Weaponizing Therapy Language

 There are times, especially in the summer, when I don't "promote" blog posts for various reasons. This is one of those "quiet posts" because I'm going to be a bit critical and mention an incident involving several people. I will try to "disguise" it as best as I can so that I'm not libeling anyone.

I'm not big on celebrity news, but I've heard recently about Jonah Hill. The American actor has been criticized because of some excessively-controlling texts sent to his now-ex-girlfriend.  Guardian writer Martha Gill explains it thus:

While dating a former girlfriend, he allegedly sent her a string of texts asking that she remove bikini pictures from social media, stop “surfing with men”, and avoid female friends “in unstable places” who had not been first approved of by Hill. What particularly caught the eye, though, was the language he seemed to use. His supposed list of unreasonable demands were rebranded, in the texts, as “boundaries”, a word typical of therapy-speak.

CBC radio discussed "the pitfalls when therapy-speak seeps into our everyday lives" and The Guardian ran a piece called "Not all therapy is a force for good". I thought I had coined the term "weaponizing therapy language" until I saw a reference to a version of the phrase in the CBC piece. (Hope it's okay that I still used it for the title of this post.) It reminded me of something that happened at school that, months later, still irks me.

To maintain a small level of confidentiality, I'm going to substitute one topic for another. Those on my staff will probably know exactly what I'm talking about. 

There are certain tasks that people at a workplace have to undertake that aren't enjoyable. People don't want to volunteer to do it but it still needs to be done. We have a job like this (and for the sake of this blog post, I'm going to call it "taking care of the staff dishes / dishwashing" - but let me reassure you, this was not about dishwashing). It had been avoided for so long that an external individual came in to plead with the staff to get this dealt with properly. After this plea, all the staff members met together and we came up with a plan. The plan was that three people would share the duties related to this job for a single year, with the guarantee that they wouldn't have to do it for longer than a year. The following year, another group of three people would take over, for just a single year. Then, a different group of three people would be responsible. That way, it didn't burden a single person and we knew that we just had to "grin and bear it" for one year with 1/3 of the work.

When the staff first agreed that this was the way we'd handle dishwashing, we made a list that lasted about four or five years. The initial trio served for a bit longer than a year, since the dishwashing situation was a bit unstable. It worked out. Sure, in some of the trios, the work was unevenly distributed, but at least if someone felt unfairly put upon, he/she/they could turn to the other two members of the group to try to help out. This year, it became time for us to reassign the groups of three for dishwashing duty. We met as a group to determine the trios. If you hadn't served on the dishwashing team in the past four years, the expectation was you'd sign up with two other people sometime in the next four years.

Someone at the meeting immediately objected. She said it was impossible for her to be a part of a dishwashing team. I can't recall her exact words, because I was so taken aback with her demand. However, I do remember that she used therapy words as part of her rationale. She said that participating in dishwashing duties was too traumatizing, and/or that being involved in dishwashing was bad for her mental health. Despite all the explanations, and reminders that this was a shared job that benefited the entire staff, and that she wouldn't be asked to do anything that she found particularly heinous (be it "load the dishwasher" or "put clean dishes away"), she absolutely refused to be involved. Other people eventually stepped up to fill the holes, and some individuals volunteered to re-enter the rotation even though they didn't get a four-year break from their duty.

The extra-frustrating thing about this whole situation is that, long ago, we used to have a single, regular "dishwasher". However, the individual in question actually complained about the quality of dishwashing to the regular, so the regular pretty much said "If you think you can do a better job, go ahead." After a time of dishwashing, the new "designated dishwasher" complained that it was just too horrible of a job that took up too much time, and stopped doing it. This is why we had a long period of time with no one doing the dishes. 

How did she get away with it? There are a few reasons. One, "dishwashing" is not part of our job description. Since it's a volunteer task, no one can be forced to complete it. Even though "dishwashing" is something that benefits everyone in the whole worksite community, it's practically impossible to stop someone from reaping the benefits even if they didn't contribute. Two, educators are trained to take people's feelings into consideration. What kind of monsters would we be to force someone to do something that would be detrimental to his/her mental health?

So, where do we go from here? Sadly, there aren't a lot of options. I'm glad that news outlets have begun to examine the excessive / casual use of therapy or medical language. Therapy can be a very good thing. I know of several people that see a therapist and it helps them. Unscrupulous people will still find ways to get out of work using any and every excuse available. I'll end with an address I keep posted to a corkboard in my basement. The paper I have credits these words to Bishop Muzorewa from Zimbabwe.

If you do good, 

people will accuse you of ulterior motives.

Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness

make you vulnerable.

Be honest and frank anyway.

People are unreasonable, illogical

and self-centered.

Love them anyway.

The biggest people with the biggest ideas

can be shot down by the smallest people with the smallest minds.

Think big anyway.

People really need help

but may turn against you if you help them.

Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have

and you may get kicked in the teeth.

Give the world the best you've got anyway.

What you spend years building

may be destroyed overnight.

Build anyway.