Public discussion about Gen Z’s rising demand for therapy often swings between two caricatures. One treats therapy as an unqualified good; a universal response to distress. The other dismisses it as a symptom of cultural decline: indulgent, infantilizing, and corrosive. Both miss the deeper issue. The question is not whether therapy or faith is superior—it is whether our dominant models of care restore adult agency or quietly erode it.
That concern is articulated sharply in a recent essay by Mary Rooke, pointedly titled “Therapy Is an Exercise in Weakness.” Drawing on her own experience, Rooke argues that contemporary therapy often encourages dependency rather than resilience, reframes hardship as permanent injury, and displaces sources of authority once provided by marriage, family, and faith. Her conclusions are intentionally strong. But even for readers who reject her absolutism, the essay surfaces a serious institutional question worth considering.
The most persuasive critiques of therapy culture are not ideological but experiential. People describe entering therapy to address a discrete problem and emerging with diminished confidence in their own judgment, strained personal relationships, or an expanded sense of grievance. Responsibility is redistributed outward. Ordinary hardship is reframed as pathology. Pain becomes identity. The result is not resilience, but dependence.
This is not a condemnation of therapy itself. It is a critique of how therapy is increasingly practiced and culturally interpreted.
Historically, therapeutic interventions—clinical and pastoral alike—were oriented toward restoration. Their purpose was to help individuals regain functional capacity: to repair relationships, clarify obligations, and re-enter the world of work, family, and civic life. Therapy was bounded, time-limited, and subordinate to broader moral ends. It functioned as a tool, not a worldview.
Much contemporary therapy operates differently. Detached from any external horizon, it risks becoming an exercise in perpetual excavation. Progress is measured less by capability than by disclosure. Empowerment is confused with validation. Vulnerability becomes a permanent posture rather than a transitional stage. In this model, the self is both the problem and the project, and care becomes endless by design.
Family breakdown helps explain the demand for therapy, but it does not explain its dominance. Importantly, even individuals from stable, intact households increasingly turn to therapy not because their families failed, but because other formative institutions have weakened. Churches have fewer clergy with pastoral authority. Congregational life is thinner and less demanding. Moral language has been replaced by therapeutic language even within religious communities. And as faith institutions retreat from moral formation and long-term accompaniment, clinical care has expanded to fill the void.
Therapy, in this sense, does not merely respond to distress; it absorbs responsibilities once carried by families, congregations, and civic associations. It offers attention, interpretation, and reassurance, but without the obligations, expectations, or limits that traditionally accompanied care.
This shift has consequences for intimate life. When marriage and partnership are filtered primarily through a therapeutic lens, ordinary conflict risks being pathologized. Trust gives way to analysis. Endurance is recoded as repression. In some cases, therapists—speaking with incomplete information—introduce blame where none existed, destabilizing relationships that previously functioned through mutual adjustment rather than clinical scrutiny.
At the same time, framing this debate as therapy versus faith is a mistake. Religious traditions have long relied on practices that resemble therapy: confession, pastoral counseling, moral examination, spiritual direction. The difference is not technique but orientation. These practices situated suffering within a larger structure of meaning, obligation, and transcendence. They aimed not at endless self-attention, but at re-entry into responsibility.
The real divide is not between secular and religious care. It is between forms of care that re-anchor individuals in agency and those that keep them circling the self.
Good therapy does exist. It is pragmatic rather than performative. It strengthens judgment rather than displacing it. It respects marriage and family as sites of obligation, not merely emotional exchange. It is time-limited, goal-oriented, and honest about its constraints; it understands healing not as permanent introspection, but as renewed capacity to act.
What deserves criticism is not therapy, but therapeutic culture—especially when it presents itself as a comprehensive moral framework. When therapy becomes an identity, when vulnerability is valorized without resolution, and when professional validation replaces moral discernment, it ceases to heal and begins to hollow out the strengths it claims to nurture.
The policy implication is not to stigmatize therapy or romanticize suffering. It is to recognize that no clinical practice can substitute for strong families, credible faith institutions, and civic structures capable of forming adults. Therapy can be a tool. It should never become the structure.
In a society struggling to cultivate judgment, endurance, and commitment, the task is not to choose between care and character. It is to insist that any institution claiming to heal must ultimately help people stand on their own.