Therapy Won’t Make You a Better Person.

Your therapist is positioned to take your side — that’s both a good and bad thing.

Yesterday, I stumbled upon a tweet that sadly reminds me of numerous avid therapy-goers I’ve met in real life:

The woman described in this tweet appears to be taking a deeply adversarial approach to dating — one I’ve heard endorsed by many straight women who attend therapy for their own betterment and empowerment. She apparently sees her current boyfriend as a future enemy in the making, not a partner she can express concerns to and collaborate with to solve problems.

Unfortunately, since heterosexual dating norms teach women to obscure their desires and expect their partners to mind-read, doing something “wrong” in this woman’s eyes could be anything from acts of violent abuse, to simply not knowing her favorite flower. Women are taught that asking directly for what they want is wrong. But they’ve also been told that in order to escape sexism, they need to be unflinchingly confident and unattached to men, who won’t ever understand them and can never be trusted. This leads to a lot of self-defeating behavior loops in straight relationships.

A woman faking sexual satisfaction without ever telling her partner how she likes to be touched (and later mocking him for not knowing something he has never been told) is perhaps the most stereotypical example of this dynamic in practice. As a young person, I used to think it was just a cliched…