Why Parents, Therapists, and Friends Do the Most Damage

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Authority, Certainty & Emotional Reasoning

Enemies do not do the most damage. Enemies are clumsy. They announce themselves. You can feel them coming in your shoulders, in the small animal vigilance of the chest.

The real damage is done by people who love you, people trained to help you, people who know you well enough to speak with confidence and warmth. Parents. Therapists. Friends. People who say this is for your own good and mean it—people whose certainty feels like shelter.

That is where the trouble starts.

Spinoza warned that we do not act from free will but from necessity, driven by causes we do not understand. “Men believe themselves free,” he wrote, “because they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined.” Ignorance matters more than action. It is the ignorance that allows certainty to masquerade as care.

Parents are the first authorities the body learns to obey, not through logic, but through dependency. The infant's nervous system does not debate. It submits. Food, warmth, safety—these are not arguments. They are conditions. By the time language arrives, authority has already been written into muscle tone and stress response. You don’t decide to take your parents seriously. Your body learned that long before you could speak.

This is why parental harm is so durable. Not because parents intend damage, but because their certainty enters a system that cannot refuse it. A mother who says, “I just know something is wrong with you,” does not need evidence. Her anxiety is enough. Emotional reasoning takes the wheel: I feel afraid, therefore there is danger. Spinoza would call this an inadequate idea—an effect mistaken for a cause. The child feels it as truth.

Therapists like to believe they are different. They are trained, reflective, and ethical. And often they are. But the structure does not disappear just because the room is quieter. Therapy formalizes authority. One person is there to know; the other is there to be known. This asymmetry is not neutral. When combined with diagnostic certainty and emotional validation, it becomes potent.

A client says, “I don’t feel that way.”
The therapist replies, gently, “That’s your resistance.”

At that moment, the system seals itself. Any disagreement becomes confirmation. This is not malice; it is epistemology. Michel Foucault described how institutions define what counts as truth, but Spinoza went further: once an affect has seized the mind, reason becomes its servant. Neuroscientific studies on confirmation bias and motivated reasoning (Kunda, 1990; Westen et al., 2006) show how quickly evidence bends to feeling. In therapy, feeling is the currency.

Martin Butler has been blunt about this. Insight that does not register in the body, he argues, is fantasy. The “fantasy-self” loves explanation because explanation preserves identity. You can talk about your childhood for twenty years and never once feel your shoulders drop. Nothing has changed. The story has improved.

There is a dark joke among therapists that progress is when the client starts using the therapist’s language against themselves. It’s funny because it’s true. The vocabulary of care becomes a leash. You’re dissociating. You’re avoiding. You’re projecting. Each term carries authority. Each term sounds helpful. None of them requires the therapist to be right.

None of this resolves neatly. There is no corrective authority waiting in the wings. No wiser friend. No purer therapist. The structure remains because it is rooted in affect and conditioning, not ethics. The damage stays invisible because it feels like care. And because admitting it would require giving up the most comforting illusion of all: that love, expertise, and good intentions are enough.

They are not. And they never were.