At some point in the future, therapy scholars will characterise this decade as a shameful time when the therapy professions lost any claim to be offering healing services. Instead, unanchored in reality and captured by a transparently political ideology, these helping professions swallowed a worldview based on power and oppression. Training institutions conspired to train students to ignore the uniqueness of each individual client and instead treated them as merely avatars for oppressed or oppressor groups (see Christine Sefein’s discussion of ideologically-possessed psychotherapy training and Sherwood and Miller’s inquiry into clinical psychology training in the UK).

One particularly pernicious consequence of Critical Social Justice is that it blinds therapists to the needs of clients who have had negative experiences related to this worldview. Its regressive reductive binary lens groups people into righteous victims and ‘the wrong kind of victims’: the latter includes people mobbed and defamed for protesting against ‘woke’ strictures’ ; people holding gender critical beliefs; and, straight white men in general.

What we need right now are more high profile therapists with a public platform to expose the difficullties people are experiencing with CSJ captured environments and to offer some useful counsel to these potential clients. One such person is Dr Chloe Carmichael who writes an advice column for The Epoch Times. In her latest post she offers advice to a young man who has been falsely charged with sexual misconduct. It is chilling to think how many people are suffering in silence and how punitive the therapy professions have become towards unfavoured groups. See her other writings on this topic and here. The post opens with the following words:

‘Dear Josh,

I am so sorry for what you have experienced. Unfortunately, your story is increasingly common—a fallout of the #metoo movement is that men are often considered “guilty till proven innocent,”—a perspective that is harmful to all parties involved. It pains me to acknowledge that your experience of therapists accusing you is also increasingly common—at least according to the stories I have heard from countless young men like yourself.

You wrote for advice, not for sympathy—so let me suggest a few ideas:’

Read the rest of the post here.