This essay is the second in a three-part series exploring how therapy both reflects and resists our cultural moment. In part one, “Are We All Becoming Avoidantly Attached?”, I looked at our growing tendency to flee emotional discomfort. Here, I turn to the rise of what I call “affirmation therapy”, a comfort-first approach that prizes validation over transformation. In the final piece, I’ll explore a contrasting movement: the renewed appetite for depth and transcendence seen in the rise of psychedelic-assisted therapy.

The Age of Validation and Safety

There’s something quietly concerning in the rise of a new kind of psychotherapy.

It’s slicker, more customer-friendly, and designed to make you feel good, not necessarily to help you figure things out. You’ll find it everywhere: on Instagram, in TikTok clips, in AI chatbots, and increasingly, in consulting rooms.

This new wave of therapy focuses almost entirely on affirmation and validation. It speaks the language of slogans and buzzwords: “narcissistic,” “your feelings are valid,” “no contact,” “emotional safety.”

It sounds soothing, but it also sells.

In this new emotional economy, feeling safe has become the highest moral good. We increasingly conflate emotional discomfort with harm, and therapy is expected to eliminate it rather than help us bear it. The language of “safe spaces” and “trauma-informed everything” has spread far beyond clinical settings.

Clients themselves are beginning to notice the consequences. In a 2021 survey of more than 1,300 clients, researchers found that many wanted their therapists to offer more challenge, not less. They described practitioners as “safe, accepting, and non-judgmental”, but often at the cost of avoiding strong emotions at crucial moments.

It’s a subtle but profound shift in the aims of therapy. And there’s a huge market for it. Influencers like The Holistic Psychologist have millions of followers, and clients now quote them in sessions. It’s understandable, we’ve lost many of the rituals and social structures that once helped human beings orient themselves. We are lonelier and more ashamed than ever. In that void, the dopamine hit of reassurance can feel like a balm: It’s not me. I’m not the problem. The influencer or “therapist” becomes a kind of babysitter, soothing us through a world that feels hostile and overwhelming.

The Feminization of the Profession

It’s also worth noting who shapes this culture. Around 75% of new psychology doctorates are women, according to the APA. Many enter the field with profound relational and empathic strengths, qualities essential to the work. But when an entire profession becomes predominantly female, its ethos inevitably reflects the relational styles our culture associates with women: agreeableness, nurturance, avoidance of confrontation. Helen Andrews, in her controversial essay “The Great Feminization” (2025), describes how these traits now define many of our cultural institutions, where “the highest virtue is no longer courage or reason, but sensitivity.” Without reducing these trends to “feminization” entirely, it is clear that psychotherapy, once a place for confrontation and truth-telling, risks reflecting the same drift.

The Economics of Affirmation

The incentives behind this shift are both financial and psychological.

Financially, affirmation keeps people coming back. The same dynamic exists in tech. When ChatGPT-5 launched, one of the loudest complaints was that it was too agreeable, endlessly chirping “great idea!” even when the idea was nonsense. (A true story: someone once asked it to praise an idea literally described as “poo on a stick.” It obliged.)

The truth is, people prefer the warmth of agreement. The moment something challenges them, they disengage. So platforms, therapists, and influencers learn: validate, soothe, and they’ll stay dependent.

Affirmation Culture

In the most literal sense, “affirmation therapy” already exists, the term is used in the context of gender identity work. But the logic behind it has spread far beyond that domain. Whether in identity politics, relationships, or psychotherapy itself, the cultural message is the same: to affirm is to care. To disagree, to question, to interpret, these have become suspect. Yet the heart of therapy lies in interpretation: in exploring what is unconscious, what resists awareness. When we reduce therapy to affirmation, we confuse comfort with care.

The Fear of Disagreement

Then there’s fear.

As therapists, we now live with a subtle terror of being cancelled or dissected online. I’ve read Reddit threads where strangers tear apart another therapist’s work: “I’d report them,” “Their job is to support you.”

A supervisor once told me, “A good therapy means that at some point, the patient will hate you.” That line has stayed with me. Real therapy isn’t about being liked all the time, it’s about change. And change, by definition, disrupts the status quo.

In the consulting room, that disruption can feel unbearable. Our defences cling hard to familiar patterns. A good therapeutic relationship can withstand ruptures, anger, and projections. That’s where transformation happens.

“Feel-good therapy” rarely touches this depth. It may soothe, but real change is never soothing.

Empirical research supports this. Studies consistently show that the therapeutic alliance, not constant affirmation, predicts outcomes. A strong alliance often includes conflict, disagreement, and repair. As Jonathan Shedler notes, “Authentic therapy is not about symptom relief through positive thinking, but emotional discovery through relationship.”

The Erosion of Neutrality

Most people actually sense this. That’s why new clients often tell me, in our first call: “I don’t want someone who just tells me what I want to hear.”

It’s true of all meaningful relationships, we want to be seen, yes, but also challenged. Growth often comes from the person who holds a mirror up to us and says, “This is how you make me feel.”

There’s a darker consequence to all this too: the erosion of therapist neutrality.

In the current climate, therapists are expected to be ideologically aligned with their clients, or risk being deemed “unsafe.” Some now publicize their political beliefs as a form of moral branding: “See? I’m good. I’m safe.”

But therapy is not about political solidarity. It’s about psychological exploration.

In my consulting room, I hear it all: pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, pro-Trump, pro-Communism and none of it matters. My job is not to agree or disagree, but to understand.

When one of my patients, distraught after Trump’s election, noticed I didn’t join his outrage, he snapped: “You support Trump!” It was a small but revealing moment, a reflection of how deeply our culture equates neutrality with betrayal.

Therapy, by contrast, is one of the few remaining spaces where such reactions can be thought about rather than enacted. Neutrality isn’t avoidance; it’s containment. It allows people to think freely, to explore their own beliefs without fear of judgment or rejection.

The Return to Depth

And something remarkable happens when people feel that freedom: they start to venture into the darker terrain of the psyche, the taboos, the contradictions, the shadow, as Jung called it.

That’s where therapy begins to transform, not just soothe.

Perhaps this is the paradox of our time: the safer we try to make everything, the more fragile we become. We’re medicating discomfort, curating micro-environments of agreement, and calling it wellness.

The real work of therapy, and of being human, begins where affirmation ends. When we can tolerate what feels unsafe, we discover something stronger than validation: we discover resilience.

Sophie Frost is a psychodynamic psychotherapist and executive function coach. She works with teens, adults and couples in Berlin and online through The Primrose Practice.