Do You Need Professional Help?

Forced professionalization and the loss of community wisdom

Playgroup saved my life.

When my children were small, I was blessed to belong to a weekly parent/todler playgroup that met every Friday at a local park. The group was started by several mothers who had met at the annual Albuquerque Homebirth Picnic, took a liking to one another and decided to start meeting for weekly get togethers. I joined the group when my oldest child was three and my youngest was a newborn, and I kept attending until my youngest started kindergarten.

My adorable, exhausting children when they were small.

I’m not a master of the domestic arts. Hanging out with small children never came easily to me. I can truthfully say that the years when my children were babies and toddlers were some of the hardest times of my life. I felt isolated and overwhelmed and lonely at home with small children. Time spent with other mothers made parenting not only bearable, but fun. I looked forward to playgroup every week, knowing it would bring me relief and joy.

The other mothers at play group were creative, brilliant, interesting women and I adored them. Their children were wild, intelligent, extremely funny little people and I adored them. Together we supported and advised each other on issues spanning from pediatric healthcare, breastfeeding, birth, and marriage/partnership. We attended each others’ births, we sometimes nursed each others’ babies. The collective wisdom of the group was enormous, and while we didn’t agree on every issue (who does, really?) we respected each others’ opinions and valued each others’ advice and guidance. We became good friends. We became a community. Many of these women and (now adult) children are still in my life.

Human beings are social organisms. Like bees and dolphins and the other great apes, we need each other. Friendship and community sustain and heal us. We can’t live without connection to other humans. For most of human history, creating community came naturally to our species. For some reason, we seem to be having a rougher go of it these days.

Yesterday I saw an ad for a local playgroup forming in my town. The group is being organized by a certified playgroup coach and costs $50 a month for a one-hour weekly meetup. Finding mom friends now requires professional help.

Over the past 30 years, I've watched the following basic human skills turn into paid professions and services to purchase: birth support, postpartum support, death support, breastfeeding support, and now friendship. And what I've noticed is that the more certified professional supporters we create, the more insane and disconnected our culture becomes.

As our culture moves further into the scientific paradigm where a reductionist explanation can be found for every aspect of the human condition, it is unsurprising that fewer and fewer people feel healthy and whole. Enter the expert, the self-congratulatory professional who can take your money and explain to you (using fancy words like dopamine, oxytocin, neuro-plasticity, and cluster feeding) how the pieces of yourself are not in proper order. The expert can discern just what kind of disorder you are experiencing, then take more money to help you. Don’t worry, the expert is not trying to rid you of your disorder. That would negate the necessity of the expert and also rob you of the benefits of a disorder identity. No, your disorder can be managed with special therapies and potions, all available through consultations with experts.

Humanity appears to be unravelling, as evidenced by the fact that so few of us still birth and live and die in satisfactory ways. Well-meaning people with activist souls push for the state to pay for more experts to address the crises of dysfunctional eating, breathing, birthing and dying. Many of these same people seek training and certification from the state to become part of the expert class so they can be paid to offer professional help. We're kicking out more and more certified paid supporters, and our rates of dysfunctional birth, poor sleep, breastfeeding complications, postpartum mood disorders and general loneliness keep going up, up, up. And this creates a perceived need for more professional help.

Are we headed into a future where insurance will pay for "certified professional friend” services? Studies show people benefit from having friends. Studies also show fewer and fewer people have friends. Clearly the government and the medical industry need to address this health emergency. But we can't just allow any untrained person to provide this essential service. Lay friends who lack training might give bad advice. They could forget to mention your brain chemistry. They might not be properly “trauma informed.”