Care What Others Think

You know you want to.

Only in the modern world, where people can afford to have ridiculous ideas and still survive—even thrive—would anyone say something like “try not to care what others think of you.” In fact, I’m willing to wager that for most of human history, the common response to this piece of advice would have been to move a few feet away from the advice-giver.

But this notion is scattered throughout American culture. Just this morning, a TV screen in the waiting room of my doctor’s office encouraged me: “Today, be your authentic self.” I nearly walked right up to the nurse and demanded that I be seen immediately. Impatience was, after all, what my authentic self was feeling.

I’m not sure where this me-first narrative came from, but I know how it shows up in therapy. Clients are often seeking “internal validation,” “intrinsic motivation,” “inner strength,” and so on. These are all therapy terms for “caring less about the opinions of others.” Many clients assume, for good reason, that this is what therapy is about. They’ve been told in myriad ways, from casual conversation to TV shows. If I base my worth on others’ opinions, the thought goes, then others will have control over me—and that’s bad.

As someone who knows a few—not a lot—just enough to be dangerous, really— things about evolution, of course this rankles me. By the magic of therapy, many clients expect to shed all reliance on others, as if reputation has not been an important evolutionary pressure for hundreds of thousands of years—as if what one thought of oneself was the determining factor in genetic success.¹ Of course, a person must pursue their selfish interests, too.

As Nesse writes:

There are good evolutionary reasons to expect constant conflicts between (id) impulses to get short-term advantages and (superego) constraints that sacrifice personal short-term gain for longer-term benefits of being a preferred social partner.²

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the fantasy of escaping society’s clutches. I once lived mostly alone, in a cabin in the woods, for two years. And I would call it the best period of my life had I not gone on to marry someone I love. But I can still recall—can still feel deep in my stomach—the freedom and carelessness of those years. I didn’t have to worry about what to do, say, wear, or eat. I never had anywhere to be; nobody relied on me for anything. It was bliss.

Participation in society, though, requires give and take. Otherwise, the costs are clear: judgment, punishment, avoidance. The kind of stuff that—let’s face it—is usually much worse than whatever it costs to silence your true self. Which is why, for as much as our culture promotes the idea of “you do you,” most people I know don’t follow it all that aggressively. Sure, maybe we’ll get a nose ring, but we won’t tell the barista to hurry the F up with our coffee. Or that she has nice boobs and we’d like to squeeze them:

The possibility that therapy is at least partially responsible for this trend in selfishness is the subject of Steve Salerno’s Beware Psychotherapy That Works. He asks: “Is it possible for a nation of 330 million fully optimized Is to also function as a fully optimized We?” Abigail Shrier asks a number of similar questions in Bad Therapy.

And yet the scene is all too common in therapeutic training, of a self-doubting client being told by a compassionate, yet firm therapist that they ought to disregard what others think of them. “If other people aren’t fitting into your life, your goals, your growth,” the message begins…and before you know it, the client has disowned their parents.

Could the average person’s mental health, whether they are in therapy or not, improve if my colleagues and I adopted a more balanced approach? One that acknowledged the benefits of both fitting in and standing out? Absolutely. And while we’re at it, we might as well push back against other ridiculous notions that our field is (fairly or unfairly) perceived to support.

A primary reason for creating this Substack was just that: to address the tendency of mainstream clinical psychology to mislead and misinform. Even when clinical psychology doesn’t create the bad idea, it is often quick to support it if doing so is advantageous. Conspiracy isn’t needed to understand why: therapists work with and care about the person in front of them. This leaves them blind to—and frequently apathetic about—other considerations, like the perspectives of the people the client complains about. (Or the truth.)

This client-centered focus leads to a fairly common occurrence, in which the therapist becomes fed up with some bully in the client’s life and demands that the client put their foot down.

“Next time,” the therapist says, “I want you to tell them to go to hell.”³

Then the client, who doesn’t actually think that person is so bad—but enjoys complaining about them from time to time—will say: “Oh, they’re not so awful, and I’m sure I share some of the blame.”⁴

The therapist is confused and suspects that the client has either been lying or is terrified of standing up for themselves. But, really, it’s just that the client understands the give and take of being a social species better than their therapist.

Other people are, to be sure, the source of our greatest joys and deepest miseries. (“Hell,” said Sartre, “is other people.”) Mental health should therefore include the ability to discriminate between those who have our best interest at heart and those who don’t. Therapists can help clients figure this out—both for specific people in the client’s life at the moment, and as a general capacity going forward.

Still, the feedback from people around us—both those who care and those who couldn’t care less—is vital information. It’s true that we shouldn't give it too much weight, but neither should we ignore it entirely. We want to strike a balance. Indeed, at the risk of sounding so obvious as to be braindead, both intuition and social feedback should be taken into account. Both individual and group considerations should get a say. Yet therapists tend to prioritize the needs of the person in front of them as if they’ve been hired as a bodyguard for their client’s feelings. Is that helpful? Sometimes, yes. Other times, no. It all depends on the kind of balance clients have struck so far.

To be fair, people who disregard what other people think don’t typically go to therapy, so there is some reason to believe that the modal client goes too far the other way. Still, therapists are too eager to jump in and shield clients from criticism, perhaps especially when the client is criticizing themselves—i.e., “beating themselves up.” “You’re too hard on yourself” is an all-too-common refrain.⁵

But guess what? It’s much better if I beat myself up than let the world do it for me. There’s adaptive value to wondering if I smell, talk too much, hold obnoxious views, or do something weird with my eyes. I don’t want my “inner critic” to become too loud, but neither do I want it to fall silent. Because then I will smell, gain a reputation as the smelly one, and suffer the results. The importance of self-monitoring becomes all the more important when you consider politeness and decency. Most people won’t tell you what your faults are; they’ll just stop hanging out with you.

Isn’t that funny? People are happy to advocate “you do you,” and yet when push comes to shove, would rather abscond than say: “You smell.” This is precisely where mental health practitioners can add value. Instead, they often make the problem worse by advocating for an extreme form of self-liberation and expression. But private judgment isn’t going anywhere. In fact, I’m often shocked by how minute my judgments are. Sometimes I’ll turn to my wife and say: “Is it just me, or are that guy’s shoes too brown?”

Now, I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush. There are many good therapists out there who do their best to suss out whether the feedback the client is receiving from their social world is accurate or misleading. Many times, clients have shared feedback they've been given with an attitude of “can you believe that?” Occasionally, I have to find a delicate way to respond: “Indeed I can.”

Plus, therapists can’t solve the problem of individualism alone. It’s in the drinking water now. The average citizen is exposed to far more messages of “be yourself” than “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” So what we really need is a cultural shift.

But therapists can play their part by promoting better ideas. Mental health isn’t about shedding the skin of social awareness. It’s not about returning to the mindset of a baby and only thinking about oneself and one’s needs. It’s about gracefully navigating the eternal human tension between the individual and the group. The individual cannot be deprived of all their needs, otherwise they suffocate; and society cannot operate if individuals don’t make sacrifices. The big picture isn’t much more complicated than that. And I say this as someone who routinely fantasizes about going back to the woods.

By the way, notice how I have framed everything so far as a tradeoff or tension. Individuals must sacrifice their personal desires for the group. Self and society are competitors. Of course, there are many senses in which this is true—you do have to sacrifice a few seconds every day putting on deodorant, even though you might like how you naturally smell—but many decisions don’t pose this tradeoff. For example, people feel great when they help others. So, in many cases, helping others is a win-win, not a lose-win.

Obvious as all this may seem, the recommendation to serve, regard, or even prioritize others is infrequent in therapeutic circles, even though therapists themselves are living proof of its benefit. Honestly, I cannot say with conviction that I’ve helped my clients more than they’ve helped me. But I can tell you, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that my work with couples has strengthened my relationship more than it has strengthened theirs.

Finally, if people expected there to be a constant, natural tension between their and society’s interests, they would feel the tension less. After all, isn’t it that I should be my “genuine self” that makes me unhappy when I’m not? The TV screen this morning could have flashed—“Sometimes, do others”—and after noting the sexual innuendo, I would have waited with much greater patience.

I’ll end with a story from my practice. A client was recently bemoaning the highs and lows of waiting for a prospective romantic partner to text him back. The problem, he’d concluded after days of suffering, was his reliance on external validation. I rolled my inner eye asked what he meant.

“I want to be focused more on what I’m doing, how I feel about myself, and not what other people think of me.”

As he was saying this, he couldn’t help but notice that his phone had it up. It was her.

“Never mind what I just said,” he declared after reading her message, a big smile painted across his face. “I guess I just really like this one.”

Anyway, I really hope you liked the article. If you did, could you hit like? Could you subscribe? Oh wait, never mind. I don’t care what you think. You do you.

Coda: How to Validate Children

Some parents might be wondering how to instill a healthy balance between external and internal validation in their kids. It’s certainly possible that kids learn where to rest their self-worth by how their parents treat them growing up. The good news is that the answer is likely to be, once again, finding a balance. Parents who are effusive about every little thing Suzy does are probably just as unhelpful as parents who barely notice anything. The answer here might be as straightforward as: give praise where praise is due. Be impressed when you’re genuinely impressed.

1. To be fair, deception can be leveraged to increase one’s perceived value, e.g., if you treat yourself as hot stuff, others might take that as a sign that you are hot stuff. But even then, it is other people’s opinion of you that matters.

2. Nesse, R. M. (2024). Evolutionary frameworks for psychiatry. In B. J. Sadock, V. A. Sadock, & P. Ruiz (Eds.), Kaplan & Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry (9th ed., p. 865). Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.

3. Probably not in those exact words.

4. Again, probably not in those words.

5. The relief that clients often feel at this point is easy to explain: a trusted member of the group—a credentialed member of general society—has told them they can relax. Of course that’s going to produce relief, albeit a relief that will evaporate quickly.