Motherhood Quote by Liz Smith

A two-sentence dagger aimed at the self-help industry, sharpened by a very old, very reliable weapon: your mother’s voice in your head. Liz Smith doesn’t argue that encounter groups are ineffective; she treats them as a punchline. The first line has the faux-parental firmness of a warning label, a brisk “don’t” that assumes the reader has already been tempted by fashionable therapies. Then she detonates the second line, yanking the discussion out of the wellness seminar and into the primal theater of family dynamics.

The joke works because it collapses two supposedly different sources of “growth” into the same emotional transaction: paying (with time, money, vulnerability) to be judged. “If you enjoy being made to feel inadequate” is the tell. Smith’s target isn’t just encounter groups; it’s the cultural appetite for ritualized humiliation repackaged as enlightenment, the idea that pain must be purchased to count as progress. By offering “call your mother” as the cheaper alternative, she exposes a suspicion that these group therapies monetize what many people already carry as inherited shame.

As a journalist who chronicled celebrity culture and social performance, Smith understood how trends sell themselves as necessities. Encounter groups promised authenticity through forced confession; Smith hears the coercion. Her wit is protective: it gives readers permission to distrust institutions that claim to heal by first breaking you down. The maternal punchline lands because it’s intimate, funny, and faintly brutal - exactly the emotional triad these groups often traffic in.