Rich Lowry has a nice little piece on why grief counseling isn’t for everyone.

That’s a good start. Let’s go further.

In most situations, although not all, therapy only feeds into the self-interested martyr complex of America. Where value is assigned by membership in a victimized group, it pays to be fucked up. Whether it was mommy and daddy, the drug addiction, or the bad choices a person makes because they’re “just too giving.”

Siderant:

It isn’t giving to lie or hide things in hopes of not hurting someone while doing things behind their back that would hurt them--it’s cowardice and cruelty excused by admitting to the kind of fault that we’re taught to admit to in a job interview. "My biggest flaw? Well, I think I’m too much of a perfectionist." To say that you’re "too kind" or "too giving" is to credit your weakness as a lovely little flaw that you can share with your friends without shame. To say that I’m a selfish coward who can’t always make the tough choices is a good deal more honest, but it doesn’t have the same victim chic going for it. Don’t underestimate the power of your peers to turn something truly and honestly bad into a Hallmark clichè, though. The power of "everything happens for a reason," it just wasn’t meant to be," and "wow, it’s great that you can admit to your problem--I know you’ll be okay" is the power to absolve of bad decisions and pain by making bad things miraculously good. Bullshit, I say. Some bad things are just that: bad. And they need to be accepted as such. A bad choice is a bad choice is a bad choice, and sometimes the best thing a friend can do is to tell you just how stupid you’re being. One of the best lines in a movie that I didn’t see last year came from Spanglish. A mother, talking to a daughter who is having a mid-life crisis of sorts, says something along the lines, “Recently, your low self-esteem is just good common sense.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

When we go to friends and counselors to make all of our guilt, shame, and regret, we’re turning our backs on a tool that can help us be better. Turning all of that off is often just an exercise in turning off that little voice in our head that tells us right from wrong--feelings of shame and regret typically don’t happen in a vacuum. To paraphrase a dying old man from the movie Magnolia, regret any damned thing you want. Use that as something to help guide you to better choices (and appropriate, honest, apologies).

One of the biggest problems with over-reliance on therapy and grief counselors is that you never actually get past an event. When you hold down your emotions, putting them a little to the side while you get on with the very important job of living life, you give yourself time to distance from the emotional power of pain. Whether that’s the pain of a death of a loved one or the pain of a divorce, the fact is that time really is what heals the wound, but that’s only part of the story.

Time only heals the wound if you don’t sit around picking at it. If you open the wound fresh every day because your therapist things that talking, talking, talking solves things, then you’re never given a chance to let the pain become anything other than overwhelming. It’s always a fresh hurt casting a shroud over everything in your life, always immediate, always as big as the moment that it happened.

That isn’t to say that there isn’t a value in talking, that there isn’t a value in therapy, and that there can’t be some good in pills that help you even out your emotions. Most people use them as a crutch, though. A way to not have to solve problems or face their own role in their hurting. Anyway, solving a problem is boring in comparison to having an ongoing drama to feed the ego. See, only important, popular people have enough in the ways of stress, problems, and sensitivity to require therapy and happy pills.

The point is driven home when you attend a social gathering and find yourself listening to people talk about the drugs they take to control their depression. These people have raised their petty, mostly self-made, little problems ("I cheated on her, but I was very conflicted about it") to the status of crucifixion all in the search for better cocktail party conversation.

What assholes.

That isn’t to say that some people don’t face real, honest to God, mental and emotional problems. It’s just to say that pills and therapy aren’t the solution to most peoples’ sadness. Learning that life deals out some tough cards, and learning that sometimes you have to find ways to cope with that, would be a much better prescription. And sometimes coping with the tough bits means putting your problems a little further away so that you can actually function in your daily existence. Then, when the hurt isn’t so fresh, you can take it out, look at it, and find a way to live with it.

All the chatter, though, is less than useless: it’s injurious.

Down with the therapy nation, and up with learning to live. Even through the hard parts.