Therapy-Speak & Signals of Dignity
03 \\ Curations for February 2024
Greetings!!
We have survived the first month of the new year. I dunno 'bout y'all, but I never really settle in to the year until about April. So we're a third of the way there!
Let's get to the latest curations, shall we?
Cracks in the Therapeutic: The Rise (and Probably Impending) Fall of Therapy-Speak, by Ian Harber
What is this about?
Ian Harber explores a video on “therapy speak” by Wisecrack, a philosophy/pop culture YouTube channel.
Therapy-speak is the dilution of concepts and terms used in professional therapy sessions, which then becomes part of everyday conversation. When we use “therapy-speak,” we’re giving our insights and opinions an extra veneer of authority (hey, it’s a legit therapy word!), and often, indiscriminately applying these insights, diagnoses, and solutions to everyone and their mother. (Have you MET our mothers?!)
Both the video and Harber explore the means by which contemporary Western society has both made this turn toward professional therapy, as well as the recent rise of therapy-speak. (Each author makes clear that they aren’t speaking against legitimate, professional therapists and genuine therapeutic needs, fyi.)
Harber and Wisecrack make note of the ways in which therapy, and by extension, therapy-speak, has replaced religion. Instead of the religious turn toward the divine and others, therapy calls for a turn inward toward the self. Unfortunately, the self by itself is a closed loop, and this inward turn makes it harder to foster such skills as emotional resilience by relying on chemical means of regulation, instead of the process of challenge and growth.
As with most positive, beneficial things, this inward turn has morphed into another means of segregation and privilege: professional therapy is mainly accessible to those with insurance, discretionary income, and the leisure time to cultivate self-awareness through “doing the work.” Lacking those things, well…you have access to therapy-speak. And if you can’t somehow cobble together the wherewithal to “do the work” and conform appropriately, then (as we discovered in the last issue of this newsletter) you become “less than human,” or a failure at running the endless treadmill, at the very least.
What can we learn?
This feels like a “view from 30,000 feet” kind of topic. It’s not necessarily something each of us might specifically do, but it’s part of the water in which we swim. We frequently encounter, through social media or actual social interactions, individuals who seem to embody therapy-speak, using it as a shield or a weapon or even a veil of mystery.
It feels easy to dismiss this kind of verbal word-play, but I think it also reveals a deep desire for both belonging and significance. By using therapy-speak, an individual signals their affiliation or affinity with a specific group, gaining credibility or approval. But because therapy-speak derives from a genuine process of discovery and healing, it also signals the reality that each of us regularly encounters hurt, trauma, and grief, from which we learn lessons of dismissal, diminishment, and powerlessness. And therapy-speak, as insufficient as it is, may be a means by which some try to recover their sense of dignity and personhood.
What can we do now?
I’ve been wondering about how we can interact with our experiences of therapy-speak in the world.
The best idea I have is that, when we encounter therapy-speak in our interactions with others, we can use it as an opportunity to gently and compassionately invite them to acknowledge their hurt and grief by sharing it in a relationship of trust and hope. Trust, that the vulnerability won’t be used against them. And hope, that they don’t have to stay in such places forever.
Would love to hear your thoughts.
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Prologue to an Anti-Therapeutic, Anti-Affirmation Movement, by Freddie deBoer
What is this about?
Freddie deBoer shares some observations on what he calls the “therapeutic/affirmational mode” (an equivalent or parallel phenomenon to “therapy-speak”), in which he notes a growing dissatisfaction with a “mandatory therapeutic maximalism and an attendant tyranny of affirmation.”
DeBoer lists a significant number of axioms inherent in this therapeutic/affirmational mode so prevalent in contemporary American society. These assumptions propose, among other things, that we are all incapable of developing resilience through meeting and assimilating both big and little t-trauma as a de facto part of life; that to want and not get is a crime against our very being; and, to experience any emotion or interaction outside of anything positive, affirming, and validating falls into the realm of pathology.
In other words, it is anathema in the therapeutic/affirmational mode to be vulnerable and to risk pain as part of being human and navigating life. (For which therapy-speak can provide us with handy labels and softball resolutions?)
DeBoer goes on to share some counter-axioms focused on ways in which we can, individually and collectively, build resilience, self-awareness, and some amount of tolerance toward differing opinions (because tolerance requires disagreements, not acceptance).
What can we learn?
I think the best insight of deBoer’s article is this: “What compassion calls for is not pop therapy or affirmation but the extension of adult respect, helping people to endure a tragic earth.”
Whether you believe the human story is ultimately a tragedy or a comedy, the intervening experience frequently lends itself to feelings of despair and suffering. In the words of the Dread Pirate Roberts, “Life is pain, princess. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
And that’s the frustrating part of therapy-speak: it devolves into advertising for the latest tool or technique promising to remove all friction, challenge, and suffering.
Alan Jacobs talks about “smooth things and rough ground,” drawing from a quote by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: we think we have ideal conditions when there’s no friction, when we have all the money and resources available to throw at a problem.
But you know what’s smooth? Ice. It’s slippery smooth. So smooth there’s no traction, no friction to help us gain our footing and press forward. Turns out we need some roughness in order to make progress.
Therapy-speak asks us to stay spinning on smooth ground, unable to slow down and attend to our deeper emotions and the challenges that invite us to grow, to endure frequent tragedies, and even to thrive - not in spite of them, but because of them.
What does this mean?
It’s not that making everything more difficult provides value or growth. Rather, it’s that we can learn to cultivate a hopeful acceptance of the roughness that naturally occurs: shit happens, yes, but we can, if we press on, become more of our truest selves in the process of shoveling a path through it.
Therapy-speak lends itself to confusion and opacity, its smoothness a sheet of black ice over a deep lake. Learning to help each other name reality in all its tragic roughness helps us break that ice, and discover what it means to swim with leviathans.
Life is hard. So is hope. And so is growth. But I think it's worth it to keep trying.
Shalom,
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