I take your point, but to engage in it seriously I think plenty of therapists have always hated this shit. Not all therapists are themselves neurotic pseudoscientific morons only out to grift money by enabling the worst parts of someone's personality. Many are, of course, but many are not. Successful therapists - by which I mean, those who somewhat often manage to enable others to overcome problems and make positive changes in their lives, not the ones having the same patient for years that they enable - very often cannot stand their charlatan brethren.
This kind of defense reminds me of when Althusser said that Marxists need to theorize why Stalinism emerged.
American therapists need to figure out why core normative and cognitive commitments of talk therapy not only were unable to stop this kind of grift but in fact gave rise to it. If you accept that A) psychic distress is the result of psychic conflicts and/or B) introspection is a reliable guide to your own mental states, you're basically set on a path to having patients yelling back and forth at each other (or you) about gaslighting or validation or emotional manipulation.
I think it has more to do with the social/economic structures surrounding therapy than it has to do with the therapy itself. Regardless of how effective psychotherapy may or may not be under ideal circumstances, most people do not have the kinds of problems that it was developed to treat.
I think a lot of the people going to therapists now are actually experiencing some kind of spiritual/social distress as a consequence of the secularization and atomization of society, and for the same reason are unable to recognize it as such. Therapy cannot give you a sense of belonging or higher purpose, but if the only tool you give someone is a hammer they're gonna smash shit with it.
"Therapy speak" in my opinion is almost always an appeal to authority. When people claim something using therapy speak vocabulary it's so they can shut down any pushback against it by saying the criticizer isn't qualified to speak on the topic.
Real said, “The bane of my existence is often individual therapists who ‘empower’ their clients right out of potentially workable relationships.” Some people, in other words, will come in armed with the idea, in many cases gleaned in individual therapy, that their spouse’s rather normal behavior is actually pathological.
Seems to be quite common therapist behaviour to just repeat back their patient’s woes to them.
I had a counsellor who kept asking me this. She commenting on my facial expressions when my misery makes me the funny bunny I am today. She asked me whether I like being funny to hide my pain... I mean... I'm a cynical sausage, so I might as well have one likeable point.
Something that's quietly acknowledged by most clinical psych people I know but rarely talked about is the fact that many people never get better with therapy, and a subset of those actually get worse.
Some people just use a therapist as someone they can pay to endlessly vent to without them getting fed up and leaving. Basically just a hired friend.
Some people use their therapists for validation so they feel better about their shitty behaviour.
And some people actively use the language taught to them by therapists as a way to manipulate the people around them.
The uncomfortable truth is that some therapists, like any other profession, are just bad at their job (and in many places the title of "therapist" is barely regulated), and that some patients are totally capable of manipulating otherwise competent therapists to get what they want (validation).
The problem, in my view, stems from the fact that most people seem to treat therapy as something you just... do forever, like exercising. These problems could be avoided if it were treated like any other medical intervention, with a defined therapeutic endpoint to treat a specific problem.
This is something I would always point out in my OCD/PTSD iop during interpersonal therapy. The language and wording always puts who's hearing it into the victim seat and pats them on the back. Obviously 50% of people in a toxic relationship are the toxic one or at least share 50/50 of responsibility by feeding the toxic stew. The main therapist at the iop was a hilarious example of that. He had OCD but grew up hyper privileged wealthy and as an only child. He was the most vapid self-centered unrelatable person you ever met but he saw himself as this brilliant savior who knew our suffering. he would highjack group session of people exposing the most teffying thing they can imagine to ruminate about boots he s buying and tell silly stories about how interesting and smart he was. He admitted to being an OCD theprist that did a 1 week seminar for PTSD then worked with me someone who grew up in a meth house dirty starving homeless and scared while my phychotic mother was doing and saying shit that would traumatize a war refugee and would tell me I thought I was smarter then him when I told him his therapy wasn't addressing large swaths of issues that were popping up from exposure. Ended up going to a trama trained therapist who was so horrified by what he was doing that she made formal complaints.
I feel like a lot of OCD-specialized therapists are not great about dealing with trauma in others because they have a tendency to group everything in as being a cognitive distortion or obsession/compulsion/magical thinking, etc.
I’m not a huge fan of what I’ve seen with OCD related clinical stuff.
Exactly, everyone with OCD has the same issue no matter how severe or what theme they are focusing on. The treatment is very one size fits all but ptsd and the effects of trauma are wildly different between every person and need to be treated differently. I have both OCD and PTSD I see how his rigid aggressive style would be helpful for someone with OCD who was resisting exposure but it's absolutely horrible for someone with PTSD. ERP is super effective if taught correctly,I feel most therapists don't teach it correctly. it's not a matter of exposure hierarchies but learning how to not engage with your OCD in the first place. Funny enough he taught me everything about OCD but never applied it,c my PTSD therapist basically connected the learning so I finally got how ERP worked, so even as an OCD theprist he wasn't very good.
Sometimes a nut solves all your problems, because all you needed was a distraction. It even worked with women, back when it was called hysteria and they treated it with a vibrator.
I used to dismiss nearly all therapy as just a paid friend/secular priest, but Its important to remember there is real constituency of people who use therapy with real psychological/psychiatric issues, behind these conspicuous, frivolous users.
Ive been caught out ragging on therapy as such only to be very badly,but justly dressed down for my bias.
Sure! not accusing. just speaking from my own experience of being a little too comfortable in dismissing therapy as a bourgeoisie hobby only to be absolutely mortified when someone plays a very serious illness card in rebuttal.
As a therapist. I hate providing couples counseling. It's the same thing with people throwing around the N word. Not every shitty person you meet is a Narcissist.
One of my favorite threads on our in vogue 21st Century PMC grift was one where people argued for/against ther*py being a scam. Multiple people saying ther*py is great and they've seen a ther*pist for a decade, and their top response saying they're scam victims because they're still seeing a ther*pist after a decade.
Way too many therapists seem to be in the business of just justifying people's bad behavior. You cheated? Well your needs weren't being met and that's only understandable. You can't be arsed making your life better? Well the world is a tough place and it's only natural to feel like staying at home doing nothing. You keep losing your friends for shitty behavior? Well, you should cut people from your life that don't support you.
Nowhere close to saying all therapists are like this, but way too many see an easy paycheck and just continue to enable bad behavior.
I know a guy who works with therapists. He has a nice little business where he does marketing/legal/paperwork for them and takes a small cut of their fees. He tells me there are three types of people who go to therapists.
People genuinely going through some serious issue. Like never diagnosed before depression, or coping with a traumatic event. These people can be helped, and are the reason tons of therapists get into the game to begin with.
People who are barely functioning, even with a lot of family support. They're just not going to get functional in the long term, and routinely miss appointments. Lots of substance abuse, homelessness, things of that nature. Just can't get it together.
The problem is that the first type gets better and eventually stops going. So that's a dead end in pay. The second group kinda can't pay. They're already on the fringes as is. So how do therapists stay in business?
Group motherfuckin 3, which is massively overrepresented compare to the other two. It's the chronically neurotic housewife who goes at least once a week to complain about her friend Janice. Or a humanities professor who thinks his mother raised him wrong so he can't hold down a relationship. Or people who simply need a friend who will agree with them. If the therapist doesn't validate them and their dumb "problems" they get another one. And these people have some bucks to throw around. This is the group that keeps a therapist's practice going. Shame of it is that, when said therapist comes into contact with group one, who they could genuinely help, they end up forgetting all their training and fail the patient.
Translation: men learned how to wield the sword of therapy speak, evening the playing field, making it no longer an effective weapon, leading to stale mate
the use of clinical terminology to describe mundane, non-pathological behavior. commonly perpetuated via social media and tik-tok. a more modern lexicon for people who would otherwise blame their behavior patterns on their zodiac sign
Most therapists can't and don't want to look at material circumstances. The article itself charges past material circumstances (I hear the Benny Hill chase music in my head): "staying married to someone who is merely 'not always considerate' is how much of America gets the mortgage paid every month." They are left with platitudes.
This doesn't explain all of it but it's hard not to see psychology in the 20th century as a sort of capitalist alternative to Marxism: something promising a total diagnosis of the status quo, with some hints for tweaking it, which of course is no such thing. (Put aside for one minute The Frankfurt School and such, which also looks like a sort of capitalist alternative to Marxism.)
The inner world is of importance to Marxists: "theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses" (less common thoughts must also be material, even if they express themselves primarily by absence, allowing other mass-ideas to dominate). So I don't want to dismiss psychology. South American revolutionary liberation psychology made headway reconciling psychology and Marxism by grounding it in historical materialism, as well as moving the discussion away from adustment to society and towards changing it.
But a therapist who cannot acknowledge the material circumstances of a couple cannot be trusted. An embrace of an ever-shifting array of interpersonal barbs (dysfunctional, gaslighter, narcissist, etc) feels adjacent to idpol, joined through a sort of stand-point epistemiology. Not only is there a managerial quality, here applied to relationships that feels like an outgrowth of hegemony, but there is also a competing-narrative element exposing an ur-quality of the borgeois family as a site of conflict. Reality is siloed (MY boundaries, MY truth) and made a cul-de-sac that can never get as far as dialectics. We have been headed off at the pass.
R D Laing -- not a strict marxist but at least attentive to circumstance -- found in his studies of schizophrenia in the family context a fascinating (and maddening) array of competing stories. The dad had authority, the mum undermined his authority; the family was whole and stable publicly, the family was riven privately; the older brother can tacitly be promiscuous, the younger daughter cannot, etc. He theorised that the schizophrenic family member could no longer hold all the competing stories and retreated totally from attempts at sense-making. The rest of the family could read the room and recognised terrain on which to compete for personal advantage. It is the American way! [Rizzo mutters in his ear] Oh, it is the BRITISH way!
The language of gaslighting feels like a neurotic attempt toget close to this lived fact of competing narratives but offers no way to resolve the problem, just an accusation. Why is mum so dead set on undermining dad? Why is the son allowed girlfriends? Why can't personal problems be aired publicly? The article itself has no solutions to the conundrum of therapy language which is just picked up and used in the same old story-fights.
Really I do think liberation psychology holds the key: these discussions must be moved into community & class group struggle sessions and there must be a dialectical-materialist element. We have to tear down the hedges and walls of enclosure around individual and couples-therapy, and also shift traditional group therapy from being a sounding board for individual issues (with a salve of occasionally unearthed commonalities) to a means for unpicking the group, and its context, as a whole.
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For "highly regarded" flair this is pretty funny.
I take your point, but to engage in it seriously I think plenty of therapists have always hated this shit. Not all therapists are themselves neurotic pseudoscientific morons only out to grift money by enabling the worst parts of someone's personality. Many are, of course, but many are not. Successful therapists - by which I mean, those who somewhat often manage to enable others to overcome problems and make positive changes in their lives, not the ones having the same patient for years that they enable - very often cannot stand their charlatan brethren.
Makes me think of someone like Harrison Ford's character in Shrinking
This kind of defense reminds me of when Althusser said that Marxists need to theorize why Stalinism emerged.
American therapists need to figure out why core normative and cognitive commitments of talk therapy not only were unable to stop this kind of grift but in fact gave rise to it. If you accept that A) psychic distress is the result of psychic conflicts and/or B) introspection is a reliable guide to your own mental states, you're basically set on a path to having patients yelling back and forth at each other (or you) about gaslighting or validation or emotional manipulation.
I think it has more to do with the social/economic structures surrounding therapy than it has to do with the therapy itself. Regardless of how effective psychotherapy may or may not be under ideal circumstances, most people do not have the kinds of problems that it was developed to treat.
I think a lot of the people going to therapists now are actually experiencing some kind of spiritual/social distress as a consequence of the secularization and atomization of society, and for the same reason are unable to recognize it as such. Therapy cannot give you a sense of belonging or higher purpose, but if the only tool you give someone is a hammer they're gonna smash shit with it.
"Therapy speak" in my opinion is almost always an appeal to authority. When people claim something using therapy speak vocabulary it's so they can shut down any pushback against it by saying the criticizer isn't qualified to speak on the topic.
Thought terminating language that favors vibes and since it's all based on feelings, it just invites any questioning to be interpreted as hostility
Seems to be quite common therapist behaviour to just repeat back their patient’s woes to them.
And how does that make you feel?
Very gaslighted
I had a counsellor who kept asking me this. She commenting on my facial expressions when my misery makes me the funny bunny I am today. She asked me whether I like being funny to hide my pain... I mean... I'm a cynical sausage, so I might as well have one likeable point.
[removed]
This comment was removed for being needlessly rude / distasteful. Please don't post like this in the future.
Im super curious what the deleted reply said. Please message me with what it was
It's just a dramabaiting personal attack with no relation to the thread, not sure why you'd care
Couples therapist told me and my ex-fiancé we should break up lol.
Also reinforced the idea that “everyone is entitled to love” which I vehemently disagreed with, is BS that’s something you have to work hard at.
Anyway I did my best but we split.
Holding space for this article
Ariana Venti be like
Something that's quietly acknowledged by most clinical psych people I know but rarely talked about is the fact that many people never get better with therapy, and a subset of those actually get worse.
Some people just use a therapist as someone they can pay to endlessly vent to without them getting fed up and leaving. Basically just a hired friend.
Some people use their therapists for validation so they feel better about their shitty behaviour.
And some people actively use the language taught to them by therapists as a way to manipulate the people around them.
The uncomfortable truth is that some therapists, like any other profession, are just bad at their job (and in many places the title of "therapist" is barely regulated), and that some patients are totally capable of manipulating otherwise competent therapists to get what they want (validation).
The problem, in my view, stems from the fact that most people seem to treat therapy as something you just... do forever, like exercising. These problems could be avoided if it were treated like any other medical intervention, with a defined therapeutic endpoint to treat a specific problem.
This is something I would always point out in my OCD/PTSD iop during interpersonal therapy. The language and wording always puts who's hearing it into the victim seat and pats them on the back. Obviously 50% of people in a toxic relationship are the toxic one or at least share 50/50 of responsibility by feeding the toxic stew. The main therapist at the iop was a hilarious example of that. He had OCD but grew up hyper privileged wealthy and as an only child. He was the most vapid self-centered unrelatable person you ever met but he saw himself as this brilliant savior who knew our suffering. he would highjack group session of people exposing the most teffying thing they can imagine to ruminate about boots he s buying and tell silly stories about how interesting and smart he was. He admitted to being an OCD theprist that did a 1 week seminar for PTSD then worked with me someone who grew up in a meth house dirty starving homeless and scared while my phychotic mother was doing and saying shit that would traumatize a war refugee and would tell me I thought I was smarter then him when I told him his therapy wasn't addressing large swaths of issues that were popping up from exposure. Ended up going to a trama trained therapist who was so horrified by what he was doing that she made formal complaints.
I feel like a lot of OCD-specialized therapists are not great about dealing with trauma in others because they have a tendency to group everything in as being a cognitive distortion or obsession/compulsion/magical thinking, etc.
I’m not a huge fan of what I’ve seen with OCD related clinical stuff.
Exactly, everyone with OCD has the same issue no matter how severe or what theme they are focusing on. The treatment is very one size fits all but ptsd and the effects of trauma are wildly different between every person and need to be treated differently. I have both OCD and PTSD I see how his rigid aggressive style would be helpful for someone with OCD who was resisting exposure but it's absolutely horrible for someone with PTSD. ERP is super effective if taught correctly,I feel most therapists don't teach it correctly. it's not a matter of exposure hierarchies but learning how to not engage with your OCD in the first place. Funny enough he taught me everything about OCD but never applied it,c my PTSD therapist basically connected the learning so I finally got how ERP worked, so even as an OCD theprist he wasn't very good.
And this is why therapy goers are disproportionately women, because traditionally men went to prostitutes for such services.
That and over 90% of licensed clinical psychologists under the age of 35 in North America are women
(I never saw a single effort to increase the number of men in the clinical psychology stream at my university)
Sometimes a nut solves all your problems, because all you needed was a distraction. It even worked with women, back when it was called hysteria and they treated it with a vibrator.
This is, disappointingly, a myth
I used to dismiss nearly all therapy as just a paid friend/secular priest, but Its important to remember there is real constituency of people who use therapy with real psychological/psychiatric issues, behind these conspicuous, frivolous users. Ive been caught out ragging on therapy as such only to be very badly,but justly dressed down for my bias.
I never discounted the existence of people who do need and benefit from psychotherapy.
Sure! not accusing. just speaking from my own experience of being a little too comfortable in dismissing therapy as a bourgeoisie hobby only to be absolutely mortified when someone plays a very serious illness card in rebuttal.
Therapy speak is just the new way to be passive aggressive while sounding enlightened lmao
Like congrats you learned to weaponize your feelings with a psychology degree's worth of vocabulary
As a therapist. I hate providing couples counseling. It's the same thing with people throwing around the N word. Not every shitty person you meet is a Narcissist.
There are two N words and you can’t use either of them
Inside you there are two N words
Society is the real gaslighter 😞
double the $$ per session though
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Talking about narcissism is narcissistic. You're the narcissist, you massive narcissistic narcissist.
[removed]
Come on, don't air your personal grievances on here.
Why do you provide it?
I am a social worker and my agency mandates we talk all cases.
Ah, I see.
Also avoidantly attached. Maybe they just don't like you.
After years and years in Therapy , i got a life coach and it have been a change changer.
It's spouses who are doing this.
One of my favorite threads on our in vogue 21st Century PMC grift was one where people argued for/against ther*py being a scam. Multiple people saying ther*py is great and they've seen a ther*pist for a decade, and their top response saying they're scam victims because they're still seeing a ther*pist after a decade.
Way too many therapists seem to be in the business of just justifying people's bad behavior. You cheated? Well your needs weren't being met and that's only understandable. You can't be arsed making your life better? Well the world is a tough place and it's only natural to feel like staying at home doing nothing. You keep losing your friends for shitty behavior? Well, you should cut people from your life that don't support you.
Nowhere close to saying all therapists are like this, but way too many see an easy paycheck and just continue to enable bad behavior.
I know a guy who works with therapists. He has a nice little business where he does marketing/legal/paperwork for them and takes a small cut of their fees. He tells me there are three types of people who go to therapists.
People genuinely going through some serious issue. Like never diagnosed before depression, or coping with a traumatic event. These people can be helped, and are the reason tons of therapists get into the game to begin with.
People who are barely functioning, even with a lot of family support. They're just not going to get functional in the long term, and routinely miss appointments. Lots of substance abuse, homelessness, things of that nature. Just can't get it together.
The problem is that the first type gets better and eventually stops going. So that's a dead end in pay. The second group kinda can't pay. They're already on the fringes as is. So how do therapists stay in business?
Group motherfuckin 3, which is massively overrepresented compare to the other two. It's the chronically neurotic housewife who goes at least once a week to complain about her friend Janice. Or a humanities professor who thinks his mother raised him wrong so he can't hold down a relationship. Or people who simply need a friend who will agree with them. If the therapist doesn't validate them and their dumb "problems" they get another one. And these people have some bucks to throw around. This is the group that keeps a therapist's practice going. Shame of it is that, when said therapist comes into contact with group one, who they could genuinely help, they end up forgetting all their training and fail the patient.
Just call your partner a massive cunt, it's creative destruction, and will help clear the air in the long run
Translation: men learned how to wield the sword of therapy speak, evening the playing field, making it no longer an effective weapon, leading to stale mate
[deleted]
tf is therapy speak
the use of clinical terminology to describe mundane, non-pathological behavior. commonly perpetuated via social media and tik-tok. a more modern lexicon for people who would otherwise blame their behavior patterns on their zodiac sign
Holy crap this is accurate
You're making us do the emotional labour of explaining this to you
I appreciate your bravery in asking this question. The first step in personal growth is admitting you have issues.
Most therapists can't and don't want to look at material circumstances. The article itself charges past material circumstances (I hear the Benny Hill chase music in my head): "staying married to someone who is merely 'not always considerate' is how much of America gets the mortgage paid every month." They are left with platitudes.
This doesn't explain all of it but it's hard not to see psychology in the 20th century as a sort of capitalist alternative to Marxism: something promising a total diagnosis of the status quo, with some hints for tweaking it, which of course is no such thing. (Put aside for one minute The Frankfurt School and such, which also looks like a sort of capitalist alternative to Marxism.)
The inner world is of importance to Marxists: "theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses" (less common thoughts must also be material, even if they express themselves primarily by absence, allowing other mass-ideas to dominate). So I don't want to dismiss psychology. South American revolutionary liberation psychology made headway reconciling psychology and Marxism by grounding it in historical materialism, as well as moving the discussion away from adustment to society and towards changing it.
But a therapist who cannot acknowledge the material circumstances of a couple cannot be trusted. An embrace of an ever-shifting array of interpersonal barbs (dysfunctional, gaslighter, narcissist, etc) feels adjacent to idpol, joined through a sort of stand-point epistemiology. Not only is there a managerial quality, here applied to relationships that feels like an outgrowth of hegemony, but there is also a competing-narrative element exposing an ur-quality of the borgeois family as a site of conflict. Reality is siloed (MY boundaries, MY truth) and made a cul-de-sac that can never get as far as dialectics. We have been headed off at the pass.
R D Laing -- not a strict marxist but at least attentive to circumstance -- found in his studies of schizophrenia in the family context a fascinating (and maddening) array of competing stories. The dad had authority, the mum undermined his authority; the family was whole and stable publicly, the family was riven privately; the older brother can tacitly be promiscuous, the younger daughter cannot, etc. He theorised that the schizophrenic family member could no longer hold all the competing stories and retreated totally from attempts at sense-making. The rest of the family could read the room and recognised terrain on which to compete for personal advantage. It is the American way! [Rizzo mutters in his ear] Oh, it is the BRITISH way!
The language of gaslighting feels like a neurotic attempt toget close to this lived fact of competing narratives but offers no way to resolve the problem, just an accusation. Why is mum so dead set on undermining dad? Why is the son allowed girlfriends? Why can't personal problems be aired publicly? The article itself has no solutions to the conundrum of therapy language which is just picked up and used in the same old story-fights.
Really I do think liberation psychology holds the key: these discussions must be moved into community & class group struggle sessions and there must be a dialectical-materialist element. We have to tear down the hedges and walls of enclosure around individual and couples-therapy, and also shift traditional group therapy from being a sounding board for individual issues (with a salve of occasionally unearthed commonalities) to a means for unpicking the group, and its context, as a whole.
If ya relationship needs therapy
Just save urself the trouble and leave fr
-someone who did couples therapy
ive been to therapists a couple times in my life, mostly in situations where it was highly suggested or forced.
it is such a wildly useless exercise and therapists are the some of the biggest grifters there are
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