You Should Not Be Okay Unless the Collective is Okay.

Musings on the harm of western therapeutic practice, nihilism, and our duty to one another.

[this is a bit all over the place, but]

In my own experience with therapy in the western hemisphere as well as my home on the other side of the world, I often found myself leaving therapy unfulfilled. I have had multiple therapists, but this lack of fulfillment seemed to be a common denominator between them all. From my experience in therapy, I realised that there is not only an immense focus placed on yourself, but on yourself as an individual who is somehow separate from the mixture of external factors that influence — even determine — your mental health. It’s more about what journaling prompts I can use to cope with my problems instead of actually fixing my problems.

Being aware of the many problems that plague our society on both a local and global scale is enough to tip anyone off the edge. And being prescribed a day off from work or school, a warm shower, ten minutes of meditation, and five minutes of journaling everyday are classic cases of treating the symptom rather than the problem.

This is because western therapeutic practices are rooted in hyper-individuality. And there is much to be said about licensed therapists in modern capitalist countries, Ismatu Gwendolyn, one of my favourite writers on this platform — wrote about this better than I could in her essay Therapists Are Also the Police: Social Work, Sex Work, and the Politics of Deservingness.

Under capitalism, the idea of expertise is designed to destabilize community and community knowledge. This is not to say that experts of their craft are bad, not to be trusted, or shouldn’t exist— I am very pro-expert. It is to say that there is far more than one way to be an expert. There are multiple ways of knowing. The “see a therapist” cry posits that we are not, cannot, should not be responsible for each other’s well-being. I could not agree less. Most of the wounds that I work on with clients happened in community: in family systems, churches, schooling, other governing bodies. Our individual problems reflect the issues we have as bodies of people. Knowing this, I am then of the opinion that seeing a therapist and healing individually, while helpful for understanding oneself and learning coping mechanisms that you really do need to survive this world, only go so far.

In light of the recent events, I found myself and those around me to be similarly distraught. We are angry, scared, mostly hopeless but clinging on to the bit of hope we have. But also we are aware that we are having nothing but a normal, human, response to witnessing broadcasted large-scale human suffering and destruction. And it is imperative that we hold onto our humanity in times like this.

I recently learnt about therapeutic practice in China from study conducted in 1973- and it is almost entirely contrary to the hyper-individualistic Western-style therapy I am used to. The study relayed that therapy in China is grounded in these four principals:

1. The belief in subordinating the feelings of the individual to the needs of the group of which he is a memberthe family, the classroom, the commune, the entire society.

2. The belief that the individual is part of something larger than himself, the revolution, and that this revolution will ultimately be victorious.

3. The belief that participation in an ultimately victorious revolution gives meaning and joy to life, even if the road to revolution is paved with personal sacrifice.

4. The belief in the infinite capacity of man to learn, to modify his thinking, to understand the world around him.

There is a clear focus on the collective, “something larger than the self”, and this approach seeks to embed a deep sense of purpose in patients. It combats the rather nihilistic narrative I see rampant in the country I reside in that so many citizens here feel as though they are politically useless, as though nothing they can say or do can make meaningful change. The model of therapy outlined in the study places an emphasis on revolutionary optimism - the radical belief that things can change and the subsequent desire to be an active participant in making positive change.

I truly believe nihilism is poisonous and that the only way to combat this paralysing nihilism is revolutionary optimism, and your therapist will not give that to you.

Neither will turning a blind eye to humanitarian crises in the name of self-care, no matter how tempting it is to just shut off your phone. It is a selfish act (though not always immoral), and to do it continuously detaches you from the collective, from your fellow humans calling out your name and begging for help. Prioritising the self is what western therapeutic practices teach you to do, but how can one truly be okay when the collective is suffering greatly? Why would one desire to be happy while the your fellow humans are suffering greatly?

It has everything to do with what you are taught your purpose is. If we are constantly told to prioritise ourselves, protect our peace, and that the atrocities being inflicted upon those who may not be in our immediate surroundings have nothing to do with us, then it is out of the question why we do not feel we have a duty to one another. There is no ‘Individual’ who exists separate from broader society. The aim henceforth must be to recognise we morally owe it to each other to constantly try to make the world a better place.

In times where I see nihilism to run rampant — particularly amongst my white peers — I am reminded of something Antonio Gramsci had written in his Letters From Prison, “My own state of mind synthesises these two feelings and transcends them: my mind is pessimistic, but my will is optimistic. Whatever the situation, I imagine the worst that could happen in order to summon up all my reserves and will power to overcome every obstacle.”

It preaches something very Nietzschean, the inevitability of pessimism (or in Nietzsche’s case, nihilism) when you reckon with the world around you, and the importance of overcoming that and emerging from it optimistic. I am unfortunately not championing the movement of revolutionary optimism, as I find myself to be quite pessimistic a lot of the times, but it is something I am trying to fight.