Is Therapy-Speak Making Us Selfish?
Nodding vigorously over here.<p>I&#x27;m a progressive queer, and my social circles are saturated with this stuff right now.<p>Essentially, what&#x27;s happened is that everyone took various degrees of damage over the past three years. You&#x27;ve got COVID disruption, the ongoing War on LGBTQ rights, and, in my city, an unrelated but nevertheless contemperaneous &amp; staggering surge in addiction, eviction and homelessness. Deaths of despair are at an all-time high. I literally don&#x27;t have any friends who I regard as well.<p>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.<p>Therapy-speak provides a veneer of respectability to the act of social withdrawal.<p>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&#x27;re quite preachy, actually, and that means we&#x27;re pretty neurotic about those times where we, like all human beings, fail our values.<p>In this context it&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>We&#x27;ve been here before. This is a great book on a related vice that has also bloomed in these hard times: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;29363252-conflict-is-not-abuse?from_search=true&amp;from_srp=true&amp;qid=ACAPb3a74H&amp;rank=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;29363252-conflict-is-not...</a><p>Excerpt, from those like me who dislike a blind clickthrough<p>&quot;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.&quot;<p>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.<p>But, virtue aside, if I have to hear one more person describe themselves as &quot;experiencing rejection sensitivity dysphoria&quot; instead of saying &quot;I feel hurt,&quot; I will be working <i>very</i> <i>fscking</i> <i>hard</i> to keep charitable.<p>I love my community, but I don&#x27;t love every hat it wears to the horse race.