Does Therapy Make Everyone Seem Like a Victim?

In Culture

In 2023, our culture is hurdling headfirst into critical race theory and the “us vs. them” “oppressed victim” mentality it brings. This is certainly happening in the more progressive parts of the US, but also to a degree right here in Idaho. For a basic understanding of CRT, check out Neil Shenvi's work.

In Counseling

Some might worry that therapy reinforces the same perspective, making everyone just a powerless victim to their parents’ foibles. Don’t therapists make people angry at their parents? Isn’t therapy about making people into “victims” or “sick people” so that they don’t have to take personal responsibility for their lives? That’s the opinion I want to address today.

Secular Psychology

First off, there is a slough of secular therapists who surely promote this very thing, jumping right on board the culture train. Undeniably, a strong wave of popular ideologies have made their way into mainstream psychology. Colossians 2:8 warns us to avoid being taken captive by deceptive popular philosophies that have sunk their claws into the culture we live in. That’s one of the reasons it’s essential for Christians to handpick a solid faith-based therapist.

Understanding Good Therapy

On the other hand, many wonderful Christian counselors will be interested in helping us understand the imprint of our childhood experiences on our development. This is not intended to remove our responsibility for our adult decisions. Rather, it brings to light the experiences that shaped our core beliefs about ourselves and the world. When these core beliefs are left in the darkness and not examined, we make decisions based on them without even realizing it, a recipe for disaster.

You see, while unexamined childhood experiences may explain poor adult decisions, they certainly do not justify poor decisions. How can this be?

As Children…

When we are young children, we have little decision-making power over our lives. The parenting style, spiritual and mental health, habits, and quirks of our parents have a profound impact on our development. We are tender, naive, and moldable. We tend to pick up coping strategies that help us survive in our particular family system. As we do this, we hold a certain childlike innocence that comes from our lack of both power and moral insight.

As Adults…

As we grow older, both our personal power and our moral understanding increase; thus, we naturally have greater accountability for our decisions. Once we reach adulthood, we have a basic understanding of right and wrong. This means that we cannot put the blame for our bad decisions on our parents or anyone else.

Nonetheless, prior to working with a counselor to understand our unconscious core beliefs, we may continue to make bad decisions without meaning to or understanding why.

As we grew into adulthood, we always had a choice as to how to behave. The problem is, we might not have even realized there was a choice. While those old coping strategies helped us survive in our family of origin, they are likely to cause damage to our own children and loved ones if we can’t recognize when we’re resorting to them. Counseling empowers us to make wise, conscious decisions that break negative family cycles.