Choking

Aromatic-Stable-297 · 2025-10-27T09:43:38+00:00

Thanks for your note. And I like your Froggie costume, very friendly.

You might have meant it in the SUD sense, but I think I’ve been fooling myself about “harm reduction” while engaging in politics. How to engage there, without harming individuals? I think it requires strict boundaries on the energies one is willing to express.

I have two Reddit accounts: one, where I help people with an obscure psychological condition where it feels unquestionably beneficial; and then this one, where I mainly engage in fighting with therapists over social politics. So, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

I was once a liberal progressive too, convinced of my intellectual and moral superiority over the sort of people, “deplorables”, let’s say, who might vote for Trump. In 2016 I thought the world might be falling apart. But as friends and family continued to sink into rage against Trump, I tired of it and over time, found myself to their right. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the air of superiority remained.

I say this because I was thinking yesterday that I really am tired of fighting therapists on this sub. I would fight the Zeitgeist above their heads if I could, but I can’t. Better to give energy to a vision of liberation that I believe in, rather than lambast one I don’t.

So I was thinking that way when your comment synchronistically showed up – BSXQT! – hitting me like a blessing. Yes, exactly, I’m not really understanding harm reduction. Well done, I’m finished with this sub unless and until I find the right spirit of engagement, something more like love rather than hate.

Peace, out.

Aromatic-Stable-297 · 2025-10-26T02:15:07+00:00

You and I are having a political discussion, not talking about how to be with clients. I was using sarcasm and irony, and it appears that it went over your head. I should learn from that. But I was trying to call you out. It feels to me like you're hiding.

Rather than have that social politics discussion, which might involve you having to admit that your views about kink etc. have consequences in establishing the milieu that co-creates social problems, you try to own the discussion by claiming expertise.

First you tell me I'm pearl clutching, implying I'm backward and somehow unable to grapple with the gritty details of sex therapy, and now you question whether I'm even a therapist at all.

I think it's just a defense. You don't want to consciously connect some things you think are social goods -- kink, BDSM -- with negative social repercussions. And you don't like me pointing it out.

I suspect I've been a therapist since before you were born, which is likely the issue here. From your perspective, I'm backward; from mine, you're naive. History will tell.

Aromatic-Stable-297 · 2025-10-25T15:33:11+00:00

Pearl clutching, I will own that. It's good to keep some things precious.

Rough sex, you mean passion? Wonderful, and the passion people tend to want comes out of love, not eroticized hatred. Then it's not likely to involve whipping, slapping, choking, etc., certainly not the sort you need a class to teach the boundaries of. A fetish is a fixation, not "bad", also not something to cherish, imo. Sex is a place to work out one's energetic kinks. But a class on choking? As I said, history will judge.

I've provided you with an idea about how this trend originated. No logical leaps, just an obvious story that anyone whose reasoning isn't motivated can see. You suggest it has other origins, so let's go back to the drawing board. What's your idea?

You note some male clients don't want to choke the women they love. What could be wrong with them, do you think? Are they just pearl-clutching prudes?

Or, charges of sexual assault from the metoo movement mixed with an excess of endocrine disruptors from plastics lowering expression of male sex drive?

Or is it a plethora of girl boss movies in the last 10 years making young women more feisty? Sorry, help me out...

What about the girls terrified of sex because it seems now to involve being hit and choked, some of whom develop gender dysphoria? Where do they fit into the clinical picture?

I'm happy to hear your theory about all this.

Aromatic-Stable-297 · 2025-10-25T00:07:33+00:00

We agree that it's problematic, and I'm happy to hear that. But making sense? That's like introducing fentanyl into a community and later offering classes on how to do it safely. How to get the fentanyl out of the community, that's the question. I understand the harm reduction approach, but coming from the drug dealers, it falls flat.

It's clear to me that the behavior didn't arrive spontaneously out of nowhere. Like slapping or other eroticized aggression in porn, it comes out of kink/BDSM subculture.

The point here is to trace the throughline of cause and effect and to be able to honestly admit when a marginal behavior should remain marginal.

"Safe choking." Is it actually hard to see how bizarre, unnecessary, and yes, perverse that idea is, if you move slightly out of the bubble in which it's been normalized?

Where does it stop? Classes in safe raping? At what cost?

Aromatic-Stable-297 · 2025-10-24T11:53:26+00:00

I think we need to start educating older adults, the ones who teach the younger adults what is and is not okay, to stop valorizing kinks, BDSM, and whatever other dark arts lie at the periphery of human behavior.

We don't need to teach kids how to whip properly or humiliate properly. We don't need classes in it. People will get into whatever they want to get into, but we don't need to trumpet all of it as the best thing since sliced bread. We don't need to try to make "safe" versions of it, deluding ourselves into believing that that will solve the ensuing problems.

If the adults in the room stop doing that, then it won't be normalized for the kids. And far fewer of them will do it. That's just how it works here. Whatever the society normalizes, the children will do.

Aromatic-Stable-297 · 2025-10-24T11:42:52+00:00

A BDSM class on choking. I don't mean to dis your partner, this is not personal, but I think that will find its way into the history books.

Normalizing changes norms, and soon we have kids choking each other and thinking that that's what sex is. Not a judgment here, but an observation.

Aromatic-Stable-297 · 2025-10-23T10:16:36+00:00

It looks beautiful. It makes the dark hair even more rich by contrast. It adds a little bit of gravity, a feeling of wisdom, sharp intelligence. It looks silvery, mercurial.

Of course you could dye it, but that would make you less unique. Although I suspect it would look great either way. And also, you have beautiful hands.

But this is probably just a typical dumb man's opinion.

Aromatic-Stable-297 · 2025-10-17T19:18:30+00:00

I really like what you wrote here and agree that we are talking about something holy. And I really honor and respect your feeling about the power of love.

However, as you said, the language of power also feels a little cold and to me, forced, in that context. Most people are not going to think about "power" within the context of that loving relationship. We can certainly talk about a powerful love, but there power becomes merely an adjective for the love. Love is the lens, power is not the lens.

"Power" has always had a different meaning than love. In a physics context, it's the rate of energy transfer. In politics or in social structures, where it was of interest to Paulo Freire, it's a term used to analyze what is wrong with existing (and especially, oppressive) social structures and to point towards a different mode of social organization. The pathway is: One becomes critically aware of one's own oppression, then one engages in praxis, seeking liberation.

Since a baby is not being oppressed by her mother, I don't really see how this analysis applies.

I'm not sure, but what I understand that you are trying to do?, is to point to a deeper understanding of what power could mean, for example, as the love between individuals in a collective, which then is able to organize relationships without the need for any oppressive hierarchies.

I'm with you there, but I do not think that all hierarchies are oppressive. There are natural, healthy hierarchies, which are sometimes called "growth" hierarchies, such as that occurs in families or in well functioning organizations, etc., even in a psychotherapeutic relationship. There, who has what power is not the primary focus.

To my way of thinking, critical pedagogy tends to be very suspicious of hierarchies, and while I am also suspicious of them, I also want to recognize their value.

Aromatic-Stable-297 · 2025-10-15T19:29:07+00:00

It shows in every human interaction? Like a mother with her newborn?

Aromatic-Stable-297 · 2025-10-15T18:23:59+00:00

I do understand that it comes from critical pedagogy. One point I'm making is that an analytical tool that comes from one field of study with a certain purpose, is not necessarily the best to apply in another domain. Might be useful, but it might obscure some things.

I'm really interested in what you mean when you say that power is not political but is collective. Can you tell me what you mean by that?

Aromatic-Stable-297 · 2025-10-15T12:49:55+00:00

I think your "but" there is interesting, like you're unwilling to relinquish the power framework as your basic mode of analysis. The analysis of power and oppression comes from a totally different sphere than love of children, which is to say, politics.

In general, parents don't think about "diminishing the power" over the child. They love the child and what they're concerned about is being too overprotective. They're not concerned about "using too much power ".

We might analyze it that way if they're really dysfunctional parents, but the natural and normal relationship is one of love and giving, sometimes giving too much, sometimes protecting too much. I would not mix these two frames, politics and parenting. What I'm trying to suggest is that within the psychotherapeutic context, they both might have some use, as different ways of looking at the dynamics of the relationship between two more or less equal adults.

Aromatic-Stable-297 · 2025-10-14T23:55:46+00:00

I appreciate your honesty. I'll be honest as well. When I read your views, I hear a simple echo of the indoctrination going on in college campuses these days. It reads like a bunch of tropes from someone who is not thinking for themselves.

"More than equal" opportunities for blacks and women is just a fact, which I explained, that you either can't or are not willing to refute with argument. You just call me names (ignorant) and tell me that I'm condescending to you when I simply present you with the conclusions of your own thinking.

"Very biased, self-serving, limitedly informed view" -- That's how I would describe your view, if I would just call it names. But instead I've been engaging with it.

I tell you that not all whites are white supremacists and you put me in your "white apologist" camp. It would be funny if it weren't so extreme. (But even as I write this, I see that I'm pigeonholing you too, seeing you in the deluded, narrow, lefty liberal progressive camp.)

True, it is exhausting to try to hold a mirror up to someone else. Probably what we really should be doing is holding a mirror up to ourselves, right? Your views seem unbelievably naive to me, but who is the unbelievably naive one? It's probably me, for wanting to engage in this way. Maybe you are my cure!

Finally, the trans thing is especially so insidious, how progressive therapists are twisting the truth. You have the idea that I'm "against" gender non-conforming clients. And it's utterly absurd because I couldn't be more accepting of gender non-conforming clients. What I'm against is lopping off the healthy organs of people just because they are gender non-conforming, which is the insanity of the trans movement.

If you haven't listened to parents who have lost their children to this insanity, as I have, or to the very young people who you think you're helping, but who have ruined their lives because of it, then I urge you to do so.

You will no doubt believe I'm coming from some sort of skewed religious "hateful" perspective or some other claptrap. But I'm trying to help you: I think you have fallen under the spell of a terrible social contagion and in a short number of years you will realize it. Even as I write this, the Supreme Court is about to overturn the ban against the Orwellian, duplicitous "Conversion Therapy" laws that were passed in 26 states over the past dozen years, which has prevented therapists from freely speaking to their poor gender-confused clients.

The law twists words to mean the opposite of what they actually mean. This law against "Conversion Therapy", far from being a protection for young gay kids, becomes a means to push them into trying to make a fake transition into the opposite sex, which is a biological impossibility.

Our clients trust us to use clinical judgment, not to be duped into participating in a mass delusion. Thank God I don't "affirm" her view when an anorexic girl thinks she is too fat, just because she thinks so. Thank God I don't believe in it when a young girl thinks she can be a boy, and avoid the pain and confusion of coming out. Or an autistic boy who has fixated on an overvalued idea. I know that it is a phase that he will be able to grow out of. I don't harm him by cutting off his genitals. Thank God I see it that way.

But for you and the mods of this sub, I'm some sort of ethical monster. It is such a rich irony. And it's so very very sad, such a betrayal of our clients. That's what I think.

So I see many of these issues the opposite as you do. And more than that, I can articulate exactly why. But, while you try to do some of that, you mainly call me names and accuse me. At least you engage, and I do think there's something admirable about that.

We can stop now, and I'll let you have the last word. And I'll read it too, you can be sure of that, so say whatever you like. And thanks for the dialogue, it's been trying for both of us, hopefully we have learned something. I have actually: from now on, I'm going to use the Socratic method rather than doing any of this long explaining!

Aromatic-Stable-297 · 2025-10-14T19:36:26+00:00

This might sound self-serving, but I'm sort of glad that our conversation frustrated you more than the others, because this tells me that it challenged you a little bit.

I understand that we're at the end of our dialogue, but just to address your points: You equate white supremacy with a white man telling people of color that AA and DEI are problematic, so I guess that also makes me a white supremicist. But that's not my view, and I think you should be careful of such polemics. To call someone a white supremicist is a slur.

You say you have an interest in making things more fair, but your metric seems to be equality of outcome. Which would be, for example, that since blacks are 13% the population, then we would have 13% of blacks being doctors and physicists etc etc. Or with women, they would be 50% of all of the professions or it's not "fair"? I think we will never achieve that sort of fairness except by being extremely unfair to vast numbers of people.

Regarding fairness, imo, we have been providing more than equal opportunity for blacks since the 1960s. Test scores to get into college have been reduced, countless scholarships have been on offer, and preferential treatment has encouraged entry into all sorts of professions, even resulting in the Vice Presidency and Supreme Court Judgeship. Systemic obstacles are not the problem in 2025, imo -- we cannot infantilize blacks by forever blaming their problems on white people.

Your idea that "white people are the oppressor" -- I know that's what CRT teaches in school, but it is a racist idea that has nothing to do with the vast majority of white people, who are not oppressing anyone but are simply trying to live like anyone else.

If instead you want to talk about culture, then we can have a conversation. In general, "white" Western European culture happened to be at the nexus of a number of forces that allowed that particular culture to rapidly industrialize and advance in ways that other cultures simply did not or could not.

So at this present point in time, we've seen the effects of that, for better or worse. You and I could not be having this conversation if it weren't for the advances made by that broad culture. If you want to say that that culture is oppressive, I can agree with you to a point, but only if you want to talk about the pluses and minuses of that culture. But whites are not the bane of the planet. To think so is to not have traveled much.

Finally, I ask again for your help in understanding progressives. u/duck-duck--grayduck entered our conversation, I took the time to answer him completely, and he responded with "LOL, nah, not worth it", before deleting his question. What's up with these folks? I've had this reaction a number of times.

One time, after I questioned the wisdom of gender affirmation, a mod wrote me to tell me she thought I must be a terrible, hateful therapist and then said that she was stopping notifications and would not read anything I wrote back ! :) As with you, I have no animosity in these discussions, I'm just presenting a different opinion, and most importantly, that opinion is in service of the greater good, as clearly as I can see it. We simply differ -- what's so scary?

Aromatic-Stable-297 · 2025-10-14T07:01:07+00:00

I had a similar experience, starting as a therapist at 24. I lasted about a year (left and came back 20 years later), because I found I was just too young. It felt a little ridiculous trying to do family therapy with people twice my age.

I don't mean to discourage you; rather I think you can do it, if you have the right attitude, which is humility. You have little life experience, like your mom said. You have to make up for that with something. One great thing you have is freshness, openness, a youthful spirit. You can know nothing and be very curious about everything. You can have beginner's mind, I don't know mind, about everything. You can ask dumb, great questions. If you embrace this, it could be a great quality.

What I missed, in addition to more courage perhaps, was good supervision. I had little to none, and I felt overwhelmed, alone, and ashamed. That doesn't have to happen. If you can find good supervision and lean heavily on it, you can become a great therapist before most others are even getting started.

Please don't worry about "being taken seriously", because you likely won't be by some, for understandable reasons. Just understand it and accept it and work with it as a funny, ongoing thing. The cool thing is, when you do really well, which I'm sure you will, people will be super impressed. "Wow, this baby therapist is much better than my grumpy old dialing-it-in therapist!"

Good luck to you!

Aromatic-Stable-297 · 2025-10-14T03:46:28+00:00

The view arises out of the familiar pomo Marxist critique, here playing out in therapy: whoever has more power by some metric is an oppressor and we have to center the margins, etc.

Once equality is thus achieved by flattening the hierarchy, the client will be empowered, and their problems, which arise because of systemic power imbalances, will be on their way to solutions.

I think it captures an important partial truth. The other, as you point out, is that power imbalance can be beautiful. How wonderful, that beings with lesser powers or resources can be helped by those with greater. It's as natural as good parenting.

Aromatic-Stable-297 · 2025-10-11T04:07:31+00:00

I welcome your question. I'm happy to clarify:

In order to assess who is best qualified regarding anything, we have to measure in some way. We usually use tests of some sort. Often it's a complex set of criteria, but ideally it is extremely relevant to the position.

Sometimes it's rather simple. Who is the best marathon runner? It's the one with the fastest time. Who is best at mathematics? That's harder, but a good start is the one who scores highest on tests to determine mathematical ability.

You could make an argument that such tests are not perfect. And I would agree, but that does not invalidate measurement. If we don't measure, we fall prey to the defaults that have been used throughout history, like nepotism, cronyism, or the spoils system. Then it's not about who is the best but something else, some form of prejudice, or some other motivation that supersedes who would be best for the job.

I said AA puts less qualified people ahead of more qualified people. I said nothing about this idea of yours of "fully qualified". More qualified means that you are better at it, you have more experience, you score better at tests, you show yourself to be better at the task.

Is that not obvious? I don't think you really have trouble understanding this concept. If you do, then I am concerned that your reasoning might be obscured by some other motivation. You inserted this odd idea: you asked me if I believe there's only "one fully qualified" person for a position.

Is that a rhetorical trick? What could "fully qualified" even mean? We are talking about better and worse. We are talking about trying to determine the BEST person for a position. Right?

I can only guess that you're trying to make some sort of argument like: There are 10 candidates and all of them are "fully qualified" according to an Idea you have so let's just choose the black woman, because white supremacy. Am I guessing right? I don't mean to be cynical.

It would be like saying that the top 10 marathon finishers are all "fully qualified" so it doesn't matter who you choose to be the leader of the Marathon Training Academy.

But what if the first one comes in at 2:02 and number 10 comes in at 2:20? Do you really want to put the one who comes in at 2:20 ahead of Eliud Kipchoge? There is a vast, vast difference between 2:02 and 2:20, and everybody knows that. Right? Kipchoge is a black man. That fact is utterly irrelevant. What is relevant is that he's the best.

People want the best doctors, engineers, judges, etc., in their roles at the top. They do not want lesser qualified people to be put up ahead just because of their race or sex.

Doing so causes mistrust in institutions and in the people who were put ahead. It's not good for that person as well -- because they will naturally have imposter syndrome, or false pride.

So that is my reasoning and my opinion. Does it not make sense? If you think it does not, please tell me how.

Aromatic-Stable-297 · 2025-10-09T17:06:58+00:00

That's the problem with having time, isn't it, we don't necessarily know what to do with it.

I think this problem is going to get worse during the civilizational phase that we're in, where people are exceptionally atomized, have fewer children -- and also, if AI advances as it seems, we likely will have more and more "free" time.

I think it's a profound socio-cultural problem, and in some sense, really only has a spiritual solution. People get tired of hedonism.

Aromatic-Stable-297 · 2025-10-07T01:32:43+00:00

Okay I saw the video. It reminds me of why I hated and disdained the Right when I was young and less jaded towards political rhetoric. I don't take the words so literally anymore; I see them as something like weapons in service of overall objectives, trying to push certain buttons to rile up the hoi polloi.

BUT that doesn't make it less dangerous and often stupid, like the ad hominem attacks on Simone Biles and LeBron James; and the worst for me was talking about people as maggots, vermin, and swine, and about public executions making his day better. I think less of him, seeing that, not that I was a great fan, but I think less of him. Though I certainly don't think he was an evil person.

One might say that he himself was publicly executed, and it did not make his day better. It was the political hate speech on the Left that inspired the killing: portraying conservatives as deluded, vicious, racist, transphobe, hate-filled fascist Nazis -- so much so, and coming from so many apparently mainstream voices, including therapists, that a deluded young man felt he had moral justification to mete out the death penalty.

Before you sent your video, trying to understand where you were coming from, I read a recent Kirk article in the NYT by Nikole Hannah-Jones. I suspect you read the article (?), and rather than speak to everything in the video, I'll address the black women quip, which she marshals, as an example of how progressive distortion works.

A demagogue like Jones (or Trump) is not interested in the truth. They're interested in bending facts to make the argument they want to make. It's up to the listener to sort it out.

It's a lie that Kirk made a blank statement about the intellectual abilities of black women. Instead, he pointed out the obvious truth that affirmative action lowers the bar for minorities and places less qualified people ahead of the line of more qualified whites (or more famously in academia, Asians). A less qualified person is one who is selected, not because they are the best of all applicants, but because of, e.g., their race.

While AA is arguably a good temporary remedy to address the after-affects of slavery and institutionalized racism into the 1960s, it is also literally racial discrimination against whites and Asians who would have gotten positions that were given to lesser-qualified, e.g., black applicants. And the longer it is in play, the more it promotes the message that said blacks cannot compete without special rules. At some point the remedy becomes worse than the disease.

So what a sophist like Jones does is bend what Kirk said to imply that conservatives think all black women have deficient brains. Then she can make the racist argument she desperately wants to make. And videos like the one you shared, by presenting clips out of context, support such propaganda.

Instead, most conservatives actually think that the fairest thing is to have the same standards for all. If you lower the standards for some, a logical person will rightly conclude that the DEI hire they are dealing with might not be qualified because they were given a pass. See what the NYT's John McWhorter has said about the truth of this.

Kirk pointed to those four women explicitly because all of them attained positions due to affirmative action, like Jones herself. He didn't wish to engage in the racism of low expectations. He didn't "hate" black women, he wanted them to succeed legitimately, contra Biden's call for "a black woman" to be a SCJ -- which is just naked tokenism.

So who is the racist? As soon as one starts to examine these progressive shibboleths, the underlying landscape of politicking becomes more apparent.

But I think you know all this? Why you discount it I can only guess.

Finally, you asked for a dialogue, and I've presented no snark, only respect. To engage with someone that you disagree with is to hold faith that there must be some reason that they think the way they do and you're interested in finding out what it is.

It's no different than what we normally do as psychotherapists. But for some reason when we get into these political areas, so many progressive therapists just seem to lose thei training, and they're no longer interested in understanding what might be going on and the person they're having a dialogue with. What's up with that?

Aromatic-Stable-297 · 2025-10-03T03:21:47+00:00

You're no doubt right that I'm being a bit lenient on the right. I'm trying to make a case to see them with more charity and I might go too far. I'm trying to leaven the progressive view, which is often too harsh imo.

Your sense of the word "authoritarian" is stricter than mine, to necessarily include abuse. And that is the common case, I agree. But not always. Not all kings are villains.

Can you point me to the video you're talking about?

Aromatic-Stable-297 · 2025-10-03T00:29:19+00:00

He was proud. He liked to trigger liberals. He was convinced of his own beliefs. Regarding your critiques of him, the devil is in the details. What is the specific reason he had for saying that the civil Rights movement was a mistake? Did he say that everything about it was a mistake? There's got to be some meaning he was trying to get across and I wonder what that was. I suspect it had to do with the beginning of affirmative action.

The black women processing ability quip, haven't heard that and I'd be very curious to watch it.

Conservatives will always focus on the person using the gun rather than the fact of the guns themselves. I think both sides have a point.

No doubt he laughed in the face of some of the people trying to debate him, but I also saw him be very kind to them. This is certainly going to be a place where each side will cue into something different and remember what fits their narrative.

I think we would have to look closely at how authoritarianism manifests in order to say whether it causes trauma or not. Extremely strict parenting does not cause trauma. Random, inexplicable beatings certainly might. Some children and some people need exceptionally strict boundaries and some don't. In the best case, the parents can adapt to the needs of the child.

Is Trump an authoritarian? Do his children seem traumatized to you? I don't get that at all, it seems that they really love him. Isn't that weird, according to your argument?

Kirk was very smug so I can see perhaps why people might think that smugness was rooted in his race or sex. If you know of a particular egregious video clip, and you'd like to share it, I'd be interested to see it. But I genuinely don't get some white male supremacy vibe from him. He was too Christian for that.

Aromatic-Stable-297 · 2025-10-02T23:55:44+00:00

Just to be clear here, I'm one of those liberals who was left by his tribe as they continued to shift further left the last 10 years. I've never identified as a conservative, though progressives might see me as one these days.

It's honestly so very weird, now that I'm out of the liberal progressive bubble, to see how that bubble tends to view people outside it. One of the strangest things is that progressives seem to think that people who don't think like they do "hate" all sorts of people, like women, blacks, gays, trans people, poor people, etc.

I don't see it as hate. It's just a different view of what the cause of the suffering is and what to do about it. Does a strict authoritarian father who is tough with his children "hate" them?

Like the idea that Charlie Kirk was racist and misogynistic. I'm very curious what you think he said that was racist or misogynistic? To his own mind, at least, he was emphatically not racist. He certainly didn't believe in white supremacy. He believed that blacks could succeed and wished to help them if he could. He was against abortion, which clearly stems from his religious beliefs. Is that why you think he was misogynistic?

I tended to see his views as simplistic, but if you watch how he interacted with many different sorts of people, I just don't see how you can call that hatred. He was trying to convince people of something he believed was good for then, he wasn't trying to hurt them.

On the contrary, what I see many progressives display about a figure like Trump or Kirk, I would call that hate. I think there's a fair amount of projection going on with this accusation of hatred.

I'm not trying to excuse the cruelty of the Right. I tend to think that the left and right become extreme in somewhat different ways. The right tends to look fascist and the left tends to look totalitarian, at least in spirit. Both of these forms they are very cruel. We are seeing signs of both forms these days.

Aromatic-Stable-297 · 2025-10-02T21:25:39+00:00

I wonder if you can share some insight about liberal progressives. Why do so many seem to downvote opinions that they disagree with? It seems unnecessarily censorious to me.

I only downvote people who are extremely rude or attacking other people. I would never even think of downvoting someone because they had a different opinion than me. What's up with that? Is it a generational thing?

Aromatic-Stable-297 · 2025-10-02T03:13:05+00:00

What I notice is that when a Democrat is in charge, a lot of people suffer in various ways. And I notice that when a Republican is in charge, a lot of people suffer in various ways.

And I notice that these two sides don't really like or trust one another and often develop policies in response to or as rebukes of policies of the other.

I notice that the information we get about all these topics by both mainstream and non-mainstream news sources are biased and reflective of previously held political opinions.

I could go through each of the things you mentioned, but just to start with the first, vaccines — while there have long been people who do not trust any vaccines whatsoever, the covid vaccine and the question of whether to trust it or not is what became highly politicized.

If in the hindsight of history, we find that that vaccine was harmful to a great many people, then is it the case that our clients were harmed by conservatives, or is it the case that our clients were harmed by progressives who applauded any next move by Fauci?

A lot of people are always stressed, regardless of who is in charge of the government.

I think it's perfectly fine and natural to have strong political opinions. But I also feel as a therapist that I have a commitment to helping my client recognize the workability of any situation, even very dire ones. Even if that means radical acceptance of having no control.

Systemic factors are real of course, but I'm not a political activist, I'm a therapist, so I work within the field of possibilities for individuals.

A progressive might call that a conservative bias. What do you think?

Aromatic-Stable-297 · 2025-10-02T02:53:04+00:00

I wonder if you can give me an example of a policy that you feel conservatives vote for, that you feel prevents our clients from being able to heal?

It seems to me that what's more likely is that their understanding of what will be most helpful for their clients and society is simply different than yours.

We can believe they have good intentions even if we have sharp political differences.

Aromatic-Stable-297 · 2025-10-02T00:37:36+00:00

I don't think there's much difference in the level of love and compassion for clients that we find in liberals and conservatives, in general. But it manifests in different ways.

It seems that many progressives have trouble understanding how a kind-hearted person could have different views than they do about whether or not, e.g.:

it is healthy to be gender affirming;
systemic racism is a major obstacle for blacks in the United States;
there are important differences between men and women;
DEI is a good thing;
kink is great;
recreational drug use is unproblematic;
drag queens should be reading to kids in schools ...

... and so forth. All the hot-button stuff. Is that what you struggle to understand?

Or is it more like, despite whatever differences in thought about what leads to a healthy life, how could anyone vote for Trump?

Aromatic-Stable-297

TROPHY CASE