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).