Lifting my gaze

Hey Friend,

I’m inspired. My wife just overcame her writer’s block and wrote a badass newsletter (HERE) and inspired me to stop procrastinating so much on my own writing.

I’ve been struggling with self-doubt. Paradoxically, the more that I learn and the “wiser” I get (inshallah), the less I feel qualified to say anything. When I started making YouTube videos 4+ years ago (damn), I certainly knew less but something (confidence, arrogance, ignorance - take your pick) made me pick up the camera anyways.

Actually, I know what it was: it was fun. I didn’t care so much about coming across as “right” or smart; I was just having a good time.

Well, let’s try to pull a bit of fun back into it, shall we?

Below are some scattered thoughts on the hidden hazards of therapy and self-improvement.

Lifting my gaze

I was on reddit recently and came across a post by someone freaking out over the instability of their government job. They didn’t know what was going to happen with all of the changes going on and it was stressing them out to the point of what seemed to be some kind of panic attack.

I scrolled down to the comments and all of the top comments said a version of: “You should go to therapy.”

A few months ago, I would have read that and largely agreed. I’ve been a strong advocate of therapy having gone a lot myself. Then after reading a book called Bad Therapy and having some contradicting experiences, and I’m not so sure anymore.

Therapy is a bit of sacred cow in the US today. To challenge its importance and almost panacean status feels to be nearing heresy. “Why wouldn’t you want someone to get the help that they need so they can feel better?”

It comes from a belief that therapy can only do good. That results scale with quantity. That more therapy is always better.

It seems a bit ridiculous when written out like that, but as far as I can tell, that’s the underlying belief behind the tenacious defense of this practice. If my own experience is indicative of the norm, then I don’t think this belief is a conscious one. Rather, it’s an unconscious assumption that never went fully examined.

But I don’t want to pretend to know what other people’s experiences are. Instead, I’ll focus on what sticks out to me as problematic with therapy’s status as the unconditional, go-to solution for struggle, as promoted in this reddit thread.

Essentially, my problem is this: It’s a fragile way to live.

When you’re told that when something hard happens, the main way to deal with it is to seek help from someone else, that essentially programs a belief that, “I am weak, I need help.”

And the definition of “hard” is entirely subjective. It’s not some defined number of unpleasant neurons being triggered in the brain that, when reached, can be officially labeled as “difficult” and worthy of help.

Instead, it is almost entirely defined by the environment you grew up in. If you grow up in a war-torn country where you’re lucky to live past 20, “hard” is an incomprehensibly higher bar than the suburbs of America in the 21st century.

Now, I’m aware of the fallacy of relative privation — the fact that just because someone else has suffered more than you, it doesn’t invalidate your own — I just use this to make it clear that the benchmark at which something becomes “suffering” is relative and, most importantly, malleable.

Knowing this, we should be hesitant to declare something as worthy of requiring professional help, as the power of the mind is not to be underestimated in matters like these. There is immense power in the act of labeling something as, to introduce a 21st-century favorite, ‘traumatic”.

This reminds me of an experience I had myself just a couple of months ago when I was seeing a therapist/coach of my own and he recommended that I seek specialized help for “childhood trauma”.

Now, maybe I really could benefit from this work. I acknowledge that I grew up in less-than-ideal circumstances which may have instilled unconscious patterns that I’d do well to avoid perpetuating onto others.

And yet, I am skeptical that labeling and intently focusing on all that was imperfect in my earlier life is the solution to leading a better life in the future. Perhaps it’s part of it, but it certainly isn’t a cure-all.

What else is there to do? This leads me to my second critique of therapy: where it risks leading you.

It starts in Bali. My now-wife and I were living in Ubud, a place renowned for attracting new-age spiritualists on a journey to “find themselves” and practice yoga. I think it’s also safe to say that this crowd had one of the highest therapy attendance rates in the world, given the general attitude of self-improvement.

It was a crowd I was quite familiar with, having been somewhat of a new-age, self-improvement junkie myself and generally being on a quest to “know myself”. I didn’t see too much wrong with the way they were living.

Then my now-wife pointed something out: Almost all these people were entirely self-absorbed by their problems, to a point where they didn’t believe they could move on in life until they had “solved them”, whatever that meant.

I realized then that this is the risk of looking inward: you might never look out. 

You might become so fixated on yourself that you forget there are billions of people in the world that need help far more than you, and who you are in a prime position to help (take this quiz for context on what I mean).

I’m all for knowing thyself. I’m all for understanding the ways in which we’ve been hurt to avoid hurting others. I’m all for learning to ask for help when we need it (something I admittedly still struggle with).

But I also want to caution against losing sight of the bigger picture. Of forgetting our own resiliency, strength, and fortune by becoming so fixated on all of the things that are “wrong” with us.

Where we decide to focus our attention determines everything. Sometimes that attention is well-spent looking inwards, but this has diminishing returns. Eventually, we must lift our gaze to the world beyond, at that which lies outside of ourselves.

I’m trying to spend more time looking up. I hope you’ll join me.

Til next time,
Ryan