16/05/2026
Psychologist Jonathan Alpert, saying similar things to Abigail Shrier: "For years, my profession has trained clinicians to elevate validation over challenge, affirmation over interpretation, and emotional fluency over the harder work of behavioral change. What has followed is the rise of grievance culture dressed up as psychological sophistication. Too many therapists now function less as clinicians than as reinforcers of the most self-protective interpretation available, teaching patients to locate the problem everywhere but themselves.
Too much of modern therapy culture keeps people stuck, reinforcing grievance, externalizing blame, and turning everyone else into the reason their lives are so miserable.
Patients leave not more capable of tolerating frustration, ambiguity, or ordinary disappointment, but less. They become more fluent in explaining why they feel the way they do while becoming less practiced at changing what they do next. And therapists are largely responsible for this phenomenon.
That same emotional habit doesn’t stay confined to the therapy office. People carry it into marriages, friendships, workplaces, and, eventually, politics."
Therapy promised Americans greater agency and insight. Instead, it delivered a more satisfying story about why someone else is to blame, writes Jonathan Alpert.
