This is mostly going off the parts about social isolation and uncontrolled external stimuli, but my most anti-millennial and under opinion (I'm 34) is that people need to nut the fuck up and get over their phone aversion--speaking on the phone, I mean--so I can call my damn friends on the many occasions when our lives are too busy or we live across town from one another and can't always hang out irl. I was posting about it and a friend commented that they worried about calling without arranging a time first in case they were putting the kids to bed or in the middle of work, and like a) if it's poor timing that person can just not answer the phone and txt/call back later and b) my god, throughout virtually the entirety of human history we have shown up in person at each others' dwellings without prior warning, now we have to schedule a phonecall?? We should enjoy hearing from our friends!! And I know hyperconnectedness/isolation and overstimulation has made that hard, along with phonecalls from telemarketers and stalkers and welfare agencies and political parties (the last one isn't much of a thing in my country tho), but it's a thing to work through, not a limitation to build into one's life--nor should we act like it's better somehow to be constantly messaging and leaving each other on seen. Another friend suggested people with phonecall fear do exposure therapy with short scheduled calls from friends and then build up in terms of length and spontaneity, I might try wrangle it with some of my phone-averse friends cos otherwise we aren't able to build or sustain our connections as well as we could!
I agree with the argument of the essay. I am here to defend Lorde’s Solar Power. Unlike the other albums, she is not promoting isolation. She’s promoting life in community, with family and with nature. In her title track she describes her lonely winters being melted away when the sun comes out (“Can I kick it? Yeah! I can!”) “Mood Ring” is a satirical track on which she pokes fun at the notion that well being only comes from highly controlled environments (“we can get high but only if the win blows just right”). I think it fits in perfectly with the sentiment of your essay as I understood it: living with a degree of self control and open to the world around you.
Hello fellow Solar Power truther! Mood Ring, and Secrets from a Girl (Who's Seen it All) both came to mind for me as songs that actually fall in line with this piece's sentiment. "Welcome to sadness, the temperature is unbearable until you face it." People insulate themselves in their own "comfort" zone so hard that it eventually becomes unbearably uncomfortable. Like a pot of water starting to boil. Face the music, pick up the phone, touch grass, etc.
As a therapist, I agree with much of what you say. However, I think the issue is finding a balance in one's life, not that therapy is a substitute for external stimuli. And I know plenty of people who are suffering from the same sense of isolation and loneliness that set in during COVID and who haven't been able to bounce back since. I've been in therapy and analysis for many years, first for my own psychopathology, then to keep my side of the street swept up as I do this work myself. I think that even after all these years it's a luxury and a privilege to have someone who knows me better than anyone else on earth to shine a light on a blind spot I may not be aware of, but I also agree that when it's time for a patient to "fly" on their own, they should be supported in doing so. However the ending of a therapy is a special time that needs to be a collaborative endeavor and not a unilateral decision that may represent an avoidance. I think of it as a graduation when it's a "good" ending.
Personally I find the present cultural obsession with therapy rather absurd.
I do believe that in the future of a historical scope, this genre of healing will be researched by scientists and anthropologists, and perceived as a backwards phenomena, similar to the way we perceive now days health promoting practices from Medieval times - using leaches, afflicting blood-imposing wounds for ‘medical’ bloodshed - as well as enlightened ideas for curing disease from later periods - breathing fresh air, drinking sulfur mineral water at special spas, resting in a sanatorium at the Alps, staying in bed for months to recover from a nervous breakdown or sniffling salts for calming the nerves.
I have no doubt that this therapy extravaganza of ours is a cultural excess which, I hope, will eventually shrink to it’s realistic proportions.
In the meantime millions will continue to consume therapy as if it held a promise of salvation, a profound decoding of a seemingly trivial human psyche.
Herds of neurotic citizens will spend billions to find sublime and mysterious meaning in their common and unavoidable human limitations. Look, I know - Life is not easy, but sometimes there’s no other way but to face it with grace. Why does one think that the key to his neurosis, anxiety and shitty mood, will be solved by a rather mediocre individual, who in the best case has a Phd, never suffered from a mental condition, and statistically speaking - he therapist or she therapist, are not necessarily wise or have a deep natural understanding of the human condition. All this is common knowledge , so why, for Christ sake, unhappy humans keep hoping that the Therapist will save them from themselves?
Strangely enough, one cannot mention socially that he’s in a bad mood, or can’t get himself to take yoga class or feels that he’s a failure, or feels guilty for neglecting his old, sick mother, or can’t loose weight, without getting an immediate suggestion from everyone around - Therapy. There lays the great wisdom of the Oracle who will help you to live and to breath and to change your miserable self, into a problem solving, courageous, creative, goal oriented, artistic, confident and well adjusted member of society .
But well, who am I to bitch about cultural anomalies - sometimes each one of us might need someone nice to hold our hand for 200$ per hour.
I partially agree. Though I think, as you hinted at, there've always been Oracles and other forms of guides in developed societies. Whether rabbis, priests, or therapists. I think these are helpful components of a society most of the time. But when an entire culture sees them as the end-all-be-all solution to all problems, that becomes an issue.
it sounds like you have not been helped by therapy, or even worse, perhaps have been hurt by therapy. You certainly have a mistaken idea of what contemporary psychotherapy is all about, and your analogies comparing therapy to medieval medical practices is inaccurate and false. I know of no therapist, who hasn’t grappled with his or her own mental issues, and the objective with most therapy, except when dealing with florid psychosis, is to uncover unconscious beliefs that no longer serve us. When therapy can help one accept oneself, warts and all, and move from self acceptance to self appreciation, it doesn’t get much better than that.
I couldn’t agree more with Winnicot’s wisdom (I shall check on Guntrip, who I’m unfamiliar with). And I totally agree - of course one can not will power their way into sanity and calm . I can assure you that if I could see Winnicott on a weekly basis and discuss myself with him, I would get rid of my neurotic fears and fixations in no time and become the most balanced individual in town. The thing is that Winnicot alas is not around anymore to help me to save myself, and I’m afraid that most practitioners of the noble craft of psychotherapy are not equipped with the rather rare and particular skills which enables one to deal with such complex a thing like a human psyche. A talent is required in therapy as much as in the Arts, in poetry, in literature, in music and philosophy. And talent is a rare phenomena. Such is life.
It seems to me that you and I agree on the basic assumption that there’s pain and it can and should be helped. It’s just that my objection addresses the practical aspect of psychotherapy, which for whatever reasons has become advertised as an ultimate source of consolation. It just can’t be true, statistically speaking, that all this tenths of thousands of therapists, that are spread all over the place - from counceling in a reality TV shows to offering their services to teach how to raise children, how to manage conflicts in marriage, at work, in live, in sex, what to do with eating disorders, with suicide ideations, with breavment, with dead children, with bad mood with inferiority complex, with being miserable and with making others miserable, and so it goes till the end of ends. I mean WTF? Are we witnessing the new Renaissance?
I can go about this for hours, but I believe you get my point.
I live in a country in war. A disaster zone. People are dying every day, soldiers, some are 19 years old.
The quantities of therapies that are running around and offering their services all over the media is enormous. You know how it goes - people are anxious, some are broken, some loose hope for whatever future. And they all use therapy ( as much as they can afford). But as you can imagine - everyone is just getting more sad and more neurotic and more emotional, and still they believe that therapy will do the job promised. I don’t think that all those sentimental psychologists are cynical . The irony is that they want to help but the tragedy is that they believe that they can.Well, who can blame such sense of self importance?
I’m in for a priest, for Buddha, for a Rabbi, for great philosophers, for great books, for drugs, for suicide, for love, for friendship, for beauty and for fire.
I really appreciate the argument of this essay, especially as it pertains to accepting the messiness of living. I also think part of the issue with much therapy today is that a lot of people (therapists and patients alike) shy away from its relational elements. I feel like, ideally, therapy should encourage self-reflection and, as Patricia put it, the relinquishing of unconscious ideas that no longer serve us. But it also needs to be a process of relational externalization. It should allow us to live out new relationship experiences with the therapist (for instance, being accepted even when we express dissatisfaction with them) that may counteract assumptions (such as, people will leave us if we express dissatisfaction, hence we must “contain ourselves”) that give rise to the difficulties which brought us there to begin with. In other words, the inward-looking part of therapy is only one element of it. Therapy can heal when it teaches us, through experience, that it’s okay to be messy!
I teach in a graduate social work program where roughly 20% of students are there to develop community organizing skills (my wheelhouse), 20% are there to develop research skills to examine effective community programs, and about 60% are there to become therapists-- and the majority of these aspiring therapists aim to run their own private practice (as opposed to, say, providing therapy through a service agency to survivors of violence or other trauma).
All students, regardless of their career goals, are required to take a few courses to develop basic policy and advocacy literacy. The rationale is that yes, therapists DO need to understand the sociopolitical context their clients inhabit to better understand how material conditions impact the mental health of human beings.
I am continuously flabbergasted at the aspiring therapists in my classes who say things like "this policy stuff doesn't apply to me, I just want to be a therapist," or the performative types who cherry-pick and decontextualize Audre Lorde quotes about "self-care" and "the master's tools" to justify their belief that engaging with policy and advocacy is counter to their ideas of "healing."
Yet paradoxically, these are often the same students who express *outrage* when our government does heinous things. It's like they observe the *effects* of external forces, but sincerely don't comprehend what it takes to change them (Relationship-building! Community organzing!
Strategy! Actually *showing up* to the townhall meeting and not just posting about it!).
I have wondered if our age of therapy-speak has actually driven such young people to pursue careers in therapy because it has led them to sincerely believe that internal work and navel-gazing = liberation.
I have broken up with two new therapists in the last month and the feeling of being stuck in this endless cycle of rumination (or told repeatedly to do CBT worksheets and mindfulness) is a big part of it. I keep hearing about these deeply meaningful, transcendent therapy experiences but at this point after doing therapy on and off for years I feel really skeptical. But I still hope I can find that and it works the way people says it does.
I go through cycles with this — it’s a conclusion I’ve reached and later reneged multiple times. Where I’m at currently is: Go to therapy because the consistency and familiarity will help if it becomes important later; if it feels unnecessary in the meantime, that just means things are going well.
“Stimuli that cannot be controlled” — that sounds like a category that encompasses everything :)
Love this essay and totally agree but those lyrics in Flowers are demonstrating more of a post-divorce, self empowerment message than an individualistic, antisocial one. Great as always!
I also think we (humankind) need to be more accepting of messiness for this externalization to happen. Often people draw into themselves when they’re feeling mentally unwell because they fear judgement or inconveniencing others. No more “save that for therapy”! Let’s be weird and too much and utterly human to each other instead!
thanks! i agree it's a matter of degree. psychoanalysis definitely helped save my life! i am definitely not against therapy at all. i just think as a culture we have begun to see introspection as the end goal rather than as the process through which you achieve a different end goal of being a capable person in the real world
This is mostly going off the parts about social isolation and uncontrolled external stimuli, but my most anti-millennial and under opinion (I'm 34) is that people need to nut the fuck up and get over their phone aversion--speaking on the phone, I mean--so I can call my damn friends on the many occasions when our lives are too busy or we live across town from one another and can't always hang out irl. I was posting about it and a friend commented that they worried about calling without arranging a time first in case they were putting the kids to bed or in the middle of work, and like a) if it's poor timing that person can just not answer the phone and txt/call back later and b) my god, throughout virtually the entirety of human history we have shown up in person at each others' dwellings without prior warning, now we have to schedule a phonecall?? We should enjoy hearing from our friends!! And I know hyperconnectedness/isolation and overstimulation has made that hard, along with phonecalls from telemarketers and stalkers and welfare agencies and political parties (the last one isn't much of a thing in my country tho), but it's a thing to work through, not a limitation to build into one's life--nor should we act like it's better somehow to be constantly messaging and leaving each other on seen. Another friend suggested people with phonecall fear do exposure therapy with short scheduled calls from friends and then build up in terms of length and spontaneity, I might try wrangle it with some of my phone-averse friends cos otherwise we aren't able to build or sustain our connections as well as we could!
I agree with the argument of the essay. I am here to defend Lorde’s Solar Power. Unlike the other albums, she is not promoting isolation. She’s promoting life in community, with family and with nature. In her title track she describes her lonely winters being melted away when the sun comes out (“Can I kick it? Yeah! I can!”) “Mood Ring” is a satirical track on which she pokes fun at the notion that well being only comes from highly controlled environments (“we can get high but only if the win blows just right”). I think it fits in perfectly with the sentiment of your essay as I understood it: living with a degree of self control and open to the world around you.
okay fair!!! need to give it a closer listen tbh. but i believe lorde is smart so i believe ur prob right.
Hello fellow Solar Power truther! Mood Ring, and Secrets from a Girl (Who's Seen it All) both came to mind for me as songs that actually fall in line with this piece's sentiment. "Welcome to sadness, the temperature is unbearable until you face it." People insulate themselves in their own "comfort" zone so hard that it eventually becomes unbearably uncomfortable. Like a pot of water starting to boil. Face the music, pick up the phone, touch grass, etc.
Another great essay @P. E. Moskowitz!!!!!!
As a therapist, I agree with much of what you say. However, I think the issue is finding a balance in one's life, not that therapy is a substitute for external stimuli. And I know plenty of people who are suffering from the same sense of isolation and loneliness that set in during COVID and who haven't been able to bounce back since. I've been in therapy and analysis for many years, first for my own psychopathology, then to keep my side of the street swept up as I do this work myself. I think that even after all these years it's a luxury and a privilege to have someone who knows me better than anyone else on earth to shine a light on a blind spot I may not be aware of, but I also agree that when it's time for a patient to "fly" on their own, they should be supported in doing so. However the ending of a therapy is a special time that needs to be a collaborative endeavor and not a unilateral decision that may represent an avoidance. I think of it as a graduation when it's a "good" ending.
Personally I find the present cultural obsession with therapy rather absurd.
I do believe that in the future of a historical scope, this genre of healing will be researched by scientists and anthropologists, and perceived as a backwards phenomena, similar to the way we perceive now days health promoting practices from Medieval times - using leaches, afflicting blood-imposing wounds for ‘medical’ bloodshed - as well as enlightened ideas for curing disease from later periods - breathing fresh air, drinking sulfur mineral water at special spas, resting in a sanatorium at the Alps, staying in bed for months to recover from a nervous breakdown or sniffling salts for calming the nerves.
I have no doubt that this therapy extravaganza of ours is a cultural excess which, I hope, will eventually shrink to it’s realistic proportions.
In the meantime millions will continue to consume therapy as if it held a promise of salvation, a profound decoding of a seemingly trivial human psyche.
Herds of neurotic citizens will spend billions to find sublime and mysterious meaning in their common and unavoidable human limitations. Look, I know - Life is not easy, but sometimes there’s no other way but to face it with grace. Why does one think that the key to his neurosis, anxiety and shitty mood, will be solved by a rather mediocre individual, who in the best case has a Phd, never suffered from a mental condition, and statistically speaking - he therapist or she therapist, are not necessarily wise or have a deep natural understanding of the human condition. All this is common knowledge , so why, for Christ sake, unhappy humans keep hoping that the Therapist will save them from themselves?
Strangely enough, one cannot mention socially that he’s in a bad mood, or can’t get himself to take yoga class or feels that he’s a failure, or feels guilty for neglecting his old, sick mother, or can’t loose weight, without getting an immediate suggestion from everyone around - Therapy. There lays the great wisdom of the Oracle who will help you to live and to breath and to change your miserable self, into a problem solving, courageous, creative, goal oriented, artistic, confident and well adjusted member of society .
But well, who am I to bitch about cultural anomalies - sometimes each one of us might need someone nice to hold our hand for 200$ per hour.
I partially agree. Though I think, as you hinted at, there've always been Oracles and other forms of guides in developed societies. Whether rabbis, priests, or therapists. I think these are helpful components of a society most of the time. But when an entire culture sees them as the end-all-be-all solution to all problems, that becomes an issue.
it sounds like you have not been helped by therapy, or even worse, perhaps have been hurt by therapy. You certainly have a mistaken idea of what contemporary psychotherapy is all about, and your analogies comparing therapy to medieval medical practices is inaccurate and false. I know of no therapist, who hasn’t grappled with his or her own mental issues, and the objective with most therapy, except when dealing with florid psychosis, is to uncover unconscious beliefs that no longer serve us. When therapy can help one accept oneself, warts and all, and move from self acceptance to self appreciation, it doesn’t get much better than that.
I couldn’t agree more with Winnicot’s wisdom (I shall check on Guntrip, who I’m unfamiliar with). And I totally agree - of course one can not will power their way into sanity and calm . I can assure you that if I could see Winnicott on a weekly basis and discuss myself with him, I would get rid of my neurotic fears and fixations in no time and become the most balanced individual in town. The thing is that Winnicot alas is not around anymore to help me to save myself, and I’m afraid that most practitioners of the noble craft of psychotherapy are not equipped with the rather rare and particular skills which enables one to deal with such complex a thing like a human psyche. A talent is required in therapy as much as in the Arts, in poetry, in literature, in music and philosophy. And talent is a rare phenomena. Such is life.
It seems to me that you and I agree on the basic assumption that there’s pain and it can and should be helped. It’s just that my objection addresses the practical aspect of psychotherapy, which for whatever reasons has become advertised as an ultimate source of consolation. It just can’t be true, statistically speaking, that all this tenths of thousands of therapists, that are spread all over the place - from counceling in a reality TV shows to offering their services to teach how to raise children, how to manage conflicts in marriage, at work, in live, in sex, what to do with eating disorders, with suicide ideations, with breavment, with dead children, with bad mood with inferiority complex, with being miserable and with making others miserable, and so it goes till the end of ends. I mean WTF? Are we witnessing the new Renaissance?
I can go about this for hours, but I believe you get my point.
I live in a country in war. A disaster zone. People are dying every day, soldiers, some are 19 years old.
The quantities of therapies that are running around and offering their services all over the media is enormous. You know how it goes - people are anxious, some are broken, some loose hope for whatever future. And they all use therapy ( as much as they can afford). But as you can imagine - everyone is just getting more sad and more neurotic and more emotional, and still they believe that therapy will do the job promised. I don’t think that all those sentimental psychologists are cynical . The irony is that they want to help but the tragedy is that they believe that they can.Well, who can blame such sense of self importance?
I’m in for a priest, for Buddha, for a Rabbi, for great philosophers, for great books, for drugs, for suicide, for love, for friendship, for beauty and for fire.
The rest is silence.
I really appreciate the argument of this essay, especially as it pertains to accepting the messiness of living. I also think part of the issue with much therapy today is that a lot of people (therapists and patients alike) shy away from its relational elements. I feel like, ideally, therapy should encourage self-reflection and, as Patricia put it, the relinquishing of unconscious ideas that no longer serve us. But it also needs to be a process of relational externalization. It should allow us to live out new relationship experiences with the therapist (for instance, being accepted even when we express dissatisfaction with them) that may counteract assumptions (such as, people will leave us if we express dissatisfaction, hence we must “contain ourselves”) that give rise to the difficulties which brought us there to begin with. In other words, the inward-looking part of therapy is only one element of it. Therapy can heal when it teaches us, through experience, that it’s okay to be messy!
I teach in a graduate social work program where roughly 20% of students are there to develop community organizing skills (my wheelhouse), 20% are there to develop research skills to examine effective community programs, and about 60% are there to become therapists-- and the majority of these aspiring therapists aim to run their own private practice (as opposed to, say, providing therapy through a service agency to survivors of violence or other trauma).
All students, regardless of their career goals, are required to take a few courses to develop basic policy and advocacy literacy. The rationale is that yes, therapists DO need to understand the sociopolitical context their clients inhabit to better understand how material conditions impact the mental health of human beings.
I am continuously flabbergasted at the aspiring therapists in my classes who say things like "this policy stuff doesn't apply to me, I just want to be a therapist," or the performative types who cherry-pick and decontextualize Audre Lorde quotes about "self-care" and "the master's tools" to justify their belief that engaging with policy and advocacy is counter to their ideas of "healing."
Yet paradoxically, these are often the same students who express *outrage* when our government does heinous things. It's like they observe the *effects* of external forces, but sincerely don't comprehend what it takes to change them (Relationship-building! Community organzing!
Strategy! Actually *showing up* to the townhall meeting and not just posting about it!).
I have wondered if our age of therapy-speak has actually driven such young people to pursue careers in therapy because it has led them to sincerely believe that internal work and navel-gazing = liberation.
soooo interesting!!!! i wonder if there's a way to get them out of that way of thinking!!
trying! tbh it's hard to get them to *read*, as I'm sure you can imagine
I have broken up with two new therapists in the last month and the feeling of being stuck in this endless cycle of rumination (or told repeatedly to do CBT worksheets and mindfulness) is a big part of it. I keep hearing about these deeply meaningful, transcendent therapy experiences but at this point after doing therapy on and off for years I feel really skeptical. But I still hope I can find that and it works the way people says it does.
I go through cycles with this — it’s a conclusion I’ve reached and later reneged multiple times. Where I’m at currently is: Go to therapy because the consistency and familiarity will help if it becomes important later; if it feels unnecessary in the meantime, that just means things are going well.
“Stimuli that cannot be controlled” — that sounds like a category that encompasses everything :)
Love this essay and totally agree but those lyrics in Flowers are demonstrating more of a post-divorce, self empowerment message than an individualistic, antisocial one. Great as always!
I also think we (humankind) need to be more accepting of messiness for this externalization to happen. Often people draw into themselves when they’re feeling mentally unwell because they fear judgement or inconveniencing others. No more “save that for therapy”! Let’s be weird and too much and utterly human to each other instead!
yes!!! totally agree
thanks! i agree it's a matter of degree. psychoanalysis definitely helped save my life! i am definitely not against therapy at all. i just think as a culture we have begun to see introspection as the end goal rather than as the process through which you achieve a different end goal of being a capable person in the real world