Bad Therapy and the Crisis of Modern Counseling

Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up has struck a nerve for a reason. Whatever readers think of the book overall, it gives language to something many parents, pastors, teachers, and counselors have already sensed: much of what passes for therapy today does not look like strong, disciplined, healing care. It often looks sentimental, overly validating, ideologically shaped, and strangely incapable of helping people become sturdier in real life.

That is why the book has been so difficult to dismiss.

Some critics of Shrier say she paints with too broad a brush, and there is truth to that. Therapy, properly practiced, can be deeply effective. Good counseling exists. Many people are helped by careful, ethical, evidence-informed treatment. But that is not the whole issue. The deeper problem is that bad therapy has become common enough, visible enough, and culturally influential enough that many people understandably confuse it with the field itself.

In other words, Shrier may overstate her case in places, but she is not wrong to see that bad therapy has become the public face of therapy for many people.

That should concern counselors far more than the tone of her critique.

Why This Book Resonates

Books do not create this kind of reaction unless they name something people already feel. Bad Therapy resonates because people have watched therapeutic language spread into nearly every area of life. Schools use it. Parenting advice uses it. Social media uses it. Entire institutions now assume that distress should be interpreted primarily through the categories of mental health, emotional safety, and personal validation.

Some of that shift has been good. Greater awareness of anxiety, depression, trauma, and legitimate psychological suffering has helped reduce stigma and encouraged more people to seek help. That matters. But the expansion of therapy language has also created confusion. Not every painful emotion is pathology. Not every difficult memory is trauma in the clinical sense. Not every inner struggle needs a diagnostic label or a therapeutic explanation.

That confusion is part of what Shrier is reacting to.

Her concern is not only that therapy exists, but that therapeutic assumptions now shape how people interpret ordinary human experience. Emotional discomfort gets treated as evidence of injury. Introspection gets treated as maturity. The language of wounds becomes central to identity. And in many settings, young people are being trained to monitor themselves constantly rather than learning how to endure, adapt, repent, grieve, and grow.

That critique resonates because many people have seen exactly that. They have watched adolescents become increasingly fluent in mental health language without becoming more resilient. They have watched adults use therapeutic vocabulary to explain everything while taking responsibility for very little. They have seen counseling become, in some circles, less about healing and more about validating a person’s preferred narrative.

That should not be dismissed as anti-therapy. It should be taken seriously.

The Strongest Part of Shrier’s Argument

The most compelling part of Bad Therapy is not the suggestion that therapy never works. It is the claim that a distorted therapeutic culture can undermine growth.

That is a much stronger point.

When therapy becomes untethered from any serious vision of maturity, it can drift into helping people become endlessly self-aware without becoming stronger, freer, or more capable. A person may become highly articulate about emotions, triggers, and personal history while remaining deeply fragile in everyday life. The therapist may be warm, empathic, and affirming, while the client remains stuck in avoidance, passivity, or dependence.

That is one reason the phrase “bad therapy” lands so powerfully. It names something more subtle than obvious malpractice. Bad therapy is not always cruel or incompetent. Sometimes it is kind, emotionally intelligent, and deeply attuned. The problem is that it does not actually move the client toward greater maturity. Instead, it can train the client to stay turned inward, interpret every difficulty therapeutically, and rely more heavily on the counseling relationship itself.

This is one reason Christian counselors should not be too quick to distance themselves from the critique. If therapy is making clients more fragile, more self-protective, more emotionally preoccupied, or more dependent on the therapist, then something has gone badly wrong.

When Bad Therapy Defines the Field

One of the easiest ways to answer Shrier is to say, “That is not real therapy.” There is some truth in that. Bad therapy should not define the profession. But that response also avoids the harder issue.

For many people, that is what therapy now looks like.

What the public often sees is not focused, careful, goal-directed care. What they see is a model shaped by constant validation, emotional overattention, identity language, and blurry relational boundaries. They see therapists who seem more interested in affirming a client’s subjective experience than helping the client build the strength to face reality. They see counseling presented as an endless process of self-exploration rather than a serious effort toward healing and growth.

That perception matters. Even if it does not represent the best of the field, it often represents the most visible parts of it.

And this is where the profession needs greater honesty. The problem is not merely that outsiders misunderstand therapy. The problem is that parts of the field have tolerated weak, sentimental, and ideologically distorted forms of counseling long enough that the public now treats them as normal.

That means the answer cannot simply be to defend therapy in the abstract. The answer must be to recover a much clearer distinction between good therapy and bad therapy.

Good Therapy Is Not the Therapist Becoming the Client’s Best Friend

One of the clearest signs of bad therapy is when the counselor begins to feel like the client’s best friend, safest relationship, or primary source of emotional stability. That may feel caring in the moment, but it often reveals a serious distortion in the work.

Good therapy is relational, but it is not friendship.

The therapeutic relationship matters greatly. Clients need trust, empathy, honesty, and attunement. But the relationship is not the goal. It is the vehicle. Its purpose is to help the client grow into greater freedom, not greater attachment to the therapist.

That distinction has been badly confused in some corners of the field. Some therapists now seem to act as though the central task is preserving emotional safety, sustaining rapport, and making sure the client feels validated at every turn. But therapy that never challenges, never confronts, and never disrupts a client’s preferred story is unlikely to help very much.

A therapist should care deeply. A therapist should not become indispensable.

If the counseling relationship becomes the place where the client feels most understood, most organized, and most emotionally held, but life outside the counseling room is not changing, something is wrong. Therapy is supposed to equip the client for life beyond therapy. It is supposed to help them develop inner strength, relational wisdom, practical competence, and the ability to function without ongoing therapeutic dependence.

That is one of the clearest differences between good therapy and bad therapy: good therapy gradually makes itself less necessary.

Therapy Should Build Competence, Not Dependency

Support is not the same thing as healing.

A person can feel profoundly supported in therapy and still be no more capable of confronting conflict, tolerating distress, setting boundaries, or bearing responsibility. They may leave sessions soothed and understood while remaining fundamentally unprepared for real life. That is not therapeutic success. It is a version of care that has become detached from growth.

Good therapy should build competence.

It should help clients tell the truth more clearly, face avoided realities, regulate themselves more effectively, act with greater courage, and live with more grounded stability. It should not simply make them feel seen. It should make them stronger.

This is where some forms of contemporary therapy go off course. Validation becomes the highest good. Challenge gets treated with suspicion. Emotional safety becomes so central that therapists hesitate to name distortions, immaturity, irresponsibility, or avoidance. Clients are helped to understand themselves, but not necessarily helped to govern themselves.

That may feel compassionate, but it is often shallow compassion. It avoids the discomfort of growth.

Real care sometimes requires challenge. Real healing often requires a person to confront what is painful, change what is disordered, grieve what has been lost, and take responsibility for what is theirs to carry. Therapy that cannot move in that direction will often produce emotional dependence rather than real transformation.

The Problem of Ideology

Another reason Shrier’s critique has force is that many people have watched therapy become increasingly shaped by ideology. Counselors today often work within a broader climate in which social analysis, identity categories, and political frameworks can begin to overshadow the actual task of healing.

This needs nuance. Social context matters. Family systems matter. Injustice matters. Wise counselors should care about all of that. But it is possible for therapy to become so shaped by ideological assumptions that it begins to interpret the client more through a cultural framework than through the actual goals of care.

When that happens, therapy can drift away from healing and toward identity reinforcement. The counselor may become more concerned with helping the client adopt a certain explanation for suffering than with helping the client become more grounded, responsible, and free. The result is often more explanation, but not more growth.

That is one reason many people have become skeptical of the profession. They do not just see therapy as emotionally indulgent. They see it as culturally captured.

Whether that judgment is always fair is not the point. The point is that it has become plausible because some counseling really does feel more focused on affirmation and ideological alignment than on helping people heal.

Why Christian Counselors Should Pay Attention

Christian counselors should care deeply about this conversation because the field cannot be renewed without a clearer vision of what human growth actually is.

If therapy has no serious goal beyond helping people feel understood, it will inevitably drift. It will be shaped by the values of the surrounding culture, whether those values are emotional comfort, identity expression, or ideological conformity. Without a stronger vision of maturity, therapy becomes vulnerable to exactly the distortions Shrier is criticizing.

Christian counselors have resources for a better way.

A biblical view of personhood makes room for suffering, grief, weakness, fear, confusion, and trauma. It does not minimize pain. But it also refuses to make pain the center of identity. Human beings are more than symptoms, more than social categories, and more than their wounds. We are embodied souls called to truth, wisdom, love, endurance, repentance, responsibility, and hope before God.

That gives counseling a clearer aim.

The goal is not merely emotional expression. It is not endless self-analysis. It is not perpetual validation. The goal is growth into maturity. That includes insight, but also courage. It includes compassion, but also truthfulness. It includes care for wounds, but also the strengthening of agency. It includes the healing of suffering, but also the formation of character.

That does not make Christian counseling anti-clinical. It makes it more complete. It allows counselors to value evidence-based care while resisting the reduction of persons to symptoms, identities, or ideological narratives.

A Better Response to Bad Therapy

The best response to Shrier is not defensiveness. It is clarity.

Yes, therapy can be deeply effective.

Yes, many people are genuinely helped by counseling.

But yes, bad therapy has become common enough that it often defines the field in the public imagination.

That means counselors need to recover several things: diagnostic restraint so ordinary suffering is not constantly medicalized, stronger boundaries so the therapeutic relationship does not become a substitute for growth, greater courage to challenge clients rather than merely affirm them, and a clearer focus on healing over ideology.

Most importantly, counselors need a clearer vision of maturity. Therapy should not make people more fragile. It should help them become more resilient. It should not make them more dependent on being understood. It should help them live with greater strength and clarity. It should not turn the therapist into the center of the client’s emotional life. It should help the client build a life that no longer revolves around the therapy room.

If Bad Therapy pushes the field to face those questions more honestly, then even where it overreaches, it may still do the profession a service.

If you want to read Bad Therapy for yourself, you can purchase it here:
https://amzn.to/4lKMkaw

And if you want deeper reflection on counseling, clinical wisdom, and Christ-centered therapeutic practice, join the Remnant Counselor Collective.

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