Is Therapy-Speak Making Us Selfish?

I'm a progressive queer, and my social circles are saturated with this stuff right now.

Essentially, what's happened is that everyone took various degrees of damage over the past three years. You've got COVID disruption, the ongoing War on LGBTQ rights, and, in my city, an unrelated but nevertheless contemperaneous & staggering surge in addiction, eviction and homelessness. Deaths of despair are at an all-time high. I literally don't have any friends who I regard as well.

Not everyone has the wherewithal to give friendship under these circumstances, and an even smaller number have the grace to appreciate this new fact about themselves in a way that does not make them feel horrible about themselves.

Therapy-speak provides a veneer of respectability to the act of social withdrawal.

Why is this veneer so important to us urban progressives? Well, recall that progressive circles generally place a premium on being on the side of the good --- we're quite preachy, actually, and that means we're pretty neurotic about those times where we, like all human beings, fail our values.

In this context it's enormously practical to have a set of values that one can imagine that one is pursuing instead --- sort of that new-agey self-actualization to which we had always already cocked half an ear, but you know, less woo. Less astrology, more Myers-Briggs.

So, in other words, therapy-speak happens to be the biggest, nearest, and most socially sanctioned rock there is, so easy to pick up and throw, and we're in the mood to throw things. At each other; at adversaries, real and imagined; at the system; at all the dukkha and disappointment that comes from having high expectations that our present world consistently fails to meet.

We've been here before. This is a great book on a related vice that has also bloomed in these hard times: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29363252-conflict-is-not...

Excerpt, from those like me who dislike a blind clickthrough

"From intimate relationships to global politics, Sarah Schulman observes a that inflated accusations of harm are used to avoid accountability. Illuminating the difference between Conflict and Abuse, Schulman directly addresses our contemporary culture of scapegoating."

These days I try hard to surround myself with people who express old-school virtues that a few years ago, I would have found amusingly quaint: grace; love and loyalty; patience; and above all, a thoroughgoing ability to listen carefully to what is said, not just when life is easy, but when it is hard AF, and to be as charitable as possible when we ascribe motivations, beliefs, and actions to one another.

But, virtue aside, if I have to hear one more person describe themselves as "experiencing rejection sensitivity dysphoria" instead of saying "I feel hurt," I will be working very fscking hard to keep charitable.

I love my community, but I don't love every hat it wears to the horse race.

Isn't that okay, though? Most people are just using therapy speech as a wedge to avoid addressing your issues in ernest. Oftentimes they simply don't care and want to offer you the same tools they have to work through something difficult. They don't have any more of an obligation to fix your issue than you do to share it with them.

I'm also a frustrated queer progressive (loathe as I am to don the hat), but I find it hard to throw the rock. The so-called therapy speak the author has identified is the barrier people use to ignore your life. Yeah, it hurts. Sometimes people are unwilling to move that barrier though, and I see no legitimate reason to tear that down, a priori their life experience.

I'm more interested in understanding the phenomenon. Self-understanding has intrinsic value. Something therapy culture gets right.

P.S.

Upon reread, I'd suggest that, yes, we do have some obligations to one another -- we have duties to one another that go beyond I've-got-mine liberalism. In much the same way that a small town facing a rising river might cause some people to work together and set up sandbags, I believe that communities (or at least the kind I want to belong to) have collective obligations that are activated by adverse circumstances.

I also have no interest in arguing this point; your values may differ, and that, as I am exhausted of both saying and hearing, is 'valid'. :)

I know HN is not a bastion of revolutionary thought. But say what you will about the movement, or its outcomes; we can & should all at least agree that it was expensive, in the blood-and-treasure sense.

There is a whole generation of progressives that now have a permanent stress reaction when we see so much as a cop car. And it's not always the people you think: I was having brunch today with a sixty-something friend and she nearly fell off her café stool when a police van pulled up nearby and disgorged several tac-vest-wearing cops, who were apparently responding to (I think?) a domestic situation in a nearby apartment block.

I think this sort of visceral reaction to armor and weapons is probably a longstanding commonplace in Black communities, but in my (embarrassingly white) circles, this is new.

I myself can't really look at officers dressed in gear without flashing back to that night at CHOP, when the snatch vans showed up, and the mercenaries in fatigues and gleaming gas masks took formation.

The trauma of that summer and fall will probably be with me until my last day. And there are lots of us who are permanently scarred from what went down.

Even when I wasn't on the ground (which admittedly was rarely) I remember watching a 3x3 of protester body cams, from nearby Portland, every night, from nine to midnight. I remember watching footage on Twitch that would cut away just as the car drove into the crowd, as if that TOS-compliance measure could do anything about the psychological impact of what had been shown.

There is trauma in just witnessing. And collective trauma finds its expression in community contretemps. Therapy-speak provides a convenient way of reframing some of these post-traumatic behaviours as personal growth. Whether this is helpful to anyone in the long run is debatable, but I'd put my money on 'nope'.

The difference between actual (good, real, effective) therapy and pop-cultch therapy-speak is that therapy involves being uncomfortable, whereas therapy-speak is often a way to avoid feeling uncomfortable.

Other than that it's pretty exhausting. It's especially exhausting when someone is using it to hide the fact that they themselves are in fact, the abuser.

The male feminist who's actually a rapist, the person "Working on themselves" and posting about going to therapy while continuing to do very awful things, etc.