What Pop Psychology Gets Wrong: A Simple Guide to Real Mental Wellness

I think Pop Psychology is causing more harm than good for a lot of people and their loved ones.

I also think we have the power to acknowledge this & turn it around for ourselves.

Once upon a time I loved the rise of mental health awareness across the internet. I was eating it up with everyone else, and there's still a lot to love.

I love that we're recognizing how important mental health is, and how it impacts every aspect of our lives and relationships.

I love that we're collectively working to figure out how to be more proactive and less negligent with mental, emotional, and relational wellbeing.

I love that we're discovering language to put to our individual experiences, and that we're finding community to share that language and experience with.

I love that we're finding the courage to speak our shame as we show it the door.

I love that we're finding protection in spaces we never found with our families and friend group of origin.

I love that so many people are experiencing the relief that comes with having answers and validation for the pain they've felt before. I love that they're not feeling so isolated and ashamed in that pain.

I love that we're learning the shit that happened to us wasn't our fault.

I love that we're learning to be safer and more responsible caregivers to children.

I love these things and will continue to love these things. But none of these erase the fact that there are things I find deeply troubling within the Pop Psychology & mental health spheres.

I do not love how we've integrated this information so deeply into our culture that we're therapizing & intellectualizing life and relationships in lieu of experiencing and connecting in them.

I do not love that we're taking opportunities to have human-to-human conversations that foster connection, and turning them into battlegrounds where we weaponize therapy language and play a game of "who's the abuser" when conflict shows up.

I do not love how we preach about community without learning conflict resolution skills.

I do not love how in the same breath you find validation that your ex was abusive you also find shame and doubt because you realize you've been abusive too - and now you're afraid to admit it. Because with this rise in mental health awareness has come a rise in hatred toward people who were taught to love in abusive ways.

To those of you who connect with that last point, I've been clear about this before and let me be clear again before moving on:

I have been abusive. I've "loved" and "protected" myself and loved ones in abusive ways. I was conditioned to. I had to look myself square in the mirror and call myself and "abuser" without making any excuses. I'm better for it.

To this day I have to recognize that this conditioning is still inside of me and the safest thing I can do for everyone is surround myself with safe people who can show up in safe ways with me. Otherwise we're all at risk because I'm not above a regression back into reactivity.

In short, my kindness is a choice. I am very well equipped to be deeply unkind and violent. Realizing that my tendency toward (verbal and psychological) violence wasn't as normal or righteous as I thought it was was terrifying and shameful for me.

So I also had to look at the whole picture and realize this was learned behavior that was a complete mismatch to my actual intentions. I am not, nor have I ever been, a "bad", unkind, or uncaring person who is undeserving of love and emotional safety. I have been a living example of what a person looks like when they had never in their lives experienced the true emotional safety they desperately craved and needed to lay down their weapons.

I have always intended to be loving. I was harmful instead, because reckless, controlling, and defensive harm is how I was taught to love. I had to completely deconstruct and reinvision what love means to me and what it looks like before I could let go of my own abusive patterns.

I had to say it out loud to the people around me and be met in safety in order for me to initiate that change. If I got shamed, I would've regressed right back into defensiveness and harm. I needed to be met with something new. I'm lucky to have found that.

So for those of you noticing your own abusive patterns and questioning your self-concept because of the shaming (not to be confused with accountability) that we see in Pop Psychology circles, you are not alone. I am not a bad person for following my conditioning without question for as long as I did, and neither are you.

It says more about you that you're connecting with the pain of how you've treated people, and that you're committed to healing these parts of yourself. It says more about you that you're doing the foreign and vulnerable work of learning new ways to deal with heartbreak, anger, fear, shame, and insecurity.

Please understand that healing happens in safe spaces. Shaming spaces are not safe and as a result they tend to heal nothing and hide everything that needs to be healed out of sight. Shaming spaces are also abusive spaces. Don't take advice on how to not be abusive from people who are actively abusing you.

Please know that there are people who understand all of these things and know how to challenge and support you in learning to connect and love in healthy, safe ways. Please find those people.

End rant. There are more things I do not love about Pop Psychology.

I do not love how we've sensationalized narcissism and turned it into the ultimate dirty word.

I do not love that hundreds of versions of "3 signs he's a narcissist" posts can be found on our FYP's where even actual, licensed therapists subsequently describe very common adaptive strategies that have nothing to do with the disorder itself or how it presents.

I do not love that people are starting to think that there's a narcissistic or abusive monster hiding around every corner. Every date. Every interaction with a potential new friend who happened to deflect that one time, or has a pattern of struggling to apologize, etc.

I do not love that we are afraid of making friends in a loneliness epidemic because we worry that "everyone" is unsafe or judging us, when the truth is if "everyone" is afraid of making friends then that suggests "everyone" would like to make at least one and they're probably more open to it than we realize.

A secure attachment style - if we're really going to go by the literature - is characterized by a positive view of self and others.

If you have a negative view of others and are constantly looking for evidence to be fearful of people's intentions or actions - Pop Psychology will have you turning away everyone who can support you during hard times for the sake of avoiding one hypothetical person who might cause you pain.

I do not love how Pop Psychology content often teaches us to perform a positive view of self by adopting a negative view of people who are more "toxic" than us.

And how the content itself backfires into reinforcing a negative view of self, because much of it spews hate to people doing very common, socialized things.

Even if the things we do are unhealthy or harmful, if they are commonly socialized behaviors in our environments, they are indicative of culture & conditioning. Not a person's character or cluster B disorders. But many influencers don't touch on this or appear to consider it at all.

I like that we're learning to feel our feelings and connect with our bodies. I do not like how this wave is incidentally encouraging us to spend more time feeling our feelings than getting into our lives.

I do not like how the narratives around trauma, attachment, & somatic work are inadvertently presenting these modalities as the lone missing links to finding overall happiness & emotional wellbeing when that couldn't be further from the truth for the vast majority of us.

Overall, many Pop Psychology influencers are pushing narratives that cause more people to second guess themselves, wonder if they're a narcissist (or otherwise bad person), believe they're surrounded by narcissists and ill-intentioned people, and develop an increasingly fear-based and negative worldview instead of the well-rounded, progressive, hopeful, and productive one that their audiences are actually looking for.

I resent this.

I love that more people are feeling comfortable going to therapy as a result of Pop Psychology content. I wonder how much of that session time is spent reversing the impact of the content itself.

But the kicker for me is that we're all in this for solid reasons. Ultimately, we're in it to feel whole and safe and confident and well even in community and even in tension.

And I guess I'm just ready to say out loud - as someone who's spent a lot of time participating this both as a creator and a consumer, and has likely contributed to these narratives when I haven't been careful not to:

I don't believe Pop Psychology, with whatever good it might be doing, is effectively delivering on the things we're really after.

To Feel Whole. And Safe. And Confident. And Well.

(Even in community. Even in tension).

What Will Deliver Actual Results For Our Mental Health & Wellbeing?

My experience isn't universal and my word is nobody's God, so take a gander and see how you feel about this for yourself. But when I was pulling myself out of a deep, dark night of the soul, my fyp wasn't full of Pop Psychology stuff. My IG feed wasn't swarming with Insta-therapy posts yet. I wasn't in therapy at all and never had been.

This means I started prioritizing my mental health before the craze hit those channels for me and I didn't have anyone shoving this stuff down my throat.

This was a gift I didn't realize I was getting, because I got to trust my gut and keep it simple. Not easy. But definitely simple.