Or in the case of non-pill tactics, change your thought patterns, so you accept that “it’s always been like this throughout history” and “focus on what’s in your control.” 🫠

Interesting, thanks for your perspective on it.

I def feel that pull at times. Even though I think my therapist genuinely means well and wants for me to get my needs met, even though they seem overall patient with my progress, the curve of it def seems bent toward “get back on track” and the track is the status quo.

It makes sense to me as therapy language, but some of it feels like it’s missing the mark on what I was talking about and where I’m coming from on this, which is unfortunately an experience I tend to see happen in therapy as well. It’s nothing personal and I emphasize over and over that I think my therapist means well (and I truly believe they do and I believe you mean well too). But there’s this thing I see therapists and/or those well-versed in therapy language do, where they come at something not with a tone of investigation, but a tone of what I can best describe in this moment as “gentle defensive individualism.” By this I mean, contrary to how they couch things in the language they use, the focus is not actually on the person they are talking to as a subjectively experiencing individual who can only be fully understood with in-depth investigation of their history, conditions, and quirks (and whose differences could be dangerous to the status quo). The focus is on an abstract representation of what healthy individual social behavior and thinking looks like, often through some kind of models containing “unhealthy” and “healthy” and then that is transplanted onto the current situation, whether it fits well or not. This is not a broad accusation that therapists aren’t ever doing investigation; they do and I’ve seen some of it firsthand. But I also see a fair amount of rushing to generalized conclusions in therapy language and in the way problems presented to a therapist get contextualized.

It may sound like I’m ignoring some of what you’re saying in the content of it, but the alternative I could think of would be to go through it beat by beat and I don’t think that would convey properly what is going on, as I see it. I also suspect that much of it would be me saying “I more or less agree, but that’s not really what I meant.” I will directly address one point though, that of abuse of power and the point of the role, and that’s to say that therapists cannot be unbiased no matter how hard they try to be and I think that needs to be acknowledged in the dynamic. You cannot compartmentalize your ideology and then act in a neutral way, outside of it. You might be able to act upon a different ideology, while compartmentalizing your real one, but it is still biased by ideology either way. Or to put it another way, no matter whether a therapist has any intent to abuse power, they are still furthering some kind of belief or framework about the world.

A person is putting their most vulnerable mental states in the therapist’s hands and the therapist is given a kind of power of influence over it, out of view of everyone else (unless the client shares their recollection of the session with others). The expectation, similar to an MD, is that the therapist will have expertise and solutions beyond the client’s understanding, which will help them live better. But if a therapist’s techniques are stuck in generalist modeling of the world born from a neoliberal, colonial framework of thinking, then the solutions will tend to be whatever is most aligned with that. I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume a connection there. I don’t think the therapist even necessarily needs to believe in it explicitly as concrete political ideology. If the tactics themselves are not neutral, then it matters little what the therapist personally believes; what matters more is what bias is carried in the tactics. The more important question, then, in my mind is the consideration of those tactics and what is behind them. So, there is the explicit promotion of ideology and then there is the implicit promotion of it, and it’s the implicit that is there no matter what, but that therapy language can sometimes obfuscate and which liberalism has a common practice of obfuscating more generally so that “we can all get along” (the contradictions swept under the rug).

Thanks for sharing it. Throughout reading it, I kept reviewing my experiences with therapy and comparing, going like, “Are they doing CBT? Oh no…” Best I can conclude, I don’t think they are as a forceful, streamlined practice, but they do seem to pull out elements of it like from a grab-bag of tools, or as a fallback when they don’t know what else to do with what I’ve said. The interesting thing though, is it got me thinking more about where the “pain points” are in therapy for me, for lack of a better phrase, and I think (I suppose unsurprisingly, if you consider the social tendencies of human beings) that I’m most happy at the end of sessions where I feel understood and supported, and most mixed or disturbed at the end of sessions where I feel misunderstood or like I have primarily been given a refresher on Mayo Clinic style descriptions of how I supposedly function and what I can do to fix it.

This line in particular from the article/essay stood out to me, so I took note of it:

As ever in psychology, qualitative phenemona are distorted to the point of destruction when forced to submit to some quantitative fetish.

So something like (I’m making this up as an example, not citing from actual anxiety measurement charts): an English language statement with a personal and subjective history behind it like “I feel anxiety when talking to other people” gets transformed into a +1 on a measurement for “anxiety disorder” and then if you get enough +'s, you get a diagnosis with anxiety disorder. This diagnosis is then treated as if it is identical to all other forms of anxiety (because it is now a neatly categorized and studied disorder), you get told it’s being perpetuated by all of the same sources (the “mind and body”, sources which are always internal… and this is a critical part, them being always internal makes them non-falsifiable and so easy to universalize across culture, background, etc., and pave over with a statistics-based aesthetic of empiricism), and can be “fixed” with the same generalized solutions (bring your thinking and behavior back in line with the status quo from wherever it has gone off to that is incompatible with it).

This is not to argue there isn’t any commonality in psychological struggle. There probably is a lot of commonality, at least within same cultures and conditions. But the particular problem form of clinical commonality I’m focusing on, which relates to what the article is talking about in my interpretation of it, is a commonality developed out of a very distorted and biased lens, and one which puts on a pretense of not being a distorted and biased lens, and that presents major problems.

I also feel the pressure of therapy not to make things better, but to provide me with enough behavioral psychology reprogramming that I can numb myself to the pain rather than again, actually dealing with the root causes that keep reproducing these outcomes.

I think I know what you mean here. Not to say my experience is one of therapists never trying to get me to do anything different (there is that too, in my experience) but there is also a certain degree of “fix the thought patterns” stuff that I hear, which seems more about “bearing the cross” than dealing with the sources of suffering directly. Not that it’s presented to me as religious in my case, but it does remind me in this moment of the Christian and Catholic connotations to do with suffering.