[smoldesu]

> Therapy-speak provides a veneer of respectability to the act of social withdrawal.

Isn't that okay, though? Most people are just using therapy speech as a wedge to avoid addressing your issues in ernest. Oftentimes they simply don't care and want to offer you the same tools they have to work through something difficult. They don't have any more of an obligation to fix your issue than you do to share it with them.

I'm also a frustrated queer progressive (loathe as I am to don the hat), but I find it hard to throw the rock. The so-called therapy speak the author has identified is the barrier people use to ignore your life. Yeah, it hurts. Sometimes people are unwilling to move that barrier though, and I see no legitimate reason to tear that down, a priori their life experience.

[1attice]

oh, I'm not interested in tearing the boundary down. I'm not particularly hurt and the people who needed to leave, left. No axes to grind, nor hatchets to bury -- and, frankly, I've been one of the people who has done some of the leaving.

I'm more interested in understanding the phenomenon. Self-understanding has intrinsic value. Something therapy culture gets right.

P.S.

Upon reread, I'd suggest that, yes, we do have some obligations to one another -- we have duties to one another that go beyond I've-got-mine liberalism. In much the same way that a small town facing a rising river might cause some people to work together and set up sandbags, I believe that communities (or at least the kind I want to belong to) have collective obligations that are activated by adverse circumstances.

I also have no interest in arguing this point; your values may differ, and that, as I am exhausted of both saying and hearing, is 'valid'. :)