being intimately involved with the UK left

D

DannyL

Wild Horses
shakahislop said:
i've never had therapy but pretty much everyone in the US above a certain level of income seems to. probably that's common knowledge. it's a very therapised culture as a result. not surprised that the language that US therapists are presumably trained in has spilled out into how people talk about everyday life. every now and then i end up in conversations where i basically don't understand what we're talking about because there's a key piece of vocabulary that I don't know.

i think that on a large scale something is happening to language; specifically something is going on where language meets the internet. some of these words, like the therapy speak, feel vague but have a fake preciseness to them. its medicalised terminology too. everything about what it's like to be human explained through a kind of medical terminology.

generally it is one thing i like about the US though, that a comparatively large proportion of the population have some kind of insight into their own emotion
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shakahislop said:
i've never had therapy but pretty much everyone in the US above a certain level of income seems to. probably that's common knowledge. it's a very therapised culture as a result. not surprised that the language that US therapists are presumably trained in has spilled out into how people talk about everyday life. every now and then i end up in conversations where i basically don't understand what we're talking about because there's a key piece of vocabulary that I don't know.

i think that on a large scale something is happening to language; specifically something is going on where language meets the internet. some of these words, like the therapy speak, feel vague but have a fake preciseness to them. its medicalised terminology too. everything about what it's like to be human explained through a kind of medical terminology.

generally it is one thing i like about the US though, that a comparatively large proportion of the population have some kind of insight into their own emotions
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Interesting point about language there, and I don't deny the prevalence of therapy may have an affect on the wider culture.

But in terms of practicing as a therapist, you avoid that shit like the plague - one of the things that makes it curative is your ability to have real emotional contact with people and those kinda pop cultural cliches just get in the way, hugely.
 
D

DannyL

Wild Horses
Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
Based on what Beiser and Linebaugh are saying, this could be more of a thing than I imagined. Guess it just doesn't happen in the circles I traffic through.
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
Clinamenic said:
From my perspective, therapy still has a bit of a residual stigma, given this American mythos of everyone being able to handle everything themselves, but at least in liberal circles this stigma seems to have largely diminished as part of this trend of wellness and mental health awareness. That is, I don’t get the sense that people view it as a status thing, but some liberals/bohemians may view someone not getting therapy as a refusal to confront whatever psychological difficulties they have - I just wouldn’t go as far as to call it a status thing, don’t think it’s that pronounced.
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People seem to have forgotten that the reason they begin therapy in the first place is to become strong again and stop the therapy. Instead they are too happy to let the therapeutic industry (Big Therapy) mire them in a self-regarding permanent weakness. It's like any footballer who has ever had an injury toting their plaster casts for the rest of their career clogging up the subs bench and hungrily garnering sympathetic messages scrawled in permanent marker from their clueless enablers in the stands.

Odd that people tend to have weekly therapy sessions just as they used to attend church weeklily.

Don't know what's happening with confessions though: most of the old sins are just great now and anything you actually have done wrong no-one's going to forgive you ever.
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
Clinamenic said:
Yeah not something everyone can afford, or something everyone would even realize the value in, but I just haven't experienced people leveraging it as a status signifier. I think mature people recognize the self-awareness required for one to admit that they need psychological help (assuming they can afford it), but I also suspect this maturity separates these people from those who would tend to leverage such stuff as vacuous status indicators, you know?

I definitely think it does indicate maturity, and a sort of courage to work on yourself, with or without the help of others, and people who appreciate this sort of maturity may consider it a good characteristic in others, but I generally don't think this tends to happen in a statusy/competitive way. Although I'm sure some people do. Anyway, I'm just saying what I've experienced. Therapy definitely seems more normalized now than I'd imagine it was a couple decades ago.
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'Self-awareness' is the problem. Too many people sinking in endless rumination which has been shown to lead to anxiety, which is spiralling out of control. Research also shows that the more 'enlightened' one is, the less rumination occurs, the less one self-regards, and the less of a sense of self one has. In Jeffery Martin's The Finders he describes people on the umpteenth of enlightenment who really don't give a shit and are loving it. His course of the same name claims unprecedented gains on previously intractable psychological measures. But be warned you may become so easy-going that you can't be bothered to breathe any more.
 
versh

versh

Well-known member
ghost of beiser said:
(If this all sounds implausible and possibly comic—someone I met at a party a year or two back was later revealed to be a race faker—this person had spent seven years pretending to be half japanese, which raised interesting ontological questions about their concurrent claim to be nonbinary.)
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Gus?
 
Murphy

Murphy

cat malogen
mixed_biscuits said:
People seem to have forgotten that the reason they begin therapy in the first place is to become strong again and stop the therapy. Instead they are too happy to let the therapeutic industry (Big Therapy) mire them in a self-regarding permanent weakness. It's like any footballer who has ever had an injury toting their plaster casts for the rest of their career clogging up the subs bench and hungrily garnering sympathetic messages scrawled in permanent marker from their clueless enablers in the stands.

Odd that people tend to have weekly therapy sessions just as they used to attend church weeklily.

Don't know what's happening with confessions though: most of the old sins are just great now and anything you actually have done wrong no-one's going to forgive you ever.
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No, you’re americanising, stay off Gab for a bit as it’s an active addiction

#weaklilly

Define Big Therapy in a British context without recourse to Covid or trans rights. Define strong without recourse to dependency. You really are a tragic cunt conflating the worst excesses of medicalisation with active peer support effecting positive change, to be expected overall
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
WashYourHands said:
No, you’re americanising, stay off Gab for a bit as it’s an active addiction

#weaklilly

Define Big Therapy in a British context without recourse to Covid or trans rights. Define strong without recourse to dependency. You really are a tragic cunt conflating the worst excesses of medicalisation with active peer support effecting positive change, to be expected overall
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I has not Gab; this is only from observing how common therapy is with certain groups of friends (not the Oxbridge elite, mind)...with clear contagion effects not only in ppl taking up therapy but also becoming therapists or quasi-therapists, eg life coaches.
 
Murphy

Murphy

cat malogen
the people who notice things syndrome strikes again

observational biases? oh no, heaven forbid does the sign of the cross
 
Murphy

Murphy

cat malogen
if you cannot separate or distinguish mild depression from acute, chronic and long term conditions where you can take your pick from anything, stfu already to use an Americanism

I see Dr Melfi, you see Dr Milfy
 
shakahislop

shakahislop

Well-known member
mixed_biscuits said:
I has not Gab; this is only from observing how common therapy is with certain groups of friends (not the Oxbridge elite, mind)...with clear contagion effects not only in ppl taking up therapy but also becoming therapists or quasi-therapists, eg life coaches.
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Oxbridge (well, Oxford anyway) has a big US influence I think. At least there always seems to be a lot of Americans about. Seems to be a vector for the US influence into the UK, coz the media etc is made of oxford people

It is possibly what you call a contagion effect, but a better way of putting it might be that people see that therapy is a good thing that's working for thier friends and copy that.
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
shakahislop said:
Oxbridge (well, Oxford anyway) has a big US influence I think. At least there always seems to be a lot of Americans about. Seems to be a vector for the US influence into the UK, coz the media etc is made of oxford people

It is possibly what you call a contagion effect, but a better way of putting it might be that people see that therapy is a good thing that's working for thier friends and copy that.
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The impression I get is that they're not actually finishing their therapy any time soon ie. they're becoming dependent
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
Excessive therapy may also be reducing the expectation that friends be open to conversations on serious, affecting matters.
 
shakahislop

shakahislop

Well-known member
mixed_biscuits said:
Excessive therapy may also be reducing the expectation that friends be open to conversations on serious, affecting matters.
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Has this happened to you in real life? I do know what you mean, the replacement of stuff that hapened in a social environment being moved over to a privatized and professional one.
 
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