In recent years, the principles of therapy culture have increasingly influenced the collective mindset of modern society in profound ways. What began as a well-intentioned effort to destigmatise mental health challenges and make support more accessible has morphed into a totalising paradigm that is fundamentally reshaping how we understand ourselves, our relationships, and our place in the world. While the normalisation of therapy has undoubtedly helped many people cope with trauma and pain, its unrestrained incursion into every aspect of human existence is having unforeseen and ultimately soul-eroding implications.

The way i see it, the issue is the way that therapeutic models, have been universally applied as the Answer to the human condition, thus breeding disconnection by reinforcing an egocentric understanding of the self as separate from the larger web of life. The relentless focus on individual healing, self-optimisation and the primacy of personal needs over the collective good surreptitiously propagates a view of the human being as an isolated entity whose liberation and fulfilment lies solely in their own navel-gazing journey of self-discovery and expression. In elevating the self and pathologising interdependence, this world view has severed the sacred knowing of our interbeing and denied the essential truth that we are fundamentally relational creatures whose deepest wholeness is found in the honouring of our inextricable mutuality.

This focus of the self is often framed as a necessary corrective to generations of repression, self-abnegation and sublimation of individual needs for the sake of the collective. And indeed, the conventional Western ideal of selfless service is rife with distortions that have enabled abuse and the violation of personal boundaries. The reclamation of personal sovereignty and the right to have needs and take up space is an important and necessary revolution. But an overcorrection into hyper-individualism is equally perilous; I think we cannot thrive in isolation, nor heal the wounds of the past through self-absorption.

What is needed is not a returning to the rigid and self-erasing collectivism of old, but a forging of a third way that transcends the duality of self and other. A path of interbeing that understands that we are both a sovereign miracle of specificity and inextricably interwoven threads in the larger basket of life. Our indigenous African wisdom and traditions have long understood this non-dual truth, this “hunhu or ubuntu” – that “I am because we are.” Many are starved of this remembering, and yet therapy culture’s hyper-focus on the individual psyche and personal actualisation only serves to widen the gap between self and the larger field of belonging.

We see this play out in the way that spiritual emergence and meaning-of-life questions often get pathologised and medicated when they are brought to a therapist’s office. The entirety of one’s relational context and social milieu is reduced to the client’s “stuff,” thus reinforcing the toxic myth of the self-contained individual. Humanness itself is viewed through the lens of pathology, with normal responses to existential suffering labelled as illness rather than gateways to deeper wisdom and connection.

One common experience that frequently gets labelled as mental illness is the way grief is often treated as something linear that needs to be resolved as quickly as possible, rather than an organic process that has its own timeline and wisdom. The DSM-5 now allows for a diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder just two weeks after a significant loss, it’s as if the psyche should be able to instantly metabolise the most heart-shattering of human experiences. In many African cultures, grief is seen as a sacred space that needs to be entered with reverence and a willingness to be utterly transformed. Rituals and communal containers allow mourning to take as long as it takes, hence honouring the unique relationship between the grieving and the grieved rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all framework.


This normalising of the therapeutic relationship as the only or primary container in which vulnerability and soul-baring is safe also inevitably diminishes the role of an intimate community in supporting resilience and wholeness. When our first response to a loved one’s pain is “you should talk to a professional about that,” the subtle message is that their emotional needs are too much for us to hold and that only a paid expert can meet them. While certain challenges may indeed warrant specialised clinical intervention, the outsourcing of all our existential and relational trials to therapists breeds a kind of learned helplessness and prevents us from building the skilful means to show up for each other in hard times.

The irony is that despite all the emphasis on “building a toolbox” of emotional and relational skills, many people steeped in therapy culture seem less equipped than ever to navigate the vicissitudes of intimacy with grace and grit. They are armed with an arsenal of jargon and ill-fitting labels, they categorise every interpersonal disappointment as a red flag, a boundary violation, a sign of dysfunction or incompatibility. Desperate to protect themselves from any whiff of co-dependency, they keep loved ones at arm’s length and mistake the inevitable tidal pull of the heart towards togetherness as a sign of weakness rather than the natural expression of our ubuntu.

Perhaps most insidiously, the therapeutic lens can lead us to relate to each other as walking wound bundles, our complexity and humanity is reduced to speculative trauma histories and attachment styles. We become clinical observers of each other rather than active participants in the unfolding story. We’re quick to pin every unsavoury behaviour on unhealed shadow material and unexamined projections, as if perfectly sanitised psyches are possible or even desirable. There’s a way in which the vigilance for pathology, once internalised, crowds out our capacity to approach each other with undefended presence, curiosity and compassion.

What is being lost is the understanding that messy, imperfect love is not only okay but utterly necessary for growth and transformation. That it’s through the fricative of relationship, in the space between self and other, that we come to know ourselves most fully – not as static bundles of symptoms and identities but as evolving processes of being and becoming


To be clear, the problem is not with the therapeutic arts themselves, which undoubtedly have an important place in the larger ecology of healing. It’s with how the practices of therapy have been uncritically mapped onto the entire territory of human struggle, and how the authority of the therapist has been elevated to that of a secular priest mediating our relationship with wholeness. When the therapeutic relationship substitutes for the natural affirmation we are meant to receive within a community, it  weakens our resilience and leaves us in a vulnerable state of shame and self-doubt.


What if, instead of viewing therapy as the default remedy for being human, we understood it as one tool among many? What if we took back the authority that we’ve given away to the experts, and learned to source our healing from the inside out and the outside in? The invitation is to reclaim relational space as a crucible for growth and healing, not in opposition to or as a replacement for therapy, but as the ground in which the insights and skills taught in a clinical setting can take root and blossom. It’s about growing our sense of belonging and remembering that we are naturally whole and worthy, with the power to turn our pain into something that helps the world. It’s about seeing our struggles and challenges as friends on our life’s journey, instead of enemies we need to fight.

Imagine a world where our sensitivities and vulnerabilities are viewed as not problems to be fixed. A world where we gather in council to heal the stories that make us strangers to ourselves, to each other, and to the living world around us. Where “mental health” is not about being perfectly free of struggles, but about embracing the full, beautiful, and messy reality of being human. Together.

Therapy may be a start, but it is not the end game, “talking about” problems is no substitute for confronting them. Our freedom is found in the practice of growing and healing each other up, again and again, through the holy sacrament of relationship. It is in the remembering that we belong to each other — that we are each other, and we are, if we choose to be bound by chords that can not be broken. It is my humble submission that maybe It’s time to compost therapy culture and grow the village it will take to repair the vast, torn fabric of kinship. To mend the shredded umbrella of our remembered interbeing, one stitch, one story, one moment of braving the broken open heart at a time. It is Chinua Achebe who said, “A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village ground, it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so”.