#therapy speak

[whereserpentswalk]

I recently apologized to a freind for making them perform emotional labor by texting them durring a panic attack. And they explained to me that that term is for abuse victims who have to regulate their abuser's emotions, and not for people confiding in their freinds.

I hate how cheapened therapy speak has become. I hate how society makes it so asking a freind for help is something you have to apologize for. I hate how every mental health word that dares to go mainstream gets appropriated by abusers as something they can use agaisnt people they want to hurt. I love my freind for rejecting abusive paradigms.

[professionalkinkshaming]

Therapy speak isn't making anyone more selfish, but it is giving the most selfish and inconsiderate of us some really mature sounding and harder-to-refute justifications for the same shitty behaviors they've always had

[augmentedpolls]

This poll is referring more to trends that are mainly annoying versus ones that are straight-up harmful such as MRAs

[dykeiism]

whenever i see people talking about the purpose of mental health diagnoses, three reasons usually come up:

to encourage self-understanding

to concisely describe treatment options to professionals

to gain access to resources and accomodations

but it's hard for me to agree with any of these. given the harm associated with diagnosis, especially diagnosis of a personality disorder, i'm finding it increasingly difficult to justify diagnosing any mental disorder at all. below the cut is a breakdown of each of these three reasons, and why i believe that none of them hold up to criticism.

(1) to encourage self-understanding.

diagnostic criteria are so rigid that they discourage self-understanding. they fragment the human experience, categorizing it into easily digestible groups of "symptoms" rather than understanding a person's struggles holistically. this is why we have a phenomenon of people thinking, "well, my anxiety tells me this, but my depression tells me that" and "i'm having an intrusive thought but can't tell if it's coming from my ocd, ptsd, or bpd." diagnosis misleads patients into believing that, much like one might cough due to either pollen in the lungs or a respiratory illness, one might feel anxious due to either their generalized anxiety disorder diagnosis or their post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis. a more accurate understanding of the human mind would necessarily involve doing away with the pathology of gad versus ptsd, and instead being able to understand that the anxiety might simply result from a combination of previous negative experiences, a naturally sensitive personality, and underdeveloped emotion regulation skills. a diagnosis is a description of a pattern of thoughts and behaviours; nothing more. my mental health conditions don't cause me to think or behave a certain way. rather, my thoughts and behaviours are similar to the thoughts and behaviours of other people who have also been deemed mentally sick. this makes it possible for doctors to use a certain diagnosis as a shorthand to describe my personality and skills (i refuse to call such things "symptoms") to other doctors. it does not mean that i have a sickness that causes me to think and act in certain way.

why would i want to understand myself through the lens of a psychiatrist, anyways? psychiatry is a deeply individual solution to systemic problems. we're living in a world that evolution could not prepare us for, yet we are told that there's something wrong with our brains if we're unable to adapt to these unprecedented living conditions. i refuse to believe that my brain is sick unless somebody has looked at my brain and can tell me where the sickness is. we must not forget that we're dealing with the discipline that understood homosexuality and hysteria as mental illnesses, and that initially understood autism to be a form of schizophrenia.

(2) to concisely describe treatment options to professionals

imagine, if you will, someone with post-traumatic stress disorder. all you know about them is that they have ptsd. now, recommend a treatment method for them!

nobody can give a good treatment recommendation based on that diagnosis alone. more information is needed: is the patient dealing with persistent general anxiety, sudden panic attacks, or a phobia? does the patient have compulsions? is the patient aggressive, anxious, or depressive? depending on the answers, the ideal treatment plan will be quite different.

now let's consider borderline personality disorder. there are 4 types of bpd and there are 256 possible ways to combine the 5 symptoms required for diagnosis (there are 9 symptoms in total). the personalities, cognitive abilities, and struggles of people diagnosed with bpd are quite diverse, and they will all require varying types and degrees of professional intervention. that being said, bpd is almost always treated with dbt and a few medication options including antidepressants, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, and anticonvulsants. there are so many other disorders that are treated with dbt and the same drugs. so why make bpd, bipolar, ptsd, cptsd, and depression their own diagnoses? what reason is there, other than to fragment our struggles and generate stigma?

my wish for the future of psychiatry is that, instead of being diagnosed with a disorder that is simultaneously very specific yet inexplicably vague, patients will be told "your struggles are related to trauma and emotional dysregulation. i recommend that you take an antidepressant and attend dialectical behavioural therapy sessions," or "your struggles are related to catastrophization and unhelpful behaviours, i recommend that you engage in cognitive behavioural therapy."

(3) to gain access to resources and accommodations

there are better ways to do this. i don't think anyone should be turned away from the accommodations that they need. however, if resources are scarce and must be gatekept, then a simple interview or quotient test will be sufficient in determining the level of need.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Chris Williamson: "Some ways pop psychology lies to you: Everyone you dislike is not a narcissist. Every unpleasant experience is not trauma. Having needs does not make you codependent. Disagreement is not gaslighting. Conflict is not abuse. Taking offence is not being triggered. Everything does not need to be normalised. Speaking like an HR memo is not self-awareness."

One of my favorite posts from you. Are these, sort of the 9 horsemen of psychology?

Seerut Chawla: These are definitely some of them. It's a dialogue around narcissism. It's creating this strange, you know, fan-fiction version of narcissism that only lives on the internet. Anybody you don't like is a narcissist. Any form of abuse or poor treatment is narcissism. Words mean things, especially when it's clinical language. And we've taken this therapy-speak, which is a part of therapy culture, and you use it to inflate every little thing. You're not just offended or you don't like something or you're uncomfortable, you've been triggered. You haven't been triggered. You don't like this so it's cause cognitive dissonance.

-

Pop psychology is not psychology.

• Everyone you dislike is not a narcissist. • Every unpleasant experience is not trauma. • Having needs does not make you codependent. • Disagreement is not gaslighting. • Conflict is not abuse. • Taking offence is not being triggered. • Everything does not need to be normalised. • Speaking like an HR memo is not self-awareness.

==

"Therapy speak" is a great way to figure out who you should simply ignore.

[i-put-the-ass-into-sass]

Lately I've happened to read a lot of (otherwise excellent) fanfics that do just this and it's so maddening !!! Like, Lin Beifong is not out here telling whoever it is that they should try box breathing and diagnosing them with PTSD!

In any story, I'm not looking for the author to show me the correct way to handle an issue that arises for one of their characters, I'm looking for an exploration of how that issue is handled by the characters as themselves! The characters do not have to be a vessel for the author to relay their knowledge of therapy or whatever, they are allowed to fumble and make mistakes, that's the whole point.

[thepeacefulgarden]

[shewhotellsstories]

A downside of therapy becoming mainstream is that people think they can apply words that mean very specific things to anything they don't like. Not every person you have a negative encounter with is a narcissistic abuser. Words mean things.

[smolfangirl]

"Therapy speak" is so stupid it's almost funny if it wasn't actually harmful

Gaslighting the way it's used online isn't true to what it actually means in a clinical context. Narcissists aren't as common as social media makes you believe they are. People can be not good for you and/or assholes without being close to what a narcissist personality disorder actually means.

A boundary is "if you aren't ready on time, I will leave without you", not "you can't ever bring up anything I did that you didn't like or else I will call you toxic".

Saying something like "I appreciated our season of friendship" is not a natural way to talk for most people, and it shouldn't be implied that this is A Healthy Way to talk to someone else. Human relationships aren't a letter from HR. A good therapist will help you find your own words to express your feelings and thoughts and wants.

TL/DR: "Therapy speak" doesn't necessarily mean the phrases and expressions are used correctly or even used at all in clinical settings

[anarchywoofwoof]

i can’t stress this enough because i feel like therapy speak has tainted the word “boundaries”

you are completely and totally entitled to the right of setting healthy, safe and effective boundaries in your relationships with other people, platonic or otherwise.

however, if you fail to make an attempt to articulate those boundaries or you neglect to do so entirely, you take at least part of the responsibility if someone violates those boundaries, especially on multiple occasions.

people cannot read your mind. everyone’s experience is drastically different. your experiences have forged your beliefs and feelings and therefore the boundaries you set are going to be a reflection of that.

you have every right to ensure that your feelings are properly considered and your boundaries are respected. and some things are just common sense: consent and respect chief among them.

but you cannot expect people to automatically be in tune with your personal boundaries. that is why they are your boundaries. they are your expectations on how you want and need to be treated in order to feel comfortable and fulfilled in a relationship.

[whereserpentswalk]

Ttrpg safety tools and the dog test

A quick rundown of what safety tools are: tools for setting boundaries in ttrpgs. Can be useful to some people, but often used really wrongly, and often seem overly gamey to me personally. It's like therapy speak for rpgs. And is similary used by the people it was meant to be used against.

One of the most common examples of these is the X card. The X card is a card with the letter X written on it. It sounds like a good idea if you've never interacted with people before. The X card is a boundary where one of the rules is you can't talk about the boundary. It's very useful for anyone who want to weaponize it, and not very useful for asserting actual boundaries.

There is also a type of chud who dislikes the the idea of safety tools because they think they're "woke". The only way to have a productive conversation around safety tools is to ignore them. Bad faith questions don't deserve good faith answers.

Now, a lot of people would think that its easier for a player to step out then deleate a scene. But a lot the culture around safety tools is based on this toxic highschool mindset around ttrpgs where someone feels like they both have a right, and a duty to be at every single momment of every session, and everyone else does to. So every single safety tool you'll see will assume the of lack the option of leaving the table at all. Being able to leave at any time is the ultimate boundary in ttrpgs and many other safety tools are attempting the impossible task of establishing boundaries without it. People compare them to safe words in bdsm. But it's like trying to create a safe word system but you have to cum and can't take breaks.

See part of the problem is 4chan and reddit have cultures of rpg horror stories. Which are useally lies. I'm not going to say fiction because that implies a relationship with the audience that they don't have. And these lies almost always have queer people, ND people, leftists, and anyone you'd see called a degenerate or weirdo as villains. While the type of nerd that Scott Pilgrim was the first book makes himself out to be a hero. And reddit also happens to be where the concept of safety tools was popularized.

It's this problem where people aren't trying to deal with actual triggers, they're trying to police content they morally condemn. R/rpg horror stories is the home of people who consider themselves outcasts for liking star wars and then have a deep fear of a marginalized person or someone from a slightly less mainstream subculture showing up at their table. And when they're the ones defining what a boundary conflict in rpg space looks like it's useally pretty bad. When a lot of safety tools go bad it's the case of weapons made to catch monsters being bad at dealing with humans.

And beyond all that. Beyond the specifics of rpg horror stories and it's influence. The way people talk about safety tools is mostly about removing content they deem objectionable from ttrpgs. When people talk about the X card and things like it, they're useally afraid someone will talk about something taboo and the table, and want a way to stop them, with the assumption that the rest of the party agrees. The extreme nature of how much someone has the power to censor, is brought with the assumption that what will be censored won't just violate their personal boundaries, but a community sense of morals.

They don't just want their triggers removed, they want things they deem immoral to be removed (not everyone who uses safety tools of course, but the hoard of bearded cishet white men who play 5e who dominate the conversation on them). That's just what a lot of the conversation around safety tools always comes down to. When somebody says they want safety tools to remove torture scenes or sex scenes from their table, it's not their personal triggers, its that they don't believe these things belong in the medium at all. They don't imagine what it would be like to be the only person in the room with their trigger, because the narrative they've created with problem players and safety tools, has made it so they assume the majority of the room shares their boundaries. Safety tools as they exist and are talked about are not built for a minority of players to be able to assert boundaries agaisnt the majority of players.

The dog test: so basically, while safety tools in ttrpgs have good reasons to exist, a lot of the time they're weapons players use to remove content they deem immoral. So often every discussion around things like the X card comes with a lot of moral condemnation, and assumptions about what content can ever be triggering vs what is ok. And this culture of moral condemnations can make safety tools especially dangerous for queer people and ND people, or just members of certain subcultures.

So I've developed the dog test. The dog test, is an example used to test if a safety tool (or more commonly someone talking about them) wants boundaries or wants moral policing. The dog test is simply to see how the safety tool is viewed if it's used to remove dogs from a game. Basically taking the commonly used examples like blood, or sex, and replacing them with the existence of dogs. Perhaps to add to it let's say the only case this hypothetical person will be ok with dogs is if they're killable enemies. This isn't unrealistic, a lot of people have trauma from dog bites, it's probably more likely to be a good faith trauma than a lot of the examples.

If they person is as willing to work with the needs of a player who has trauma around dogs as they are more sympathetic triggers than they've passed the dog test.

Disclaimer. A lot of these thoughts were developed in a discord conversation with @dragonpurrs and a lot of these words were originally things I said to it.

[warningsine]

If the language used on the internet is a reliable indicator, we’re more psychologically enlightened than ever. We discuss attachment styles like the weather. We joke about our coping mechanisms. We project, or are projected on to. We shun “toxic” people. We catastrophise and ruminate. We diagnose, or are diagnosed: OCD, depression, anxiety, ADHD, narcissism. We make, break or struggle to “hold” boundaries. We practise self-care. We know how to spot gaslighting. We’re tuned into our emotional labour. We’re triggered. We’re processing our trauma. We’re doing the work.

The language of the therapy room has long permeated popular culture. Common terms like “repression”, “denial”, “slip of the tongue”, “hysteria” and “inner child” all lead back to Freud. But over the last decade or so, with the vast expansion of social media networks, a new, seemingly sophisticated language sits on modern society’s tongue. Some call it therapy-speak. Or psychobabble. But despite its prevalence, the language is divisive.

Last month, online discourse throbbed with disdain when Sarah Brady, the ex-partner of Jonah Hill, shared text messages he’d sent her about his “boundaries” (no “surfing with men”, no friendships with “women who are in unstable places” and no swimsuit selfies). Many argued that his self-satisfied language was a weaponising of therapy-speak; using “expert” terms to try to control her behaviour.

If we’re often online and are plugged into wellness, self-help or relationship worlds on social media, therapy-speak is our first language. Here, algorithms feed us from a bottomless well of content by coaches and other self-proclaimed experts who teach us how to cope with being triggered; how to identify a narcissist; how to “show up” in relationships; how to hold a boundary and so much more. With every scroll, a new tutorial in human psychology. But what are we actually learning?

“By virtue of being human beings, we’re masters at distancing ourselves from difficult aspects of emotional life,” says Dr Jonathan Shedler, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco. “One way we distance ourselves is through words. What we’ve got now is this kind of pop-psychology language of clichés, abstract concepts and turns of phrase that are so different from speaking from the heart.”

For Shedler, modern therapy-speak is “not actually a product of reflection and examination”. In psychotherapy, he says, “we always move from the general to the specific. People will say something general or abstract and a good therapist is always asking for examples. If a person says that they felt stressed, we might say, ‘OK, tell me more about that. How did you experience the stress?’ If a patient is using therapy-speak, the goal of the work has to be to move away from this to something more immediate and emotionally alive.”

Platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and TikTok pull in colossal viewing numbers on these abstract concepts. Search “gaslighting” on YouTube and the top result (“10 Examples of What Gaslighting Sounds Like”) has 3.3m views. On TikTok, the #narcissism hashtag has 3.8bn views. Search “triggered” on Instagram and a tidal wave of multimedia content appears. You can scroll for 10 minutes and still be fed lists, memes and vlogs. Even if only a small portion of viewers take the language they’re absorbing online into their offline conversations, we can still imagine how easily it seeps into public consciousness. Particularly among young people, the main demographic for platforms like TikTok.

We might argue that an increased awareness of psychological dynamics, and a growing ease for identifying and discussing mental health issues, are particularly good things for teenagers and young adults. The historical backdrop is that mental health was shrouded in stigma and taboo for so long. If young people can have a freer, more matter-of-fact understanding of mental health, it may lead to less suffering in silo. Maybe even a positive effect on generations to come. But the expansion of certain language worries some professionals who work with young people.

Kate teaches biology in a secondary school in Manchester, where she has worked for 15 years. She has been a form tutor for 10. In her experience, conversations she hears among teenagers – and the way issues brought to her are described – have changed dramatically in the last five years. “I hear words like ‘triggered’, ‘gaslighting’ and ‘narcissist’ so often now,” she says. “Young people are using these words to describe their fellow pupils and other teachers, when they feel hurt or singled out. I had to look up what gaslighting meant.”

She reflects empathically on how difficulties in friendships when you’re at school can “feel like the end of the world”. “You want to validate how they feel,” she says. “Because being a teenager is really hard. But sometimes it seems as if they’re wedded to words they’ve picked up on social media. They’re dismissing each other and, sometimes, struggling to take responsibility for their own behaviour because they have compelling words like ‘triggered’ that make their own feelings the most important thing, above all else.”

Kate wanted to be quoted under a pseudonym. She was worried that her reflections might be seen to be taking a coping strategy away from young people when “the world is stacked against them.” It makes sense.

Climate change weighs heavy on their minds. Media influence and gender norms continue to create a disparity between their lived reality and future aspirations. (Men are still portrayed as independent, emotionally stoic and in roles that signify strength; women as childcarers, home-keepers and care-workers. A young person’s real-life sense of themselves may not fit with the images they absorb, and may cause mental distress or limit a young person’s sense of potential.) The pandemic, social inequality, austerity and online harm have driven a huge rise in NHS mental health referrals – and the system is buckling. Thresholds for getting specialist help are so high that many young people are refused care, sometimes with fatal consequences. It is a curious phenomenon that, while statistics suggest young people’s mental health is declining, social media has provided a compelling language with which to navigate their lives.

But some therapists (including myself, and many I know) believe that the expressive nature of therapy-speak is, actually, not all that expressive. The language barely aligns with what therapy is; a singular relationship between the therapist and their client, with its own intimate context and idiosyncrasies.

Shedler focuses on the word “triggered”. “For some people, it’s very difficult to say, ‘I was angry’ or, ‘I was terrified’. So there’s already a layer of obfuscation about what their internal experience is. Something we try very hard not to do in therapy is locate the upsetting thing externally. If you leave the ‘I was triggered’ there, your internal experience is almost secondary. In meaningful therapy we try to reverse that. All our experiences take on personal meaning. The work of therapy is to explore those layers.”

The psychotherapists I have trained with, and been supervised by, use very little of the therapy-speak I see on social media. Theory and literature inform the work, but conversations are in much more plain English than you might think. This is what we try to invite in our clients: the freedom to speak plainly.

In my experience, some younger clients have brought in words like “triggering”, “gaslighting”, “narcissism” and some confident diagnoses of others’ “personality disorders”. Sometimes, it has seemed hard for them to name emotions like fear or anger. The influence over their language doesn’t just come from social media, but from reality shows like Love Island, Love is Blind and Married at First Sight. (I was struck at how often the term “gaslighting” was used in the last season of MAFS, a show that consumed me more than I’d care to admit.)

It can take a long time to get beneath the use of these terms – which may be described as a defence mechanism – and explore someone’s deeper, more vulnerable emotional experiences. This relies on building a safe, trusting relationship. But often we don’t have time.

For so many people, long-term therapy is unaffordable. In the UK, if you can’t afford private therapy, mental health support on the NHS is often dictated by a postcode lottery and limited to six-to-eight sessions of CBT. Short-term work can be effective and meaningful for some people. But in-depth therapy is often a luxury. This might explain why the confessional nature of therapy-speak annoys some of us. It might seem imperious; a white, middle-class gate-keeping of suffering from people who, in relative terms, suffer the least.

I’m reminded of a Twitter thread from 2019 on which someone offered a template for responding to a friend in distress when you don’t feel able to help. It said: “Hey! I’m so glad you reached out. I’m actually at capacity/helping someone else who’s in crisis/dealing with some personal stuff right now, and I don’t think I can hold appropriate space for you. Could we connect [later date or time] instead/Do you have someone else you could reach out to?” The vocabulary was widely made fun of, with many people identifying how hard the person was working to avoid a friend in distress.

For Shedler, the kind of therapy-speak we’re saturated with online is particularly destructive: “It alienates us from our internal experience while pretending to do the opposite,” he says. We might say it’s helping people to become so much more psychologically minded. But he feels “the reality is it’s actually doing the reverse.” It’s probably true that there’s little room for self-awareness, or taking responsibility, if we’re quick to tell people they’re gaslighting us by expressing something we don’t agree with. (Incidentally, the term comes from a film in the 1940s, not psychology literature.) Or if we confuse conflict with “abuse”.

I have shifted positions on the casual use of therapy-speak many times. I still don’t know exactly what I think, other than that I think about it a lot. I have worked in a charity providing therapy to survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. Many of my clients have struggled with the effects of austerity and navigating the benefits system, while living with chronic health issues that compound their emotional distress. As a result, I have bristled at the term “trauma” being bandied around. I have balked at pithy Instagram memes about drinking, after witnessing the devastation of addiction. I’ve also observed that people are still more likely to minimise their distress than embellish it.

I have struggled seeing “triggers” (a concept derived from the treatment of PTSD) so widely appropriated, and the increased cultural understanding that we should avoid being triggered at all costs. This is in conflict with the most robustly evidenced approach for trauma therapy: to slowly and carefully help someone tolerate their discomfort by increasing their exposure to their feelings, both in the room with a therapist, and in the outside world.

However, writing all this down also makes me think, what right do I have to assume passport control for certain words? The language of healing, or surviving, will look different for everyone. It’s complex.

Social media undoubtedly plays a role in flattening human emotions into neat, shareable terms. We’re encouraged to pathologise friends, family or lovers with vocabulary that strips away nuance and context. This probably does get in the way of the “speaking from the heart” that Shedler speaks of. It might help us feel more powerful when we’re hurt or afraid. But what happens to the pain and fear once we’ve labelled someone? Where does it go?

I’m not sure where I sit with some of the other language. If someone says they were traumatised by the pandemic – by isolation, caring for dying people, loss of loved ones, financial ruin, long Covid – is that not valid? If a young person is struggling because their parents can barely afford to feed them, or with their identity in a world that doesn’t seem hospitable to who they might want to be, might appropriating therapy-speak help them feel like they have more agency?

A good experience of therapy can help someone flourish. It’s also an experience many of us might struggle to have. But notions of the therapy world continue to be positioned as the “right” way of being; in ourselves, and with each other. Therapy-speak might be annoying, tiring and get in the way of authentic emotional expression. Perhaps even with damaging consequences. But something so pervasive requires a little more than suspicion.

Could the expansion of this language speak to a collective hunger for a framework that helps us talk about our existence in modern society? That is, trying to feel peaceful, purposeful and connected while many structural forces collide and make that existence feel harder and harder. There’s no clear solution, other than: make the world easier to live in. But a therapist might tell you that’s magical thinking.

[taylovelinus]

saw this Refinery29 article titled “Is Therapy-Speak Ruining Our Relationships” and loved it because it has put into words a concept I have been unable to describe for years.

Everything now is so unnecessary clinical, this obsession to categorize and neatly label and file each and every thought and feeling and interaction and relationship we have… don’t you get exhausted, constantly pathologizing every behavior and assigning some sterile, inoffensive name to everything you do? do you do it to sound emotionally intelligent, so you are perceived better? or maybe it’s to give yourself plausible deniability and an inoffensive, easily explainable and rational out for your shitty, selfish behaviors? no matter what it’s just so fucking insane. the internet has sincerely rotted some people’s brains, especially the brains of gen z, to where every relationship and every interpersonal interaction is viewed through this clinical lens…

we’re not lab rats in some project, we’re human beings. our interactions are not always easily categorizable. no one is 100% good or 100% bad. and this cold, clinical terminology being applied to everyday relationships 1) takes all of the warmth and beautiful complexity and humanity out of other people and your relationships with them, and 2) waters down the real meanings of these terms to the point where they don’t mean anything anymore. Your friend telling a white lie and denying it isn’t the same thing as gaslighting, and you need to get a fucking grip. Your friend confiding in you about something really emotional for them isn’t them trauma dumping on you. like holy shit have you ever had friends? like actual friends? confiding in each other is called being friends, like just for the record. I don’t know what the fuck “holding space” means and also I don’t care literally at all because I’m normal. I am busy having normal, beautiful, messy, complicated relationships with friends and family and lovers and I am not trying to attach clinical labels to everything because those things don’t help. all they do is create barriers between you and other people and you prevent yourself from making real human connections with other people.

I’m really sorry you have to hear this from me, but if you want something real, you have to risk getting your feelings hurt sometimes. you have to be willing to risk being confused or angry or hurt or frustrated, but through the shit you can find genuine human connection. it’s out there and it’s worth having and life is so much better spent and more deeply enjoyed when you allow yourself to just be and to get close with others and stop thinking about them like robots or test subjects and assigning clinical labels to your every feeling and interaction with them. be so fucking for real.

[trashbagcommunist]

It's always kind of depressing when leftists get scapegoated for a problem that is pretty universal in irritating people.

Like I saw a post earlier that I'm really agreeing with, how therapy speak is passive aggressive and shuts people down and then it ends with how this is just so typical of "lefty types"

Like as if therapy speak isn't primarily the domain of liberals who wished they worked in HR or something. As if antipsych didn't emerge from leftists.

I'm not saying there aren't some leftists who do this, I've known some, but I see it as rooted in a kind of liberalism they haven't unlearned--because it's an approach so rooted in individualism and imo leans into the fragility of certain privileges where you feel like you need to "handle" people (people of color, disabled people, trans people) with kid gloves and also you feel a kind of contempt for them because of thinking of them that way.

[howifeltabouthim]

I've been told a million times that I am worthy of love just as I am, that I need to take a long look in the mirror, that I need to be the bigger person and move forward. But what good is it to become the bigger person when nobody else has to change? . . . I'll move on when everybody else has to look in the mirror too.

Laura Hankin, from The Dreamers