CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Break Up with the Rage Economy

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

Whitney reflects on how the "rage economy" of social media and news is destroying our mental health and capacity to connect with others. She explores how algorithms reward inflammatory content that keeps us trapped in cycles of anger and isolation. Later in the episode she highlights a positive example from Real Housewives of Orange County where a parent demonstrates accountability and course-correction in real time. Whitney Goodman is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and the founder of Calling Home, a membership community that helps people navigate complex family dynamics and break harmful cycles. Have a question for Whitney? Record a voice memo on your phone and email it to [e-mail] or leave a voicemail to 866-225-5466 Join the Family Cyclebreakers Club⁠⁠ Follow Whitney on Instagram | sitwithwhit Follow Whitney on YouTube | @whitneygoodmanlmft ⁠⁠Order Whitney’s book, Toxic Positivity⁠⁠ 00:00 The Rage Economy That's Destroying Our Mental Health 04:34 How Algorithms Reward Inflammatory Content Over Nuance 08:58 Breaking Free from the Cycle of Rage and Reactivity 12:34 When Sports Team Politics Replace Critical Thinking 16:35 Real Housewives Example: How to Course-Correct as a Parent Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Calling Home podcast. I am your host, Whitney Goodman. I'm the founder of calling home and a licensed marriage and family therapist as well as the author of toxic positivity and the upcoming book, The Parent You Have. Today is Thursday. It's a Q&A episode. And before we get into that, I want to talk about something that's been like really weighing heavy on me and I haven't been able to totally put it into words. And so I feel like the podcast is always the best place for me to do that because I can talk about things and like flesh it out instead of trying to say it perfectly. And maybe you all will be able to relate to this. In the last couple of weeks, especially, but I would say honestly, in almost the last 10 years, I have felt that there is this

force online that is destroying our mental health, our capacity to connect. It's making us stressed and overwhelmed and all of that. And I think that it is the rage economy that has been developed. I am the kind of person that when a group or a certain line of thinking, like really upsets me or makes me feel uncomfortable, I want to learn, like, everything about it. And so over the last year, I would say, I have become deeply invested in following or looking at certain creators that I feel are being extremely inflammatory. and trying to induce rage in the population at large. And I am not talking about righteous anger or feelings of anger that are justified.

Anger is a good, healthy emotion. It drives us to make changes to know when something is wrong. I think there's something far more insidious happening, especially among political creators. that their content, at least in my algorithms, gets pushed farther and wider than anything else I see. The content that does the best is the content that evokes, and when I say the best, I mean the most views and the most interactions, is the content that invokes rage. And I'm talking about rage that is hateful, isolating, vindictive, mean, and just overwhelming. And when I think about someone experiencing rage, they cannot think clearly.

They mistake things as something that they're not. and they walk around in a constant state of fear and paralysis and overwhelm. And I've noticed that as I consumed this content consistently, I started to feel worse, even though I was doing it from the perspective of just trying to be curious about what this was doing to our minds and our brains and our bodies. And I really think that there is an incentive now for creators to say the most shocking, rage-inducing, vengeful, horrible things that people become completely disconnected from who they are and what they believe and what they want all in the pursuit of trying to be the

most shocking and get the most clicks and likes and views. And you learn as a creator, you know, I've been doing this for seven years now. And you do learn that the more inflammatory you are, the more you're willing to fight and say things with zero nuance and just like give a statement that makes no sense. It is not rooted in fact. The more attention you are going to get. And I think in a lot of ways, that is why I have struggled some on social media lately because the algorithms hate nuance. They hate anything that isn't black and white and that isn't going to inspire someone when they see it to immediately be like, what the hell and start pounding, you know, on their phone. And it is so bad for you to feel

angry all the time. It is so bad for you to be filled with so much hatred and rage that you are walking around the world, looking around, thinking that you are always going to have to hurt someone or defend yourself or take someone out. Like, these are symptoms of PTSD, this hypervigilance, always being on edge, always looking out for threat, always thinking that something's coming. And I really think that a lot of the population is stuck in this loop of information seeking, getting information that is rage-inducing, violent, manipulative, that inspires us to turn inward and isolate and hate others. And when that happens, we become even more dependent on receiving that information

and becoming further isolated and more aligned with that type of rhetoric and those beliefs. And I really think that this can be applied to a variety of issues and like schools of thought. But I'm telling you as a therapist and as a human being that I really think it's time for us to break up with that. I really think it's time for us to stop giving our energy to people who are clearly interested in making money off of trapping you in a cycle of rage and reactivity. And this is something that has helped me is that I realize that even of you, a scroll, spending three minutes on that gives that person money. It gives them more notoriety.

It spreads their message farther. And it's not working. that type of engagement as a means of fighting some of these ideas, it's not working. It's only hurting you. I want you to think about how you feel after you engage with these types of content. I want to think about how you sleep, what kind of conversations you're having, how you feel about your friends and your family members, how you feel about yourself. what is this doing to you and are you stuck in a cycle of wanting to feel outrage and anger all the time like that can start to feel like it's something that you need to have always and

not in the sense that it's an addiction but that it's it becomes a compulsion I even notice for myself like I'm always wanting I'm like looking up like what's this person says What does that mean? What are they saying about this? And like, I don't need to do that. And I don't, I don't want you to mistake this for me saying that we shouldn't be aware of the things that are violent and hateful and terrible in this world. We do. But you know what a lot of those things are already. You know them without viewing a hundred clips. of the same incident. You know them without going and checking on all those people that you don't like and that make you feel terrible about yourself and seeing what this person is saying about this. And it's become truly insanity. Our news programming is no longer news. There are channels that you can turn on and literally just watch people talk bad about other people or make assumptions or inferences or debate whether something is going to happen

or not for literally 12 hours a day. That's not you being informed. You are simply listening to someone spout their opinions often in a very controversial or like sort of strong tone, to make you angry. I just find that pretty much everything right now that is getting a lot of views is to induce rage and anger. And it's not how I want to feel all the time. It does not make me productive. It does not allow me to create the world that I want to live in. It doesn't make me a good mom or sister or wife or daughter, it makes, it makes me want to isolate and it makes me angry. And so I think it's just something to think about is like, how much anger do I need to fuel myself with in order to be productive and engaged and do good things in this world?

and how much of this is that I am being, like, I'm becoming addicted to a system that wants me to just be sitting there, like going like this all the time and feeding the beast without ever doing anything. How much of this is about a system that wants me to hate myself and hate my neighbors and to just become totally disconnected from reality? Because I, I think that I've been seeing these posts lately that are so fascinating that we have become like sports team kind of allegiance as a country politically. And I've noticed some of some people making these posts that are like, if you are a liberal, tell me something that you don't agree with the Democratic Party on.

And you read through these comment sections. and there's so many people being like, oh, well, I think these things too. Or I'm like, oh, we all think this. This is how all my friends, like, there's so many shades of gray. And I find myself listening to how some of these people, these talking heads talk about people that I know who identify one way or another. And I'm like, that's just not accurate. There is this mission, I think, to take 5% and sort of apply. it to an entire population of people this is happening constantly and it's not it's not right

it's debilitating I think it's so isolating and it's not helping and so I just want us all to think about why are we platforming some of these people why are we engaging with this type of content, you know, that these types of people and this type of rhetoric cannot exist without support and without engagement. And so I think for me, there's a very fine line of trying to decide what is the difference between being informed and just wanting to like, I don't know, feel this all the time. I think sometimes we just want to be angry and we want to like, we think that that's us being proactive, just like fighting all the time and reading people fighting.

And I think so many of these accounts online are actually bots and not even real. I saw something the other day. I don't want to get this statistic wrong, but it was a very high percentage of like bots on Twitter or X, they're fake accounts, like they're not actual real. people. And I don't know. All of this to say is that I'm just, I'm worried about us. I'm worried about the world. I'm worried about the world that we create when we get sucked into algorithms and these rage cycles that keep us trapped. And we stop trying to have any nuance, any critical thinking, any understanding of the world and like our fellow man. And I, you know, it's obviously

how we got here. But I think it's worth considering like if you found yourself stuck in this cycle of like, is this helping? Is it working? Don't want to keep doing it. What am I getting out of this um is it making me a better person in any area of my life and why do i think that this is what i should be doing how is it tied into like my identity my particular flavor of of activism um it's scary to witness people get stuck in this particular cycle and i think we all have a duty to ourselves into the world to try to like step back and say I'm not going to allow these talking heads and algorithms and platforms control how I see the world and how I live my life and the kind of person I am because it can become so dangerous and so so tribalistic and

just wrong. So that being said, I hope that everyone is. doing okay. I think there's been a heightened amount of vitriol and anger and just like the cessful nature of the internet. And as someone who uses it for work, I just, I feel it. And I thought that I should say something to that effect because it can get freaky out there sometimes. And all I want to do is like break my phone and not go on it for five days and pretend that's nothing that nothing is happening but the truth is that it is and this affects all of us and so if I can get you to think about it even in a slightly different way I hope that that helps okay moving on I want to talk about a scene from the most recent episode of the real housewives of Orange

County as well. There is a scene where Emily is talking about her son, who I believe was diagnosed with ARFID, which is an eating disorder, and is potentially being diagnosed with autism. And in the show, they are talking about the struggles of parenting and co-parenting with one another and how difficult it is to parent a child that has some different and unknown needs that they are trying to navigate. And Emily is talking about this with the other woman, Jen. And you see Emily say, I thought my other kids didn't need me as much, but I was wrong. And it struck me that she said, I was wrong. I didn't do the right thing. Like this is happening in the moment, while she's in this parenting crisis with her children.

And she realizes that she has been kind of negligent maybe, you know, to her other kids because their needs were not as glaringly obvious as her sons that is struggling. And so she pulled back and maybe didn't give them as much attention, but focused on giving the attention to her younger son. And I was so struck by, you know, her ability to talk about. the mistakes that she had made to show herself compassion, to discuss this with a friend, get support, talk about how hard it is, and talk about what she was going to be doing differently. And I thought that this was just a really great example of how you can pause in the

moment when you realize that you are making a mistake as a parent. And in that pause, you can do something different. And you don't have to beat yourself up and shame your own. herself and totally like throw out the baby with the bathwater, you can just say, I messed up and I want to start over. And I want to help my kids and I want to see that they're struggling. And I think she mentions that one of her older children said, like, hey, can I go to therapy too? I'm struggling and I don't have anyone to talk to. And the child that has the diagnoses is in therapy. And so, you know, this is a moment where she really is like, oh, they're also being

impacted by this. And I just think. that was huge and great. It was in the most recent episode, season 19, episode 10 at like 15 minutes if you want to go check it out. I think it's a great example and also a great example of how like a friend can support you in those moments. I really hope that this episode gave you something new to think about, something helpful to take with you and use and help you feel less alone. Thank you so much for listening. Please don't forget to like, subscribe or leave a review. It really helps. I read every single one of them and I really appreciate all of you. Thank you and have a great rest of your day.

The Calling Home podcast is not engaged in providing therapy services, mental health advice or other medical advice or services. It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified health care provider and does not create any therapist patient or other treatment relationship between you and Colin Holm or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Collingholm's terms of service linked in the show notes below. Thank you.