What Pop Psychology Gets Wrong: A Simple Guide to Real Mental & Emotional Wellness
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.
This article was originally published on ToriReid.org.
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 re-invision 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.
To me, improving and maintaining mental wellness is a lot like improving and maintaining physical wellness.
The M.O. is to stop doing shit that's bad for our health (like eating a whole pizza for dinner 3 times a week), and start doing things that are good for it (like consuming whole foods and working out).
I find the same to be true for mental health.
I made a full commitment to stop participating in things that were bad for my mental health (I let my gut guide me here, NOT influencers).
And I filled that new space with things that were good for my mental health (again, I trusted my intuition on this. I wasn't in therapy yet).
Bit by bit I would just notice things I identified as "bad" for me or "good" for me, based on how they impacted me, and I would start cutting them out or adding them in accordingly.
This was my entire job as a functioning adult. Everything else in my life fit within this umbrella of "good" or "bad" for my mental health. Neutral was ok too.
With each change, I found myself feeling emotionally lighter, more confident, more trusting of myself and even others, proud of the progress I was making, and so on.
This simple solution won't cover everything. There is still space for attachment work, trauma work, and the like and I'll get to that in a minute. But 80% of what's helped me hasn't been any of that and it feels really important to say this plainly right now.
80% of my problems were handled with this simple truth and my quality of life and overall wellbeing had the most dramatic improvements based on this more than anything else.
"But what if I'm diagnosed with X?"
Again, it's just like physical health. If I have type 1 diabetes, this of course will add complications for my physical wellbeing. Still, I will suffer more and worsen my symptoms if I don't practice a healthy lifestyle at baseline.
And I will suffer less if I do practice a healthy lifestyle. In fact I'd argue it's even more important for someone with type 1 to practice a healthy lifestyle. They don't have as much room to wiggle on that as many of the rest of us.
The same is true for mental health diagnoses. For example, I'm diagnosed with clinical depression (among other things) and have never been medicated. My symptoms are worse when I fall off of this commitment to prioritize my mental health.
When I do things that are bad for my mental health that I wasn't doing before, my depression shows up and alerts me to that. I can get to a very dangerous place if I don't correct my patterns because my lifestyle and practices play a huge role in feeding or starving the depression.
But when I do things that are good for my mental health and cut out things that aren't good for it? I'll go years without suicidal ideation. I'll fuck around and forget I'm depressed to be honest. Not because the symptoms are non-existent, but they're much more subtle to the point where they're not taking over my life.
Prioritizing mental health as someone with diagnoses means I have to stay consistent with seeing my mental health as my #1 priority to stay alive. Maybe so do you.
The same is true for autistic meltdowns and overstimulation. The same is true for the dumpster fire of an attention span and executive dysfunction that come with my ADHD.
My lifestyle dictates a lot about how intensely these symptoms show up and how deeply they impact me. No amount of trauma therapy or attachment work is going to change my lifestyle choices on my behalf or make them matter less. I have to prioritize them. Period.
No matter what your diagnosis is, physical or mental - this is how health works in general.
Do things that are good for it. Stop doing things that are bad for it. Period. That's the bulk of the work.
Why is all of this other stuff being pushed then?
It's still really valuable it just has its (much smaller) lane.
Trauma therapy can help us remove some serious blocks to unlock "next levels" of things. We can overcome a shock trauma and be able to drive cars again after an accident, or it might help us experience deeper emotional intimacy in our relationships to reprocess some relational trauma.
But trauma therapy doesn't dictate our baseline mental & emotional wellbeing. It doesn't make up for choices in our lifestyle that we need to make to manage that aspect of our lives.
Somatic practices can help us become very well attuned and strengthen our regulation for sure. This can make it easier to make some otherwise dysregulating and scary choices to improve our quality of life and wellbeing. No doubt.
But Somatic work won't make the baseline mental-wellness lifestyle choices for you and it won't make it "easy". Doable, but not easy. You have to do that independently and it will take effort.
Attachment theory can tell you a lot about what a healthy attachment looks like and help you develop a healthier view of relationships. It will give you practices for this and it can have a really solid impact on your wellbeing.
You still have to practice it in order for it to work though. You have to choose to practice secure attachment as a part of doing something that's good for your mental health.
So these things are helpful. Yes. AND, there is no therapy out there in which you can reprocess trauma and old memories really quick and suddenly find yourself experiencing your personal pinnacle of mental wellbeing, etc.
Because mental and emotional wellness is a practice. Not a product.
I would bet money that you can transform your mental and emotional wellbeing in any area of your life that's being impacted by sitting down with your own internal system and asking yourself two questions:
"What have I been participating in that's bad for my mental health?"
"What can I participate more in that's good for my mental health?"
And commit to developing a practice of stopping the bad, and doing more of the good, at the same time. Step by step.
"At the same time" is critical.
On one hand, I've had multiple clients come to me confused about why their self care routines aren't singlehandedly helping them feel better.
I respond with some version of my love. It's great that you're hitting the gym every morning. But if you’re still filling up on junk it's going to impede your progress.
Only I give them the "mental health" version.
Yes, you've started Yoga and coaching and you're taking mental health walks and you're journaling and that is beautiful. Keep that up. But none of that is going to cover up the stench of the things you're still participating in that are hurting you. You have to cut those out, too.
And this isn't just about "cutting people off" and setting boundaries with others.
A surprising number of our most critical boundaries are with ourselves. Small and large.
For example:
I had to stop blaming everyone else and the system for my life. It was bad for my health and fueled my sense of helplessness and resentment. I wanted and needed to feed my sense of competency to overcome the challenges sitting in front of me. Fixating on who's to blame doesn't help me with that. Including blaming myself.
I had to stop participating in the back-stabbing, gossippy culture I was a part of. It tainted my worldview to see people pretend to be friends just talk trash about each other behind their backs and betray each other in more harmful ways.
I **had to start filtering who I allowed myself to receive feedback from. It's bad for my mental health to care so much about the opinions of people who don't know me well enough to have an opinion. This includes people on the internet who do not have a worldview I envy in the slightest, and have no interest in adopting their opinions in general. Let alone internalizing their opinions of me.
I had to stop ruminating on problems and grow confident in my ability to find healthy solutions.
I had to refuse to continue being reactive and learn how to share anger and frustration in a healthy way. This helped me realize conflict doesn't have to be a fight. It can actually be an opportunity for connection. There is such a thing as a respectful argument. There is such a thing as loving conflict. This was astounding for my mental health. I couldn't have believed it without trying it on for size myself.
I had to choose on my own accord to stop looking at peoples' behavior through such a cynical lens and learn to see that most people aren't actually ill intentioned or trying to give anybody a hard time. Behavior can be really trash, but the human behind it is usually very good. When trash behavior shows up, we're usually just having a hard time together. If the hard time persists, chances are we're just at a loss for how to deal with it or we're not a good fit. The story is usually not that anyone's evil or narcissistic or bad or fucked up.
I had to stop taking things personally and let peoples' behavior be about their own conditioning - just like my behavior turned out to be about my own.
I had to practice forgiveness and acceptance in place of holding a grudge. That shit was heavy and not good for my mental health.
The list goes on.
When I say I stopped participating in things that were bad for my mental health, about half of it was going down a list of my own automatic beliefs and thought patterns and asking myself, "is the way I'm thinking about this good for my mental health?"
If the answer was "no", I had to discard it and retrain my thinking. Find a different truth that fit, and felt more productive and regulating for me.
This took work. A LOT of work. Especially in the beginning when my ego was more sensitive about it. It was not fun to prove myself so wrong about so many things I was used to feeling so "right" about, but it was deeply rewarding in the end.
I had to choose between my ego's need to be "right" about how fucked up everything was and stay where I was, or to finally let myself be "happy" and let all of that cynicism and misery go.
It turned out that when I chose happiness, I gave myself and everyone else around me more space to be "right" (valid) in their own experience of things.
More on that here: The Power of Taking Things Personally (Or Not)
It feels so much better in this space I'd do it again a million times.
Self care alone didn't save me. I had to cut the junk. I had to let stuff go that I was attached to because - when I finally asked if it was good for me to hold onto it - it turned out the answer was "no".
Eventually it got easier to come to terms with letting old beliefs go that were protecting me, because every time I did, life got better. I felt better. The literal moment the initial discomfort or pain is over from cutting the junk out, I found the relief I'd been seeking.
I felt the progress as it happened. If you're like me, you will too. You'll feel a little lighter, a little more confident, a little more self trust and respect, step by step. I truly believe this.
✋🏽 And if you want support with developing new perspectives that will help you, that's literally what I'm here for. Book a free call with me to see if we're a good fit.
On the other hand, I've also had clients who've been great about cutting the junk but still weren't happy. They were very rigid about boundary setting and cutting people out wondering why they don't feel happier yet from making all these changes.
Wondering why they just feel isolated and angry now. To which I share that it's time for you to intentionally fill that space with things that are good for your mental health.
Boundaries and Self Care don't work separately. We have to do both.
I too had to prioritize things that supported my mental health and wellbeing, and fill my day with those things as I cut out the bad.
Many of these are relational. Few things help us find safety in relationship better than focusing on having more supportive, balanced, generative, and regulated social interactions.
We can choose to contribute the energy we want in our social interactions. If I want to experience more hope, support, softness, positivity, etc. in my conversations with people - I show up that way.
On more than one occasion I've found myself pleasantly surprised to find the other person meet me there when I wasn't expecting them to. (I think the not expecting anything in return piece is important, but it does happen).
If I wanted to see people in a more positive light, I started looking for evidence that their intentions were good. It wasn't difficult to find. Most people have good intentions even if they have bad form.
This helped me feel better. Like no one's out to get me or betray me. We'll make mistakes but, if all our intentions are good, we'll follow through on those and try to work it out. This is my most treasured relational self-fulfilling prophecy. Much better than the ones about "they're going to hurt me".
But many of the "good for your mental health" items are also basic quality-of-life things. While relational stuff really helps with connection, few things build confidence, self respect, and self trust like simply focusing on improving your quality of life and seeing yourself make strides in that.
Many of us who suffered complex trauma were literally not taught how to take care of ourselves as functioning adults. In fact many of us were conditioned to resent the idea of doing so because it looked like fighting for our lives in the past. This was a part of the neglect of childhood.
We do not have to continue the neglect in adulthood.
Learning to want to take better care of yourself is TOP TIER EXCELLENT for your mental health.
Meaning, I take care of myself simply because it is good for my mental health. Not because I'm "supposed" to. Not because it "looks good". Not even because I "have" to. In fact, those are poor motivators for me. I become self-neglectful when those are my motivators.
But when "it's good for my mental health" is my motivator, no problem.
Weird, right? Not really.
When we neglect taking care of ourselves we're doing it to find some relief from the stress.
When we take care of ourself to feel better (because it's good for our mental health), we're ALSO finding relief from the stress. Just in ways we don't beat ourselves up about later and make us feel better about ourselves in the end.
I do it because I feel fucking better about myself when I do, and I like feeling better about myself.
Waiting to feel better about myself before I start taking care of myself has never worked. Taking better care of myself for healthy reasons inevitably results in me feeling better about myself in the end.
Not only that but this is when I learned taking care of myself isn't all stress & responsibility.
We literally have the agency to design our lives almost however we want.
I think that's pretty cool.
Taking care of myself is also giving myself friends and fun and hobbies.
Taking care of myself is giving myself the experience of fresh clean sheets are you kidding me?
Taking care of myself meant finally overcoming my fear of the gym (and being hella proud of myself for doing so because it was really scary for me fr).
And finally getting into martial arts after wishing to my entire life before that.
Taking care of myself is doing work in a profession that exercises my gifts and feels fulfilling to me.
Taking care of myself is building healthy relationships with myself and the people around me.
Taking care of myself is learning how to be loving to others without forgetting myself. And loving to myself without forgetting that I love others.
Taking care of myself meant refusing to set myself up to stress about money, and choosing to dig myself out of the financial hole I was in because it was terrible for my mental health to live there.
This is just to name a few.
All of these choices to take better care of myself were so, so good for my mental health and improved my quality of life. As my quality of life improved, the ease with which I was able to experience life also deepened.
As a child, taking care of myself was hard, and scary, and I was under-supported and didn't have guidance.
As an adult, taking care of myself is whatever I make it. I'm glad I learned that I get to make it enjoyable and rewarding if I want to.
If you struggle with this, I highly recommend you find your version of this. I imagine it might be good for your mental health and you'll be glad you did.
Integrate This
If you've been in a bad place or noticed yourself struggling more this past couple of years - that is natural and normal. The world feels very chaotic for a lot of us. A lot of heartbreaking and scary shit is going on, even outside of our personal lives. And Pop Psychology isn't to blame for that. It's an "everything" thing - or it feels that way because that's the narrative we're consuming and committing to.
I feel very confident that integrating what I'm talking about here can make a pretty immediate impact. I had to re-commit and refresh on this this year myself and it was well worth it.
Action Items
The Commitment:
"I'm only participating in things that are good for my mental health, and cutting out things that are bad for it. This is my #1 priority from here on out."
Write it on a mirror. Then answer these two questions and reflect on them ongoing. This is a practice. Just like physical health. We see big improvements then ongoing maintenance work.
What are you participating in that's bad for your mental health? Work to remove your participation in those areas. Including the narratives you think up, because you really don't have to commit to them just because they invite you to.
What's good for your mental health that you can do more of? Relationally? Taking care of yourself/improving your quality of life? It could be as simple as making your bed. Listen to your system and trust your intuition about this.
I'm rooting for you,
Tori