therapy speak

so, pulled out of the Jonah Hill thread, over the last few years I've been witnessing isolated examples of people weaponizing therapy-speak, often unintentionally. a local performer posted a public FB post to talk about how they were actively being gaslit, referring to a thread where the other person was at worst being mildly insensitive. or the word "toxic" being bandied about in regards to minor, garden variety arguments.

Jonah Hill of course now being a prominent example of someone actually using therapy-speak to abuse another person (https://jezebel.com/jonah-hill-sarah-brady-texts-therapy-speak-1850621501).

but - therapy does of course help people identify toxic behavior they didn't previously understand to be toxic by teaching these terms (i.e. me and boundaries, and understanding how I'd enabled my parents financially in the early 21st century). I've recently resumed going. And it's helped call out people who have been abusing others with impunity, and in those cases the therapy-speak was used accurately and helped give a better picture of why the aggressor's behavior was bad.

so I guess my question is - has the mainstreaming of therapy-speak had the unintended affect of giving abusers new tools to wield to their advantage, and has it diluted the power of some of the terminology? or does the mainstreaming of therapy-speak still have net positives, with this being merely an unfortunate side effect? by mainstreaming, I really mean made available to people who have not themselves gone to therapy, so are learning the word from blogs/news articles as opposed to from their therapist.

the instant diagnosing and labelling people do with five minutes of googling? i'm not a fan. that's pretty mainstream now.

I don't think it's really "therapy-speak" if its intent (consciously or unconsciously) is oppressive, or if the goal is not to empathically connect with another person.

And (speaking as a trainee therapist - so my POV is highly biased!) I would be dubious of any therapists that used "therapy-speak". I happily would use jargon in an essay, but not with a client.

All words hold subjective meaning, whether they're therapy-speak or not, so I don't see a specific danger in it. And obviously being in therapy doesn't make you a "good" person any more than *not* being in therapy makes you a "bad" one.

thank you for that perspective, Chuck!

The Jonah Hill thing makes it clear that a lot of people don't really understand these terms. "Boundaries" are definitely not "Rules that YOU Must Follow." "Gaslighting" is not "disagreeing with me." Identifying toxic behavior is not just an opportunity to hang a label on someone else and then ostracize them.

it's kinda like how some language from social justice movements has been "appropriated" for other purposes ... though, I feel like I learn a lot from the ilx "words ... that annoy you" thread about being more open to change in language and semantics and not being as prescriptivist as I was when I started posting to ILX. I am fairly certain we discussed how "gaslighting" is now used to refer to a lot of things that don't rise to the level of abusive.

chuck’s post make sense. i think i saw someone say on twitter they can’t imagine any therapist using language in the way that seems to be defined by the notion of “therapy speak”: words like toxic or gaslighting for example. other phrases like “safe space” and “boundaries” do seem to me to be useful concepts for helping people (I include myself here) navigate emotional and psychological difficulties (lol at emotional and psychological being two different categories for me there - v on brand)

i wonder whether it’s a case that words that in some way connote or support vulnerability - and opening up and expressing vulnerability seem like they are or can be important parts of therapy - are also words that can be used to attack people’s vulnerability outside of safe spaces. hence their abuse.

some hobbled grammar in the first line there. clearly it should be

chuck. post. make. sense.

I've been hearing about 'toxic positivity' lately and wondering what the hell it is

Ted Lasso

xp I remember reading about how doing couples therapy when one of the people is abusive is actively damaging because the abusive partner learns specific language and concepts that they can use to constrain their partner even more. And yet people still push this all the fucking time. Lundy Bancroft has written a lot about this and this has stayed with me since I read it:

The highly “therapized” abuser tends to be slick, condescending, and manipulative. He uses the psychological concepts he has learned to dissect his partner’s flaws and dismiss her perceptions of abuse. He takes responsibility for nothing that he does; he moves in a world where there are only unfortunate dynamics, miscommunications, symbolic acts. He expects to be rewarded for his emotional openness, handled gingerly because of his “vulnerability,” colluded with in skirting the damage he has done, and congratulated for his insight.

That was @ the second half of Fizzles’s post. Sorry if a bit esoteric.

xxxpost my understanding is: people who aren't willing to acknowledge others' negative feelings as valid, or promote 'positivity' over authenticity. or display a dismissive, naive optimism instead of empathy.

i.e. people who say things like "I know you're struggling now, but things are going to get better, they always do. Just think positively for the future". or "I understand you're upset, but instead of focusing on all of the negatives, why not think of all of the positive things you have going for you? then you won't be so upset!". or object to how 'negative' someone is being when they're emotionally venting about something bad they experienced.

Ah, right

My ex made me read a book about actually listening to people, and it talked a fair amount about not offering advice or a positive outlook, but instead just acknowledging their perspective without immediately offering some solution... to validate their perspective

(okay, she didn't make me read it, but it was likely too little, too late anyway)

xpost to gyac - don’t think that’s esoteric. makes absolute sense to me. seems a v harmful thing to do. i suppose the general term is “bad faith actors”, of whom you have to be careful in any walk of life. obv in therapy multiply that by 1000.

your post makes me wonder about couples therapy generally. it seems extremely open to manipulation, perhaps in many cases instinctive, as in “not intentionally malignant”, manipulation.

couples therapy, like any therapy, is flawed if you're using it to "win" an argument.

for instance, a friend has had a falling out with his sister over something she said, and she called back to say she told her therapist about what she said and that the therapist said there was nothing wrong w/ it. whether the therapist actually said or not, it was based on the way the sister communicated it to the therapist, and now she's using that to try and say "so that means I'm right!" and invalidate his concerns. when in reality I'm sure the therapist probably never intended for what she said to be used that way.

people definitely do that although it doesn't work on me because I usually reply "cool, have them call me and I'll argue with them instead of you"

i must admit - my experience is v limited - i would be v surprised to hear any therapist pass judgment (like “there’s nothing wrong with it”). i tend to assume the approach broadly is “why did you feel the way you did about what they said?”. “why did it generate that reaction?”

Usually they don't speak in absolutes like that, which is why that particular example was obviously bullshit (and the friend said as much to his sister). good therapists validate feelings but also challenge their patients as well.

mine for instance made me feel that it was valid that I was upset with my folks for constantly coming to me for money and helped me establish a plan to confront them about it, but also felt that I mishandled something at work that I was complaining about and got me to realize that.

I did have one therapist who essentially seemed to say everything I did was fine but that's why I stopped going. too agreeable with the actions I said I was taking, zero challenging, and i was like "obviously I don't have it all figured out, that's why I'm here!".

xp I actually broke it off with my therapist for a deeply inappropriate comment, so useless sample size but can and does happen

boooooo. wanker. male, female or other.

and deeply unprofessional right? don’t get me started on being able to assess the profession as a potential customer.

well I haven’t gone back to one since so yeah, just a bit!

xpost an old friend of mine had a therapist a few years ago who mentioned in passing during a session that her roommate had burned down her apartment, then called him later that night and asked him to borrow a significant amount of money to secure somewhere to stay.

(which, obviously one would feel empathy in that situation, but very inappropriate reason to contact a patient)

20 odd years ago, I used to work in a small manufacturing shop with a woodworker/craftsman boss, an old NY Jew who was obsessed with therapy (he hated his mother)... in fact he'd moved out with a whole crew of like-minded therapy devotees, almost a small cult, that settled on the coast in Northern California in the late 1960s, near Bolinas. I'm not sure what 'school' of therapy they were into, but I gathered there was a lot of yelling and confrontation, 'let it all out' type shit, in hours long group sessions

Anyway, he tried to interject some of this into our team meetings... "That's my truth - you can have your truth, but this is mine and I need you to acknowledge it" etc. He even talked about hiring a therapist to come in and work with us all, a bunch of alcoholic 20-something miscreants.. "Andy, that comment made me verrry uncommfftable, and I want you to acknowledge as much." He was a cool dude overall and a hell of a woodworker but we just wanted to get paid and go get drunk

I think a lot of people who want “therapy” just want someone they can talk shit about other people at!

therapy devotees ... Northern California in the late 1960s ... a lot of yelling and confrontation ... hours long group sessions

danger! danger!

There's a podcast on Synanon that I want to check out (with Robert Downey Jr.?)... checks all these boxes lol

To the broader point of therapy speak in new religions or cults (Scientology, Nxivm, etc.)... that shared jargon allows you to pull the faithful closer, in the sense that WE have a secret knowledge that others don't know.. while simultaneously pushing away skeptics or former friends/family, who don't know what the hell you're talking about

Feel like this kind of thing maybe should be between people and their…um, therapist…and bringing to the workplace is problematic for the obvious reasons stated.

I heard somewhere that San Francisco's Cafe Gratitude (a repulsively positive vegan restaurant) would force new employees to attend Landmark Forum seminars, the descendant of EST

Social media has done a great deal to spread and degrade therapy speak, that way that any term or jargon that escapes academia or another specialized context will jump the wall and start getting misapplied by a lot of people online who are using it more out of a sense of vibes than actually understanding.

I see a lot of therapy speak get used in activist spaces and it drives me up the fucking wall. Shit that makes sense in a therapeutic private clinical setting gets weaponized and wielded for clout.

It’s totally fine to talk shit about other people in therapy, for many people it may the first time they’ve felt safe expressing “negative” thoughts about others.

Btw thanks gyac, I’ve never heard of Bancroft before - I’ve just downloaded the book that quote’s from.

(Sorry many xposts)

My buddy's 14 year old always talks of being 'triggered'... they'll ask him to clean his room, and he'll reply that they just triggered him... kind of a catch-all for 'annoyed'

XPs you’re welcome. It’s pretty old but the author still gets absolute hate for it from the manosophere even though it came out preinternet.

Have to go away from this thread for a bit, but the intent for using any of these kind of words should be to help people talk abou their lives in a meaningful way and heal from trauma, not to be yet another instance of being controlled etc.

yeah good point chuck

Yeah, meant to say Chuck otm.

people perpetrating abuse claiming to be "the real victim" is just what abusers _do_. why wouldn't someone perpetrating abuse do that? it works. the term "abuser" itself is an essentializing label, making the problem the _person_ and not the _behavior_. i'd argue that in many cases, someone perpetrating abuse has far more to gain by throwing around terms like "abuser" than the person who's being victimized by the behavior. if you're not judging the behavior at all, but the person, people tend to introduce... evidence that goes to character, evidence that has no real bearing on the behavior in question. but he directed _chinatown_! but he's really, really funny! and so on, and so forth. i don't know that there's _any_ possible response to accusations of abuse aside from social death. it doesn't allow for reconciliation or de-escalation or anything of the sort.

which, in turn, means that instances of inappropriate behavior that _don't_ merit the harshes possible judgement are ignored or overlooked. somebody does something that's not egregiously awful but is certainly not _good_ and one dismisses it as a "mistake" and doesn't talk about it, and then one finds out that that person has done it to twelve other people and none of them have talked to each other, and the fucked up thing is that person isn't even doing that shit _on purpose_. nobody ever taught them it was wrong. they grew up abused and fucked up and they know the fucked up shit they went through isn't _normal_ or _healthy_ but that doesn't mean they know what _is_ normal and healthy.

but at that point what the fuck do you do? they've done it to thirteen fucking people. just sending someone off to a fucking workshop is a grossly inadequate response to something like that.

of course all of this is all _completely theoretical_ and is not at all something i have had to deal with directly in my everyday life.

re: expressing negative thoughts in therapy - oh my GOD this is so essential to my daily life. like i've said elsewhere, a lot of what i struggle with is having a surfeit of rage and no healthy way to express it. most weeks lately i just rant angrily at my therapist about all of the things it's not safe for me to say to anybody else. of course that's not actually therapeutic, what would be actually be therapeutic would be to _resolve_ and _process_ the anger, but one hour a week isn't _close_ to enough time for me to do that. so i shout and i'm cruel and vicious and vitriolic and say all the things i think but bury deep inside and it lightens the load a little bit. temporarily.

How do we feel about this stuff

PS: Someone reached out and asked for an example of how you can respond to someone if you don’t have the space to support them.

I offered this template: pic.twitter.com/lCzDl60Igy

— Melissa A. Fabello, PhD (@fyeahmfabello) November 19, 2019

in a crisis, you triage. try to help everybody and you wind up helping nobody. when you triage, you determine how many people you are capable of helping, you choose which ones to help, and you help them. and you hope the ones you don't help can get help somewhere else. and if they don't, you work really, really hard to not blame yourself.

a _lot_ of people, both personally and professionally, have decided that i am not one of the ones they are going to spend their time and energy helping. i don't blame any of them. it's not the fault of _any of them_ that i am not getting the help i need. the problem is the _systemic denial of resources_ to people in need of mental health treatment, and to displace that blame on individuals who are trying to enforce healthy boundaries is unfair and unjust.

yes, that's right. the real problem is capitalism.

@ caek, I’ve never had a good experience expressing a boundary with somebody who is crisising, if my (seemingly limitless) capacity for doling out emotional support ever does approach the “I’m too exhausted” point I typically just stop responding

I did reach that point with a friend, once. They texted me to ask how I was doing and I was feeling really low about x and y and he just wrote back “god you’re still on about that? how boring” and that… was actually really effective. Definitely a more Landmark-style response haha. It worked tho!

@ Kate, it has been my experience that with a certain degree of consistency, individuals who are going online and posting “educational” posts about what DARVO is are actually the aggressors the dynamic they’re referring to. It’s.. sad and comical. Person one says “so-and-so was abusive etc etc” in an online post, person two says “person one has been bothering me ever since I broke up with them and it’s now harassment and I don’t know what to do”, person one says “omg DARVO much” and, well…

@caek now what i _will_ say as an add-on to that is that my therapist was literally taught in school that she should refuse to treat people with my particular diagnosis, because people with that diagnosis are at an extremely high risk of suicide. that _is_ something i strenuously object to, because it's essentializing - it's treating me not as a person, but as a diagnosis. that's not a moral or ethical form of triage, i don't believe.

Also @ Kate, the usage of the term “abuser” is in my view deliberately deployed as an essentialist gambit, to maximize the possibility for fast and furious social blacklisting, it’s an effective rallying cry to affect an act of mobbing.

Idk how I feel about it. Some people are abusers and should be outed as such. I generally feel, across the board, that terms like “abuser” are over-applied in certain scnenarios… but this feeling in me could also be a response to the fact that when I read what other people are terming as “abuse”, and I think of what this ex or that shithead did to me (without repercussions), I’m like… huh.

I mean, I was in a relationship with a dude who was abusive to me. I hate thinking of him as “my abuser”. It just feels so cookie cutter and makes me feel like I’m attempting to simplify the complicated feelings I feel about having been abused by him. I don’t want to see him cancelled, or harmed, or anything like that. Nor do I want an apology, I don’t think? What I want, in truth, is for the abuse to have never occurred. I want for it to have never happened. Barring that impossibility, I want to heal and forget, I guess.

I heard somewhere that San Francisco's Cafe Gratitude (a repulsively positive vegan restaurant) would force new employees to attend Landmark Forum seminars, the descendant of EST

― Andy the Grasshopper, Tuesday, July 11, 2023 3:55 PM (yesterday

there was a feature length article about this in the East Bay Express or SF Weekly (I forget which) -- they had a Berkeley location as well, and at the time, they had a spot in the grocery store that is now owned by Amazon in Oakland. Back in the 90s, I worked for a radio production company in SF, and the boss was a Landmark devotee, and he had a personal coach, and we had occasional meetings with him. There was lots of talk about empowerment and "making someone wrong" (that is a bad thing). Some of the stuff really was not that different from non-violent communication type skills tbh. My main memory was going to a meeting where we had to go around the table and say what would make us feel empowered at the company, and I said, "a raise."

I might have posted about this years ago, I forget, but I ate at Cafe Gratitude once, with my parents, because my mom had read some nice article about the food. And the menu items were all "I am (feel-good verb)" ... which reminded me of Fight Club where Ed Norton says, "I am Jack's distended colon" and "I am ...(various other parts of Jack's body)" ... and to this day, I associate Cafe Gratitude menu items with Ed Norton and Jack's body parts.

also Landmark were notorious pen thieves when I worked A/V at the SF Hotel they would rent for meetings ... the flipchart markers. They stole the flipchart markers and then lied about it. That was not very empowering.

I do wonder how therapy was impacted during the pandemic - people doing virtual sessions who needed to talk about things that members of their household did but didn't feel comfortable opening up because they were in the other room/might hear. im sure not every housemate was amenable to "can you leave the house or put noise-canceling headphones on for 45 minutes?"

fgti - i really appreciate the contributions you've made to this thread, i think it's really important for you to be able to say what you're saying

idk if it's a good idea for me to do this or not, but i do feel like, this morning, talking personally about my experience with abuse. not comprehensively, because my experience is unfortunately _extensive_ (and a large part of the reason i'm so fucked up lately), but a little bit.

with me and my ex... i did do emotionally abusive things to her. i feel like it's super important for me to say, super important for me to say in _public_ and take _public accountability for_, but boy, the way people treat me when i say that, it's _rough_.

if people want to essentialize me as a Bad Person and not talk to me, i _understand_ that, i feel like people have the _right_ to do that, even though it hurts like hell. it's not the only issue, though. because a lot of times people who don't do that, they essentialize me as a Good Person and they excuse or deny what i did. i hate that so, so much. what i did was wrong, and it is wrong, i believe, to excuse or deny that truth. i'm under so, so much pressure to minimize or deny what i did.

---

why did i do it? because i thought that was _normal_. because i grew up being severely emotionally abused and i genuinely didn't know it wasn't ok to do what i did. now that i know it's not normal and not ok, i'm not going to fucking do it! but it doesn't change the fact that i did it.

one of the hardest things is that a lot of people just _don't know what abuse is_. it's not clear-cut! a lot of times it's really ambiguous. the first time my ex and i had sex, i remember that i had told her that i didn't want to have sex with her, i remember not wanting to have sex with her, and i remember having sex with her anyway. well, she doesn't remember it like that. what was i going to do? accuse her of "gaslighting" me? that's what she accused me, whenever i said anything that didn't accord with her view of things, like when i suggested she might possibly benefit from therapy. she said i was gaslighting her, and that her only problem was me. i don't really have any way to argue with that. i'd try to talk and she'd escalate and make accusations against me.

the same way, she would routinely grope me without asking, in situations where i didn't feel comfortable, and when i told her that she would say "i can't help it, you're so hot", and because she was the _woman_ and i was the _man_ it was supposed to be a joke. i would say look i don't parse humor, when you say something i treat it as if you mean it, and she would just say "oh, well, you shouldn't do that", not in a _mean_ way but in a _charming_ way. she was a really charming, likable person. because when you're the man whenever someone touches you, well, it can't be wrong, because _men always want it_, right? doms aren't supposed safeword. men aren't supposed to say "no", that's not their role.

and i'm not saying any of this to say that she was a bad person. she thinks she's a bad person. that's what she was raised to believe. that's something else she'd say all the time, if i pushed her about her groping me further, she'd say "i'm not a good person". she is, in fact, a good person, i will insist upon that to my dying day, and she _never believed_ me when i said that. and because she wasn't a good person, it was ok for her to do bad things to me. because i wasn't a good person either.

---

because that's the other thing, if i'm the Abuser i can't possibly be abused, particularly not by the person who's designated as my Victim. i left _her_. she didn't leave me. and i left her because she was abusing me. it took me a long time to recognize that. my friends kept telling me, hey, this isn't good, this isn't a healthy relationship, and i knew it wasn't. because a lot of my friends _were_ abused, _did_ experience abuse, and i could see that pretty clearly. i once had to explain to a (now former) friend of mine, an intelligent and street-smart person, that she had in fact been sexually assaulted. having to do that fucked me up a lot and that's one of the big reasons she's a _former_ friend of mine. see, it's different when it's _us_ it's happening to. so when i said "oh they don't understand, they don't know her, they don't know the _context_", i'd heard my friends cape for their abusers that way. when i said "but she loves me", i know every fucking abuse victim says that, every abuse victim makes that excuse, and it didn't stop me from thinking and feeling that.

the only way i can love myself is by taking the care and love i give towards others and extending it to myself. and when i spend time around other people who hurt me... it's hard for me to love myself. and when i don't love myself, it's easier for me to treat other badly, and to say you know, of course i do those things, i'm a Bad Person. just like my ex said to me.

and it goes beyond that, too. i go on a couple of dates with someone who's never been in a healthy relationship in her life, who's been through some really fucked up shit, and i break up with her and she spends hours talking to all of my friends trying to "process" her "trauma" and she hears that i admit to being an abuser and all of the sudden she says oh, wait, that's why i feel bad, she abused me. because when all you know is abuse, it's hard to tell what's abuse and what isn't. it's not _deliberate_, it's not _malicious_, that she believed that about me (and she doesn't now, and she apparently believes has no responsibility for having made false accusations about me, because she didn't _mean it_), and i mean, i do take accusations of abuse seriously.

i believe that, when someone makes an accusation of abuse, you believe them, and that was really hard for me in this case because i did not, in fact, abuse her. so i'm like, i don't know, maybe i abused her and just didn't know it, didn't realize it, because that was what happened when i abused my ex-wife. that's plausible, that's a thing that's happened. in this case, though, this woman i went on a couple of dates with, she wasn't _lying_ but she was _mistaken_ in her belief that i had abused her. but that's not the narrative, that _can't_ be the narrative, because there's _so much_ pressure to dismiss victims, to accuse them of being malicious and lying, to put _them_ on trial.

---

here's the other thing, and both my ex-wife and this woman i went on a couple of dates with, they have this in common. they were ok with everything _until i broke up with them_. my ex-wife, she made excuses for me, if i said what i'd done was abuse she said, and she had a point, you don't get to determine that, i'm the victim here, i get to determine if it was abuse. well, once i left her, it was abuse. not before. her narrative, i heard this a lot, was that she was a _strong woman_ and she _respected herself_ and she would never take abuse. and if there's evidence pointing the other way, well, it's been taken out of context, or it didn't happen, or...

the other thing that happened, when i left my ex, was that she said i had a _responsibility_. i had an _obligation_, because i did bad things to her and she stayed with me, she stayed with me and _helped_ me and i did, in fact, get better. that was the problem. that was really the problem, when i transitioned, i got _better_, i started to respect myself, and the things she did to me stopped being ok to me, but to her, to her they weren't a problem. i was the problem. so i had a responsibility. after all she'd done for me, i had a responsibility to her.

and that's why i am _so insistent_ that people have the right to walk away from me. because i had the right to walk away from my ex. i didn't, i don't, _owe her_, it's not my _responsibility_ to put up with her abuse. i would have stayed, honestly. i would have stayed if she'd recognized that what she was doing was wrong, if she'd recognized it and was willing to take responsibility and work on it. but she didn't. she didn't until i was gone, and then she hated me and she hated herself for being "stupid" enough to ever love me. and that was the best twelve years of my life, right there.

---

so that's part of my experience with abuse. there's a lot more stuff i've seen, particularly in the past year, because portland is fucked up. it's really, really fucked up. and queer people, we're all traumatized we're all fucked up, especially this year. and for a long time i didn't want to admit any of this because i worried that it would reflect poorly on _the community_, that if i said this stuff people would say "see, the queers are Bad People who do Bad Things". i don't think, on reflection, that it was the right choice. i think it's wrong, _very_ wrong, to remain silent about this stuff for the sake of The Community.

---

oh, and while i'm confessing stuff, i'll also admit i'm a _huge_ pen thief. i have a giant purse and i have a bunch of pens in there but it's huge enough that i can never find anything in there, so whenever i see a pen, i assume i don't have one and i take it. like i'm not as bad as that guy from season 2 of "homicide: life on the street" but yeah i'm definitely a pen thief.

I do wonder how therapy was impacted during the pandemic - people doing virtual sessions who needed to talk about things that members of their household did but didn't feel comfortable opening up because they were in the other room/might hear. im sure not every housemate was amenable to "can you leave the house or put noise-canceling headphones on for 45 minutes?"

― linoleum gallagher (Neanderthal)

oh yeah it definitely impacted me. i'm doing therapy and i want to talk about the things my ex was doing but she's over there in the other room and she _says_ she's not listening but then when i say something she doesn't agree with in therapy she just _happened_ to overhear, she wasn't listening on _purpose_ or anything. i relied a lot on discord when it came to the abuse stuff.

and most therapists are still not interested in returning to in-person appointments

very thankful my new one is.

FWIW I don't think therapists would ever put people in boxes like "Bad Person" or "Good Person". I think that's the kind of thing people on Twitter who watch too much TV/shows like to do... AKA making complicated human beings into cartoon characters that are meant to assume these simplistic desginated roles in a dramatized narrative.

it's def something the neo-Puritan movement is doing. therapists definitely don't traffic in that, most of the ones I've had have been a bit more Carl Rogers in their approach though I don't know if *that* is necessarily always helpful. I did like when my therapist would tell me if I was being a shit.

and most therapists are still not interested in returning to in-person appointments

― Muad'Doob (Moodles)

i mean the truth is that it's always been really hard to handle situations of abuse. like in my instance i never learned the skills to take care of myself, my ex was my caretaker, and i knew that, and i knew there would be negative consequences for leaving. and so did my ex, because she told me over and over and over again that she _had_ to stay with me because if she wasn't there i'd kill myself within three months. and the reason she hates me and hates herself more than anything is that i didn't do that. so it was really, really hard for me to leave.

i was doing... for a while i was doing volunteer stuff, i'd listen to people who were questioning their gender and i wouldn't give any advice. i'd just listen and give them permission, tell them it was ok for them to be who they are, to do what they wanted to do. that they weren't "fake" or imposters, that every one of us feels that way, it's normal to feel that way. i guess a lot of people would accuse me of being a "groomer" for doing that, for daring to listen to these people with an open mind and not telling them what they _had_ to do.

anyway, i heard _so_ much fucked up shit doing that. child abuse is _endemic_. absolutely endemic, it's everywhere a lot of it is horrifying and people don't know what to do about it. i don't know what to do about it. my dad left my mom because she was abusive, and he couldn't take us, he couldn't take care of us, and he called CPS but what were CPS going to do? we were old enough that the damage had already been done, taking us away from an abusive home environment and putting us in a fucking orphanage wasn't going to help. it wasn't _severe_ enough to warrant that, the only remedies possible are the _extreme_ ones. if you don't do the egregious stuff, then you're just assumed to be a Good Enough Parent and a lot of these parents just _aren't_. they don't have the skills, they don't have the support. my mom certainly wasn't and isn't. and whenever i tried to tell my mom that what she was doing wasn't right, it was abusive, she'd just say "well if you don't like it maybe you can go stay with your _father_". gee i'm not sure why i have such a huge fear of abandonment.

Kate thanks for sharing all of that. I’ve been meaning to say the following, for days, but then my thoughts trail on and I delete the post before posting it, but I find your contributions to this thread and others invariably generous, and I feel extremely grateful to you for being able to read about your experiences

Part of the reason I’m resistant to “abuser”-speak is that.. I’ve actually been in a relationship or two? and I know that what people often term as “abuse” is sometimes just like “what happens in a relationship”?

My thirteen-year marriage, we absolutely abused each other, both of us. I was prone to “being overly persuasive” and then learning later, with a certain degree of surprise, that my husband never actually wanted that thing I’d thought we’d mutually agreed to have done. He, on his part, was prone to getting drunk and lashing out. We’re still super close, now, even six years after splitting up, we’ve talked about the ways we abused each other and it’s all fine, we’re like family to each other.

Meanwhile, I have a dear friend who I love— she one time showed up at a park and had just been dumped and was upset. She described the situation— she wanted to hang with this guy, he didn’t want to hang any more, she called him lame and sent him a “here’s what you’re missing” titty pic, he didn’t respond, the next day he said he didn’t want to see her. At the park, she was despondent. It was clear she’d just been dumped and that was that. But her language slipped so quickly into therapy speak— “he was gaslighting me” for not responding to my titty pic, “he’s abusing me” for creating a situation where we have to be exes while continuing to work in the same professional field, and so on.

I absolutely think “therapy speak” is useful and should be used but I also think it’s easy to abuse, I guess that’s what I’m trying to say

Really grateful for my current relationship, my boyfriend is shitty when he’s annoyed about something, affectionate when he’s happy, it’s really easy and good. My parents like him, my ex-husband likes him, and he’s really cute and an excellent driver and he reads a lot

I find your contributions to this thread and others invariably generous

otm, your generosity is appreciated Kate

I was prone to “being overly persuasive” and then learning later, with a certain degree of surprise, that my husband never actually wanted that thing I’d thought we’d mutually agreed to have done.

i've been on both sides of this, and it tanked probably the 2 closest friendships i've had in my life. i'm still estranged from these people, i think it was traumatic for everyone but i have probably taken it the hardest, and it's very painful still and totally shattered my confidence. i wouldn't say that i experienced abuse in either situation. obviously it's not up to me to judge whether i abused someone else. i would say that i expected too much and feel very guilty about it.

i actually thought about this a lot when the My Dinner with Andre poll came up, because in one of these relationships, i was the Andre and in the other i was the Wally.

the issue had been that i have a hard time saying "no", that i don't really know how to set boundaries, and i'm not really anymore but i used to really be willing to do unpleasant things for... approval? idk, just to make people (esp friends) "happy" with me. i would bend over backwards, but i would eventually resent it. so that's an indication to me of just not being good with setting boundaries. my one friend has a hard time taking "no" for answer, and probably doesn't recognize all that about me. and the other friend is much the same as me in this regard, and i kind of knew but also lost sight of it.

short version is, the Andre friend wants my very fingerprints on his soul, because he thinks i'm awesome and he loves the shit outta me. and he's so excited to be getting it that he doesn't realize he's stepping on my toes. and the long version of that is going to sound extremely familiar to the Wally friend. i don't see that as abuse. i don't think the guy was deliberately manipulating me, maybe it was a little coercive, but i think he would be horrified if he stepped back and saw it from this angle. tbc i don't know the details of your relationship, fgti, the thing you said sounds familiar, but it's vague and i don't wanna presume. i'm happy to disclose more, though it's probably unnecessary. fwiw *if* it's anything like my experience, it's actually harder to be on your side of the coin.

i think in both cases it was like someone who has a hard time saying "no" tries to express in a way that they're not totally comfortable and the other one is just hearing what they want to hear because they're overexcited, and actually when i put that way, yikes.

thanks y'all. that said i do want to... frame this, i'll say, that i'm saying these things primarily _for myself_, because it's important to me, and it's tremendously helpful to me, the appreciation i'm getting, that you're reading what i'm saying, and reading what i'm saying in good faith. it makes me feel like it's safe for me to make myself vulnerable in this way. it is a real challenge, and not just about something as intimate and personal as this, to talk about trauma. i haven't really had a place where i could do that and be listened to for a while, and because of my BPD, i don't always know if i'm being socially appropriate. so i really appreciate the positive feedback, it helps me a lot.

i just realized that i'm talking in textbook therapy speak, lol. i guess you know where i stand on _that_ issue.

ask a therapist

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/13/jonah-hill-texts-therapy-speak-therapist-boundaries

^pretty good, thanks

This is amazing - I am in awe at the deftness of turn of phrase as much as the analysis:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/jul/14/what-are-relationship-boundaries-jonah-hill

i'm.... not sure if you're being serious?

this is the second thread in the past day where i've seen these "parapraxis" people quoted approvingly i guess maybe i'm out of touch. i don't know where to begin with the idea that the very _concept_ of "boundaries" inherently reflects a selfish, new-age egocentrism with _no backing at all_ in freud

yeah i'm just going to go listen to "uncorrected personality traits" and assume that robyn hitchcock is being completely, err, straight-faced about everything in that song

i mean if the parapraxis people want to take freud seriously, that's cool, i'd genuinely _love_ to hear what the parapraxis people have to say about me. please. explain me through the lens of freud, i'm _fascinated_ by this concept.

sure, the problem isn't that jonah hill, whoever the hell he is, (and he's _definitely_ not alone in this) twisted and perverted a genuinely healthy concept into a new way to abuse people. the problem is the concept of _boundaries_ itself. i don't need boundaries. i mean never mind the fact that my parents were abusive and i never had a chance to learn how healthy human beings interact with each other, never mind that i went straight from my mother's fitful sleep to a ten-year marriage with someone who didn't have the chance to learn those boundaries either, that we had an incredibly codependent relationship (i mean, does freud even _mention_ codependence?), never mind in the year since i got out of that marriage person after person has walked away from me. i mean they're citing "boundaries" and clearly _they_ must be the ones who are being wrong, everybody around me is just like jonah hill, it has _nothing_ to do with me carrying around about twelve metric tons of explosive rage that i have no idea what to do with, "bpd" probably isn't a real thing, actually. what i _really_ need is to lie on a couch and talk about my mother to somebody who's read a bunch of 19th century books.

i kind of, actually, i don't want to do the logorrhea thing but i wanna get into some more mental illness nerd shit. because i am a nerd about this shit, my mental illness is fucking terrifying but i'm kind of an analytical person and it's fascinating to me to figure out what my brain is fucking doing and how i deal with it. like to me that's mindfulness, knowing... not necessarily knowing "why", that question is often irrelevant, but _what_ my brain is doing.

one of the things i have to deal with a lot is my ability to strongly believe things that aren't reasonable to believe. this is just part of the human brain really, everybody does that to some extent, but the problem is that i believe things that aren't reasonable to believe that _other people also don't believe_. like, if i believed the christian bible was the literal word of god, that's not true, but it wouldn't be a problem for me to believe that.

the other issue is that what's a "reasonable belief" has no bearing on its actual truth-value. not only am i a woman, but it's reasonable for me, in my particular time and place, to believe that i'm a woman. it _wasn't_ reasonable for me to believe that in 1996. and when you believe something that's true but nobody else believes, it... well, that's one of my cognitive biases, if i believe something it doesn't matter what other people believe, if i'm right i'm right.

which would be great if i was always right. the awkward thing is that i'm not always right, which is terribly embarrassing for me.

so one, it means that i do tend to trust other people over myself. even when it comes to my own senses. there's that old richard pryor bit, "who are you going to believe, you or your lying eyes", and it was a funny joke until _my eyes started lying to me_. this is something a lot of trans people (probably most trans people) go through. i would look in the mirror and see a man and everybody else would assure me that they see a beautiful woman. and i have to trust them rather than trust myself. even though i say over and over again that transition is about trusting myself over what other people want me to be. and i understand where that cognitive distortion comes from, it turns out a lot of people have this persistent self-image which doesn't... update itself as rapidly as our actual physical appearance changes. normally that's fine, but when one is dealing with gender...

and another upshot is, since my brain does lie to me, i kind of need external validation from other people. and it's kind of crucial for me to choose the right people to trust. i have a lot of anxiety about this. i'm in a constant state of existential doubt, because this _does_ make me vulnerable. particularly to narcissists. narcissists are _very very good_ at taking advantage of people who have low levels of self-trust. and all of this, i believe, kinds of leads into the well-known bpd phenomenon of "splitting", wherein someone is seen as either absolutely trustworthy or absolutely not trustworthy, with no in-between. because if someone is trustworthy _some_ of the time (like most people are), how am i supposed to know when to trust them and when not to trust them?

i don't actually have an answer to that question. if anybody has any ideas, let me know! i'm interested.

A way I personally deal with splitting tendencies is by accepting and existing in, like, grey states with interpersonal interaction. I don’t fully trust anyone, nor do I fully mistrust anyone— but I trust people to behave as history has shown they will behave.

I am very close friends with somebody who I believe to be a sociopath. He’s a lot of fun! I don’t look to him for any empathy, tho, or expect that our time spent talking/hanging out will in any way reflect my interests or topics about myself. I have learned to enjoy his company. I trust him to behave as he behaves.

yeah that's a tough thing for me to talk about to other people, i mean for instance being a narcissist doesn't automatically make you a _bad person_ or anything. malignant narcissist, sure, but most narcissists aren't actually malignant. these so-called "personality disorders", i mean, they're just ways of dealing with trauma. as long as you understand that a narcissist doesn't actually care about anybody else and accept that as one of their limitations, they're fine. the problem is that people have strong motive to hide their motivations. i genuinely believe that if there wasn't any stigma associated with narcissism those fuckers would be shouting it from the fucking rooftops. but as it is, generally people who will tell you they're narcissists aren't and just have really low self-esteem.

This is amazing - I am in awe at the deftness of turn of phrase as much as the analysis:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/jul/14/what-are-relationship-boundaries-jonah-hill

― Dr Drudge (Bob Six), Friday, July 14, 2023 2:11 AM (seventeen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i kinda needed to read this tbh

yeah, that was great.

like to me that's mindfulness, knowing... not necessarily knowing "why", that question is often irrelevant, but _what_ my brain is doing.

i feel this.

but the problem is that i believe things that aren't reasonable to believe that _other people also don't believe_

heh, if you wanna know about my experience, paint a face on everything you see.

make the mouth look kinda like this:
https://cdn1.vectorstock.com/i/1000x1000/17/50/cartoon-smile-mouth-lips-with-teeth-and-tongue-vector-24231750.jpg

make the eyes say "we love you!!"

where's the problem again?

anyhow, great post Kate, i have stuff to say about and wondering if it would it be cool to start a thread called "personality disorders" or something and pick it up over there?

i'm very unfussy about keeping things on topic! just thinking it might be good to have a dedicated thread.

btw good thread Neanderthal :)

“Healthy boundaries tend to be broader, more flexible, inclusive and respectful and will include propositions such as gratitude, open communication, space and honesty,” she says. “I would also suggest that they are, above all, requests and not demands.”

This makes me feel like I don't understand the word at all. I thought a boundary -- I would have thought almost by definition -- is a line you are insisting not be crossed. Like, "don't call me stupid." A demand, not a request. I guess I don't actually know what it means in therapy. Maybe it means something more like "maintaining an individual & autonomous identity separate from the partner and not melting entirely into the relationship"?

This makes me feel like I don't understand the word at all. I thought a boundary -- I would have thought almost by definition -- is a line you are insisting not be crossed. Like, "don't call me stupid." A demand, not a request. I guess I don't actually know what it means in therapy. Maybe it means something more like "maintaining an individual & autonomous identity separate from the partner and not melting entirely into the relationship"?

― Guayaquil (eephus!)

it's kind of a common way of framing boundaries, and for me, that's not how i look at it. i grew up, i guess one of the biggest metaphors for boundaries i know is pink floyd's _the wall_, where it's done in this very absolute sense. that's a strong temptation i have, to view boundaries in those terms.

but healthy boundaries are not like that at all. i view them as being more like a cell membrane, if y'all have had high school biology (and high school biology is, i will say, a gross oversimplification, at least going by what they taught me about chromosomes). so for instance, and this is the well i keep going to because lived experience, if you meet a trans woman and you start asking her questions about her genitals, that's not engaging in healthy boundaries. there are situations where that's a legitimate question, though. like, say you're a doctor and you gotta decide whether or not you need to screen for testicular cancer. knowing whether or not your patient has testicles is important information.

a lot of this... to me a lot of this is my job, i work in healthcare compliance, i've spent a _long_ time learning about hipaa and the "minimum necessary" rule. to me the "minimum necessary" rule is... to me that's a form of healthy boundaries that happens to be codified into united states law. when are disclosures authorized? when is it acceptable to collect this information?

i'm actually going to get really nerdy about this, because one of the big sea changes in healthcare data analysis is around what's known as "social determinants of health". which is to say, conditions that aren't technically medical conditions but have a strong correlation with one's overall health condition. does someone have stable housing? does someone have access to transportation? and the intent of that is _not_ to stigmatize, correlation isn't the same as causation. it's not somebody's fault if they can't get transportation and miss a lot of medical appointments, but that _is_ a situation the healthcare system can and should take steps to... ameliorate the effects of.

the sea change here is the increasing understanding that things like race, gender identity and sexual orientation, these are social determinants of health. when you're providing healthcare, when you're looking to provide the best possible care in terms of measurable outcomes, taking this information into account _measurably improves outcomes_.

but that's not how i was raised, that's not how a lot of people were raised, and for a lot of people, your doctor asks you this stuff and it _is_ optional. it's an individual decision, people do have a right to set boundaries around that and in practice most people do. most people won't disclose that information to their providers. and i do disclose that information. not only do i do that, when i'm looking for care, i specifically ask for queer providers, if possible trans providers (and in portland it _is_ possible sometimes, anywhere else it'd be unlikely), because these are people who are better able to understand my healthcare needs and provide better care.

for some people telling everybody the second they meet someone that they're trans is, for them that's not healthy boundaries, it's not other people's right to know, but for me, for me i choose to talk about being trans, i go so far as to choose to talk about my genitals, even if people don't ask, even though it is really uncomfortable for me to talk about private things like that, or at least it used to be until i decided i would just start doing that all the time. because my doing that means people are less ignorant, and it's not my responsibility to do that, but it's something i'm capable of doing and it's something i actively want to do.

that, to me, are some of the ways boundaries work in practice.

I once heard somebody say that he had originally thought of boundaries in the obvious way but now he thought of them more as a sort of armor, which seemed very useful to me.

i think that's a good framing, though it's not one i'd use myself because it reminds me too much of ephesians 6:10-18

still. i guess there's no reason one _can't_ be a christian and have a healthy approach to boundaries.

“Manziel faced a misdemeanor assault charge after being accused of hitting and threatening his then-girlfriend in January 2016. His lawyers reached an agreement with officials to dismiss the charge upon set conditions.

The Browns cut Manziel in March 2016.

Manziel said in the documentary, according to multiple reports, that he was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder, that he refused to enter rehab and that he began self-sabotaging, going on a "$5 million bender" before attempting to end his life.”

WGAS

I have appreciated the many thoughtful posts on this thread, which inspired me to finally read this https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/C/Conflict-Is-Not-Abuse - Conflict is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman. I’m halfway through and it’s given me a lot to think about vis-a-vis “therapy speak” type dynamics

Haven’t reread this thread but was just thinking that while of course certain terminology can be very useful there is also inevitably an element of “it’s okay when I do it but…”

“it’s okay when I do it but…”

AKA the ILX mantra

xxp that looks good. i myself need to be better about accepting criticism and not weaponizing whatever shit i have going on tbh.

Feel like the letter of the law in some circles is that you can say stuff about your own self but it is sometimes frowned upon to say it about others, especially to their face, but if the shoe fits...

fedderman needs to shut the fuck up about people attacking him for his “mental health issues” or whatever the fuck he’s on about