There are cases largely resistant to help, most because the help we provide does not adequately address the problem. Sure, we’ve racked up countless, inspirational stories of the clients who have turned their lives around and are basking in a glow of our supposed support. But what about the hundreds of thousands who would actually benefit from us involving ourselves less? Or, as Jack Black says, “so step off!”

This doesn’t imply you harbored malevolent intent, or that your help was tainted with a wicked motive to destroy the person’s livelihood. In most cases, it’s actually quite the opposite: it’s more likely that your compassion and big heart got the better of you, to the degree that the relationship morphed into that which we clinicians call “co-dependency”. There is such thing, believe it or not, as caring too much, or having too much empathy. Both end poorly in almost every scenario, from professional conflict to special education, from couples to teenage bowling leagues.

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With two people fluent in the art of self-awareness and boundary-enforcing, I’m not entirely convinced co-dependency is inherently negative. Grown adults with the emotional maturity to recognize when “enough is enough” could very much lean on people just enough before they decide to piece together the own mess that is their life. This is what friends are for, right?

As social creatures who very much derive meaning from our relationships, the ability to lean on, and even occasionally depend on others, is what forms strong bonds and bolsters our sense of self. My husband, for example, was clearly placed on planet earth to fish the absolutely disgusting hair slugs from the shower drain for me, even though the slug is comprised entirely of my own hair and that fact in and of itself could be ammunition he should probably use against me. Alas, he doesn’t. We’ve moved beyond the chuckles and the eye rolls to Dylan simply scooping out squirrel-shaped logs and whipping them toward me playfully, as if I do not behave like a toddler being shoved an airplane-spoon of peas. Knowing he’s available for this honest work, and willing to do it for me even though he, too, finds it disgusting, is a faction of our relationship that I most treasure. And laugh at.

Helping people, for me, typically results in a bodily sensation best described as my every fiber aglow or aflame. There is truth to the warm glow that is born of altruism, which I suppose Andrew Huberman has lectured about being related to some brain region entirely unpronounceable but it doesn’t matter because he’s very not ugly. He’s also spoken about the neurochemistry of gratitude, with novel neural pathways developing with every consistent action we take toward servicing another person. Helping also feels, in a perverse way, mildly addicting. Few things in this life garner that sensation of your senses smoldering, of a heightened belief in the self as a wonderful person that can conquer most any feat all because we’ve propped up another clumsy human. This even occurs when we’ve assisted or supported someone undeserving of help, or the asshole who is outwardly unappreciative of it. It’s no wonder the hyper-compassionate feel compelled to volunteer their organs, even if it means their own life is at risk.

One of the most common examples I’ve seen of this phenomenon in recent years is the envy that strikes the former provider in therapy fields. As clinicians, we’re often transferring cases between one another. This occurs for logistical reasons, like geographic location, or simply not seeing progress for an extensive period of time. Some providers will transfer a case to me with thorough anecdotes and delicate warnings, all in hushed tones as if there’s a tacit understanding between them and the client that the client will truly crumble without this person’s presence and service. “How will I ever live without you?!” is what we all subtly yearn to hear, considering the tearful encounters and the late hours spent agonizing over this wildly frustrating person’s progress. In a way, such thoughtful expression of their appreciation would be symbolic of the effort we’ve devoted to the now-positive trajectory of their once-shitty life. But wouldn’t you have it! The client not only responds in a manner far more neutral than expected, but they go on to demonstrate even greater self-awareness, self-control, and independence than we believed was possible without our counsel. A client a few years ago verbatim told me, “Ugh, thank God. I was getting kind of bored of talking to you anyway.”

And then you’re heartbroken, although not in the same manner as an unrequited love or ugly divorce. That identity you hold dear, that which is some form of a hero, is immediately invalidated by your client’s abrupt behavior, behavior which, in the grand scheme of things, denotes real progress. We’re supposed to be happy that our clients pull from their toolbox without our guidance---unless we’ve identified so strongly with this “savior” role that we’re unsure who we are unless we’re desperately clawed at by the client (both metaphorically and literally). As twisted as it may sound, this fear is quite common; that is, the fear that we’re so insignificant we’re good as forgotten. It has happened to me over the course of my career, although far less so in recent years. Such is the power of perception and a strong sense of self outside of what we’re paid to do.

Part of this conundrum is the belief that you’ve invested so much time and energy into this one person that any progress they make must be at least, in part, due to your counsel. You’re 100K in student loan debt, after all--- I’d hope to Christ your expertise is footing the bill at least some of the time. I’ve never been arrogant enough to believe that I’ve changed anyone’s life, or that their journey toward self-betterment would be unattainable if not for me. But I have experienced the sting of being less important than I thought. And, when people come to rely on you for events ranging from trivial to catastrophic, it’s even that much more challenging to determine where your support ranks on their list of significance. “Kayla helps me because she has a nice face” is flimsy testimony of a job well done. Or a job done at all.

We fall into traps of stealing others’ opportunities for competence but believing we’re helping. We get to play the noble martyr. We get to play dress-up as the hero we were never capable of becoming if not for this pathetic loser who has told us for the seventh time that they’ll really go to rehab and this time will be different, all because of us. Even though we outwardly express our exasperation with their shitty decisions, there’s also a part of us that demands they stay sick, disabled, and in need of our expertise. And I’m not even sure this happens consciously- it usually takes an outside party to reveal to us the truth we’ve coyly modified. The reality that is us actually hindering a person’s movement forward for our own selfish reasons. It’s deeper than craving chaos or thriving on theatrics--- it’s a buried desire to feel relevant.

To be clear, I’ve yet to meet a single person who pays umpteen thousand dollars in student loans to obtain a clinical license all for the sake of sabotaging a person’s goals. I haven’t even heard so much as a person state that they feel a sense of joy when their client plateaus week after month after year. It’s something that just happens when two people have been battling for betterment together for too long. The co-dependent tango is a relational corruption that typically takes several months or even years to develop, and the development is slow enough that it’s almost untraceable. It’s a subtle metamorphosis in both the client and the practitioner, where roles change ever so slightly, , but over time amount to a complete reversal of parts. The clinician is now desperately holding on to the relationship, as they believe the person’s entire livelihood is at risk, while the client continues to leech off of this useless help all while reassuring the clinician that they would be dead without them, please stay, please help, this time is different, I promise.

Clinical psychologist Dr. Siggie posted a quote recently that applies here: “Too many parents make life too hard for their children by, overzealously, trying to make life easy for them.” In other words: you’re probably an enabler. I am also an enabler. I enabled my brother Conner, along with my parents, until he eventually died of a Fentanyl overdose that was frankly a long time coming. It happens. It doesn’t make enablers bad people; it means we’re humans who struggle to draw the line between empowerment and permissiveness.

A world chockfull of “help” has managed to obliterate the mental health of children and adults alike. Perhaps it’s always worth it to ask, then, what part we’re playing in a person’s struggles.

Occasionally, it’s the help we forcefully project onto them. So be like Elsa and let it go.

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An interesting question maybe all of us should consider: should we aim to increase positive thinking, or decrease negative thinking? I’ll go first, likely to the dismay of more sunshine-oriented crowds: we can add positive spins and language swaps and reframes to a cup of piss all we want. If the cup of water has piss in it, we’re still drinking piss. So we may as well reduce the volume of urine so it’s easier to chug. Am I coach of the year yet?!

I suppose the answer to this question also depends on the personality type of the person asked. Although the research points unequivocally to the latter (i.e., most people respond with “less negative thinking”), we also must consider how culture has affected our perceptions of happiness versus contentment, optimism versus pessimism, and, of course, “vibez”.

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First of all, I hate the word “vibe” and any phrase which pertains to people “vibing”, the presence of some elusive but barefaced “vibe”, or collective rejection of a “vibe” that does not meet the criteria for that which is a “good vibe”. Phew! Glad I started this piece on a note of my seething rage for matters which are clearly quite trivial.

This supports the theory that my very nature teeters more towards skeptical in regards to most matters. But especially those which are popular and mainstream. At worst, it has been considered argumentative and even a bit scrappy, which I fully own, even if embarrassingly so. I was raised by people who saw events, life circumstances, and people by filtering out the neutral facts and highlighting the negative or the outrageous. I’m not entirely sure Mom and Dad did this willingly or even consciously; my Dad’s sister has reminded me on numerous occasions that his skittish nature is because of his parents (i.e., my grandparents). As children we’re largely sheltered from the misdoings of our elders, mostly because the time we spend with them is a joyous vacation from Mom and Dad usually rife with gifts or money, and void of any real consequences for behaving like animals. My brother and I were proper, for the most part, and would’ve been shipped to Siberia as orphans had we behaved even mildly close to how today’s children behave.

It’s only as we age and reach supposed maturity that we reflect upon our childhood and all of its teachings. My Dad, when I was a kid and still as a 33-year-old woman, has a tendency to respond in terse, sometimes disproportionately crude ways to things that don’t warrant such theatrics. To illustrate a recent example, I was on the phone with both my Mom and Dad on speaker last week while my Mom was letting their dog out onto their small patio. They live in a condo complex, where backyards of each resident meld into one another with no fencing or barrier to show whose house or property is whose, other than a tiny slab of brick which makes up a tiny deck. Their dog, Teddy, is a flirtatious expeditioner. He occasionally wanders to the decks of neighbors, where he’s known by most everyone by his name and by my Mom, who manages to befriend strangers in parking lots and create lifelong friends with people she meets while waiting in line at Walgreens for her prescription.

In a distant, muffled volume, because remember I was on speaker, I heard Mom say something like, “Ken, Teddy ran off.” My Dad, who could’ve simply said, “Kayla, hold on a sec,”, and shuffled outside to assess the severity of “Teddy ran off”, instead began yelling, “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?! JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, WHAT IN GOD’S NAME HAPPENED?! WHERE THE FUCK IS THIS DOG?!??! WHAT DID YOU DO?!!??! FUCKING HELL!” His sundry tones and unnecessary remarks about the apparent alien abduction of the dog trailed off while I waited nosily on the other end of the phone. A couple of minutes later, he returned to me, behaving as if nothing had occurred and his screaming restored order on the brick slab of chaos. My Mom would continue to passive-aggressively whisper to herself about how he was crazy, in a tone just above a whisper to ensure he heard it clearly.

My Dad has been like this my entire life. As a child, I wanted to marry him. He was everything int the world to me, a beacon of grit and masculinity that fostered a chasm of adoration so broad I couldn’t imagine loving another male. For the most part, aside from the incest, this still rings true, despite his temper and his melodrama and the unsocialized manner in which he reacts to things.

There have been moments sprinkled throughout my childhood and my adulthood when I ached for a simple nod of approval or so much as a half-hearted “good try”, and I instead was met with blunt criticism and graceless, albeit honest, feedback. Dad, why did you have to tell me that I could’ve done better on a piece of art I’d agonized over for weeks? Was it entirely necessary to remind me that I fell short, again, after I’d already come to this realization through a series of unchangeable errors? You know I’m a kid that doesn’t have fun with hobbies or sports because I become so immersed in my performance, my strengths, my abilities, at the cost of the joy of it all. You know that since elementary school I’ve harbored a neuroticism that could only be learned rather than inborn, the kind that forces my eyes awake when kids my age remain motionless, asleep, consumed by a blanket of contentment I’ve long envied and yearned for. Many may read this with an “aww, that’s so sad,” or even “ugh, what an asshole”. I don’t see either of these as remotely accurate. I also don’t think Dad’s lack of affection or gentleness in times I could’ve used it affected me in any real way other than the sting of their receipt in the moment. It’s entirely possible to experience a dearth of positive vibez as a kid and still go on to be a somewhat normal person.

Interestingly enough, Dad’s ferocious sensibilities weren’t only applied to those situations that were frustrating and therefore worthy of complaints and criticism. His outlook did not discriminate against even those events and situations which most would agree were positive Before I proceed, I do want to emphasize his caring, supportive, and wise traits, and remind readers that he never once used my brother and I as metaphorical punching bags or obedient prey. Although there was always a clear bias toward poor outcomes or shortcomings or net negatives, he also parented with an arsenal of thoughtful support, using adages that I’d repeat to myself silently in times of peak distress. “Give ‘em hell” became the soundtrack of my elementary subconscious, which later evolved to “gird your loins” in middle school and finally, “your tenacity is what I admire most about you” in my personal turnaround that was college. For better or for worse, Dad helped carve a neurotic daughter into a stoic woman that people rely on for her honesty, courage, and valor.

It was his inherent proclivities, though, his hypervigilance and his impulse for catastrophe, that ultimately tainted many a good moment. I don’t resent him for these, they just function as data points I can use to better think about my own behavior and attitudes.

When I was first accepted into college, which was not difficult because I intentionally applied to one of the worst and cheapest universities in Illinois after barely having graduated high school, he led with, “You’d better take out student loans for that because it’s going to cost a fortune and if you decide that you don’t want to do it anymore then you’re fucked.” Throughout my undergrad, my brother, who was in his third or fourth rehab center for heroin by that point, would arrive home on visits to a similar lecture series on compelled misery my Dad had long since assumed was what it meant to be an adult. The words of wisdom imparted on my brother escape me, but they sounded like phrases from Tony Robbins, if Tony Robbins had been possessed by the Antichrist. Robbins’ suggestions that were “your past does not equal your future” were rewritten by Dad as, “you totally fucked yourself”. There were, though, aspects of Tony’s message that I think, buried beneath Dad’s crusted surface, were itching to live vicariously through us.

Again looking through the clearer lens of hindsight, I wonder if Dad was simply terrified, and he didn’t know how to connect to my brother and me in any way other than to warn us of the troubles and the trials and the tribulations that constituted the past five decades of his own life. This was Dad’s one and only opportunity to stand tall in his parenting role of twins, both of whom suffered from lethal, compulsive behavior disorders that he wasn’t even aware existed when he was our age. His own paranoia and anxious temperament unfurled into a Negative-Nancy, an emotional transformation that I’ve come to realize he perhaps didn’t even consent to. Or maybe he was like this long before we were even a thought. Or, more likely of an explanation, the conception of my brother and I was the vehicle for such nervy transmission.

My brusque sarcasm and somber tones are certainly inherited traits from my Dad. In recent years, I’ve asked myself and my husband countless times: Am I a pessimist? My husband has stated that while he doesn’t believe I’m a pessimist at my core, he’s definitely seen defaults towards negativity in more recent years, kinds that are mildly symbolic of Dad’s uncalled-for mania. Self-development, specifically when done well, is painful. Who wants to come to terms with the person they’ve become, especially if that person is a stranger you’d never befriend, someone so foreign to you you couldn’t possibly trust its instincts? I needed to understand how this came to be, and what about my environment and my own beliefs have contributed to a version of myself I couldn’t stand.

The most difficult part was reconciling my public-and-professional perception and that which I know to be true via direct evidence: to others, I’m extraverted and bubbly, sarcastic and sharp-tongued, perhaps at times inadvertently condescending or too forceful in my opinion. But never have I been framed as a pessimist by those who I’m tasked with helping. Was it just people I’d come to trust, befriend, and love? And if so--- how much has my temperament changed their perception of me? Has it drawn them into a whirl of complaints unfettered by solutions, a world of fury they hadn’t bargained for but felt compelled to partake in because of our relationship? I hate myself for having put people in a position that felt as unfamiliar to them as this grim self does to me. However, not all hope is lost.

I’ve also reframed my definition of “pessimist” entirely after tremendous, involuntary exposure to some people, in recent years, that I’d consider delusionally happy. Perhaps anyone with a realistic view of themselves and their future compared to a “toxic optimist” can be considered bitter. So, again… am I a pessimist? Am I a sometimes-pessimist, sometimes-optimist? Does it matter?

Sometimes I wonder if my attitude and aura, which are clearly genetically endowed as well as reinforced through life experience, are habitual rather than accurate. In looking at most of the people I’ve attracted, I am delighted. While I don’t believe it’s adaptive to dwell or ruminate over how we’re seen by other people, we absolutely need to take others’ opinions into account. Confidence, yes, is built within, but it’s also built by contributing to society and those around us. We cannot ever survive a world in which other people do not factor into the equation; it’s why I so heavily reject the “just do you, the hell with what other people think” mindset. I believe that if I truly were a toxic presence, I’d tend to attract equally fragile people with a penchant for fury, for futile argumentation about things they’re completely unaffected by. I’m somewhat assured, then, that my negativity largely occurs inside my own brain. Is this pessimism? Or am I ruminating and over-analyzing? I have a tendency to do both.

I heard somewhere that we attract the audience we deserve. Perhaps I’ve attracted the “wrong” types here and there, mostly because I lost control of myself and succumbed to the malevolent brands of reinforcement. I’m human, too! But, again, I’m pleased with the opportunities I’ve been offered and the connections I’ve forged. Would this have happened if I were truly cynical? Perhaps I’m only trying to make myself feel better.

This is why I’m captivated by teaching critical thinking, and a “do it yourself” framework. What I just did, an out-loud banter weighing my rank on the asshole-meter, is an example of how we gather evidence for and against an argument, with this particular hypothesis being “I am a pessimist.” In what I’ve discovered about myself, especially in recent years, one fact has stuck: an excess focus on ourselves, and even our thinking, does no good. To fixate on that which needs changing or improving, and making frequent public announcements as to our vulnerability and our goals, is likely more performative than it is indicative of deep self-awareness. Too much good can easily fall into bad. So maybe I just need to better and more consistently embody the opposite of my most “toxic traits”, or, at the very least, cultivate more neutrality, and give up the useless battle that is predicting the future and anticipating how I might feel about it.

People do change despite psychology’s theory that our personality traits are unwavering and somewhat immutable. My family has proven repeatedly that we’re wildly capable of not only changing how we respond in situations, but our beliefs about things we’ve long since despised. Maybe we don’t need to constantly want more, to achieve more, to make more money or get another degree or hire another coach. Maybe we just need to adjust that little space between our ears to reinvent our realities anew.

My Dad invited his brother-in-law over for Christmas this year, which was a shock to all of us. He’d long since written him off as a “jagoff” unworthy of forgiveness because of a series of mistakes Uncle Frank had made, mistakes my parents still shelter us from for reasons unknown. Dad is quick to do this; he’s known for abruptly and unflinchingly abandoning relationships at the first error or perceived wrongdoing, seemingly without a hint of remorse, as if their very identity disintegrates before his eyes and they’re out of his sight and his mind. But this year, at age 74, Dad has made efforts to change. He even invited one of his neighbors, a social step I’m certain was foreign to him. I haven’t seen my Dad socialize with another non-human family member in a long time, and I’m unsure what small talk or pleasantries would even look like. Maybe his newer sense of purpose has been renewed in his later years with the way the world has shifted and his recognition that his years left are numbered. I wonder if he sees parts of himself in me that he’s desperate to change, seeing as most would consider 74 years old a pointless age to want more and want better. Dad’s best bet is vicarious conversion.

Allowing myself back into my interests of psychology, achievement, grit, and human performance have reminded me that I’m entirely capable of finding meaning, even in places I’ve denounced as gurgling cesspools of stupidity. I’m trying as hard as humanly possible, with very strict time parameters, to catch my negative defaults before they’ve bloomed and make the choice to come up with alternatives. This is effortful. It’s exhausting and embarrassing, and I’m a tad unmoored by how often I respond inappropriately. Optimists may try to reframe these as flowery traits that aren’t even that bad; they’re strengths, queen! Do you, boo-boo! I don’t know how helpful this is. I think what I’ll do is honestly assess whythese traits have become so easy for me to revert to, and break the habit in the way I teach hundreds of people to do for my job.

Maybe the outlook isn’t so bad. My track record is pretty great.

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“Hell yeah! I love that you’re so impulsive.” – our realtor, when we bought our first house.

A small portion of me was offended. Mostly because I’d tried my hardest to conceal my impulsivity and trick people into believing I’m a thoughtful, mature woman with the ability to weigh and measure her options carefully. This kind, perfect stranger, who meant no passive-aggressive harm in this statement, accidentally sent a clear message: I’ve got your number. Being identified as our traits we try so desperately to hide, and essentially being caught in a lie, of sorts, is what Tony Soprano refers to as “being had”--- and boy was I had. It certainly hasn’t been the first time my infractions have been snuffed out used as examples; I tend to ask for forgiveness far more than permission, and occasional red-handedness comes with the territory. The result, though, is often the same: a sudden flush of prickly stinging behind my cheeks, the quick uptick in erratic thumps of my heart, an internal pressure building that only wants to lash out, to justify my wrongdoing, to lie to myself. We all sing saccharine BS to ourselves when we’re wrong. Perhaps we’ve tamed this tendency enough to the point that it only happens from time to time, or maybe we’re teetering more on the unhinged end of the spectrum and let that childish streak paint its broad strokes over our image. Either way, it usually does not get easier to be found out.

I’d been found out by someone who had revealed my darkest traits in all of two short house showings.

Was I that bad? Were my proclivities that abundantly obvious to people around me? Maybe I’d mistaken my fervor for extraversion and open-mindedness. I love new things! Novelty doesn’t scare me! I’m entirely open to new perspectives! Same old, same old bores me to tears! All of these things are true, but I do very much have a proneness, a fetish, even, for extremes. I’ve been told by nearly every millennial woman I know that I should be tested for ADHD because of my personality and my preferences. As someone who is in the field of mental and behavioral health, I try to hide my irritation with this suggestion with a chuckle and a redirection. Because, frankly, why does it matter? What would an ADHD diagnosis do for me, other than solidify my attributes, the ones I both love and loathe?

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This is something I still have a hard time understanding as it relates to the power of diagnoses. Or, I should say, the perceived power in a diagnosis. It’s plausible that diagnoses can resolve some doubts about characteristics we’ve struggled to manage. But then what? Let’s assume I do have ADHD, as is evident by my being easily seduced to take unnecessary risks, or my childhood opposition to playdates and social gatherings, or my seemingly bottomless interest in a hundred different things at once. How does knowing I have ADHD change these things? It doesn’t. It only offers a label to something we’re already aware of. When we teach children to become fixated on the semantics or the brands or the captions instead of developing solutions to the problems themselves, we all but groom them into becoming the millennial adult that uses her diagnosis to evade accountability. I just wasn’t raised that way. Oh, you broke your leg? Good thing God gave you two. 

I was somewhat of a shy kid, which is shocking to people who know me as an adult. “YOU?! You didn’t participate in class?!” It was the most common and expected criticism my parents received about me during parent teacher conferences throughout all of elementary through junior high. “She’s such a sweet girl, but she really doesn’t participate”, or “When she does have things to say, it’s always a good idea! Kayla just doesn’t partake much in our group discussions or projects.” I didn’t like a lot of other kids. My Dad is a life-long loner devoid of even mild hunger to socialize with anyone but me and my Mom. And although I didn’t realize it at the time, I have a feeling my parents’ lack of affiliation with most any human was transferred to me via modeling. My habit toward solitude wasn’t because I was a tomboy who generally opted for more “boyish” activities than female-oriented hand games and circle time. Being a tomboy was, at the time of my childhood, just as commonplace a status symbol as it was to remodel your kitchen. My resistance to friendship was largely because mine and my family’s lifestyles were too different for me to find anyone very relatable.

Since I was a child, I’ve been an early-riser. And I don’t mean an early riser like those who wake up at 6 and claim they’re positioned to conquer the day while the world lies motionless in bed until sunrise. No. From kindergarten through high school, between 5:00 AM and 5:30 AM were typical wake times for me and my brother. In college, this would become between 4:30 and 5:00, and, for the past decade or so, my husband and I have been waking up between 3:45 and 4:15 in the stillness of the morning. I’d wake up before any other child at a godforsaken sleepover my parents forced me to attend, bored, wanting to go home, fidgeting to develop an escape route. “I wonder what Rachel’s parents would do if I just… left,” I often mused. Perhaps fortunately, we weren’t 9-year-olds with phones or gadgets or technological devices to fill our time. Kids during my school-age years were forced to develop their own strategies for amusing themselves. And boy did I have ample time to bring forth entertainment.

When Rachel’s Mom would wander past the bedroom upon hearing my rustling, she’d say something like, “What are you doing up?” I typically replied with, “I don’t know”, because I suppose I didn’t know exactly why I was awake. More importantly, I couldn’t understand why everyone else was still asleep. “I mean… do you want to like, read a book or something?” This is probably when my love of reading truly ripened. Maybe this was a wonderful, unforeseen consequence of my parents harassing me into a sleepover I didn’t want to go to with a bunch of annoying girls I didn’t even like. I found something to better occupy my time, my mind, and my budding cognition.

Forcing children to do things they don’t like is essential for growth. We frequently hear adages like that of “Do hard things,” or “Growth happens outside of your comfort zone,” but we seem to have forgotten what constitutes as occurring outside of this “comfort zone”. Mental health and behavioral health practitioners have successfully made a mockery of the outside rings of this safety terrain, as the bar gets lower and lower with each new webinar about childhood trauma. Sleepovers increase the chances your child may be exposed to childhood sex trafficking, and your child shouldn’t be forced to do anything they don’t like! While well-intentioned and I’m sure just another, more extreme version of irrational parent worries, this is wildly misguided. It focuses too heavily on the emotions of a child who doesn’t yet have the maturity to make many important decisions for themselves anyway. The fear of our kids’ reactions seems to be driving the notion that they get to decide when, where, how, and why their day will play out, with parents only available as optional guidance counselors. Make no mistake: this is not compassionate, and there is absolutely zero literature on this approach for disabilities, emotional disorders, ADHD, or behavioral problems. There’s not a trace of me that resents my parents for exercising their manpower and encouraging me to endure non-preferred things with non-preferred people. It was the linchpin in my ability to communicate across opinions, attitudes, personalities, ages, and cultures.

In retrospect, I also wish my parents would have been even more forceful as it related to some of my greatest skillsets. I’ve been gifted in drawing since elementary school despite no formal training. In high school I’d receive a full-ride scholarship to an art school in Colorado, who basically offered to purchase all of my art in exchange for an education. At the last moment, I panicked. Would I become the stereotypical starving artist? I also absolutely loved every aspect of exercise, physical therapy, weightlifting, nutrition, and health, and the potpourri of my interests and "passions” seemed to have skewed my judgment. Not only did I reject a full-ride scholarship, I also decided that my experience in treatment for anorexia would make me a wonderful psychotherapist; at a moment’s notice when declaring a major, I scratched out “kinesiology” and instead put “clinical psychology”. It was a horrible mistake.

I don’t mean to make it sound as if my career has permanently damaged my psyche or that it has funneled me into a path destined for misery. There are moments in my career in which I’m able to fully exercise my other passions and my joys and things I’ve mastered to fluency, which forges a sense of competence that is rewarding no matter what the work itself is. But perhaps that’s my most important point: telling children to follow their passions has a high likelihood of resulting in people working their passions into mundane jobs that they eventually end up hating or resenting. And for what? So we can be inspirational and tell our children that work isn’t work and we’ll never work a day in our life if we love what we do? How many people can honestly say that? My parents bitched until they retired at age 72 that they prayed for the day their workplace burned down and the employees were given severance packages as small vacations from tedium of everyday life in the plant. The concept of burnout did not apply to Baby Boomers. This was just what they called “work”.

If I’d learned to apply the focus of art and weightlifting to my ADHD-like traits, I think I’d have been better positioned to make informed decisions about my future. I need not get into the details of formal schooling, as our world is rightfully possessed by the dismantling of the Department of Education and educational/institutional corruption in general. What I will say, though, is that too heavy of an emphasis on how we feel about something, instead of the sense of competence, control, and autonomy we have related to meaningful work, often pans out as a feeling of being stuck. Passions change over time. Our likes and dislikes tend to evolve with age. Passion also doesn’t guarantee mastery or even fluency in skill. And, if I may be frank: wanting to have a dream job you’re passionate about is millennial woo-woo that is unnecessary as it is smug.

My general advice, then? Your child probably doesn’t need a social skills therapist or an ADHD coach or a specialized bullet journal for neurodivergent kids. They probably need a nudge, much like many of us adults need. As Matt Beaudreau of Apogee Schools says beautifully, “You don’t need more resources. You need to learn to be more resourceful.” Whether I have ADHD or not, my decisions are entirely within my control. It’s my responsibility to exercise these, all while taming my impulses, regardless of what you decide to call it.

And how wonderful is that?

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“Those who make themselves look bigger on borrowed power are essentially living according to other people’s value systems.”

Impersonating someone else, with the intention of manipulating public perception, is a childhood no-no. ‘Be your truest self’, people say. ‘You are worth it!’; ‘Why be someone else when you are so special just as you are!’ I’m pretty sure I’ve seen such adages stamped on co-workers’ laptops and Stanley cups. It’s surely valuable to practice radical acceptance as it relates to ourselves and our abilities. Radical acceptance might look like writing out a list of the many ways we’ve contributed to a problem. Or it may be a tacit promise to ourselves that we will not complain about things we choose not to address. This everyday practice is utilized everywhere, from patients in psychotherapy to corporate executives struggling to gain respect from the peons that are their employees. It’s a useful strategy if executed in appropriate dosages; to understand thyself without argument or resistance is the surest path to improving upon that which we suck at. But is there such thing as being too accepting?

We can become passively approving of behaviors in ourselves and in others that most would find repugnant simply by virtue of being around them for a considerable period of time. This social phenomenon has been referred to in some circles as “bamboozlement” or by Tony Soprano as “being had”. I’ve seen this reality-warping in special education fields thousands of times, by now: Rules and boundaries, bad! Permissiveness and feelings, good! I once worked on a case with a special needs client who trespassed into a gated community, broke into a stranger’s car, stole the stranger’s belongings, and received zero consequence, zero jailtime, or even so much as a talking-to by local authorities. The response on the part of staff: “Well… what would jail actually do? He has special needs. It would just be traumatizing.” What becomes normal is not necessarily reflect what’s right, what’s sensical, or what’s needed. Being around low standards for long enough, in the name of “helping”, is truly poisonous and contagious. Poor thinking is circulated often enough that we radically accept it as factual. What would have ultimately benefited this client would have been something that probably pissed him off initially. But feeling hurt and progressing forward are not mutually exclusive.

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Alas, our “mental health” still remains truant. But how can this be? How can we have more specialized therapists, more “compassionate care”, more trainings on mental health, and psychiatrists lulling our mismanaged personality problems with drugs… and still see such problems? How can we spend 5 years teaching a client a skill only for them to seemingly suffer amnesia at the hint of one little compulsion, one little environmental trigger? Is this what “helping” is? Well… it shouldn’t be. When skills are only “mastered” in one setting with a safe person, and are not tested under more realistic demands and circumstances, we cannot be surprised when people eventually revert back to their usual kinks. And, because so many millennials have developed our careers asynchronously online, and without any requirement for real-world retesting, we wouldn’t even recognize that our clients are dependent on treatment. Or that we are dependent on whatever digital crutch we’ve fallen prey to. We see them as successful in session because of us, and we exploit these successes as proof of our product. But it’s always found out eventually as faulty.

Enter David Goggins. Goggins has grown increasingly popular over the years, and maybe rightfully so. He’s a militant and comical Navy SEAL with a knack for reminding us that we’re all little bitches who are not working nearly as hard as we’d like to believe. An increasing trend has been the claim that we’re “just like David Goggins, and the world would be a better place if more people were like that.” Firstly, it’s imperative we understand that we are not like David Goggins simply because we like to tell people the blunt truth. An important factor in being brutally honest with people is to be respectful enough to stick around for their reaction, and continue to show them positive regard despite defensiveness or even hostility. How many people do you know can do that? Anyone, literally anyone, can tell someone to “get over it” via email or text message. But can we muster up the courage to tell someone we very much like, face to face, that they’re being irrational and selfish? Can we stick to our guns when they inevitably respond like children? Can we respect a person anyway, despite these traits we may find reprehensible?

To be even remotely David-Goggins-esque, we must admit that we take a liking to projecting this persona onto other people, but we would prefer to only receive compliments or surface-level critique in return. I frankly do not know anybody who claims to be like David Goggins that has demonstrated resilience in the face of crushing feedback. To cower into ourselves, I believe, is human nature. There is no masterclass in the digital world that will serve to dampen the sting of tough criticism and truthful feedback; that is only accomplished through repeated exposure to tough criticism and truthful feedback. If you find yourself wanting to engender the curt candor of Goggins, ask yourself: Have I approached myself with brutal honesty first? Have I been kind to myself by brutally and unabashedly evaluating my faults? What are my faults and defaults when I’m pissed? Can I explain my failures without mentioning other people as contributing factors? Is my thinking actually accurate, or am I pretending to be something or someone else? Is my perspective accurate, or is this thinking more of a habit? When I get irritated by other people, is it because I’m guilty of the same thing? Do I have the experience and expertise to help another person with this? Have I earned the right to treat other people the way I want to? Bluntness is an earned right.

Shane Parrish of Farnam Street states in his book, Clear Thinking, “The person who wants to be seen as great shows the world how to manipulate them.” With so much remote work allowing us to pretend to be great versus actually beinggreat, it’s imperative our younger generations learn to practice discernment when presented with information. Do I believe this because it’s true? How do I know it’s true? Or do I find myself believing it because I like the person saying it?Confidence typically results from what psychologists refer to as “self-efficacy”, or the prevailing belief a person has in their own abilities and skills. Unearned confidence is that which is built by gullibility: skimming an article we find interesting and suddenly feeling like we have expertise in the subject, or attending a 2-hour lecture and deciding we’re knowledgeable enough to make a podcast episode about why everyone else is mistaken about it. True success, and true knowledge, involve an extensive track record of applying what we learn successfully. It’s less about the size of our mental archives but more about how we use the knowledge we do have. There are very obvious, straight forward ways to regain control of our critical thought, and none of them involve sitting behind a computer screen. Get in front of people and let them do the teaching.  

In listening to a podcast episode of “The Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Podcast”, I was pleased to hear her articulate some of the issues with gaining digital credibility. I’m paraphrasing, but she stated something quite similar to, “It is easier to bypass the work it takes to be humble when much, if not all, of our ‘work’ takes place from behind a computer screen.” Think about how people “sold themselves” in job interviews or to prospective romantic partners prior to Tinder or Microsoft Teams. Not only were we responsible for wearing real pants, we were expected to demonstrate some degree of professionalism through our body language, our verbal language, our communicative abilities, and our knowledge of the role. Now, with much of our understanding being polluted by the illusion of explanatory depth, anyone can appear competent. The illusion of explanatory depth is quite straightforward: we believe we know more than we actually do. When we surround ourselves with highly approving people who unflinchingly agree with us, our poor thinking is only further reinforced. “OMG, you are like, so right! I don’t know why you’re right, but it sounds right!” It’s why it’s imperative we peel ourselves away from ChatGPT and learn things enough to actually be able to explain them, in depth, to real human beings. It’s sadly an increasingly diminishing skillset which, again, has a very straightforward solution. Stop trying to learn by not trying.

I went to school, preschool through graduate degree, when computers were not permitted in the classroom, slides were not posted and sent out to students, and public speaking was a requirement to pass. Professors did not have to take coursework in conflict resolution or social-emotional communication to foster more compassionate relationships with their students. They simply told their students if they measured up or not, and told them to kick it up a notch had they fallen short. They did not offer affirmative reframes of “falling short” of “failing”; you fell short or you failed, and that was that. That was the learning opportunity.

A professor I respected most in graduate school was the woman who kicked all of us out of class because we showed up unprepared to deliver a speech. Straight from the Goggins playbook? Not quite. It’s just good, old-fashioned accountability. Nobody was a little bitch baby; we just failed. My favorite teacher of all-time, Mr. Panitch, is probably one of the two males I look up to in my life, and a close second only to my Dad. Mr. Panitch couldn’t care any less if you were nervous, you were terrified, your dog just died, or you broke your arm on black ice on the way to class. His standards for excellence taught us not to take our fears and our ignorance so seriously, and to remedy our anxiety with courage. A girl who was terrified of public speaking passed out in front of the class, to which Mr. Panitch responded by calling the nurse, giving her a few minutes and a sip of ice water, and still requiring her to finish her speech.

It was also unheard of, when I was finishing school, to email a professor “asking for the slides for review”. This was the duty of the student to come prepared with a notepad, pen, and a listening ear. Accommodations were unprecedented when I was completing my graduate degree not even 10 years ago. We weren’t given questions ahead of time for job interviews; we were expected to understand the material thoroughly enough to be prepared for any form of a question. ChatGPT didn’t review emails to check for more optimal wording. While I’m certainly not making the argument that resources shouldn’t be shared and PowerPoints or lecture slides should be kept hidden, I haven’t seen much critical thinking develop as a result of such abundant sharing. If anything, it’s been the opposite: a complete decay of critical thought. Naval Ravikant states, “The tools for learning are abundant. It's the desire for learning that is scarce.” Do you need a masterclass or a coach? Or do you just need to try?

Perhaps bringing back messy, hard-to-follow, discussion-based and project-based learning will revive our innate need to connect with other people. I frankly am unconvinced that texting or emailing back and forth are passable stand-ins for legitimate interaction. There is such beauty in unpredictable, dysfunctional human beings, and an insistence on speed or optimization has robbed us of that mystery. What will they say next? I’ve mentally prepared and studied this, I feel confident in learning no matter what this person throws at me! I can always say I’m not sure if I don’t know what the answer is. What do they know that I don’t? In one of my favorite college courses I teach, I make my students sit across from each other in chairs about 3 feet apart and stare at each other for 60 consecutive seconds. No laughing, no smiling, no muttering that they feel so awkward. They’re then asked to debate one another without staring down at their iPhone, and without using a surface-level archive of social media screenshots containing likely inaccurate information. They’re tasked with developing their own opinions on issues based on what they’ve learned thus far, their own personal experience, what they’ve come to learn about all perspectives on a matter, and their understanding of where their partner may be coming from. My response to “but that’s so weird”?: “so what?”

It can be jarring to realize that people we’ve idolized are actually giant assholes, or are shallow and uninformed. Remember when Ellen DeGeneres was exposed as a tyrant? WHAT?! The lovable lesbian show host with spunk and a proclivity for pranks is not only mean, but she doesn’t write any of her own jokes?! I suppose this is the way the world has always been: there are songwriters who gain zero recognition but continue on because of their love of words and music. Hosts of snarky TV specials rarely write their own jokes, but possess a charm and personality that perhaps their writers do not have (or even want). Copy-and-paste comes in many forms. And, make no mistake: it serves solely the purpose of entertainment. The advent of the internet has proven itself, repeatedly, to be one which values drama over logic, and theatrics over legitimate information. This is not a reason to focus our efforts on being entertaining over being informative, at least if we claim to want to help people.

The basics will work time and time again. You do not lack coaches or resources or templates or PowerPoints, you lack effort, discipline, and perseverance. This is okay; we all do, occasionally. You’re not a bad person because of it, you just need to radically accept that the problem isn’t other people. The problem is your attitude.

Build it, and they will come.

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It’s easier to believe that our problems are unique and highly complex than what they truly are: normal and run-of-the-mill. Doing so allows us to sidestep the entirely unglamorous, mundane, but effective, foundational steps. The basics, if you will. In deciding that we are above the basics, and that only a hyper-individualized plan tailor-made to our one-of-a-kind challenges will “work”, we distract ourselves from the actual problem. And, coincidentally, diverting our attention from the problem can convince us the problem has fixed itself, or that the silly routines we’ve adopted have mediated the issue. It’s a little mental sleight of hand your mind is responsible for, and it’s wildly effective. Strength training to gain some muscle and drastically improve your life? No way! You are a middle-aged woman with insulin resistance and PCOS who struggles with overwhelm in day-to-day life and requires XYZ service for $500 a month!

In a psychological experiment whose name and author escapes me, study participants were told they’d be taste-testing brands of wine, both dirt-cheap and upscale. Of course, as psychological experiments would have it, both groups received the exact same wine, in the exact same cups, at the exact same time. The first group was told they’d be privileged enough to experience top-shelf pinot noir, hand-squeezed and strained from the delicate hills of Calabria. The second group was told that their wine was the alcoholic version of sloppy seconds: it was cheap (less than $10 per bottle) and could be purchased at any gas station.

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first group perceived their wine as having a magnificent taste. They commented on its subtle aromas and notes of dark cherry and cocoa. Their experience, or so they thought, was elevated simply by nature of the wine’s price and presentation. The second group behaved similarly. Their wine, according to their taste buds, was for poor college kids who wanted a buzz, and the wine’s flat taste and miserable context made for a 1-star review. I’ve written frequently about how our expectations heavily influence our experience, so much so that our perception is prone to bias, inaccuracy, and self-deception. That is, we tend to experience what we expect, for better or for worse. And, with so many people marketing their “product” on social media with a top-shelf-wine-like presentation, it can be easy to fall into the trap of believing we’re addressing a problem we have--- only by distracting ourselves from it.

The obsession with ameliorating discomfort or “optimizing” everyday life can be discouraging to those of us in human service fields, who likely entered the field of our choosing simply because we found joy in helping. While my salary is certainly comfortable, it had zero bearing on why I chose psychology in the first place. Money means next to nothing for those of us who have fully felt the joy in being of service to another person. I’ve theorized it’s the reason why my business skills are horrific, at best, and that I constantly feel a sense of guilt for naming any sort of price for services I provide. I’ve largely resigned to the fact that I’ll never work for myself--- and I think this is how I know I’ve made the “impact” I’ve longed for since my undergraduate degree.

The influence I’ve had on people, so far, has seemed very granular. That is, it has occurred on very individual, microscopic levels that I’m unsure have transferred to a broader scale just yet. For years, and even currently, I wanted to believe I was capable of what widely-known companies were doing: they had large followings and seemed to be spearheading their own reform in their respective fields. How do I do that? Why haven’t I done that yet? What are they doing that I haven’t done? It became that of envy versus wanting to help that haunted my every decision, to the point that clients and being of service weren’t even an afterthought. Was this the impact I wanted to make? Scrambling to build an audience so I’d have faceless people to boast to about my mission of “changing the world”? And, further, the feedback I’d received from people, and their continuously shitty behavior following my “services” for them, proved repeatedly that my so-called mission was a farce, and that the only impact I’d made was being the chick people used as a scapegoat to air their politically incorrect thoughts and feelings. That is not the person I want to be. I’ve recognized that being a public-facing person is not something I’ve ever enjoyed or have ever even been good at, aside from perhaps public speaking and basic crowd work. It’s the people, the reactions, and the conversations that I’ve grown fluent in--- not the stage they may take place on.

Feedback is necessary should we improve. We’re exposed to objective criticism in school by submitting essays and projects for grading, to which our teachers scribbled their corrections in red ink across each page before assigning a final grade. Regardless of how strong a person is mentally, constructive criticism usually stings. It’s less about the constructive criticism itself but more about how we react to it, and what we decide to do with it. Keeping the importance of feedback in mind, we turn to today’s influx of “remote coaching” positions. I’ve spoken with countless clients/athletes/consumers/patients that pay month and month and even year after year for these high-end services about why they believe they need them. Their answer? Usually some rendition of, “It’s entirely individualized to what I need.” I once believed I’d be a remote coach that would finally stick it to my bosses by making my own money. I failed miserably, because my “work” is best executed in person--- the service that business coach after business coach will tell you is “too hard to scale”. It is definitely difficult to make a living driving to client’s homes, their gyms, residential facilities, and psychiatric institutions an hour and a half away. But they’re getting from me what I believe is what I’m made to give people: connection. Individualized, made-for-you service. This is where I’m fully on board with hyper-individualized care.

After working in psychological fields in both clinical and teaching positions, our clients are in desperate need of more individualized, thoughtful care. Their technicians and their practitioners are often bogged down with massive caseloads and useless administrative work to the degree that a cut-and-paste treatment plan written for Sally 3 years ago will just have to suffice for today’s Sandy. This is especially common for those working with children, as the demand for psychological or behavioral services for kids younger and younger has skyrocketed in recent years. This is likely due to the public perception that their child is the fine-wine sourced from Calabria, and that only a hyper-specific program tailored to their “deep feeling kiddo” and their intricate web of needs will help progress them toward some lofty goal of compelled happiness. Okay, I kid. Sort of.

To reiterate, in theory, individualized care is wonderful. Necessary, even. But I frequently wonder if our fetish for feedback isn’t so much about evaluating our performance as it is about reassurance-seeking. I wrote in one of my last pieces about how we’ve outsourced many of our very basic, very simple and natural problems to online coaches, to templates and “resources”, to Google, to ChatGPT. I’ve used and greatly benefited from all of these digital resources, specifically Google maps, because I never have any idea where the hell I’m going. It’s something that has allowed me to get to places with ease but also ensure I never actually have to learn directions.

Perhaps this is my point. Coaching in any industry can feel a lot like it’s giving direction. And, when done well, it does. Coaching, mentoring, teaching, or servicing another person in need of guidance requires the practitioner to enhance a client’s critical thinking and guide them to a destination without offering up a solution. Effective service is typically acute (that is, 3 months or less) and does not require constant feedback. If I’m being entirely honest, there are things I do on a day-to-day basis that I don’t want feedback for, even if I’m not doing them efficiently or correctly. Hobbies, for example, have entered the digital marketplace as routines which warrant a template, an e-book, a resource, a “coach”. My recent obsession with gardening, for example, has coyly seduced me into rabbit hole after rabbit hole, all of which conveniently sell some form of gardening expertise whose authors apparently believe I cannot find on page 1 of Google.

There’s also something to be said about having more fun, taking things less seriously, and doing shit that isn’t evidence-based but is enjoyable. Trust me, I recognize how this sounds. The fields I work in rely almost exclusively on scientific evidence and data to support a person’s claims, which I completely support and utilize for the majority of my work. There are some aspects, though, where I think the “evidence-based only” groups actively dismiss the oh-so-common pleasure principle. Sure, the Chinese detoxification method that is “cupping” has minimal evidence base to support its efficacy in muscle recovery. But it leaves cool, quirky little circles on your body and it feels really pleasant. It distracts you from that knot of fascia under your shoulder blade and puts you into a state of deep relaxation. Is this necessarily a problem? If the person continues to injure themselves and continues to throw money at things like cupping, it certainly can fester into a problem. If the person enjoys it, though, and they’re not hurting anybody else? I suppose we aren’t in a place to tell people how to spend their money. This is my “impact”--- helping people reconnect with common sense.

This is where I believe much of today’s coaching is more a marketing tactic to breed treatment dependence in consumers. Treatment dependence occurs frequently in psychological fields and in therapy. It’s when the practitioner is unable to help the client use their skills independently and when they’re not in the presence of their therapist. In modern day, since we live in the “everyone should see a therapist” epoch, it’s common for people to attend their weekly sessions for 3, 5, and even 10 years.  The sessions have no real agenda or even proposed outcome. They’re in place because they’ve become a part of a person’s routine that they believe is necessary for their functioning but also can’t seem to explain how it’s benefitted them or why they continue to go. It’s the illusion that someone is actively listening to our specialized set of problems and is supporting us in a specialized way--- even if we can’t explain how they’ve supported us or in what way our lives are better as a result of this service.

The basics can take us a long way. They can usually take us far enough to where we don’t need to throw money at coaches and templates and resources. I’ve been the person that believed my problems were above the basics, or that my skillset had advanced beyond the beginner level. Both of these things may be true in some instances. But I hate to break it to you: none of us are that special. And, for some reason, much of today’s “services” demand we see ourselves as special. We’re not spectacularly architected snowflakes rife with unparalleled complexity. Our problems are likely more similar than they are different from the billions of people that populate planet Earth. While this may come as a shock or even a buzzkill, it’s meant to be a positive thing. It means that you’re not fundamentally damaged and that your existence need not be dictated by a coach or a mentor. It means you can experiment on yourself and trust in your common sense. And it also means that you’re not alone in the many struggles that feel exclusive to you and isolate you from other people.

It isn’t that serious. Some are goal-chasers and high achievers and actively seek feedback to improve upon their every misstep. This is crucial should we aim to improve ourselves and understand how our perspectives differ from others. And then there are some like me, a recovering lofty-goal-chaser with a kink for blunt criticism, who no longer wish to aspire to a career goal or even a personal goal. For once, and perhaps for the first time in my life, I want to just “be”. I still want to hear as many perspectives as I can. I still want my clients and students to trust that I will hear them and offer my honest opinion, even if it’s difficult to give and receive. But I’m not all that interested in evaluating my work performance or pursuing a fitness goal that has proven, historically, to have zero impact on my overall sense of purpose.

Perhaps rightfully so, we’re terrified of symptoms. We’ve proven to our symptoms, whether real or imagined, that we cannot handle their presence. Our efforts to discharge these symptoms, through consultations and coaches and evaluations and pills and resources and blogs and social media, put us in a position that offers immediate relief but long-term sensitivity. It’s important to educate ourselves on a broad array of information. It’s also important we recognize that much of what’s marketed is trying to divorce us from reality, from common sense. Do we really need continuing education units or webinars on stress management? Are we that defeated and controlled by our stress that we feel it’s heavy enough to need online course correction? More often than not, we’re inflating our problems more than our problems are truly internally combusting. Literature on chronic pain reminds us of common sense: that the more we fixate on our pain, the greater pain we experience. This does not require a pain coach. It requires an acute phase of self-awareness and understanding that a little hard work and a little less self-analysis goes a long way toward “symptom management”.

I guarantee you, if you stop managing your symptoms and instead look to the root cause of the problem, the solution will be simple. Coaches cannot change your behavior or your trajectory. That has to come from you.

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We love to outsource things that we’re perfectly capable of doing ourselves. We’re spellbound by numbered infographics and “hacks” that promise ease of use and immediacy. This occurs in large part because we’re innately lazy, in tandem with our advanced society prioritizing ease and comfort over much else. If I told you resource-gathering and certification-collecting is just another form of procrastination, though, would you believe me? Allow me to demonstrate.

“Can anyone share a resource on parent training?”

“Who has a script I can use for helping my client be better at conversation?”

“Has anyone ever worked with someone with depression, and if so, can you send some resources my way about intervention ideas?”

In the time it took these individuals to render the above messages, patiently wait for responses via email, politely respond to those responses, and wait even longer for the response they like best, they could’ve taken action toward their perceived problem. That is, their problem of not knowing how to proceed with parent training, or teaching someone how to navigate conflict, or demonstrating their mastery of small talk. They don’t see their perceived problem as one of their own procrastination, but as an absence of understanding. This ultimately (in their eyes) warrants further education, resources, templates, certifications, and webinars.

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The expertization of very basic behavior change, which likely resulted from the pathologization of laziness and lack of effort, has been instrumental in hindering a person’s sense of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is a concept in psychology 101: it’s a person’s belief in their capacity to produce specific change and reach specific outcomes. Our decreasing belief in the power of self is how many of today’s mentors, coaches, and therapists make their greatest buck: they convince you that your very straightforward problem, which is mostly the product of poor self-awareness and an unwillingness to address personal barriers, is complicated, deeply entrenched, and psychologically intricate. That it is such a niche conundrum that only people with niche credentials are able to provide you with a direct path to relief and thriving.

“Sign up today to get certified in cycle-syncing for women in their 40’s who are also post-partum moms and former athletes!”

No. You do not need to hire someone to teach you how to exercise on your period. You need to recognize that 1) women menstruate, which is a biological occurrence we’ve known since the beginning of time, 2) there are Olympians who are menstruating and 3) your period probably isn’t limiting you physically so much as you’re mentally allowing it to. It’s your attention to it, because of “certified coaches in cycle-syncing”, that has subtly created the nocebo effect, or the expectation that you’ll feel negative sensations. Stated more simply in the form of a question: prior to seeing advertisements for cycle-syncing, how did you manage to exercise whilst bleeding before social media?

“I’m a parenting expert who specializes in emotional dysregulation in ADHD kids with deep feelings--- purchase my course TODAY for scripts, guidance, and interventions on how to collaborate with your deep-feeler in times of distress!”

No. You do not need a resource or a script as to how to speak to your own child, let alone implement the appropriate form of discipline at your discretion. How did my parents, and their parents, learn to parent in past decades without the expert guidance of a manual written by someone whose oldest child is 6? Children around the world, specifically those in third-world countries, are known for their demonstration of leadership from very young ages. In the book Hunt, Gather, Parentby Michaeleen Doucleff, she describes her experience with children in the Yucatan scaling mountains at age 6 while carrying their 10-month-old baby brother on their back. Young boys not even 12 years old in Africa can be observed sharpening their own spears and hunting their own animals to shlep back to their tribe over 10 miles away--- without adult supervision. Dr. Camilo Ortiz uses ancient cultures, and his no-BS understanding of parenting, to implement what he calls “independence therapy” for anxious kids: he leaves them the hell alone, to their own devices, and trusts that they’ll problem-solve without adult interference. And proving to ourselves that we’re capable of doing so is what builds confidence and diminishes anxiety--- not endlessly talking about it and hiring a SWAT team of therapists to “address” it.

Similar to the obesity epidemic, which has resulted largely from sedentary lifestyles, poor lifestyle choices, and the mass consumption of ultra-processed foods, what I call the “infobesity” epidemic is one of shitty thinking habits and the mass consumption of low-resolution information. Because so many typical reactions to everyday life have been pathologized and medicalized, we’re made to feel that what we need is more “education” or “awareness” to these “new” problems. It’s a never before seen syndrome in children, where they say “no” to literally everything we ask! Let’s call it Pathological Demand Avoidance to really highlight the uniqueness of such a rare issue of childhood! So we glue our fingers and our eyes to our iPhones or our computers instead of actively addressing the problem itself, as we believe the problem is that we “just don’t know enough” and “need to feel more prepared.” The world is changing fast, after all. Ironically, preparation for problem-solving rarely involves any form of education. It involves building proficiency through doing. If you’ve ever been a client in therapy, what I hope is that you realize much of getting “better” has little to do with exchange of education or even information. It’s built on careful identification of all the ways we contribute to our own suffering, and actively producing alternative behaviors that are more adaptive to our functioning.

I’ve seen service-dependent individuals across nearly every industry that either bills by the hour or charges out-of-pocket for exchange of “individualized” service. I was first hit over the head with this realization when I was finishing my practicum for clinical psychology. By use of real and mock clients, my cohort treated people for hundreds upon hundreds of hours--- many of which were duplicate sessions from the last because of how little change was occurring. In reflecting on my own experience with psychiatric treatment, I found myself suddenly skeptical: how was it that I almost died from one of the most serious, untreatable, and lethal psychiatric disorders (i.e., anorexia), but was able to “graduate” from the grips of therapy in less than a year’s time? And here we have patients with relatively far milder, and not in any way critical or dangerous, conditions that are proud to report they’re on year five of their weekly “stress management” sessions? At what point do we evaluate the money we’ve spent, reexamine the minimal progress made, and decide that the service we’re paying for is something we could’ve figured out on YouTube or Reddit?

This is, though, what services want people to feel: confused. They want you to feel like you’re incapable of managing any form of stress or life circumstance by your own instinct and experience, and they do so by divorcing you from common sense. Oh, you think losing weight is as simple as just tracking what you eat for a week and then subtracting some calories from that? HA! Loser! You need to download trainings, webinars, brochures, infographics, and apps should you hope to know what to stuff your face with for your remaining time left on this earth! And even after you do that, there’s specialized courses for Paleolithic gut-healing for people with social anxiety. You can buy my course here.

As I’ve mentioned previously, there are circumstances or pathologies that may require more intensive intervention. A person who wants to lose weight but has struggled to do so for a decade, for example, may need a more comprehensive educational and applied approach to nutrition. But this same person will also only need this degree of mentorship for a short time before they’re able to implement it consistently on their own. That is, if the nutrition coaching is sound and the coach is in it for the service and not for the money.

Ultimately, being highly effective and good at what you do is not profitable and certainly a poor business model. This is rarely discussed, as it would be some form of financial suicide for the businesses and practitioners out there whose primary source of revenue is repeat flyers and people who are treatment dependent. For those individuals, please forgive me: I’m not bringing this to light to drain your finances or even making you doubt your business model. You already know, damn well, that your business functions off of solving people’s problems. Which involves recruiting a hell of a lot of people with a hell of a lot of problems. This isn’t inherently nefarious. It's the continuous poking and prodding at people to make them question their own efficacy that is.

Regarding recipients of service, whether that be psychotherapy or life coaching or professional mentorship, it’s important you conduct your own research to gather as much information on your own prior to outsourcing. This is more of a personal preference than anything else, but there is legitimate science to support how humans learn most efficiently: they learn through repetition, practice, and experience. Bloating our brains with resources and templates and hacks will not be of use, because the problem isn’t a resource, template, or hack deficiency. It’s a deficiency in trusting that you can solve something on your own before giving up and calling in reinforcements.

This is perhaps best exemplified through sport. In professional sport, athletes watch replay footage of their performance in a game. This form of self-evaluation via video analysis is crucial to better understand their weaknesses, and, with the help of their coaches, develop a plan for improving upon them. But what if the athletes stopped only at watching playback footage? What if they were only given lectures on increasing their top end speed instead of training relentless sprint drills to actually build top end speed? Would they trust themselves to perform come gametime, despite only having collected more passive forms of information (i.e., video and lecture)? In more dire circumstances, perhaps using aviation as an example will drive this point home.

Pilots must fly through all weather conditions. They’re expected to maintain smooth sailing despite looming thunderstorms, hurricanes, tornadoes, and hail occurring quite literally below their nose. In their training, after they’ve mastered the basics to fluency, they’re required to intentionally turn their plane upside down and to “spiral the plane out”, or send it soaring, nose-down, plummeting toward the ground. In this dizzying practice, the pilot is assured that their skills can withstand high-stakes, high panic, and high distress, with zero resources, templates, or scripts as to how to regain control of the aircraft. With enough applied practice, pilots (we assume) feel fairly comfortable flying and securing safe landings of passengers in all conditions--- not only those on sunny days with clear skies.

If pilots demanded more resources and more templates because they felt “unprepared”, would we trust them to fly? And, now that I mention it… would we trust any professional who feels the need to memorize a generic outline prior to executing a skill? Yes, we must learn the rules to break the rules. And learning the rules often means monotonous, rote memorization of basic facts, equations, number figures, and sequences. But for fuck’s sake, what about the ability to think quickly on your feet, and change the course of your plan when the plan inevitably fails? Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of any human service to consider is the high likelihood that your teacher, your coach, or your therapist is operating their entire practice off of recycled templates and resources. It’s commonplace in therapeutic practice for hundreds of emails to ding back and forth between colleagues asking for “some resources on [insert clinical problem here].” In the time they spent emailing, they could’ve just… I don’t know… developed a resource themselves, using what they paid to go to school to master.

Because the disaster that is university education is too deep to touch in this specific piece, what I will say is this: education in the form of memorizing, lecturing, reading-without-comprehending, and writing-with-templates-and-guides is a bullshit, lazy stand-in for true learning. The unread library effect, which I’ve written about frequently, is the feeling that we’re acquiring knowledge by merely searching for the next best book or the next greatest resource on a particular problem. By searching for and even purchasing a resource, without having read it or thoroughly understood it, we are of the belief that we’ve advanced our expertise. This occurs often without our conscious awareness, as I assume, if we were consciously aware that resource-gathering is just another form of procrastination, we’d take action instead.

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The great condemnation of the “Almond Mom” is yet another online trend which points to Mom and Dad as the main culprits for a myriad of psychiatric problems. “Almond Moms” are health-crazed parents described as “fatphobic” people who use their body weight and image as a yardstick to judge their own, and their kids’, self-worth. Their behavior, according to some, is largely disordered and emanating from a hatred and loathing of their own bodies, which ends up being projected onto their family. As modern day would have it, this of course is used to describe any parent who wishes to clean up their family’s lifestyle and lead a generally healthy life.

With this said… what if the almond mom trend is actually something our country desperately needs? After all, nearly half of our country is obese, and half of our country’s kids have some form of a chronic condition. For the almond moms touting two children, it’s likely that at least one of your kids will suffer from a chronic syndrome, with the most common being obesity, diabetes, or a mental health condition. The rise in children receiving diagnoses like they’re Tootsie Rolls may leave you skeptical regarding our country’s continued initiatives geared toward childhood “health”. How are all of those health and exercise initiatives going? Remember when Michelle Obama did push-ups on Ellen and filled vending machines with apple slices instead of Nutty Bars? Ah, those were the days! Especially considering a child’s “truth” is now regarded as sacrosanct, and if they want to eat chocolate for every meal of every day, that’s their authentic little diabetic self, advocating for their own needs! Is this empowering? That is, for half of today’s children to be riddled with symptoms of eczema, autism, ADHD, asthma, and/or a mental health condition?

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Now, before the authors and advocates of staunch mommy blogs come after me for my “harmful” perception of kids’ development, I must say: there is such thing as an excessive focus on aesthetics and health. My own anorexia quickly developed into orthorexia for many, many years before I found a means of freeing myself from the grips of compulsive counting and obsessing. Orthorexia, for those unfamiliar, is a less-severe and life-threatening mutation of anorexia in which an individual becomes preoccupied with “health food” only. This can look like refusal to eat anything that isn’t “low-fat” or “low-carb”, a highly restrictive allegiance to a specific dieting trend, or cutting out entire food groups if they do not meet the criteria for “health”. Depending on who you ask, it could also look like individuals strictly adhering to a Paleo or Whole-30 diet.

What I can say with certainty, though, is my anorexia-turned-orthorexia had absolutely nothing to do with media messaging, skinny supermodels, or being taught how to cook a healthy meal. Anorexia’s cure also wasn’t through “body positivity” and believing there is no such thing as bad food, though. Because eating disorders have next to nothing to do with food and everything to do with a person managing a compulsive behavior problem and having a very low tolerance for difficulty. A child who is told Oreos have more sugar than strawberries, or that ice cream is an unhealthy breakfast, is highly unlikely to develop a psychiatric eating disorder. These are basic, logical facts that I believe we owe to our children--- no matter how much they may not like to hear it. Do you handle it well when you go to the doctor and see that you’ve gained weight? When you’re wrestling with your jeans in order to fit into them, do you reframe the situation with “body neutrality”? Or do you cuss yourself out in the mirror while swearing off those frickin’ Thin Mints you keep buying despite having no willpower against? This isn’t a problem so much as it’s a rational response to aspects of ourselves that we’ve neglected. While I’m not making the argument that we continuously shame ourselves our obsess over our weight, there isn’t an inherent problem in weighing ourselves, measuring our food periodically, and nutritionally tightening our belts. These aren’t problems. They’re only problems to a society that prioritizes victimhood, shitty lifestyle, and an external locus of control as “brave”.

When we launch into almond moms being children’s most threatening problem, we sorely miss the plot. Almond moms are causing eating disorders! Moms who hate their bodies will teach their daughters to hate their bodies! Call me harsh and perhaps even gauche, but I don’t see eating disorders as being a major problem in our country. Frankly, it’s the opposite: the greatest risk facing our kids appears to be that of obsessive laziness, comfort, and ease in the people who are raising them and educating them.

“Diet culture” is not new, much like a mild fixation with appearance is unsurprising. Have you seen mothers on Instagram? The ones who claim to love their body, and they love their body by posting themselves in provocative positions in what appear to be wrestling singlets online for hundreds upon millions of people to gawk at? By all means, if this is your version of contentment with motherhood, I am not the person to tell you otherwise. But something tells me there’s an underlying insecurity present that forces a woman to believe she’s only as worthy as her online audience ranks her. With this in mind, and this may sound counterintuitive, it’s unlikely that exposure to social media, or even exposure to a “health-nut” of apparent, is the reason for development of a psychiatric condition. Yes, social media has been nothing short of tragic for the psyche of today’s kids and many of their parents. But it likely wasn’t what caused their most pressing issues. The unnatural and addicting, intermittent reinforcement we receive online is likely what exacerbated existing symptoms to the degree that they’re now more noticeable.

I’m certain we’ve all had a classmate in elementary school who was the loser that came to school with celery sticks and home-grown pepper slices as snacks. There wasn’t even such thing, at the time (at least to mine and my family’s understanding), as “organic almond butter”. The almond butter moms and their progeny were perhaps so sparse and detached from my social circle that us normal kids, who sucked down Kool-Aid Jammers and Pixie Stix, were unaffected by their food rules.

And perhaps herein lies my point: we were unaffected because our attention wasn’t stolen. We were unaffected by the apparent “peanut allergy epidemic” because nobody we knew even sneezed in the presence of a peanut. The adults in the room throughout my childhood were intelligent enough to refrain from the moral panic that is so common in today’s parents and today’s educators: you’re not going to die if your table partner eats fake peanut butter, so calm down and do your math homework. The dangers of the almond mom seem to fall under similar pseudo-problems as the mother who still spanks her unruly son or the father who believes that there is such thing as first place, and only those who win will receive a trophy and a high-five. The primary reason for my belief in the almond-mom-threat being overblown is my own experience as an anorexia patient, and my degrees in clinical psychology/behavior analysis that shape my understanding of psychiatric conditions.

Firstly, eating disorders, specifically anorexia, typically do not develop from seeing someone thin or being told that we’re fat. Never in my life have I been told I need to lose weight, go on a diet, or “watch what I eat”. Insecurity, body image issues, and disordered eating habits may result from more frequent exposure to Victoria’s Secret catalogues, specifically if the young woman is entering her teenage years. But we must remember that teenage girls are emotional terrorists by design. The healthiest of teen girls with no history of mental health issues quickly becomes a raging c-word the moment she turns 13, and is unrelenting in this psychological warpath until she smartens up toward the conclusion of her high school years. Our feminine rage can also manifest differently. In high school, most of us began experimenting with drugs and alcohol around our sophomore year, when we got our driver’s licenses and were free to act foolishly wherever and whenever we wanted. My parents were known for making us come home earlier than most all of our friends, much to our dismay. I can guarantee you, though, that my parents’ disciplinary style did not contribute to mine and my brother’s mental problems. Much like basic food rules likely will not contribute to the development of a food complex.

Our problems both were compulsive and addictive in nature. Mine was anorexia, my brother’s heroin (and basically any substance he could get his hands on). I will die before I blame any of this on my parents, as they were authoritative, powerful, supportive, and unbelievably loving. My childhood did not lead to the development of panic disorder and anorexia, much like it didn’t lead to Conner’s hunger for intoxication. Part of me has wondered for many years if we merely inherited some “addiction” gene, as my mother is highly compulsive and my father is overall panicky. But nobody in my blood line on either side has ever struggled with addiction or an eating disorder. How much of our behavior was learned versus genetically endowed, then? And would it ultimately matter? We are responsible for addressing our own behavior. Unfortunate circumstances may not be our fault, but they’re certainly our responsibility.

Many people believe their mothers are the reasons they need to see a therapist. It’s an ongoing joke in therapeutic circles, one I’ve considered for many years. This may partially be true, but it’s more likely that we’ve just failed to address our problems as things we have control over versus cruel afflictions we’re forced to carry for our lives. Does the world have an obsession with thinness and dieting? Honestly, I don’t think so. I just think the human body generally wants to be healthy and is inclined to keep itself alive and thriving at all costs. Staying alive as an obese person with shitty lifestyle habits will put far more stress on the body’s systems than a person who is of healthy weight with a responsible lifestyle. Objectively, it shouldn’t be controversial or harmful to inform your child that they cannot have something with a lot of sugar in it. No, Timmy, you’ve eaten 2 adult-sized Crumbl cookies already. You cannot have another one. This will not give Timmy a food complex or an eating disorder. It may make him cranky and trigger a mild tantrum, but do not mistake dramatic, emotional responding for a psychiatric diagnosis.

If we hadn’t instructed parents to pretend bad foods didn’t exist or that sugar isn’t horrible for humans and animals in high quantities, we may have children who do not suffer from such growing, chronic problems. These are problems unprecedented even one to two decades ago: 1 in 36 children has autism, with over a third of those being in the moderate-to-severe, nonverbal category. Six million children are diagnosed with ADHD as well as anxiety, with nearly 20% of teenagers having contemplated suicide in 2018-2019 alone. All of which again begs the question: Is it the almond moms or idiotic mental health movements we’ve decided are compassionate and caring? How are all those social-emotional learning programs going for our children and young adults riddled with supposed anxiety, depression, PTSD, and ADHD?

The problem is not an absence of compassion, but an over-abundance of it. We’ve invested so heavily into the emotional aspect of things completely detached from our own lives that we generate as many reasons as possible to not behave like adults. We’re “compassionate” to the degree that we accept and even encourage completely inappropriate behavior, as we believe pretending “there are no bad foods!” is less of a risk to our children than stuffing them with ultra-processed junk because we’re too burnt out  or too marginalized or too anxious to cook. Our compassion is not truly compassionate if it’s in place only to quell our own personal problems. Your kids didn’t do anything to you--- so stop bending reality and calling it trauma-informed teaching or gentle parenting. No, sweetheart, you cannot have M&M’s for breakfast. And no, you already ate a bag of chips, so you can’t have another one. You’re probably not anxious, Maya, you just drank 50 grams of sugar and now you’re sitting on your ass on the couch. Have you tried going for a run?

The problem is not the almond mom and her vicious rigidity, but a too-loose approach to parenting that looks more like begging and pleading to be liked. Do your children really need to presented with a choice of 7 different vegetables at different stages of ripeness, or do they need to be told to eat their brussels sprouts, goddamnit, or they’ll be breakfast in the morning? The almond mom can teeter on the edge of neuroticism and inarguably create “complexes” in their children, depending on the language she uses to describe herself and her relationship with meals. But, all in all, she’s more likely to just be a pain in the ass. And I hear a healthy diet is great for hemorrhoids.

Being overweight or obese is a serious problem. Yes, a problem. Not “little hiccups in your health journey” or “resulting from being a victim of weight stigma”. This cannot be overstated: being overweight wrecks absolute havoc on your health. It destroys the body’s functioning in similar ways an overindulgent parents obliterates a child’s sense of self-efficacy. Someone needs to be the adult in the room, and I hope to God it is the literal adult who decides to do it.

And if the kid whines and wonders why all the rules? Tell them it’s because you said so.

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One of the craziest things I’ve heard in clinical fields in recent years is that controversy around “stimming”. Let them stim! Let them rock and flap and tap and shake, it’s their character and their divergence! All of these things may be true. But what’s also true about completely dismissing basic social etiquette is that we’re willingly isolating people from social situations because of their behavior. I’ve seen results of this permissive, overly indulgent style of managing people. They usually end up being young adults who cannot make eye contact with an employer, laugh at inappropriate times in conversation, cannot seem to understand humor or sarcasm, and feel compelled to share their life story with people they’ve only spoken to online. Before the hypersensitive, “rejection-dysphoric” tyrants of Instagram come after me, I’ll preface the piece with this: a person’s social or functional ineptitude is not a reason to treat them poorly or discriminate against them. It is a reason, though, to question our culture’s insistence on “destigmatizing” everything.

According to Daring Greatly by Brené Brown, shame is “the fear of not being worthy of connection and belonging”. Whether learned or ingrained by virtue of personality, it is a looming fear that our abilities, and what we give to relationships, is not enough, and that we’re damned to rejection by those we care about most. Using this definition, shame certainly sounds miserable. There have been some arguments in recent years that the triggering of or fight-or-flight response is akin to the startle response in those with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I think it’s both ridiculous and a tad insulting to compare a war veteran to a person who may be overly sensitive to rejection, but I also resonate with the discomfort that comes from wanting approval but not receiving it. The physiological responses to distress resulting from shame can also be pretty pronounced: rapid heartbeat, sweating, flushing of the face.

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Shame is largely dictated by social standards, and rightfully so. Shame is what tends to keep people in line, at least socially, in ways that do not require a formal law or regulation. Few people appreciate a sloppy drunk, for example. But sloppy drunks are not arrested and detained because of their inability to handle Natty Light and a few shots. They’re instead scorned by passersby and maybe yelled at by other sauced idiots and wake up the next morning to tell themselves, “I’m never drinking again.” Depending on societal and cultural standards, which tend to change quite rapidly, shame can be inappropriately used and excessively displaced depending on things like social likability or acceptability. While the term “cancel culture” isn’t used as often as it was a few years ago, it goes without saying that this is the epitome of excessive, irrational, and displaced shame.

As an emotion that is considered “self-conscious”, shame can be informative in that it offers insights into our feelings of unworthiness and cues us to do some further digging into our thoughts. Did we commit some form of a moral or social transgression? Public shaming and humiliation have run rampant in recent years and are perhaps better known as DEI initiatives or XYZ Pride Months. With such clear signals about what our culture supposedly values, our unwillingness to conform to these standards could easily trigger a sense of shame. Or, if you’re like me, it makes me roll my eyes to the back of my head while continuing to go about living my day-to-day in spite of stupidity. In my case, then, my failure to meet the current social norm did not trigger this volatile emotion that Brené describes as “shame”. If we did not commit a moral transgression or violate a widely accepted social rule, though, sometimes the shame emanates from a source more… internal.

Our own failure to meet expectations or goals we’ve set for ourselves can trigger shame. If we’re determined to reach a specific athletic goal, like decreasing our mile run time, coming up even slightly short (we’re talking milliseconds) could be enough to induce a shameful self-loathing. Some athletes take months and even years to recover from this feeling, as evidenced by developing a phenomenon known as the yips, or “choking”. Similar to anxiety, when we avoid the very stimulus that induced the discomfort, our hypervigilance to said stimulus grows stronger. You’re not “slowly getting back into the game”, but you’re slowly hindering your performance over time. The athlete who avoids addressing the possible shame that triggered the continuous “choking” is only making themselves more prone to choke in future games. The individual with anxiety who “gives themselves grace” is not engaging in self-care, but securing continued fear responses and growing anxiety. Perhaps it’s useful, then, to split shame into adaptive and maladaptive. Shame that is adaptive is that which may hurt, but changes behavior to that which is more acceptable. In doing so, the person is punished less frequently in social situations and therefore experiences a higher quality of life. Maladaptive shame, which is usually more of the internal, self-loathing kind, can motivate a person to avoid discomfort and/or project their shame onto others in finger-pointing and blame games.

With anxiety being a close cousin to emotions like shame, I believe both can be leveraged to draw out goodness in ourselves and in others. We tend to use our negative feelings, or nearly any negative experience, to justify avoidance of such discomfort. “Well, I’m just an anxious person” has become a universal hall pass, of sorts, that signifies to others: “I’m allowed to avoid things, and you are to comply with this rigid rule I’ve set for myself.” I do understand the pull to use our feelings as conclusions: I’m mad, why should I have to do anything hard the rest of the day? I slept like shit, why should I have to be patient for everyone else around me? I’M AN ANXIOUS PERSON SO HOLD SPACE FOR ME, GODDAMNIT!!! We’ve likely all used these cards depending on how distressing a situation is. With this tendency in mind, though, it’s imperative we recognize how maladaptive and unhelpful these habits are. When we not only adopt negative traits as part of our personality, but use them to avoid any form of criticism or shame we’re incapable of tolerating, we isolate ourselves from the things that matter most. Plus, we become annoying martyrs that people don’t like to be around.

I’ve wondered for years why people are so willing to pay hundreds upon thousands of dollars to go to therapy and boast about it, but are resistant to paying money for their physical health. Part of this, I’ve hypothesized, is because our of our mainstream culture and its mixed messaging. We’ve long since incentivized illness, disease, and sickness in both social and societal ways. Socially, we empathize with those that are struggling and we idolize those who have overcome significant challenges. As the saying goes, “everybody loves an underdog”. Societally, our medical and therapeutic institutions only make money should the client continue to meet the criteria for illness. They only receive “treatment” and subsequent attention, then, if they present as ill. We’ve also demanded that Americans see chronic problems, like obesity, as something that should not be stigmatized or shamed, but accepted as “a different way of being”. I will not even go down the road of neurodivergence, as it’s a concept so utterly stupid it deserves zero attention. All of these examples point to our complete escapism as it relates to feeling shame for things that should, quite frankly, spark feelings of inadequacy. If we’re chronically sick and we’re not taking care of ourselves, in what galaxy is it normal or adaptive to demand people celebrate that?

What if obesity were stigmatized much like homelessness is stigmatized? When we discharge our pride and “sit” with the discomfort of feeling shame, we recognize how powerful it can be in motivating healthier behavior. While I’m not suggesting we treat people poorly because they’re overweight or obese, I do contest that emphasizing the devastating trajectory of life with obesity is imperative should we hope to change society for the better. And I don’t think shaming a complete abandonment of self-care is cruel or mean-spirited--- I think it’s necessary. Meeting people where they’re at in therapy or in any form of a supportive relationship is an important aspect of assessing motivation to change. In my clinical experience, this rarely works. People need to be told to buck the fuck up every once in a while, and they need clinically pull their pants down should they hope to experience any form of meaningful change. In the realm of physical health, I can see why people would be embarrassed to seek out services out of their own pocket. We’re “supposed” to know how to cook for ourselves, put together a meal, write a basic exercise routine, and navigate our day-to-day. It’s understandable that an individual may feel silly spending money to have someone tell them what they need to be eating. I likely do not need to remind readers, though, that wellness industries have been capitalizing on this uncertainty for decades: Jenny Craig, the founder of one of the country’s most popular weight loss programs, is still worth $300 million. Weight Watchers, as of June 2024, is still worth $125 million. Our shame may well be present, but apparently it’s not powerful enough to override our desire to be thinner or healthier. From where I’m sitting, this is highly adaptive shame.

I also believe we need to consider the following question: what if it’s a good thing that we’re a little embarrassed every now and again? After all, we’re adults who are perfectly capable of figuring out, on our own, how to cook for ourselves, how to sleep 7-8 hours, how to exercise, and how to manage our basic needs. If you type into ChatGPT, “Write me a 6-week paleo meal plan” or “Write me a 12-week long periodized strength training plan”, it will do a fairly accurate job concocting a method for you. We claim that “we just don’t know what to do”. I believe a bit of this, and then I don’t. While we are inundated with ridiculous amounts of contradictory information, making it difficult to discern opinion from fact, I also don’t think we’re the damsels in distress we make ourselves out to be. “I just don’t know what to eat!” Yes, you do. You know that a diet consisting of 90% whole foods is necessary, and no, sugar-free Dunkin Frozen Cappucinolattefrappas are probably not “good for you”.

All of this to say… it’s okay to be embarrassed. It can actually be a wonderful thing to feel ashamed that we haven’t taken the time to care for ourselves, considering our body and our health is all we have. What’s wrong with this, aside from perhaps our own ego convincing us it’s rude, cruel, or inaccurate? Why do we try so hard and spend so much money on “reducing stigma” when stigma is probably at the very bottom of everyone’s list of real problems? Not to mention… you know what’s a lot worse than being stigmatized for being obese?

Actually being obese.

Does this mean we’re permitted to be mean or cruel to people who have serious challenges, whether physical or mental? Absolutely not. I see no reason to ever criticize someone’s character or treat them poorly for any reason at all--- but especially not because of the way they look or the manner in which they’ve chosen to manage their problems. But it’s also quite useful to be point-blank in talking to people about their behavior. I love Dr. Nowzaradan from “My 600-Pound Life”--- he’s the bariatric surgeon that works exclusively with morbidly obese individuals who have hundreds upon hundreds of pounds to lose. He’s the epitome of compassion with high standards: while he doesn’t dismiss the reasons people give for not following through, he often responds bluntly with something like, “Well… that’s a problem. You need to do a better job of figuring that out.” The understandable response is often some defensiveness, which I wholly understand. Some even argue and try to formulate nonsensical justifications for their lack of progress. But with each excuse comes Dr. “Now” simply saying, “Uh huh. Okay, well, that’s not good.” The less attention we give to excuses, the more control over ourselves we gain.

I’ll leave readers with this. Take stock of your greatest problems you’re experiencing and ask yourself the reasons why the problems persist. If your first response is that of alluding to you lacking complete control, I want you to reassess the conclusion. When you find yourself attempting to rationalize away something you’ve long since complained about, I’ll pull one of Dr. Phil’s most cited quotes:

“How’s that working out for you?”

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Below is a common exchange between patient and provider:

“I’m feeling really anxious and brain fog and overwhelmed.” See a psychiatrist for an SSRI.

“I’m constantly exhausted and can’t lose weight.” See an endocrinologist for metformin.

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“We’re trying to have a baby, but I have PCOS.” See a gynecologist for clomiphene and/or hormonal birth control pills.

“I’m having a really hard time focusing. I wonder if I have misdiagnosed ADHD.” See a neurologist or physician for Adderall.

This is a very, very short list of what has become widely accepted as normal in our Western society: unnecessarily medicating lifestyle problems. The young woman who claims to be constantly tired and overwhelmed is not asked about her poor sleep schedule, which consists of going to sleep at 2AM and staring at her phone in the minutes before putting her head to the pillow. Her PCOS and high body fat percentage isn’t seen as resulting from a highly unhealthy diet consisting primarily of ultra-processed food, minimal protein, antioxidants, or fiber, and sugary coffee drinks instead of water. And her lack of focus can’t possibly be because she fuels her body with junk, she isn’t appropriately managing her stress, and she’s using excuses as to why she’s so sedentary. Your problems are lifestyle problems, so here is a pill to treat those.

I’m unsure why this isn’t spoken about more regularly: the rates of all of these conditions, and all-cause mortality, are sky-rocketing… at the exact same time our spending to “treat them” is. If I weren’t scientifically-minded, I’d think there was an association between pharmaceuticals and sickness…

Should you be a young student or one just starting their career in some form of healthcare, it’s important you reevaluate your purpose. I don’t say this to sound grim or hopeless, but to offer a realistic insight I wish I would’ve been taught in my years in graduate school and practicum. Cash rules everything, specifically the manner in which our country attempts to service people in need. The best way we can arm ourselves with knowledge and the thick spine needed to make it through this field with our sanity is to understand that its entire structure is based on incentivizing illness. This is done by brainwashing staff into basing treatment recommendations on those which earn the company the highest reimbursement rates. When you follow the money, you will set your mind free. You’re not a conspiracy theorist or right-wing extremist, just a person with sense who sees “helping fields” as little more than playing dress-up and billing for it. “Helping people”, at least under our healthcare system, will typically only lead to broken spirits, cynicism, and the making of another miserable cog in a dysfunctional machine. Allow me to explain.

I first went to graduate school for clinical psychology. I envisioned a rewarding career of pulling people out of the depths of their own pain and guiding them to the greener grass that their illness convinced them was little more than a paranoid delusion. My own experience with overcoming anorexia and learning to manage myself independently despite extreme discomfort was something I knew I could give to others, with the right tools and unconditional positive regard for their pain.

They were not the paranoid and mentally poisoned ones. I was the one that was deluded.

I’d find that the field of psychology, specifically that which treats psychiatric patients in hospital settings or clinics, is entirely uninterested in rehabilitation or even care. Their doctrine mirrors America’s prisons: they’re surface-level “interventions” that aim to make a point more than they hope to teach valuable skills to reintegrate stragglers into society. Healthcare agencies incentivize billable hours through use of the codes that offer the highest reimbursement rates: prescribing medicine, lengthy and often unnecessary medical procedures, or repetitive sessions with a psychiatrist. In the field of therapy for children, the highest reimbursement rates come from the use of technicians, as they’re paid like dirt but still contribute to the bulk of a company’s income. The company then profits immensely off of every one of their hours in the trenches; higher-ups don’t even have to be present, they can pay people minimum wage and call it “meaningful work”, and they can make themselves appear to be the noble ones fighting the good fight against autism or anxiety or whatever trendy diagnosis is increasing at an abnormal rate. Disturbingly, and I don’t think many young clinicians of all industries realize this: none of these billable codes require proof of progress. Literally nothing. They actually don’t even look at any form of data to determine if the intervention itself is working. They’re concerned only with the manner in which you can craft a document to make it insurance-ready.

What this means for any billable service is that billable hours can only continue if the person remains a client. I’ll continue to repeat this point until everyone out there with a God complex recognizes how limited they are in their capacity to help. To retain clients is any billable industry’s largest aim, as they’re decades and sometimes life-long patients who pay in droves to see minimal to zero progress but be told they’re receiving quality care. In fact, therapeutic fields have recently begun referring to themselves as “quality assurance providers”. What a steaming pile of horse shit. The providers are young bucks in their 20’s who were taught in graduate school to only offer band-aid solutions to very deep-rooted but also very simple problems.

We’ve begun billing for trainings covering topics like “trauma-informed care”, which essentially is a clan of women projecting their own childhood nuisances onto their young clients and believing they’re teaching them to uncover their buried trauma. This is, according to insurance and the company, “billable”. Important to note, though, is this is not for the client. It is for clinicians who like to hear themselves talk and have an inflated sense of self-importance. These should ideally be people withheld from serving mentally ill and disabled populations. But, to again refer back to billable hours… narcissists and incompetent dimwits can still bill. Why stop them?

I have yet to meet a single clinician in any medical or therapeutic field who legitimately or even remotely finds their job meaningful. I don’t honestly think it can be, so long as it’s constrained by insurance and money-hungry administration. One of the sickest aspects of therapy, specifically, is its insistence on squeezing the juice out of every clinician and client so as to preserve a steady stream of revenue. They do this through use of “making up” for billable hours lost. When clients progress, they require less therapy. It’s similar to a client that is in the ICU and becomes stable enough to be moved to a less intensive suite of the hospital. This should be worth celebrating, right? WRONG! Your agency immediately flags progress as a deficit in revenue and will proceed to demand you “make up” for any lost hours. These requirements are as silly as “making up” for .75 billable hours “missed” in a month (and no, I’m not joking or exaggerating). My best example to compare this to is the idiocy that is the “snow day”. Schools are required to stay in session for a specific amount of days each school year. Which, at this point, is comical, considering we allowed students to stay at home for 2 years because of a virus that minimally affected them and had next to zero risk of imminent harm. But I digress. If enough snow days are utilized during the school year, administration is then required to tack on these days during the summer months, to “make up for” the lost time.

When these snow days are added, do you think they repeat the same lessons that were planned for the snow day? No. If kids miss school because they’re sick, do the teachers all repeat the lesson from the sick day to make sure the recovered kids are all caught up? No. This is not how learning works. I’ve seen similar illogical reasoning in the fitness industry. A woman who was preparing to go on vacation decided to workout twice per day for an entire week, to “make up for” the time she wouldn’t be working out on vacation. Oh sweetheart. That is not remotely how fitness or even common sense works. What occurs instead on a snow day or a hail merry day is something readers have likely all experienced: a bunch of teachers and kids fucking around and complaining that they even need to be there in the first place. It is perhaps the least amount of learning that could possibly take place between school hours. So what purpose did the “make-up day” serve? It allowed the school to check off a box so they don’t get sued or their funding sources don’t get pulled. I can’ reiterate this enough: follow the money.

Similar debauchery occurs in the medical industry. Aside from acute problems, like getting a cast for a broken arm or being revived with Narcan from a drug overdose, I strongly suggest people with “chronic” conditions consider other sources of information as it relates to symptom management and recovery. Medicine and therapy are simply not designed to address the root cause of problems, as doing so runs the risk of actually helping people so they’re no longer patients. And what happens when people are no longer patients? I’d hope you know the answer to this by now.

Some scoff at my seething hatred toward billable industries, citing stories of their own success with medicine and/or therapy. I do not want to discount these experiences, and as I mentioned,  there are more acute cases that billable industries do a fine job in managing. But there are a couple of things I’d like to point out, one more broad in the sense that this logic is faulty and another pertaining to our country’s sickness statistics. Regarding logic, we cannot use our own personal stories and anecdotes as exceptions to general information. For example, should I make a statement about weight-loss drugs being dangerous and not adequately addressing the behavior and psychology of eating, an individual may exclaim “BUT I TOOK WEIGHT LOSS DRUGS AND NOW I’M OFF MY INSULIN AND HEALTHIER THAN EVER!” This is wonderful! But also--- your story of taking weight loss medication does not stand to negate the factual information that was mentioned. It’s also worth investigating whether or not it was the weight loss drugs that helped, or a constellation of other behaviors (exercise, diet, nutrition education in tandem with weight loss pills).

Secondly, our country is ill. Almost disgustingly so. Over 70% of young people between eighteen and twenty-one years old are too unfit to join the military. Are you kidding me?! Being a young adult is supposed to be the age when you can do a Michelle Kwon triple-axle off of the hood of your car, onto a cement curb, and still manage to keep your ligaments intact. It’s also supposed to be an age when you’re physically spry, energetic, and more capable of running a mile without stopping than your grandmother. But for the majority of young people to be this physically unwell? I’m unsure why there is no outrage for that. Yes, let’s continue to talk about eradicating stigma for morbidly obese people.

There’s also the fact that some high-powered individuals find it useful to spend insurance dollars on making drugs like Ozempic accessible for everyone. Or that they believe accessibility is the true problem. I’m sorry, but as Andy Dufresne from Shawshank Redemption stated, “How can you be so obtuse?” In other words, I urge you to pry your head from out of your rectum. We cannot actually believe that the sky-high rates of mental illness and our country’s sickening obesity statistic is because people simply just don’t have access. And the bigger joke is perhaps the “solution”: No, don’t change your lifestyle! Inject yourself with medicine! If this doesn’t describe billable therapeutic fields, I honestly have no idea what does.

So here’s what you can do. I’m not sure you’re ready for it, considering it’s conspicuously simple. But that’s exactly the point: the media and billable institutions rely on your belief that health is complicated, confusing, and unattainable without medicinal or professional intervention. They’ve been quite successful in divorcing people from reality and their basic understandings of themselves to persuade them into a logical stupor. The fact that nutrition and basic health are complex and only available to the elite is an utter farce. The preliminary steps are straightforward and almost too accessible: Walk every day. Eat whole foods that don’t come packaged with an ingredient list and label. Strength train, at a minimum, twice per week. Sleep between 7 and 8 hours a night. That’s literally it.

But Kayla, walking won’t make me less anxious! But Kayla, eating a vegetable won’t make me lose weight! But Kayla, but Kayla, but Kayla. This is our problem: the constant and relentless laundry list of excuses as to why something won’t work even though we’ve never tried it. So perhaps some scientific evidence for the ladies (considering it’s almost exclusively women I hear produce such excuses) will be of use to better bring my point home.

PCOS is one of the most diagnosed issues amongst women, which has led to young women my age and younger having serious issues with fertility. This is unbelievable, as women my age, decades ago, could essentially blink in the direction of a male and get pregnant. One of the key drivers of PCOS and infertility problems is high insulin. PCOS, alone, has gone up 65% in the past decade, with the diagnosis affecting 20% of women worldwide. A fifth of women are struggling with fertility issues!!! This is, frankly, wild. An important aspect of high insulin and PCOS to note is how closely it is tied with being overweight and being obese: the prevalence of obesity in women with PCOS is 80%. What’s encouraging about this, though? Weight loss through lifestyle changes, like eating 800 grams of vegetables and low-glycemic fruits a day, and increasing skeletal muscle mass through strength training, can all improve insulin sensitivity. Is this prescribed by doctors, though? Likely not. Women instead are given birth control pills or metformin, and they become fast vessels for the insane amount of money required for in-vitro fertilization. A big win for insurance.

And what happens when a woman becomes a mother that is overweight, unhealthy, or obese? She may report symptoms of chronic fatigue and muscle aches that she’s given drugs and injections for, despite her highly sedentary lifestyle, mass consumption of ultra-processed food, irregular and deficient sleep, and unstable blood sugar levels. Because these symptoms have become normalized as “adulting” or “hot mess express” or simply just existing as mothers, they’re dismissed as par for the parenting course. Important to note, though, is that an obese mother with diabetes has quadruple the risk of having a child with autism, and double the risk of having a child with ADHD. Developing brains are apparently highly susceptible to irregular sleep patterns and diets laden with shit. Even antibiotics in childhood are being shown to cause issues: antibiotics dispensed in childhood increases the risk of mental health issues as children age. After all, when you’re using these drugs to “heal” by destroying the entire gut microbiome, we have to suspect that the home for serotonin production will be altered.

It's not cute to be in a constant state of exhaustion or distress. It’s not adorable to drink wine every night because we’re incapable of managing day-to-day stress. It’s not admirable to be late because we’re unwilling to better manage our time and it’s certainly not noble or “brave” to be on 10 different pills for issues that are largely diseases of lifestyle. I imagine a world when we incentivize health instead of incentivizing sickness, and we admire perseverance instead of foam at the mouth over a celebrity mentioning their struggles with mental illness. This is not “acceptance”, at least not to me. It is an unhealthy obsession with people who have serious problems, an obsession which gives us tacit permission to be lazy, to be chronically “overwhelmed”, and to assume the position of helpless.

You are not helpless. You are not confused. And you are not overwhelmed. You don’t have “gym anxiety”, you have a lack of experience in the gym and therefore you’re self-conscious about how you move your body. It’s quite similar to a child learning to walk or a person learning a new language. You’re not anxious, you’re a noob. And we all are, at some point or another. Try turning off the news or your Instagram feed for even a day and see how quickly your perception of yourself changes.

You’re not as damaged as you think. And if you are? Try getting off your ass and eating a vegetable. I KNOW you can do it--- do you know that you can?   

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Modern schools are spellbound by “social emotional learning”, or the pursuit of integrating coping skills, attitudes, and “coping behaviors” into educational lessons to better teach emotional regulation skills. It certainly sounds noble. Children have largely been deemed emotional terrorists, which renders their parents exhausted and resentful and in desperate  need of a program like SEL which promises to gently recalibrate their psyche. The name is ironic, as social-emotional learning has transformed adults and children into feelings-possessed sissies who seem incapable of carrying out a conversation without the mention of diagnoses, negative mood, or symptoms of “anxiety”. Today’s educational institutions, specifically K-12, are effective breeding grounds for ideologically crazed adults with a strange compulsion to diagnose every child as psychologically disordered.

Anxiety and depression have become two of the most common diagnoses amongst young kids and teenagers, despite having access to all of the country’s leading “mental health experts”, “trauma-informed counselors”, and “social emotional learning” programs. When stated out loud, it seems almost too obvious: if mental health is tanking but treatments are soaring, perhaps the treatment is the problem. Our society, though, makes quick work of overcomplicating very straightforward issues and tainting them with makeshift stories and opinions. “It’s because the world is so bad right now!!! Who wouldn’t be depressed?!” says the millennial psychotherapist. “It’s because he’s still exploring how to best communicate his sensory needs to us; of course he’s dysregulated,” says the trauma-responsive teacher. To bring this into context, the assumptions made about increasing rates of psychiatric disorders amongst our youth are made by people with little to no education, knowledge, expertise, or experience working with mentally ill clients.

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I do believe this is an expected result from the tragedy of good intentions. With our inability to handle nearly anything in moderation, including moderation itself, we’ve overcorrected past abuse into a neurotic fantasy. A fantasy which assumes any shred of difficulty, criticism, sadness, bullying, or negativity is enough to squelch a youngster’s spirit, forever damning them to “insecure attachment” or “anxiety”. And I don’t necessarily say that to bash the people doing it--- they’re clearly being reinforced by a culture of adults who find it equal parts adorable and useful to talk incessantly about their own problems. It’s become self-serving but is still believed, by many, to be a revolutionary form of “care”.

When I consulted in schools, I was constantly brought into the principal’s office (as a grown adult employee, mind you) for “taking the kids out of class”, for “letting them get away with too much”, and for “disrupting the learning environment”. I did so by pulling them out for exercise snacks, which were small bursts of movement 5 minutes or less spread throughout their day. My rationale was that, firstly, the lesson was copy-and-pasted from last year and proved to be completely ineffective in teaching the kids much of anything other than how to blindly fill in blanks on a piece of paper. Secondly, sitting in the same spot hour after hour, feigning even neutrality when I wanted to gauge my eyes out from my own boredom, made me wonder how challenging it must be for teenagers to sit still. And lastly, exercise is medicine. One hundred percent of the student body at this school was medicated, some quite heavily for very serious mental illnesses, and I couldn’t think of a worse idea than grouping mentally ill kids together and keeping them inside for 8 consecutive hours.

I’d find myself in similar, hot water at the psych ward I first worked at while I was finishing my clinical psych practicum. I played Metallica over the wing’s speaker system and encouraged the patients to walk as many laps as they can in the hallway until the end of the 8-and-a-half-minute song Master of Puppets. The psych nurses told me I was creating a dangerous environment. Unsurprisingly, I was not asked to return. A decade later, I’d see staff punched, spit at, kicked, scratched, and thrown to the ground on a daily basis--- none of which occurred after listening to metal. They’d also be the very people left completely unsupported in these “clinical” environments, as any form of therapeutic clinic or hospital system finds an extra set of hands just too steep of a price to pay for basic safety and dignity.

In every setting I’ve worked, whether in a psychiatric ward or a school or a university, there are pictures and infographics decorating each and every wall. Nearly all of the decorum points to the same ideas: how to practice breathing when we feel anxious, how it’s perfectly “okay to not be okay”, or directions to the “wellness center” which claims to fix kids up psychologically until they feel “safe”. Perhaps a guide for staff regarding the detrimental, even dangerous effects of essentializing feelings would make a nice mantlepiece.

I have overcome panic disorder after 15 years of being addicted to Klonopin, and I have my education in both clinical psychology and behavior analysis. Let me be the one to tell you (and this is nothing new, nor did I invent this concept): launching into therapeutic mode when you’re anxious, afraid, depressed, or angry are surefire ways to make you more anxious, more afraid, more depressed, and more angry.

Let me explain using the very common example of anxiety. Anxiety thrives off of fear. It is an entirely avoidant-based constellation of symptoms in which the individual actively escapes sensations of fear because they’re uncomfortable, too uncomfortable for a person’s perceived ability to tolerate. The impending doom anxiety imposes upon you is exactly what sustains it, what feeds it, and our recognition that it’s present becomes anxiety’s power-grab. It wants you to not only notice it, but obey it. When we start to feel anxiety, whether through racing, irrational thoughts and/or physiological symptoms, like hyperventilation or our hearts pounding, I believe we’ve taught students to handle it in a manner that reinforces it. We cannot begin a cycle of box-breathing and self-affirmations. The most effective approach to anxiety is to welcome it, dare it to do its worst, and move on as if we’re unaffected. I’m essentially suggesting the exact opposite of today’s “social emotional learning”: do not give power, attention, or even time to your feelings. Ignore them.

Believe it or not, I’m not kidding. When I explain this to classrooms and school staff and practitioners, they chuckle. They respond in a joking intonation to what they believed to be a joke. What I stated above (that is, ignore your feelings), is not an opinion or hunch, but scientific fact. I make it unbelievably clear when I have no evidence to support a conviction or a thought--- and this is not one of those circumstances. Because when we launch into a cycle of box breathing, excessive self-reflection, clawing for a “calm down corner”, and erratically scoping out an escape route, we’re proving to anxiety one thing: “You have made me so uncomfortable that I will do anything to get rid of you.”

This is exactly what anxiety wants: for our time, our energy, and our resources to deplete in its favor. We’re quite literally feeding into it directly when we engage in the behaviors that social-emotional learners or school counselors encourage: talk about it relentlessly, ruminate about its difficulty, and refuse to move on until you “feel ready”. While our feelings and irrational thoughts do tend to enhance the symptoms of anxiety, they, in and of themselves, are not exactly what we need to change--- at least not outright. We need to change our RESPONSE TO and PERCEPTION OF what is happening internally. Anxiety is the petulant child whose sole purpose is that of getting under your skin, who stops at nothing until your seething rage reveals itself in the form of screaming and yelling, to which the petulant child squeals in delight. The petulant child has learned one thing: “If I push enough, you will erupt.” Anxiety is its identical twin.

Something I encourage my clients to do, whether they’re strength and conditioning or psychiatric clients, is to shift their attention toward their language. As they share their issues with me, I mark internal tallies counting how many mentions they make of “my anxiety”, “I’m just so anxious, so I can’t”, or phrases that essentialize their issues. I allow them to air their fears, struggles, and thoughts for about 5 minutes before bringing to their attention what my brain has been charting. Many of them admit they hadn’t even realized they were engaging in this powerfully negative form of language, let alone identifying the connection between their thoughts and their behaviors. Others have proceed to dig their heels in and angrily explain to me that “their anxiety” REALLY IS that powerful.

My response? Then stop giving it power. The only person who can do that is ourselves. Not society, not social emotional teachers, not trauma-informed counselors, not the President. You.

It is a requirement that we stop responding to anxiety as if it deserves our attention or time. Stop indulging it by airing its dirty laundry to anyone with a pulse. Stop behaving as if it’s as permanent as our pancreas or our skin. And for fuck’s sake, stop avoiding things just because you’re anxious. I do not allow any client I work with to tell me, “I just can’t because of my anxiety”. If we allow them to deem anxiety this influential, we’ve lost as a clinician, as a coach, as a teacher, as a friend.

Working with children is no different. I’m unsure why we believe that anxiety and depression are entirely different subspecies simply because they are “suddenly” revealing themselves in kids. This, in my conspiratorial opinion, works to make children into lifelong clients to benefit Big Pharma. A mentally ill child is a lifelong paycheck, as are their highly vulnerable parents who are desperate to take away their pain. Parents, know this: the mechanisms of anxiety are still the exact same, and need to be approached as if they’re the exact same. Your kids would be better off entirely shifting attention away from anxiety symptoms and instead learn the power of their physiology. An individual who exercises regularly, for example, is constantly exposing themselves to symptoms of anxiety (some shakiness, rapid heartbeat, heavy breathing, sweating). In doing so, they learn such symptoms are not always sensations to be feared, or even sensations that make for interesting topics of conversation. A child who learns to regulate their own breathing and learn the physiological thresholds of their body is a child who is unstoppable.  

We rarely give attention to the sprinter who speaks of how heavily they’re breathing following a hundred meter sprint. And we certainly wouldn’t bring attention to the person who reports their legs feeling uneasy following completion of a marathon. But when we tie “mental health” to it, it suddenly gains importance. Why? Because we secretly fetishize mental illness. We’re captured by the idea that maybe we don’t have to do anything difficult, because we’re so intricately disordered that we’re just “different”. And for children?! Maybe I’m not a bad parent! Maybe I can be off the hook for disciplining them, because they’re neurodivergent or disordered or sensorily sensitive. No. You are feeding the monster that is anxiety--- your own and your children’s. Should you be skeptical about my straightforwardness regarding anxiety, I challenge you to experiment on yourself. When you begin to feel anxiety, say to yourself, out loud, “Oh great, you’re here!” and move on about your day. No meditation, no breathing, no self-talk. Do not give in.

Our bar is increasingly low for our abilities as human beings. Which is mind-blowing considering all that we’ve overcome: World War II. The Holocaust. Famine. The Great Depression. 9/11. Black Death. AIDS. Slavery. Are we really going to stoop to the degree of “if I go for a walk for 10 minutes today, that’s good enough”? Maybe I should have prefaced this thought with the understanding that 10 minutes of walking may be a tremendous accomplishment for the morbidly obese individual who has not walked in months or even years. It takes such mental toughness to pull ourselves out of a physical and mental rut so deep. But for those of us of generally sound mind and body, I want us to believe we’re capable of more. I want us to believe that our children can handle scraped knees and bruised psyches by reminding themselves of the creed that is sticks and stones.

‘“May the Force Be With You” is charming, but unimportant. What’s important is that you become the force--- for yourself and perhaps for other people.” – Harrison Ford

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit honestlyunorthodox.substack.com