We are all acquainted with self-styled experts and coaches online who spew forth an endless stream and litany of terms and phrases borrowed from clinical psychology, while not having the foggiest idea what these terms and phrases actually mean. It's part and parcel of the vast canvas of misinformation and misleading advice and analysis preferred by these people. Misinformation that very often verges on utter unmitigated, counterfactual nonsense.
It's also a private case of a much larger phenomenon known as therapy speak, a gentle way of saying psychobabble, totalrubbish and trash, and cow manure.
Unfortunately, therapy speak is used not only by YouTubers, out for your money, but also by your girlfriends and boyfriends and spouses and colleagues and neighbors and everyone around you.
Therapy speak is the debasement, the molestation, the mutilation of the actual vocabulary of clinical psychology.
These words have context, these words have a history, and these words have a highly specific clinical meaning.
Using them out of turn and out of context, de-contextualizing them, renders them tools for manipulation and abuse.
I've been warning against this phenomenon for well over 20 years. There are dozens of videos of mine on this channel.
And now it is completely out of control, by the way, in the field of narcissistic abuse.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of the first book about narcissistic abuse ever written, Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, and a professor of clinical psychology. Therefore, I actually know what these words mean.
Okay, so let's delve right in.
I want to be clear.
Information does not amount to knowledge.
Information is raw material. Knowledge is structured information.
Curiosity and education are not one and the same.
That you are curious, that you devour online articles and watch videos and so on, doesn't make you an educated or erudite person, doesn't make you an expert.
Anecdotes do not a science make.
An experience is not synonymous with expertise that you have survived a narcissist does not make you an expert on narcissism it makes you an expert on the narcissist that you have survived. No question about it.
If, by the way, that person is indeed a narcissist to start with, diagnosed appropriately by a qualified and trained clinician.
Anecdotes are not science, as I said.
Only experts can meaningfully converse with other experts and debate with them.
And it is up to you to determine whether the person you are listening to online, on the screen, is indeed an expert, or just a wannabe expert, or even worse, a charlatan or a con artist.
All of these people use therapy speak. They all use words like attachment styles, trauma bonding, boundaries, PTSD, CPTSD, triggers and gaslighting.
And if you were to push these people to the corner, they wouldn't know to define a single one of these words or phrases appropriately, correctly.
This is especially prevalent among younger people because these young people tend to attend therapy much more commonly than older generations. Therapy has become part and parcel of the young person's experience of life. It's normalized. Its therapy has been destigmatized.
And when you are in therapy, inevitably you're exposed to a new vocabulary.
This new vocabulary allows you to decipher and express complex dynamics and relate to events in your life and to people in your life in ways that may not have been available or understood before.
But if you take these words out of the context of therapy and apply them elsewhere, you are a swindler, a scammer, a con artist, or even much worse, a manipulator and an abuser.
So the rapid rise of Therapy Speak is dark. It's a dark phenomenon and it leads inexorably to increasing the epidemic or the pandemic of loneliness and to ruined relationships.
Because Therapy Speak is a weaponization of legitimate speech. Weaponization, when speech become deleterious and dangerous and manipulative.
Psychobabble is not an innocent, innocuous phenomenon. it is pernicious and utterly an indicator of social disintegration and aggression. It's a form of externalized aggression.
I've made a video about how boundaries are weaponized, your advice to it, there's a link in the description.
Now, therapy has become a kind of badge of honor.
Attending therapy is not merely about improving yourself or understanding yourself better through insight or managing your relationships more appropriately and efficaciously and productively. These used to be the aims and goals of therapy in the past.
Today therapy is the font tone. It's something you have to do in order to prove that you're evolved, self-aware, self-reflective, humble.
Therapy, therefore, has become a form of virtual signaling, and it goes hand-in-hand with a rise in the self-attribution of victimhood.
A study by CNBC found out that 86% of daters, people in the dating scene, are more likely to date a person a second time if that person mentioned that they go to therapy on the first date.
So therapy is like a certificate of sanity or proof of seriousness and commitment and investment when it comes to life.
But is therapy conducted this way?
Therapy is very self-centered, egotistical, dare I say, an expression of narcissism.
Analysis, therapy has become a very selfish thing to do. It's a navel gazing experience, self-centered to the maximum. It's not about other people or the feelings of other people. There's no emphasis on care, self-care, within relationships. There's no attempt to render the patient or the client, render them more socially efficacious, less antisocial, less aidi.
No, the emphasis on current day therapies is on self-care as a stepping stone on the way to self-sufficiency.
We are encouraged to become more isolated because the focus is on the self and on nothing else but the self.
So we end up alone, we end up bored, we end up way monastic and in some cases we end up poor psychopathic.
Therapy is driving us to be less mentally healthy, not more mentally healthy, and that is the blame that I lay squarely at the feet of the self-help industry. And all the mindfulness presentist approaches to therapy.
Therapy seeped out of the clinic, out of the office of the therapies, bled out into real life and became therapy speak.
It sounds highly self-aggrandizing.
When you use terms from therapy, from clinical psychology, you sound as if you know what you're talking about.
Apropos the coaches and the self-styled experts I've mentioned before.
You sound intellectual. You sound amazingly analytical, super intelligent.
But using therapy speak is sterile. It doesn't help people to avoid conflict, it doesn't reduce anxiety or discomfort, it doesn't restore egosyntony, look it up, it doesn't do people good.
It's not about the greater good, it's about self-aggrandizement.
So when you're advised to set a boundary or to respect yourself or to honor your essence or all this kind of it's not about it's not necessarily about you the person who is giving you this advice is self-aggrandizing and getting richer in the process.
And you on the other hand become much more self-directed, inwardly directed, much more schizoid, much more isolated, much less capable of meaningful significant compromises and sacrifices within relationships, much less able to manage your relationships truthfully, much more sterile.
When you use terms such as gaslighting or boundaries or whatever, you shut down communication, you don't encourage it, you don't foster it because some of these terms are highly accusatory.
When you say you're gaslighting me, you're accusing someone. When you say these are my boundaries, the implicit messages, go away. Don't bother me, don't invade my space. Don't compromise my principles, which may or maynot be good for me, may or may not be good for you, may or may not have anything to do with reality, may be delusional, hallucinatory, crazy making, insane boundaries, but they're my boundaries. They're my emotions. Therefore, they're my emotions, therefore they must be true, they must prevail.
It's a conflictive position. It's a conflictive position. It's not a position of coexistence, of collaboration, of creating things together.
It's a position of I bid farewell to reality and to the world and to you in it because I'm too enfeebled to cope with all this. I must preserve my resources, my energy just in order to survive.
It's a sign of profound weakness.
So when you disagree with someone, you are actually saying communication is not possible because my inner world, my inner escape, my mind, my emotions, and the few words I learned in therapy, they render me superior to you as far as my knowledge goes, as far as my penetration, my understanding, my erudition and my insight.
So not only there's nothing you can contribute to me but you're wasting my time, you're breaching my boundaries, you're being aggressive you don't understand me because you're incapable of understanding me. It's an F off message for both leave me alone message kind of thing.
It's the engine of atomization.
When you label someone, you don't have to deal with them because they have been pathologized and stigmatized.
And so when you're in a relationship, for example, this tendency to use therapy speak, to pathologize the other, to stigmatize the other, to push away the other, to brand the other, and to render the other incompatible with you, well of course it destroys a relationship.
People end friendships, people end intimacy, people undermine the capacity to thrive within love or some other forms of committed relationships because they tell themselves that either they don't possess the capacity to invest or the other person is not worthy of investment.
And this sounds a lot like Wall Street, not like Main Street.
So people use words like gaslighting, love bombing, narcissism.
But this gives you a false sense, when you use these words, it gives you a false sense that you're able to diagnose other people. You're totally qualified to label them. And it's harmful.
It's harmful to you. It's harmful to them. And it's harmful generally because it retards. It stunts your personal growth and personal development, your exposure to life and to others, your ability to evolve via friction and pain and loss and conflict.
All these are hampered by avoiding life.
And when you say this person is a narcissist you're avoiding them this person is gaslighting me you withdraw these are avoidance and withdrawal strategies they're not strategies to engage with life they are excuses and justifications to constrict your life, to limit it by excluding others and situations and environments.
And you are leveraging therapy speak.
These few words you've learned in therapy and you have no idea what they mean, you're leveraging therapy speak, to sound as if you know what you're doing and you don't, you don't know what you're doing.
Narcissism, for example, is a vast field. 99.99% of the so-called information online is utter nonsense that flies in the face of everything we know about narcissism, of every study ever conducted.
And yet you're being fed. You're being fed this diet.
Because the people who are selling you on this misinformation and nonsense and trash, they want your money. They just want your money. They couldn't care less about you.
In the vast majority of cases, they're actually narcissists and definitely covert narcissists.
And yet you succumb because it makes you feel superior somehow.
This ability to use a new language self-aggrandizes you, caters to your own narcissism, triggers in youa feeling of superiority, omniscience, and invulnerability.
From now on, equipped with this language, I will never be a victim again. Equipped with this knowledge, so-called knowledge, total nonsensical knowledge. I will have become immune to future predators and abusers.
This sense, this false sense of immunity is super, super dangerous because it sets you up for failure.
It's better to be totally exposed, naive and vulnerable than to believe yourself to be immune and protected when you're not.
These therapy phrases, these therapy frames, these words and vocabulary borrowed from clinical psychology, they're not science-based, the way they're used by laymen, online, and the overwhelming vast majority of YouTubers are laymen.
They're not professionals. They're not scholars. They have no record in the field whatsoever. They haven't written, published peer-reviewed articles. They haven't participated in conferences. They haven't written a single academic book. They haven't conducted one study, nothing. They have no record.
They appear from nowhere, claiming to be experts. And they're using these words and terms and phrases because it makes them appear authoritative and knowledgeable when they're not.
When they're not. They're scamming you and you're buying into this scam and then you're using this language you're using this language boundaries for example boundaries is not a free pass boundaries is not the ability to dictate to other people what they can or cannot do boundary is not a license to infringe on someone else someone else's autonomy agency individuality and real boundaries.
Boundaries, it doesn't mean, when you have boundaries, it doesn't mean that you can blackmail other people into changing their decisions and choices regarding career, friends or professions.
Boundaries are not rules that you set for someone else in order to cater to your own needs and insecurity.
And yet, the word boundaries is used in all these senses online.
The only sense missing is the right one.
A boundary, and I will quote Gunther, a scholar on boundaries. A boundary is a healthy limit that a person sets for themselves in order to protect their well-being and integrity. It is a rule or a guideline that one creates to identify reasonable, safe and permissible ways for others to behave towards them and how they'll respond when someone passes those limits.
Another psychologist, Danit Nidke, says, it's about knowing where you end and others begin, knowing what's yours and what's not yours.
And this is the only correct definition of boundaries.
People use therapy speak to justify their own controlling and manipulative behavior.
Coercive control is couched in terms of boundaries. I'm only setting boundaries.
When I tell you what to do and not what not to do, when I threaten to punish you and blackmail you if you misbehave according to my own guidelines, then I'm just setting boundaries.
This is emotional abuse, disguised as boundaries.
When you set boundaries, you should express how the other person's actions, choices, decisions, behaviors make you feel, talk about yourself, this is how your behavior makes me feel, this is how your choices make me feel.
Don't use ultimatums, don't threaten, don't tell other people what they should and should not do, don't shame them and humiliate them if they think they misbehave. If you think they've misbehaved.
You can say this makes me feel uncomfortable. This makes me feel insecure. If you persist in this kind of behavior, I'll have to walk away.
And even this last sentence is illegitimate to some extent.
But yeah, I'm a great believer in establishing the costs of breaching boundaries.
But that's where it stops. Anything that goes beyond this is abusive and manipulative.
Social media has normalized therapy. Everyone and his dog is in therapy and everyone and his dog is a therapist, really or imagined, licensed or not.
But therapy is an immense undertaking. It's highly nuanced, it's contextual. It's embedded in vast bodies of observations and knowledge over more than 150 years.
Therapy is not a way for you to acquire knowledge to assess other people. Therapy is not about empowering you to become an instant self-styled experts.
No matter how many videos you watch and how many articles you've read, you're not a therapist. And you don't have the right, you absolutely do not have the right to use these words and phrases end of story because you don't really understand them.
And I'm talking now to coaches and self-styled experts online also, I'm listening to some of the videos and I cringe, I simply cringe when they talk about splitting and when they talk about trauma bonding and when they talk, they have no idea what they're talking about. None.
And because they know they have no idea what they're talking about, they simply confabulate. They invent stories. They invent the knowledge that they lack. They're too lazy to really dive in and get an education, so they invent things.
It's dangerous. This kind of affirmation is dangerous.
It's easier nowadays to share your private feelings. And when you do, there's always a gang, a group, a forum, and they will tell you, you're right. I've had the same experience.
And then, based on anecdote, or online manipulation, by the way, you decide that your private emotions, your thoughts and your experiences are true and valid. Why? Because you found another three people who agree with you.
But people agree with people for a variety of reasons. For example, people pleasers always agree with people. Submissive people always agree with people. Even schizoids always agree with people just to get rid of them.
So that you found people who agree with you doesn't mean that your experiences and emotions and cognitions are necessarily true and valid.
Self validation is never recommended. You need to seek professionals to validate you.
Part of a real therapist job is to help to validate the patient's feeling. The very act of listening is a form of validation.
But it is equally the therapist's job, the therapist role, to inform you when your emotions and cognitions and experiences or memorized experiences don't sit well with reality. When you're losing the reality testing, when you're faking, when you're wrong, a good therapist confronts you. A good therapist doesn't always agree with you. Confronts you, realigns you, recalibrates you, and restores your sense of true reality, your reality testing.
In social media, this is so rare because these are silos and echo chambers. There's confirmation bias. You gravitate towards people who would tell you that you are always right, always correct, validate your experience, confirmation bias, you would rule out and ignore or even attack anyone who would challenge you.
So you end up being surrounded by people who echo you, reflect you, but don't add anything new to your knowledge of yourself, your environment, your history, don't add any new understanding, any new insight, nothing. It's like talking to yourself, basically.
And yet, most of us are very defensive. When we are confronted with the truth or with an alternative point of view, we become very aggressive.
And we often externalize this aggression. We block people, delete people. We argue, humiliate, insult people, and so on so forth.
We don't want the truth. We don't want reality. It's human nature.
That's what therapy is for. That's what clinical psychology is for.
But not self-styled experts and coaches, because they tell you what you want to hear.
They tell you you're a perpetual victim. They tell you you're immaculate and unguilty and flawless and blameless. They tell you anything just to take your money.
And they keep telling you this because they want to keep you maintain you in this state of neediness the need to be validated the need to believe that you are not the crazy party, that you've been victimized, that you've been abused for no guilt, no contribution of your own. You had nothing to do with it.
And there are people out there who pander to this. They tell you this as they take your money and laugh all the way to the bank.
And that's about 99% of YouTubers online. Even the most amicable, most sweet, most amazingly attractive YouTubers are out for your money and would lie to you and deceive you and themselves all the way to the bank. It's as simple as that.
And most of them, all of them have no clue what they're talking about. They just want to sound very sophisticated and educated and amazingly intellectual, but they have no idea what they're talking about. None. Not even the beginning.
It's a house of cards. If you rely on social media for your therapy, you're in trouble.
Because social media is a splitting phenomenon. Splitting is a primitive defense mechanism where we divide the world into black and white, bad and good, all bad and all good, all black and all white, no nuances, no shades, no gray areas. Complex emotional concepts are stripped bare and reduced, not even to their essence, but to their caricature.
So if social media, this is your therapy, you're really, really in very hot waters. You're likely to gain a rough, skewed ID of some phrases and terms in clinical psychology and in all likelihood the wrong idea.
And then, having acquired these words and phrases and therapy speak, you feel educated, empowered, superior somehow. It caters to your narcissistic defenses, to your own narcissism.
And you begin to apply your newfound knowledge to other people. You have graduated. You have become a coach.
And now you feel qualified to use these words and phrases from clinical psychology on other people. You diagnose people, you manipulate, it's a horrible scene because you pathologize people, you give them bad advice, you misdiagnose their nearest and dearest, you ruin their relationship, you affect their intimacy. This borders on criminal, if not criminal in some countries.
Therapy is not a badge of honor. It's not a certificate. It's not a license.
That you are attending therapy is not proof that you are on your way to health or that you are sincere or that you're a good person or that you really want to work on your issues.
Nowadays therapy, as I said, is a form of virtual signaling. Many people go to therapy precisely in order to pick up techniques and language, lingo, that they can then abuse to justify selfish or manipulative behavior.
And frankly, to manipulate people.
There are books out there that tell you how to use concepts borrowed from clinical psychology and therapy, how to use them to manipulate people, your environment.
Some of the biggest names, Greene, Peterson, that's what they're all about. Borrowing from clinical psychology and converting whatever they know into manipulative techniques.
And so when you learn a specific vocabulary, if you feel that this vocabulary helps you to more accurately assess your issues, that's a good sign.
But then if you start to abuse and misuse this vocabulary with other people not being qualified or trained to do so, you will have become a con artist, a charlatan, overuse and misuse.
Not only drains these concepts of their true meaning, but imposes falsity. You're falsifying the whole environment. You're falsifying society. You're engaging in an act of contamination and pollution.
Our conversations, your conversations become muddled with vague, meaningless terms, warped somehow to fit your end goals.
Gaslighting, for example, something I've been railing about for well over 10 years. I was among the first 30 or 40 years ago to suggest that gaslighting is a technique used by people with Cluster B personality disorders. I was not the first, but I was among the first, definitely. I definitely popularized this idea.
And yet, it took a life of its own. It became utterly, utterly insane. Everyone is accusing everyone of gaslighting.
Gaslighting is not a term that you can apply when there is a difference in the perception of reality, when you disagree with someone.
That's not gaslighting. That's argument. That's a debate.
Gaslighting is abusive. It's an abusive technique. It aims to make the victim feel crazy. Make the victim doubt their own judgment of reality, their own reality testing. Make the victim distrust their own experiences, invalidates the victim in order to allow the abuser to continue the abuse.
And it involves highly specific elements, for example, a disparity in power, a power asymmetry. It's a crucial element in gaslighting.
All the descriptions of gaslighting online are wrong. I have never come across a single video which describes gaslighting correctly. Not one. And I've watched thousands.
Similarly with narcissism, everyone is accusing everyone of being a narcissist because they are not as empathic as they expect them to be or because their ego is a bit inflated and they take themselves too seriously or too grandly.
But narcissism, pathological narcissism, especially narcissistic personality disorder, is a very, very, very rare personality disorder.
Everyone has narcissistic defenses. Everyone has healthy narcissism. Some people have a narcissistic style. These are not mental health disorders or pathologies.
Self-styled experts go online and spew nonsense like one of every six people is a narcissist.
This is an ignorant, profoundly ignorant statement by someone who has no idea, not the first idea about narcissism. And it borders on charlatan, in my view, in my opinion, this is charlatanism and con artistry.
I'm sorry to say. it's shocking that such people continue to propagate this misinformation with impunity. It's shocking that the academic community doesn't stand up and say where here's the list of con artists and charlatans and dilettantes and so on and here's a list of people who could trust.
Similarly, people online, self-styled online experts and gurus and coaches, they use trauma bonding, as if trauma bonding is a kind of connection between people who have traumatized each other or have gone through trauma together.
That's not trauma bonding. Trauma bonding, first of all, is neurobiological. It involves deep emotional attachment between an abuser and a victim, where the victim continues their relationship and protects the abuser because the trauma bond makes the victim feel like their abuser is meeting their needs and providing for them. It's a form of self-harm in a way.
Definitely not the way it's described online.
PTSD, similarly, is used wrongly. Emotional flashbacks, the nonsensical concept.
PTSD is exposure to real or threatened death, injury, violence. It causes mood swings, real flashbacks or nightmares, where you cannot tell the difference between the flashback and reality, avoidance, hypervigilance and other behaviors.
But it's not the same. It's not the same as complex trauma, CPTSD, and it's not the same about being unable to get over something or having vivid memories or recalling the emotions you have had when you went through a period of difficulty or discomfort.
This has nothing to do with PTSD.
And yet, self-styled experts online and gurus and coaches, I mean, they use this.
As if it, everyone, according to them, half the population are in the state of PTSD.
OCD is the same. If someone is excessively neat and clean and orderly, he has OCD.
But OCD is an obsessive-compulsive disorder. It's a severe mental health disorder.
Where a person experiences obsessions, distressing, intrusive thoughts or urges, coupled with compulsions, repetitive, ritualized behaviors intended to fend off the obsession and the catastrophizing which goes hand in hand with the obsession.
Something bad is going to happen. If I wash my hands three times, it will not happen.
It's nothing to do with being what used to be called anal retentive. It's nothing to do with being to clean, to organize, to orderly, nitpicking attention to detail. There's nothing to do with OCD.
Meg Walters at Refinery 29 wrote, is the real appeal of therapy speak that we seem to tidy things up so much that we're able to elevate ourselves above the thorniness and complexity of real emotion, that we can convince ourselves that nothing we feel or do is ever wrong.
And I would add because it has a name or a word or a phrase that correspond to it.
If you can label it, you control it.
If you control it, you need not fear it.
If you can label it, you control it. If you control it, you need not fear it. You need not even feel it.
If you're terrified of your own emotions, of your own cognitions, of the environment at large, of the world, if things become unbearable, intolerable, just give them a name.
You know, primitive people or ancient people in the ancient period, they believed that you could control an entity with the name. You can control a demon with the name. The name of God was proscribed, was forbidden because it contained power.
There was the belief that the letters of the alphabet and various names and various words have inordinate embedded power which could be unleashed by uttering them.
And so we are faced with the same thing.
Therapy speak is like regaining control over ourselves, our emotions, our impulses, our cognitions, our behaviors and our life and the environment and other people.
Power of language, the symbolic power of language to borrow from Lacan.
And it also helps us to justify our own misbehavior.
Because if you mistreat someone, you can tell yourself that you are just setting behaviors. If you cut someone off, you can say, I've reached my maximum capacity, whatever that means.
Misusing and abusing clinical terms and phrases borrowed from clinical psychology, therapy speak, helps you to regain egosyntony, to reconcile yourself with yourself, to reframe what you're doing, your bad choices, your erroneous decision-making, and your misbehavior, misconduct.
To reframe them as having to do with something positive, something therapy-like, therapeutic.
Now I'm not saying that you don't need to learn these words and so. I am saying that you need to learn them in depth if you want to use them.
To gain a license to use a word, you need to learn to study this word in depth, including history, its context, read books, read articles. Prior to that you are not you're not at liberty to use words. Words have meanings. Words do have power. Words have outcomes in real life. Don't use them glibly.
When you're trying to make sense of your emotions, when you're trying to process your behaviors, when you feel that your mental health is under constant attack, emanating from other people, from the world at large which is totally crazy making, delirio, I agree.
The way to do that is not by lying to yourself that you're now equipped and trained because you know you've learned six or seven words. Self-aggrandizement is not the solution. Ask any narcissist.
All their ways of making sense of the world, like religion, they're falling out of favor.
So people are turning to what they believe is science.
And they think if they use words like energy, it makes them scientists.
That's a problem with psychology, clinical psychology. Psychology is not a science and can never be a science.
And yet psychologists, when they grow up, want to be scientists.
So they use statistics and they use highfaluting words because it makes them feel as if they're scientists.
Actually, psychologists, psychiatrists, psychologists more than psychiatrists, therapists, they're guilty of therapy speak as well.
They're guilty of self-aggrandizement. They're guilty of megalomania and narcissism and grandiosity, which is a cognitive distortion.
Layman may just be imitating their own therapies and their own psychologists.
Eva Illouz is a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She wrote a New York Times piece, she was quoted, I'm sorry, in a New York Times piece by Tara Isabella Burton.
And she said that the problem at the root of therapy speak and so on is that we have withdrawn too far into subjectivist individualism.
Illouz says that what it means is that our emotions have become the moral ground for our actions.
We feel entitled to make demands or to behave in certain ways purely because that's the way we feel. Our feelings justify everything.
We are the benchmark. We are the yard, we are the Yardstick bar none.
And this has a lot to do with Maslow's self-actualization.
Maslow actually is the culprit, is the guilty party. He introduced the self into the path of the lifespan. He made it a desirable object, a desirable destination, the ultimate destination.
And Burton writes that the pursuit of private happiness has increasingly become culturally celebrated as the ultimate goal.
Becoming one's authentic self has become simply giving in to all your desires and wishes and impulses and urges.
That's what it means to be authentic. It means to give in to what Freud called your id, to be unboundaried in effect, to be unlimited. And to neglect and ignore everyone else. F them, you know, I'm number one, it's the me generations.
And so the end result, of course, is everyone is shunned by everyone, everyone is afraid of everyone, everyone is avoiding everyone, and we have the loneliness pandemic, atomization, isolation.
We don't try to work things out. We don't take accountability. We don't compromise. We don't negotiate. We don't communicate.
We blame others. We justify ourselves.
Splitting everyone, everybody is all bad and all good, I'm an innocent victim, I did nothing to deserve this, etc.
We are not present with our emotions. We never embrace discomfort or risk.
We avoid reality to the best of our ability, there's too much friction, too much discomfort, too many demands.
We're spoiled. We're simply spoiled. This is the age of spoiled pampered individuals who self-aggrandized by talking about themselves all the time and by hurling, catapulting, verbal stones, and their perceived enemies, which is everybody else.
This is what we ended up with.
And nowhere is this more manifest than online.
Now, here's an exercise for you.
Go back online and watch three videos by three different self-styled experts and coaches.
Bear in mind what you've just heard in this video.
I hope you will see these people in a totally different way for exactly who they are.
Money-grabbing charlatans, fakes, and scammers.