Validation Is Not Enough — But Neither Is Willpower

Jonathan Alpert has practiced psychotherapy in New York and Washington for more than twenty years, and his recent diagnosis of therapy culture is worth taking seriously. Validation has become the whole treatment, he argues. Feelings are confirmed rather than examined. Wounds are identified and labeled rather than worked through. The result is a generation that is, in his phrase, 'emotionally articulate but psychologically brittle.'

He is right about the brittleness. He is right that challenge produces growth where mere validation produces stagnation. He is right that externalizing blame shrinks a person rather than enlarging them. Where his account runs short is at precisely the point where it needs to go deepest: what makes genuine agency possible at all, and why the bootstrap formula — even in its kinder, more nuanced form — cannot carry the full weight he places on it.

What Alpert gets right

Alpert describes a therapy culture that has 'traded the difficult work of growth for the comforting work of validation.' Walk into a contemporary therapist's office, he writes, and you will be encouraged to identify traumas, label triggers, and set boundaries — but you are unlikely to be told that you can choose differently, act in spite of your feelings, or take responsibility for the life you are building.

This is a real phenomenon, and its consequences are visible. Young adults arrive at his practice having mapped their attachment styles, scored themselves on every online ADHD screener, and excavated their childhoods for the originating wound. What they lack, he observes, is any sense of agency. The diagnosis has become the identity. The grievance has become the floor plan they live in rather than a room they pass through.

Steven Hayes, the architect of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, has spent decades arguing for something structurally similar from within secular psychology. The problem is not that painful thoughts and feelings exist; it is that people fuse with them — taking the hand-scribbled sign on the side of the road as a command rather than noticing it the way one notices the temperature of a room.[^1] Defusion, in Hayes's framework, creates the psychological distance needed to act from values rather than react from pain.[^2] Alpert and Hayes differ in method and vocabulary, but both are pointing at the same collapse: when inner experience becomes the final authority on what a person can do, the person stops being an agent and becomes a spectator of their own life.

Vitz, Nordling, and Titus, in A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person, name the anthropological underpinning of this collapse. The human person is not merely a subject of experience but an agent oriented toward genuine goods — truth, beauty, communion, virtue. When therapeutic practice reduces the person to a repository of feelings to be validated rather than a rational, free agent called toward flourishing, it commits an anthropological error before it commits a clinical one.

Where the diagnosis goes lame

Alpert's corrective is this: 'the conviction that you are the author of your own life, and that the next chapter is yours to write.' It is a fine sentence. It is also, on close inspection, incomplete in a way that matters pastorally.

The Catholic Christian tradition has a precise name for why authoring your own life is harder than it sounds: concupiscence. Aquinas, following Paul, identifies concupiscence not as sin itself but as the disordering of appetite that sin leaves behind — the pull of lower goods against higher ones, the drag of habit against resolution, the gap between what a person intends and what they repeatedly do (Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 82). This is not a problem that better agency simply overcomes. It is a structural feature of fallen human nature that persists even in the redeemed — what Aquinas calls fomes peccati, the tinder that remains after baptism.

Alpert acknowledges that patients 'have been shaped by forces they did not choose,' and he wants therapy to hold that truth alongside the truth of agency. But holding two truths in parallel is not the same as explaining how one gets from wound to flourishing. The missing term is grace. Not grace as a theological ornament appended to a sound-enough secular account, but grace as the actual mechanism by which disordered desire is reordered, by which the will is elevated to act consistently with its own best intentions.

The Pelagian error — the heresy that bears Pelagius's name and that Augustine spent his mature life refuting — is precisely the belief that the human will, rightly motivated, can achieve its own healing. Therapy culture in Alpert's description has made a secular Pelagianism of the opposite kind: the will is so wounded by external forces that it can do almost nothing. Alpert wants to restore the will. The question is whether restoring willpower is enough, or whether the will itself needs something more than rehabilitation.

Created, fallen, redeemed: where the CCMMP sharpens the picture

The Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person reads the human person through three irreducible states — Created, Fallen, and Redeemed — and the failure to hold all three simultaneously produces distortions in both directions.

Therapy culture, as Alpert describes it, is stuck in the Fallen state and cannot get out. It sees the wound accurately but cannot imagine genuine restoration. The wound becomes the person's essential identity; the diagnosis is the truest thing about them. This is not, in fact, a compassionate anthropology. It is a diminished one. It honors the suffering while quietly abandoning the sufferer.

Alpert's corrective overcorrects toward the Created state — the original dignity and rational freedom of the person — without fully accounting for the residual effects of the Fall. His image of the patient as 'author of your own life' is beautiful, but it can too easily land as demand rather than invitation, especially for the person whose will has been genuinely deformed by early attachment failure or chronic trauma. Telling a person with deeply habituated patterns of avoidance that they simply need to choose differently is like telling someone with a fractured leg that they simply need to walk.

The Redeemed state is where Alpert's account needs completing. Theosis — the Greek theological term for the process by which the person is progressively transformed into the likeness of God through grace — is not the same as self-improvement. It is not the bootstrap mythology Alpert rightly rejects, but it is also not mere willpower rightly directed. It is participation in a life that is given, not generated. John of the Cross, in the Ascent of Mount Carmel, describes the soul's progress toward freedom as one in which the person must cooperate actively — emptying themselves of disordered attachments — while receiving passively what they cannot manufacture: the purifying action of grace in what he calls the passive nights.

Benedict Groeschel's reading of the spiritual passages draws a clinical implication: the purgative stage of growth is marked precisely by the discovery that willpower is insufficient, that the very effort to control one's inner life by force of resolution tends to tighten the knot rather than loosen it. What is needed at that moment is not more agency but surrender to a grace that works at a level the will cannot directly reach.

This does not undermine Alpert's point about responsibility. Aquinas is insistent that grace does not replace natural agency but elevates and perfects it. The person remains fully a cause of their own acts; grace operates through the person's freedom rather than around it. But the sequence matters: the restoration of genuine freedom is the fruit of cooperation with grace, not its precondition.

Pastoral implications for Catholic Christian practice

What does this mean concretely for those who integrate Catholic anthropology with clinical practice?

First, Alpert's challenge to the validation-only model should be received gratefully and deployed with precision. A therapeutic posture that merely confirms whatever the client feels is not compassionate — it is, as Alpert says, a kind of abandonment. The Catholic tradition has always insisted that accompaniment is ordered toward truth, and truth sometimes looks like gentle confrontation. Aquinas's account of prudence includes the capacity to judge one's own situation honestly, which requires the kind of reality-testing that Alpert is calling for.

Second, the concept of psychological brittleness Alpert describes maps closely onto what Suazo, following Aquinas, calls disorders of the cogitative sense — the internal power that evaluates particular situations as good or threatening. When the cogitative sense has been habituated to read ordinary discomfort as danger, the person loses the capacity to act freely in ordinary circumstances. Clinical work that only validates this reading deepens the disorder rather than healing it.

Third, the goal is not self-authorship but theosis. The difference is not trivial. Self-authorship implies that the person contains within themselves the resources for their own transformation. Theosis names a process in which the person is genuinely active — choosing, cooperating, practicing virtue, forming habits — but within a relationship to God that is the actual source of transformation. The patient is not the protagonist of a solo narrative but a participant in a story whose author is Someone else. That shift in frame does not diminish the person; it is precisely what dignifies the wound without making the wound the last word.

Alpert ends his article with an image: therapy at its best 'returns to the patient what therapy culture has taken from them.' He means agency. The Catholic account would say: what therapy at its best returns to the patient is the accurate sense of who they are — wounded, yes, but created in the image of God, redeemed at a cost, and called forward into a freedom that no amount of mere validation, and no amount of mere willpower, can supply on its own.

References

[^1]: Hayes, S. C., Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life — 'What we need to learn to do is to look at thought, rather than from thought... notice the hand-scribbled sign in the same way we would notice graffiti.' [^2]: Hayes, S. C., ACT lecture — on the goal of psychological flexibility: 'how do I handle my own emotions thoughts attention sense of self... in a way that would allow me to be open to my past present here... and to decide what that purpose is.'