The business of healing ourselves

I don't know about you, but I'm starting to feel really done with therapy speak. We are constructing a fragile world where we are all broken, kids grow up thinking parents not letting them have ice cream for breakfast is a trauma, and somehow every single soul has at least one diagnosis, maybe two, which serves as an excuse to act like an asshole and not apologize for it. In a world of armchair therapists with huge audiences, what does truth matter anymore?

If I sound salty, apologies. It's been a week, bear with me.

This might be wishful thinking, but I sense a trend shift. More of us are starting to notice the bitter after-taste of the compulsive navel-gazing heal yourself-movement. Recently I heard a Swedish writer reply to a question on how to love oneself and she responded with basically saying, why do we fucking have to? Isn’t this a boring question? Are we not just tired of this self-centeredness? 

She's right, I thought, I'm so tired of this endless conversation on healing ourselves. It felt refreshing. I later read a review of some new Swedish self-help book where the critic made a similar observation. This belief that we can cure ourselves from everything we experienced, turn ourselves into perfectly balanced humans without scars and triggers, and then we’ll somehow be protected from anything bad happening to us.

It’s a mirage, of course, which is obvious when writing it out like this. But it’s easy to get caught up in the hamster-wheel of self-improvement. Especially when TikTok and Instagram are filled to the brim with 22-year-old life coaches who have figured out all their trauma and with a snappy edit convince you that if you join their €300 masterclass, you can too.

What if all the fix-yourself-coaches and businesses would focus on how we can contribute better to the world around us? Maybe fixing ourselves in order to fix the world is the wrong way of going about it – maybe focusing on fixing the world will be what actually help heal ourselves? If nothing else, it might heal ourselves from the collective narcissism the western world can surely be diagnosed with.

Signed,
Your Armchair Unlicensed Therapist without an audience