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For Progressives, Therapy Is Church
There’s a weird advice-columnist habit.
Go to any hip, forward-thinking online publication and look over their advice columns. It’s mostly what you’d expect: etiquette, “self-care,” and injunctions to stop keeping secrets from your spouse. Run-of-the-mill agony-aunt fare, not so different from “Dear Abby” or “Miss Manners.”
But if someone writes in with a serious problem, they get two answers instead of one. The columnist makes their suggestion, but also says, “You should talk to a therapist about this.” The psychotherapist has the real answers. You can trust them to lighten the load of your distress and give you even better guidance than the columnist.
On one level, it’s basic ass-covering. “Here’s my advice, but in case I’m wrong you should ask someone else and do what they say, not me.” But why is the go-to fallback line “talk to a psychotherapist,” not “ask a trusted family member” or “journal about it?”
Advice columnists, like most media professionals, are almost uniformly college-educated liberal Democrats who live in deep-blue big cities in solid-blue states. Their job is literally to tell other members of their class how to act in their daily lives. So, you can assume that they understand the ins and outs of the affluent liberal psyche and value system better than nearly anyone else. When they have…