Walk into a therapist’s office and it’s likely they’ll tell you to meditate, practice mindfulness, notice interdependence, and embrace non-attachment. These aren’t therapeutic discoveries. They’re Buddhist practices, stolen and repurposed. Your therapist isn’t trying to convert you to Buddhism. They just took what worked and claimed it for themselves. Therapists have been stealing from religion for over a century. Every time, they rip a technique from its spiritual roots and plant it in godless soil. Therapy’s Rap SheetFirst, the evidence. Troubled people turned to religion long before therapists existed. Religion made sense of psychotic breaks, gave direction to chaos, and comforted troubled souls. Then God died in Western Europe. Religion could not adjust to scientific discoveries and had nothing left but empty platitudes. The Enlightenment killed spirituality and replaced it with empiricism. Science advanced, industry boomed, and engineering flourished; but mysteries remained. So did miseries and meaninglessness. Science could treat infections but couldn’t touch the pathologies of the psyche. People needed relief that didn’t look like religion. Then Freud walked in with his talking cure. Dozens followed. Freud worked hard to distance himself from religion. He called religious beliefs infantile illusions. Sure, they comfort people, he thought, but they’re not real. Humanity should grow up and embrace reason. Maybe it was a Freudian slip, but he built psychoanalysis on techniques stolen from the Judaism of his family home and the Christianity of his native Vienna. The Jewish tradition of wrestling with meaning became psychoanalytic interpretation. The confessional booth became the analyst’s couch. The priest’s authority to absolve sins transferred to the analyst’s authority to interpret the unconscious. Original sin morphed into the Oedipal complex. Freud repackaged religious healing in scientific language. Sin became neurosis. Confession became the talking cure. Spiritual guidance became analysis. The soul became the psyche. Priests became therapists. Prayer became introspection. Salvation became mental health. He didn’t object to religion’s methods, he objected to its metaphysics. Not how it healed, but what it claimed about reality. Meanwhile, in America, God hadn’t died. Churches and synagogues stayed alive by competing in the free market of beliefs. Psychotherapy competed with them. Americans could choose therapy as easily as religion, so therapists marketed their product under new labels, containing the same ingredients. To avoid association with current religions, the creators of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy reached back past Christianity and stole from Stoicism. Like Stoicism, CBT tells you to identify irrational thoughts, challenge them with logic, find different interpretations, focus on what you control, and accept what you can’t change. These techniques worked in ancient Rome. They work now. But the Stoics weren’t trying to reduce depression or anxiety. They were pursuing virtue, wisdom, and alignment with the divine reason they believed ran through everything. CBT kept the mechanics and tossed the meaning. It turned a philosophy of life into a treatment protocol. Stoicism aimed to make you good. CBT aims to make you feel better. Freud and CBT were hardly alone in their thievery. Native American healing practices proved irresistible to therapists. Talking sticks got nabbed for group therapy. Vision quests were carried off to wilderness programs for troubled teens. Every time, therapists insisted they were doing something different from religion. Something scientific, evidence-based, secular. Each time, they were doing what religion had always done, using the same methods, just in a white coat instead of vestments. Some therapists noticed what was missing from psychotherapy. It had no soul. Therefore, it broke into religion’s house a second time, to steal one... Continue reading this post for free in the Substack app
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Monday, 8 December 2025
When Therapists Steal
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