“The persona is a mask which makes people believe one is somebody. It is a compromise between the individual and society as to what a man should appear to be.”
— Carl Jung (Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (Collected Works, Vol. 7))
The Death of Goodness: Why I am writing this at all…
I have stayed quiet for a long time. Not because I had nothing to say, but because I became accustomed to staying in the shadows. Observing. Analyzing. Simply being a wallflower. There was comfort within the discomfort of it all.
I am a therapist-in-training, a mother, and a woman shaped by both compliance and rebellion. For years, I have carried a growing dissonance between what I know in my body and what I see in the world around me and especially within the clinical realm.
We say we care about healing. We say we care about wholeness. However, what we reward is fakeness. Blind obedience. Faux goodness. Polished language. Correct affiliations. Emotional tone regulation. Smiles.
We have, moreover, been told to be safe. Kind. Neutral. Do not say too much. Do not feel too much. Oh, but don’t forget to empathize. And one of the single most important pieces: Do not think too much…best yet, not at all. We are to make sure everyone is comfortable, even if we and our clients are disintegrating inside. Internally ripping our faces off, screaming into the abyss of our minds that fails to pierce through the veil of our lips.
And I have become tired of it all.
Exhausted by the pretense that goodness equals wholeness. That if clients are able to be “socially acceptable” and “independent,” they are healed. But they aren’t. Not truly. It is rather, the opposite, and that is now why this website exists.
This space is not for performance nor to reinforce the shiny persona of the perfect clinician or the healed mother or the spiritually poised woman. I am not writing for applause or even in the hopes that the world will even wake up; I am writing because if I don’t, I will suffocate under the weight of what has been left unspoken — not just within me, but that resides under the overbearing weight of the performance we have all abided by for much too long.
I have seen too many people break under the lie that goodness will save them. For it won’t. It always has been and always will be a mere mask. And masks are useful…until they begin to rot from the inside because it was mistaken for an authentic sense of self.
Goodness Over Wholeness: A Cultural Delusion
The clinical world, for all its talk of self-awareness and integration, often operates on a fundamentally disintegrated model. We are taught to repress the parts of ourselves that might make others uncomfortable: rage, shame, complexity, ambiguity, and paradox. We call that “professionalism.” Some even call it “trauma-informed.” We say it’s for safety. No, it is to merely maintain an illusion. Clinicians are some of the most messed up souls around, yet we act as though we have all of the answers (now whether we consciously admit to this or not is a whole other story).
What it really is that we as clinicians and clinicians-in-training have mastered is avoidance. And in that avoidance, we do the very thing we claim to treat by dissociating. We become “well-behaved” monsters: smiling, credentialed, abiding by ethical codes. Hollowed out. Half-alive and barely living.
We have traded soul for approval and mistaken emotional compliance for mental health. We call ourselves “helpers” while living inside systems that are terrified of anything raw, messy, or real. And then we have the gall to wonder why the world is collapsing and find some external force to blame all of our problems on…the crux of these problems that really reside within.
The Monsters We’ve Become
We imagine that monsters are violent, loud, and cruel. Grotesque and malicious. Wholly one way without an inkling of goodness within them. However, the true monsters are often those who believe they are good while being completely unconscious of the damage they do; the nuance of this complexity lacks any acknowledgment, whether in training programs, intellectual circles, or mainstream pop culture.
Monsters include the therapists who smile while pathologizing difference and judging each client by the diagnosis they were labeled by. The educators who punish emotion under the guise of order. The activists who rage for justice while secretly feeding on ideological purity and power. And yes — they are all of us. Me, you, and your friend’s sister’s cousin twice removed.
We are all susceptible to the spell of goodness. But why? Because goodness feels safe. I mean, it has gotten us this far, hasn’t it? We are no longer worried about outsiders raping and pillaging. Nor about having our neighbor turn on us simply because we are in some way different from them…or are we?
Now, what about this wholeness I spoke of? Wholeness asks us to face the parts of ourselves we have exiled: the shadow, the shame. The parts of us that wanted to punch the person that nearly crashed into us, scream at the system we feel is suppressing us, or collapse in the grocery store and cry because we are just so tired of pretending to be okay.
This blog marks the end of my performance.
Where We Go from Here
I do not have a formula. I do not have an endpoint. But I do have a voice, and a deep ache for truth. If you too are tired of being “good” and living in a world that tries their damnedest to collapse reality down to a 2D version of itself — black and white, good and evil — but still want to be whole…you are not alone.
If you feel more like a monster than a saint some days…you are also not alone. And if you are willing to question the very ground, we’ve built our “helping professions” on — then welcome!
This is not a safe space. It is a sacred one. One that while perhaps infuriating you, will also make you think. Sacredness begins not with perfection, but with brutal honesty. As the late psychiatrist, Dr. Carl Jung noted, what we do not face, we become. And what we refuse to name, we are destined to act out. Thus, wholeness is born when the mask is torn, and the monster is finally met.
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
— Carl Jung (Alchemical Studies (Collected Works, Vol. 13))