Today's Experts are Wrong Too

From parenting to nutrition to psychology, we've apparently been "lied to" until now. How can I trust that today's experts aren't lying too?

This weekend, I accidentally found myself falling down a rabbit hole almost tailor-made for my neuroses, culminating in the discovery of my Nightmare Therapist.

After I purposefully started hiding all terrifying content about rare pediatric diseases on my Facebook Reels feed, a few other things filled the niche of “content I know I shouldn’t watch but it kinda scares me so I will anyway.” Those things have included horrifying stories of murderous babysitters and content made by various non-psychologist therapists about the subtle, accidental ways well-meaning parents commit severe emotional neglect (usually speaking to adult children of accidentally emotionally neglectful parents.)

The latter has been a pet peeve of mine for a while, primarily because I really dislike the type of therapy that seeks to reimagine the patient’s life story as one of perpetual victimhood and being the only empathetic person in a family full of sociopaths. I call this green juice therapy—it feels like you’re doing something healthy, but ultimately does nothing but entrench things you already believe that make you feel good and give you pseudo-clinical permission to be more narcissistic.

The Nightmare Therapist who sucked me in this weekend wasn’t a psychologist (they almost never are.) She was a licensed family and marriage therapist, and I would name her directly except her following was moderate (on par with mine, I guess) so she wasn’t a big household name who felt like fair game. But anyway, what I found most surprising about her was how confidently she declared fairly out-there opinions, citing that she was a “professional,” while insisting that all the even-more-qualified professionals before her were completely wrong, taking shots at any approach to psychology that focused on the patient’s diagnosis instead of the modern (and apparently objectively correct) “holistic environmental approach.” (AKA: Blame Mommy!)

A few wackadoo things Nightmare Therapist said that stuck with me after mainlining her content for an hour straight while telling my husband I was “actually working” even though I was hunched up on the couch like Gollum watching Facebook Reels:

• Parents “demand” hierarchy over their children to suit their own selfish needs. Parents impose rules and choose the role of the authority figure because they’re “too lazy” to “do the emotional work” to be “real parents.”