Psychologists love your trauma (and they don’t want you to know what comes next)
Changing the way we talk about mental health
By now, you’ve probably heard the gospel of mental health: "Your trauma is valid." "Healing is a journey." Very touching. Very soft. But let’s be real—if healing were just a journey, then why does it feel like some people are still sitting in traffic with a flat tire, posting about it on Instagram, and waiting for a therapist to change it for them?
That’s because modern psychology, in all its well-meaning, lab-coated wisdom, has a bit of an addiction. Not to healing, mind you. No, no. Psychologists are in love with your wound. They want to poke it, study it, name it, and, if possible, get you to schedule biweekly sessions to talk about it forever.
The Business of Brokenness
Here’s the thing: If you actually get better, if you move from "I am traumatized" to "I am transformed," what happens to the multi-billion-dollar mental health industry? What happens to the self-help influencers who need you to keep scrolling for 5 signs your attachment style is ruining your life? What happens to the entire culture of victimhood, where status points are awarded for whoever has the most diagnosed scars?
Exactly. The system does not want you to transcend your suffering. It wants you to be emotionally aware just enough to recognize your pain, but not so much that you actually outgrow it.
Why Focus on the Wound?
Fear Keeps You Hooked – Ever notice how therapy-speak online is basically a horror movie for your self-esteem? “Unhealed trauma lives in your body.” “Your nervous system is stuck in fight-or-flight.” "That text from your ex? Probably a sign of your childhood abandonment issues." BOO! Now keep coming back for more.
Healing Is Subjective, Trauma Is Marketable – If you tell people they’re evolving into stronger, wiser beings, that’s not an easy sell. But slap a label on their pain (C-PTSD, relational OCD, self-sabotage disorder), and suddenly it’s a thing to diagnose, discuss, and treat.
Empowerment Means Less Control – If people genuinely understood that suffering is often the birthplace of badass character development, they’d stop waiting for someone to "fix" them and start creating something out of nothing. And we can’t have that, now, can we?
Jesus Would Like a Word
Look, I’m not saying psychologists are the devil. (Though some of them sure do love diagnosing people with a messiah complex.) But if Jesus were here today, He might flip some therapy couches the way He flipped those temple tables. Why? Because the modern mental health movement has forgotten something: suffering isn’t just a wound—it’s a doorway.
Some of the greatest people in history—spiritual figures, artists, revolutionaries—didn’t just sit in their pain. They used it. They saw their suffering as an invitation to something greater, not just a reason to journal and cry about their triggers.
Viktor Frankl survived the Holocaust and wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, a book about finding purpose in suffering.
Frederick Douglass was born into slavery, taught himself to read, and literally escaped oppression.
Harriet Tubman wasn’t in therapy processing her trauma—she was out there freeing people.
You think they had time to sit around and self-diagnose? No. They were too busy turning pain into power.
The Real Mental Health Revolution
Here’s the punchline. Healing isn’t just about feeling better. It’s about becoming someone stronger. It’s about taking the worst thing that happened to you and making something so good out of it that even the devil himself has to admit Damn, that’s impressive.
So, if you really want to disrupt the system, stop being just a case study of what went wrong and start being a testament to what’s possible. Heal, but don’t stop there. Build. Create. Conquer.
Because the best revenge? It’s not just happiness. It’s greatness.
Somatic trauma therapist here. No therapist in the US who takes your insurance is profiting off of you. They are lucky if they can make a living. The ones who do have a full caseload of cash pay clients are not getting rich off of their clients unless they are charging some astronomical fee like 500 an hour. Comparing therapists to self help influencers is a false equivalency. The whole Instagram mental health industrial complex is not the same beast as traditional mental health. Both have their issues, but conflating them is useless. Diagnosing is not the same as treating, it is not a label, it does not define a person, and you use diagnoses primarily to make a treatment plan. You revise your plans and goals regularly with your client. You absolutely need your trauma validated in the beginning. Many people who develop PTSD were alone or felt alone when the overwhelming thing happened to them. Many of them don’t believe they should feel the way they feel, or that something is wrong with them. Healing trauma isn’t an intellectual exercise. You need mind body interventions because part of trauma IS chronic nervous system dysregulation and you can’t talk your way out of that. A therapist who “wants to keep you stuck in your trauma” is either incredibly unskilled or a sadist. Your job, as a therapist, is to set treatment goals and meet those goals so the person can move through the world in a way that feels better to them. Your job, as a trauma therapist, is to empower your client to make meaning of their experiences and build strength and resilience. But you are never going to tell someone who suffered chronic sexual abuse as a child that their abuse “made them stronger” or tell them they are “transformed”. Those are not helpful statements and they suggest that perhaps the abuse they suffered was a good thing. Yes, there are some inspirational figures who have overcome incredible pain, oppression and trauma in their lives without any therapy, like the ones named in this article. But for the people who can’t do it on their own, holding up these figure as examples is not helpful and adds to the feeling that there is something “wrong” with them.
I do not like the ways in which social media is shaping how people self diagnose, perseverate on what is “wrong” with themselves or others, throw labels around that they misunderstand and misuse. I don’t think it’s helpful to constantly be consuming one minute reels about attachment disorders, or trauma, or depression - all of which are complex issues that get watered down with zero nuance on social media. But it’s ironic to me that this author is asserting that you don’t need an expert, while arguing that it’s those experts who are trying to keep you trapped in your pain, while using social media as proof of this phenomenon. I cannot tell you how many times I have had to debunk some mental health snippet a client saw on TikTok and tell them why it doesn’t apply to them or why it’s just completely untrue. To me, the culture of “self healing” which is usually headed up by some cult like figure, and Instagram mental health influencing, is far more damaging to people than a therapist who has invested significant time, resources and energy into their profession, and who is held accountable by their peers, their licensing boards, state laws and their clinical supervisors to behave in ethical and safe ways. That doesn’t mean there aren’t shitty therapists - there are. But to assert that the issue is “expertise” that’s forcing people to stay stuck in their trauma is misguided. It’s actually the death of expertise and the rise of simplistic thinking and platitudes that is keeping people stuck. You know. Telling people who are suffering with their mental health to heal, build, create and conquer. That’s like telling someone with a broken leg to just go run a marathon.
OK, but I think there's a line between 10 sessions of 'Let's talk about your rotten tooth' without removing it, and 'Let's pretend your tooth a.) isn't rotten and b.) is making you stronger'. I agree the ultimate goal should be to remove the rotten tooth and not spend ages talking about it and sticking your tongue in the cavity to retraumatize yourself, but in order to remove the rotten tooth we have to acknowledge that it's there, that it hurts and is a problem, and THEN set about removing it. The thing is, toxic mental nonsense isn't as easy to recognise as a rotten tooth. Trauma definitely doesn't make you stronger or add to your life in any way, neither does endlessly talking about it or victimizing yourself with it, but it DOES need to be acknowledged as the problem that it is, and we do need to learn how to soften around it and get intelligent with it BEFORE unpicking it and getting it out. 'Rah rah toughen up' or 'Rah rah let's just get over this' believe me is a mindset all of us get daily from everywhere, we don't need to be advised to follow that line when it's literally everyone's go-to. There's a happy medium, but that happy medium requires great intelligence and skill and it's going to be different for every patient, something your average therapist just isn't skilled enough (or let's face it, incentivised enough, as you point out) to do