we tell ourselves stories in order to vibe
Tuesday, 4:05 PM
From: Randa
a lot of my friendships have been predicated upon emotional support and tons of analyzing our feelings - about work, relationships, how to be in the world - everything.
but lately i have started to doubt the value of language when it comes to understanding our emotions (and i won’t go into this but i also think it’s INSANE that we diagnose disorders that we treat with medication based on linguistic interpretations of feelings)
this is the new manifestation of my psychotherapy skepticism
learning how to articulate my emotions, while an interesting exercise, has not made me feel better. it just turned articulating my emotions into a hobby. while i was journaling and talking about feelings and going to therapy i could have been getting really good at sports or something. i have achieved some level of self-awareness, but at what cost?
when helping friends with boyfriend problems i feel like we just make up all these stories about our behavior when maybe we should just go to a sauna and sweat and do whatever intuitively feels right. like i can make up stories all day long about why you and your bf are fighting and maybe some of them will be sort of true but is it really helping? i guess narrativizing as a coping mechanism can be a calming exercise (“we tell ourselves stories in order to live”) but i am just losing interest. my friend casey wants to train an AI on my voice so she can just talk to the AI instead of me when she wants support.
to be clear i am the number one offender of going to friends for help or validation for decidedly trivial matters. but lately i have been turning to more corporal coping mechanisms like doing sports or submerging in water. and it’s sort of, how you say, epiphanic.
i am also less inclined to give specific explanations and instead turning to memes and metaphors and poems and things like that
what is going on? i feel like i’m shedding a part of myself because this sort of verbalizing is the foundation upon which many of my friendships were built. and i am nervous it will break them.
am i becoming insensitive? too sensitive? growing older? shredding too hard?
i’m curious from your Guy perspective because most guys don’t really talk about their feelings unless there is a big reason to do it. you and i talk about feelings / what to do about gfs and bfs but it’s more from an ideas guy / performance art / character study POV if that makes sense.
Wednesday, 10:31 AM
From: Harry
I really like my current therapist, but that hasn’t always been the case. I’ve had talk therapists that I’ve found to be extremely unhelpful. I’ve also had therapists that I was convinced were going to cure my anxiety, which I actually think was more unhealthy.
My current therapist, who I’ll call Danny Wordcel to grant him anonymity, framed therapy to me as “less a process of healing oneself, and more a useful tool in the unending process of emotional regulation.” (bars!!) To me, that shift represented a move away from a quest to find the morsel of childhood trauma or whatever that, when addressed, turns me into the man I’ve always thought i could be, and into a mindset of like, “this is who I am, and dumping my shit one a week, for whatever weird reason, helps”.
I’ve seen the discourse around frustrations with talk therapy. Dirt had an interesting piece, and Friend Of The Analog Pod Ludwig had an interesting personal account of their relationship with psychotherapy. And listen…I’m in these streets talking about Jungian analysis, ketamine therapy, etc.. I’ve gone to a spiritual healer in glen park who told me I was a diplomat of a river tribe in a previous life. I’m all for questioning modalities of therapy, but I do look at these more inward-looking and intense therapeutic practices as seeming a little….too good to be true. The reason therapy works for me right now is because of how basically useless it feels. You turn a large ship slowly. If it felt transformative, I’d be dubious. You know what transforms me from anxious to not anxious extraordinarily quickly, getting hammered. But obviously, that’s not a sustainable anxiety reduction technique.
On the topic of Does Talking To Your Friends Even Do Anything, I do know the feeling you’re talking about. I remember reading Peggy Orenstein’s great article The Miseducation of The American Boy and becoming totally obsessed with the idea that what was stopping me from living a well-adjusted life, was stunted masculinity. I went on what felt like a year-long holy war against the fellas not talking about their feelings. I tried all kinds of radical honesty and time and time again I found that like, taking 10 deep breaths or going on a run just works infinitely better than telling your hinge date you’re feeling nervous. This talking shit works, but not nearly as well as we want it to.
I also kinddaaaaa think the whole, “guys can't talk about their feelings” thing is a tad overblown. Not that we aren’t stunted, I think men are. But people of all genders are so so so bought into the performance of being regular, that the current difference between socialized men and socialized women is smaller than we think compared to how far most of us are. Watch an 8-year-old emotionally regulate, they look insane. And I bring this up because i do think it even further renders this goal of “talking it out” futile. The real release we’re looking for is like a total radical constant sicko mode that just isn’t feasible in polite society.
BUT just because chopping it up with the inny sanky doesn’t Save Your Life, I think it's insane to just throw it out. So in that way I wouldn’t say you are being too insensitive, but I would say you might be falling into the classic CBT black-and-white thinking zone. This may seem obvious but I have an example from our relationship, where last summer I was having a terribly anxious day and we went to the park and sat in some grass. I barely remember what we talked about, and certainly, we didn’t come to any galaxy-brain solution for my host of unsexy and self-created problems, but there's something weird and important about being in distress around someone else and having them not run the other direction, which is a latent fear a lot of us have, I suspect.
Here's the last thing I’ll say, as we get older, and we talk to our friends about our problems, it is funny to note that patterns start to arise, and that can feel weird. I find myself doing the same dumb shit over and over again, and so do my friends. So this whole extra wave of late 20s doom sets in where it starts to feel like oh, this isn’t gonna change. So I’ll give it to you that as we stare so plainly at the truth that most of the words we say don’t do anything, you’re bound to get a tummy ache thinking about that.
I know you’ve talked about alt therapies and I think your point about the power of memes and poems and art is valid, is there anything in my defense of Talk that doesn’t hold up to you?
Wednesday 8:36 PM
From: Randa
ok ok i’m not trying to say that it’s totally worthless to talk about feelings with your friends, i just want to do it less. i’ve been told by lots of ppl that i’d make a good therapist and i think i’m starting to resent being the peoples’ emotional support animal. HOWEVER…
i am not talking about simply being around people (i think they call this “co-regulating”) like we did that one day. i actually think of that day often and laugh to myself because it was unbearably hot and miserable and it felt like such a journey to get to that shady patch of grass. a lot of my favorite friend memories are the miserable ones because struggling with other ppl can be funny in hindsight. the only pic i have of that day is u co-regulating with dave:
anyway - the pattern thing is real. i am trying to get to a place of acceptance of myself, my friends, and my family as flawed people who make the same mistakes over and over… instead of people i can fix to be perfect. i think that’s largely where my frustration lies, my belief that i can fix them / they can fix themselves. it’s soooooo unchill of me………..
Thursday 9:47 AM
From: Harry
No i mean look its totally fucked up that the only thing that kind of works doesn’t work at all. I’ll leave you with this banger of a quote from
, in her really lovely and smart essay about similar ideas. I know you aren’t at all advocating for the isolation that she’s referencing, but I think it captures the catch-22 of it all“And here’s the thing about friction: it really does hurt. Isolationists have one very strong argument on their side — when you’re alone, there’s no one there to hurt you, even accidentally. There’s no one there to throw your own flaws into stark relief. There’s no one who you might hurt with bursts of uncontrollable emotion or human carelessness. It’s hard to be hurt, and perhaps even harder to hurt the people you love — why not cut the risk, lock the doors, and live a life of robotic, impersonal, action-oriented optimization?
The answer, of course, is that none of us are any good alone.”
BARS!
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