Is Therapy-Speak Making Us Selfish?
bustle.com
bustle.com
A whole lot of people just don't have great EQ or IQ and they're just frustrating to deal with overall.
Maybe the new therapy-speak language is different but the underlying problems remains the same. Whether or not I use therapy speak, I'm not going to continue being friends with people who have are/become more pain than pleasure.
There’s also a real conflict of interest in therapy where the therapist has a financial interest in pleasing the client but no stake in the wellbeing of the client’s acquaintances (other than the value they provide to the client). Hence empowering them with generic therapy speak around boundaries seems like somewhat of a logical outcome of that (and anecdotally what I’ve observed in my own experiences with therapy and in others who go to therapy)
>I'm not going to continue being friends with people who have are/become more pain than pleasure.
This is two-way street. A friend recently called me out on (to me) benign behavior, which now makes me feel like I have have to walk on egg shells when I interact with them. I am (almost) sure they didn't mean me to take this as seriously as I have, but I feel how this expired has pushed me to the very edge of the campfire and I am thinking about walking over to the next campfire to see how other people are doing.
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.
The applicable example being how an intimate pizza party made somebody feel "unsafe" and "unloved". Too extreme! What other purpose could such language have than to initiate a power play?
Well, let's put the ball back in your court: how would you rewrite that pizza party example to be less euphemistic and imprecise?
Frankly, the wording the guest used is direct and to-the-point. It's probably disarming/distressing to hear if you're the host, but it's not therapy speak. If someone tells you that you make them feel unsafe, you should probably resolve that. Responding with denial that you could have hurt someone's feelings is the dictionary definition of gaslighting.
First, not every relationship has to work. Sometimes people are just incompatible. Even family and long time friends.
A boundary doesn't mean you get what you want. The boundary-hearer would have been good off setting their own boundary. Boundaries are of the form 'if x then y'. If your boundaries include the word boundary you are probably doing it wrong.
In the relative ghosting situation, it isn't up to them. They can open a dialog, but that's it.
"You made me feel ..." can be a problem because it doesn't take responsibility for the feeling. It can result in a defensive response. The other person could also have tried harder to understand what they were told - neither person seemed sympathetic. Nothing wrong with it, but not what a therapist ought to be recommending to someone having communication trouble.
Diagnosing others on second-hand accounts is definitely not something therapists (should) do. Diagnosis is a last resort thing, and patients shouldn't be encouraged to diagnosis others (especially to their face). An important lesson that many people need is that it is okay to assert boundaries even if the other person isn't a narcissist or doing something wrong. A boundary should not involve telling the other person they have done something wrong.
Really the biggest thing most people need to learn is a safe and non-inflammatory way of communicating to fall back on that won't get them in trouble when their emotions are running high. The formulaic ways of speaking are crutches until you get the intuition for it.
If you do a good job with this stuff, you won't have to push other people to speak or act differently. They will come to you and ask what your secret is for handling the 'difficult' person they are having trouble with.
The quoted last words in the beginning of the article are just like that.
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.
> “She says, ‘I need to address this. You made me feel unsafe and unloved tonight,’” Hakala says. “I went, ‘Excuse me?’”
Like, this is an extremely straightforward and honest way of addressing your feelings. It sounds like that person was fed-up with their behavior and the host didn't understand. After that, if you still go on the defensive, maybe you should feel bad about the way you treated them. These articles always conspicuously leave-out details to these situations, but I doubt it extends beyond the slice-of-life sitcom script in your head.
The rest of their anecdotes are similar, ham-fisted interpersonal problems that seem less one-sided than they're made out to be. The article is clearly trying to loop this back onto an anti-woke sentiment, but it's just not there. It mostly sounds like the author is trying to make a universal theory of friendships gone sour.
is the "correct" method, for anyone else wondering.
It doesn't have to follow the exact formula. The formula is a crutch. For example 'you made me feel unloved' might instead be 'Today, you didn't talk to me as much as you normally do, and I felt hurt because I was wanting more attention'. The goal is to get across to the other person what you need/needed and how you felt without implying they did something wrong. If you say 'you ignored me' they might say 'What!? I did no such thing'.
Likewise the person responding to them could have tried to listen to they they 'really meant' instead of responding defensively. E.g., 'it sounds like you feel hurt because you wanted more attention?'. If you get it wrong, and the other person wants you to know, they will keep talking. If they keep saying the same thing over and over again, you just haven't gotten it yet.
Also, I caution against thinking of it as the correct way for any that don't take the scare quotes in the parent comment to heart. Eventually you may irritate someone severely by implying they are doing it wrong, and it will not help you achieve what you wanted.
Just my two cents, though. Nothing about the exchange these people had was unsalvageable or friendship-ruining, which is why I find it so funny that it's story is being used as an anti-woke polemic. Nothing bad happened here, they just ruffled some feathers and instead of telling us why, they accuse their friend of being the "therapy-speak" problem. It's practically paraphrased from an episode of Glee or something.
Expressing the speakers understanding of the impact that listener had on their emotional state so that it can be addressed is the point of the expression (which is not in exactly the optimum recommended form, but that’s a side issue), so that’s not at all an unintended result.
> It’s an accusatory way of expressing one’s emotional state.
It’s not a way of expressing an emotional state, its a way of expressing a relationship problem, of which the emotional state is a component, but not the central feature. And, yes, the speakers understanding of causation (the feature you call "accusatory") is central to the purpose.
> Nothing straight forward or honest about that.
It is exactly straightforward and honest, provided that it reflects the speakers honest understanding of the relevant causal chain.
Obviously, if that's not the case its not straightforward and honest, but then we are speculating beyond the information provided.
> It’s pure manipulation
No, its not.
Misunderstandings happen all the time. Sometimes people are in a fragile emotional state or have an "eggshell psyche". Goodwill doesn't grow on trees.
The form "you made me feel X" starts from the premise that the listener somehow assumed direct control over the speaker's emotional state and turned the dial setting them to feel terrible. That's not causation, unless you believe in magic.
The person who's feelings are injured has a responsibility not to make other people responsible for their emotional state. Their feelings don't just automatically create responsibilities in others. What kind of standard would that be?
A lot of people in this thread are focused on questioning the guest's psyche and discrediting their reaction. Yes, people control their reaction to bad events. However, if you spend an entire evening being racist/sexist/somethingist, even inadvertently, then people will likely blame you for their reaction. There are a lot of dinner topics that would make me feel unsafe, and it's not hard to see how that would make someone feel unloved or ostracized.
So, the volley of blame continues. Instead of showing humility and mutually acknowledging that neither of you care about the problem, we need to write a Bustle.com article to absolve ourselves and extend the conversation into "therapy speech".
Regardless of who is right and wrong, this article promotes childish escalation over common understanding. It's such a ridiculous fallacy that it poisons the topic it actually wants to discuss, which is the impact of impersonal rhetoric between friends.