How To Invalidate Your Own Vocation
Via Muldoon in the comments – and the pages of Psychology Today – the evaporating standards of “affirmative psychotherapy”:
Mental Health Professionals Can Help…
Validate Their Experiences – Your clients are not exaggerating. Listen without pathologising. Validate without hesitation.
Affirm in Every Interaction – Use the correct name and pronouns like it’s second nature. Audit your forms, website, and policies to make sure they reflect that commitment.
Sharp-eyed readers may have registered the seeming absence of curiosity, of enquiry – say, regarding very common causes of the phenomenon in question. Readers may also wish to ponder the inevitable tensions between affirmation and investigation – and to place bets on which will be dispensed with in favour of the other. In this Yes, You Are Napoleon school of psychotherapy, where the unwell must always be told whatever they want to hear. Possibly before being steered towards irreversible mutilation and lifelong pain.
Readers may also wish to ponder how a similarly affirming approach might fare with other mental health issues – such as anorexia, with alarmingly cadaverous young women being told, “Yes, dear, you are every bit as fat as you imagine and should definitely continue starving yourself.”
A consequence of all this affirmation and declared solidarity is a hasty jumping to conclusions. A begging of questions. For instance:
The author of the above, Tess Kilwein – PhD, pronouns “she/they” – would have us believe, and would have her patients believe, that the most pressing and fundamental causes of woe are “bias,” “microaggressions,” and “anti-trans bills” – among which, laws that restrict women’s changing rooms and other intimate spaces to use by actual women, rather than delusional and/or predatory men.
And yet, a person with sexual dysmorphia – someone vehemently alienated from the physical reality of their sex – would presumably still feel that way even if stranded on a desert island. Just as they do now, when alone – say, in the shower or when making tiresome TikTok videos. Seems to me it ain’t the world that’s causing the problem.
This willingness to pretend – and to then applaud oneself as righteous and heroic – is, I’d suggest, a less than ideal tendency for a mental health professional. Someone to whom a person’s wellbeing, or hope of wellbeing, has been entrusted. Likewise, the rush to externalise all causes of misery. While social interaction – knowing that other people are likely to perceive you as you actually are, not as whatever it is you wish you were – may amplify the existing dissonance, such interaction doesn’t cause it. It isn’t the root of the problem.
That’s an, as they say, you thing.
In this supposedly therapeutic context, the words affirmation and validation translate as a willingness to lie. A willingness to indulge obvious bollocks and play along. And so, one might wonder how Dr Kilwein might affirm and validate some of the chaps seen here. Or this merry bedlamite, who violates women’s toilets and pushes his phone camera under the doors of occupied stalls in order to livestream to his admirers, all those affirming fans, the protests of his latest victim.
But, says Dr Kilwein, we must “validate without hesitation.” Because this practised, habitual dishonesty is, she says, “justice” and “courage.” And therefore, a basis for in-group status. At which point, the nakedly partisan activism of such people – and the abandonment of anything approaching detachment and objectivity – even basic curiosity – appears jarringly at odds with any claims of professionalism.
We are, however, assured that Dr Kilwein is a proponent of “bold storytelling.” Which is just what a patient needs when their perceptions of reality are wildly unreliable.
Let me stop you right there, Dr Kilwein.
Let us not forget BIID (Body Integrity Identity Disorder), where people want limbs amputated, or to be blind, or paralyzed. Which, on the surface, seems familiar.
“Mental Health Professionals Can
HelpMake Money…”Makes you wonder how casually they write prescriptions.
When she was three years old, my little sister declared she was a mermaid.
Back then, everyone viewed it as a stage she was going through, and simply expected her to grow out of it. And she did.
Today, her nursery school would probably schedule the amputation of her legs, and sue my parents for not indulging her fantasy.
I noticed long ago that “bold” was a leftist euphemism for “grossly dishonest”.
Meanwhile in Caledonia…
An author looks askance at a tweet.
A “Political Activist/Journalist/Songwriter” takes a bold stance.
That.
The songwriters are coming. We must flee.
If she lived down the street I would warn all the parents about her.
The songwriters are coming. We must flee.
Rogaine, it is like garlic to vampires to keep them away.
Tom Lehrer was there, some 60-odd years ago:
Have belatedly realised it’s a Bank Holiday weekend. I should be out doing… Bank Holiday weekend things. Though I’m not entirely sure what those things are.
Looking for a parking space, maybe.
The difference between a Border Collie and a Huskie.
Yeah, but so is ‘leftist’.
Easter.
Church & chocolate eggs.
I’m pretty hopeless at remembering Bank Holidays.
It’s my only failing.
What?
Sure.
Instalanche
[ Panics ]
Where did David put the breath mints?
After church I wanted to linger and wager on which kid would get the most eggs in the Easter Egg hunt. Wife didn’t like that idea. Sometimes Catholics aren’t any fun.
See, you have a way to remember. For me, it’s one of those floating-about-the-calendar holidays.
I agree with that statement.
I just think the world shouldn’t ‘validate’ it.
This blog on any typical day:
…and David fixing up-buggered links:
I want an Optimus Robot bartender that talks like the bartender robot in The Stars My Destination.
Broadly speaking, my own view is that if someone wants to live as if they were a member of the opposite sex, then, er, okay, bit weird, but it’s not something that I would spend my evenings raging against. Life has no shortage of peculiarities.
The issue, as I see it, is when others are coerced, whether by emotional and psychological bullying or by force of law, to participate in the pretence, to affirm the untrue. And in practical terms, this condition means that cross-dressing men, say, should have the decency not to violate women’s bathrooms, changing rooms, etc., and that they should stay the hell away from children.
Suggestion: Ship them all off to prisons in El Salvador.
A moment of honesty from the TQ+ about who motivates them.
One of the numerous data points on my journey to “liberals are evil” was being told that Satanists are fine people.
For some reason, I read “Kilwein” and it comes out internally as “Killwiener”
“I will scream rape at any of your officers if they try to force me out of a female space. I will accept no violation of my human rights as a woman.”
How to wave a red Cluster B flag high enough for everyone to see.
Cyclist has harrowing experience unrelated to his cycling. Manages to do good.
I agree, I just don’t think it should be encouraged or celebrated and I really don’t like forcing others to play along.
That is the nub of it. Where the trouble starts:
For instance.
And the creepily surreal violations of changing rooms intended for women and girls.
“Validate Their Experiences – Your clients are not exaggerating.“
Will we see psychiatrists now telling anorexics ‘Why, yes, you really could do with losing a few pounds, have you considered liposuction?’ If not, why not?
“We must go into the toilets, in numbers, and say, ‘We Are Here!‘”
More scenes from the TRANSGENDER HOLOCAUST.
Palette cleanser and..umm…deer pic. This was outside of a friend’s house. Deer had been caught in some orange plastic fencing and approached him for help. Then she just hung around.
Aren’t there laws discouraging the abuse of the mentally deficient?
We don’t get many deer in the garden hereabouts.
[ Fetches binoculars, monitors shrubbery. ]
They’re pretty thick around our neighborhood but his place, about 20 miles away, while far more in-the-woods he said he doesn’t see too many. Here we have to chase them off with Deer Scram and..uh…other methods.
We went inside to play pool for about three hours and when we came back out I thought she had left. But as I rolled up the driveway I saw she had just moved about 20-30 feet to the other side of his garage and plopped back down again.
That said, there’s an abandoned, heavily overgrown cemetery about a mile from here and apparently there are deer living in there quite happily, next to fairly busy road.
[ Shrubbery-monitoring intensifies. ]
[ Begins very slow, stealthy movement towards wine cellar, lock picks in hand. ]
[ Deploys liquid nitrogen. ]
‘…and apparently there are deer living in there quite happily, next to fairly busy road.’
Remember, you can only collect free game if the car in front makes the kill!
Never acquired a taste for venison. Beloved Sister-In-Law #1 once gave a party and served her, shall we say, experimental venison pizzas.
I had to slyly make use of a paper towel and a nearby kitchen bin.
Venison – all game meat, really – has very little fat, so it has little of the flavour we associate with good meat. And it’s very lean, which equates to tough meat. You either have to braise it for a very long time to tenderize it and add flavour, or else grind it up, mix it with lard and make sausage out of it.
I wonder who he is “really” getting to know? Or if he is deliberately missing the point of these conversations?
Personally, I’ve never questioned the realty of me. Questioned my choices? My role? My goals? Of course. But not if I’m a “real woman”.