we're all somehow on a "healing" journey

idk what i'm supposed to be healing from

Go to therapy. This video was sponsored by BetterHelp. You’re getting lovebombed. Heal your inner child. Emotional manipulation. Are you self-regulating? Are you healing? Meditate on it. Microdose. Journal about it. Daddy issues. Fear of abandonment. Therapy is a green flag, date him. Not the guy you like, that one’s a narcissist. Boundaries. Anxiously attached. Avoidant. Triggers. Optimize your soul until it’s a Swiss watch. Learn so much about your feelings you stop feeling anything at all. One step sideways, and it’s your fault. We warned you, silly woman!

It’s all starting to sound the same. I can’t tell what anything is anymore: words blend together into something incoherent, annoying, and too abstract for me to care. I don’t think you’re trying to help me — I think you’re trying to commodify my human nature.

(I’d like to preface this post by saying in no way, shape, or form am I making light of or discrediting therapy and other mental health and self-help practices. The following is a critique of how the above has been culturally and socially commercialized and made into an abstract panacea for all our problems.)

No matter where I turn, I see screaming red banners pointing at me yelling in all-caps that everything I’m feeling, doing, and thinking is wrong. Fundamentally broken and in need of repair. Could be — or should be improved. Outsourced, ideally. And I, too, have been both a victim and perpetrator of the emotional commodity complex: a certain conviction that my current state of being is a pathology, a wound to treat rather than part of my mostly average, mostly human experience. Where have I been wounded? Still have yet to find out. Something about my childhood, allegedly.

I needed answers. I was trying to understand why certain things in my life don’t seem to work or change: seek out the kind of wisdom and governance of my feelings that would grant me the life that I want, the friends that I want, the partner that I want. Maybe even a better ass and dewier skin. That’s what they promised, right? Heal and have better relationships. Heal and you will be attracted to the right people. Heal and your mental health will improve. But on my third therapist and a dozen questionable self-help books later, I saw that much of the work I perceived as meaningful and intrinsically intellectual wasn’t changing my life in the way I had been promised it would. It felt surface-level. Felt more like running from something rather than towards it. Most of what I was trying to run from — that is, as it turned out, the absurdity and chaos of the human experience that doesn’t care if you learn the entire DSM-5 front to back — was steering the wheel in the opposite direction, commodifying every grain of thought I’m having at any given time. I thought that if I did enough self-work, eventually, by some happenstance, I would start living better. Did that happen?

I now must turn to the camera and break the Substack fourth wall. Narrator’s voice: safe to say that after spending a good portion of her time healing herself, she hasn’t, unfortunately, started living better. She still has a bad relationship with money and food. She still has trouble turning acquaintances into friends or finding the “right” kind of men. She’s still perpetually lonely and single. She still hates herself a little more than she cares to admit. The only difference is that now she’s equipped with the right therapy jargon to give each one of her pathologies a name and a pattern. *Insert a laugh track from your favorite shitty sitcom.*

live laugh heal

The idea that healing is something we can all universally benefit from implies a certain singular state of being that is holistic, morally superior, and unshakeable; and yet all of us, regardless of our upbringing, starting points, and unique circumstances, somehow failed to get there. Suspicious, isn’t it? It also suggests that reaching that state simply by living and learning —and sometimes not learning at all— without external tools, often expensive ones, is impossible. Everything you do must have an underlying desire to optimize yourself out of the negative and into the positive. To be healed is to be free of whatever is holding you back, be that your sadness, grief, heartbreak. In The Loss of Sadness, Horwitz and Wakefield (2007) argue how the medicalization of emotions like sadness has expanded the boundaries of what’s classified as a mental health problem. This has paved the way for the self-help industry to exploit this expansion, treating normal emotional states as problems needing intervention. Not only have we completely denounced the emotional chaos we all come prepackaged with, but we’re also now feeling a great amount of guilt and shame for not feeling good all the time. Sharing your pain with people is now “trauma dumping” or “oversharing” — unless it’s on a sofa and with a $150/hour therapy price tag.

The oversimplification is part of the problem. All the knowledge and real psychological terms that were initially developed with good intentions have since been chewed up and spat out by self-help enthusiasts on the internet eager to diagnose you and the people in your life with conditions you barely qualify for. It’s gotten to such a ridiculous degree where now we’re all magically collectively dating (and recovering from) narcissists, all share the same neuroses and traumas, all getting lovebombed, are all anxiously attached and highly sensitive. It’s as if we’re yet to consider we’re all just… people. I mean, if being a person is a pathology, sure, quarantine me.

At a certain point, you have to question whether your pure and innocent (and also very human) desire to become a better person and understand yourself deeper is being actively monetized and preyed upon. Bröckling (2016) in The Entrepreneurial Self argues that neoliberalism encourages individuals to perpetually optimize themselves, seeing our lives as businesses in need of continuous management and efficiency. "The imperative of self-optimization implies that individuals are always seen as incomplete, constantly striving to reach an ever-elusive state of perfection." It’s honestly not surprising that the self-help community often feels like a cult or a ponzi scheme; By seeing ourselves as a continuous self-improvement project, we enter into a cycle of inadequacy, taking our genuine well-being away in favor of getting to the very top of the healing mountain when we don’t even know what that pinnacle looks or feels like. And we’ll happily pay for it, too. To be fixed is to be saved, and you better damn know the best solutions will cost you money.

I get why we’re drawn to it, though. The idea that ultimate healing 1) exists and 2) is accessible can be addictive, as it gives you a comforting safety cushion to rely on when something isn’t going your way. It’s a honey-coated explanation for why bad things happen without having to accept that the world is simply not an ideal or a fair place, people don’t act as they’re told, and things don’t happen on cue. We’re so mortified by the assumption our lives will never be the way we envision, never reach the point of eternal bliss, we turn to something abstract, purely conceptual, and within our grasp to help us get some relief — whilst fully understanding that whatever we’re trying to do may be obsolete as there’s never a timeline for “healing”. Have you noticed? You are promised a better life, better people, better experiences; you’re just not given any concrete instructions, details, or a timeframe. Go figure.

all your fault, all your mess

Your healing is your business. It’s seen as a personal responsibility performed in isolation — a byproduct of our hyper-individualist existence under neoliberal values, stripping us of the autonomy to make collective change. It’s an insidious little practice. Lonely and single? That’s certainly not because of your 50-hour work week and a lack of third places. You just have a communication problem and deep-set abandonment issues. Bombarded with unrealistic beauty standards and haunted by Em Rata’s paparazzi shots? Must work on self-perception and keep that body dysmorphia of yours in check. Your coworkers don’t take you seriously because you’re too young or a woman and it makes you want to crawl out of your skin? Impostor syndrome, baby! Bröckling (2016) critiques the neoliberal emphasis on individual responsibility and self-management, which aligns with the self-help industry’s message that success and well-being are solely individual matters: "The self-help industry propagates the idea that personal success and well-being are the results of individual effort and the correct application of specific techniques, reflecting the broader neoliberal ethos.”

In her post Life Under Capitalism is Monotonous, Ayesha Khan writes: “They aim to “treat” you in isolation, with no sociopolitical context which makes it hard for you to understand the roots of your problems.” Sadness and loneliness are easily addressed with medication, breathing techniques, and podcasts, instead of looked into as symptoms of a dysfunctional society that refuses to address its hostility and impossible standards of living; a shift that completely diverts attention from the social contexts that contribute to our emotions. Now you just feel crazier and worse. And so does everybody else. Individually.

If we’re all broken by design and supposedly suffering from the same problems, then we must look at the common denominator here – either the environment we’re operating under is the thing that’s broken, or none of us are actually faulty and we’re being marketed expensive solutions to problems that don’t exist. I’m inclined to believe both of these can be true at the same time. Instead of letting our universal negative emotions and experiences unite us relationally, we let them separate and incubate us in search of a cure. This benefits the self-help industry and diverts responsibility from the collective onto individuals.

Now, I don’t want this to be taken the wrong way — I would never discredit spiritual healing as an ancient practice; I acknowledge that therapy and certain self-help tools can save lives. I know that certain proven methodologies can do absolute wonders for a bothered mind and an aching heart. I simply despise how we’ve learned to see these matters as an end-all-be-all, isolated, and oversimplified solution you have to partake in if you want a chance at a good life. While I think finding ways to make yourself feel better and more equipped to deal with the world is always a good idea and should never be frowned upon, it’s crucial to draw the line between self-help as a mechanism and a stupid, vapid, blanket statement attempt to fix something that never needed fixing. And then guilt-trip others into doing the same.

I sigh. Big time. Isn’t life hard enough as is without the added pressure of healing and working on myself? Must I be wondering whether every man I’m talking to is emotionally available or if I’m securely attached enough —none of these words are in the Bible or even Jane Austen btw— instead of rejoicing in the chaotic, otherwordly experience that is falling in love? Must I be thinking if I’m getting gaslit or if there’s a certain hidden power dynamic I’m unaware of? Must I bully myself into self-improvement and diagnose every mistake I’m making, high on intravenous self-scrutiny and a complete deprivation from learning by doing? Or can we simply surrender to the fact the stakes are always high when we care enough, no matter how much we try to shield ourselves from life’s curveballs? You either take a chance here or you don’t. And if you happen to care enough, that should be celebrated.

We can choose to dive headfirst into the human experience as divinely complex and disorganized as it is, or we can continue medicalizing our unpredictable emotions and squeezing invisible patterns out of human behavior where most of the time there aren’t any. Unpredictability is the trade-off, and maybe the precise line that separates living from existing. Maybe I want to cry a little here and there. Be neurotic, stupid, emotional. Maybe I love me a little selfish indulgence in wallowing and repeating my patterns, whatever they are. Maybe I want someone who’s going to profess their love for me 2 weeks into knowing me (hot take, but I don’t think there’s a timeline for developing feelings.) I want a dirty martini and a cigarette. I want to have the best day and then the worst day and then the best day again. My overthinking contributes to my creativity and doesn’t need a cure. Maybe I’m not overthinking at all — maybe I just have a lot of thoughts. I need my friends to “trauma dump” on me because their pain is my pain, too. Messy for the sake of being messy, not naming feelings or stacking them in alphabetical order.

At the end of the day, life is not a self-optimization project. And I think we’re making ourselves pretty miserable here by treating it as one.

with reticence,

valerie