Hard Men Podcast
Hard Men Podcast
Bad Therapy: How Mental Health Experts Are Destroying America
The majority of Americans have been catechized to believe that psychologists are the experts when it comes to happiness and human flourishing. But as Abigail Shrier says in her new book, "Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up," it's probably true that psychologists are the last people on earth to consult about how to raise healthy kids. Why is that?
In this episode, I talk with pastor Dan Berkholder about why psychotherapeutic methodologies are so anti-Christian and do more harm than good. We talk about iatrogenesis, the concept that healers—in this case therapists—actually do more harm than good.
Additional Resource: Check out Dale Johnson and Samuel Stephens' episode on Bad Therapy, on Dale's podcast, Truth in Love.
Sign up for the New Christendom Press Conference in June 2024.
Join the Patreon exclusive membership.
10 Ways to Make Money with Your MAXX-D Trailer.
Alpine Gold Exchange Website: alpinegoldogden.com
Set Up a Meeting: https://calendly.com/alpinegold/alpine-gold-consultation
Talk to Joe Garrisi about managing your wealth with Backwards Planning Financial.
Sign up for Barbell Logic.
Buy your beef or pork box today from Salt and Strings Butchery. Use code "HMP" to get $20 off your next order.
Visit Livingstones, your Reformed Design Partner for Churches.
This episode of the Hard man Podcast is brought to you by Backwards Planning, Financial and Joe Garrisi, by Alpine Gold, by Max D Trailers, by Salt and Strings Butchery and by Livingstones.
Speaker 2:My son returned home from sleepaway camp this summer with a stomachache. Home from sleepaway camp this summer with a stomach ache. When it didn't quickly abate, I took him to a pediatric urgent care clinic where a doctor ruled out appendicitis. Probably just dehydration, came the verdict. But before the doctor cleared us to go home, he asked us to wait for the nurse who had a few questions. In bustled a large man in black scrubs wielding a clipboard Would you mind giving us some privacy so that I can do our mental health screening? He said after a beat. I realized the privacy the man wanted with my son was from me. I asked a csu's questionnaire, which turned out to be issued by the national institute of mental, a federal government agency. Here is the complete, unedited list of questions the nurse had planned to put to my 12-year-old in private In the past few weeks.
Speaker 2:Have you wished you were dead? In the past few weeks? Have you felt that you or your family would be better off if you were dead? In the past week, have you been having thoughts about killing yourself? Have you ever tried to kill yourself? If yes, how? When Are you having thoughts of killing yourself right now? If yes, please describe when the nurse asked me to leave the room. He wasn't going off script, he was following a literal one. The script for nursing staff directs nurses to inform parents To ask these questions in private. So I am going to ask you to step out of the room for a few minutes. If we have any concerns about your child's safety, we will let you know.
Speaker 2:Driving my son home from the clinic, I was haunted by the following possibility what if I had been just a little more trusting? Children often try to please adults by producing whatever answers the grown-up seemed to want. What if my son, alone in the room with that large man, had given him the yes the questions appeared to prompt? Would the staff have prevented me from taking my son home, and a child who was entertaining dark thoughts? Was this really the best way to help him, separate him from his parents and present him with a series of escalating questions about killing himself? I hadn't signed my son up for therapy. I hadn't taken him for a neuropsychological evaluation. I had taken him to the pediatrician for a stomachache. There was no indication, no reason to even suspect that my son had any mental illness, and the nurse didn't wait for one. He knew he didn't have to.
Speaker 2:We parents have become so frantic, hypervigilant and borderline obsessive about our kids' mental health that we routinely allow all manner of mental health experts to evict us from the room. We've been relying on them for decades to tell us how to raise well-adjusted kids. Maybe we were overcompensating for the fact that our own parents had assumed the opposite, that psychologists were the last people you should consult on how we raise normal kids. When we were little, my brother and I were spanked. Our feelings were seldom consulted when consequential decisions about our lives were made when we would attend school, whether we would show up at synagogue for major holidays, what sort of clothes fit the place and occasion. We didn't particularly relish the food set out for dinner. No alternate menu was forthcoming. If we lacked some critical right of self-expression, some essential exploration of repressed identity. It never occurred to either of us.
Speaker 2:It would be years before anyone in my generation would regard these perfectly average markers of an 80s childhood as vectors of emotional injury. But as millions of women and men my age entered adulthood, we commenced therapy. We explored our childhoods and learned to see our parents as emotionally stunted. Emotionally stunted parents expected too much, listened too little and failed to discover their kid's hidden pain. Emotionally stunted parents inflicted emotional injury. We never doubted that we wanted kids of our own. We vowed that our child rearing would reflect a greater psychological awareness. We resolved to listen better, inquire more, monitor our kids' moods, accommodate their opinions when making family decisions and, whenever possible, anticipate our kids' distress. We would cherish our relationship with our kids, tear down the barrier of authority past generations had erected between parent and child and instead see our children as teammates, mentees, buddies.
Speaker 2:More than anything, we wanted to raise happy kids. We looked to the wellness experts for help. We devoured the best-selling parenting books which established the methods by which we would educate, correct and even speak to our own children. Guided by these experts, we adopted a therapeutic approach to parenting. We learned to offer our kids the reasons behind every rule and request. We never, ever spanked. We perfected the timeout and provided thorough explanation for any punishment, which we then rebranded as consequence to remove any associated shame and make us feel less authoritarian.
Speaker 2:Successful parenting became a function with a single coefficient our kids' happiness. At any given instant, an ideal childhood meant no pain, no discomfort, no fights, no failure and absolutely no hint of trauma. But the more closely we tracked our kids' feelings, the more difficult it became for us to ride out their momentary displeasure. The more closely we examined our kids, the more glaring their deviations from an endless array of benchmarks academics, speech, social and emotional each now felt like a catastrophe. We rushed our kids back to the mental health professionals who had guided our parenting, this time for testing, diagnosis, counseling and medication. We needed our kids and everyone around them to know our kids weren't shy. They had social anxiety disorder or social phobia. They weren't poorly behaved. They had oppositional defiant disorder and they weren't disruptive students. They had ADHD. It wasn't our fault, it wasn't theirs. We would attack and finally eliminate stigma surrounding these diagnoses. Rates at which our children received them soared In the course of writing my last book, irreversible Damage, and for years after its publication, I spoke to hundreds of American parents and during that time I became acutely aware of just how much therapy kids were getting from actual therapists and their proxies in school, how completely parents were relying on therapists and therapeutic methods to fix their kids, and how expert diagnoses often altered kids' perceptions of themselves.
Speaker 2:Schools, especially, jumped at the opportunity to adopt a therapeutic approach to education and announced themselves our partners in child rearing. School mental health staff expanded more psychologists, more counselors, more social workers. The new regime would diagnose and accommodate, not punish or reward. It directed kids in routinized habits of monitoring and sharing their bad feelings. It trained teachers to understand trauma as the root of student misbehavior and academic underperformance. These efforts didn't aim to produce the highest achieving young people, but millions of us bought in believing they would cultivate the happiest, most well-adjusted kids.
Speaker 2:Instead, with unprecedented help from mental health experts, we have raised the loneliest, most anxious, depressed, pessimistic, helpless and fearful generation on record. Why? How did the first generation to raise kids without spanking produce the first generation to declare they never wanted kids of their own? How did kids raised so gently come to believe that they had experienced debilitating childhood trauma? How did kids who received far more psychotherapy than any previous generation plunge into a bottomless well of despair? The source of their problem is not reductable to Instagram or Snapchat.
Speaker 2:Bosses and teachers report, and young people agree that members of the rising generation are utterly underprepared to accomplish basic tasks. We expect all adults to dispatch, ask for a raise, show up for work during a period of national political strife, show up for work at all, fulfill obligations they undertake without requiring extensive breaks to attend their mental health. It is not unheard of for boys of 16 or 17 to put off getting a driver's license on the grounds that driving is scary, or for college juniors to invite mom along to their 21st birthday celebrations. They are leery of the risks and freedoms that are all but synonymous with growing up. These kids are lonely. They settle into emotional pain for reasons that seem even to their parents a little mysterious.
Speaker 2:Parents seek answers from mental health experts, and when our kids inevitably receive a diagnosis, they grasp it with pride and relief. A whole life reduced to a single point. No industry refuses the prospect of exponential growth, and mental health experts are no exception. By feeding normal kids with normal problems into an unending pipeline, the mental health industry is minting patients faster than it can cure them. These mental health interventions on behalf of our kids have largely backfired. Recasting personality variations as kairoskuro or dysfunction.
Speaker 2:The mental health experts trained kids to regard themselves as disordered. The experts operate from the assumption that everyone requires therapy and that everyone is at least a little broken. They speak of resilience, but what they mean is accepting your trauma. They dream of destigmatizing mental illness and sprinkle diagnostic labels like so much pixie dust. They talk of wellness while presiding over the downward spiral of the most unwell generation in recent history. With the charisma of cult leaders, therapeutic experts convinced millions of parents to see their children as challenged. They infused parenting with self-consciousness and fevered insecurity. They conscripted teachers into a therapeutic order of education which meant treating every child as emotionally damaged. They pushed pediatricians to ask kids as young as eight, who had presented with nothing more than a stomachache, whether they felt their parents might be better off without them. In the face of experts' implacable self-assurance, schools were eager, pediatricians willing and parents unresisting. Maybe it's time we offered a little resistance. Excerpt from Abigail Schreier's Bat Therapy.
Speaker 1:Schreier's Bad Therapy. Well, welcome to this episode of the Hardman Podcast. I'm joined today by Pastor Dan Burkholder. Dan, thanks so much for joining me for this riveting episode.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me, eric, excited to talk about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, dan, I just kind of want to jump into this. The uh, the book that we're taking a look at here obviously is Abigail Schreier, and this one is a pretty recent, pretty new. This is bad therapy subtitle why the kids aren't growing up.
Speaker 1:Of course, abigail is, I believe, writes for the wall street journal and a couple of other places, but she really hit the scene, dan, when she wrote a book in 2020 called Irreversible Damage the Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters and these two books kind of dovetail together because, as she was researching for irreversible damage, she found that, if you've read that book, she found that really the number one place, besides social media, where transgenderism was making infiltration into young kids' lives was it was being suggested to them by guidance counselors at school, psychologists, etc.
Speaker 1:So, dan, I think this is probably one of the most important books of the last couple decades, particularly because the church itself has been infiltrated by bad therapy, by psychotherapeutic methods. The church has offered no resistance in the last 50 to 60 years to these things. Of course, abby is, I think, just I don't know if she would be a practicing Jew, but not a Christian and yet this book is really really helpful. So, first question I want to ask you is just, you've read we were going through the first three chapters really in this discussion but really kind of that gives you a pretty good understanding of the book and what's in there. But for your money, like, why is this book so important in this moment? How is it hitting us and why are we finding it so useful?
Speaker 2:Yeah well, it's an interesting question, because if you had told me a few weeks ago that this would be a monumental book, a very, very important book for Christians to read, I would have been very hesitant as to understanding why you would say that.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The thing is, my experience with therapy is on the counseling end. I have experienced, you know, parishioners or church members that have had therapy and typically they're a little bit more difficult to counsel because you have to untangle quite a bit of damage that's been done in therapy. That's nothing new to us. We've known this. Both Eric and I have done quite a bit of counseling at the church and anytime that there's somebody that has received therapy, usually it's a greater challenge. And so, looking at this book, I understood, you know therapy is is problematic, but I thought it was to a smaller subsection of people. I didn't realize the scope, and this is this book has really helped me understand, because I'm disconnected from the public schools. We started our own private school, yeah, we're not in them.
Speaker 2:We don't yeah, we don't have the schools we provide counseling for our people. We don't farm out our counseling or therapy and so in some ways we've insulated ourselves from this massive adoption of this therapeutic psychoanalysis sort of model, and so I didn't realize the scope of the issue, and it actually helped me to understand a lot about why Gen Z is the way that it is, and maybe we'll get into that into the episode a little bit more. But really the thing that really shocked me is just seeing behind the veil of what are the goals of a therapist and therapy and the scope how many people are receiving therapy right now? And it's, it is. It is mind blowing.
Speaker 1:Well, and the thing that she points out is, not only are a lot of people receiving therapy, including children. Her emphasis in her last book and in this one is really how they're. They're particularly targeting children, and it's not just that these kids are going to therapy, it's also that therapeutic, psychotherapeutic methodology has infiltrated the public school system. So she's got chapter four on social, uh, emotional learning, and so it's things like we're going to start our math class today by talking about a little Johnny, why don't you go first? What's something that makes you sad?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I Eric. You recall, yesterday I came into your office and I was all hot and bothered.
Speaker 1:Dan was ready to fight.
Speaker 2:This is how disconnected I am. Just so you know, I'm not an expert in therapy. I do counseling for a living, so I've got a different perspective.
Speaker 1:And really biblical counseling.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's correct. So when I first read about school counselors in bad therapy, I was very confused, because both Eric and I had similar experiences when we were in high school. We both had one meeting with our school counselor.
Speaker 1:They called them guidance counselors.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was a guidance counselor. That's correct. Yeah, no-transcript. I didn't realize that they're essentially a therapist or like a shrink in the school. Oh yeah, schools have wholesale adopted this therapeutic, you know model and in its like in the introduction is in in in graining this in young children who have never even thought about a lot of these things, and it's introducing a lot of these ideas.
Speaker 1:So we'll get into some of the problems. I want to give a little bit of background. So for Christians particularly I think there'll be a lot of Christians obviously listening to this podcast and they're like one of the questions I get a lot is well, you know, psychology and Christianity, those aren't at odds. And I think even as you read a book like this you realize, wow, this is so. It's importing such an alien, anti-biblical worldview upon our kids and upon the next generation.
Speaker 2:And this is why, in some ways, it makes it even more shocking that she's not a Christian.
Speaker 1:And she's pointing out all these same things, correct. One of the things, for example, the primary command given to children in scripture is what it's to obey your parents and the Lord. And she says in the book. She said I was so shocked the number of, especially with social emotional learning, but the number of therapists, the number of school counselors and psychologists and the SEL social emotional learning group practitioners how much of it. She said it's like Soviet Russia, where they're like encouraging the kids to spy on their parents and then not tell their parents what they report back. Like do you ever see dad showing negative emotions? And you know all this crazy stuff? Right, never. And she said, fundamentally what they're doing is they're trying to undermine parental authority.
Speaker 1:And again here's, here's Abby who is, you know, not a Christian, but she is talking to at one point in the book. She's talking to a psychologist in Europe I think it's like Sweden or something Scandinavian country, but she's talking to him. And she asked him do you do psychotherapy with kids? And he goes absolutely not, it's worthless. And she said what are you talking about? And he goes. Well, there's really like if you look at reality and how counseling works and therapy, there's really one person that just seems to be naturally fit for determining what happens in a kid's life, and she said who? And he said the parents, and he said so, if I have an issue with a kid, I just talk to the parents and I had written in the margin.
Speaker 1:Even I said wow, it's amazing, even secular people, non-christians, can recognize God's covenantal reality through the household, and so we're obviously not fans of psychotherapeutic methods for a number of reasons, but number one, as we see here, because it's undermining God's hierarchical authority structure for parents and families.
Speaker 1:These people are literally brainwashing your kids and trying to destroy the covenant household. Yes, and people are completely oblivious to it, and I think Abigail is doing us a really good service by pointing out some of these errors. Dan, as we're going to get into this more, unpack some of the book, but I thought this was interesting. So yesterday you came in my office you're reading this and you started asking me a few questions and I started Googling, and one of the things that we pointed to is this is all of it whether you go to psychology in schools, you go to therapy, this just seems like closely tied to feminism and to like the worst kind of woman brain Meaning. If you put the worst kind of women in charge, like Dolores Umbridge type, ladies controlling Karen's like psychotherapy is what you would think you would get Right. Yeah, so that's what you were saying to me.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, I believe you said I think this could be a bigger deal than feminism, and I was thinking I'm like, well, isn't it? It could be the same thing. And I said how many therapists are? Are women?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I, and exactly to that point. So I'm sitting here thinking like feminism is such a rot in the American culture. But part of the problem is it's so pervasive, it's so much the air we breathe that we don't recognize it. We don't recognize that we're in a, in a in an ocean of wet water because we've been wet.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I proposed a theory in a therapist chair and essentially encourage someone to ruminate, to uh, you know, to fuss, to essentially gossip and to uh, just blame everybody but themselves dan, and you said you're like these therapists.
Speaker 1:It seems like it's all the worst tendencies of sin and women like gossiping, like the busy body that won't stay at home and you get paid to do it.
Speaker 2:But yeah, you actually have people, then come to you so that you can busy body with them.
Speaker 1:So we did a little research. While Dan was talking, I looked this up and you can think about psychology and HR, dei, diversity, equity and inclusion programs, about the same. They're kind of the scourge of our culture, right? So I looked this up in 2021, 73.4 percent of hr professionals are were women. So that's a big percentage. 75 of the busy bodies, nasty hr people, passive, aggressive, ruined companies uh, 73.4 percent women dei, 69, almost 70% of DEI workers are women. Is that surprising to you, dan? No, no, can't be no, okay. Finally, to answer Dan's question on psychologists, so I think this was uh, yeah, so 2019, 70% of psychologists were women 70%.
Speaker 1:So to Dan's comment, it it's it seems like, yeah, this is the type of thing that women would want to get involved in. You notice the same thing with critical race theory and blm. It's like it's run by busy body. Women, um, I think joe rigney's stuff on empathy really applies here. Like weaponized empathy, um seems to be, you know, key in this moment. So I guess, to wrap all that up, like, is there a connection between feminism and psychology and what's happened in our culture in the last 50 years?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, absolutely. And the reason I say that is because, fundamentally, we haven't really got into what therapy is, but essentially, if you imagine, it's the ultimate introspective model of attempted correction, and so you're looking inside yourself for problems and answers, and the answer is to the problems typically are to blame, shift on someone else, and so you'll find in in Abigail Schreier. She pointed out this. Back to your earlier comment about destroying the covenant household is that typically parents are made into the bad guys. So a lot of your issues are because of your childhood. Because you were disciplined. You weren't disciplined, you know. You were emotionally supported, whatever it was.
Speaker 1:It's the early childhood trauma theory. Exactly which we'll get into has been proven false, but yet still persists.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and so there's a radical change in the trajectory of parents cutting off or children cutting off relationships with their parents. It's been increasing in number, which is essentially a weaponized fifth commandment violation. But my point is that if you look at the sins that are common to women, that are in the grain of the feminine soul, in the feminine mind, is that you're going to find things like, uh, over rumination, or which is one of the one of the things we'll talk about later.
Speaker 2:You know all this like fretting yeah, fretting anxiety, you know, uh, having a troubled spirit and continuing, instead of correcting that, instead feeding it, uh, which creates more anxious and more depressed people, because the further you look inside, the further you'll find that you're, you're anxious and it, it, it's a compounding effect actually breeds selfishness and conceit.
Speaker 2:And then and then it's an opportunity to also, uh, gossip essentially about other people. So why, why do you think you are this way? Well, my dad, he was, you know, upset with me as a child and he raised his voice or whatever. Well, that's because he has. Whatever diagnosis the psychologist will give him.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's usually like something along the lines of like well, my dad is a post-narcissistic, whatever Right, he's toxic.
Speaker 2:I need to write him out of my life, have nothing to do with him, yep, and so then, anytime that there's an issue, it's oh well, remember your father. He was a narcissistic, whatever the heck it was that you just said. And essentially, you get opportunities to then say, oh, that reminds me of another time in my childhood that my dad did this, or I was on the phone with my dad the other day and he did this. And, um, Abigail Schreier says that, essentially, you have a, uh, a friend and a therapist that is paid, but they won't be there when you have your first child. They won't be there for your 21st birthday, they won't be there for your wedding. They're just there to listen to you and to essentially encourage you to gossip, uh, as a busy body. And so that's why I say it's and blame shifting, yeah, blame shifting.
Speaker 1:That's exactly.
Speaker 2:That's a huge one, and so I think Do anything but take responsibility.
Speaker 1:That's right, and so she'll talk about things, not necessarily in a biblical lens, but helpful in that she will say things like psychotherapy takes away agency, meaning let's talk about all the other people who are problems. Let's talk about why they basically why they sinned against you and that's made you the way that you are. Um, it turns people into helpless victims um, we'll get into it in just a minute. But it puts you in rather than an action state, focusing what do I need to do in this next moment? To be obedient, to fulfill my duty, whatever. It puts you in a a situation frame of meaning. You're just looking at all the circumstances around you and you're saying, well, this happened to me, so this is why I am the way that I am. What all that does is it takes away agency. As you mentioned, rumination on feelings, emotions and kind of the big point here. If you're a pastor, if you want to know more about this, I would and even just a layman. I will include links for this in the show notes, but there is a really helpful short review of this, a 42-minute review of this on the biblicalcounselingcom website. So, Association of Certified Biblical Counselors these are guys who are trying to look at.
Speaker 1:Okay, here's psychology over here. You know, comes from guys like Freud. Freud said if I could, my goal would be replace every church with a psychological clinic. So not neutral space. They're very anti-Christian. They always have been. It's an alien worldview to scripture. And so these guys in the podcast. It's titled Bad Therapy, Truth and Love Podcast 465. Again, I'll provide links for this in the show notes, but it's going to be Samuel Stevens and Dale Johnson, Dr Dale Johnson, going through this book from the perspective ofa biblical counselor. Right, so, as a pastor and somebody who wants to counsel from the sufficiency of scripture, how do we view a book like this? And particularly, how do we they're like this is a great book because it's dismantling how bad psychotherapy is.
Speaker 1:So, Dan, as we get into this, one of the things I want to start unpacking is why do we have a problem with psychotherapy? A lot of people in our culture have been trained to think and COVID kind of exposed this. But wait a minute. These are the experts. These are the people who know, really know what mental health is, and they know how to create thriving people.
Speaker 1:Well, I think a couple things that you could say here. Number one, what Abby said in the introduction that we read, it's not working. Yeah, you have raised the most unhealthy, mentally unhealthy generation of all time. At what point do we take the keys away from these people that we call experts? And that's why I connect it with covid, because for the first time in many people's lives are like, yeah, but the experts lied to us and they were idiots and the things that they did killed millions and millions of people unnecessarily. They detonated our economy, but but but are they really experts? And I think a lot of people correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of people are finding like, well, they're idiots, the things you know.
Speaker 1:God is clear. He's clear spare the rod, spoil the child. And I think this is hilarious. What was the? There's one of the chapters in here that I loved. This is like a Brian survey type chapter title. Chapter 10 is spare the rod, drug the child. She's even picking up biblical language here, that actually putting your kid on like Ritalin, it would be better to follow the scriptural command just to spank him. Yeah, so, anyway, all that to say, do you think that there is? Does this book have the potential to be a red pill for people about, like, all this stuff that you've been told is these are the experts is not?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think so. You know what's there's going to be? Um, obviously a lot of barriers, because there's so many presuppositions, even that I didn't realize that I had myself as I started to read. And you know, growing up 90s, early 2000s, in school, and seeing some of the experiences I had although I didn't have a, you know, a school counselor giving me therapy, but just some of the practices that my teachers and even my parents had adopted, how are you feeling?
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, yeah, and instead of the school of hard knocks, it was definitely a softer sort of parenting. You know, my parents did a good job. I was disciplined and all that, but especially at school, they were very much so attuned to your feelings sort of language, and I just didn't realize how much of that I had been. You know the water that I'd been swimming in, so I could see the, the difficulty to for one that had been raised. You know, a later time when this was definitely more emphasized in their formative worldview years, uh, that it could definitely be a harder pill to swallow, but I think that a book like this could actually be tremendously helpful to the church in America.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I totally agree. And a couple of things that we'll get into real quick. What does psychotherapy do? That's bad. A lot of it is like you have a false anthropology We'll talk more about that. But you have a false view of what men are like. Obviously, they don't view people as sinful agents who need to take responsibility. They view them fundamentally as victims who are wronged, and then fragile people that are like, once you break them, like it can never be undone and we need to live in our trauma. And they'll point out like, even for kids, like you're rewarding people for saying that they have emotional trauma, like you get a hand clap if you say you have trauma. So what's that going to do? It's going to get people to fixate and focus on their trauma.
Speaker 1:The other thing that's really interesting is this, uh, sort of the mislabeling of conditions. So we've become so used to it because psychotherapeutic language has infiltrated every part of the popular vernacular in America. Yeah, but when you think about it, you're like does my child have oppositional, defiant disorder? Is that how a Christian should think about that problem? Well, scripture says folly is bound up in the heart of a child. Yeah, it's actually not that there. There's not a disorder. That's actually pretty normal when a toddler won't obey you. And there's something you should do, you should discipline them and correct them, and scripture is like really clear about this. Well, and even you know maybe you see how many labeling yeah.
Speaker 2:People might laugh at that, you know, because maybe you're you haven't even heard that term before and you're just like that's silly. But even in counseling the other day you and I were counseling someone and they said, well, I'm depressed. And you're like what? What do you mean depressed? Do you mean something really bad happened? And they're like, well, yeah, there was this thing and this thing and this thing. You know there were, there were a list of things that were actually like no, those are actually, those are bad. You're not depressed, you're sad because life is hard right now, it is a dark place and it's very difficult.
Speaker 3:As the saying goes, gold is the money of kings, silver is the money of gentlemen, but debt is the money of slaves. If you're tired of seeing your wealth sapped by the silent theft of inflation, consider adding gold to your financial plan. Gold and silver have been recognized as sound money and a store of wealth for centuries. Converting your savings into gold and silver will protect and preserve your wealth so that one day you'll be able to pass down a true inheritance to your children's children. That's where our friends at Alpine Gold Exchange come in, offering 0% buy-sell spread gold leases with up to 3.5% annual return paid in gold, by the way and secure vaulting right here in Utah. Alpine Gold approaches every transaction with fairness, honesty and respect, reflecting a strong Christian business ethic in all that they do. Transcription by CastingWords. You'll be speaking with Jace, ethan or Stu, three members of Refuge Church right here in Ogden. Head to ogdengold and check it out today.
Speaker 1:Here at the Hardman Podcast. I've spoken with some very successful and competent men. Most of these men share a characteristic of delegating to other competent men to manage various aspects of their lives or businesses. I've realized that I don't have the time to properly navigate investment portfolios, financial planning and tax strategies. It simply takes away from the most important work that I do. That's why I've used Joe Garrisi with Backwards Planning Financial to help me with integrated planning. Joe is a Christian man who focuses on insurance, investments, tax tax efficient strategies, company benefits, debt plans, estate planning, multi-generational planning and more. He's been available when I have questions or ideas for my financial planning and future and Joe has made a plan specifically for my family and my goals that best suit my needs. Whether you have millions in assets or just starting to invest, joe Garrisi can help you reach your goals to grow the kingdom and leave a good legacy for your generations. You can visit backwardsplanningfinancialnmcom Again, that's backwardsplanningfinancialnmcom or call 615-767-2555 to speak with Joe to prepare for your future. The testimonials presented may not be representative of the experience of other clients and are not a guarantee of future performance or success.
Speaker 1:America is built on the backs of hardworking blue collar Americans. That's why we're so excited to join forces with Max D Trailers, a Texas based and family owned company, to bring you this episode. We're proud to partner with Max D to see the vision of new Christendom established. One small business at a time, max D builds innovative, hardworking trailers for the builders, fixers and growers of the world. You can follow their stories by checking out Max D Trailers on Instagram or by visiting the link in the show notes. Learn more about Max D Trailers by visiting maxdtrailerscom, where you can check out the article ways to make money with your trailer.
Speaker 1:Red meat is a staple of a healthy, protein-packed diet, but not all meat is created equal. That's why I buy my meat from Salt and Strings Butchery. Salt and Strings is owned and operated by my friends Quinn and Samantha Bible, and the meat they offer is raised, harvested and processed exclusively in Southern Illinois. It's cut and packaged by my friends Quinn and Anthony, and not only is it the best meat I've ever had, well, all their meat is sourced from local farms that share our Christian values.
Speaker 1:Salton Strings is now offering a beef and hog box that can be shipped directly to your door. The 15-pound beef box features 100% black Angus beef and includes ribeyes, t-bones, sirloin chakros fajita meat and ground beef. You can order your beef box today for just $259. It will send it directly to your door. The hog box is $239 and features premium Duroc pork, including eight thick pork chops one of my all-time favorites pork steaks, cured and sliced bacon, ground pork, bratwurst and breakfast sausage links. You can place your order today at saltandstringscom or use the link in the show notes, and also be sure to follow Salt and Strings on Instagram.
Speaker 2:We'll also include the link in the show notes we use this word depression, which is a clinical, uh you know diagnosis to to just essentially say that you're sad. Well, that's not really even what depression is. Uh, usually depression means that you're, you're melancholy, which which means that there's no real reason for you to be down.
Speaker 1:But I usually divide it with um. You know, even like jordan peterson has some reels on this that are helpful, but in talking to people, it's like the difference between like depression and life actually sucks. So, like somebody's like, oh, my child died, I'm depressed, I'm like, no, you're actually going through grief. It's called mourning. You're going through mourning and grief. That's not, that's not depression, and I don't want you to go think you have to go get a drug to numb that right. On the other hand, uh, what traditionally was called melancholy and depression, you're correct. We would have called things like well, when everything in your life is going really well and you're incredibly sad anyway and you can't figure out why. Okay, that's even by the american psychological association. Like that's what they would have classified, as you know, depression. Uh, what you and I were also talking about.
Speaker 1:People come in all the time and they're like, oh, I just have a ton of trauma. Did you know that there's actually a manual, american psychological, that like they'll put out a manual and like they have handbooks and like define trauma for me? And it's like when you have 10 of your buddies on omaha beach die in your arms, okay, that's trauma. Like it has to be a severe usually violence included, bloody gory, like it has to be a very severe thing. Even things like a spouse dying is not considered traditionally, wasn't considered trauma, and the reason was because these things are part of the normal course of life.
Speaker 1:So but now you have people saying like, oh, you know my, my parents growing up weren't as emotionally nurturing as they should have been. I had a lot of childhood quote, unquote trauma and it's teaching. Here's the point. It's teaching you to view yourself a certain way and I think this is interesting because two centuries ago or a century ago, let's say, if you're a Roman Catholic, the primary way that you would have viewed yourself is like I'm a sinner, I commit sins, I need to confess my sins, I need to be absolved of sins, I need to attain to salvation. You know what I'm saying? Like these are the identity markers and now that has totally shifted to I am a broken emotional vessel, I'm fragile. Of course, they're never going to talk about sin, they're never going to really talk about agency. I mean some. They're like if you go to the, you know one out of a thousand, right, you go to Jordan Peterson, he's going to talk to you about agency.
Speaker 2:I mean Jordan Peterson, intelligent guy, you know when he when he was really popular, like in the past, he should not have been popular. His thing was like take responsibility, clean up your room before you change the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's like, or even like people would come in like grandpa about that people would come in like schizophrenic, all messed up, and he'd be like, well, let's find one area in your life where you can start taking responsibility. And then they would do it and like the most jacked up people would get better and he's like, yeah, you just need to take responsibility yeah, I guess it would be important to highlight eric.
Speaker 2:what is the, what is the biggest difference between? We talked about biblical counseling versus therapy, the therapeutic model, what would you say is like the biggest differentiator between them? Like the goals of biblical therapy versus, or biblical counseling versus therapy?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think, fundamentally, biblical counseling would be a belief in the sufficiency of scripture, that the word of God is able or is fully capable of equipping the saints for all things pertaining to a life of godliness. So, from a biblical counseling perspective, it's like we're going to start with, like, reform, theology, creation, fall, redemption. Who are people? We're going to start with the biblical worldview and then really, what we're trying to do with suffering is a couple of things. We're trying to offer people hope and help, right Meaning, gospel, hope. We are rooting all of this in the teaching of scripture, fundamentally seeing men as scripture would describe them.
Speaker 1:And then I think, even with you know, you think about something with, like, trying to alienate all the toxic people quote unquote out of your life, you know. No, we're actually trying to teach people to fulfill the commandments of God. The fifth commandment is real you should honor your parents. Now there can be situations where you know people always want to default and talk about abuse, right, and so we're like, well, what if my dad is trying to kill me? You're like, okay, yeah, I get it. That that's that. That is actually something that you need to take precaution against. But that's usually not what these situations are about.
Speaker 2:Now it's usually like well, my father was abusive, Like, oh, did he? Did he hit you, or what? Like, well, no, he was, he was spiritually abusive. Yeah, what does that mean he was just distant? He was mentally? Yeah, it was distant.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Whatever you know, I would say one of the big differentiators is getting. You know. There's there's biblical counseling, there's like grief counseling, you know, and there's there's definitely difficult times that people are going through. That's, that's one category. There's also times where people, their life is just absolutely messed up. Right, they've got a lot of issues in their life, maybe it's relationships or, you know, work or whatever.
Speaker 1:A lot of like coaching.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's coaching and it really comes down to well, this is what scripture says. This is where do you think the root sin is? And typically it's. It's a. It's like a, you know, a Socratic dialogue to get them to see what the root sin that they need to repent of is and then helping them to walk through repentance and what that actually looks like.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then that's kind of yeah, that's kind of the final stage is like we're very focused on habitual change, meaning changing your habits, things like self-discipline, helping people establish biblical patterns for their lives. So you know, somebody comes in and they're like I'm depressed. You know we're immediately going to be like let's try and find the root causes, let's figure out what's going on, let's figure out where actions are out of step with you know biblical commands, like if you're a man, for example, yeah, what are your duties?
Speaker 1:I'm depressed okay, well, but you don't work. Your wife works. You don't work. You're at home, you eat cheetos all day and you play video games and you're not taking responsibility. I don't care like I'm depressed now I really don't even care to dig through your childhood. Yeah, and we'll get into that in just a minute. It's actually. It proves out that it's actually not helpful.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Whereas focusing on agency saying what can you focus on that is in your control and start taking steps to what we would say obey scripture. Well, I just wanted to say, as far as biblical counseling goes and that's it's with all of the pastors here at Refuge Church is that the success that we experience in counseling is very high and success in the way that we measure it is okay. People come in and they see their sins and they repent of their sins and they don't need to meet with us anymore and they're healthy, fruitful, you know, fruit bearing members in the church, with, with producing good fruit in their family.
Speaker 2:You know they don't need weekly counseling. You know that's. That's how we can measure success, whereas juxtaposition of therapy.
Speaker 1:Yeah she even points this out in the book, which I think is really interesting that the people, what they do is they take the healthiest people who actually don't need therapy, and then they subject them to therapy because they're the ones who are going to pay their bills and keep coming back Like they don't want to deal with schizophrenics and, in fact, most psychotherapists won't like you've got to find a specialist somewhere in the country, uh, but what they're fundamentally doing is like they're trying to keep you in therapy as long as possible.
Speaker 1:They're not really providing solutions, whereas what you're saying with us, we want to give you the tools to be able to live biblically and righteously, to be able to live biblically and righteously and in the really severe cases of sin. You know, we might say, okay, we're going to do eight to 12 weeks of counseling with intensive homework, and that would kind of be the other thing that people are usually shocked by when I talk to them about. It's like we're going to have homework and they're like, oh, I thought I was just coming here to like unload my feelings every week. Like, yeah, I'm not interested in that. I certainly care about you as a person, but because I care, because I care.
Speaker 2:And I'm not going to let you dumpster dive.
Speaker 1:She says this in the book. She says the best counselors are the ones who will be like, oh yeah, you had some really bad trauma. Ok, I'm sorry, that's really hard.
Speaker 2:Ok, let's focus on like the guy even says, like you should move past it as quickly as possible and not fixate on it if you want to see healthy change. That's right.
Speaker 1:So I think that's a good transition to our next point, yeah, and I want to jump into kind of one of the main themes of the book that abby talks about, which is this greek word, iatrogenesis, so iatroesis, again Greek word that means originating with the healer, and it refers to the phenomenon of a healer harming a patient in the course of treatment. So this is, dan, basically the concept that you know you can actually do harm when you're trying to quote unquote help people, and it's not enough just to say well, I was trying to help. Though, and particularly, I think her point is that, while psychotherapy claims to help people, it's actually a very non-scientific practice. They don't even really ever clearly define what therapy is other than like a conversation. That's really what it is A conversation aimed at steering people in the right direction to hopefully make them happy and healthy and flourishing.
Speaker 1:But this is what Schreier says. She says, in the aggregate, psychology has not been proven to actually help people. So this is the bottom line. Everybody has this innate trust in the psychological experts, the mental health experts, and she points this out repeatedly. There's zero data to substantiate the claim that it's helpful.
Speaker 2:Well she also mentions with iatrogenesis is that you know, if you talk to any of the doctors that come to the church here that are like MDs that practice medicine, like we have a ICU doctor, iatrogenesis is a big deal.
Speaker 2:He's thinking about this all the time, I guarantee you, because he's prescribing medication and he has to know is the underlying is the is the treatment actually going to help or is it going to amplify and make things worse? If you prescribe the wrong medication, you're definitely going to make things worse. Or we've got a physical therapist and and if you, if you do the wrong medication, you're definitely going to make things worse. Or we've got a physical therapist and and if you, if you do the wrong training or accelerate it too quickly, or the wrong motions or whatever, you could cause more harm than good. That's what iatrogenesis is meaning. The problem that she points out in the book is that with, uh, you know an ICU doctor that prescribes the wrong medication, obviously he's liable for that. But you can say, well, the medication was wrong and we can adjust the medication. But when the therapists themselves are the medication, it becomes very personal to admit that iatrogenesis has taken place because you are the medicine.
Speaker 1:It's also quite subjective.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean mean we can look at things and say like, okay, well, mental health has definitely decreased in america. The most therapized uh generation is the least healthy mentally. Okay, so we do have some broad data, but it's not like taking a medicine and then taking blood work right right because it's measurables.
Speaker 1:Right, and she says too, it's like the psychological industry, if you will, is there's like no regulation, I mean, and the thing is like we're like, oh, but they have a doctor in front of their name and you're like, yes, so what? I mean, they've read Freud and you know Young and stuff like that, but it's like in Carl Rogers, but that doesn't actually mean anything, one of the examples it's given. I think that's really helpful. I grew up with this. I don't know if you did was dare, yeah, uh, I did, which I I just think is hilarious, uh. So for me it was like fifth and sixth grade. We did dare, yeah, and they were like talking about chlamydia and you know herpes and all the sexual things that could happen. And they were here's crystal meth and here's how you do it, and like here's the difference between cocaine and crack.
Speaker 2:And I was thinking to myself like I remember they had to know this like a board that where they had attached a crack pipe and hypodermic needle and like all of the tools that you would need in order to do any drugs that you wanted.
Speaker 1:Yes, Well, and so her whole point with that example is it did exactly what a person with common sense might have thought it actually taught kids how to use drugs.
Speaker 2:Well, did she? Did she say? There was like the video of Kirk Cameron who was like, who was like, if you, you know, don't, you won't be cool if you do drugs. And so kids automatically thought, well, this cheesy dude, you know, if he thinks that doing drugs is is not cool, it must be actually really cool yeah, so then you have dare, and it's like kids who participated in dare, drug usage actually was higher than kids who didn't.
Speaker 1:yeah, so it's it's a good example of things backfiring.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they may be well-intentioned, but it's almost like talking about the thing and introducing those ideas would actually cause those ideas to be implanted into the minds of children, such as like sex education. I bet you could look up the origins of sex education and encouraging condom use and to avoid teen pregnancy, and you'd probably. This is I'm just guessing. I haven't looked at any numbers, but I'm guessing that you would find a correlation with sex education and a teen pregnancy or children having sex.
Speaker 1:You know, and actually they're tied together. So on the King's hall, I think season two, we did an episode on uh, we were talking about the Carl Truman book and you remember this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it sounds like a good episode. I should listen to it.
Speaker 1:We were talking about how, the triumph of the modern self. But one of the things that psychology did was first they tried to psychologize the self and then they tried to sexualize the self, and particularly with children. So this is why Freud would focus on things like the anal phase, the oral phase, but in children. So it was like he was fixated with we want to sexualize children. And then again, bad therapy. Well, the connection is, all these therapists were the ones that were responsible for introducing, quote unquote, gender dysphoria. To who? To kids, yeah, to children. So we've psychologized the self, as Freud wanted to do. We've sexualized the self and now we're unhitching people from the reality of even gender, like their sexed biology, yeah, and we're claiming to not know.
Speaker 1:My point in saying that is this is actually wicked. It's not just harmful, there are iatrogenic effects, I agree. But this stuff, this is what people, I think, don't understand is that this the intent was wickedness. From the beginning, you know, the pushers of stuff like this were like the Kinsey Institute, right, like not good people, pedophiles and perverts, well, and sexual degenerates, and it shows that we've been successfully catechized into a, a accepting this absolute insanity.
Speaker 2:What was the movie that she referenced in the book I had? I had seen it before and it was a good movie. I can't recall what the movie was Uh, I was hoping that you'd remember it off the top of your head but about what it was essentially like? A movie that you end up with self-realization, you celebrate. Oh, it was a beautiful mind. No, not a beautiful mind. Uh, matt Damon.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 2:Oh, goodwill hunting, Goodwill hunting yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, cause they talked about how the movie basically was the beauty of how psychology should work. Yes, ironically, like in real life, robin Williams committed suicides. So it wasn't like what I'm saying is like. None of that was true.
Speaker 2:No, no, it wasn't but but essentially the Matt Damon character. He comes to realize, like his childhood trauma, and comes to terms with it and then becomes like a good man, you know, and everybody cries and claps and everybody's happy at the end of the and so we've been catechized, you know, uh by entertainment and uh by media and the culture that we live in, so that accepting nonsense like like in the introduction, you know, to where you go to a pediatrician and a nurse comes in and asks a kid, an eight-year-old boy, if he thinks that he'd be better off, like his parents would be better off if he was dead.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, this is the crazy thing. It's like you're actually planting. Children are highly impressionable, yeah, and you're actually planting like would I be better off.
Speaker 2:Would it be better off I was dead? I hadn't thought about it before, but now that you mention it, maybe it would be yeah it, it's crazy.
Speaker 1:so that kind of leads into the next thing. Um, obviously we could say a lot about this book, but I want to talk about chapter three and she goes through I think 10 yeah, 10 steps to what is bad therapy, and so we can just kind of breeze through these. Step one in bad therapy is teach kids to pay close attention to their feelings. So one of the things that's interesting, dan, is our culture.
Speaker 1:Psychotherapeutic models, methodologies have taught us to focus and to fixate on how we feel. And what's so interesting to me about this is, as she says, this is actually one of the worst things you can do for somebody's mental health. So an example of it is she talks about like basketball coaching. If you think about a state championship game, the worst thing you could do before a game look, everybody's nervous, everybody's got the jitters the worst thing you can do is be like guys, I want to go around the room. How is everyone feeling? No, what a good coach does is he says okay, here's the game plan. You guys can do it. I want you to focus on what you need to do. I need to focus on your job, get your head in the game right Yo?
Speaker 1:Hey, dennis Rodman, I need you to play defense, you know, think of the movie Hoosiers, even um I uh, you know remember the Titans.
Speaker 2:I don't want them to gain another yard. You're telling them how to feel. Gene Hackman tells the kid.
Speaker 1:He said I want you to guard him so closely that you can tell me what flavor of bubble gum he's chewing, right? So like he's, and even gene hackman, everybody's nervous. But he takes him out on the court and he he makes them measure the hoops. And he was like see, even in the state championship, it's all the same. We're all playing on the same hoops. Everybody puts their pants on the same way. What is all that doing? It's getting people to. We're all playing on the same hoops, everybody puts their pants on the same way. What is all that doing? It's getting people to not focus on how they feel right, but on true, objective things. Well, meanwhile, psychotherapy is saying let's ruminate yeah.
Speaker 2:So uh, chensova dutton yeah she's an emotional researcher she said, emotions are highly reactive to our attention to them. Certain kinds of attention to emotions, focus on emotions, can increase emotional distress, and I'm worried that when we try to help our young adults, help our children, what we do is throw oil on the fire. And so, to your point, one of the best ways to handle emotions is to not focus on the emotions, and this is something that we actually talk about quite a lot, especially with ladies. But it's true for people, because you know, both men and women are emotional. But especially with women, it's easy for emotions to kind of end up guiding them.
Speaker 1:Well, they rule you.
Speaker 2:So one illustration I think this is Pastor Sauve. He talks. He used this illustration, he probably stole it from somewhere but emotions are like a horse.
Speaker 2:If you have unbridled emotions, they're like a wild horse that you're tied to that's just going to lead you around everywhere, and what you need to do is to bridle those emotions, you need to saddle them and you need to be the one steering your emotions, not the other way around. And so what I think that they're pointing out is that if you continually just focus on the emotions and what they're doing and become hypersensitive to the emotions and let them guide you and then essentially, increasingly become enslaved to your emotions, is that going to lead you into a better place or a worse place? Well, guaranteed, it's going to lead you into a worse place, because, essentially, what you're doing is you're not disciplining your spirit, you're not actually using your duties and the word of God to guide your footsteps, to guide your life, but instead are just letting your emotions run rampant Wherever they may take you. That's where you're going to end up, and you're unbridled, you're undisciplined yeah, I think lacking self-control that's really helpful.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I've often said in counseling probably sold for somebody too. But emotions are like warning lights on the dash. They make a really bad gps, though. Like sometimes they can tell you real things, like if you're burned out or you're stressed out or if your wife is really anxious. Those can be helpful warning lights to say like, okay, what's causing this? But this is helpful. This is the same lady, uh dutton, says uh, this we are basically telling them that, as children, that that this deeply imperfect signal right their emotions, what they're feeling, is always valid, is always important to track, always important to pay attention to, and then we should use it to guide our behavior and use it to guide how you act in a certain situation. So she's telling them, like letting your emotions rule your life and guide you and be the barometer for everything that you do is a horrible life decision.
Speaker 2:And it becomes obvious now when you look at different conversations that have been happening. You know you look at any like drink liberal tears sort of video where you have some sort of liberal on campus melting down. Yeah, exactly Because there's some microaggression or whatever. That term has fallen out of favor. I understand, but but there is no reasoning. There's no truth. Actually, that's why conservatives have been losing for a long time is because a lot of the younger generation doesn't really care about truth. They care about their emotions.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, and like this is so helpful. She says this is Schreier. In an individualistic society like ours, we incline toward the erroneous belief that feelings accurately signal who we are in the moment. But in fact feelings are responsive to so many cues and because of that, so often they are wrong. The anger you feel it does not necessarily indicate that you are in the right or that someone treated you unfairly Right, necessarily indicate that you are in the right or that someone treated you unfairly Right. Really you?
Speaker 1:may feel envious of a friend, even though you would not actually want what he has. You may feel loved by someone who actually mistreats you, or you could resent someone who's only treated you kindly for the wrong reasons. Feelings fool us all the time. This is the point. Adults should be telling kids how imperfect and unreliable their emotions can be. Very often kids should be skeptical that their feelings reflect accurate picture of the world and even ignore their feelings entirely.
Speaker 1:She says gasp, you read that right. A healthy emotional life involves a certain amount of daily repression. So we've been told, dan, psychotherapeutic models included. You got to get it all out. You got to pour your heart out to somebody, and I don't know if you've ever done this, but you know times when you vent and you actually feel worse afterwards. And my wife and I were having this conversation just about some things in our past that we've gone through that are hard, and I said how do you deal with it? And she said oh, it's simple. It's like a dump, a dumpster. I throw the trash in it, I closed the lid and I say we don't go there because it's just not helpful to rummage around in the dumpster. You're going to get stinky and dirty and you're you're going to relive all these bad emotions. And she said you know, honestly, the thing that I've found most helpful is, you know, stay busy with godly activities. You know, sure there's a time to. You know, pray about things and talk with your husband about them. Do it and move on.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And this is what's so crazy to me. They go through this and they're like who are the people who deal data wise? Who are the people who've dealt best with trauma and with hard situations in their life? And Schreier says she's like it's actually the people who are like I'm going to be with my friends, I'm going to get back to daily activities, I'm going to put one foot in front of the other.
Speaker 2:Yeah, she mentioned statistics about soldiers and how it became mandatory for them to receive psychotherapy For PTSD. Yeah, it's become much worse since they have.
Speaker 1:Yeah, she said that the people who go to the PTSD group therapy are worse than the people who just get on with their lives. So we tend to make fun of the stiff upper lip British kind of response to trials, or even the greatest generation, british kind of response to trials, or even the greatest generation.
Speaker 1:But you remember this in 1917, when he you've had time to watch this, so spoiler alert when he tells him that his brother's dead, he holds back tears, he shakes his hand and he says like thank you for being a friend of my brother. And then they have a moment and he's like your brother was a good man and you know whatever he had this impact on me moment. And he's like your brother was a good man and you know whatever he had this impact on me. And he's like you should get some food, soldier Carry on.
Speaker 1:And then, earlier, right after his friend had died, you remember? The officer tells him he goes. I know you probably already know this, but it won't do to dwell on it.
Speaker 2:Yes, right after the cherry blossoms.
Speaker 1:Yes, and I remember reading in the movie reviews are like oh gosh, terrible stiff upper lip. British Can't believe they did that and I'm like but did you want him to have a cry fest right there? Yeah, Actually, the thing that got him through it was knowing his friend died, but it was for a mission and a purpose and a reason, and so all he could do was I got to get to the next thing, I got to do the next task, and he just kept taking steps until he finally does achieve that. Were you surprised at all by that though, that rumination being so unhelpful and emotions being so unhelpful?
Speaker 2:I was not surprised. I was surprised that a secular person would come to the same conclusion. Oh, interesting, yeah, I mean because this is so ingrained in society that you should have a good cry, your brother's your brother just died in the in the example. Like you should pretty much be immobile for a couple of days and then maybe they would encourage you back to your job. Uh, maybe not treat you with kid gloves, but it doesn't surprise me because we tell this to people all the time, like, what is the best way to get you know, we've had quite a few miscarriages and some difficult situations in the church and one of the best things to do is you help them with grieving and mourning, rightly, and the best way to do that is to continue to remind them of the duties that they have.
Speaker 1:They have other children, yeah, and I think, got work biblically admission it is helpful too, because, um, abraham dies and they take, you know, I think, a month, 30 days. So there's even set time where that's like we're gonna grieve, we're gonna think about the good memories, we're gonna think about how it hurts, um, but then there's a time where you wash yourself, you put on fresh clothes, now we move on. So so I think in our culture there can be two problems. One is like people never grieve, yeah, okay. But then to the other would be, we, just we grieve forever, and that's not healthy either. Um, I want to, uh.
Speaker 1:Step number two is induced rumination. We've really already been talking about it, uh, but I want to talk about I mentioned this before kind of this two, um, two ways we can orient ourselves in the midst of suffering, trial, tribulation. So, as I mentioned, one is action orientation, the other is state orientation. So this is what Schreier says Adopting an action orientation means focusing on the task ahead, with no thought to your current emotional, physical state. A state orientation means you're thinking principally about yourself. How prepared do you feel in that moment? The worry you feel over a text left unanswered, the light prickling at the back of your throat, the crick blossoming in your neck. Adopting action orientation, it turns out, makes it much more likely that you will accomplish the tasks. She goes on to say among the worst things you can do is attend to your disappointment, discomforts and painful relationships when you're trying to get stuff done. It seems like this is one of the problems generationally that we have, where you've read articles about this people calling in sick I saw the BLM riots. I won't be able to go to work today and you laugh about this. People calling in sick. I saw the blm riots. I just I won't be able to go to work today and you laugh about this.
Speaker 1:But in 2016, I was working for a media company and our cfo was a big lib from san francisco and donald trump wins the election and we were in the middle of year one of like startup, so like a lot of hard work going on and our cfo calls a meeting with you know, I was a editor-in-chief and we had other people in the c-suite on the call. I think there was a lawyer on the call and he calls and he goes guys, um, I just need to let you know that I'm resigning. I'm going to be taking like a year off of work. Hillary didn't win and I am undone. I don't know how I can press on in a world where Donald Trump is president. And I'll never forget our publisher, who was from Wisconsin. He just started laughing and he was like is this a joke? And the guy was like no, you need to take my emotional state very seriously. He's like it's going to take me a year or two.
Speaker 1:And all of us blue collar guys were like how spoiled this generation of people has to be, and also wealthy, to do something so stupid.
Speaker 1:But I look back to my dad and his generation. I remember saying to my dad when I was in high school I was like dad, do you like your job? And he's like it pays the bills and I'm very grateful for that and I can take care of my family, yeah, and I'd be like well, are you happy? And I remember him saying to me one time what the hell are you talking about? Work isn happiness. I have a job to do and I look back on that and I'm grateful for that mindset. Probably your fathers and grandfathers throughout your lineage in history have probably been much the same way. You think Alfred was like well, I don't like Ethelny, though it's not the palace Like nobody cares, no, but now you get this generation where people are so soft and fragile because they've been trained to be yeah, one thing that they, that she talks about in the book, was that the zoomers themselves they're one of the first generations.
Speaker 2:Oh, they're miserable. First of all is what she says, but she ties it. The reason, uh, that they're miserable is because they have no hope for the future and they think that they can have no effect to improve their condition. Interesting, and so I think one of the keys and this is when we disciple younger men, and it's actually been the key, you know, the key to success for both hard men podcasts and King's hall is having a positive vision of the future, and part of that positive vision is actually coming up with a vision.
Speaker 2:Personally, you have to own it yourself, coming up with a vision that actually transcends your own existence, meaning like it's a, your, your mission, your vision for the future is bigger than your own life. So when you say, like I have children, what are my duties? I want to pass on an inheritance not just of wealth but of the Christian faith of a particular culture, you know I have to take care of my generations and that's a, that's a vision bigger than just you, you know. So when you encounter difficulties, when you feel a certain way, when certain socio-political, economic events happen, it may shake you up a little bit emotionally, but does it actually change the vision that you still have to take care of your generations? No, it doesn't it keeps you on course.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, and that's why that post-millennial vision is what actually helps you to keep going through all that. I also think, Dan, this is probably one reason why I actually have a lot of hope for Gen Z and younger Me too. I think this is why things like White Boy Summer it's this ethos of WGMI we're going to make it. Yeah, it's this ethos of we're not going to be um, you know, emotionally fragile snowflakes Like they keep trying to train us to be. This is why I think the ethos of that movement is like, like I shared, the Rhodesian SAS and short shorts standing on a ridge. They just look like Kings with their you know FALs and they their ripping heaters on the ridge, but there's something about that ethos that isn't fragile, and so I think this is why Kings Hall season three has resonated with people.
Speaker 1:We're tired of being told that we have to live in this world of Dolores, umbridge, hr, ladies Like we need to, you know, bow to that and guys are looking for bravery and courage and physical competence and physical violence. They're looking for something that our world isn't giving them, and so I think, if you can say, you know, basically like screw your feelings, focus on your duties. And this is really. I remember going through biblical counseling early in my I think it was 18, 19, somewhere in that range, you know, just working through relationship stuff with my wife, and it was great. It was really great because the counselor was like I was like well, I feel this, I feel this way, and I'm really discouraged. And he would be like oh yeah, yeah, we like we don't do that. Though he was like here are your duties, pray to god for help and then do them. And you know what's crazy, I got better.
Speaker 2:It was basically like don't think about how you feel I don't know if this is the podcast for this, but uh, it's almost like psychology, psychoanalysis, therapy is part of a larger cooperated effort to essentially neuter people 100%, to steal courage and to steal human vitality and give people no hope.
Speaker 1:It's incredibly emasculating. It winds people in knots.
Speaker 2:And if you're, if you're curious of the roots of psychology, modern psychology, yeah, you should just Google about the people groups that have started it Jews, jews.
Speaker 1:Yeah, freud, and then feminism too, by the way closely tied these things all kind of go together. But I've always said just look at a picture of Betty for Dan and her nose tells the story. That's all I'll say on that.
Speaker 2:Um, I think that's all you needed to say. She's a Jew.
Speaker 1:Um, one thing I will say on step two, on rumination. I thought this was really helpful. Um, she was speaking to a psychologist, canair. Canair's response was elegant and astonishing. He said being overly prone to talk about your emotional pain is itself a symptom of depression. So if you're always talking about it, too, with other people, so one thing I would say as a form of discipline and I would say to like people in the church, people in your community, you don't want to be the guy who's always like in, in just like a casual conversation, be like oh, I'm dealing with a bunch of stuff and trauma, and here's all my pet sins right now and here's all the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 2:It's like dude, hey, that's not good for you to do that If you are like that or encounter people like that. Jeremiah Burroughs, the Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment is the medicine that you need.
Speaker 1:Right. And then I think, just disciplining your habits conversationally, that, like every time I see Dan, I'm not like Dan's, like hey, how are things going? I'm like, oh, and I just start recounting all the worst things in my life You'll actually find as a helpful practice If you sit down and start listing out all the things you're thankful for, all the things you're glad about, spend 10 minutes thinking about them and your mood will change to one that's pretty positive. So don't be a ruminator. Step three bad therapy. Make happiness a goal, but reward emotional suffering. So she says. According to the best research, we have it all backwards. If we wanted our kids to be happy, the last thing we would do is to communicate that happiness is the goal. Right, and so she'll get into this thing. Dan, where, when you're constantly saying are you happy, are you happy, are you happy? No one's ever really that happy.
Speaker 2:No, she. She says, like how often do you think that you're truly happy? Like it's very, very rare that you're actually happy, Like maybe it happens a couple of times a day. So if you're judging your entire life based on the question are you happy? Then the answer is unequivocally no, I am not a happy person.
Speaker 1:Right, and so this is actually. I'm going to tie this into kind of like John Piper and desiring God. This is one thing I found unhelpful about Christian hedonism was you're doing this?
Speaker 2:Oh, that's a good point.
Speaker 1:You're like am I? Am I joyful in the Lord right now? Am I joyful in the Lord?
Speaker 2:Instead of saying God is most satisfied in us when we are most joyful in him. Is what it is, yeah, but, and we were most joyful in him, is what it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but if you're always saying, am I joyful, am I joyful? You'll never be joyful. On the other hand, if you say God has called me to do my duty and John was like not happy about the duty equation. But I actually find it much more helpful. I'm a much happier person when I'm like God, give me strength to do my duty to you, to my family, and make me joyful in it. Duty to you, to my family and make me joyful in it.
Speaker 2:Amen. The end go, do your duty. Yeah, the joy ends up being a by-product. So when you successfully disciple your children and they do the thing that you've been discipling them to do, they finally do it without you telling them like that brings me joy. Yes, but that wasn't the target. The target wasn't for me to have joy. The target was for me to do my duty and discipling my kids to do the thing right, to live righteously. And when they do it, you experience joy.
Speaker 1:Right, and I think the just the idea of older generations are a good model for this. She tells a story of like an old lady who's like they didn't expect to be happy all the time. Why would you expect to be a 10 out of 10 happiness at all moments? And then you're depressed because you're not.
Speaker 2:It'd be like going to a movie. Every time you go to the movie, you're like this is going to be the best movie I've ever seen in my entire life. Every meal you eat, this is going to be the best meal I've ever had in my entire life. You were only going to be disappointed almost every single stinking time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's, it's bad. Well, especially now with modern movies and modern food anyway. So don't, for your kids sake and also for your own sake, don't fixate on happiness, but again focus on the actions that you are called to do. Uh, step four affirm and accommodate kids worries. So this is one where, um, you know, basically you start building life around whatever the kids are scared about, whatever they don't like. We're like oh, we gotta cut the crust off his pb and j. He doesn't like the way that it feels, or whatever, rather than exposure. And one of the things that's interesting here that I found was I was thinking about my own childhood and I remember a number of things that I didn't like. Lima beans really did not like lima beans.
Speaker 1:I don't like lima beans now and it was I mean I'll eat them what was really good was like my parents fed us like we were a part of the family. It's kind of like like our view of worship, like you ate what the big people were eating. My mom would make meatloaf and we'd have some green beans and every now and then lima beans. And if you said something in our household like I don't like that, generally the board of education would meet the seat of knowledge pretty quickly. I remember one time as a kid I had to be under five, but I distinctly remember pouring in my glass of milk on my plate to try to drown and hide my lima beans and I got the Board of Education and I was. It was like still daylight the middle of summer. I was sent to bed for the evening with no food and I cannot, honestly, I cannot sent to bed for the evening with no food and I cannot, honestly, I cannot remember complaining about a meal after that because starvation was worse than eating the lima beans.
Speaker 2:Well, we'll see if it works with my son, because I had to do something similar last night to where he wouldn't eat his dinner and and I said if you here's six minutes, you have six minutes to eat your dinner and we're all done. And he didn't, so he went to bed very early.
Speaker 1:We had another pastor friend who would the kid, would say I don't want this for dinner. And he said that's fine, you don't have to eat it. And he put it in a Tupperware and he said we'll have it for breakfast. Yeah, and it was like I think I'll eat that real quick here now.
Speaker 2:We've done that with spaghetti, Like do you want spaghetti for breakfast or would you like eggs? Like I want eggs, Eat your spaghetti. Well, and I think really takes one time.
Speaker 1:Really what it is is we're not doing our kids favors when we cater and we say, oh, let's, you know, let's avoid all the things that you don't like. Instead this is kind of a duh thing for the hard men podcast, but it's like no kids, and especially boys, but like you need to be exposed to hard things, you need to be exposed to danger and risk, and your kids like let them experience some hardship.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of the worst things you can do is to coddle anxiety. Yes, because it's going to breed more anxiety and it gives justification for your anxiety when the you diagnose it yeah, this actually ties into step five, which is monitor, monitor, monitor.
Speaker 1:Um, talking about how parents are involved in everything, yeah, play dates kids are never left alone to just get in some mischief and figure out how to play together and work things out anthony esalen talks a lot about this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's also a lot of these themes, by the way, are very much in the coddling of the American mind Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukanoff. So a lot of dovetailing here. But really they say the things. This is Abigail Schreier the things that are joyful to children danger, discovery, dirt games whose rules they invented, with the ridiculous cast of characters they call friends. Their hearts aren't fooled by moms carefully arranged. Simulcra, the hypoallergenic, non-toxic slime she begs all the kids to make with her from a kid that arrived from Amazon. Isn't this fun? You think about how gay that is, first of all. But but, dan, I think about this from our childhoods. Like we generally had a generation that was more willing to take on risk, be brave, be courageous, but think about the way we grew up.
Speaker 1:I grew up in pickups with no seatbelts. I remember, even even as a kid, the things where we hiked 14 years with my dad. I was probably under 10. I had jeans and a t-shirt on and there was snow and we were like hiking across precipices in our tennis shoes and I remember saying to my dad dad, I'm really tired, and he was like you'll be fine, and we just kept going Mm-hmm. Now it's like you know, manicured playdates. We need to check the Yelp reviews on the venue we're going to go to. Moms are just hovering at all times she mentioned that earlier in the book like college students who need mom to come with them to like everything. Like what is going on, I think, safetyism, helicopter parenting, as you look at your kids, kids I know that they're often not monitored it's uh, even if we wanted to tell me the story.
Speaker 1:Tell me the story, by the way. Your kids love to be outside. Yeah, which the story I heard the other day from the. I was dying laughing but somehow there ended up a duck oh okay, so okay, so well.
Speaker 2:well, there's many. I have ducks and chickens.
Speaker 2:Um, recently I'm I'm assembling a bed, an Ikea bed for one of my boys and the four boys they're outside playing and they're usually in the streets, you know, one is usually not wearing pants and one is usually not wearing a shirt and none of them are wearing shoes and they're out in scooters and bikes and the road.
Speaker 2:You know it's like a dead end kind of road anyway. So I'm, I, uh, I hear some laughter, and so I come downstairs out of the bedroom and I look in the back of my truck and the boys had taken one of those big Tupperware bins and they filled it with chickens and they put them in the bed of my pickup truck. And they took a bucket of feed it was like a two and a half gallon bucket or a three gallon bucket of feed and they dumped it out into the bed of my truck and they'd let the chickens out, thinking that the chickens were going to be happy in the back of the truck. And chickens start flying out of the back of my truck and they're running around the front yard and the kids are just laughing and they're having a great time. I had to discipline my emotions, eric. I don't know if I did not feel happy in the moment, as there's like poop everywhere and you know, from the chickens and probably from the kids, if I'm honest. We're potty training some right now.
Speaker 1:Well, but somehow a duck and a chicken at one point ended up in a bedroom.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, so that's a different one. Yeah, I woke up early one morning I mean it's like five, 30 in the morning to laughter and I hear a thwap, thwap, thwap, thwap, thwap on my floor and I'm like I sit up and I was in a deep sleep and I'm like what is going on? And my wife says there's a duck in our bedroom. And the kids are just dying, laughing because my three-year-old went out into the coop, caught a duck and let it go into our bedroom to wake us up and it hid in my wife's closet because it was terrified. Sure, it was, yeah, yeah. So my my oldest son then, hearing me use that as a sermon illustration, decided that week he was going to do the same thing, but with the chicken, and so he released a chicken into our bedroom.
Speaker 1:He thought the sermon illustration was approval?
Speaker 2:Yes, he did. And you know what? It wasn't as funny the second time. The first time it was hilarious. The second time it was not funny. They're not allowed to do that anymore.
Speaker 1:Are you a business leader aspiring to build a parallel economy and glorify God with excellence in everything? Livingstone Studio offers full service design solutions to communicate your values visually, set you apart from the competition and convey the good, true and beautiful. Leave behind the cookie cutter templates and build with cathedral style aspirations, like Livingstones, crafting lasting beauty at every turn. Livingstones can help you stand out with a timeless brand, complete with a world class logo, custom website, marketing materials, graphics and more. Learn more at livingstonesstudio or contact Rob Hewitt directly at robatlivingstonesstudio for a free consultation and landing page audit. Livingstone Studio, your reform design partner. Yes, and for all that, I guess the um that I'm making is there. There needs to be time and space for boys, but for girls too. Uh, learning how to play, um, learning how to. There will be some mischief, but that's actually good for them too. I'm sure they've figured out some things about the packing order between them. Yeah, um, how to get along.
Speaker 2:They know where all dad's tools are, and I don't, because they're in the yard somewhere oh, that's great.
Speaker 1:Uh, so, yes, play that is not always manicured and monitored by adults. Uh, bath therapy, step number six. Uh, they say just uh, shida schreier, dispense diagnosis liberally. So one of the problems she points out is that when you label things, often you're taking away agency as well. Again, you know you're, you have some sort of defiant disorder, rather than you're sinful and disobedient. There's folly in your heart and perhaps you're lazy as well. But, she says, when, for example, an occupational therapist says that a child is neurodivergent, it seems as though the child no longer has the option to simply stop being lazy Because you're like oh, why this condition?
Speaker 2:Yes, it's very fatalistic. You know families outside of the church coming in where their children have diagnoses of all sorts of things as excuses as to why they're not going to be able to perform well academically and you find very quickly that they're actually just normal kids and they have lots of excuses.
Speaker 1:Well, and it's interesting because even we've had brain training and we've had cases of like real, you know varying degrees of real dyslexia. Yes, but wrapped up in every single case is, yeah, and also your child is lazy and I can say that because mine was in there too, one of my children and it was like, yeah, no, you have some real issues that you need to work through. But wrapped up in all that is you're using that as well. I can't read as well as other kids, so I don't have to try. You're like, no, no, no, no, this means you have to work harder. Yeah, so I guess just this idea that creating a label for everything labels are usually attached to step number seven, which is drug them.
Speaker 2:Well, just backing up for a moment, you can see in the Christian church how we've taken these labels and own them. One of the easiest ones to see for me is, instead of using the biblical language of a drunkard, we call people alcoholics, and so it's an identifier to say like no, I actually have a condition, that's that I'm a drunk, but it's actually alcoholism and so it justifies a whole host of behaviors.
Speaker 1:Yeah, defining it as a disease, as a disease exactly. Which takes away agency?
Speaker 2:It does. Yes, absolutely, and people use it as an identity. So they're an alcoholic Christian, which is. It doesn't make sense. You don't say I'm an adulterous Christian. Well, this is fornicating Christian.
Speaker 1:This was one of the points earlier. Step number three make happiness a goal, but reward emotional suffering. So one of the young teens in the book that she uses as a case study said that you know really uh it. When you talk about your strengths, like I am really good at these sports, people are like, oh, you're arrogant. But if you're like I'm depressed, people are like, oh, come here, I'll give you a hug. Yeah, so what you're being rewarded for is all the, all the, you know, emotional suffering. And he said that people really start to wear it like a designer handbag. You notice this in the depression, suicide conversation that happens in our culture.
Speaker 2:It's like you're you a badge of courage, that you're quote depressed all the time it's also like a race to the bottom to see who can have the most issues, right? So she gives a story of a young girl that's school-aged and she's asking about her friends. And what are they like? Are they happy? And she unequivocally says no, most of them have some sort of diagnoses. And she goes through like a young child, goes through all of the different psychological disorders that these kids have and it's almost like if you don't have one, you're left out. Oh, you're just normal, right, I have all of these problems. And so back to your point about it. It's basically like a way to have attention.
Speaker 1:Yes, to get attention and to get people to feel bad for you. So this ties into step seven drug them, she says. First comes diagnoses, then comes Medicaid. If Lexapro, ritalin and Adderall were the solution, the decline in youth mental health would have ended decades ago. But it has not.
Speaker 1:And you know we've seen a number of people come in, adults and children. I always tell like an adults when you've got the drugged up. Usually they're like some mix like Klonopin. A lot of these are, you know, xanax, others depending on what they're on, but there are a lot of them are like anti-seizure medications. But you'll see people otherwise healthy adults, on these drugs and I I characterize it by a stare, kind of a blank, listless stare. You can tell they're on them and you know they're like a lot of times like kind of slurring speech and you're like what in the heck is going on? Like beyond that, uh, people that I've talked to that are on them and she she says this is no, this is like backed up by research. They often make people more depressed, they complicate the problems, they give people nightmares, night terrors, and then they become highly addictive and hard to get off of. Of course, jordan Peterson on some of these psychotropic drugs and uh almost killed him.
Speaker 2:So it's like well, not to mention some of the side effects are like suicidal thoughts. Yeah, uh, intrusive, suicidal thoughts so this is what this is we've actually experienced in the church.
Speaker 2:Um, maybe I don't know if you were here or not, but there was a gentleman he had he had moved away from the church. Maybe I don't know if you were here or not, but there was a gentleman. He had moved away from the church. He had come here for a while and he was on a lot of antidepressants of some sort and he ended up killing himself in a horrific way.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes, I remember this, and it was so far out of his character.
Speaker 2:It's because he was on these antidepressants.
Speaker 1:Basically forced on antidepressants yes, that made him go crazy. Yeah, so she, schreier, says there are the meds morbid side effects imposed on a teen who is already struggling. They include weight gain, sleeplessness, diminished sex drive, nausea, fatigue, jitteriness, risk of addiction and, of course, a sometimes brutal withdrawal. Suicidality remains a common side effect of antidepressants, for reasons that researchers say are not well understood. You start looking at these, dan, and it's like this is really bad. In fact, schreier will say if you can relieve your child's anxiety, depression or hyperactivity without starting her on meds, it's worth turning your life upside down to do so. So she's convinced like this is horrible. The whole SSRI thing is absolutely horrible and we need to avoid this at all costs.
Speaker 1:So if you're, I think like we have this conversation a lot with kids particularly, but with adults as well a lot with kids particularly, but with adults as well I think as biblical counselors and pastors and christians, we have to be so careful that we use the language that the bible uses to describe what's wrong with people. What do you mean? So, just like you talked about when people are gay I am, I have been. Well, I've gotten in trouble many times for calling them sodomites. There's a reason I am intentionally trying to use biblical language. There's a reason that I will say adultery and fornication and not and there's a reason that people are uncomfortable that you say it right and and I try not to say things like quote-unquote living together, fornication, adultery, um, even, even language for ladies.
Speaker 1:You're a whore. That's biblical language. It's offensive to people, but I think the words are so important. This was the whole point of 1984. Like trying to re recategorize everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, new speak.
Speaker 1:Yep, in ways that remove agency. And so think about it. If you have a whole culture that doesn't believe that they're sinners they believe that they're traumatized victims it actually becomes really hard to preach the gospel and call them to repent, because they don't see that as the problem. No, because they're victims, correct. So anyway, I think it's important to speak rightly about these situations. Bad therapy step eight, encourage kids to share their trauma.
Speaker 1:So one of the most significant failings of psychotherapy being a psychotherapist says is its refusal to acknowledge that not everyone is helped by talking about their problems. Many patients, he says, are harmed by it. So this gets into the PTSD. This is where, by talking about their problems, many patients, he says, are harmed by it. So this gets into the PTSD. This is where he talks about Matt Damon and Goodwill hunting, she says, impact theaters across the country. Heart swelled, tears rained down and the American mind renewed its faith in the curative miracle of talk therapy.
Speaker 1:Outside of Hollywood, however, rehashing sad memories often creates more problems than it solves. So we've gone through that. But, um, yeah, it's helped me in counseling too to think through um, we do counseling with people, but it's not simply come in and talk about your problems. Um, usually you'll have one or two meetings where we're asking them a lot of questions and we're fact finding and then it really transitions into coaching, habit training, teaching. I'm actually not interested in just listening to them complain every week about the same things. Yeah, incredibly unhelpful. So if you're a pastor, you want to think through those things.
Speaker 1:Also. I think as a parent I've been much more cognizant not to be like. When I say to my kids, like how was your day, I'm like, instead of saying like what things were hard today, I will say thing. And to my wife as well, I'll say things like hey, what were your three, three favorite things about today? And you know, they're like when school got over and I'm like, okay, again, we're gonna be, we're gonna. What was your, what was your favorite thing that you learned?
Speaker 1:But you'll find over time that it actually produces people who are happier. Yeah. Then if you're like, hey, tell me the worst things about your day, no, that's actually not helpful. Um, even with grieving people, you'll find that they want time to talk about what's hard. But then there's time where they want to joke and they want to talk about the game and they want to just move on and again, just trying to get people in groups to share trauma all the time. By the way, oh boy, here we go.
Speaker 1:I think one of the dumbest things in the history of the world. I hate it. And it was a common practice in like mainline and specifically like baptist churches. Oh yeah, the men's group stuff, men's groups with like book studies were hate it, and it was a common practice in like mainline and specifically like Baptist churches. Oh yeah, the men's group stuff, men's groups with like book studies were like we're going to read a sentence from like John. I want you to tell me how that sentence made you feel. And I've sat through these very recently not at our church, obviously and I was like what the hell is going on right now, the way that group therapy dynamics have infiltrated everything.
Speaker 2:Well, that's the whole inductive Bible study method was like what did this mean to you? It's like I don't actually care what it meant to you. What does it say? What did it mean? What is God?
Speaker 1:wrote it what is objectively true, but I think, just being cognizant of like we need, I think we need to just ditch those models of group therapy, everything. I don't need group therapy, you don't need group therapy. You. You've seen the memes. They're kind of a joke but it's like the best way a man deals with things is by like bearing his feelings, having a beer, like working on a car with his buddies and then going shooting and I'm like, but you read this book and you're like that's actually true.
Speaker 2:Or like the whole meme series where, like guys would literally rather do this than go to therapy, and they're just like crazy things.
Speaker 1:Well and and when you realize, like, how emasculating therapy is, that actually makes sense. Yes, bad therapy. Step nine encourage young adults to break contact with toxic family. Dan, this is a big one because it's a fifth commandment violation. Of course, as we said before, there are times when, if you have abusive parents, for example, like they hit you. I've talked to people who are like, yeah, my dad tried to kill me. Okay, my dad's on heroin. Okay, that is actual. You want to distance yourself? Yes, yeah, my dad is a serial killer. Okay, different obligations.
Speaker 1:But I think the point here is, um, what's happening? Is people going to therapy? The therapist is like, oh, your dad is a narcissistic, whatever. And then they're like, write that person out of your life. Um, but she says family estrangement is a major iatrogenic risk of therapy, not only because it typically produces so much desperate, chronic distraught to the cutoff parents. It also strips the adult child of a major source of stability and support, and for generations afterwards. So it's really funny. She even tells a story somewhere in here where, um, like you're, you call your mom on the phone. She said something you don't like. You hang up quickly in a panic. You call her back like 10 minutes later, pretend that nothing happened. You have a conversation, then she watches the kids that evening. Yeah, now, this is funny.
Speaker 1:We would obviously encourage like you should, reconciliation, yeah, actual repentance, but I'm sorry that was wrong. Whatever we can move on. But but I do actually think there's something about that. Like dude, people are going to sin against you. Um, I have a lot of people that I've known in my life where especially the boomer generation what they will say is we don't live near our family and we don't have anything to do with our family on a daily basis, because that's how you sin against each other, so let's just alienate each other proactively. What do you think about that? Um, what have been the net results, societally, of family estrangement?
Speaker 2:I actually don't know how to answer that question. How do you measure complete disregard for the fifth commandment by, by the way, first commandment with a promise? Should it be any surprise that life expectancy in the United States is declining in the year of our Lord, 2024,? That life expectancy is declining is because people are actually just dishonoring their parents. Now, one of the things that's really helpful with biblical counseling is that when you essentially look at what does the scripture say about your duties, you have duties. What does it mean to honor your parents? You know your father and mother Different episode, different day and also what does it mean for parents to you know what duties do they have to their children, to their grown children, and so one of the things that you do is you walk through that, like if you're talking with, you know with the children, and you have to talk to them. What are your duties to your parents and how do you fulfill those duties? The best you can. Of course, your parents are sinners. You're sinners too, and taking responsibility are sinners. You're sinners too, and taking responsibility.
Speaker 2:But I can't help but think because of how much we've completely disregarded and this, in a large part, has been aided by the modern evangelical church to essentially disregard the covenant family has resulted in such an individualized uh people that loneliness. It shouldn't be a surprise that people are actually depressed because they're lonely and they don't. They don't have family, they don't have friends. You saw a movement in partly with the great relocation that's happening, but especially in like 2020 and 2021, where people all of a sudden were moving near their family because they were isolated and they realized that they needed family. Maybe they couldn't cope as well, you know, without uh remaining busy with their, their day-to-day lives. They realized that family was actually quite important.
Speaker 2:My parents, even when family is imperfect yeah, as they all are, just as a side note. So my parents were living in Wisconsin that's where I'm from and I can't remember exactly when they moved, but it was 2020, 2021, some 2022, something along. They had a small group Boomers love small groups, okay, like Bible studies and my parents said that every single couple in their small group was moving to their family, to their kids Interesting, yeah, yeah. So there was like a dozen of them and they were all moving.
Speaker 1:But I think a big part of it is families were like this. You know in the past where it's like families, it was very common to have like multi-generational homes or multi-generational neighborhoods. Um, you live near each other. I always liked like the first big fat Greek wedding is a good picture of your family's annoying. They're funny, they're hard to deal with sometimes, but they're your family and they also take care of you. Yeah, and especially, I think with the increases of social tensions, inflation it is. You see all these videos, tiktok videos of young people who are like my college degree, I can never pay this off and I can never buy a house and I'm miserable and I work in a cubicle out of. That is when parents and people who have access to wealth that was gained in earlier periods can say things like I'm going to help you, instead of yeah, it is going to be really hard, but we've already started thinking through this. I know you have as well. It's like I'm not going to expect my 18 year old to move out of my house the day he turns 18 and be like good luck, you're on your own. No, it's going to be like, yeah, work a job, fine, let's. Let's be working now to the point where, in you know, two years, year and a half, you are ready to have a job, whatever that is. Um, you can live in our house as long as you're working hard in building, that's fine. I'm probably not. You know, I'm not charging you rent. I can cover that. But it's also things like they're also helping contribute to the household and you know, one day it's like we have a house now that's like it's built for a family and there's going to come a point where it's like OK, I can pass that on to my, to my children, uh, because I don't actually need a full-size family house, and whether that's to, you know, live in a grandma, grandpa, pad out back, or whatever it is, it's like, okay, there's ways you can help each other. Um, I was even thinking about this with my dad recently, where it's like we were talking about all the knowledge that he has that this generation doesn't.
Speaker 1:My dad said, uh, really interesting. He said, yeah, you know vehicles. They want to sell you an 80,000, $90,000 truck. He said I think there's going to come a resurgence in people who are interested in, like, square body Chevys from the eighties, cause they're actually really cheap to maintain. Yeah, like a new engine on the old three 50. I mean, we replaced many of them and you'd pay for a refurb. It was like 1500 bucks and it would go 200,000 miles and they were. Anybody could work on them if you knew what you were doing.
Speaker 1:But I said to my dad. I said, yeah, but there's something in this equation. He used to build race cars and he knew how to work on them. I said you have the knowledge, though, that a lot of people don't, so you can work on them and like that's cool, pass that on to grandkids. You know stuff like that. So I think just the ability to say for a couple of households, somebody like my dad, to maintain a fleet and Jason your brother, would be the same way maintaining a fleet of vehicles at low cost Cause I'm, you know Dan's not a fleet and Jason your brother would be the same way Maintaining a fleet of vehicles at low cost, because you know Dan's not a fool, he's not going out and buying $95,000 pickup trucks, just not going to happen. So that means like keep them running, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:But you need that family knowledge. The knowledge is good because obviously you develop a life of skill, especially with the loss of the trades, like you're. You're pointing out the the ability to wrench on something, to grow something, to fix something, like my dad he did. He's built houses, like multiple houses, just as you know, not not for work just my uncle needed a house built.
Speaker 1:He built a cabin there's a whole body of knowledge that they have.
Speaker 2:Yeah so he knows how to do everything. He's poured much, much concrete done, plumbing, electrical, like the whole deal, so anything that needs to be done. You know I'm usually calling my dad instead of looking at YouTube, although I do consult YouTube, don't tell my dad. So there is, like the, the knowledge part. There's also the culture part, which is really interesting because, as much as we love to, you know, just absolutely drag boomers because man, have they earned it, but their problems aren't the problems of today. That's part of the reason why they they kind of stand out so much is because the the modern, even though the fruit of the culture today was caused because of boomers. They have experienced different issues and so they can think through things a little bit differently and pass on a little bit more of the, I think, just an older world.
Speaker 2:You know hard work. You know we say, with those videos of people that are complaining about you know student debt and I can't buy a house and whatever, and you get the typical boomer trope like maybe if you wouldn't spend so much money on lattes you could be. You know you'd be able to afford that. There's a part of that where it's like, yeah, okay, boomer, yeah, you don't understand the time we're in, but what are they saying? Actually, there's a value that's important.
Speaker 1:Yeah, be frugal work hard, be disciplined with your money, like, don't go into crazy amounts of debt. How about that? Maybe you shouldn't have got a stupid degree. I think the other thing to remember to uh, the importance of generations. So I've talked to my dad about this before too. Like you know, here's all the things that boomers did and you know they 2008 specifically. Like you traded your kid's future.
Speaker 1:But my dad brought up a really interesting point. I think it's fair. He goes, yeah, but you have to understand I didn't support that. When it happens, I'm not, I didn't vote for that, yeah, and I wasn't part of the people who had any power over it and I was like, yeah, no, that's a good point. And I think to look at them and say like, like, I look at that generationally and you see that that's really good, those things are really good. Now, you know, with future generations, we need to not be atomized and alienated from one another and actually using those things to say, okay, I'm going to help my offspring, I'm going to help pass on these different legacies.
Speaker 2:Well, that's why I think you need to have a vision that includes your generations. Yeah, not just a target of retirement.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's why I think to the this, this whole issue of like. Why is it so bad to just alienate your family? Cause you're furthering the atomization of culture and you're fueling this loneliness where, um, you know, if you have a lonely culture, the thing you actually need is your generations and your people, uh, to be around you. You don't want to die alone. No, you don't want to live alone. Um, so I think that's good. Uh, number 10, and this is kind of where we'll wrap things up Uh, step 10, a bad therapy create treatment, dependency, and really I think this is kind of obvious. But when you, basically when you need to talk to a therapist to make any life decision, you will get to the point where you're dependent upon them and you're not able to do anything without this extreme coddling. And you're not able to do anything without this extreme coddling.
Speaker 1:And she closes the chapter, chapter three, by talking about emotional hypochondriacs. That's what we're functionally creating. And she tells a story of women in breast cancer. She said women are terrified of breast cancer. She's quoting here. They will examine their breasts so frequently that it starts to get tender. They will say well, Jesus, it must be inflamed. Dr Barsky told me what they're really doing is actually making it worse. So she says, the most effective treatments for hypochondriasis or, you know, emotional hypochondriacs are behavioral modifications that force the sufferer to stop mentally and physically attending to their pain.
Speaker 1:She says, those who have turned their distress into what he calls an organizing principle, this becomes the problem. They join online groups devoted to their mysterious illnesses. They stop going to work, they rearrange their social lives as a shrine to their symptoms. I don't know, Dan, that sounds like idolatry. They require nothing short of a rescue mission, something to shift their focus from themselves and tear them from this self-destructive mental loop. She says, however, bad therapy does exactly the opposite. So I just want to close by talking about this organizing principle. Is that what you mean when you're saying, like I'm an alcoholic, I'm depressed? Is that kind of what you have in mind with organizing principle?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, and if you think about it, your identity I mean this is people in your subconscious. I think you do this, but if you want to be identified, for example, if you're a gym rat as part of your identity, you're going to coddle and feed that identity. What are you going to do? Well, you're going to go to the gym a lot. You're going to focus on your nutrition, your macros or micros, macros, your you know, your workout plans, all of those things You're going to cultivate that. Well, if you identify a part of your identity is realized in being depressed, like I am depressed. You're going to do the same thing with that identity. And obviously there's. You'll feed that and, and you know, continue to coddle it and obsess over it. Um, and obviously there's with your identity. There are good things and you can do this good, good and bad.
Speaker 2:Actually, one of the one of the most helpful ways to to stop a bad habit is, uh, it's kind of like my trick, but you don't identify with it anymore. I was, uh, I can't remember who I was watching, but they had mentioned, you know, like you used to smoke, uh, so, uh, you don't smoke anymore. No, no. So if I said, hey, I've, I've got a cigarette. You want one. You wouldn't what, would you say.
Speaker 1:And you said no thanks, no thanks, I'm not a smoker.
Speaker 2:Oh so if because if you had said what brand is it? What brand is it Is a Marlboro or you know whatever? Uh, you would sell, identify as a smoker, and if it was the wrong brand you'd say no, but but it's no longer part of your identity.
Speaker 2:And so maybe, maybe I'm mixing some modernist sort of views in there but if you're like no, I'm a Christian man, a masculine, I'm a father, I'm a husband, uh, I'm a business leader, I have duties that I need to attend to, you're obviously going to cultivate that identity. You're going to, you're going to cultivate that identity in Christ. This is biblical basics, right, you're? You're going to walk in righteousness and impurity and and virtue and you know all those things. So you're going to feed that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is a. James Clear talks about it in his book Atomic Habits. That same thing. He says one of the most effective things that they've found for habit change is to start with the identity. You know what would a healthy, fit person do, and so you can ask yourself that question Like what? What would a strong Christian or a faithful masculine Christian?
Speaker 2:man read this book and I use these. This practice all the time.
Speaker 1:I say that what would a good?
Speaker 2:pastor do in this situation?
Speaker 1:right and, and you know, the office the other side of it that's funny that we use is, you know, dwight said it's simple. I ask what would an idiot do? And then I do not do that thing. But you could apply it and you could say what would a coward do? Right, we don't want to be a coward, but what would they do in this situation? And then we can also say on the positive side, like what would, what would a good they do in this situation? And then we can also say on the positive side, like what would, what would a good wife do in this situation? What would a good, godly, gentle of spirit, kindhearted, submissive wife, what would she do in this situation?
Speaker 1:And that actually becomes. If you can frame yourself in that identity biblically and act out of that identity, you're much more likely to maintain the habit than if you say I'm a smoker and I'm just not gonna have a cigarette this once, yeah, or I'm trying to quit, if you say that you're gonna fail, but if you say oh, no, thanks, I'm not a smoker you can see this all the time, with people on diets where they're like, well, I'm fat, I'm fat, I'm fat.
Speaker 2:And then, when temptation comes, they're like, well, I'm hard, I'm fat, I'll just. I'll just eat the thing. That's right, I'll just eat, I'm fat, I'll have a third taco, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think you know the, the reverse and all this right Emotional hypochondriacs, how do you this is where I think it King's Hall but also like read the stories of great Christian men from the past, read the stories of the guys who stormed Normandy Beach. This is why I started this podcast, hard men. You know there's a book I was reading and it's called A Handful of Hard Men and it's about like the Rhodesian SAS and the cell of scouts and these guys went through hardship and a hard man was somebody who you know had self-mastery, he could soldier on through great difficulty not a lot of food, heat bugs, insects, fighting communist guerrillas but functionally it's the opposite of this emotionally fragile state of kind, of the ideal person that we create today because of you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, hyper-emotional, very anxious, cowardly person.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so that aren't self-sufficient.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I guess the encouragement just for our listeners, like you know, to wrap all this in above is to say like we need to know this. This is like knowing the strategy of the enemy. Yeah, bow is to say like we need to know this. This is like knowing the strategy of the enemy. Yeah, Um, I want you, as Andrew Isker says, psychotherapy is a replacement for Christian thought in trash world. And I want you not only to love righteousness and love biblical counseling and the word of God, I want you to hate what is wicked. Yes, and psychotherapy the more you read about it, you're like this is. This isn't just innocuously bad or like accidentally bad, this is intentionally bad.
Speaker 2:It's actually part of the goal. This is part of Satan's goal is to enslave and to kill Right, and it makes you subhuman. These, these counter biblical ideas and methods, ideas and methods. It makes you subhuman instead of the fullness of humanity found in Christ, who's to call you up to courage and to hope and to righteousness, instead of being enslaved to your sin and then obsessing and coddling your sin it makes you subhuman. So come up into Christ, into the fullness of humanity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so putting these things to death and being courageous and Stan hard men, be a hard man. So hopefully this conversation has been beneficial to you guys. We do want to encourage you. If you're not yet signed up on Patreon, you can support this show. Also get access to exclusive bonus episodes. Dan, you and I did one recently. It was phenomenal. Well, you were on it. What was it about? You don't remember. You have to look it up. You don't remember either.
Speaker 2:You don't remember. We did an episode on the pugilist wait. What was this?
Speaker 1:my show and you don't even remember oh, it was not talked about. It was the singles mixer, dang it, you got it yep singles mixer and I just got it because I pulled it I pulled it up on patreon.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we're gonna have a singles mixer. We've got a conference coming up June 6th through 8th in Ogden, utah, and we encourage people to come. But one of the things we were encouraging in teaching our young men and young ladies like here's some tips for how to enter the quote unquote sexual marketplace, how to find a spouse, how to have a conversation in a productive way. If you haven't yet go to new Christendom presscom slash conference, you can sign up and come and join us. But yeah, also Patreon great place for exclusive content like that and also get episodes free of ads. So that is a nice thing. You don't have to unless you want the ads.
Speaker 2:What if I do? Dan, you should listen to him then Just listen to him and support our sponsors.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we also encourage you to support the sponsors. They make this show possible. We want to thank everybody who is supporting this show and others. And, dan, thank you for joining me for this episode of the Hard man podcast. Encourage people to read the book bad therapy by Abigail Schreier why the kids aren't growing up. And again, we'll have a link for the podcast with Dale Johnson from ACBC not ACDC, dan for those about to read the book. We salute you.
Speaker 3:I hope somebody gets that.
Speaker 1:I did, Dan, thank you. Well, aren't you supposed to say I'm gonna oh okay, thank you. No, thank you, Dan. Would you close us down, since I know it's your favorite thing to do?
Speaker 2:Stay frosty fight the good fight and act like men.
Speaker 1:Let's go.