As someone with a very serious psychosocial disability, I am fascinated by how able people characterize therapy.
For a lot of straight dude creatives, this shows when they write therapy as some kind of esoteric chess mindgame where two men throw weird platitudes and psychobabble (what we used to call therapyspeak in god's america) back and forth. The therapist tries to "get in the head" of the patient and the patient is like aha but I can outsmart therapy with my powerful mind. This is ridiculous and not how therapy actually works, but it bespeaks a profound insecurity about being perceived by a qualified other, of being the dumb one in a room and also the subject of conversation at the same time, and maybe more importantly a fear of being labelled as disabled in some way.
Interesting!
But I'm more interested in people who say things like,
Therapy is great! I recommend it to everybody! It can be so useful to work out which relationships are beneficial to you and which ones are like a weight around your neck!
And it's like, oh! Interesting. It's interesting that "working out who to cut off socially and who to keep around" is so much of what you think therapy is as a universal experience that it's the first thing that comes to mind when you recommend it.
No no no I'm not saying you're a bad person or anything or that you're the toxic one or whatever, it's just, hm, interesting. Interesting that it's this and not, "working out how to manage stress" or "working out how to handle irrational anxieties." It's the cutting people off one.
That's just, well, it's really interesting. Y'know?
And look far be it from me to judge or stigmatize therapy or whatever, frankly I am just endlessly fascinated by what disability shit becomes when it is identified as being of benefit to normals and is thus adapted to their needs and interests. "Therapy" in the American context is this intentionally extremely vague construct that more or less just means spending money to talk to someone "about whatever," and not a series of dubious pseudomedical treatments for scientifically and medically complex neurological conditions that interact with legal constructs in strange and sometimes ridiculous ways, ala schizophrenia or bipolar.
What does "therapy" become when the subject is a weird white suburbanite who thinks that eating kale and doing yoga are the pathway to "health?"
