Trauma and Resilience

A year ago I had a conversation with a mom at a family gathering. She had a single son, about six, who was playing with my son. They were doing usual kid stuff, playing on a swing and making up their little nonsense games. He seemed like a normal kid. Then the mom started talking about his litany of problems. Apparently he has “sensory issues” that they were working on. He also had “Mild dyslexia” because of his struggle with reading. Of course, he had therapists on board for both of these maladies. When I asked for details, it was strange in how mundane it all seemed. He didn’t like certain fabrics and types of foods, and his struggle in reading didn’t seem like anything out of the ordinary for a six-year old. The kid was a financial bonanza for the medical establishment, but were they really helping? Could it be these interventions are just teaching him needless dependency where just a little more parent time reading and shrugging his these “sensory issues” would make a healthier boy than these extensive sessions?

I’m currently mostly through “Bad Therapy” by

Abigail Shrier

. It’s one of those cases where I’m nodding along in agreement with the vast majority of what she is saying. I’ve seen far too many cases of sociopathic therapists causing ruptures to relatively stable lives, “affirming” destructive nonsense, and the want to just get a paycheck.

There were also some cases of Good Therapy, one case especially when I talked to a woman who had trouble coping with the guilt of having an abortion after realizing the wrongness of what she just did. Like a good therapist, she was directed with coping mechanisms that were designed to give her agency to move forward while not giving herself excuses for actions she committed.

The recurring theme I see in the “bad” therapists is their want to completely remove a sense of agency from their patients. If they are suffering from depression, it’s a chemical imbalance. If they’re having marital problems, it stems back to their childhood issues. In order to progress, you have to reopen old wounds under the direction of your therapist, fix your "‘imbalance’ through medications, or avoid certain people you have no ability to combat with their ‘toxicity’. It’s a world full of outside malevolent forces they are incapbably of handling.

The moral hazard is obvious, as therapy is much more lucrative with repeat customers, and creating people with agency, by definition, ends with patients who no longer need you. The more pernicious part is what could be termed as “The Devouring Mother” to use a Jung archetype, who seeks to stifle and consume children instead of letting them grow independent. Teachers LOVE feeling like a savior, oftentimes giving themselves an overly grandiose view of their work with these children. They don’t want to just teach reading. They want to feel like a HERO. But maybe these impulses are not saving children, but immiserating them.

The stereotype of early parenting is the bootstraps mentality, where if you skin your knee, you needed to get up and quit whining. If you got something wrong on a test because you had a bad day, suck it up. Don’t get on the team? Work harder. Don’t go out with the neighborhood kids all day, that’s dangerous, we are putting you in highly controlled social environments instead. The wisdom of earlier generations was thrown away for what was deemed a more sympathetic approach that avoided repression of emotion, now deemed dangerous.

When comparing the two approached, one has to look at the results, and what becomes clear is the new therapy culture has not created happier children, but far more neurotic ones. For anyone who is capable of stepping back, the reason is obvious. If authority figures treated everything like a potential trauma that will ruin their life, to the point where they need one-on-one help with a “professional” the parent offloaded the issue to, the child is going to get ingrained in his head this really IS dangerous and can ruin his life. If Grandpa dies and the parent immediately whisks the child away, doesn’t let him go to the funeral, and plops him with a therapist, the implicit message is “you could get so traumatized by Grandpa dying it could ruin your life.” compare this to a more sane approach, where the parents mourn, everyone mourns as a family at the funeral, the child watches Grandpa get buried, and the family unit copes together. The former teaches fear of trauma, the latter resilience.

The reason people fear the thought of creating resilience is it forces authority figures to allow risk. It’s literally impossible to teach a child how to endure if she is not allowed any stressors in her life, and has no abilities for independence. It means doing things outside approved channels, without permission. It requires agency in a world where the terror of liability dangles over everyone’s heads. Simply put, therapy culture is, itself, built from fear.

If we are subjecting children to a factory built around such an implicit setup, how can we expect children to become stronger, to be able to withstand life’s winds without a counselor they pay 150 dollars an hour to listen to them? Do we really think children are too dumb to understand the subtext? Are we really naive enough to wonder why kids are neurotic when all the adults around them act neurotic in fear of this nebulous ‘trauma’ coming like an evil wind to destroy a child’s life? Is it a coincidence that when we put normal kids with normal learning difficulties in an intensive session away from other kids we give an implicit sense of helplessness?

Such thoughts bring one to the obvious conclusion that maybe the bootstraps people had a point here. They may not have had a point with other things, but there was certainly some ancestral knowledge lost when a generation of parents didn’t understand the necessity of allowing some suffering in children, some unfairness, some hard knocks to give them a glimpse in how to live in an adult world where there is not going to be a clear authority on how one should live, nor a schoolmarm to make things right.

Instead of trauma-minimizing parenting, the healthy frame is resilience focused, trying to ensure that your kids will be able to navigate the world by example. This means sometimes it’s better to back off. It’s sometimes better to give them agency even if you don’t consider what they’re doing as prudent. Sometimes a parent has to allow a small problem to remain a problem for your child to figure out. Sometimes less parenting is better parenting.