What If TikTok Therapists Are Making People Less Happy?
Lena Dunham's new show is a send-up of internet therapy culture.
Lena Dunham's new Netflix show Too Much is a rom-com for the TikTok-scrolling, influencer-besotted age. In the show, 30-something Jessica relocates to London after a thunderous breakup that causes her to go a little insane. While Jessica is the kind of frumpy, childish mess familiar to fans of Dunham's other work, she also immediately meets and falls in love with an astoundingly handsome indie musician named Felix. The show chiefly concerns the pair's lighting-fast courtship. In one episode, Felix tags along to Jessica's chaotic work party. In another, she's his plus-one at a farcically posh British wedding. There's a lot of sex, a decent amount of drugs, and—seeing that Felix is a musician—some rock and roll as well. A consistent theme is that Jessica runs too hot—she's too much, as the title suggests—and Felix runs too cold. He's emotionally distant and hard to read, while Jessica is an open book.
However, while Too Much ends up being an overstuffed if eminently bingeable rom-com, the most interesting moments come not from the main characters, but from Jessica's ex-boyfriend, Zev.
While Zev at first seems like a victim of Jessica's obsession (we meet him after she's literally broken into his house), he's eventually revealed to be a jerk of a now-familiar type: the therapy boyfriend. Using the pseudo-intellectual language of therapy, Zev sanitizes meanness and neglect. When Jessica (reasonably) feels insecure, he tells her that she "can't always ask for constant reassurance," adding that she should "maybe see a therapist, 'cause it's actually really selfish of you not to let go of this anxious attachment style." In a therapy session after their breakup, he compares Jessica to his overbearing mother, casting himself as the victim of her overwhelming, suffocating demands for affection.
"The first thing I smell, before I see it, before I hear it, is a girl in need of that kind of love," he says. "And for a moment, I'm her knight in shining armor, but little by slowly, she starts to hate me."
And sure, Jessica is a stereotypical "high-maintenance" woman. She's needy, she's intense, but she's no succubus. What makes Zev's treatment of Jessica—and later his new girlfriend, Wendy—so frustrating is his ability to cast his meanness in the language of therapy. As Wendy later tells Jessica, "He chooses strong women just to tear us down."
His fixation with attachment theory in particular reads as a send-up of online therapy culture. Over the past few years, online therapy culture has helped turn attachment theory from a dry, academic concept into a wide-ranging explanation for just about every relational problem. On TikTok the hashtag #anxiousattachment has nearly 140,000 posts.
In its original context, attachment theory referred to an attachment between a parent and child. Contemporary attachment labels like anxious and avoidant attachment come from research done by psychologist Mary Ainsworth in the 1970s. In her experiments, she observed how infants behaved in a battery of mildly disruptive situations—like meeting a stranger or being left alone. Ainsworth observed that while some children (whom she called "securely" attached) could be easily comforted after these disruptions, other children reacted strangely. Some, whom she called "ambivalently" attached (though most influencers call this "anxious" attachment), were clingy and could not be easily calmed after their parents returned. Others, the "avoidantly" attached, never got upset in the first place. Still other children exhibited behaviors that were difficult to categorize.
Over the intervening decades, what began as an academic theory to explain child-parent relationships has now become an all-purpose explanation for just about any interpersonal struggle. Do you need reassurance or fear people dislike you? You're probably anxiously attached. Do you struggle to commit and often feel smothered by your partner's affection? That's avoidant attachment.
Jessica probably isn't anxiously attached in any manner but the pop-psych sense. Sure, she's a bit nuts, but in ways that have more to do with Dunham-ian neuroticism than with a childhood trauma–adjacent attachment disorder. If any character in the show has a legitimate case of attachment issues, it's Felix, who was genuinely neglected by his parents and abused by the nanny who cared for him during their long absences.
Mostly, Jessica just wants to be loved. However, this, too, is a sign of attachment issues according to some therapy influencers. If you feel clingy, if you expect your boyfriend to tell you he loves you or respond to your texts, that's a sign that something is wrong with you. Well-adjusted people, mentally healthy people, are supposed to be fulfilled by nothing but their own company.
When watching videos about anxious attachment in particular, it's hard not to feel like so many of the problems these influencers identify are just normal. The feelings of insecurity these influencers describe will be familiar to anyone who's had their heart broken.
"When you feel them pulling away, you're waiting on communication, you feel them becoming inconsistent, you can sense the change in their energy toward you, it can feel intense. It feels like you had some love and attention, and it's now being taken away," says one influencer in a video about anxious attachment with more than 30,000 likes. She assures her viewers that, when they feel worried, "In that moment, you are not thinking clearly. What this is doing is activating a past wound."
Like many therapy-culture ideas, there's probably a sliver of truth to what many of these influencers are saying. There are some people who are overcome with anxiety about their partners in a way that is ultimately unhealthy. But these messages end up providing easy cover to cast real problems—even your partner being a real jerk—as the irrational hallucinations of attachment issues.
Most of the time, if you feel something is amiss in your relationship, it probably is. While claiming to help people better understand themselves and their relationships, therapy-culture influencers end up making it even harder to know what's real and what's anxiety. Sometimes, if you're feeling insecure, if you're constantly worried your partner no longer loves you, you don't have attachment issues—you're accurately perceiving that you're about to be dumped. In those situations, becoming obsessed with attachment often feels like a kind of self-directed brainwashing. Therapy culture may bill itself as a way to bring therapeutic clarity to the masses, but actually creating healthier relationships—as Jessica herself eventually learns—sometimes means putting your phone down.
