Overview / Summary
Internalized capitalism therapy is a way of working in counselling that treats feelings like “I’m falling behind,” “I’m not good enough,” or “I should be further along by now” as evidence of an internalized ideology rather than as accurate assessments of your life. In The Future Is Degrowth (Verso, 2022), Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, and Aaron Vansintjan describe how the belief in continuous growth as necessary and good has become “common sense: self-evident and far-reaching” despite being a relatively recent historical construction. Applied to individual experience, the same ideology shows up as the private grading system in your head, the invisible race you feel yourself losing, and the physical gnawing that arrives when someone else succeeds. Decolonizing common sense, at the level of psychology, means learning to distinguish the standards you’re actually choosing from the ones that were installed.
Table of Contents
- The gnawing that shows up when your friend gets good news
- Behind on what? Set by whom?
- The crises this ideology keeps producing
- The common sense of capitalism is recent, and someone built it
- Growth as ideology, and the private grading system in your head
- Growth as a social process, and the invisible race
- Growth as a material process, and where the comparison lives in your body
- What it means to face this
- What internalized capitalism therapy actually offers
- What becomes possible when you stop being the only variable
- Work with a Venturous Counsellor
- FAQ
TL;DR
What if the gnawing in your stomach that shows up when someone else succeeds isn’t a character flaw to expel? What if it’s a symptom of an unquestioned ideology you were raised inside, one that installed a private grading system in your head without your consent?
Three shifts this post offers:
- “Falling behind” only makes sense inside a specific ideology that treats life as a track with a shared direction and a shared measure of progress. That ideology has a history. It didn’t have to be this way, and it hasn’t always been.
- The comparison lives in three places at once: your inner narrator, the shape of your relationships, and the felt sense of your body. Working with only one of the three tends not to move the needle.
- Facing this doesn’t dissolve the gnawing overnight, but it does give you back the question of what you actually want, instead of leaving that question to a standard that was never yours.
There are five reflection questions along the way to help you integrate this into your own life. Explore how you shift with them, pause, return to them, take them at your own pace. If you want support, Venturous Counselling is always here to accompany you.
The gnawing that shows up when your friend gets good news
A friend tells you their news. They’ve just been promoted. Or they’ve bought their first place. Or they’re engaged. Or they’ve published the book they’ve been writing for years. They’re genuinely happy, and you’re genuinely happy for them. That part isn’t performative. You mean it. You really do.
And then, almost instantaneously, sometimes before they’ve even finished the sentence, a small gnawing starts up somewhere right in your stomach. What’s wrong with me. Why am I not there. What have I been doing with the last five years. The gnawing is followed almost immediately by a second wave, a shame about the gnawing itself. What kind of person feels this when their friend is happy? You smile bigger to cover it. You mean the smile. You also mean the gnawing. Both can be true at the same time.
If any of that landed for you just now, you already know the territory this post is about. It has a name. And once you can see it, some of it stops being internalized as a character flaw, another thing you got to do better at.
This is the terrain internalized capitalism therapy works with. It’s a way of thinking about what happens in counselling that treats the gnawing as information about the systems you were shaped inside, rather than as a verdict on your character. What starts as why am I like this? becomes something bigger. It becomes: whose standard is the gnawing enforcing? Who benefits when I keep measuring myself against it? What would it take to notice, and not obey?
Behind on what? Set by whom?
The phrase “falling behind” is doing a lot of work.
To fall behind is to be losing progress on a track. Which means there has to be a track, and it has to be one you and everyone else are on, and you have to have all agreed on the direction of travel, and there has to be a way of measuring who’s ahead. None of that is stated when the phrase gets used. All of it is assumed.
Try this. Try to name the track you’re afraid you’re falling behind on. Say it out loud if you can. Not “my career.” Not “my life.” Actually name it. What is the finish line. Who set it. Where did you learn what the milestones were. Who benefits when you keep running toward them. Who benefits when you fall behind on them. What happens if you decide the track is nonsense.
Most folx, when they try this, find that the track almost always ties back to the idea of capitalism. Of how to win in this system that measures growth through the number on your paycheque, the title on your email signature, the amount of vacations you can go on, the worth of the assets you own. And there are real risks to not participating in that. The twinge of pity you detect when someone asks you about your life or your goals. The debilitating urgency that gets you to spiral into your to-do list mid scroll. The catch in your breath when you open your credit card statements.
A first reflection.
Who is the person whose success would create the gnawing in you today? Not the person you’d envy in a clean, transparent way, but the one whose success would land as a small personal indictment. Who is that person? And whose success wouldn’t create the gnawing at all, even if their success were greater? What does the gap between those two lists tell you about the standard you’re actually running on?
The crises this ideology keeps producing
Zoom out for a moment.
The grader in your head isn’t the only place growth logic is failing. It’s failing at every scale simultaneously, and the same colonial, capitalist ideology that installed the grader is what’s producing the wider situation we’re all inside.
In the opening chapter of The Future Is Degrowth, Schmelzer, Vetter, and Vansintjan name the crises most of us are trying to live through as a single interlocking phenomenon rather than a list of unrelated problems. Climate breakdown is now measurable in the weather outside your window. Species are disappearing at rates that will register as a mass extinction in the geological record. Hydrological cycles, agricultural soils, ocean fish populations, and the microbial life that underpins all of them are destabilizing. Civil war and climate-driven disaster are displacing millions of people, who are then met with militarized borders. A pandemic can shut down large parts of the global economy in weeks. Financial crises arrive roughly every decade. Stable employment is being replaced by precarity almost everywhere. Nationalist and racist political parties are surging. And underneath all of it, the labour of care (raising children, tending the sick, holding communities together) holds everything else up while going systematically uncompensated, largely by racialized femme-presenting folx, and by folx in the Global South, whose extraction subsidizes the lifestyles of the Global North.
Their argument is that these aren’t separate problems in search of separate solutions. They’re the interlocking symptoms of a single system that requires continuous expansion to keep functioning, and that has now hit the ecological, social, and political walls of the world it’s expanded into. What they name as the way out is a deliberate, democratic reduction of that expansion. Not recession. Not austerity. A planned slowing that redistributes what already exists, decommodifies what should never have been commodified in the first place, and refuses the story that growth is the only path to a good life.
Zooming back in. If the same system is producing planetary crisis at scale, care-work exhaustion at the community scale, precarity at the household scale, and a private grader at the scale of your own thoughts, those aren’t unrelated. Your exhaustion sits squarely within what’s happening to the planet. It’s the intimate, human-scale version of the same “grow or die” compulsion that’s currently making the world less livable. Your body is being asked to be an inexhaustible resource for the same reason ecosystems are. The system needs continuous throughput, and neither you nor the planet was designed to provide it.
This is why this frame matters. What’s called “common sense” about your worth, your productivity, your standard for what a reasonable life looks like is the intimate face of a systemic ideology that’s currently unravelling everything it touches. What you feel wrong about wanting (rest, boundaries, slower work, less consumption, more time with people you love, more presence than performance, more being-ness) is precisely what a system in crisis needs from us in order to move somewhere livable.
A wider reflection.
What would it mean to know that the exhaustion you’re carrying isn’t yours alone to solve, and isn’t a personal failing to fix? That it’s the intimate scale of a planetary-scale crisis, and that many of the small things you already feel wrong about wanting are actually what a world in crisis is asking of us. Notice what shifts in you when the shame around wanting less is met with the truth that wanting less is one of the ways forward.
The common sense of capitalism is recent, and someone built it
The word “common” in common sense is doing something similar to the word “behind” in falling behind. It suggests something universally held, obvious to any reasonable person. What it actually names is narrower: the set of assumptions that dominate a particular political and economic order at a particular time. Slavery used to be common sense in many places. So did denying women the vote. So did the belief that queer people were sick. Each of those “common senses” felt as obvious in its time as falling behind on your life feels today.
In The Future Is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism (Verso, 2022), the political economists Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, and Aaron Vansintjan trace one particularly powerful version of common sense that most of us are still living inside: the belief in continuous economic growth as necessary, natural, and good. They point out that this belief is startlingly recent. The term “economic growth” only came into wide use in the middle of the twentieth century. GDP itself was invented in the 1930s. It was only by the 1950s that growth became the shared ideology of both capitalist and state-socialist societies, and that the idea of endless growth became, in their words, “common sense: self-evident and far-reaching.”
Borrowing from the linguist George Lakoff, the authors describe growth as a cognitive frame, meaning that a single word triggers a whole cluster of associations without asking to be examined. Say growth, and most of us hear: progress, prosperity, well-being, opportunity, health, life. Say degrowth, and the same people often hear: recession, regression, poverty, danger. The word has done its work before the argument even begins.
Now try the same test with a word from your own life. Say success. Say it in your head, without editing. What shows up with it? Not the abstract dictionary answer. The images. Whose life do the images resemble? What do those people have that you’re using as the measure? Whose face shows up as the standard, and whose life would you have called “successful” a decade ago that doesn’t make the list now?
This is precisely how ideology becomes psychology. Not by convincing you of an argument, but by installing a set of associations underneath the level where you’d normally think to examine them. And what has that installation done to the part of you that decides whether your own life is good enough?
Growth as ideology, and the private grading system in your head
Schmelzer, Vetter, and Vansintjan argue that growth operates as three interlinked processes: as an idea or ideology, as a social process shaping norms and relationships, and as a material process shaping bodies, land, and energy. While the book is not a therapy text (it’s a book about political economy), the three-part structure lands strangely well in the counselling room, because these three processes are also three of the main places the ideology of growth lives inside you.
The first is your inner narrator. The private grader who scores each day when you’re not looking.
You finish a day and, somewhere below conscious attention, a grade gets assigned. Productive or unproductive. Good day or bad day. The grade is almost never about how you felt, or who you were with, or whether anything mattered. It’s about output. Did you move forward? Did you close the gap? Did you shrink the pile? On the days you didn’t, a small penalty gets logged in a ledger you don’t remember opening. On the days you did, there’s a brief spike of relief, followed by the immediate arrival of tomorrow’s ledger.
Or maybe this sounds more like it: you open an app to check one thing, twenty minutes later, you’re on the profile of someone you barely knew in university, working out how they got where they are and whether it counts. You close the app. You don’t feel more informed. You feel worse. You feel behind. You question if you’re smart enough or work hard enough, or are personable enough to get the opportunities that they seem to have in droves.
Or maybe you have a birthday and you dread it. Every birthday now includes a private inventory. By this age I should have. By this age I thought I would. By this age everyone else has. The list stays invisible until you’re confronted with it. Then it becomes crushing. You blow out the candles anyway, hoping the next 365 days hold longer minutes than the last.
That grader isn’t your judgment. It’s a frame. It’s what happens when an ideology of continuous growth gets absorbed as a private standard for being a person. Under that standard, the reasonable person is always improving. The reasonable person doesn’t have a ceiling. The reasonable person doesn’t have needs that interrupt the trajectory. The reasonable person bypasses luck and systemic oppression and “succeeds” anyway. The reasonable person keeps going. The reasonable person is never quite there yet, and never should be, because being there yet would mean stopping, and stopping is not allowed. Nothing is ever enough.
If you’ve ever felt like you’re the problem for not being where you thought you’d be, the fact is, you’re not the problem. You’re running on a definition of there that was never neutral, and was never designed to fit you. (Or humans, and ecology, and interconnectedness, and true, sustainable wellness.)
This is central to how anti-oppressive therapy for BIPOC communities approaches distress. What looks like an individual’s symptom is often a result of an unlivable standard. Decolonizing common sense, in this frame, means learning which parts of your inner narrator are yours and which are the colonial, capitalist ideology co-opting you.
A second reflection.
When you say the word “success” quietly to yourself, what images show up first? Whose life do those images most resemble? Not who you want to be. Who the images actually resemble. Would you have called that person “successful” ten years ago? If not, when did the standard change, and who moved it?
Growth as a social process, and the invisible race
The second place the ideology lives is in your relationships and the peer field around you. Schmelzer, Vetter, and Vansintjan argue that growth isn’t only an idea; it’s a social process that shapes norms, roles, and what kinds of lives are recognized as legitimate. On the macro scale, this is about labour markets, class structures, cultural expectations. On the scale of your actual life, it’s about the invisible race you feel yourself losing.
You didn’t sign up for a race. Nobody handed you a number to pin to your chest. And yet, at any given moment, you can rank yourself against your peer group with unnerving and critical accuracy. You know where you place. You know who’s ahead. You know, roughly, by how much. You didn’t ask to know any of this. The knowing arrives whether you want it to or not, because the peer field arrives whether you want it to or not — through social feeds, family conversations, class reunions, small talk about what people are up to. Whose kids are where. Whose career is at what stage. Whose house is where. Whose partner does what.
For many folx, especially folx navigating bicultural identity, migrant family systems, or racialized caregiving expectations, the race is layered on top of a second race. You’re “falling behind” on the terms of the culture you were raised inside and on the terms of the culture around you now; the two measures don’t line up, and you’re the one asked to hold the contradiction while also being tasked at winning both. Julianna Lei sits with a lot of folx living inside exactly this arithmetic. What she often names, gently, is that the exhaustion isn’t about the specific measure. It’s about being asked to be measurable at all, in every direction, at every moment, by everyone.
Cultural norms and mental health can’t be separated as clean categories. What passes for reasonable in your workplace, your household, your community, is going to shape what you’re allowed to notice in yourself, and what you’re allowed to want or let go of.
A third reflection.
If everyone you currently compare yourself to disappeared from your awareness for six months, the feeds, the group chats, the peripheral information about who’s doing what, what would happen to your sense of how you’re doing? Would you still know? What would you use to know? Notice what comes up when you try to imagine that. The resistance to the question is itself information.
Growth as a material process, and where the comparison lives in your body
The third place the ideology lives is in your body.
Schmelzer, Vetter, and Vansintjan trace growth as a material process, the expanding use of land, energy, and material throughput, rooted in colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism. On the macro scale, this is about extraction and ecological limits. On the scale of your one life, it’s about what happens when a body carries the residue of an invisible race for years.
The residue shows up in specific places. The jaw that clenches when you scroll past someone else’s announcement (and then the subsequent TMJ appointment you have to book). The stomach that tightens when someone asks what you’ve been up to lately followed by the thought of “I wish I stayed home”. The chest that squeezes at 3am when you can’t sleep and your brain has chosen this moment to rehearse a comparison that keeps you even further from rest.
That bracing is your body telling the truth about the environment it’s been trained to survive in. When you were young, doing well by the growth standards of your household, your school, your culture, was probably a good survival move. Fight, flight, freeze, and fawning are all strategies your system developed because they worked. Over-achieving, staying useful, being impressive, being ahead of where you needed to be — these kept you safer than the alternative would have.
The problem is that your body is still running those strategies now, in situations where they no longer serve you and might be costing you your health. Insight alone doesn’t fix this. You can’t argue a survival response into submission. You have to build enough safety, over time, that another response becomes possible. This is part of what somatic therapy in Vancouver does. It’s slow. It’s deliberate. It grounds you back into a sense of self that moves beyond the consciousness that has been overtaken by capitalist ideology.
Much of what gets marketed now as “somatic wisdom” was extracted from Indigenous, Black, queer, and disabled healing traditions and depoliticized in the process. The body’s response to systems of harm was tended by lineages of people long before there was a market for “regulation.” Real work with the body names where the exhaustion is coming from, reconnecting you back to your lineages and your essence of being, not only how to soothe it.
A fourth reflection.
Where does the gnawing live in your body physically? What other sensations show up with it? When was the last time you felt it? What set it off? What did your body do in the seconds after? And what did you not let yourself do because the gnawing didn’t want to be felt? Sit with the answer for a minute before moving on.
What it means to face this
Schmelzer, Vetter, and Vansintjan quote a line from James Baldwin: nothing can be changed until it is faced. They use it about political-economic systems. It fits the individual level too, and possibly better than they intended.
The reason common sense is so hard to change from the inside is that facing it costs you something. The moment you notice the private grader isn’t your judgment, you can’t quite trust its scores the way you did. The moment you notice how much of your energy has been going into meeting standards you didn’t choose, you have to sit with the grief of that. The moment you notice which relationships operate on comparison and race logic, you have to decide what to do with that information.
None of that is comfortable. And none of it is optional if you want the pattern to change.
This is the fear that keeps most folx from doing this kind of work: if I see this, I can’t unsee it, and then what. The honest answer is that you’ll have more information, and more agency, than you had before. You won’t be handed a plan. You’ll be handed back your capacity to choose one. That’s harder, in the short term, than staying inside the script. It’s also the only door out.
A fifth reflection.
If you gave yourself permission to not be behind, because there is no track, what would you be free to notice about what you actually want? Notice the resistance to even the question. That resistance is worth staying with. It’s the shape of what got installed.
What internalized capitalism therapy actually offers
A lot of therapy, even well-meaning therapy, reinforces the same common sense you came in to question. It focuses on your coping skills, your regulation, your ability to adapt to circumstances. It treats the standard as fixed and works on making you fit it better.
Internalized capitalism therapy takes a different starting point. Instead of asking how you can adapt more successfully to a standard that’s hurting you, it asks whether the standard is worth adapting to. That single shift changes everything downstream.
In practice, this kind of work often includes slowing down enough to distinguish which of your beliefs about worth are actually yours from which were installed; noticing the private grader without collapsing into it; building a language for what you actually want, separate from what you’ve been trained to want; working with your body, not only your thoughts, because the standard you’re questioning lives at that level; and naming the systemic context of your distress not to explain it away, but to be accurate in your assessment of what’s really going on, the non-negotiable precursor we have to identify in order to “solve” anything.
A lot of folx believe that identifying systemic context is the antithesis of personal responsibility; that it’s “making excuses” and doesn’t change reality. But reality doesn’t change…until it does. Social construction of reality changes you, but you can also change the social construction of reality. The truth is none of this lets you off the hook for your life. If anything, it puts you more squarely on the hook, because it returns the question of what to do to you, instead of leaving it to a standard you didn’t write. This is central to how growth counselling at Venturous approaches change. You aren’t asked to accept the world as it is. You also aren’t asked to fix everything alone. You’re asked to figure out, in your specific context, with your specific carewebs, what a livable life could actually look like, and to stop punishing yourself for wanting one.
Related work on self-worth counselling, boundary setting through a justice lens, and what a wellness therapist won’t tell you about growth counselling sits inside the same frame. And for folx already navigating bicultural identity and straddling multiple worlds, the reframe often lands less as a revelation and more as a naming of something already carried.
What becomes possible when you stop being the only variable
If you take one thing from this post, take this: you were never the only variable in the equation of your life. Even though you’ve been asked to act like you were.
When you’re the only variable, every gap is your fault. If you’re behind, you should have hustled harder. If you’re not there yet, you should have wanted it more. If someone else got what you wanted, you must not have deserved it as much. Common sense, in the version most of us inherited, says the answer to every gap is a “better” you.
When you stop being the only variable, the questions get more liberating. Some of what’s happening is about your choices, your capacity, your history. And some of it is about the shape of the workplace, the shape of the family system, the shape of the economy, the shape of who gets rewarded for what and by whom. Both are real and you can work on your part without pretending the rest doesn’t exist.
When you stop being the only variable under investigation, a lot of the shame drops off. You start to notice how much of your energy was going into disproving an accusation that was never fair to begin with. What’s left, when you stop defending yourself against that accusation, is the actual question of what you want your life to be. That’s what identity and personal growth counselling is often for. Not the fixing of a broken self but the recovery of the person who was there before these unsustainable standards got installed.
This is also part of what decolonizing our relationship to healing time makes possible. Not a promise that the systems will change tomorrow. A promise that you don’t have to keep pretending they don’t exist in your own head. What you do with that agency is yours to decide. But it becomes yours to decide.
Work with a Venturous Counsellor
If this is landing and you want a place to work with it in your own life, Julianna Lei offers identity and personal growth counselling that meets people navigating exactly this territory. Her work draws on narrative practice, walk and talk, art therapy, and nature-based approaches, and she often sits with clients who are living between cultures, between roles, between what they were told was reasonable and what they actually know. Sessions are offered in-person in Vancouver, walk and talk in both Vancouver and Burnaby, and virtually across BC.
Next Steps
If you want to find a fit for this particular kind of work, start with the 3-minute matching quiz, or book a free 15-minute consult with one of our counsellors. Every consult is a chance to feel out whether the way we work is the way you want to work. There’s no expectation to book beyond that first conversation.
FAQ
Is “internalized capitalism” a real concept?
It’s a framework used across anti-oppressive and decolonizing approaches to mental health, though it isn’t a diagnostic category. What you’re experiencing isn’t a disorder inside you. It’s a way of naming how the values of a particular economic system get absorbed as personal beliefs, and how those beliefs affect your sense of worth, your relationship to your own life, and your access to what you actually want. Many folx find that having a name for what they’re experiencing is itself part of what helps.
What if I actually am behind, like, materially, not just in my head?
This is a fair question and worth taking seriously. Material behindness is real for many folx, especially folx living inside racialized and classed exclusion from wealth, housing, or professional access. That’s not in your head and is exactly the track that we’re naming. Capitalism forces material behindness to be a personal failure. Internalized behindness accompanies it, it’s the private grader that keeps running even when your material circumstances are stable, or that measures you against a track that would never have included you on fair terms in the first place. Both supplement each other to make sure you can never get off the track. This kind of work can hold both without collapsing them into each other, and can help you see which parts of the exhaustion are structural and which parts are inherited. For folx also carrying the acute exhaustion piece, community care and anti-oppressive therapy sits inside this frame too.
Doesn’t naming the system just let me off the hook?
It’s a common fear, and it’s worth taking seriously. The honest answer is no. It actually puts you more squarely on the hook. When you’re only ever the variable, the only question is how to fix yourself. When you’re one variable among several, you get to choose which part of the equation you’re going to work with, where you need company, and what’s genuinely not yours to solve alone. That’s harder than self-blame, not easier. It’s also more accurate.
What’s the difference between this and burnout therapy?
Burnout therapy in Vancouver often focuses on recovery from a specific episode of exhaustion. Internalized capitalism therapy sits underneath that, asking why the exhaustion cycles keep happening and what beliefs about worth keep pulling you back into overextension. In practice, the two often move together. You may need immediate support for the acute exhaustion and a longer conversation about the standards you’ve been living inside. A good fit therapist can hold both.
Do I have to be politically progressive for this to be useful?
You don’t have to hold any particular politics to notice that a voice in your head is scoring you against a standard that was never explained. This work isn’t about adopting a political identity. It’s about examining the standards you’re already running on and deciding whether they’re standards you’d actually choose. Many folx come to this work with no strong political framing and leave with a clearer sense of what belongs to them and what doesn’t.
How do I know if a therapist understands this frame?
A therapist working with this frame will name systemic context in the room. They’ll ask about the shape of your work, your family, your communities, not only your individual thoughts and feelings. They won’t rush you into “reframing” your reactions as distorted when your reactions are accurate readings of an unfair situation. And they’ll be willing to sit with the fact that some of what’s hurting you isn’t going to be fixed inside the therapy room, while still taking seriously the parts that can be.
Where can I read the book referenced in this post?
The Future Is Degrowth: A Guide to a World Beyond Capitalism by Matthias Schmelzer, Andrea Vetter, and Aaron Vansintjan was published by Verso in 2022 (ISBN 978-1-83976-584-1). Chapter 2, on economic growth, is the section that most directly informed this post. The book is available through most independent bookstores and libraries. If cost is a barrier, most public library systems in BC can request it via interlibrary loan.
