it happens to adults just as much as it does to children.

In the next paragraph, it's even true for adults, who in general are much less easily led by other adults. These iatrogenic effects pose at least as great a risk and likely much more to children. So, therapy, talking about your problems, sharing your problems, ruminating on your problems might have a detrimental effect.

It might cause you, force you, assist you in rewriting the internal narrative, placing yourself in your internal story, your life story, the epic of your life being written moment by moment by the internal narrative in your mind. It can change that to where instead of an active participant with agency and the grip on the wheel, deciding where you go in your life, how to get there, it recasts you in this production as a victim. What are the consequences of that? Again, I'm going to do it for you.

You can climb right in that rocket ship, ride it up there, and take a look at the landscape of the society in which we live, and you can decide for yourself if there's any other application here. I'm talking about rumination or implying, and she doesn't use that word, I don't think, in this book. It's not so far. Talking about rumination, she says individual therapy can intensify bad feelings, too. A couple of psychologists wrote candidly about the patient who quit therapy

after a few weeks of treatment. This is great. All we do is talk about the bad stuff in my life, the patient told this person. I sit in your office and complain for 45 minutes straight. Even if I am having a good day, coming here makes me think about all the negative things. Ruminating on the shit, dwelling on the feces in your life.

Even if you're in a good mood, you go in and talk to your therapist, you talk to the person you're paying to get you better, and all of a sudden, you're just dwelling on crap. My mind's going back to one of those episodes I did last August, talking about when I went down to South America and Mexico.

All of these people, all of these backpackers, these foreign kids, these non-American kids, dwelling on everything bad about the United States while they're sitting in the second or third world, singing the praises of the second or third world, but all they can find, all they can ruminate on is what's wrong with this country and them being sitting there with that guy doing the same thing. I didn't do it. I didn't fall into that. I was incredibly happy to come home. I saw the good.

I didn't, you know, fly into Atlanta or Houston and immediately be all consumed and overwhelmed by capitalism. I mean, it was a shock to come back and be assaulted by all the advertising. I'm not saying that didn't happen. It did.

But it lasted about long enough for me to go into the store, buy a pack of cigarettes that I liked, buy something, know that I could get what it was that I wanted without having to go to seven or eight different stores or buy an inferior brand because they didn't have what I actually wanted. I came, and that led me down another path, being able to focus on what's really good about this country, the highways. Our buses suck compared to Mexico's, and everybody else is down in Latin America.

I'll give them that, but the roads, traffic, Traffic, are you kidding me? Airports. There are a lot of really good things about this country that I began to focus on after I had left. But many people, it's not just travelers, it's not just people who, all they do is focus on the bullshit, the shit in their lives, the shit that they see. I resembled that comment. Sometimes I still do. That's rumination. Rumination, ruminating on everything that's imperfect.

What should be better? What could be better? What they have? What I don't have? You go into your shrink's office and you start talking about that. You talk about it for an hour every week or two or three times a week. Sometimes it turns into ruminations. Ruminations are the gateway to depression, anxiety. Anxiety, where all you think about are the bad things in your life and how things could be so much better or should be so much better.

Everything is imperfect. Nothing's perfect in my world. Well, we've started to raise a generation talking and reading this book. Apparently, we've started to raise generations of children raised by parents, who don't think anything should ever be wrong.

There should be nothing, no imperfection. no bad feelings in their children's lives and they've tried to shield them from that from birth this is my generation that raised these kids too, Gen X raised these kids what the hell happened and she frames it as well our parents sucked so we want to make sure that our kids get raised by that's fine that's a noble aspiration but what did you raise Peace. You raise children with no emotional immunity. Everything gets through.

I'm reading another book, this 1491 book. It's a stretch here, but you know what it reminds me of? One of his theories in that book, 1491, it's about the Native Americans prior to contact with Europeans. And he's putting forth with a lot of evidence that 95% of the Native Americans in the Western world, in the Western Hemisphere, died before contact due to disease. Because they didn't have the, I don't want to call it deficiency.

He wanted to make sure that he wasn't putting forth that they had an inferior immune system. But there was something different about their immune system than there was about Europeans who had grown up around different sets of animals.

So when these other viruses, illnesses were introduced in this hemisphere, there was no immunity. It just tore through the Native American population, the native population, the indigenous population, if you want to call them that, in this hemisphere and decimated. He thinks up to 95%. And by the time that the conquistadors and all of them showed up down in Peru and the rest of South America, they still had a hard enough time subjugating what was left.

But he thinks that 95% may have already been killed by disease. There was no immunity. The connection here is that if you don't immune your children to pain, Don't teach them how to deal with trauma if it's not really trauma, especially if it's not really trauma, if you're calling everything trauma. And saying, oh, this should never happen. They have no defense in place when something bad actually happens to them. What are you doing to these kids?

No psychological immune system. They haven't built up any kind of antibodies. Everything's bad. Everything bad is happening to me and it shouldn't. That's injustice. That's oppression. You're oppressing me. By not letting me bring my mommy to the interview. view. A lot of people these days like to say that this generation has grown up entitled, feeling entitled, like they're entitled to everything. Well, is that what this is?

They've never really experienced any kind of pain or any kind of pain that they had to work through themselves. It's always been laid at the feet of someone else or given to a therapist who told them, well, or maybe put them on medication.

She gets into this as well How much medication How many kids are being put on psychiatric meds I think she says prophylactically A protective measure Protective medication, Psychological medication Anyway, yeah, I'll go back and read the quote again She says, I sit in your office and complain for 45 minutes straight Even if I'm having a good day Coming here makes me think about all the negative things, Sounds like social media, right?

And then Schreier says, reading that, she remembered saving up emotional issues to report to her therapist so that they would have something to talk about at our own session. Injuries, she says, that she may have just let go, learned to deal with. You know, sprain an ankle, eventually it heals. Does the same thing happen psychologically? Do you cope and process it in your own way, in your own time? How often does that happen? How often does that happen?

But how often do you take those problems, maybe these emotional sprains, into your shrink's office, and have the shrink dig it up and dig it up, dig up more and make it worse to the point where maybe it doesn't heal or maybe you start to identify with it too much to let it heal like a scab you're always picking. Until eventually, it leaves a huge scar. I'm inclined to believe that that happens. In fact, I know it does.

I'll keep going on this a little bit longer because she gets into, in the next section, remember the D.A.R.E. Program back in, I guess it was the late 80s or the 90s?

D.A.R.E. to keep kids off drugs. Big failure. Didn't work. He says not only was the campaign entirely ineffective, but follow-up studies reveal that D.A.R.E. May have actually increased substance and alcohol use among teens. Q.P.I. faced Kirk Cameron and pleaded, You don't have to try him to be cool. You remember that? What a douche. But we sniffed a traitor, chilling for the man.

Kirk Cameron promised there were other avenues to cool, Cool, but teens who heard this message apparently figured drugs were quicker and more straightforward than most. Participating in group therapy to discuss problems or discuss a problem you didn't already have. That may be sufficient to introduce it. Rocket ship's waiting.

Participating in a group discussion about a problem you didn't already have could be sufficient. To introduce it. You know what I thought about when I read this? Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at work. Being drug in before your social commissar, your DEI commissar, to discuss inherent bias, white privilege racism. If you weren't racist before, could it possibly be? Could it happen?

Maybe. Maybe, maybe it could possibly happen that if you weren't racist before, when you went into work one day and were told you had to go to a mandatory seminar to be told how you were racist, how you were biased, and how you as a white man or woman were living a life of privilege.

No matter your economic status, no matter what your background was, no matter what you think about black people, brown people, any other kind of people, you are automatically a racist inherently because it's in the system. Do you think it's possible? Do you think maybe it's happened somewhere where a person said, fuck you. I'm not a racist. I've never been racist. But now, maybe I should be. I don't like you anymore. I don't like being attacked when I'm going to try to make a living.

I don't like being drug into re-education seminars and told that I'm a bad human being inherently because of how and who, because of how I was born, who I am. Doesn't have anything to do with my behavior. No, no, no. It has to do with the color of my skin. You are judging me based on the color of my skin, which I've been told my entire life is wrong. I agreed with that, but now you're doing it to me, so all of this was bullshit.

It's okay for you to judge me by the color of my skin after telling me for decades, that's wrong, you shouldn't do that. Fuck you. Hold my beer. Do you think it's happening? That's what I thought of when I read that line. May be sufficient to introduce it. I'll give you another example. Remember I was telling you I had to go to that therapy stuff back when I got my. Back when I got in trouble. Back in the 90s for the first time. I had to go to AA, Alcoholics Anonymous.

They told me that I had to say I was an alcoholic and I was powerless. You know what I did in my early 20s? I was like, hell yeah, I am. I don't have to do anything. I got me a disease. I can't help drinking. It's a disease I got It ain't me, it ain't my choices It ain't my responsibility I'm diseased. Was not the last time I got pulled over, coincidentally. That was an excuse. It was an excuse for me. I was being told I was an alcoholic.

Participating in group therapy, introducing a problem I probably didn't really have. But it gave me permission. I'm a victim of my disease. It gave me a permission not to be accountable for who and what I was doing. Well, I became accountable as soon as I got pulled over. So legally I was accountable. But in my behavior, in my decision-making, no. Absolutely not. It took that away. Weird, isn't it? This is not a story that is isolated to me. I've heard this before. A number of other people.

You have given me an excuse. To relieve myself of a personal response of agency. I'm a victim. Guzzle, guzzle, guzzle. The next section here, I've only got a couple more of these, don't worry. The next section of this is called Wanting to Help is Not the Same as Helping. This is page 11. We're only on page 11 of this book, and it's 250, 300 pages. It's great. I suggest you go get it. Once again, the title, Bad Therapy, Why the Kids Are Not Growing Up by Abigail Schreier.

It's on Amazon. It's worth every penny. So far. I'm sure. Sure. I mean, I don't think I've ever read a book that grabbed me this quick and didn't just blow me away. And after what happened to her with, what was the name of the other one? Irreversible Damage. Give her some money. Read this book. Maybe we can sit down at Thanksgiving. I don't know why you'd be at my Thanksgiving, but okay, let's pretend we're going to have Thanksgiving dinner.

If you read this book, I might invite you over for Thanksgiving dinner to discuss it. Maybe the 4th of July. You want to come over for the 4th of July and discuss Abigail Schreier? You want to start a book club, Toddzilla's Book Club?

I could turn a podcast, I could do a podcast on Toddzilla's Book Club. Would you like that? Would you like to hear Toddzilla's Book Club? Anyway, wanting to help is not the same as helping. That's the next section in this chapter. Ah, yeah, there we go. So we were just talking about this, participating in group therapy to discuss a problem Entering therapy to discuss a problem you didn't already have may be sufficient to introduce it well.

She says in the last decade, therapists promoted the gender dysphoria craze, which led to a 4,000% increase in diagnoses for teen girls. Gender dysphoria. Gender identity disorder. Follow the euphemism, dysmorphia, that's a disorder. Gender identity disorder became gender dysphoria. So they could lower the stigma. To save feelings, always follow the euphemism. You've heard that on this show before, you're going to hear it a million more times.

Group therapy to discuss a problem you didn't already have may be sufficient.

To introduce it, well, the last decade, therapists promoted the gender dysphoria craze. A 4,000% increase in diagnoses for teen girls followed. Social contagion. Growing army of young women who regret their medical transitions. D-transitioners tell strikingly similar stories. Very often, when they trace their lives back to the junction where things sped dramatically off course, there stood a shrink playing railway signalman flipping the switch maybe you were born into the wrong body.

Or maybe the social contagion kicked in. Kids follow trends? Well, maybe dig out the high school yearbooks. I can prove it to you. I did. I had them all at once. Then they go in and they sort of diagnose themselves or suggest that maybe this and maybe that. Maybe then they can go tell their friends, I'm trans. I'm part of this protected species now. Entering group therapy to discuss a problem that wasn't already there may be enough, may be sufficient to introduce it.

Last section about this is that therapists are a little touchy about iatrogenesis. You know, the practitioner, he who's supposed to help you actually does harm. That's what that word means. She asks, why don't therapists typically admit that their methods can cause iatrogenic harm? A group of researchers considered that question and concluded that, unlike the doctor, the psychotherapist is the producer of treatment. This makes perfect sense. It's intuitive.

The psychotherapist is the producer of treatment and is therefore responsible, if not liable, for all negative effects. The therapist often doesn't want to acknowledge that the medicine isn't working because she is the medicine She herself is the medicine Admitting that would be a little personal.

The rest of this is really interesting because then she goes on to say that shrinks are badly incentivized where iatrogenesis is concerned A doctor may decide that a patient would no longer benefit from thyroid medication, discontinue it, and keep the patient. But a therapist gets paid by the dose. Once she decides you don't need therapy, she loses a customer. Actually, it's worse than that, she says. It's in therapists' interest to treat

the least sick for the longest period of time. It's in the therapist's interest to treat the least sick for the longest period of time. Ask any therapist what it's like to treat a bipolar or schizophrenic patient. The answer? Extraordinarily difficult. Many refuse to treat such patients for this reason, she says. But sit with a teenager once a week who has social anxiety. Say the family pays on time. The teen's problems are small.

Nobody's getting violent during your session. It's little wonder why, having acquired such a patient, a therapist may be reluctant to surrender her.

Makes sense. I mean, if you're skeptical about the pharmaceutical industry, if you've ever said there's no money in curing cancer, doesn't this make sense? Do you? Are you a little skeptical? Got a little healthy cynicism, do you? There's big money here. And if it's true, at what cost? I'll jump ahead to the next chapter, one more section for you, to give you an idea.

But she says from the time that they first lurched across the living room floor, On unsteady legs, parents treated these kids to therapeutic parenting. I see you're having some big feelings. How would you like to express that, Adam? Would you like to stomp your feet or grit your teeth? Their teachers employed therapeutic methods. Tell me about your drawing, Madison. What does it represent to you?

And read them books about how to process their feelings. She says a decade ago, a writer for Slate, oh boy, there's a red flag, noted that instead of using moral language to describe misbehavior, this is great, instead of using moral language to describe misbehavior, educated parents had begun employing therapeutic language. A-list adolescent heroes from Huck Finn to Dylan McKay suddenly struck us as undiagnosed sufferers of oppositional defiant disorder.

Oppositional defiant disorder. you weren't incorrigible. You had oppositional defiant disorder. This would have perfectly... Let me tell you, if you didn't go to school with me, I'm sure most of you didn't. Some of you did. Some of you may remember your friendly virtual Toddzilla 35 years ago. I definitely would have exhibited the symptoms of oppositional defiant disorder.

Had I had the opportunity as a less than conscientious 17-year-old to walk into Mrs. Adams' office and say, I think I may have a psychiatric condition called oppositional defiant disorder, I'm not really just an incorrigible asshole. I have a condition. I would have done it. You can't punish me I have a condition I know I would have done that I'm bragging Well yeah I guess I am kind of bragging But I don't know I don't know if I'm bragging or not I just know I would have done it,

It's oppositional defiant disorder. Oh, and this is just the beginning. This is why I wanted to jump ahead into this next chapter here.

Another derivative of that is conduct disorder. Conduct disorder. And then she says, of course, agency, this is going to become a theme. I want you to remember that word, agency. You're going to hear it again real soon. Agency slunk out the back door. In other words, agency, being responsible for your own condition, where you are, your own behavior. Agency, being responsible for yourself, for where you are, what you do, control of your own life.

You're just assigning responsibility, giving it away to some disorder. You have no agency left. This theme will come back. Agency. Suddenly, every shy kid had social anxiety or generalized anxiety disorder, GAD. Every weird or awkward teen was on the spectrum or at least spectrum-y. Loners had depression. Clumsy kids had dyspraxia. The hell's that? I don't even know what that is. Dyspraxia?

Parents ceased to chide picky eaters and instead diagnosed and accommodated the food avoidant. Oh my God. Formal diagnosis, avoidant restrictive food intake disorder, or ARFID. Should I repeat that euphemism for you? Avoidant restrictive food intake disorder. Nope, not a picky eater. He's all that crap. If a kid whined about an itchy tag at the back of his shirt or complained that hallway noise kept him from getting restful sleep, his parents didn't tell him to ignore it.

They bought tag-free clothing of soft Pima cotton and appointed his room with a soft sound machine to address, you ready for this, his sensory processing issues. No chiding kids for messy handwriting. Oh no, that was dysgraphia. No telling kids with the blues that it takes time to adjust to a new town or new school. They had relocation depression. No reassuring them that it's normal to miss their friends over the summer. Oh no, you have summer anxiety. Anxiety.

She says we've all been swimming in therapeutic concepts so long we no longer note the presence of the water. It seems perfectly reasonable to talk about a child's trauma from the death of a pet or the routine humiliation of being picked last for a sports team. That's trauma now. Fragile. Now, one more thing for you. in the course of a single month, three zeitgeist epitomizing stories hit the news.

Once again, this is from Schreier's book. The American Academy of Pediatrics in 2022 reversed perhaps a century of standard protocol and declared that kids with active head lice should no longer be sent home from school. Oh no, it's better to scatter bloodthirsty vermin across the entire student body than that anyone bear the emotional stigma of having being sent home. So, rather than be embarrassed, infect the entire school with lice. This, my friends, is the seed of idiocracy.

The Washington Post's mental health professional, in quotes, informed readers that having your name mispronounced is damaging to the psyche. Hardly any of you know what my real last name is, but if you do, believe me, I kind of empathize with that one. Just a little bit. It's a pain in the butt. Did it damage my psyche? No, I don't think it did. This is just the first few pages of this book. Bad Therapy, Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up. Abigail Schreier. Again, I love this woman. Hold on.

And I think it's criminal. I think it's a crime against American society. This woman is not a household name superstar. You can get that book on Amazon. It's relatively new. And again, I would implore you to go back and check out the Bill Maher episode. from last week. Music. I highly recommend grabbing that book. Give us something to talk about at Thanksgiving or Christmas.

Gotta mean that, maybe. Yeah, we get five or six people together that have read that book and want to come over and discuss it someday. Maybe we could actually do a roundtable podcast. I'm kidding. There's no way. Anyway, the thing that really got to me, I think, in context at least of this podcast, is a lot there. But that quote, all we do is talk about the bad stuff in my life.

And then Schreier talking about how she would stockpile things to go talk about with the therapist So she'd have something to talk about And how some of those things may have been, Things that she would have just naturally let go of Had they just been left to lie and process normally and naturally, Dwelling Digging things up and recycling them over and over Talking about them over and over and over again Obsessing on these negative things in our lives, the problems that we have.

The word for that, the psychological term, I think it's a psychological term, it's rumination. Ruminating about things that make you feel bad. The imperfections, how bad your life is, even if they're not really that bad. Maybe it's a comparative thing where you're comparing your life with someone else's. your problems, your life's imperfections with what you perceive to be someone else's perfections.

One of the things that we're dealing with in this current age, social media, are curated online images, lives, the presentation of lives, these avatars, these social media avatars, where if so many people, not just influencers, but so many people who are putting forth this disanitized version of their lives to show the world how great their life really is. It doesn't matter that they're not authentic. It doesn't matter that they're highly edited.

They're putting forth this image, a curated image for people to see. And then people open their phones, open their little devices, and start scrolling through and see how perfect the presentation of this person's life is, not realizing that it's been curated, that it's been doctored, that it's been edited. The natural inclination, of course, is to compare their lives with what's perceived to be this perfect life over here. And then you start, well, he's got this. Why don't I have that?

Well, he looks like this. Why don't I look like that? The comparisons, every imperfection, every impurity is highlighted.

And if you've been trained to dwell on every imperfection, every negative thought in your life, If it becomes second nature to you at some point, if you're scrolling social media, if you're always connected to these devices, to these platforms, seeing videos and pictures, whatever else, if it's become second nature, how far of a leap is it for you to start ruminating on every negative thing in your life as it's hand-delivered to you at the speed of light electronically into your pocket?

And by way of comparison, everything in your life is inferior to these presentations that you're getting on a minute-by-minute basis. Rumination. It is the gateway to depression. Trust me. Most depressed people are always thinking about the bad things in life. How they feel. And it spirals downward. This takes you to this thing. And this thing here, you sit and ruminate on it. You dwell on it. You obsess on it. It takes you to something else.

It takes you to something else. And pretty soon, a lot of people get to the point where nothing is good. They cannot possibly, physically cannot see anything good. They cannot find any, they can't break out of the cycle. That is clinical depression. Some people don't make their way out of it. Some people do not survive it. I'm not breaking any news here. That's what I thought about when I saw that. It's like, hmm, if these kids in this effort, and I think it is. I think it's a noble effort.

I think it's a goodwill effort to try to keep kids from suffering, try to keep kids out of pain, try to keep kids from experiencing trauma. I think it comes from a good place. But if it's training these children to focus and obsess, dwell on every single imperfection, every single emotional impurity, At what point does it become habitual? At what point does it become emotionally debilitating? At what point does it rob resiliency?

The ability to bounce back, the ability to cope, the ability to understand that life is not fair. Sometimes bad things happen to you, and you've got to figure out a way to persevere and fight through it. I can't say we because I'm not one, but have parents, has my generation of child bearers, have they robbed their children of that ability of resiliency, of basic fundamental stick-to-itiveness and perseverance? The ability to understand that bad things happen and sometimes we have to ride

through them. Sometimes we have to work through these things. That life is not pain-free and perfect. It's never going to be, and it shouldn't be. A perfect life is a boring life. You can't accomplish anything significant without struggle, and that's what builds that character. A little bit of suffering and learning to fight through it, learning to build the strength to persevere through it and come out the other side a better person.

And the ability to fight through it, come out the other side a little bit stronger, longer, a little bit better, but also more confident, knowing that you can do it and not being afraid of every thing, every negative thing, every possibility, negative event that could come your way and derail you because you have no emotional immunity. Having to avoid every psychological germ because it might just get you fatally ill. Has My Generation, Have they robbed their children of that immune system?

Have they, in their effort to protect their children, raised a generation of Humpty Dumpties who, as soon as they fall off a very low wall, can never get up and put themselves back together again? Rumination. Ruminating on everything that's bad. Dwelling on everything that's bad. Now, I talked about the little rocket ship earlier, right? Now, it's really easy to apply this.

If this is the new paradigm, I hate that word, but if this is the new way to do things, how difficult is it to see that applied in other areas? Ruminating on every imperfection. Nothing can be imperfect. I mean, you see this every day, especially right now with Israel, Gaza. If there's anything being ruminated on right now, it's that, the obsession with that conflict. here in the United States by people that it really doesn't affect.

Most of us are not being affected one way or the other by this, but it's something to obsess on. It's something to ruminate on. It's an injustice one way or the other. It's an injustice. Pick your side. You can spin it into an injustice. Right? Domestic politics. Some people are, you know, ruminating on abortion. Abortion rights. That's their one issue. That's the one thing that they cannot let go. Erase systemic racism.

Donald Trump has been a national rumination obsession for eight years. He continues to be. And if we're already trained to do it, and we have these little devices, provoking that outrage and that rumination sort of twitch, that tendency anyway, Anyway, this habit of obsessing on anything that bothers us, anything that just isn't perfect, picking it to death. How difficult is it to provoke that? How difficult is it to monetize it?

I mean, isn't that really what social media does with their algorithms? It gives us something. It finds out what we're ruminating on, what we're obsessed with, what we choose to dwell on, and it just feeds it to us over and over and over and over again. Monetized rumination, right?

And is there any wonder if that's the case? Now, as I've said before, and this is demonstrable, if rumination, habitual rumination, is the gateway to depression, is it any surprise that not only children, have these astronomical rates of depression, but society-wide, is there any question as to why depression rates are so high? Is there any question as to why so many people are on these medications?

We've been trained, we've been conditioned, groomed, if you will, and you just did because you're listening to my show, we have been groomed to be ruminators, to be obsessed. Because it sells, it can be manipulated. And, you know, to be honest with you, if you attach a degree, a sliver, a scent of self-righteousness to that rumination, you attach maybe some virtue signaling to your group.

A lot of angles to that, huh? But it doesn't really change what it is, and I don't think that it changes where it leads.

If always focusing on the negative, always focusing about what's bad in your life or in the world, leads to depression, you are, as I talked a few weeks ago about, A.J. Soprano. Pretty soon, you might find yourself with a cinder block tied to your leg, jumping in a pool, metaphorically or literally because you have found the toxic sludge of rumination. And maybe you're not aware of what it does to you psychologically, how it sort of seeps into everything else in your life.

But if you're not aware of that and it's being fed to you algorithmically, speed of light, devices in your pocket every single day, again, is there any surprise that we've got such a mental health crisis in this country. Now, if you're anti-gun. If you're concerned about shootings, mass shootings, school shootings, trans shootings now, won't bring up the manifesto piece they released from that Nashville shooting. Rumination. I think it's part of it. I don't think it's everything.

I'm not going to lay it all at the feet of this rumination thing, but I think it's a very big part of it. And you can see this. Open your phones. Maybe you experience it, maybe you indulge it, maybe you participate in it. Maybe the best thing to do is to turn the television off, if you still watch TV, or maybe put the phone down, deactivate the accounts, at least the social media accounts, and try to have organic interactions with people.

Instead of texting somebody, go have a beer with them. I don't know. I've talked about this over and over and over again. I've had my own experiences with social media, with the digital detox stuff. I kind of always find my way back to it because it's easy to keep in touch with people. But inevitably, you can feel it sort of seep back in. I get it. There's no condemnation here. But I am really interested in the financial end of this. It kind of ties to me.

It kind of ties into what she was implying in the book about therapists, the business model, the monetary model of keeping people dwelling on their problems. So you've got something to sell, be it therapy or a news product, outrage, links. It's not conspiracy theory to think that way. Of course, of course, it's being factored in. If we can keep people going on this, if we can keep people pumped up and outraged and obsessed with this, that or the other thing, sure.

They'd be idiots. If they understand this, they would be idiots not to do it. They would be committing financial malpractice. Stockholder malpractice if they didn't, right? I wonder about this too. I mean, if you go back, I don't know, in the 90s, maybe it was the mid-90s when we started hearing the first inklings about this, every kid gets a trophy, raising very soft, fragile children. This isn't brand new. What we're seeing is those kids have grown up.

I don't think we realized. I mean, we were, you know, I think if I remember right, correct me if I'm wrong, But I seem to remember most of us were like, these kids are going to have a really hard time when they get older. Here they are. They are having a really hard time. The problem is we didn't think society was going to rebuild itself around them. We figured they were just going to run into a brick wall. Well, this is an A.J. Soprano thing that I did. It's back there.

A.J.'s something or other. It's one of the episodes back there.

But I think this really plays. I've watched a few more episodes of The Sopranos again. Went back and watched some of the midseason stuff where he's getting older. The Sopranos nailed this, man, 20 years ago, 25 years ago. They saw this coming. It's a great social anthropology exhibit, a great snapshot of that time. And if you're observant, perceptive, you can pick out the seedlings of what we're experiencing right now. Now, 25 years ago, Meadow's like 40 now.

But I'm really interested in that AJ thing because the obsession with the environment, the news that was going on, you know, the Iraq war and all that, and where it led him. He was ruminating on this stuff. He fell into a pit of depression. Boom. It applies. And one other question I have here before I go. I'm curious. I'm thinking back again. I'm thinking back to the early, mid, late 90s. I seem to remember, Rodney King aside, we were in a pretty good place racially, early, mid 90s.

I felt like we were anyway. And then something happened. And I'm wondering if this rumination thing, having this obsession, having it fed to us constantly, told that we were entitled to live in a pristine, perfect world, that there was something wrong, if any imperfection, whether you have to obsess on this, you have to fix everything, everything is wrong. I mean, were we moving past it? But as Ms. Schreier said in her book, stuff I may have let go was dragged up.

Well, were we letting it go? Were we in the process of actually maybe perhaps moving past it? But we went into the collective therapy session, the social justice therapy session, drug it all up again. Were we moving on as a nation before the social justice quacks and the feel-gooders convinced everyone that they were victims of some trauma or another and encourage them to ruminate on it, obsess on it. I don't know. I do not know.

Yet again, excuse me, excuse me while I whip this out. I'm just getting you on you. Didn't touch any of this other stuff. This is great. This is really great. Sometimes it happens that way where I feel like I'm going to do a whole lot of stuff when I sit down and I don't touch anything. It's all right. That means I've got more. Abigail Schreier, Bad Therapy. It's the name of the book. Why the kids aren't growing up again. I know I've said it a hundred times. I know I'm being repetitive.

I know I'm being redundant. Tanzila in Greek means redundancy, by the way. Get that book. Music.

I'm saying this after reading 30 pages anyway, Todd's OX that's me escaping the cave podcast Todd's OX pod that is what this thing was you can get more over at substack still got the YouTube channel up gonna be taking some time off I think to get caught up on that not sure if it's gonna be this week or next week but I need to get some more clips up check out the YouTube channel if you would please new listeners Thanks for checking it out.

Appreciate the old guys, too. We'll talk to you next time. So long.