Transcription
Self-esteem is what is that? It's a nonsense. She feels terrible about herself because she's far away from her goal and she's always gotten what she wanted. She always got the that degree. She got the promotion. She had the fancy boyfriend that looked good on Instagram and he's athletic and he's all these things, but they don't want the same thing because they didn't date with the intention of marriage. Know what you want and know it before you're 35. That's unpleasant to hear. Yes. But would that have prevented you from sitting with that burnout in my room at 34? Also, yes.
You must be some kind of therapist. [Music] My guest today is Hannah Spear. She is a medical doctor trained in psychiatry and psychotherapy practicing in Zurich, Switzerland. She's the creator of the Psycho Babble Substack and podcast challenging post-modern influences in the mental health field. Hannah, welcome. and thanks so much for joining me. Thank you so much for having me, Stephanie. It's a pleasure. I'm really glad to be talking with you today. I don't even remember what article of yours I first saw, but uh the moment I read your work, I said, "Okay, I need to get her on the podcast." Um, so I've just been reading and getting caught up with your Substack, uh, Psycho Babble. And I think I want to lead with sort of a challenging question. Why do you call yourself the anti-feminist psychiatrist?
I know it sounds, you know, offensive to some perhaps at first glance, but you know, I have so much experience treating women, young women, uh, and, uh, also older. And I came to realize after I became a mother myself that so much of women's suffering, so much uh of the yeah mental disorders, if you want to even call them that, so many of the their life problems are due to having built their lives on feminist lies, feminist principles, and that they have for so long adopted feminist attitudes that at some point be it in their 20s, 30s or 40s, lead to psychopathology. And I tried for years uh sometimes with the same women to to help them with the methods, the techniques that I was learning. Uh at the time I was training in cognitive behavioral therapy and it didn't work. And every weekend we talked about this uh earlier. So I would work uh as a resident Monday to Friday and then on the weekends I would go to the university and train and cognitive behavioral therapy. And so I would I would try all these techniques Monday to Friday, do what I'd been told and I'd go back to my teachers and they were you know they were supervisors. They were they were psychologists and psychiatrists with five degrees and all really they were experts in their fields and they would tell me trust the process and basically give me and us my colleagues had the same problems that you're doing it the wrong way. So or that the patients weren't trying hard enough. Okay. So we'd go back and we'd do the same thing over and over again. And these people were just stuck in therapy. So that's why that's what psycho bababel is based on. All these people who are stuck in therapy for much longer than they need to. And I don't think they need to be there at all if they built their lives uh on different attitudes.
Like for example, you know, women in their 20s, they would come in and they I'd notice a pattern like in their 20s, young women, they would very often present with panic attacks, anxieties, very often health related. um in their their 30s they would present differently but in their 20s they had very often been pushed into degrees into the universities in into degrees that they had they didn't have really the interest in and they they weren't able to finish. So they'd have writer's block. They would just they would really be stuck. They wouldn't be able to finish and they would have panic attacks. And you know, and if you've ever had anxieties, you know that affects everything from the first time those symptoms present. You can't sleep. The next day you're tired. Then that gives you this feedback loop, right? You're you're tired. More anxieties come. Oh no, why am I feeling this way? Then you then you really can't sleep, right? You can't concentrate. Then you have poor grades. Then you get feedback from the poor grades. Oh no, am I lazy? Am I not good enough? Am I not good enough? We women, we tend to think, am I not good enough? Right? Am I stupid? Am I really stupid? And then you're they're just caught in this loop and they can't finish. Um so that I just saw again and again with that age. Um and they what what they were doing was that they were just trying to fill this. They had unmet attachment need, unmet emotional needs that they were taught they could fill with academic achievement and ambition. And it doesn't and doesn't work. And a very strange thing happened, right? They would come in one week and they'd be super happy and and glowing. And they had a successful date, right? That had positive male attention. And then like a couple of weeks later, he's nowhere to be found. like he's in his 20s. Of course, he doesn't want commitment and she's devastated. I just that's what takes precedence for for these girls. It's that they were very preoccupied with their dating life and what happened there and their their their academic achievements. They they came they were secondary although they'd never admit it. So that's that was that was sort of this this pattern. So I call that uh and I and I I think my maybe that was the article you read that that's the archetype cuz that you see that again and again.
And the second was then the woman in her 30s the one who who who like more like Rory Gilmore, right? One of these ideals that we grew up with that this sort of effortlessly achieving just sort of flew through university degree no problem does sports is athletic has a boyfriend not really invested then she has a career that goes really well and she has promotion after promotion and that gives her that dopamine kick right so you think this is really the right way and then you know by the by her 30s, we have uh a decline in the in our ovarian reserves and that leads to a hormonal feedback and that's this cliche of the biological clock which is a cliche for a reason. Then suddenly our priorities shift and we think because that woman in her 20s thinks that she will always feel like this. It's so easy to believe of course these things will always matter this much. this promotion feels so good. That will always matter this much. And then by when she's 32, 33, that's often the age, 34, they would just come in and say that nothing gives me joy anymore. I want to feel as happy as I remember feeling when I was a certain age. And that so that that that dopamine kick is no longer happening for them. And what happens then is that they have no energy. They're depleted. and they'll get diagnosed with some fatigue or burnout. So that's that that was more the burnout than the panic attacks that the things that I was doing no longer works for me. Like she looks up from her fancy desk. She has a a nice office somewhere usually and it doesn't it doesn't mean what it used to mean. And then like what about her boyfriend? What about this? She hasn't built her life so that when that happens, she can become a mother because we do have innate maternal desires that will some point show up. And if we build our life on these feminist lies, that's going to uh create a motivational conflict then between what is and what should be. Cuz your goal, you've been walking through your goal over here. Suddenly the goal is over there and you're on the wrong path. Of course, that's going to lead to some psychological conflict. So that's and that's the the common the common denominator as I see it is feminism. Feminism is this pathogen of resentment that we believe we hear it from we're very small, right? for the from from the first moment we put on those tight tight stockings and we say why why doesn't my brother have to wear these tight clothes and our mom doesn't tell us well you know look at what he has to wear this is uncomfortable too no she tells us well you just have to learn that the world is unfair to women you just have to get used to it all these little things we grow up with and it just it's it just a grows resentment and we go into our relationship with this resentment.
Like I remember having a fight with my husband when I was pregnant. I used to believe these feminist lie too. I'm from Norway. Like I was I was a feminist. I had a huge fight with him when I was pregnant. And I said, "Why do I have to take a break from my career? Why don't you have to do this and why don't you have to do that? Why should it be me?" I felt so, you know, righteous in my victimhood. and he could just go on and do what he wanted to do. Nobody pretend like nothing was happening. I think a lot of women recognize that. That was resentment. Instead of thinking about everything that I got to do, everything I had the chance to all that bonding with my baby. He had no idea. But that's not what we we we're we are raised with a resentment that also tells us that career is only measured in male terms, right? That success I mean success we measure success in male terms. Success is that ambition. It's what you uh achieve in your career. What about success as a mother? What about raising three kids with no mental disorder? Now, when I've changed my mindset, that's for me success. Then none of my three kids need help sleeping at night. They go to sleep after half an hour. I have no friends where that's the case, right? They're all working moms. Everyone Everyone needs help with some kind of thing, right? So that's I that was never success was what was what was told to me was success. This is that's something that I had to to learn by myself. And so that's why I think feminism is this pathogen of resentment. And I think as a doctor, I have a duty to to to point that out.
On that last note before we started recording, we were talking about how you have paired way down on the amount of hours you work during this chapter of life where your children are young. You said your youngest is three. And and I think I said that that was preventative mental health care that that being present as a mother with your children during these crucial early years. And you know that's how as you said you raise children without mental disorders by being available as a mom. Um, but I want to play devil's advocate and maybe straw man or misrepresent your position a little bit just to give you something back on because I can imagine people sitting here saying, "Well, that's easy for you to say, Hannah. Look, look at you. You have it all, right? You're you're beautiful. You're smart. You have the husband and the children. Uh, but you also have a career. You can call yourself a doctor. You have an education. um you have the ability to return to a highpaying and respectable career when when your children are older. And are you saying that women shouldn't have those things? Are you saying that women shouldn't pursue an education or what is it that you mean when you talk about the lies of feminism?"
That's a very good question. And listen, I I wasn't given any of this. I used to weigh 100 kilos. I was always ugly. I used to have teeth outside of my mouth. Right. This is this is um I think that uh I did I made a couple of choices when I had leverage in my 20s. Right? And that's so that's what I'm trying to say to women that you have a lot more power than they want you to believe. You are not some victim. um where the only solution is that you solely focus on your financial independence. I think on the contrary, if we only focus on our financial independence, that's when we really doom ourselves, right? We have to know a couple of essential things. That is that we have a we have a duty to ourselves to choose the right mate, the best mate that we can have cuz as human females we choose. But we have to do that when we have the most leverage. And that is not in our 30s when we have financial independence. On the contrary, that is in our 20s. and I chose the best mate that I could find when I was 25. So that was the first thing that I did for myself as a woman. I chose someone who was stable, who who who fit the way the what what I wanted to, right? So I I relocated. That was no easy thing. I wanted to stay in Norway with my family. I didn't want to move down to Switzerland. I was like, where is that? Right? I had I wanted a Jewish husband. So I went online. I found the best one that I could possibly find and I moved countries. I did all these hard things. These were not things that were given to me. But you know be but um I think that we have to make good choices and the right time and with that we can find ourselves in in more powerful positions as women. I'm not talking about powerful position in terms of being a CEO somewhere, right? But I have these three kids and am in this situation of life because I made good choices and I really hope that I help my daughter to make good choices as well. I want her to to date with the right values. I want her to date with the intention of marriage. Right? That's one of these choices. You don't just give yourself up for anything. You have these the the you have leverage as a woman and they are very different from the leverage you have as a man.
I want to keep I don't know if that advocate. Yeah. I don't know I don't normally do this so much with my guests but I feel like you are so well representing sort of one ended of an argument that if it's all right with you I want to kind of keep pushing back not based on what I actually think but based on how I can imagine people distorting what you're saying. Yeah. So to the education because you also asked about the education if I could just so we don't forget because I think that's such an important point right so yeah I I I don't think the medical profession is a very good choice for a young woman right because and that is also what I tell people who who ask it's a very long education that requires you be there 100% you can't and be preoccupied with dating or or these are you have to it's so hard and it doesn't just take seven years then it takes I know I spent six years in residency it just it goes on and on and on I do think that women have to think uh earlier on the fact that when you do become a mother you want to do right by your children you want to be there for your children to create proper attachment and I do think there are range of things women can do nowadays that will allow you that flexibility. It's not that I'm arguing for this propag Hollywood propaganda housewife, you know, that we see in Mad Men and she just sits around smoking and staring at her children. That's what we've been told a housewife is. You know, mothers used to be work a lot. They used to also contribute. Um but now we've had you know we have to find different types of interruptible work and I think we just have to think about that earlier on before we choose doctor lawyer consultant like all these things that are super hard to flex around a family in the way that will not give us some form of psychopathology because if I treated these women and there's just no way they just all they do is play chess with the hours of the
So I think a cynical, mistrustful perspective would hear what you're saying as pulling up the ladder underneath you, right? That that here you went and got this fancy degree and you entered this this potentially very lucrative field and now you're saying, "Oh, I did this, but this isn't a good choice for other women." I think a more trusting perspective would hear here's an intelligent woman honestly reflecting on her choices um and the reality of the fields as she has encountered them and comparing them to women's wants and women's needs. Um, again, this sort of cynical twisting of what you would what you've said. Here's what I hear. Looking at it through that lens, you're saying, "Okay, you lost a lot of weight when you were young. You fixed your teeth." Basically, you made yourself not only healthier, but more attractive. And then you said you chose the best maid at 25. Now, I think through the cynical lens, people hear, "Oh, she's talking about how women hit the wall, right? There's this really sexist notion. And you've I mean you've probably seen it on social media. Um these people who are incredibly judgmental about women and our looks as if that's the basis of our worth, saying that women hit the wall when they are 30 or 25 or whatever, right? And that, you know, so I I could hear someone I could imagine someone hearing what you're saying through that lens and saying, "Well, that's really sexist. Why should you reduce a woman's value or attractiveness as a mate to her her youthfulness, her fertility, her her weight, and all these things? Why are you saying that a woman needs to use those things as leverage? Isn't there more to us as as human beings?"
Of course, but you know, you also live in reality. I'm sorry. There's evolutionary reality. And what do men want? They want signs of fertility. What is that? Uh being being slim is one of them. You know, being symmetrical is another one of them. If I think that you're doing yourself a huge disservice if you if you if you don't live in if if you don't, you know, look look at biological reality for what it is, right? And use that to your advantage, right? If you do, you have a lot more power. Don't put yourself in that position. You you have to remember I sat with these women for hours trying to help them for hours. And then I started psycho bababel because if you're 37, you're unmarried, you don't have a relationship, you have a gleaming career that you no longer want to work at. All you want is to be a mother. That pain that is so palpable that is you have psychiatrist, you know, I talked to the Daw Rimple. He worked with criminals. For him, that was the the thing that moved him the most. And for me that was it was those women at the end of their 30s. Some had had one kid. They desperately wanted that second kid and they couldn't. And it's just they didn't believe those bi biological realities either when that when they should have. But they came to they really came to when they were they had to do shots every day for their hormone treatments. They were doing hormone treatments for years. And that is a pain. You just don't want you say, "Oh, we have all these technologies. You all these like, have you spoken to someone who goes through hormone therapy to become fertile? It is hell. It is a strain on your relationship. It'll make it'll make your husband never want to have that second kid because all you talk about is am I fertile today? What is have I taken the test? What are my blood values?" That is all you think about, right? If you are at the end of your 30s and you want that kid. So, like that's where I'm coming from. You know, living in reality. We have leverage more in our 20s than in our 30s. You can call that hitting the wall. I've heard about this meme. I haven't seen it, but to me that sounds a lot like burnout where they come, they can't do anything else and just they just want to lie in bed. They don't see a future. It's completely hopeless to them. And they say, "Oh, should I go on the dating market? my h my my because a lot of women now they experience they're 34 their boyfriend doesn't want to commit they're sitting there they're waiting for a proposal sometimes for years that's not coming should I now break up with him and go on the dating market I'm 34 how does that even work I have to download one of these apps like I've sat there with these women talking about that right so this is not me pulling up like I mean if you go on my substack you will see I will never be hired by a hospital ever again. Like from what I've said like that is fact. I've t taken that. But I'm I'm prepared. That's not My kids are the most important thing for me. I'm I'm not a fancy doctor. I'm a mom. I'm a very proud stay-at-home mom. And I'm not sure that I will ever work a hospital or clinical job again. This this is like I I look at psycho bababble as like housewives used to be uh involved in local government and charity. This is it for me.
So we haven't really delved in yet to what you mean when you say the lies of feminism, but you've described feminism as an ideology of resentment. And I think resentment is kind of that I guess the the difference between the attitude that I hear you recommend and the attitude that seems more prevalent. So the the one I hear you recommending is a very pragmatic almost utilitarian view of assessing your options as a woman who wants what's best for you. Right? So assessing what do I need to do and when and how in order to like you said get the best mate for me, right? And so that involves things like you're saying taking care of your appearance. You're saying doing that without resentment, doing that without an ideology that says, well, why should I have to make myself look more attractive? This is a problem with the patriarchy that teaches men to look at women this way. So you're talking about removing that resentment. And I'm wondering what you think that shift might look like for women who have let's say sort of absorbed an ideology that in the ends up being self-defeating, right? So, if there are things, for example, that you could do as a woman who wants a good mate, if there are things you could do to make yourself more attractive to good mates, but resentment and as you say, certain feminist beliefs are in the way of that because you're saying, "Well, I shouldn't have to." What is the shift that needs to take place or the the change in the logic for women to have that much more pragmatic and in some ways selfserving view of okay if I can do it I will do it.
Well the antidote to resentment is a gratitude and understanding of the other person's situation. And I think a lot of women have been deceived when it comes to what it means being a man. If you really look at men's situations and and men's struggles. So that really made a difference for me where I when I looked at um how men struggle. I think there are a lot of things that we don't realize um that for example we have a we have a legal system that um that favors us. If you look at uh the punishments men receive in comparison to women for example, um you look at a few statistics that could help you change your mind as to uh how men suffer uh in greater numbers. And um yeah like there are so many things with the mother experience of motherhood that you know they can only dream of but you have to take that experience without resentment. If you go into motherhood feeling resentful why do I have to do this? what if oh my boobs hurt and like oh there you know all these things that we like to focus on it can be magical if you don't right and that we at least have the opportunity to feel that magic and they don't what do they have to do they have to go and uh break their back providing for us because we make sure they do that whatever but they don't get they they don't get to do what we get to do. That's a way that you can see it, but very few of us do, right? It's very comfortable to be in the in the role of the of the victim, right? Or me and I'm doing it anyway. It's our hero story. Um, and I just see that they very often go through hard experiences without ever playing the victim. Um, so that's I think a little gratitude um at what we get to the opportunity to experience and um yeah, understanding for the other side.
As you're speaking, I'm thinking about how At the extremes, you have, let's say, grandiose pathological narcissism. You have someone who grossly overestimates their own contribution and devalues others consistently as a pattern in life. Um, and then scaling it back from that extreme. All of us, I think, face temptations or opportunities at various points in our lives to indulge in that same what I call narcissist math, that overestimation of my contribution and underestimation of yours. And I think it's that type of accounting that we do mentally that feeds resentment. And I think anyone who's paying close enough attention to their thoughts and feelings in relationships as they go through life will notice that that temptation is there for us. You know, anytime we are uh feeling tired or overworked or anytime we have to do something that we don't want to do, uh it's it's always available to us to indulge in that type of thinking. and and you don't have to be a pathological narcissist to to engage in it. You can just be sort of an ordinary human. Um, and do you think that this is something that that we need to become more more circumspect about, more cautious about this temptation in ourselves to tend to towards narcissism? It's I mean it's a feature of narcissism at the extreme, but I call it narcissist math. Anytime we're you know overestimating our own contribution or our own suffering and underestimating that of others.
Yeah, I think there's definitely definitely some of that, but I don't want to go and diagnose uh a large group of women. I I hear I'm very careful with the word narcissism to be honest. I think it's um well we do have the very interesting research of uh Gene Twangi right and she says she's done these narcissism surveys on university students very very good research she's a proper uh where she shows that there's an increase in narcissistic traits among college students. I thought I think that's very interesting and I but it's a it's a it's a personality trait. So some of it I you know it's we can grow into it but but that means it's also uh genetic is also born with yeah I think what I meant there is is more to point out that in narcissism we have the most extreme and overt examples of this. So, for example, um you know, someone who's in a relationship with someone with narcissistic personality disorder might find that they could they could put 10 hours into something out of love for that person and the other person won't give them an hour of their time back. So, you have the extremes of, you know, devaluation, right? But I'm saying to a lesser degree without narcissism, you know, to a lesser degree that and I think I'm just trying to relate to your ideas about resentment and gratitude and the fact that uh life is hard and and domestic life is challenging especially when you bring children into the mix. And that I think I mean to say that there's always um a part of us that could succumb to that resentment you know to to looking at what am I doing and and how can I you know it's not a conscious thing right but the not at all that's why I'm saying yeah that we are sewing that seed of resentment right in the everything that we tell them like there was this example of this every day because I caught myself in the whole this panty hose example that I give right and I said hold on like I was about to say yeah I'm just used to it and I was like let's and then I did this whole thing where I called her brother over and I was like look at this thinking he has to button it up cuz we were going to go pray and so we had to wear our nicest clothes and then so he was just putting all you know his uh his tie I was like do you want to wear a tie. Does that seem comfortable? This this we have to practice putting ourselves in in men's shoes instead. It's so easy to say, "Oh, poor me. It's comfortable under this blanket of self-pity." Of course, it's tempting to all of us. And uh but it's it's death. Like resentment is lethal. It really is. Um, and we have no problem talking about the resentment of insults. That's gotten a lot of attention. Oh, you know, they're cuddling with the resentment, resentment towards the world, and that's, you know, leading them to do all these different things. Correct. Correct. But there's the other side of that as well. There's a lot of in resentment in women that is leading them to uh live unhappy lives, right? You can approach motherhood with gratitude, with okay, I'm going to do everything that I can to make this the best situation as I can. Okay, it hurts a bit, but you know, look, okay, I'm tired, but I won't always be tired in, you know, but you can go into the mom blogs and you can suffer, you know, with you'll get plenty of commiseration depending on where you go. You can always and that's so I just see all these article page up and page all the reals about like how difficult women's lives are and how diff mothers and and I'm just saying yeah yeah you know it's very easy to sink in there it's no less dangerous than the resentment of the insults.
Wow. So, in your articles, you give some um what's the word? Like vignettes of certain characters that represent perhaps an amalgamation of different sort of profiles of people who've come to you for help and and you look at the women's side and the men's side and the relationships and and I want to talk about Patrick. So Patrick is the guy in his 30s who doesn't want to settle and Exactly. I think I mentioned him before. I mentioned the girlfriend. So his girlfriend Penelopey is really suffering because she wants to settle down. She has this instinct. And you know, everything that you describe in your blogs, everything you're talking about now, I I saw it too um in not only my practice as a therapist a lot there, but also in my personal life, too. Um but you know, it's no secret that women's self-esteem suffers when they are in relationships with non-committal men. And that when men act as though the things women want, when men act as if women are ridiculous for wanting those things, like Patrick and Penelopey for instance, like you know, as if she has all the time in the world, as if you know, five years without a ring on her finger, you know, what's five more? When men behave that way, uh men that women have opened their hearts, minds, and bodies to and invested in, yeah, it it has a real impact on a woman's ability to find her center, to believe in herself, to be clearheaded about where she's going, what she's looking for, what she deserves, what she has to offer. um given given all the Patricks of the world who uh have no problem essentially wasting women's time for all their fertile years. Uh, you know obviously we can't just pin these problems on women or beliefs that women have perpetuated because it's things everyone is doing right. So given how many women do have these urges and inclinations as you describe, right? There's a part of them that's looking for that attachment security as you say. Um and and they're trying to head in that direction, but but the dating scene just isn't the dating scene is making them feel crazy for wanting those things. What would you say to those women or or what needs to shift in the men in the society to make it more possible for women to pursue their actual goals?
Yeah. Yeah. So, I mentioned Penelope before like 34 comes in with burnout. uh she's smart, she's done everything right, you know, good degree and she raised through that and she started her career and then she h you know she probably then has this boyfriend um and that's Pat Patrick and when they got together she was the 20-year-old who thought she would never want kids and because she thought I'm always going to feel like this every time I get a promotion. And her goal was set over here. And like I said, then she had 30 something and the goal suddenly shifted shifts without her consciously doing anything about it. And then suddenly she finds herself miles away from the goal. And then it's very diff difficult to get that dopamine kick that c makes us happy and makes us keep going forward. Gives us hope. right? Gives us every time we're going the right way towards a goal, it gives us that good feeling, right? And um so imagine Patrick thinking that she's ah you know she's careerdriven. She's always she says she doesn't want kids. That fits you know I just want to travel. I just want to do my sports or whatever. But we know from we know from the dating app data now that 90% of women go for 10 for the top 10% of the men, right? So that we have to also be real about our criterias and our expectations in dating. Um and you know you have to date with the intention of marriage and Penelope doesn't do that. She lets the years pass cuz she thinks I'm never going to want to have kids. So that's why I'm saying Patrick then suddenly after I don't know how many years of relationship say well you know I thought we agreed that we weren't going to have a family. I thought we agreed that we were always going to travel. So he feels betrayed like why why are you turning on me? Why do I now have to be worried that we're going to have a fight every time I come into the living room? So he withdraws, you know, turtle that he doesn't want, you know, he's terrified and then, you know, they're stuck in this impass because he knows what she wants and she know what he wants. So it's not that they they don't they have some unspoken they're not communicating properly. They know exactly where they're at, but it's just is she more afraid to to sit and wait for him? Maybe a proposal is just around the corner. Then I haven't wasted any time. Or is she more afraid of staying with him and not having a family? Cuz she her fear is also to enter the dating market and be single. So in therapy, she has to balance those fears, right? That's how you am I more afraid that I'm going to stay stuck in this relationship or am I more afraid of entering the dating market? Which fear can I manage? That's good therapy. you know, not focusing on her building her self-esteem. Self-esteem, by the way, is this that this founded on nothing. Is Nathaniel Brandon came up with this self-esteem nonsense that we still for some reason teach. Self-esteem is what is that? It's a nonsense, right? She feels terrible about herself because she's far away from her goal. And then she's she's always gotten what she wanted. She always got the that degree. She got the promotion. She had the fancy boyfriend that looked good on Instagram and he's athletic and he's all these things. But they don't want the same thing because they didn't date with the intention of marriage. Know what you want and know it before you're 35. Is that's unpleasant to hear? Yes. But would that have prevented you from sitting with that burnout in my room at 34? also. Yes.
So, Patrick, he's in that top 10% of guys. He is tall, dark, and handsome. He's athletic, successful, and popular. He's got all the uh traits when it comes to attractiveness and status. And your reckoning with this hypothetical Penelopey in the situation is reassess where you're at in life. Yes, it's nice to have this really hot boyfriend, but if he's not satisfying your heart's desires, is it is it really so nice? Could you date a guy a few inches shorter? Could you date a guy who's We don't like to They're always a head taller than us, three and a half years older with a better education. That's what we like. That's what we like to date. But no, I'm not So, so here we come with this whole should I settle? That was this whole Megan Kelly thing, right? Where she tells me, how dare she tell women to settle. That is I'm not what I'm saying. But if you every guy that you're dating, you feel I have to settle here. You have to investigate your own situation. Perhaps you do have some narcissistic tendencies. Are you really as great as you think you are? Like is that really the case that you every date you go to you think oh you know he isn't good enough for me but if you and I'm sorry you have to think is this a man that I want to have to father my children that's that's the right question as a woman is this a stable man you have to have the right values also what I tell tell men right because I had this exact conversation with someone in my audience on Substack back after this. Um, and then I and then he said, "Oh yeah, well women, you know, there it's you should never marry a woman. A lot of a lot of a lot of men now are going a little bit on this magtau thing. Why should you marry women at all? The legal system is against you. Uh that you can never fulfill the expectations, etc., etc." And then you I just tell them you will fare no better if you don't build a family. Right? Men in their 50s, they aren't cool anymore. You you don't want to be the guy in the club when you're 50 is what I tell them. That you're not charming anymore. You just you want to and and it's not good for men to be without a family. They need that purpose. We are all better when we when we when we have a purpose and that p purpose for tens of thousands of years have been family. If you are the outlier, if you have a very particular personality structure that doesn't, you know, motherhood doesn't call to you or that's just not for you. But that is very very rare. I've met maybe a handful of women that fit that. But even they even they will be the first ones to say I wish I wasn't like this. I this is not a life I want for anyone in that category. So I for most of my life felt like I was not meant to have children. And uh you know then I I met my soon-to-be husband um in my mid30s. It you know took a while. It's taking a while for us to get married. But you know, by the time I met him, I was filling I was feeling this void of that stable partner, but also the void of the lack of children in my life. And so for me, it ended up being really suitable to fall in love with a man who had children and to become a a stepmom. um you know, but I think for me it took years of um the the benefits that I've received of having that really loyal, stable, loving partner to get in touch with that instinct. But I'm also an outlier among women in many ways. Um and you know, intellectually and in terms of some of my drives and things like that. So, I'm definitely in that category of women that's like I can talk about these issues and I see exactly what you're saying and I see like the degree to which they still apply to me and the degree to which I'm an outlier and sort of, you know, found this compromise. But even for women, you know, who are like me, right, very intellectually driven, take a long time to settle down, things like that. Um, it it can I think some of the popular culture stuff can get in the way of getting in touch with those drives and what they mean for us, where they're trying to point us to to go. And that's a sort of a theme I notice in your writing is that you pick up on the the instincts in women and the feelings that emerge when these instincts aren't uh sort of nurtured and honed and and
Yeah. Yeah. When we don't take them at face value. When we think because we somehow think that we can just erase all we know from evolutionary psychology with 50 years of social theory that just that just only we can believe something like that, right? And we have we have all this good knowledge. Um that's why it's it's better in uh in societies uh where we just do you know that's why do we do it that's what we've always done a tradition for a reason that's because you know men need this especially you know men will not why should they do they do it because their parents taught them to because their friends start getting married and you'll notice if you're sitting there waiting for a proposal proposal from your your man uh who is this Patrick perhaps it you know in the cases where it does happen that he come comes around and proposes it's because all his friends starts to like dominoes then they start doing it as well it's like we need a community around us to to guide us we do what they do and now we have too long to think about it we sit for 10 15 sometimes 20 years and just do mental gymnastics. Who am I? What am I supposed to be? Is this the right thing? Is this a sex? What is success for me? What if it's my self-esteem? What do I think about myself? What about and it just it's not good for us. Just it's obviously not good for us. We have too long to think about ourselves and we don't think about what do myself want in 10 and 20 years. As I said, you don't want, it's not cool to be the 40-year-old guy in the club. That's not charming anymore.
Well, and part of what I'm getting from that is that part of what makes it so easy for the Patricks of the world to behave well into their 40s as if they will always have their pick of women is women being in denial about their wants and needs. Whereas, if we were more collectively open and honest about women's true wants and needs, then even the handsome, tall, athletic, successful Patricks of the world would still exist in a culture where the beautiful women available to date them are dating with that intention. As you described, I'm just saying the Patrics are few. They are just the tip of the iceberg. Stop dating the Patricks altogether. I never gave them a time a day because I always dated with intention. I would bring up how many kids I wanted way too early. Everyone around me said, "Aren't you going to be single for a year, Hannah? Don't you want to just be single for a year? Just a year." And I was like, "No, no, breakup date. Breakup date." Right. It it just I wanted I I wanted what I wanted. and and uh and I would do things that that all the blogs and all of my friends said was just outrageous for a woman to do. Um being so open about that. But yeah, I never touched the Patrick's. They were too cool for me. They're too cool for me and there aren't that many of them. It's just that we always want them because of social media or, you know, whatever. Um uh but that you know that's now we have good data on that from the dating apps and I think uh if if women came down from their high horse they would find it slightly easier to be on the dating market.
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So, Hannah, you talked about dating with intention in your 20s, finding your husband when you were 25. What advice would you give to women in that chapter of life, and maybe potentially as well to the therapists who are treating them with regard to what their wants and needs are?
Yeah, I would say, find someone who's completely honest with you, who's not just trying to stroke your ego. I don't think anyone is furthered with that. And I do see that we tend to, women, we tend to affirm each other. So, you know, for a lot of women, that's we do struggle with our weight. And I've seen therapists, and I also write about this, you know, I've seen therapists advise things like standing naked in front of the mirror and doing positive self-talk. And women will spend a lot of time doing that, and it'll be wasted time. It rarely works because we, like we said there, we have instincts. We know when we're unhealthy, we don't feel good. Being overweight doesn't make us feel good. And I use that as an example because it's a very common problem, right?
And I'm obviously not talking about those who suffer from anorexia, those who are normal weight and they just want to, it's an aesthetic thing. I'm talking about clinical overweight. So, that's a BMI over 25. And that's for therapists, you know, the quicker you can, you can, you can get to work on that actual, you know, behavioral work, the better. You need to establish a relationship. You need to be that they, that they take it from you, that they also are able to be honest with themselves and what they, what they can do better.
But I think for women, a lot of self-improvement is lost because, to start with self-improvement, now we're going to talk about that later, but because of the postmodernist influence in psychology and psychiatry, we, we don't, we don't really like to talk about self-improvement because that would imply that there is a better and a worse. And postmodernism, they want to do away with that. They don't want to talk about hierarchies. And if you say that you're working towards a better you tomorrow, that means that there's a worse you today, obviously. And they don't like that's a hierarchy. That's not a, that's not a good thing. So, they want to break that down. They want to say, you know, there's no, everything is equal. You today is just as good as you tomorrow. And then you're going to end up standing in front of that mirror naked saying to yourself that you're beautiful no matter what. Ten minutes later, you're feeling awful again.
So, that's, that's, and that helped me a lot, as you know, when I was in my 20s, to be honest about my habits and what I could do better. And my husband helped me with that. He helped me with that a lot.
So, there's the "health at every size" is a popular notion these days. And, you know, a few years ago, I remember, you know, a prospective client asking if I practiced "health at every size" and really having to kind of grapple with, "How do I feel about this?" Well, I don't know exactly what they say. I haven't done a "health at every size" training. I haven't read a "health at every size" book, but I'm pretty sure that's wrong.
But I, you know, there is this, so you critique the post-modern influence in psychotherapy. And, you know, before we started recording, I was telling you a little bit about my backstory, how trans rights activists tried to take away my license. I'm curious, in Norway where you're from and Switzerland where you live, if the political climate for therapists is such that, you know, a therapist who dares to say, "No, I don't believe in health at every size. I actually believe you will be healthier and happier if you lose weight and that there is a right and a wrong way to eat." You know, if you start saying things like that, obviously, you know, a good psychotherapist is going to be relational and establish that rapport and that trust, as you're saying, with their patient, but there's only so much we can control. So, does it feel like sort of an oppressive political climate in those countries these days? Does it feel like people like therapists can take the risk of being more honest about these issues?
So, we don't have the extremes that you have in the US, but those trends are also coming here. It's usually with a delay, and they're more insidious. So, it's not, it's, it's a very, luckily, Switzerland is the most conservative country in Western Europe. So, it's, it's slower here. We don't, it's not so pronounced. We also have a trans lobby and trans clinics, and that just started when I, when I left. Like the last week I was doing clinical work at the hospital, I got that pamphlet in my, in my mailbox, and I just thought, "Thank God, I'm out of here." You know, it just said "trans" in big letters. So, I just saw that coming in, and I just thought, "Good." I mean, I just, this is, I don't want to, you have, you have to ride the train or you're going to be...
I just had an interview on Psycho Babble with a German psychologist. And that's kind of funny. He's, he's being hunted now by the, by the mob, by the woke mob and the trans mob because he had, he wrote a book about these issues, pointing out very well the same things that I'm saying as well, that, well, he's, he gave an interview to the biggest newspapers here in Germany and Switzerland called, "Left-leaning women suffer more from mental disorders," which was his, his finding, and it was very well argued. And he has had to, yeah, he's, he's, he's really under threat. So, it shows. So, I think, yes.
Um, it's, it's also, what was your question? That it's here, you, you also feel this, well, so, so the trans rights activist lobby is the most extreme and egregious example of the pressure in our field to affirm that which is not healthy or even sane. Yeah, we see that to a lesser degree with things like, to bring it back to your points about resentment and how certain feminist narratives fuel resentment, right, being pressured, feeling the pressure to affirm people's ideas, even ideas that are harming them. And I, I hear this from my therapist friends all the time. It's not just the trans stuff. The expectations that patients are bringing into therapy about the therapist being there to model and affirm. And so within that vein, the pressure to affirm one's lifestyle choices.
And, you know, in my opinion, if we're, if we're looking at a dysfunctional pattern of eating and movement, if we're looking at someone who's relying on food as a comfort blanket, then that's, you know, more getting into the realm of addiction, more getting into the realm of, "What are they emotionally avoiding here?" So, the idea that a therapist should just affirm that coping mechanism rather than explore it is pretty ridiculous to me. But I'm just saying, with the whole "health at every size" and all of that, how free do you feel and how free do your colleagues feel in Switzerland to be honest about the fact that humans are not equally healthy at every size, for instance?
I think that sadly there are very few therapists who see it that way. They gladly affirm. I see it coming from them mainly. These kids that come in, then they, where do you think they get it from? Where these blogs? Or if you go, have you been to Psychology Today, for example? These are psychology PhDs who write these, these, these nonsense things, like affirming this and and and having too high expectations from yourself. I use that as an example because that, that was what I heard the most from women coming in at the first, first therapy session.
And I don't know if you do this, but I would always establish certain goals. What do we want to achieve with this round of therapy? And that would just always be echoed, "I want to have, I want to lower the expectations I have for myself." So, I just want to, I would just want to have help affirming that everything I do is correct and I don't have to change anything. Right? That's translated instead of saying, "Where, which areas of my life am I not doing my best at the moment? Where can I have help in motivating, inspiring me to to improve, be it at work, be it in my relationship, be it with my own self, with my own body?"
'Cause the opposite of that, the alternative, the only alternative to that is to sit and and stroke, stroke the ego. "Of course, you're fine just the way you are. You're doing everything right. The problem is that you're just expecting too much of yourself." And that's also one of the reasons people are stuck in therapy for years. It doesn't work. It's a postmodernist fantasy.
Do you think sometimes that people have this idea, "I need to expect less of myself," and the reality is that they need to expect more?
Exactly. I think that they can do a lot more. Those people's potentials are limitless. Well, when we put our minds to it, and especially when we have, so, I mean, look at everything we have available. We like to talk about how this is difficult in social media and this is difficult. But look at what we have at our fingertips. And if that doesn't work, you can go to a therapist and have them help you, right? Everything we have access to. It's amazing. You don't have to ask anyone for help. You just like put on every app you go into has a something, something assistant, right? So, yeah.
So, what are, where do you think that psychiatry and psychotherapy get it wrong with regard to women's issues and men's issues?
With women's issues, like I, like I said, that they waste women's fertile years. Right. I think that they are very much responsible for this whole, "You're still young with so much technology to help you. People get pregnant at 40, right?" I think that a lot of that would be solved by making them liable, right? Getting, what, isn't it, to me it's absurd that the documentation required for a therapist, it differs, but I don't know of anywhere where you're required to tape every session with confidentiality. What's the difference between taping a session and doing x-rays or what we're obligated to do now, document the session? So, after this session, a therapist will sit and write up what happened. "He said, she said," right? That's what, that's how we document the session.
The um, I've, I've read, because as a psychiatrist, I had to sort of supervise a ward. So, I would have to read through the documentation of other therapists or psychologists and nurses with degrees, etc., because I had the medical responsibility, the oversight. So, I had had to sift through every morning the documentation of the sessions. And that's when my eyes started to open because it was all the, it was all, was all the same sentence after sentence. In German it's called "self-care," which is self-care. We