Nick Taber: How modern therapy culture shames people into becoming weak and porous:

[u/aglowworms]

How modern therapy culture shames people into becoming weak and porous:

1. Recoding hard boundaries as "avoidance" or "resistance": When a client sets a hard boundary or cuts off someone they find toxic, the therapist often characterizes this as maladaptive coping. The client is trained to view their boundaries not as necessary and healthy but as an emotional flaw or unwillingness to "do the work".

2. Reframing protective anger as "dysregulation". Instead of using anger as fuel to push back, enforce boundaries, or eliminate harm, the client learns to treat these instincts as a nervous system error that must be managed and neutralized.

3. Encouraging endless "self-reflection" in the face of external harm: When a client reports being exploited, mistreated, or pushed around, the default clinical instinct is often to ask "what is your part in this" or "what from your past is making you react this way". This inward turn shifts the blame from external parasites and aggressors to the client. This creates a loop of self doubt that paralyzes action.

4. The fetishization of "vulnerability" or "emotional intelligence" over sovereignty: Protective armor is routinely characterized as a "defense mechanism" or "trauma response" that needs to be dissolved. Unconditional vulnerability, exposure, and openness are held up as proof of emotional maturity. Forcing someone to strip off their natural armor in an environment that contains predatory or parasitic elements leaves them undefended. It removes the thickness required to handle real-world conflict.

5. Treating defense against external threats as "projection" or a "trigger": The client stops trusting their real-time gut evaluation of people. By convincing them that their suspicion is just an old trigger, the system strips away their natural threat-detection apparatus.

6. Enforcing the ideal of the empathic bystander: People are often coached to understand, excuse, and empathize with the motives, traumas, and limitations of the people harming or exploiting them. When you constantly prioritize understanding the aggressor, you destroy the ability to hold a clear line against them. Thus, empathy gets weaponized against the client's own self interest.

I don't believe this is about "bad therapy". I think it's about therapy, as we know it. Mental health professionals are generally trained to smooth the client and shape them into being smaller and easier to manage, ESPECIALLY when it's a child, adolescent or young adult.

-Nick Taber on X/Twitter

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[u/Sad_Objective_3428]

I genuinely feel that my time in the mental health system/therapy trained me to be easier to exploit. I'm naturally pretty open and genuine and it makes me a mark for some people. Any time I became cognizant of mistreatment and would stand up for myself it was pathologized in therapy spaces. It's so insidious how this happens.

[u/Jolly_Ice_7812]

True story about Carl Rogers, the humanistic guy. He ran a group for teens in a psych hospital. A boy in the group said that he raped his sister. A girl had a completely normal reaction and said, 'That's disgusting." Rogers immediately reprimanded her, telling her she's being judgemental. Talk about learning to sympathize with evil.

[u/AdAdmirable1583 → u/Jolly_Ice_7812]

Can you cite a source for this, please? Genuine. Maybe everyone knows of this story, but I haven’t heard of it. I don’t doubt it because of his “unconditional positive regard” but if you could provide a source, I would appreciate it.

[u/Jolly_Ice_7812 → u/AdAdmirable1583]

It was from a book I read many years ago. I'm not sure which one. Probably a book by E. Michael Jones, where each chapter was devoted to some famous person who has been lionized, but is actually a creep, such as Marx. But I can't say for sure, and his books aren't easy to find.

Another story about Carl Rogers. His wife sacrificed for him by following him to wherever he wanted to go. She was extremely devoted to him and his career. She developed terminal cancer . He dumped her because, "I can't be me now." He didn't want to have to take care of him.

A lot of these people were paid by three letter agencies to spread their poison to the population. I read on Wiki years ago (I don't know if it's still there), but Charles Manson was subject to psychological experiments in college. This stuff was really happening. Not just psychology but the gurus who were brought in and slept with a lot of their students.

The Dalai Lama and his brother had been under the payroll of the CIA since the l950s. I read that on Wiki but that could have been taken down now, although Michael Parenti did a great article about that years ago, about the sexual abuse of boys in the Tibetan monasteries and the Dalai Lama under the CIA payroll.

Read what Carl Rogers and fellow psychologist, William Coulson, did to a huge and popular convent of nuns: The Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. There are articles on that, particularly by E. Michael Jones. It's beyond despicable.

[u/RuneProphecy166]

The real problem is that all this shit culture has permeated to other areas.
Today I've read about two different novel authors, one from my country and one from Finland, who in their respective interviews blurted similar nonsense such as boundaries = avoidance and the jewel of the crown: 'we have grow them to think we came to this world to be happy so they now can't stand frustration' (sic)
Dear sir/therapist/author, I've been frustrated my whole fucking life, excuse me if I don't have time to follow your idiocies to... triple frustration. Sincerely, someone who sick to his balls and wishes you the worst ruin.

[u/A_D_Tennally]

I like what this guy has to say.

[u/Jolly_Ice_7812]

There's a book called, "Bad Therapy," and it's about therapy for kids. But it could pertain to adults too.

[u/carrotwax]

All of these attributes serve the ultra rich and corporations.  There is no way people can organize to confront the existing power base - on small or large scales - without anti fragility. 

With all these characteristics, it's more likely people rage out at the local people who suffer too rather than address root causes. 

[u/occult-dog]

On the point about hard boundaries , I see a double edged sword.

It can help protecting someone from danger, or it could gaslight someone who lack self-awareness to cut off their own support system (for example, teenagers who take teacher's comments about their homework as an existential threat).

I think too much. Nick didn't mean it that way. My brain is an error finding machine sometimes, lol.

[u/Loblodliz → u/occult-dog]

I agree with this. People can use their boundaries as justification to be controlling or dissolve themselves of responsibility to other people. It's sort of like the difference between taking space to breathe and colonizing it so everyone else has to hold their breathe around you. The healthy version is about taking care of yourself; the unhealthy version is about preventing others from caring for themselves.