Des News (Opinion): 7 signs your counselor may be undermining your faith

[smac97]

Just saw this:

Perspective: 7 signs your counselor may be undermining your faith

Some excerpts:

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Competent, ethical counseling is a force for good. Yet new scrutiny of the practice has arisen in recent years. For instance, Abigail Shrier drew attention in 2024 to the consequences of “poorly executed” therapy focused on children. And earlier this year, therapist Jonathan Alpert argued that a proliferation of therapy has left America “more anxious and divided.”

I have been wondering about what seems to be "a proliferation of therapy."  From the Amazon blurb for Alpert's book:

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Psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert delivers a provocative look at how therapy culture has reshaped the way we live, speak, and relate to one another, and how it's changing the fabric of American life. In today's America, therapy is everywhere. Seeing a therapist is no longer taboo, and mental-health resources are more accessible than ever.  Yet despite this positive progress, anxiety and depression among Americans are now at record highs, and the country feels more divided than ever.  It's time to consider the possibility that we've become over-therapized, and examine how this practice, intended to heal, may be making us weaker instead of stronger.

I've been wondering about this for a while.

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These concerns have brought renewed attention to what renowned psychologist Allen Bergin, 40 years ago, called the “deterioration effect” or “therapist-caused deterioration.” Despite 30 studies documenting the possibility of worsening in counseling, Bergin lamented how overlooked these incidents were, “no matter how serious the consequences may be for the patients involved.”

Jodi Hildebrandt and Barbara Snow, call your office.

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We draw attention here to seven signs of potential deterioration in one’s faith and spirituality during counseling — something that shouldn’t happen in high-quality therapy that respects different worldviews.

I've seen many people who have clearly benefitted from therapy.

I've also seen people for whom therapy seems to be creating more problems than it solves.

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Signs to watch for

1. A therapist claiming to be ‘neutral’ or ‘value-free’

For years, scholars like Brent Slife warned counselors that they cannot put their values “on the shelf” since their own deeply held convictions are “inescapable.”

Yet most mental health professionals today still signal to clients that they are largely impartial on major life questions — perhaps only influenced by what “research” and “good mental health practice” tells them.

Such a counselor can act, Slife warned, as a kind of “crypto-missionary” — where one worldview gets supplanted by another during therapeutic work. Scholar Ed Gantt told the Deseret News that in some cases, clients are “pronounced healthy and psychologically well to the degree that their values and their worldview come to match the therapist’s.”

Mental health and its varying causes and influences can be hard to pin down and sort out.  And it may be tempting for a therapist, when trying to sort out all that complexity, to tell himself that he is being objective and clinical in his assessments and recommendations, and that his therapeutic efforts are detached from his personal opinions about marriage, family, sex, religious, politics, and so on.

Lawyers face a daily task of fulfilling our fiduciary duties to clients.  These folks come to the lawyer with legal issues to sort out, and he does so for payment, fairly often a lot of payment.  That payment stops when the legal problem is fixed, so there can arise a perverse financial incentive for the lawyer to extend or perpetuate those problems.  

Do therapists encounter similar perverse incentives?  And not just financial, but emotional?  

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This may impact religious clients especially, given that roughly half of therapists identify as atheist or agnostic and as many as 80% receive little to no training in religious issues.

Although she was initially trained to deflect when a client asked about her own faith, therapist Carrie Skarda described becoming “more self-disclosing in that over time.”

“I don’t try and pretend to be neutral around my own faith practice anymore,” Skarda told Deseret News. “If the therapist can’t be transparent about that, that would be a warning sign to me.”

I wonder if this is particularly important in places like Utah, where no small number of people have distanced themselves from religion, and may be lacking in impartiality when it comes to religious considerations in therapy.  I would not want to seek counseling from a therapist who is hostile to my faith, or to faith in general.  And perhaps the "pretend{ing} to be neutral" thing should sound a warning bell.

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Even counselors who identify as religious can undermine a client’s faith — sometimes unknowingly pressing their clients away from a God-centered view of life. Therapists who cite their own experience with “faith crisis” or “faith transition” as part of their expertise also won’t necessarily be impartial in their treatment of the same.

I've wondered about this.

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2. Encouraging putting oneself above all else: ‘Stay true to yourself’

Instead of a duty-first mentality of “I have responsibilities,” clients can be gradually encouraged over the course of therapeutic work toward an identity-first posture that prioritizes themselves: “I must protect my authentic self.”

Replacing “What does God ask of me?” with “What do I want?” can subtly erode covenant ethics, identity and higher purpose. This emphasis on pursuing the “so-called authentic self … can become one’s God,” therapist Rebecca Taylor told the Deseret News. “You’re either going to follow God, something higher than yourself, or you’re going to follow yourself.”

While feelings deserve attention, “they are not always the wise, final or sovereign word,” added therapist Ty Mansfield. “Good therapy helps clients relate to their emotions with curiosity and compassion, while still discerning how to live according to their deepest values and commitments.”

Concepts like "my authentic self" and "my truth" seem to be unfalsifiable rhetorical cover and justification for the individual doing what he wants, detached from any external moral barometer.  

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3. Portraying spiritual authority as intrinsically oppressive: ‘Stop letting someone else tell you how to live’

Mansfield told the Deseret News that once we assume that the “true self is found by looking inward, identifying one’s strongest feelings, and expressing them outwardly,” it’s more likely that any external authority — God, family, religious community, moral values — will end up being “interpreted as oppressive.”

If a mental health professional speaks of clergy, commandments, tradition and religious community as intrinsically problematic, this should be another sign to watch — especially since many believers attest that God knows the self better than the self does.

This one also carries particularized resonance for me.  Having spent many years on this board, I have seen numerous instances of some disaffected/former Latter-day Saints, or else opponents of our faith, work hard to characterizing the Church's emphasis both on faith and and behavior, and self-denial and self-regimentation, to be "oppressive."  Fortunately, these are just random and anonymous voices on a message board.  I am free to heed or ignore what they have to say.  A therapist, on the other hand, is going to be in a position of intentional and particularized influence and access to the individual.

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4. Treating strong faith commitments as pathological: ‘Beware high-demand religion’

Strong religious commitments can be spoken of within therapy as unhealthy — reinterpreting prayer, fasting, chastity, repentance and obedience as symptoms of repression or dysfunction.

“If a therapist reduces religion or faith, generally speaking, to being about fear, repression, parental or social conditioning, internalized shame, or social control — then that should be a red flag,” Mansfield said.

Notice if a therapist is “pathologizing” faith, he said, “as opposed to seeing faith as a potential resource for meaning, identity, resilience and moral formation.”

While more overt hostility to faith is less common, therapist Jeff Bennion noted that more subtle body language signals — a skeptical frown, leaning back or leading questions — often do more harm because they are less obvious.

A client may begin to “narrative-shift under the therapist’s guidance,” Gantt said, “labeling their church community, upbringing or beliefs as the core problem or the source of their trauma — and something that needs to be thought through and examined and reconsidered.”

As an attorney, I have had effectively no need, or even opportunity, to address the role of religion/faith in a client's life.  It's just not in my job to assess those things.  Must be hard sometimes for therapists, particularly those hostile to religious faith, to perform such assessments.

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5. Hyper-focusing on guilt and shame: ‘Maybe this isn’t so good for your mental health?’

When therapists focus exclusively on experiences where religion may have prompted stress, shame or guilt, said therapist Samuel Major, they can slowly convince clients that faith is inherently toxic.

Yet not all guilt is toxic. And not all shame is something to eradicate. Sometimes conscience is functioning exactly as intended. And a therapist who reflexively tries to eliminate all guilt may accidentally numb the very signal that points toward repentance. In turn, this may derail character formation that spiritual transformation can yield.

There is something to this, I think.  

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6. Using ‘trauma’ language to describe faith struggles

The growth of trauma-oriented treatment is a positive development for the many who have endured overwhelmingly disturbing events, like child abuse and sexual assault. Yet in recent years, trauma has become a “creeping concept” broadly inclusive of a wide range of experiences and sources of discomfort and distress.

"Trauma" is in there with "authentic self" and "my truth."  Labels susceptible to being used to obscure more than to define or clarify.

And then there's "mission creep."  "Trauma" gets extended to non-traumatic or not-quite-that-bad sorts of challenges in everyday life.

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That can include being taught about the consequences of sin, what is entailed in repentance and forgiveness, and the demands of obedience and sacrifice — all of which involve some degree of soul-stretching discomfort. Yet such challenging moments, Taylor noted, may be interpreted by mental health professionals as, “Oh, something is wrong. We need to remove a religious belief … or our community needs to be changed.”

If sin is treated merely as pathology, spiritual transformation and repentance become irrelevant.

“Your therapist needs to be able to differentiate religious struggle from religious harm,” Mansfield emphasized. “Somebody can be in a struggle with their faith without that struggle being harmful or toxic to them. Any real growth is going to induce some kind of struggle.”

Bennion cautioned that inadvertently therapists can “subtly undermine transcendent goals by saying, ‘I don’t know if this is good for your mental health right now,’”

“A good therapist will help you really get to the bottom of what your intrinsically motivated goals are,” he added, “and then encourage and support you in achieving them, even if that results in some short-term anguish, difficulty or suffering.”

"{D}ifferentiate religious struggle from religious harm."

If religious imposes on an individual an expectation to change one's behavior, or to refrain from a behavior, or to maintain a behavior, these can be challenging things to do.  They can be a "struggle."  But the struggle may nevertheless be appropriate and good.

This is most acute when there are implicit or explicit expectations of maladaptive perfectionism in play.  See here:

What 18 years of research tells us about the mental health of Latter-day Saints

A therapist who sees the Church as bad, and its behavioral standards as "oppressive," may have a hard time with this differentiation.

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7. When conflict arises in families, suggesting, ‘Maybe you need to cut them off’

In cases of abuse, endangerment or exploitation, it’s critical that physical boundaries are put in place and legally enforced.

But when such threats are not present, counselors may still encourage clients to put boundaries on others that can be experienced as cruel and excessive — for instance, cutting off loving grandparents from grandchildren.

Boundary language is “often used in such unsophisticated ways that it really just gives people permission to avoid or cut off people,” Mansfield said. “Everyone becomes ‘toxic’ or ‘unsafe’ or ‘abusive,’ and those words become meaningless.”

If a counselor is encouraging you to cut off a relationship that could still be preserved, deepened and healed, remember the reconciliation, endurance and peacemaking at the heart of many faith traditions.

A better approach is not to foist boundaries on others but to apply them to yourself — determining what is right for you to do when a discussion gets difficult.

I hadn't heard of this one.  

"Boundaries," like "trauma" and "authentic self" and "my truth," seems to be a concept susceptible to therapeutic misuse.  Safeguards are appropriate.

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The value of good counseling

Far from dismissing the value of good therapy, this is about raising awareness about when counseling or coaching risks veering off the rails to become something else. Let’s remember:

• Good therapists can deepen faith.
• Trauma-informed care matters.
• Some religious environments are abusive.
• Boundaries can also be righteous.

After counseling, ask yourself: Do you feel more capable of love, sacrifice, repentance, forgiveness and covenant-keeping — or more centered on self-protection, self-definition and self-gratification?

Good closing comments.

Thoughts?

Thanks,

-Smac

[Kenngo1969]

I have been called ("diagnosed as"?) a narcissist.  I'm not sure what credentials the person who "diagnosed" me has, if any.  To the best of my knowledge, I've never even met this person, let alone interacted with him or her in any way beyond a brief on-line exchange.

But, I'm sure this person has more than sufficient credentials to enable one to make such a diagnosis, reliably and validly.  I'm sure even that brief, not-in-person interaction told this "therapist" everything one needed to know. 

Q.E.D.    

[?????]

[Calm]

2 hours ago, smac97 said:

Yet despite this positive progress, anxiety and depression among Americans are now at record highs, and the country feels more divided than ever.  It's time to consider the possibility that we've become over-therapized, and examine how this practice, intended to heal, may be making us weaker instead of stronger

Correlation is not causation.  It’s not like nothing else anxiety producing in our world has changed so it can only be therapy that is driving up anxiety.  How about more people going to therapy because for more the level of anxiety has gone up dramatically?

This is like claiming the Church makes people depressed because antidepressants are prescribed at a higher rate in Utah.  
 

Why don’t I point to the increase of lawyers as contributing to the increase in anxiety?  
 

Or maybe I should point to the increase of household debt, obesity, single person households, internet use (possibly contributing to loneliness) and other factors known already demonstrated as contributing to anxiety.  
 

This is not to say that all therapists are good or that everyone is helped by therapy.  There are some bad therapists out there and there are clients in long term therapy that aren’t benefitting from said therapy.  
 

Diagnosis of anxiety going up also does not mean anxiety itself has gone up (see Utah’s example of antidepressant use).  People being more willing to admit they have anxiety could be a contributor. 

Edited 33 minutes ago by Calm

[smac97]

11 minutes ago, Calm said:

Correlation is not causation.  

I agree.  Hence the propriety of the pieces statement here: "It's time to consider the possibility that we've become over-therapized, and examine how this practice, intended to heal, may be making us weaker instead of stronger."

It would be interesting to see how causation could be quantified in this context.

What are your thoughts about the two books referenced in the article?  "Bad Therapy" and "Therapy Nation: How America Got Hooked on Therapy and Why It's Left Us More Anxious and Divided"?

11 minutes ago, Calm said:

It’s not like nothing else anxiety producing in our world has changed so it can only be therapy that is driving up anxiety.  How about more people going to therapy because for more the level of anxiety has gone up dramatically?

This is like claiming the Church makes people depressed because antidepressants are prescribed at a higher rate in Utah.  

Salient points.  Worth considering.

Alpert published an article in May: 

Psychotherapist reveals why therapy might be doing you more harm than good

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Imagine a woman who has a near-miss with an 18-wheeler on the highway. Shaken but unharmed, she tries to move on. But the anxiety sets in. At first, it’s only near the site of the incident. Then it spreads.

Soon she can’t drive on highways at all. Eventually, she stops driving altogether.

With public transportation unreliable, she’s forced to quit her job. She can’t visit her mother, who lives two hours away. Her world shrinks.

Determined to reclaim her independence, she finds a therapist with stellar reviews. Too anxious to drive, she takes a taxi to the appointment, hopeful this will be the first step back to freedom.

 

Instead of focusing on her fear of driving, though, the therapist begins asking about her gender and race.

“How do you feel as a woman driver on the road with aggressive male drivers? What is it like for you, as a White woman, to get behind the wheel?”

Eventually, the therapist pivots to politics, asking whether anti-abortion laws are contributing to her “oppressed status.”

Confused, the woman pushes back. What does any of this have to do with her fear of driving?

The therapist snaps. “Are you here to do the work? We need to dismantle systems of oppression.”

The patient leaves feeling worse than when she arrived.

As bizarre as this sounds, it really happened to someone I know. And it’s not an isolated case. I hear more and more stories from patients who say their therapists steer conversations toward race, gender and oppression regardless of why they came in.

"Systems of oppression" is a political concept.  Odd to see it deployed in an individual therapeutic setting.

"{T}herapists steer conversations toward race, gender and oppression regardless of why they came in."  So the question perhaps is not "Is this happening?", but rather "How prevalent is this sort of thing?"

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One of the most common patterns I see is patients who have spent years in therapy and can describe their problems in extraordinary detail but still feel stuck. They can explain their childhood, label their emotions, and identify every possible trigger. But when it comes to making decisions, tolerating discomfort, or taking action, they’re no better off than when they started.

In some cases, they’re worse.

They’ve been taught, implicitly or explicitly, to look outward for explanations rather than inward for solutions. If something goes wrong at work, it’s a toxic environment. If a relationship struggles, it’s because of someone else’s unhealthy patterns. If they feel anxious or overwhelmed, it’s framed as evidence of deeper harm rather than a signal to build coping skills.

This way of thinking can feel validating in the short term. It gives people a clear explanation for why they feel the way they do. But over time, it can erode a person’s sense of agency. If your problems are primarily the result of forces outside your control, then your ability to change your life starts to feel limited.

That’s a dangerous place for therapy to lead.

This seems like a good point.

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The language and assumptions of therapy have spilled into everyday life. People increasingly interpret ordinary disagreements through clinical or political frameworks. Words like “toxic,” “trauma,” and “gaslighting” are used to describe routine human friction. Discomfort is treated as damage. Conflict becomes something to avoid rather than work through.

This makes relationships more fragile and harder to repair. It also feeds a broader sense of grievance and division, especially when personal struggles are consistently framed as the result of larger systems rather than something that can be addressed at the individual level.

None of this is to say that culture, identity, or history are irrelevant. They can be deeply important in certain cases. But they should not crowd out the core purpose of therapy, which is to help people live better, more functional lives.

The therapy office should not be a political battleground. It should be a place where people come to get unstuck, to build strength, and to move forward.

When therapy loses that focus, it doesn’t just fail individual patients. It contributes to a more anxious, more divided society.

"The therapy office should not be a political battleground."

That sounds right.

Thanks,

-Smac

[Calm]

Since I don’t have Alpert’s book, I had Chat summarize his evidence that therapy culture is contributing to levels of anxiety.  I am not impressed.

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His 2026 book, Therapy Nation, makes a much broader argument: therapy culture has contributed to Americans becoming “more anxious and divided.” His evidence, as presented publicly, includes things like:

 

• his own decades of clinical experience;
• anecdotes from patients;
• observations about how therapists practice;
• the increasing prevalence of therapy;
• increasing mental-health diagnoses;
• examples of people interpreting ordinary problems through therapeutic/psychological frameworks;
• arguments about therapists validating rather than challenging patients;
• arguments that therapy culture encourages people to see themselves as victims or psychologically fragile;
• and his contention that therapists increasingly frame problems in terms of identity, oppression, etc.

 

So anecdotal and correlation.

Smac, if this was an argument showing being LDS increased anxiety based on a Utah therapist’s own clinical experience, someone who specialized in LDS who were distancing themselves from the Church or who had left, based in part of extensive claims those who had left the Church saying they were happier and less anxious ( of which there are plenty) using the same type of evidence you would be pointing out all the problems with said conclusion.  
 

I need to see more empirical data demonstrating his claims before I invest in exploring your hypotheticals.

Edited 22 minutes ago by Calm