Men Should Go to Therapy
And other meme-ified slogans that suck, actually
“Men would literally rather ________ than go to therapy.”
Have you seen this joke format? The gist is I think is: look at all the avoidant things men will do instead of confronting their own behavior. Which, sure? But somewhere along the line it became “men will literally do [insert thing] instead of go to therapy.”
This piece is actually not about balloon guy, if you can believe it, but the sentiment captured in this quote “installation” of his that recently went viral.
This is a two-pronged what the fuck -- the proliferation of quote-content online and the ubiquitousness of content that implies “working on yourself” is only done through therapy. In the meme here, an invoice from the therapist is seen as “sexier” or more telling than a nude, which is not only weird logic, but predicates the sexiness on access to paying for therapy, which ultimately is a bad joke and just a testament to how horribly inaccessible healthcare is here, and the numerous barriers that prevent people of all genders from seeking help. The phrasing also disregards peer support and other ways communities can help each other outside of invoice-only therapy.
I’ve definitely made jokes about men needing to go to therapy, the implied sense of the utopia waiting on the other side implicit in the phrasing. Yes, if men went to therapy the world would be a beautiful place. Everything would be fixed, everyone would be in love, nothing would hurt. In tandem with that thinking is the idea that all the extra work women take on—in the home, in the office, as caregivers—would dissipate. Men, equipped now with an awareness only possible from talking about the self in a paid-for session, would be ready to take on the labor previously outsourced to women. Never does the meme format (why would it) question who is now responsible for the man becoming sentient, never does it equip him with the ability to do this for himself. He pays for talk therapy, he proves it to you with an invoice, patriarchy ends, capitalism is...over? Yeah!
There are so many fallacies with this logic, the obvious and already noted being that therapy is extremely inaccessible, and that even when one does find a therapist, not all therapists are created equal, and some may hinder rather than help. Anyone marginalized entering these spaces may encounter simply more of the same bullshit they are trying to unpack. Not all communities think about therapy in the same way, especially for men. So even if money was not the sole problem, there are myriads of other valid reasons that telling someone simply “go to therapy” ignores cultural and structural barriers to doing exactly that. Beyond that, therapy isn’t the only way, or even the best way necessarily, to alleviate stressors, as long as we’re in a capitalistic society.
To fixate, then, on what the world would be like if all men went to therapy is to skip the capitalism problem entirely and instead blame random dudes for not wanting/being able to talk about themselves in a clinical setting. Which men are discouraged from doing far before they make it to the therapist’s couch. Obviously we’re going deep on a meme which isn’t in itself that deep, but point being, this also seems to insinuate that one person’s healing journey could change the world.
Which still undoes itself, as an idea: it is unfortunately, perhaps, not true that people who go to therapy enter half-baked and emerge a beautiful ready to eat cookie. People are more complicated than that. The projection many make of being able to track when someone has done good work on themselves because of therapy is simply that: projection.
And why do we trust therapists to be able to bridge the gaps in understanding? Why do we expect therapy to de-condition decades of deeply ingrained behaviors, ones we all likely don’t even know we’re acting upon? Therapy can help us name hurt, can help us reframe the world, but will it change us?
I know, and you likely do too, that therapy isn’t a panacea. At all. To suggest such is disingenuous. I can’t help see the “men go to therapy” meme as part and parcel of this girl boss feminism that seems to creep around the corners of even the most seemingly innocuous phrases. It once again finds a way to put the responsibility on men to fix themselves, to google it, to not ask questions but also, miraculously, find their own way to the correct ideas. Men not wanting / not going to therapy shouldn’t be meme-ified in this casual way that insinuates no men are in therapy and the reason for this is because they are complacent, lazy, and willing to let women do all the growth, to teach them about it later. Is this sometimes true? Sure, of course. Everything is sometimes true, especially if you’re looking for it.
There’s also the reality that people who go to therapy might become equipped with the language of therapy, and then just be able to use that to continue doing whatever they were doing before, but now sound sort of logical about it. Who does that help?
And if we keep up the insistence that men should be fixed by therapy, what does that imply? That therapists are better mothers than partners? That men still need to have some third-party bystander encourage their self-growth, that it is never within their own means? What does it mean if we frame all change as instigated by others, never from the self? What does it mean to keep isolating the process of change? Never is this mentioned as a potentially collective endeavor, but one of self purification—to fix oneself is treated as the path to fixing everything. It’s comforting maybe, to believe in that. But it’s not reality, certainly not the one we exist in.
I hesitated to publish this today, given the recent / literally happening right now mass shootings. But it also feels intertwined. As America “opens” again post Covid we are already glimpsing so clearly that a return to “normalcy” here means a routine acceptance that violence lurks around every corner, that no space is truly safe. But what I’ve written about also seems relevant: this idea that the violence we witness each day living here could be solved by individual men learning to be better, or by going to therapy, is woefully simplistic and ignorant of the larger realities of what a *healthier society* could look like. People do desperately need mental health support—as they do overall access to healthcare. Do they get that through therapy? Can they?
I intentionally am leaving a lot of these questions open-ended because! I simply have no idea. Our country is so deeply broken, it feels hopeless often, and the hope latched to ideas like “this is our utopian world if men went to therapy” feels…sinister. Misplaced. And at the same time, I deeply understand the impulse and the sentiment.
I hope thinking out loud has been an interesting thought exercise. Please sound off in the comments with thoughts, comments, sources, etc. Also my lovely editor Lexie pointed me towards The Representation Project film “The Mask You Live In.” Check out the trailer below:
Talk soon,
Shelby (Clem is here but busy)
It's "going to therapy" as a generic catch-all term that bugs me. I'm a man who has "been to therapy" with a non-M.D. counselor (that I was lucky enough to have totally covered by my insurance). I had a discrete set of issues that I need some help with. She talked to me, offered some helpful tools, and then said we were done. It was definitely worthwhile, but only because I was already self-aware enough to know what I needed help with and how to ask. If I had just approached her and said, "I'd like therapy, please, because it's good to Do Therapy," I really wonder what I'd have gotten out of it. What is it that men are supposed to "go to therapy" FOR?
i am a therapist in training and i could not agree more. individual change is important, but so many problems that people bring to therapy in the first place did not start with them. america's mental health crisis is a systemic issue that needs to be addressed through systemic change.
also, i have lived in CO for almost 30 years. i've lived through and grieved too many shootings, starting with columbine when i was 8. the one that happened today was in my city. i am just so tired and sad. :(