Dr. Roger McFillin (00:01.388)
Welcome to the Radically Genuine Podcast. I'm Dr. Roger McFillin. This week, Matt Walsh, the conservative commentator from the Daily Wire, told several million people that most therapists are worse than useless. Now, if you follow his work, you're probably used to these hot, pithy takes. He's quite comical. I often get a laugh when I see some of his takes on modern society and culture. And he's jumped into my field.

The mental health industrial complex. And he basically said that therapy in itself is a business model built on repeat customers. He had takes about repressed memories being, you know, cooked up by the psychiatric industrial complex, something that has been clearly disputed and dismantled for years, but is kind of unknown to most therapists who are practicing in the field. And

He basically said you'd be better off skipping the couch entirely and going for a jog. And I think what followed was completely predictable. Many of his audience cheered the take, while others were completely outraged. And in all that noise, as far as I can tell, nobody bothered to do the one thing that actually matters, which is to sort out which of his claims are true.

Where is their truth? Because it wouldn't be so controversial unless there was a degree of truth to it. And where may he be missing the mark? So here's what this episode is. And I'll warn you now. If you came here for a takedown of Matt Walsh, you're probably going to be disappointed because he lands more punches than maybe many in my profession want to admit. And if you came here because you love that thread, you're probably also going to be disappointed because there's a place where he

Kind takes an uppercut to the chin. And it involves just a human take on human struggle and how do we help people who are really in bad places in their life? And so hopefully by the end of this episode, I'm also going to answer the question that every critic owes an answer to, and the one that Walsh doesn't really touch in a meaningful way.

Dr. Roger McFillin (02:25.42)
If this modern therapy complex and it's

Cousin, the psychiatric drugs are a big part of the problem. Then what do we do? What are our alternatives? But first let me say set the table here because context matters. And most of the people screaming about this story probably don't understand it or didn't read it. The spark was an article in the Wall Street Journal asking whether therapists are to blame for the rise of adult children.

Cutting off their parents. And in fairness to the reporting, the article makes a few careful points. It says that after decades of urging families to communicate and work through problems together, a segment of therapists has reversed course and now encourages estrangement, cutting off a parent, a sibling, a spouse, framed as self-care, framed as protecting yourself from people deemed toxic.

It says the critics of this trend, and many of them are researchers who have studied families for decades, argue that it encourages kind of a self-centered, narcissistic self-delusion, and it's destroying families. And it makes the point that most therapists agree estrangements are sometimes justified. Like they're real abuse exists, and nobody who is serious disputes this. But what's changed is the bar.

This the threshold for what counts as abusive, enough to sever a family, that bar keeps dropping. And then the article tells a story. And I want you to hold this woman in your mind for the next 40 minutes. On her therapist's advice, she cut off her mother. And years passed, she married without her mother there. Grandparents died without goodbyes. Other relatives cut her off in anger over the estrangement, estrangement, a consequence.

Dr. Roger McFillin (04:29.686)
That nobody really warned her about. And she had children of her own. And something shifted. She realized that every parent has flaws, including her, including the one that she's cut off from her life. And so she picked up the phone and they reconciled. And she now says she deeply regrets it all. Though she can't only blame herself because she's the one who received the advice and received the advice from a professional.

It was a licensed professional that advised her of this, and then the family paid for it. And, you know, the professional just doesn't. You know, who gave some of these professionals the right to make such a a claim? And, you know, where are people vulnerable to receiving such direction? And I think that's what lit the fuse. Because Matt Walsh, he kind of picked up that article. And then, you know, he what he often does is.

He throws a match on on the flame. And I'm going to read you his post now, word for word, because I'm not gonna do what our current media climate does and like paraphrase him and create him to be a cartoon, and then everyone date debates the cartoon. So here's the first one. And this is a quote Most therapists are worse than useless.

The vast majority are liberal women who don't possess the life experience, wisdom, or moral or intellectual foundation to offer worthwhile guidance to anyone, especially men. Most of them got into the therapy business in the first place because they have their own deep mental problems. Now they're acting as life guides for other confused people, despite being no less confused themselves.

He keeps going. But even in the relatively rare circumstance where a therapist isn't a weird, dysfunctional person, still the practice of therapy presupposes that the best way to deal with your problems and quote trauma traumas, unquote, is to obsessively talk about them, which is always not the case. You're better off going to the gym or going for a jog.

Dr. Roger McFillin (06:52.182)
I know this is hard for people in our culture to understand, but talking it out is actually not the way to solve your problems most of the time. There's a reason why most people in therapy stay in it forever. Therapy creates repeat customers. This is intentional. It's a symbiotic relationship. The therapist needs her clients to come back so the business is viable.

The clients want to come back because they have a narcissistic desire to talk about themselves and navel gaze in lieu of actually doing anything to take change or charge of their own lives.

And then, short and to the point, don't go to therapy. Fix your diet, get some exercise, spend more time outdoors. You will infinitely feel better after a week than you would after 10 years of therapy. There are more posts on repressed memories, and I'm saving those for its own segment because they deserve it. So that's the thread. So let's get to work on it.

Before I grade anyone else, you deserve to know why I'm in position here to comment. I first entered this system when I was only 22 years old. I was working in the children's psychiatric hospital while I made my way through my graduate education. These were locked units, kids in crisis, kids under the age of 10, some of them as young as four or five. And I saw institutional psychiatry from the inside.

Before I held any single credential. It was a transformative experience for me. From there, I went into the juvenile justice system, eventually serving as a juvenile probation officer. And my caseload was kids initially who committed crimes and then carried this diagnosis of mental illness at the same time. So both systems end up claiming these kids, and I watched what each system actually did for them, which was certainly not much.

Dr. Roger McFillin (08:58.285)
I earned a master's degree, then went into schools. I entered into a doctoral program in clinical psychology. With that came training in community mental health centers. I was going into the homes in our impoverished neighborhoods. I worked in various clinics, being trained in cognitive behavioral therapies. Once licensed, I opened my own center. I have a background in conducting research, a board certified in behavioral and cognitive psychology.

I've contributed to the literature through book chapters and scientific publications. And for the past six or seven years, most of you know me as one of the most outspoken critics of the mental health industrial complex. And so nobody can accuse me of circling the wagons today, but there is a tension that I live with as well as other mental health therapists and psychologists out there who listen to this podcast or follow my work.

And I think it does belong at the center of this episode. Now, I have recently stopped providing therapy. I was being called to new challenges, and I'm answering that call. Many of you may know that from reading my Substack or listening to a previous episode with Tracy Thurman, but I'd be lying if I told you that that was the whole story. I believe there are limitations of therapy and the system.

It operates inside. They're real. There's real potential harms and they are not insignificant. And I've watched so much of this up close for three decades, and I wasn't willing to keep pretending otherwise. So today I still help people, but I provide coaching and consultation services around the world outside of that system. And the people who do reach out to me have real legitimate problems and they're looking for real solutions.

Not a quick social media take that can go all or nothing in either direction, which raises the question that I promised you in the opening, the one that we have to answer. If therapy and drugs, which the system has devolved into, are part of the problem, well, what do we do? So I want you to hold on to that because a critique without an answer to that question would just be another performance. And the show is not very interested in doing performance.

Dr. Roger McFillin (11:25.337)
But let's talk about Matt Walsh first and where he lands some real punches. He also swings wild, and every wild swing, I think, hands the industry an excuse to dismiss the entire critique. And often that's how reform dies. And I'm interested in real reform. So let me start where Walsh and I agree, because this agreement I think runs deeper than most people who are in my field would like to acknowledge.

And I'm gonna start with the first one, and I'll probably bears repeating. Talking in itself is not curative. Okay. The talking cure is a lie, it's not accurate. Talking about your fears, your childhood, your inner world week after week, it doesn't heal or transform anything. And in plenty of cases, it's going to make things worse. And I don't believe.

The reason is that complicated because you're a powerful creator being. And where your attention goes, all your energy flows in that direction. So you park a person's attention on their wounds or their problems or their struggles for an hour every week under the disguise that this is curative in itself. If you do this for months or even years, you will not get transformation.

You're just going to get someone with a more elaborate story about all their wounds and their history, a better rehearsed narrative, and a richer vocabulary for their own struggles. And this certainly gets reinforced by the therapist across from you. Listen, identifying a problem area in your life has exactly one legitimate use. And it's this: to become more intentional about making changes.

And that's it. It's the identification is the starting line. It was never the race. People change through what they do differently, not through what they analyze endlessly. And an industry built on the back of Freudian psychology generally has no incentive to hand you a different map. Many of these therapists.

Dr. Roger McFillin (13:50.062)
Legitimately enter into the field with a very basic knowledge of Freudian psychology and other humanistic kind of understandings about person-centered therapy that lead them to believe falsely that just the process of talking, facing, and analyzing is enough to move that person into a shift in their life. And it often does not.

So let's consider a long-term therapy client who is fluent in their own narrative, who's deeply insightful, able to explain their childhood in beautiful paragraphs, and remains unchanged. This becomes the norm too often because the therapist believes that this person is insightful, and that insight is going to shift into.

Behavior change. But ultimately, if therapists are honest, they don't have to do much work in such a situation. And I will talk about who really gets harmed and why the incentive-based structure in therapy supports working with the people with the least amount of severe challenges. And now the repressed memory post, because

This is his strongest ground, and he deserves to be heard in full here because here's what Matt Walsh wrote. And I think it goes a little bit beyond even what he was recognizing. Repressed emotions, total nonsense. Talk about programming. You're a victim of it and you don't know it. Therapy has programmed you to sit around analyzing your own emotions, hoping to unlock some kind of secret code to happiness and success. It's all bullshit. Stop.

Obsessing over yourself and go live your life. And deeper, obviously, people can forget things, but the repressed memory scam claims that the mind completely buries certain traumatic events, and only a trained psychiatric professional can magically uncover these buried memories that your own conscious mind is unaware of. There is simply no evidence for this claim. It's been debunked many times over. This was litigated very publicly.

Dr. Roger McFillin (16:16.481)
And openly back in the 80s and 90s. And there are many cases, including some very famous ones, of psychiatrists helping their clients to invent false memories. That's what generally ends up happening when you go to a therapist searching for your repressed memories. And again, this is all documented, unquote. And one more the concept of repressed memories is in fact total nonsense, discredited and debunked. Another scam by the psychiatric industry.

One that has been used to ruin counts countless lives and yet, like the chemical imbalance myth and many more examples, the industry still peddles it, and rubes like yourself still eat it up uncritically.

So here's my professional assessment on the core science. He is correct. And I think the full truth is even more unsettling than his version. The idea that the mind can bury a traumatic event completely, and that only a trained professional can dig it back up has never had reliable reliable scientific support. And some of this is at the core.

Of psychodynamic and psychoanalytic principles. But to understand why this practice is so dangerous, you have to see what actually happens in the room. And this is what's more important to me because a therapist is never a neutral observer of a client's story. A therapist is a co-creator of it. Every question chosen, every theme reflected back.

Every knowing and like those nods at the mention of a parent or the idea the person is a victim to somebody else begins to shape the reality that clients start believing. And in a field now trained on victim and perpetrator narratives, that co-authored reality tends to arrive with some villain pre-installed.

Dr. Roger McFillin (18:29.304)
And most clinicians don't even understand the limits of the instrument they're working with, because the mind, the mind is not a recording device. It composes, it creates stories. And the further you get from an event, the less reliable the story becomes, and more open it is to suggestion. Memory researchers have shown decades ago just how easily these false memories can be planted under exactly.

Those conditions recovered memory therapy tore families apart. It put people in prison. It generated false accusations that put people through hell. And the litigation, and this whole concept was litigated in open court through the 80s and 90s. The satanic panic, the daycare cases, families destroyed by memories of things that never happened.

And and here's the finding I think that flips this whole story is trauma research kind of shows the opposite of repression. Terrible events tend to be remembered too well, not too little. So I want you to think about the role of suggestion, the ideology of these trained therapists, how fallible our memory is. And then you put

All that together in a room for enough billable hours, and you do not uncover a hidden past, you begin to manufacture one. So a clinician who's still out there fishing for buried memories in 2026 is practicing pseudoscience and creating harm. So let's connect this directly back to the Wall Street Journal estrangement story that provoked this threat in the first place.

The modern version of therapy doesn't dig necessarily for buried memories, but it reinterprets the remembered ones. So the strict father now becomes abusive. The imperfect mother becomes a narcissist. An ordinary flawed childhood gets co authored into a case file where the

Dr. Roger McFillin (20:50.106)
Prescribed treatment can be like distance or shutting people out of your life. You know, Matt Walsh also mentioned the chemical imbalance myth almost in passing. And longtime listeners of this show know I could do a hundred hours here, so I'll keep that tight. The serotonin narrative had completely collapsed. The field's own leaders now shrug and call it simplification as if it were harmless. It wasn't harmless.

It's marketing device that persuaded millions of people that they're suffering with some brain defect requiring blunting drugs.

And so that goes in its own column. Of course, you know my take on this. And then there was the jog. everyone laughs at his comment about the jog, and but nobody should have because movement, sunlight, real food, and time outdoors will do much more for most struggling people than years of weekly talk therapy. And this rec exercise research isn't fringe. It's robust enough to.

Embarrassed a treatment establishment, even for severe depression. You know, such interventions that focus on behavioral activation have profound effects in breaking people from patterns. And of course, the health impacts of changing diet and getting sunlight, being connected to nature, exercising are powerful. And of course, you're getting people out of their heads. But

Mark this moment because right here is where I plant the flag here for the back half of this episode. So most people, Walsh's prescription is is genuinely enough. you know, a lot of the people who are going to therapy would definitely do much better following that advice. But of course, that's not everybody. And the distance between most and all is where this thread.

Dr. Roger McFillin (22:50.584)
in my opinion goes off the rails and where real situations and real problems, it it doesn't receive the attention and the solutions required. So we're gonna head there. First, I have to tell you what generally happens in training programs because I think some of this is honestly funny and it sets up the next stage of this for when I provide solutions. So when Wall says therapists lack the wisdom

And life experience to guide anyone. He does in in some ways frame it as a gender problem and a politics problem, which I think is a concern. And this is where the division lies. I'd frame it quite differently because the problem starts earlier than he thinks. And how easy it is to get a license can do most of the work for him that he didn't attend to in his diatribe. So think about what we're actually describing here.

Truly, a 20-something, barely out of adolescence, can complete a two-year master's program and then walk out legally credentialed to guide other human beings to the darkest passages of their lives. Two years isn't a very long time. It's right after graduating at 21 or 22. You do some supervised hours, and by the time you're 25 and 26, you are sitting in that chair. And what fills that training?

It is not a rigorous academic education. They do not receive a strong scientific foundation. There is not training in critical thinking. You're not extending into the history of how human beings have met hardship across thousands of years. Instead, you spend more time studying the origins of psychodynamic and humanistic thought, which is early 20th century.

You're not in any way examining the philosophical underpinnings of suffering and meaning. And life experience, which is critical, certainly does not become part of this curriculum. Right? At that age, most people who haven't had children yet, they're not married, might not even have to endure any type of loss, are certainly not equipped to be guiding people in middle age or.

Dr. Roger McFillin (25:18.852)
Your own children. Now let me be fair about something because it actually makes this worse, not better. I do believe there are natural born helpers. Some people are wise beyond their years. You may know one. Lots of communities have them. That person is what others instinctively bring their troubles to. They're probably kind, compassionate. They don't say a lot, but when they do.

It can hit home. A young woman or a young man who is somehow wise behind their years can sit with other people's pain without being scared of it, without rushing to fix it. And some of these people enter these programs, I believe, carrying a genuine gift. And that's where the tragedy lies for me. The training is more likely to interfere with that gift than to develop it. Two years of

DSM psychiatric pseudoscience layered over frameworks descended from Marxist philosophy, oppressor and oppressed, power and privilege, systems and structures. The natural-born helper walks out the other side, pathologizing her neighbors instead of understanding them. And most never even know it's happening to them. They think they're, in some way, decreasing stigma.

Or they've learned to apply a healthcare specialty to improve mental health. And that's how indoctrination works. Nobody experiences being indoctrinated. They experience the learning and they accept it into their worldview.

Now the other thing is you have to consider who's flooding these programs. Enrollment in master's level counseling programs has surged after COVID. Of course they have. They pushed this mental health crisis on us. They said we have

Dr. Roger McFillin (27:16.079)
An underfunded, an underprofessionalized helping class. You just need more therapy. You need more drugs, they say, as private equity jumps into the game. And the profession profession tends to congratulate itself with this influx of people into the field. But I read it very differently. A culture marinated.

In these ideas where young people who have been stuck in therapy speak for a decade, where they've been taught that their feelings are facts and discomfort is trauma, they got locked inside this prison for years. It's shaped their worldview, and now they enter into academia and they think that they can make this a career. Mostly young women. It's that's exactly what the percentages show.

And they tend to also draw from a very narrow slice of the culture entering a curriculum without science to push back on, no strong evaluation of history to compare it against, no philosophy to test ideas with, and no lived hardship to weigh any of it against. So it's minds with no antibodies. The surge is not a sign of a society getting serious about mental health. It's a symptom of the greater wound.

And I think the product is now graduating at scale. And from plenty of interviews, the modern student might be able to write a gorgeous essay on her position of

Understanding about how systems create trauma, oppression, versus the oppressor. She probably will log more classroom hours examining her privilege than she'll ever spend learning the impacts of a starving brain does to a teenager's thinking. She could probably spot a microaggression at 50 yards, but can't build an exposure heart hierarchy and have people overcome fears that are keeping them small.

Dr. Roger McFillin (29:26.811)
So that's the person the culture is sending out for guidance through some of the darkest and most serious passages of one's life. A lot of people are coming into therapy offices on multiple drugs, dealing with medical conditions, part of a sick culture. And this gets just deviantly twisted into some psychiatric diagnosis. This is a huge problem. Okay. And so this is where.

I think Matt Walsh, his argument hits home for so many people. But then let's also, you know, take a look at the other side and where I think in this challenge of ideas, he kind of takes an uppercut to the chin. And I'm sure he doesn't understand it because he hasn't been in the room with it. He doesn't have this experience. And of course, there's a percentage of our fellow brothers and sisters who are genuinely suffering and in a bad place, not functioning.

And there are concerned people that love them. So, in my line of work, I may have worked with a young woman whose eating disorder put her on the edge of organ failure. And she's stuck in a mind that telling that's telling her she is large or sick. she's fat, she's unattractive. And despite almost being de being near death from starvation.

She's attached to that world and dealing with the physical effects of that starvation. And then you trace that back further. Something that may have prompted that response was like a severe sexual assault. And then there's the man who's obsessions and rituals have like shrunk his world to the point where he doesn't even leave his house anymore. We know people who have survived.

Something legitimately horrific. And I mean legitimately, not the concept creep version of trauma where a rude email and the emotions related to that become identified as a traumatic response. I'm talking about the ones who had gone through severe and prolonged childhood trauma or a significant event that violated bodily integrity.

Dr. Roger McFillin (31:54.195)
How about a combat veteran? So these are serious situations. Many of them in those cases, like their nervous system doesn't even function the way an average person would. They're constantly on guard.

And these were the cases that I was having to meet every day. And it's what I faithfully took on because I saw it as my purpose. And so a Matt Walsh comment on X, what it does is it diminishes and devalues what people are facing. And it doesn't offer any solutions. Go.

For a jog isn't going to get it done, clearly. And it's much more than connecting with nature. And

This is where I think as a culture we're screaming for answers because there's real trauma. Like we have to discuss that. and that's not to dismiss that most people who face these things overcome it naturally. They do, but post-traumatic stress is real. And roughly 20% of the people who pass through these real atrocities in life combat rape, violence, these catastrophes. They end up living with nightmares and intense anxiety.

A hypervigilance that like never seems to power down. And inside, painful memories that the rest of us are able to set down and move through, they get stuck on. It compounds itself, right? The use of substances as a way of getting some relief, the developing eating disorder I mentioned before, and the medical toll of prolonged stress on the human body. I've sat with those, and anyone else who has can tell you it's not invented.

Dr. Roger McFillin (33:51.235)
And we need to be able to serve those people, which is exactly the group that Walsh's advice abandons. And it's exactly where his thread stops being provocative and just becomes more ignorant because these re people do require help more than a diet, more than a lecture about self-obsession, but more skilled and wise direction from someone who understands how a person get get trapped inside their own fears and how they can get free.

And I mean, in the same breath, because you should never say one of these without the other, that 20% outcomes not the norm, as I mentioned. 80% of people who endured genuinely terrible events recover on their own without professionals, because resilience is the ordinary human trajectory. And the mind is built to be able to process this pain. And we force many to people.

Way too many people in the therapy have gone through something hard.

But this conversation is for that percentage that is looking for answers. And for the ones who do require help, a validating chat was never gonna be enough. And honestly, I wouldn't even call what they need therapy. I mean that word now belongs to the commodified 45 minutes of 53 minute session with a prof provider whose all likelihood

Is like woefully undertrained for the severity sitting across from her or him. What they need is closer to skilled guidance through the hardest passage of their life offered by someone who's dedicated their life to understanding this, who has real training, real experience, the wisdom to tell the difference between pain that needs to be felt and a pattern that needs to be broken. And Walsh throws.

Dr. Roger McFillin (35:52.231)
These people away in his rush to burn everything down. And this is where we have to move forward here. Because I don't want you to mistake my correction here for a defense of the system, because I think here's the twist on this. and we should feel uncomfortable in these discussions because the system throws many of these people who need help away. It just

It it does it does it systemically through incentives. The system was not truly built for the people I described requires that help. It runs on manufacturing patients out of the normal. And that engine is often this diagnostic system. And

Everything that promotes the diagnostic system, that DSM catalog for all of this. So we start to now restrict the definition and boundaries for what is a disorder. And we have completely and overwhelmingly lost a sense of what is normal.

And what walks into the therapy office and stays in the therapy office becomes is the the worried well, the lonely, the demoralized, the people moving through ordinary pain of being alive. But that severe eating disorder, that severe OCD, the people who are want to end their life, they don't get the necessary care that's required.

And it's not seriously even laid out in a way that's going to lead to any real help. They end up getting pushed into the medical system and drugged.

Dr. Roger McFillin (37:59.057)
And so those who stay in therapy, the field coined a name for this, for this preferred customer, all the way back to nineteen sixty-four.

Yevus, Y-A-V-I-S, young, attractive, verbal, intelligent, successful. So put yourself in the practitioner's chair and the incentives. They explain it. The articulate, the insightful, the high-functioning client becomes a pleasure to see and a reliable revenue stream. The client with a severe eating disorder is a medical emergency waiting to happen.

So is the suicidal client, a liability. The complex case is exhausting and doesn't fit the schedule.

So the ones who are struggling the most get screened out or referred out or waitlisted into oblivion. The hour goes to who needs it the least. You get paid the same, whether you are treating a case with multiple presenting life-threatening behaviors, or the person who just is dealing with a career shift or the ending of a relationship.

So the navel gazers Walsh mocks here are in many cases exactly the clientele the business model selects for. He thinks he's describing therapy's failure, but he's describing its business plan. And consider what the people being screened out actually require, because this is where the mismatch stops being about economics and it becomes more of a moral one. And it's also the beginning of my answer to the question that I plant at the top of the show.

Dr. Roger McFillin (39:43.036)
Recovery from a severe eating disorder, from a from crippling obsessions and compulsive behaviors that have been set up, from addiction that has like affected an entire family. It was never going to happen inside an hour of talk. Certainly not with a prescription. It requires a daily plan, daily intervention, connection. Worked daily. The ability to show up on a

Tuesday morning and a Saturday night, not just an appointed hour. It takes the family in which that person is connected to.

And the family becomes much more of a support and a treatment team than anyone else would admit. It takes learning an entirely new way of responding to pain, which means doing very, very difficult things again and again with love and encouragement on both sides of the struggle. Getting sober, getting physically healthy, meeting emotions in a new way instead of running from them.

A new way of thinking about your life, your purpose, because nobody climbs out of hell for the privilege of returning to a life that means nothing to them. Imagine the type of professional it requires for that degree of commitment. The goal needs to be a relationship with pain that transforms and expands a person, not one that restricts them further, which modern therapy is doing.

Now, ask what fraction of that fits into fifty minutes one time a week in a refill.

Dr. Roger McFillin (41:30.311)
This current system hands those legitimately struggling the one intervention they need the least, and then calls it an inevitable failure, treatment resistance. The failure was never the patient. It was the dose, the design, the delivery.

Dr. Roger McFillin (41:52.679)
Now I think we have to step back a little bit because

We end up seeing two loud voices arguing over the wreckage of what I believe is a much older issue. Because beneath the the bad science and the perverse incentives sits a fundamental cultural problem. And I think it bull it it really begins longer than any of today's therapists understand, and before they entered graduate school, because many of today's therapists were just born into this. They're just

Swimming in the sick water, and it's all they know. We have lived in a culture that has medicalized the human experience and completely forgotten what normal is. Somewhere along the way, we started relating to our minds as if the brain was a dysfunctional organ, and our emotions are symptoms of some concocted illness.

So sadness became something to screen for. Fear became a chemical error. Grief now has a timeline. You know, we've lost the oldest conversation human beings ever had with themselves, the one where emotional pain is a meaningful signal, pointing at something that matters, asking something of us. And these questions are not being asked in the mental health system. And you have to understand what that loss does inside a person.

When you're when your inner world is framed as pathology, you judge it. You monitor yourself for this dysfunction. And everything you find, you will always find something because it is evidence that you're broken. And then you are under this delusion that this intensity of emotional pain or these thoughts are unique to you and your mental illness.

Dr. Roger McFillin (43:54.268)
And of course, this grows unbearable. So you search for an escape. And this is where the culture performs its cruelest trick. The escape comes in multiple, multiple approaches. The drinking, the drugs, the numbing, the endless scroll. It can also become an escape from personal responsibility. So we blame our our pain and our suffering and a lack of a life of meaning on someone else.

And each escape gets labeled another disorder, requiring another treatment, producing another patient. This is where the machine feeds on the despair it manufactures, and everyone involved sincerely believes they are helping.

And the most respectable escape of all is always a prescription psychiatric drug. A drug that blunts the emotional experience, these powerful energies, becomes chemical avoidance, and of course, the creation of more sickness from the side effects or the main effect of the drug. The muting that so many people describe on these drugs.

Dr. Roger McFillin (45:01.437)
Then not being able to feel at the things they should feel, that is what has become the treatment. And therapy in itself is perverse in the same idea that living a better life means feeling these intense emotions less. That's why you're monitoring these emotional experiences in therapy.

And this training starts way young. It's in our movies and our children's shows where feelings are fragile things requiring expert management and social emotional learning. Schools teach this nonsense. They get you to self-monitor before they even begin to teach courage or faith. And it runs the collective consciousness like a kind of low-grade fever. It's whispering to children that their inner world is dangerous and someone else holds the answer to how they should feel.

Think and behave. So a child marinated in that message for 18 years and then goes into this ideology in undergrad, it pushes right into the post-grad world. They're pre-enrolled into it. Now they are nothing more than a cog in this machine. And I just don't think it was always this way. Well, I know it wasn't always this way. For most of human history,

It was different. There were myths and stories, parables that taught people how to respond to their own minds and their own suffering. Religious texts, the Stoic reminding himself each morning that the obstacle is the way. Every culture had its sages, its elders, its philosophers. The one who had crossed the hard country ahead of you, they were ahead of the path and could tell you.

What your pain was for or how to move through it. And I think that figure is nearly completely gone, replaced by these pseudo-experts in expert culture. Definitely sincere, but woefully uninformed. And who will unknowingly undermine your natural resilience and convert you into a perpetual patient and actually not even knowing.

Dr. Roger McFillin (47:25.459)
That they are harming you.

So let me stand in that older tradition for a moment and tell you what some of these sages knew. Because this is more wisdom and knowledge than anything that could be learned through a diagnostic manual or the distorted scientific literature or these therapy training programs. You're not your mind. Your thoughts that they pass through your mind are transient.

Mental noise. They're meant to be observed, not obeyed. Your emotions, they're not dangerous. They are energies. They're meant to get you on your path. They're meant to be understood and used. And they will move you through these areas of your life if you stop running from them. Breaking patterns.

Ones that are creating the problems in the first place is hard. It's difficult, and life is difficult. You're not a diagnosis, a disorder, a malfunctioning brain. You're a victim to that propaganda. You are a child of God. You are here with a purpose, and that pain in your life is not the interruption of that purpose. It is the doorway into it. Anyone who helps you live that way is helping you transform work.

Whatever their title is. Anyone who teaches you to fear your inner world, to outsource it, to medicate it, and numb it into oblivion is helping you stay sick, whatever their credentials. Could be a friend who suggests it, a parent, of course, your medical doctor or your therapist. So I ask you to choose accordingly.

Dr. Roger McFillin (49:22.534)
Awaken.