Do not Go to Therapy

An alternative, holistic, Christian approach for men's mental health.

Over the past year, I’ve talked with multiple friends who tell me they’ve started going to therapy or are making a resolution to do so soon. This has led me to have very interesting conversations with many different men about the state of men’s mental health and about the tools we have at our disposal to combat the crisis of loneliness and sadness that men all over the world seem to be facing.

Some of you might have set a new year’s resolution to start going to therapy and working on your mental health. If that’s you, I praise you for your courage and for having the awareness to recognize you’re not doing as well as you’d like to and looking for a way to change that. My intention is not to bash your efforts, but rather give you a word of caution and propose certain alternatives which I believe could be more effective and long-lasting in improving your mental health and overall well being.

You see, I’m not a big fan of therapy. At least not in the way it’s conceived nowadays, and even less so for men. I’ve seen it do more harm than good for the vast majority of men in my life who’ve attempted to fix their sense of emptiness by going to a “professional psychologist”.

Before I go further, I want to be very clear in saying that there are certain conditions and situations when consulting a professional is the right choice. This is simply my two cents on the topic and what I think is the best course of action for the vast majority of men who are not mentally ill but simply desperately looking for some purpose and direction in this world.

The Problem With Therapy

It starts with how psychologists are now being educated. Universities have lost the plot. Almost all careers are now shrouded in a very strong feminist, liberal, left-leaning shadow, and psychology even more so. When most people claim going to therapy is the right choice because you’d be talking with a professional, they forget to question how that professional was educated in the first place. If that “professional” believes gender is a spectrum because his progressive pink-haired teacher told him so, is that really a “professional”?

You cannot blindly believe someone just because they have a college degree in a specific domain. If you’ve been to university, you know how easy it is to cheat your way through it, and also how some careers teach you basically nothing at all, or all the wrong kinds of things. I’ve seen doctors who have graduated while knowing absolutely nothing about health, economists who never learnt the most basic macroeconomics concepts, and english literature majors who haven’t read a full book. A college degree means nothing, even less so nowadays, when universities all over the world have been infiltrated and poisoned by the insanity of gender theory and other similar ideologies.

I don’t care if Suzy has a psychology degree if she believes that white people are the devil. I don’t care if she is a “licensed therapist” if she believes that you can be “born into the wrong body”.

The point is that a degree doesn’t prove anything, and even less so nowadays.

Secondly, even if you get lucky and find a decently educated therapist, the way that modern therapy is structured —in general—, is just not ideal, in my humble opinion. To be very clear, I think it’s not ideal for men specifically. It might be ideal for women. I don’t know, and that’s not what I write about.

But from writing about masculinity for 4 years now, and having hundreds of conversations with men all over the world, I’ve seen that most men don’t really need to vent about their problems for an hour every week. Men don’t need to feel “listened to” as much as women might. We need something different: to feel appreciated, yes, but also, and mainly, to feel powerful, to feel purposeful, to feel as though we are moving somewhere meaningful. And that’s something that therapy simply doesn’t provide us with.

This does not mean we don’t need to sometimes share our problems and talk about them, but when we do, it’s usually with the intention of finding a quick solution for them, not venting for the sake of venting, which is sadly what most modern therapists are charging thousands of dollars for.

Setting a specific time each week for talking about your problems just means you’ll find more problems to talk about. It also means you’ll be thinking about your problems all the time, and they’ll take up all the space in your mind. You’re either thinking about them or talking about them. What good does that do? Unless it’s to find a practical, applicable solution —which again, isn’t usually the goal in therapy—, thinking and talking about your problems simply feeds this vicious cycle of anxiety, stress, and an obsessive fixation on everything that’s wrong with you.

Thirdly, there’s a huge risk in going to therapy, and that is that there’s a worrying overprescription of pharmaceuticals, to the pint that basically anyone that goes to therapy gets diagnosed with anxiety or depression and is told to take some pills to fix it. This not only doesn’t fix any of the root causes but also leads to addictions that can end up completely wrecking you. We should avoid taking pills at all costs, and yet therapists are prescribing them to anyone all the time. Even ignoring the obvious financial incentives doctors of all kinds have to get you hooked on pills, this should be reason enough to avoid going to a therapist unless as a last resource, and only after trying other alternatives first.

These are the main reasons why I think therapy is not the ideal strategy to fix your mental health (except in very specific cases, as I’ve said before). There are plenty of other reasons but in the interest of being brief, I’ll mention them in the next part of the article.

The alternative that I propose is as follows:

An Alternative Approach for Optimal Mental Health

The mental health crisis in men today stems, in my opinion, from a few root causes (none of which is a lack of talking about our problems): extreme individualism and loss of family values, lack of purpose, loneliness, poor spiritual or physical health, and postmodern society’s attack on masculinity. All of these factors are linked to one another, and they all create a sort of void that men are falling into at increasingly alarming rates. It’s never a matter of simply “talking” or “sharing” your problems, but something way more complex that requires a more holistic approach to be understood properly. Only after you’ve done that, can you take intentional, directed action to improve on it.

Extreme Individualism and Loss of Family Values

Living for yourself and your own pleasure gets old very quickly. It might distract you for a while, but after some time of living hedonistically, all you’re left with is a sense of deep dissatisfaction, as the things you thought would bring meaning to your life get exposed as meaningless and empty. Before, at least the hedonistic pleasure seeker would be part of a family which could give his life some stability, but now, men are opting out of having families only to realize how extremely lonely a life of pleasure gets after a while.

Men need to live to serve: their families, their communities, their nations and God.

Ask yourself if you’re devoting your life to service or if you’re just living to pursue selfish goals.

Lack of Purpose

Lacking a clear direction will drive a man crazy. And the problem is that the modern world doesn’t naturally give you one. In earlier times, there was a clear path to follow from the moment you were born. There weren’t that many options and because there was no social media there were no comparisons beyond what you could see around you. I don’t know if that was better or not, but it definitely meant that it was easier to feel satisfied and at peace with the path you were walking. Now, it’s complete chaos: there’s an information overload, a wide variety of options and opportunities, and young men all over the world spin in circles trying to find out which one of the 2000 different career paths will give them the most satisfaction. Too much unrestricted freedom is not always a good thing. Add to that the fact that cheap dopamine addiction means we can’t commit to anything and you end up with a generation of men lost in the maze of their own minds, desperately looking for some guiding light and finding nothing but dead ends.

Purpose in our time needs to be sought after intentionally, with discipline and perseverance, because it won’t fall in our lap as it did when the world was younger and it was obvious how you could help build it.

Men need to find and pursue a deep purpose, a worthy vocation that will sustain them through life.

Ask yourself what kind of good you can bring into the world, and how you could make it into a career or dedicate your life to it.

Loneliness

It’s not a secret that men are isolated and lonely. Extreme individualism and the destruction of the family unit mean after a certain age, a man is often left to fend for himself.

Some people cannot fathom just how lonely some men are. Count yourself blessed if you can pick up the phone and hear a friendly voice on the other end. Really.

Some men don’t have even that. No one to call. No one to check up on them. No one to care even one bit. And even though we know God is with us at all times, we still need the company of those we love who are physically present on earth.

This is where therapy can be useful, I’ll admit. At least it can give these men someone to talk to and socialize. But again, that doesn’t really solve the problem.

It used to be we had strong family ties and solid friendships within our communities. Loving relationships with people that care for you, know you and appreciate you usually remove the need for a therapist in the first place.

Men need solid relationships with family, friends, and community. We need people around us who we can talk to and confide in.

Ask yourself if your relationships are loving, kind, and charitable, and ask yourself how you can build a support network to have your back when you need to.

Poor Health (Spiritual or Physical)

Spiritual, mental, and physical health are forever correlated. You can’t expect to be mentally healthy if you are 500 pounds and struggling to breathe 24/7. You also can’t expect to be mentally healthy if your spiritual life is non-existent.

Very often, simply pursuing physical improvement and spiritual development is enough to drag men out of the whole of sadness and anxiety they find themselves into. The gym has saved millions of men from despair and sorrow, and so has religion.

Something worth considering.

Men need to work on their bodies and make of them a worthy temple for a sane mind and spirit.
Men need to work on their spirit, pray often, be obedient to God, and live to serve Him.

Ask yourself if your body is healthy. Ask yourself if your spirit is healthy. If not, how do you expect your mind to be healthy?

Postmodern Society’s Attack on Masculinity

Young men are being told from the moment they can talk that their very essence is “toxic”. They are being medicated, verbally abused, misled, and confused by “teachers” and “caretakers” whose only interest is to further their demonic gender ideology.

It’s undeniable that there’s an attack on masculinity, and it’s had a very deep effect on men. Part of the problem is that boys are being told that masculinity is toxic and oppressive, instead of being told that there’s a way for a man to be virtuously masculine.

Men need to be told there’s a right way to be a man, and that masculinity isn’t toxic. Men need to be told that their masculinity is a gift from God and that they should emulate Christ as the ultimate role model of perfect, virtuous masculinity.

Ask yourself if you’re trying to imitate Christ and if He’s your model for masculinity. Ask yourself how you can better know Him and imitate Him.

A Final Word

There’s a lot more that could’ve gone into this article, but it was getting long enough already so I did my best to keep it concise.

Just to wrap it up: therapy isn’t going to fix deep-rooted, complex problems like the general crisis of purpose we see in men today. It’s a tool that can be useful, in specific cases and only if the therapist is carefully selected. Before you go to therapy, try to fix your lifestyle, your health, your relationships, your career choices. 99% of the times taking care of those aspects will take care of your mental health too.

Throughout it all, remember that God is with you and remember that you are not alone in this battle. Jesus is helping you carry your cross, and millions of men all over the world, like myself, are fighting alongside you. Do not despair, do not lose hope.

I promise you there’s a purpose for you in this earth, through which you’ll not only feel satisfied and at peace, but also bring good and light into the world.

Now you just have to go out there and find it.

God bless you and keep you,

Simple Man

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