If you aren't in therapy, you are probably still using its language to describe how you feel. This week the New Yorker has issued a special digital edition devoted to examining therapy as a fundamental feature of modern life -- and how it's permeated our culture, for better or worse. It was co-edited by Marella Gayla, and she joins us to discuss alongside Matt Lundquist, founder and clinical director of Tribeca Therapy.
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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thanks for spending part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live-streaming, or on demand, I'm grateful you are here. Coming up on today's show, we'll talk to Author Nicole Flattery about her new novel, Nothing Special, based in part on Andy Warhol's audio diaries.
We'll also learn about the new Louis Armstrong center in Queens, and we'll talk through some pet sitting questions with someone from Brooklyn Bark. Ray may come in and out and help me with my computer in the middle of this segment, so we'll just say hi to Ray when that happens. Let's get the show started with some therapy speak.
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How are you feeling? If the answer is not great, some people might also describe their state of mind with the words like toxic. As in, my toxic co-worker doesn't do his fair share of the work, and then blames others for issues. Or if someone you didn't respect your boundaries, that might have triggered you. You get the idea. You also hear those words in our culture, on college campuses to describe issues in the classroom, and in coverage of the workplace, or even the latest public breakup.
As we are all getting more comfortable discussing mental health issues out loud, which is good, we are searching for ways to describe what's going on, and often the language of the therapist's office is coming into play more and more. This is something that The New Yorker magazine is covering in a special digital issue devoted to, as they describe it, "Therapy as a distinguishing feature of contemporary life." It's out now. Joining me now is Marella Gayla. She's an associate editor at The New Yorker, and she co edited the current digital issue. Marella, welcome to the studio.
Marella Gayla: Thanks for having me.
Alison Stewart: Also joining us is Matt Lundquist, friend of the show. He's the founder and clinical director of Tribeca Therapy. Welcome back, Matt.
Matt Lundquist: Always great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Alison Stewart: [unintelligible 00:02:03]. Listeners, what therapy speak have you noticed creep into your life? Has there been a time when therapy speak has been helpful, or when did you experience therapy speak and it made things maybe harder? Put on your thinking caps. What's a time someone used therapy speak with you, and what was it that person was really trying to express?
Our phone number is 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can call us up and get on the air, or you can text to us at that number. You can also reach out via social media. The number is 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Marella, what made you want to take on therapy? What made The New Yorker think this was a good subject in the summer of 2023?
Marella Gayla: I think there was a immediate urgency to the subject. In a way, it felt like a really obvious idea to me, which also can mean that it's a good one. It just seems like every week, there's new research on widespread loneliness and distress and social malaise and feelings of isolation and hopelessness among young people. It's also become a commonplace that everyone's in therapy, everyone talks as if they're in their therapist's office. It's something that people have been discussing a lot in the last few days with this viral boundary moment with Jonah Hill.
I think the ubiquity of therapy speak gives people a lot to feel cynical about. I think people are rightly skeptical of the uses and misuses of these concepts. My co-editor, Carla, and I also felt really moved by the sense we had that people are feeling bad, but are also extremely curious and even empowered to figure out why. I think it's really easy to look at these pursuits of feeling better as conduits for selfishness and self-absorption, which they can be.
We were really interested in looking at therapy as a sort of imperfect tool. Not as something that has complete moral and scientific authority, but as a tool that can help us and also fail us.
Alison Stewart: Matt, let me bring you in here. There's a lot of terms. There's analysis, there's counseling, there's meetings, there's therapy. Can you clarify what is therapy, and what isn't therapy?
Matt Lundquist: Yes, it's a great question, and it's a question that we as therapists have to engage and reengage over time. There's, like anything when it comes to language, I think different ways that that gets designated. As a legal distinction, I'm a licensed therapist in New York state. New York State has some very particular laws, which you can look up on the Office of the Professions website, that dictates what that is.
It means that there's a certain kind of training, that you've passed the licensure exam, that you've completed a certain number of clinical hours of supervision. Technically, when you stop and think about the activity of therapy, what actually goes on in the therapist's office, I think you would be hard-pressed to identify most of what goes on as distinct from Alison conversations that you have on the radio or conversations that priests and rabbis have with their parishioners or that friends have with-- that coaches have, that mentors have.
In reality, it's a funny thing to designate a strict definition of-- Technically, what it means is that it's a conversation that's with a certain kind of a professional. It's an activity that's designed for the purposes of helping one individual or groups or couples, in the case of couples or group therapy, grow and improve their lives, and it's a space that's for them. That's not a position necessarily that's unique to therapy, but I think that is an essential definition as part of what therapy is.
Alison Stewart: I want to read a quote from The New Yorker digital issue, and I'll get you both to respond. Marella, I'll start with you. "If our current moment has a defining impulse, it's the drive to feel good again." Those are the words on the cover of the digital issue. Why did you choose that pull quote? Why do you think this is?
Marella Gayla: I think it's something that popped into my mind while I was watching TikTok one time. It felt like all the videos I get of young women are about various routines they have. There's this kind of medicalization of feeling good, this need for regimen and routine. It just occurred to me that even outside the strictures of health care, there is this interest in wellness, in self-improvement, in being conscious of your everyday processes and how they affect your well-being and your mind.
I think it gets at also some of the other stuff we've been talking about with the feeling that therapy speak is percolating into the way we handle our relationships, and our friendships, and our relationships and family.
Alison Stewart: Matt, what do you take about that idea, that there's a drive to feel good again?
Matt Lundquist: I think there's unquestionably a drive to feel good again. I'm interested and fascinated. I'm sure The New Yorker has a lot to say about the "again" in that statement. I think that feeling good is certainly an understandable value that I think, in many, many ways, is timeless. I think we're saying something in particular about this moment, I think COVID being a critical cultural reference point. Though I think for many people coming out of four years of Trump and the impact of that on our lives and emotional help is certainly a part of that.
I think that there's a drive to feel good. I think people have an interest in feeling good. I'm always curious about the question of where that lives alongside a drive to be good and do good, and how the practice of trying to feel better as a person is commingled with the practice of being a good and decent person, being kind and caring to other people around us. I think there's interesting ways that therapy locates itself, depending on practitioners and moments on both sides of that question.
I think the drive to feel good again is universal. I think it looks a particular way. What it means to think about and talk about feeling good looks a particular way right now, given what's going on in the world.
Alison Stewart: My guests are Matt Lundquist, founder and clinical director of Tribeca Therapy and New Yorker associate editor, Marella Gayla. She co-edited The New Yorker special digital issue on therapy. You're our guests as well, listeners. What therapy speak have you noticed come into your life? Has there been a time when therapy speak has been helpful, or did you experience therapy speak, and it made things harder?
If you could put on your thinking caps, what was a time someone used therapy speak with you, and what do you think they were really trying to express? 212-433-9692 is our number. 212-433-WNYC. We have a few calls ready to go. Okay, I hope I get your name right. Yevgenia from Manhattan?
Yevgenia: It's close enough, Yevgenia. Thank you. I've noticed that, especially in comment sections now. Now that full out slurs and insults are becoming more reportable, and they're easily deleted by moderators, men who like to insult and degrade women on the internet, they're finding that therapy speak is becoming more efficient. They know that if they call you a bad word, that's just going to get deleted, but if they really want to cut through to you, they weaponize therapy speak.
They use the same words that you might use in your own life, toxic or whatnot, and they will use that towards you, and it's less likely to get deleted, and it's more likely to get positive attention from other people, and especially other women.
Alison Stewart: What's an example that you've seen?
Yevgenia: I see it on Instagram comments all the time, for example. If you go under any super popular post from a woman, especially, let's say a woman is talking about other women gaining self-respect and not dating men that will hurt her or degrade her, you will usually find comments underneath that video, and men will come in in droves, and they will start using therapy speak to degrade that woman and any women that disagree with them.
Alison Stewart: You need therapy, or you're toxic.
Yevgenia: Exactly. You need therapy, you're toxic.
Alison Stewart: Interesting.
Yevgenia: You should really re-evaluate your privilege or-- Just anything that they've heard women use, and they will just throw it right back at you and weaponize it.
Alison Stewart: It's really interesting. That's an interesting observation. Thank you for calling in. Andrew is calling in from Hoboken with a personal experience. Hi, Andrew.
Andrew: Hi. How are you?
Alison Stewart: I am doing great. You're on the air.
Andrew: Thanks for taking my call. I have a funny story involving therapy speak. I was dating a girl last summer, and she wanted to go on a vacation. This vacation was to take her ex-boyfriend's mother and one of her absolute best friends from Arizona and bring the three of them together for the first time ever. Very peculiar. She said, "Do you want to come on this trip to my ex-boyfriend's mother's house?" I said, "Sure, why not? That sounds incredible. That sounds like a rom-com."
We fly down there, and it turned into a weekend of-- it was like a four-day weekend of therapy speak meets astrological therapy as well. I don't know how to describe it really, but it was so strange, and it became really uncomfortable and very invasive for me where the entire weekend turned into I'd say anything, I'd be like, "Oh, let's play Rummy Cube." They'd be like, "How does that make you feel?" They would dive into it.
It really wasn't even about me at that point. It felt like it was the three of them one-upping one another on how in-depth they could get in this talk. Even I got to the point where at the end of the trip I said, "Hey, listen, I've been feeling very uncomfortable this entire trip. I feel like I've been under a microscope with the three of you. Could you guys back off?" They were like, "Yes, of course. How does it make us feel?" I just put them in front of themselves and took a flight home, and they sat there for two more weeks together and just went after it.
Alison Stewart: Wow. That is a perfect story for this segment. Andrew, thank you for calling in. Matt, what are the potential issues with using this language, which is very useful between a therapist and a client and a patient? What are some of the issues that can come up if we just start using it?
Matt Lundquist: Yes, I'm thinking about both language and also the activity that your caller just described. I think, going hand in hand, I'll say a couple things. One is I think you're acknowledging, and I think that's right, but I think therapy language, there's certain ways of talking that do go on. I think a lot of stuff that is credited as therapy speak isn't in reality necessarily the stuff of therapy or the stuff of good therapy. That distinction is I think really important.
Even in as much as there is, certainly as there is in any profession, [unintelligible 00:13:52] there's a way that given groupings of people talk and find useful in talking. I think that that is useful in therapy, and I think that that can be useful outside of therapy. I think the language is useful, but I think that the question is that we can tend to forget that therapy is a very bizarre and unusual relationship where, unlike most relationships, it's very clearly a one-sided relationship.
The therapist is there for the patient. The time and space is about the patient's feelings and needs and thoughts and desires. It tends to be and needs to be at its best scheduled. There's an agreed-upon fee. There's certain agreed-upon contexts. In other words, there's a container that allows for certain ways of talking and certain kinds of activities to take place in ways that are likely to be thoughtful and productive.
If we keep the activity and the language, but put that into a different container without being very, very thoughtful about whether or not it in fact fits into that container, and then the case of Andrew being there, the particular kind of people that are in the container of this wild vacation, I think we get into a lot of trouble, which is that we forget that in order to be able to do certain kinds of activities, we need a very particular space that's a beautiful space, but it's not a space that you can just randomly make up here in a random living room in Arizona.
Alison Stewart: I want to read a text, and this gets to one of the pieces, Marella, in the digital issue. This text says, "I teach at university, and students have become so fluent in therapy speak, self-diagnosis, and weaponizing this speak. It's increasingly difficult to teach this generation due to everything 'triggers' them. Professors are accused of not supporting mental health. Also, they don't feel 'safe' all the time. They're triggered. The word 'trauma' is very much overused." There was a piece in the digital issue called, Are You My Mother? Tell folks about Are You My Mother? What's the premise of this piece in The New Yorker?
Marella Gayla: That is a wonderful essay written by Merve Emre, who is a critic for The New Yorker, and also a professor of literature. It picks up on this long-standing relationship between a psychoanalyst and patient and that between a teacher and student, and asks how that comparison could be useful and help us think through some of these moments of conflict that happen in classrooms.
Merve talks a little bit about how words like toxic and triggering and traumatic and harmful have become the set of terms that describe these moments of friction in the classroom. These moments that end up as segments on Fox News. I think what the piece does well is it takes seriously the feelings of dismay and the feelings of disenfranchisement and powerlessness that young people feel and how that expresses itself in the classroom.
What she's proposing is looking for a different set of words to describe those feelings, without categorizing these moments as moral injuries or as acts of violence or harm. The words she lands on are slightly, I guess, older concepts. She lands on transference and countertransference, which are psychoanalytic concepts about-- The way Janet Malcolm describes it in her book, The Impossible Profession, was the way we all invent each other according to early blueprints.
We bring to our interactions these imprints from our early life and project expectations and hopes from other relationships onto things that are happening in the present. What Merve is looking at in the piece is wondering, are teachers harming their students in all of these cases, or could we think of these difficult and contentious moments as places where teachers and students are projecting unfair or misplaced expectations on each other? Could we use that disappointment as a source for inquiry rather than punishment?
Alison Stewart: We are talking about therapy and therapy speak with Matt Lundquist, founder and clinical director of Tribeca Therapy, and New Yorker associate editor Marella Gayla. She co-edited The New Yorker special digital issue on therapy. After the break, we'll talk a little bit about boundaries, climate anxiety, and take more of your calls. This is All Of It.
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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guests this hour are Matt Lundquist, founder and clinical director of Tribeca Therapy, as well as Marella Gayla, excuse me, New Yorker associate editor, co-edited The New Yorker's special digital issue on therapy. Emily had called in, but she couldn't stay on the line, but she had an interesting comment.
She said, "I'm friends with a therapist, and we are using therapy speak as new moms to make sure that we have the headspace and emotional availability to check in with each other before we go on a rant about motherhood or something else." She said it's been slightly helpful to her in that way. We've got Kay on Line 5. This will be interesting for you, Matt. Take a listen in. Hi, Kay. Calling in for Middlesex County. Hi, Kay. Thanks. You're on the air.
Kay: Hi, there. Can you hear me okay?
Alison Stewart: You sound great.
Kay: My question really touches more, I guess, on the dual relationships when you have a friend that may be in the mental health profession, like a therapist, and they cross over that line and begin to therapize you with that therapy speak. When I raised that to someone after going through a very tough, difficult time in our family, the retorts were, "I see a lot of anger in you," and blah, blah. We had had a death in the family, so obviously there was frustration and anger. I'd just like to get the opinion of your experts on that because I wasn't a patient, but what do you do at that point to get that person to stop?
Alison Stewart: Matt, I'm going to let you handle this one.
Matt Lundquist: Yes, of course. I think there's a few things here. I think referencing back to what I said in reference to your earlier caller, Alison, is this question of really respecting that therapy requires a very particular context that even therapists don't have outside of their treatment room and outside of that therapy relationship. I think attempting to do certain kinds of activities that are of that domain elsewhere, I think, tends to not work and can be unkind and harmful.
I think, though, that if we look at the question of, I think that there are activities and ways of talking that happen in therapy that I wouldn't want to render off limits, whether that's to a therapy patient or somebody who's learned some things about that or a therapist. I think the question is to really think about is this way of speaking and is this activity of talking about our experiences of one another, using a particular language in a particular way, is it, in fact, serving the relationship? Is it deepening the relationship? Is it building closeness and intimacy? Is it helping us generate fun and the meaningful things that come in the context of relationship? Is it helping us work through conflict and deepen our values?
It sounds clearly, in the case of what Kay is describing, at least for her, as a member of that relationship, it wasn't. I think that needs to be reflected on, regardless of the particular language that's being offered, is to think about this isn't the way of talking that is serving me and to examine that and to put that on the table in the relationship.
Alison Stewart: This therapy speak concept came up a lot this week when a woman who dated actor Jonah Hill shared some screenshots of a text message he allegedly sent her. She accused him of being, and this is a quote, narcissistic, misogynist, it's hard to say, and someone who used the word boundaries as a way to get what he wanted. A lot of people noted that Hill had recently made this documentary about his therapist, and he's very invested in his therapy.
I'm saying we're not going to have a conversation whether boundaries are good or bad. We actually want to talk about the language. One article in Men's Health said, "Fellas, you can be better than Jonah Hill. The actor is learning a very public lesson about the misuse of therapy speak and the definition of boundaries." He had written, "I made my boundaries clear to you," in regards to some things that the girlfriend was doing. Matt, when we use the word boundaries, what does it actually mean? What's a misuse of the word boundaries?
Matt Lundquist: It's a fascinating concept, and there's this interesting conversation that's been happening in the therapist world off of this. I think to attempt to offer a narrow and specific definition, it's about being clear with oneself, and then communicating that to other people about what we're down to participate in and what we're not down to participate in.
I think consent is an important question about that. I think there's an appreciation that I think some of the positive work that the language around boundaries is doing is around this idea. We used to talk about affirmative consent and people being really clear with themselves about what they want, communicating that to other people so that people can decide do those terms in fact work for them.
I think that when we get into this question of the misuse of boundaries, I think it's a fascinating question to look at. What sort of work is being done in evoking the word boundaries? There's an appeal to the presumptive moral authority of therapy. This isn't me setting a limit. This is a thing I learned in therapy, so it has this stamp of approval. It gives it this moral authority. Also, I think it functions, and I think very, very often therapy speak and its misuses, functions as a way of not having to take responsibility for a position that we have and a value that we have.
I think that Jonah Hill has some ideas about who he wants to date and some ideas he has about what he ought to be able to control in how that person operates. I think he's not taking responsibility for that. It seems to me in this case that evoking the concept of boundaries is an end run around of having to actually own a position that he has, that we could argue about whether that's a good or kind or misogynistic position. I think that's an important question. I think he's disassociating from ownership of that in a way that I think we see a lot when we hear complaints about therapy speak.
Alison Stewart: Marella, I want to ask you about a piece that looks at climate anxiety. What is climate anxiety, first of all?
Marella Gayla: I think it's defined in the piece as a broad umbrella of emotions that-- It's a series of sketches of people around the world who describe their various emotional states and responses to seeing the ramifications of climate change in the places where they live, and it also looks at a number of psychotherapists who have made-- talking about climate anxiety as specialty for themselves and who have become experts in talking with patients about feelings of distress around the decay of the earth, the doom of it all.
The piece brings up a really interesting tension, which is what does it mean to try to feel better about climate change, and is there some way that feeling anxious and agitated about the world ending around you is actually a really politically important thing for us? Is that a way that we can stoke a feeling of collective urgency around it? I think that question gets at some of these other complaints and concerns about the place of therapy in our culture. Does it individualize something that needs to be felt as a collective?
Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Kevin from NIAC, who has pulled over to talk to us. Kevin.
Kevin: I have two comments. The first one is that one of the things that has leaked down and bled down in the course of this therapy speak is the idea of safety and comfort, that all people must be 100% comfortable and 100% feel safe in the work environment, in your professional environment. That is an impossible bar to set, I feel. There's no way that that can possibly be met where people are not in any way uncomfortable with maybe a demand placed upon them or work placed upon them.
This leads to my second thought, which is that, at a certain point, what makes people uncomfortable and what makes people feel unsafe when they're triggered by some issue or some idea, it's going to, in some respects, cap our possibilities. I'm thinking of a professor friend of mine who cannot now talk about-- He's a theater professor, and he can't talk about certain plays that might involve suicide or that might involve a rape without somehow first acknowledging that this book is going to have a suicide or a rape, which then, of course, is-- Talk about the spoiler alert. You don't even get to read the play under the circumstances that the playwright was trying to expose his or her audience to.
Alison Stewart: Kevin, I'm going to dive in because I want to let Matt respond to that. This is interesting. The idea that if we are expected to feel safe all the time, if we're not expected to have any friction in life, then we don't really, I'm going to paraphrase a little bit, we don't necessarily learn how to cope with problems if we're constantly looking to feel in emotional bubble wrap.
Matt Lundquist: I would add an anecdote. Your caller's describing a friend who's a theater professor. I've heard about classrooms that are training therapists where there's big hesitations and trigger warnings and reluctance to talk about upsetting things like suicide and rape, which are the stuff of therapy and things that we need to be prepared to talk about and skilled at talking about. I'll tell you, they're uncomfortable. They're deeply uncomfortable. I think they ought to be uncomfortable, but they're important to talk about. Both for therapist and patient.
I think this question around safety is really interesting. I was thinking about that in the context of what Marella was talking about in the New Yorker article, looking at this question of trauma, is I think there's a lot to be said. The thing I would flag in deference to what your caller is raising is that I think there has become something of a conflation between feeling safe and being safe. We say to people, we can imagine a professor or someone leading a workshop saying, "My goal is for everyone to feel safe."
I think the problem with that is that there's a difference between those things. I think we see as therapists ways that very often people in reality are in very safe situations, but because of complicated issues from perhaps their emotional past, they don't feel safe. I think being able to index upon the distinction between those things is very important, though I would support, as your caller is saying, some kinds of activities in life do mean embracing a degree of both felt and lived unsafety.
I think developing and learning can often feel and in some ways be unsafe. I think that growth and development is something of a disruption. I would add that that's, I think, often a misunderstanding about therapy. I very often hear therapists and cringe a bit saying, "I want you to feel really safe in my office." I think there's an underlying value there. I think my position is I want and am responsible for maintaining that people be safe in my office, but we need to invite feelings that may not be so safe because that's a part of how we make room to feel and talk through things that don't feel good, things that are scary. I think we need to be prepared to embrace those things and to think more about the distinction between feeling and reality in those ways.
Alison Stewart: The New Yorker's special digital issue on therapy is available now. I've been speaking with New Yorker associate editor, Marella Gayla. She co-edited the issue, and Matt Lundquist is the founder and clinical director of Tribeca Therapy. Thank you for everyone who called, and thanks to both of you for being part of this conversation.
Marella Gayla: Thank you so much.
Matt Lundquist: Thanks for having me. Thanks.
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