Is Therapy-Speak Making Us Selfish?

30 pointsby oxwabout 2 years ago

7 comments

dangusabout 2 years ago

I don't really think it's therapy or therapy-speak doing this, I think it's just a bunch of anecdotal stories about a bunch of dang danguses.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.

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morkalorkabout 2 years ago

Therapy-speak is exhausting and patronizing and so are the people that use it, no thanks.

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bitsintheskyabout 2 years ago

It surprises me that anyone can defend using speech distorted with such euphemistic, and even worse imprecise, language when dealing with another person. Respecting a person means transparency and simplicity. Allow the other person to interpret situations how they would, even if it's in a way you haven't molded. Playing with vague language that gives you the moral throne is a method of gas lighting.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?

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bbwbsbabout 2 years ago

The examples in the article are not what therapists recommend (or should be recommending, at least).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.

smusamashahabout 2 years ago

This immediately reminded the black mirror episode smithereens. Character played by Andrew Scott finally got his phone call with the ceo of the social app and was telling him how it killed her Fiancee while sobbing. HR on the other end told him to give this Therapy speak "You sound like you're in a lot of pain." to which he responded with "Oh, Jesus fucking Christ! Speak like a fucking human being!".The quoted last words in the beginning of the article are just like that.

1atticeabout 2 years ago

Nodding vigorously over here.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: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29363252-conflict-is-not-abuse?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=ACAPb3a74H&rank=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29363252-conflict-is-not...</a>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.

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smoldesuabout 2 years ago

There's some merit to what they're saying here. Arguing that this isn't a two-person problem is where I have to suspend my disbelief, though.> “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.