Less TikTok, More Screaming

social media therapists & feeling nothing as an epidemic

Less TikTok

Like many, many others, I am hopelessly addicted to my phone. Years ago I had a boyfriend turn on the screen time alerts feature in an effort to help me curb my phone usage—to this day this has done nothing but help me track my steadily increasing dependence. When I’m caught in the endless scroll, I’m aware that my dopamine receptors (or whatever) are being manipulated by the consistent stream of novel stimuli—memes and pictures of hot people and videos of beautiful products blinking at me like a slot machine, and this is likely why I have such a difficult time snapping out of it. At the same time, I’ve successfully dodged most other addictive behaviors, despite possessing a not-insignificant genetic predisposition and a personalty type that leans escapist. So when I find myself actively willing myself not to open TikTok, an app I patently do not enjoy but inevitably spend hours scrolling every time I use it, I have to wonder why this shit has such a hold on me. Like, I’m just laying in bed, not even having fun or feeling joy in any capacity. Why can’t I stop doing it? And how is it that the absence of feeling feels so fucking good?

I return to Max Read’s 2020 Bookforum review of The Twittering Machine often, because it makes a compelling case for the collective addiction to social media that goes deeper than the “dopamine addiction” model. In The Twittering Machine, writer Richard Seymour suggests social media addiction (and subsequent negative behavior on these platforms) is connected to the death drive. We don’t just check our phones incessantly and spend hours scrolling TikTok because our brains are on a dopamine high; we do it because we have a passion for wasting time. Halfway through the review Read wonders, “what if the reason we tweet is because we wish we were dead?” and my brain can’t help but echo the popular TikTok comment section refrain: real, real, real.

It’s easy to make the case that we use social media in order to address some sort of lack in our lives. It’s a way to reach out to others, share ourselves, maybe even achieve fame or creative success. However, most of us know by now that this is rarely the true result of devoted social media usage. Seymour contends we continue to use these platforms even as they actively stand in the way of connection, productivity, and inspiration because self destruction is our actual, unconscious goal. Real life is disappointing, but for most of us not overtly, unbearably tragic or painful, and so we quietly resign ourselves to microdosing death in order to break up the aching monotony. The endless scroll allows us to access the same trancelike, death-adjacent space we enter when we sleep, or daydream, or, I don’t know, orgasm. The primary difference is while these petite morts tend to function as gateways into or out of deep feeling, the trance that accompanies being on your phone makes feeling impossible, and that’s the point.

Our collective surrender to the brain-numbing infinite scroll has fostered an addiction to taming and/or eradicating real human feeling. This obsession is demonstrated by both the widespread usage of these platforms and the actual content that becomes popular within this context. The proliferation of social media therapist-influencers and the particular brand of prescriptive, toothless self-help they peddle is one example of this phenomenon that I feel is worth exploring here.

The ethos of contemporary therapy is highly questionable to begin with, and this has to be addressed before unpacking the implications of disseminating its principles in a highly gamified, fundamentally consumerist online sphere. As it stands, access to therapy hinges on class privilege, adherence to existing social norms, and a whole host of other factors that favor those who already have a safety net. Additionally, mainstream therapy tends to bolster the collective interest in individualistic self-optimization, worsening many of the issues it seeks to resolve in the process. We attend therapy to become our “best” selves, lead our “best” lives, and to signal to others we have done so. We savor the delicious superiority that coincides with telling someone who hurt us to go to therapy and advertise our own attendance on our Hinge profiles to signal our own immanent perfection. Therapy has become a litmus test for social belonging and inherent goodness, a sign that one is aware of and has adapted to the newest standards of how to behave.¹

Even without this social signaling, the lessons we learn inside of therapy favor a sort of hyperindividualistic self-sufficiency that encourages clients to prioritize personal growth over communal welfare or institutional change. When you imagine yourself to exist separate from the world around you, and therefore seek to change yourself independent of it, the project of self-improvement becomes about adapting to oppression, rather than working toward a less maddening world. Therapy that prioritizes individual self-improvement with little other context functions to create hypernormal, docile subjects that live in service to power. We become our best selves, not in ways that allow us to find personal peace and better serve the world around us, but in ways that make us better workers and citizens. Even if the system is contributing to our pain, we are actively encouraged to find ways we can fit better into that system. The subtext is always that we have no other option.

As therapy shapes us into obedient subjects, we internalize the idea that a “healthy” person is in control of their emotions, which they demonstrate through following increasingly narrow social scripts. There are countless infographics circulating about the “right” way to deliver an apology, for example. Falling in love with someone too quickly is “toxic,” or “unhealthy” but falling in love too slowly or struggling to connect with others is a problem too, and potentially a sign of narcissism. We make fun of the casually cruel, HR-ified social scripts that circulate the internet every few months, but I think those scripts are just extreme manifestations of a more subtle and insidious belief system that we’ve already bought into: we are supposed to be going to therapy to learn how to control ourselves. No more yelling, public crying, or any version of making a scene. No more being in a bad mood at your stupid fucking job. No more falling madly, deeply in love. The world has rendered you so fragile you might break at any moment under the weight of its cruelty. And you’re too weak to change the world (shh, you are) so you have to live in fear. You must be careful, and quiet, and good. This is how you survive.

When we combine this ideology with the addictive, hypnotic mechanisms of social media, shit starts to get very, very bleak. The Holistic Psychologist Instagram account, run by Dr. Nicole LePera, is a case study in the many ways therapeutic content creation can go sideways. I followed Dr. LePera years ago, intrigued by her trauma-informed therapeutic approach. At the core of Dr. LePera’s methodology is a belief that trauma deeply transforms the nervous system, creating what we think of as mental health disorders. She teaches that we can achieve personal freedom through healing our nervous systems and making changes in our lives that support this healing journey. For this reason, she calls her followers “self healers.”

At the time I found Dr. LePera’a insights to be occasionally helpful, affirming, and thought-provoking, and I still do. Over time though, I began to observe troubling cracks in her ideology and online presence. For one thing, Dr. LePera produces a very high volume of content, posting to Instagram every day and Twitter upwards of ten times a day. In order to accommodate this content schedule, it is necessary to construct new and interesting ways to discuss trauma—how we accumulate it, how we heal from it, who stands in the way of this healing, and on and on. I don’t follow Dr. LePera on twitter, but because I tapped on one of her tweets one time to read the comments, I began seeing truly jarring tweets from her account such as “when’s the first time you remember feeling heartbroken as a child?” in my feed almost daily. Due to the sheer amount of content and the high engagement this content encourages, any engagement at all with The Holistic Psychologist renders her omnipresent, waiting patiently every time you open your phone to remind you that your childhood sucked.

Dr. LePera’s excessive content enumerates the many ways you could have been traumatized as a child, as well as what you may feel as you undergo the sacred process of “self-healing.” Followers of these accounts are told across numerous posts that they are on a “healing journey” that most people in their lives won’t understand. Because they have experienced a “spiritual awakening” they are now inhabiting a superior form of reality that their unenlightened loved ones just won’t understand. Post-awakening, small talk becomes boring, and so do people who don’t directly contribute to our healing. It might be lonely being spiritually superior, but it’s worth it. Even if you’re alone, you will be healed.

The overall tenor of individualism and glorified isolation throughout Dr. LePera’s content is troubling. I understand that there are many, many people for whom going no-contact with family, friends, or ex-partners is a matter of safety and emotional wellbeing. Abuse is no joke, and the harm that can be inflicted between human beings is absolutely real and often devastating. But the frankly overwhelming number of posts about isolating oneself from family and community, considered alongside the persistent messaging that the healing journey fundamentally separates one from others doesn’t sit right with me. There’s something off about an Instagram infographic declaring it’s “valid” to end a lifelong friendship, or not be close to their sibling. While these things are of course “valid,” (at the very least, they’re certainly common) they’re also deeply personal choices that should be carefully considered and regarded with a certain amount of gravity. When we “normalize” something, we are communicating that it no longer needs to be considered. This type of post treats the complex relational dramas that constitute real life as a simple matter, something “valid” and “normal” that we don’t need to think deeply about or truly experience for ourselves.

This push for “normalization,” the need to deem every experience as “valid,” intends to dissolve shame, but instead discourages real human experience and feeling. Once again, we are encouraged to deaden ourselves. I want to work through my complicated feelings about certain friends and family, pursue the question in the books I read and the things I write. I want to talk about it with people. These are real human problems, and it’s not supposed to be simple. I resent the idea that we can deem any such feeling “valid” or “normal” and call it a day. Let me grapple! Let me exist!

Dr. LePera has turned healing into a religion, a lifestyle, and above all, a brand. Surely this woman, possessing a doctorate in psychology and years of clinical experience, doesn’t believe that it’s good for her clients to consume new information about trauma every day of their lives, so much so that they make it a part of their personal identity. And nevertheless she persists! Making new infographics, tweeting, creating memes, because it benefits her to do so. Dr. LePera’s group of “self-healers” are no different from Swifties; they’re fucking stans, a group of consumers easily manipulated because of the emotional relationship they have to the person-as-brand. At least Taylor gave us a few good songs to cathartically cry to before shoving her red scarf down our throats.

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More Screaming

When I was younger, the world felt overstimulating, painful, and exciting. Lately it feels quiet, painless, and freakishly dull. I find myself seeking stimulation where I can get it, but I’m also increasingly addicted to my little numbing devices. Last weekend I day drank, my favorite method of combining the two. My friends and I put our names on the wait list at a brunch spot and walked across the street to buy a bottle of champagne. One of my favorite things about St. Louis is you’re allowed to drink in the street; seated in a couple wrought iron chairs in the alley next to the restaurant, we passed the bottle and talked about love.

I love my friend Annie. Her very longterm relationship ended about six months ago and she’s figuring out what love means to her, again. Imagine I just passed her the bottle. “Every time I spend time with a “healthy” couple, I feel confused. They seem totally functional, no real issues, and it’s great. But something’s just off. I always end up feeling like I’m watching two people recite lines from a play. Everything they say is so practical, exactly what they’re supposed to say. But what about everything else? Is that what I’m supposed to want?” She passes the bottle to Rachel.

I’ve always felt the same way, but have also found seeking pure feeling at the expense of practicality doesn’t work out so well for me either. I explain the particularities of how my most recent relationship crashed and burned, and they assure me I didn’t do anything wrong, but really they’re saying they don’t care if I messed up, because they love me no matter what.

Rachel passes the bottle to me. I’m crying a little bit, and they’re telling me I’m allowed to cry. “Do you guys ever just scream? Lately I just want to scream, but it feels insane to do that. I can hear every word my upstairs neighbor says, so I know he’d hear me. And I live in this heavily populated city so there’s people everywhere, no matter where I go. But it feels like something people should do.”

Annie is the quietest of the three of us, but she smiles and tells us she loves to scream.

“You scream??”

“I scream. In my car.”

“But don’t the other drivers see you?”

“I scream on the highway—it’s great. You should try it sometime.”

I resolve to scream.

The last time I screamed was probably almost ten years ago. I had a summer job in college conducting customer experience surveys for a car rental company over the phone. You had to read everything you said from a pre-approved script, and every single person you called got mad at you. Sometimes they let you have a book if the automated dialer slowed down, but if you deviated even one word from the script your book privileges were revoked. I made $7.50 an hour. That summer frat boys broke into my house and ate a bunch of my food and it was particularly devastating knowing that loss equated to several hours of my time in call center hell. After a while I started finishing out my shifts by getting in my car and screaming in the parking lot before driving home.

That time in my life reminds me of this scene from Waking Life:

Did you ever have a job that you hated and worked real hard at? A long, hard day of work. Finally you get to go home, get in bed, close your eyes and immediately you wake up and realize that the whole day at work had been a dream. It's bad enough that you sell your waking life for minimum wage, but now they get your dreams for free.

In the morning, I would cry to my boyfriend about having to go to work. Then in the evening I would come home and have nightmares about being there. The misery was suffocating and I didn’t even get to keep my dreams, but I could scream, no one could keep me from screaming! When I look back on that time, I know the screaming helped.

I think of humans as vulnerable, changeable, profoundly open beings. When I use words like “vulnerable” or “sensitive,” I don’t mean weak or emotional. To me, these words convey that we are not the stable entities we tend to believe ourselves to be, and we are never not in a process of transformation catalyzed by everything we come into contact with, or “sense.” It is our nature to be profoundly open to experience and the world around us, and we long for that.

Love reawakens us to our true nature as inherently vulnerable beings, because love requires our transformation. Dreams function similarly—finally in a state of radically nonlinear antirational openness, our psyche is able to pour out and express itself to us. Love, dreams, fantasy, meditation and deep prayer all require a vulnerable, trancelike state that enables a break from every day reality and returns us to ourselves. I regard this process of “checking out” from reality as sacred, as it requires one to disregard the fear that accompanies vulnerability in service of a greater purpose, such as connection, truth, spirituality, or self-discovery. When I use my phone to check out, I go into a trancelike state, but unlike the sacred trances I described above, there is no greater purpose being served. I turn off my brain and open myself up, and corporations pour their content into me. They give me their dreams for free.

I’ll close with a few of my favorite lines from the Silver Jews song “Room Games and Diamond Rain,” one of the most beautiful and devastating love songs ever written:

You keep finding and reminding me,
That you only can be kind to me,
When you got with me you started dreaming my dreams.

Dreaming each other’s dreams—taking on the other’s experience and transforming oneself in the process—this is why we love. It is also why we shouldn’t attempt to harden ourselves. We are vulnerable so we can love and catch glimpses of reality outside of our tiny, humble individual vantage points, and this feature of humankind should be respected and protected. The endless scroll and the algorithm are mechanisms that invade our psychic space and pervert this sacred vulnerability by making us dream the dreams of people trying to sell us things and tell us who we are and how we should behave. We are lulled with constant meaningless stimuli until we’re numbed out, our screams swallowed. And in the space where we could be letting love in, we are being told all the reasons we should turn it away.

1. Though I am concerned by the current state of therapy as a practice, I also have the utmost respect for therapists who have done the work of unpacking how therapy can perpetuate inequity, and strive to provide quality care that extends beyond a politics of individualism, shame, and social control.