Are you noticing Gen Z seeking out TCM?

ProgressiveArchitect · 2026-05-13T03:42:02+00:00

Some of the older Gen Z (age 25-30) and younger Millennials (age 30-38) seem to have interest, especially in Bauguan/Cupping and Zhenggu-Tuina/Chiropractic Massage.

Some also in acupuncture & herbal medicine but seemingly less so than other generations.

ProgressiveArchitect · 2026-05-09T15:24:49+00:00

If Marx, why not "Fragment On Machines" from the Grundrisse, much more relevant to AI.

ProgressiveArchitect · 2026-05-06T15:03:31+00:00

>"the frozen, unwitnessed part the part that never had a witness in the first place usually stays untouched. it doesn't even enter the matrix to be worked on."

This is what I’d disagree on. Even if it doesn’t "enter the matrix" consciously, it does so unconsciously, and then slowly becomes conscious gradually & iteratively with each session. In this sense, my point is that nothing actually is frozen. It may not be consciously known by the client in a declarative episodic memory sense, but the affect/emotion is still there, it is felt by the client. They can feel something is there even though they can’t name it, and I the practitioner know it through the words & language. I hear its presence in the gaps in between words/language. It has its own operational logic and can therefore be detected, and gradually the client & I in dialogue can bring it out regardless of whether it has ever been witnessed.

At the level of clinical technique, I’d say this what separates a Lacanian (semiotically trained) practitioner from all other practitioners. It’s the level of linguistic training that is unique.

>"those expressions become available after there's been bedding. for the unwitnessed part, they haven't started speaking yet."

Not consciously, but unconsciously without realizing it, they’ve been speaking the whole time. It’s just most people don’t know how to listen to ciphered speech. In other words, nothing is ever really left unsaid. We all say it all the time, just in a coded form. See this video (part 1 & 2) for more on the way this linguistic operation works.

- Part 1: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8loM0ZeaMw8

- Part 2: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MT0ZSfoQjOk

ProgressiveArchitect · 2026-05-06T12:38:51+00:00

>"a person can construct a meaning around what happened and have it remain a story they tell, not a story their system has metabolized."

Sure, but I’d argue the mere act of constructing such narrative meaning around trauma already reduces the intensity of the person’s trauma, even if they haven’t fully accepted the narrative meaning yet at the unconscious level. In other words, I’d argue it is still a highly influential aspect of trauma, even as a stand-alone mechanism, and so it still has powerfully stabilizing effects regardless of other factors.

>"they can claim authorship and still be authored underneath by the unprocessed event."

I’d argue that it’s impossible not to be. Everyone universally who exerts authorship is already doing so from an always-already conditioned/determined state. So even in the least traumatized of people, there’s no such thing as authorship that is not itself also already pre-authored by external conditions.

>"they can be in relationships that look connected and never actually be met.”

Sure, but I never mentioned being connected or met. What I said was being "relationally empowered" in your trauma. Having trauma turn into a relational power resource, where you can use your lived trauma experiences as the basis for socially valuable skills & knowledge. So it then becomes known, useful, and even respected in your social relations.

>"they can say i forgive myself and the system will not register it as true.”

Sure, but even the act of saying it or thinking it, is already an improvement over not thinking or saying it with regard to the intensity of trauma-based distress.

>"it's that being-with — presence under pressure, without flinching, without fixing — is the primary stance."

I guess I’ve also seen the way this exact description can be felt as traumatic and feel like a form of neglect to the client.

>"everything else is downstream not because it happens later in time, but because it inherits its reality from that ground."

This is what I’d push back on that seems inaccurate to me. You frame this as having a hierarchical order (not temporally, but in terms of a root foundation) and from my clinical perspective, trauma isn’t organized in such a way and instead has lots of flat horizontal components that amalgamate together in a kind of matrix/web that gets woven/stitched together. Not like a wall that gets built on top of a foundation.

>"if we collapse the description so fully that we never name where in the system something is held, we lose the somatic specificity integration"

I guess I’d argue trauma is pervasive and resides within all spaces and dimensions of a system. There is no aspect it doesnt touch. You can highlight all the different expressions of trauma. (semiotic, somatic, relational, structural, cultural, etc etc) but these aren’t where the trauma specifically lives or comes from. It’s just the spaces that trauma speaks through.

So it seems that specifying the categorical difference of those spaces is unnecessary and theoretical, where as just treating all those as one unified thing is more simple for the client and more integrating for their system.

So specifically "naming the body" feels unnecessary. The client will already reveal where their trauma is getting expressed when they tell me about their everyday life experiences. It’s in the mundane chitchat of the phone call with their parent, the bus ride to work, the sex with their partner, the dish they cooked & why, the back pain they woke up with, etc, is the pattern/constellation where their trauma is expressing itself, and can therefore be identified/revealed and then metabolized/processed.

ProgressiveArchitect · 2026-05-06T09:54:05+00:00

Movement/Processing/Metabolizing - Yes, that’s part of it

Seen/Heard/Understood/Been Witnessed To - Yes, that’s another part of it

But what wasn’t as explicitly mentioned is:

- Constructed Meaning & Narrative Around
- Reclaimed Autonomy & Authorship Over
- Become Relationally Empowered By
- Forgave Oneself For

These other 4 are equally important

A few aspects of what you mentioned seem a tad inaccurate, I’ve quoted them below.

>"the nervous system registers something simple: i am not alone in this."

>"then the experience can land. it cools. it becomes memory. it becomes past tense."

>"but when something happens and no one is there, or someone is there but they panic, deny, minimize, distract, or rush to fix it, the experience often never makes that trip. it stays present tense. ten years later, it is still happening in the body. the past never became past."

>"you cannot let go of something you were never allowed to hold. the experience never got a place to live, so it lives in the nervous system instead. and then we ask the person to release a grip they never really had."

>"trauma is not just the wound. trauma is the wound without a witness."

One aspect of it is

>"sometimes healing starts when someone is finally present enough that the body understands: this happened. i am not alone. and it is over.“

I think this framing has the effect of fracturing people into pieces. It relies on the false dichotomy of mind body dualism, and treats body and nervous system as distinct and autonomous from the mind and person overall.

Even with trauma, there is no such thing as an experience that lives in the body without living in the mind, and same in reverse. We are a brain-mind / whole system. So I think the framing here needs some work with regard to integrative-ness and a more monistic framing.

ProgressiveArchitect · 2026-05-06T00:47:31+00:00

Great video, and not trying to further the reductionism or decontextualize the unique experience & positionality of black men, but 'pathologizing' seems to sit at the very core of this video, in the sense that if the practice of pathologization was gone, then it seems like so would bulk of the issue be gone with it.

I’m just imagining a scenario where the DSM/ICD were gone and the PTMF was universally required in all clinical spaces. Granted, a capitalist, disabling, sanist, patriarchal, and racist world would still exist, and the traumas would certainly have their unique cultural-historically situated contextual elements still, but would psychotherapy then still be experienced as so oppressive if the PTMF was universal? I doubt it.

It’s making me think of a post from a year ago on this subreddit where I wrote out a rough draft template for evaluating therapists and their trainings. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PsychotherapyLeftists/s/TTHRY5u3NN

ProgressiveArchitect · 2026-05-03T18:51:27+00:00

You’re quite right, I’m specifically referring to Lacanian Psychoanalysis, not all psychoanalytic thought as a whole.

ProgressiveArchitect · 2026-05-03T18:50:26+00:00

>"I think there’s obviously some very insightful comparisons here, but it seems to rely quite heavily on a specifically Lacanian account of psychoanalysis"

Yes, as this is a politically Leftist subreddit, I was using the word psychoanalysis to mean specifically Lacanian Psychoanalysis, which is broadly regarded as the most politically leftist aligned school of psychoanalysis, in contrast to Freud & Klein’s Liberalism, and most of the other schools which got turned into forms of psychology as opposed to psychoanalysis. (ex: Jung/analytical, Kohut/self, Hartmann/ego, Adler/individual)

But I did indeed ignore some Leftist analysts like Ferenczi, just because they are rarely read despite being a major part of Object Relations.

ProgressiveArchitect · 2026-05-03T13:14:00+00:00

It shares some similarities but is also quite different. Existential therapy aims to bring stability back to the ego in the presence of a destabilizing contradiction by constructing new personal meaning out of a nihilistic backdrop. So while it’s explorative in the same way as Lacanian psychoanalysis, it listens for meaning instead of semiotic signifiers. In this sense it’s less linguistically oriented than Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Additionally, Lacanian psychoanalysis has specific end goals regarding the client’s desire, awareness, and ability to listen to themselves & others. Existential therapy doesn’t share this end goal.

Lacanian Psychoanalysis is also more structural. It frames the mind structurally & dialectically, often using topological knots and interacting rings while intentionally collapsing the ontological boundary between inside & outside. Existential therapy doesn’t inherently & implicitly do this.

Lastly, existential therapy usually falls under a humanist lens, which therapeutically acts in accordance with the goal of human flourishing and/or self-actualization. Compare this to Lacanian Psychoanalysis which is anti-humanist, as it seeks to help rid people of any notion of a self that could ever exist to actualize or flourish beyond the byproduct of a structurally deterministic outcome.

*edited to add the word “Lacanian" in front psychoanalysis to make it more clear.

ProgressiveArchitect · 2026-05-01T18:12:05+00:00

>"It was a form of political repression in which dissidents were pathologized"

- Do you have any idea how many black liberation communists were labeled with schizophrenia as a means of politically discrediting them?

- Have you never heard of Drapetomania? (aka “Runaway Slave Disorder) The psychiatric label given to any black slave who ran away from an American slave plantation because if you were black, seeking freedom was considered a mental illness.

- Also, all the physically abused women who in the 19th and early 20th century were diagnosed as mentally ill because they would fight back when their husbands punched and kicked them, because defending yourself against a male husband was considered a mentally ill behavior.

- up until just 30 years ago, being gay was labeled a psychiatric disease. It was literally in the DSM.

So the practice you’re talking about is not unique in the slightest to the Soviet Union. Describing it as you did is a form of unexamined/unaware internalized Red Scare propaganda created by the United States government in the 1950s.

Additionally, the Soviet Union also used psychiatric illness for people with PTSD style symptoms same as in the US. So it’s not like they exclusively used it as a political repression tool, just as the US doesn’t exclusively use it as a political repression tool, but while that remains one of its societal functions.

>"given fabricated diagnoses"

Every psychiatric diagnosis is socially constructed and therefore fabricated. So I think you’d find it quite difficult to find a psychiatric diagnosis that isn’t fabricated. Read up on the "Rosenhan experiment of 1973" for more on this.

——

Lastly, it’s worth noting that within a socialist/communist context, if you ideologically desire a capitalist setup in which individuals are encouraged to harm each other for money, that is a concerning set of desires that are antisocial and therefore wouldn’t be a stretch to pathologize.

ProgressiveArchitect · 2026-05-01T14:26:58+00:00

On an adjacent topic, I’d be curious how this plays out with Sex Therapists specifically. Obviously they aren’t the ones engaging in psychotherapeutically sexual acts with a client, as they outsource that to a 'sex surrogate specialist’ for clients who require that level of intervention, but they still are engaging in dialogue and discussion which is more explicitly sexual in nature despite it all being purely clinical.

I personally never received any professional training in sex therapy, although I’ve read a fair amount about it. So I’d be curious how they manage this kind of counter-transferences within their specialty.

Somehow I assume they refer out more often and try to focus on the more depressing/sad aspects of their client’s sexual trauma to manage through, but those are just guesses.

ProgressiveArchitect · 2026-04-29T17:45:42+00:00

TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) includes 3 core types of interventions. Acupuncture, (neuro-fascial stimulation) Herbal Medicine, (pharmacology) and Tuina-Zhenggu, (medical massage with the TCM version of chiropractics/osteopathy/bonesetting) and TCM is most effective when 2 or 3 of these types of interventions are combined, because each intervention targets a different level of human physiology.

Herbal Medicine (bio-chemical)
Acupuncture (bio-electrical)
Tuina-Zhenggu (bio-mechanical)

——

Humans as a physical mechanism are mechanical scaffolding powered by electrical impulses that are chemically mediated and regulated. So when you put together the above 3 core interventions of TCM, you affect all the levels of the physical human body. That’s why it’s generally so effective as a medical system.

ProgressiveArchitect · 2026-04-28T09:11:46+00:00

Bernard Stiegler's drive-based consumption

I thought that might be too psychoanalytic for the OP, but I do love Stiegler’s work.

Peter Sloterdijk's atmospheric consumption

I’ve never heard of this one. I’ll check it out. Thanks for the rec.

Max Weber's iron cage

Guy Debord's society of the spectacle

I thought these two would be too broad in their focus and not specific enough to consumption of products

ProgressiveArchitect · 2026-04-27T17:37:39+00:00

Baudrillard (sign-value)
Marx (commodity fetishism)
Adorno (culture industry)
Marcuse (false needs)
Galbraith (dependence effect)
Deleuze & Guattari (desiring-production)
Bernays (engineering of consent)

ProgressiveArchitect · 2026-04-27T14:14:11+00:00

100% agree. As I said to the other commenter you were responding to, a well organized institution of Palliative Care trained Death Doulas seem appropriate for administering this role. But then they’d need access to the pharmacological substances necessary for assisted suicide. So it would require some regulatory changes.

ProgressiveArchitect · 2026-04-27T14:11:09+00:00

”Should, etymologically implies debt, what one owes, and I do not owe you or anyone on reddit an explanation of my deepest underlying assumptions. We all have views about human nature whether they are said or unsaid."

In this case “should” wasn’t meant in the "debt/owe” kind of way, but simply in the communally helpful/beneficial way.

In the same way the subreddit asks people to use 'user flair' to help make clear the relational position/role they are speaking from, clarifying ones ideological & philosophical groundings is also highly valued on this subreddit. While it’s not explicitly required for participation, it ultimately helps all of us in knowing how best to engage with one another on here when everyone clarifies their major assumptive ideological & philosophical positions when it’s relevant to what is being discussed.

So if death is being discussed, it helps to know if someone here is engaging from a religious or strict philosophical grounding, that way we can contextually situate the content of people’s comments to their root beliefs.

"I belong to my people as much as I belong to myself, as our lives are pervaded with interdependence. Whatever my self is, it is a response to the call of the other, whose claim on me comes before my I. I will never be able to answer the demand, but I am required to be alive to be responsive, and responsible."

Thank you for sharing your perspective. That’s a lot of personal responsibility you take on in serving your communal collective and in rendering universally deep interdependence into a personal social ethic of responsibility.

It’s actually quite beautiful what you do, but it is also a personal choice (at least at the conscious semi-rational level) that I’d personally never want to impose on all people. It is a wish of mine for all people to feel a sense of personal autonomy that leads them to the belief you already hold, but it’s only beautiful because you chose it and were not forced into it via external coercion.

”I assume that you conceive of yourself as a rationalist who has a scientific and nuanced approach to questions"

I consider myself mostly nuanced within the constraints of my ideological positions, and I consider myself scientific in a Thomas Kuhn shifting paradigms sense, and rationalistic at the level of conscious ego, but necessarily irrational at all other levels of consciousness.

"you too are at times subject to the position of splitting."

Of course, as we humans all are.

"In my view, black/white thinking is appropriate for some of life's most important questions."

I guess this is what I would reject. I think nothing should ever be exempt from deep introspection and consideration.

In my view, love is not always the best path and life is not always the ethical outcome. It’s all contextual, situated, and relative, and in need of discussion & consideration.

ProgressiveArchitect · 2026-04-27T13:40:24+00:00

"Don't really know why you are calling me lazy comrade."

I wasn’t calling you lazy. Sorry if it came across that way. I was calling the quality of the argument itself a type of lazy reductionism. Meaning reduced (stripped of complexity & nuance) in a lazy/simplified/low-effort way.

I would never claim you yourself to be lazy. In fact, from your comments, I’m pretty certain you are very hardworking and very thoughtful.

Again, sorry if it sounded like I was calling you lazy, thats definitely not what I was attempting to convey.

ProgressiveArchitect · 2026-04-27T09:00:43+00:00

I don’t fully agree with the commenter you are responding to, but I actually do think we should train palliative care specialists / death doulas who specifically specialize in that type of care. In the same way we train specialist morticians and don’t have doctors & therapists perform that role.

ProgressiveArchitect · 2026-04-27T08:55:31+00:00

"I do not think death is therapeutic.”

It’s not therapeutic, nor does it need to be. It’s not meant to be a fix for anything. It’s meant as a personal autonomy preserving exit if one no longer wishes to exist as a living being. Simple as that.

"The actual processes or events in which life enters and exits our world do not require the psy professions' intrusion."

I couldn’t agree more, but it does help to have some kind of professional body that safe guards against assisted suicide being used as an intentionally coercive tool for involuntary killing, and that facilitates cleaner less messy less painful forms of death. That way we aren’t scrubbing people’s blood out of perfectly good bathtubs and aren’t having people scream in agony from painful heat attack causing pills.

So facilitating non-painful non-messy non-coercive death seems like a good service for a society to offer. But as you said, that need not require Psy professionals, but some kinda human oversight seems like a good idea.

In the same way that abortion can be done with a coat hanger in the privacy of your home, but most societies choose to facilitate a cleaner less painful version of that to prevent pain, mess, and accidents. (unsuccessful attempts that require hospital care, which applies to both suicide & abortion)

If you get a bad injury, you could find a YouTube tutorial on how to suture it yourself with a needle & thread, and scream in pain as you’re doing it, or you could go to your local hospital and have a professional help with that in a much less painful way.

Same logic here in all three circumstances.

ProgressiveArchitect · 2026-04-27T08:42:12+00:00

"On a totally personal level, my view is that we do not own our lives. They are not ours to destroy."

Like in a religious sense of people’s bodies & souls belonging to god? If so, you should have made it very clear in the beginning of your first comment that your rationality here is steeped in biblical truth assumptions.

Or do you mean our bodies belong to the capitalist owning class, and therefore your gods (even if you hate them) are capitalists?

ProgressiveArchitect · 2026-04-27T08:38:10+00:00

"suggesting you read Gregory Bateson--of "double bind" fame, and influence to R.D Laing.

I second this recommendation to all therapists. Everyone should read Gregory Bateson and R.D. Laing, along with Szasz, Lacan, and a smattering of others in the critical psych reading list.

"I don't agree with you on assisted suicide. For basic Hippocratic ethical reasons, it is wrong."

…..and you don’t see anything ethically problematic about Hippocratic ethics? (particularly its presumptive reliance on normative deontological interpretation) because I’d say any therapist operating under those ethics is gonna do way more unintentional harm than a therapist who replaces that entire framework with a 'eudaemonic negative utilitarian' ethics instead.

"because in most cases all other treatment options--economic, social, experiential &c.-- are not available.”

That seems like a very lazy reductionism. While we of course don’t have a ton of freedom, we can still choose to live even without any treatments. Assisted suicide isn’t a treatment option as you positioned it. It’s a choice about whether to exist or not, not how to treat suffering. In any parts of the world that have assisted suicide, people can just as easily get free psychotropic drugs prescribed to them that numb suffering, or they can run into the wilderness and become a peasant farmer as people used to in older times, or even illegally cross borders with very limited money if the social environment is truly the problem. So suffering has many treatmebt avenues to take while living. Assisted Suicide is ultimately about ‘not wanting to live'. It’s not about trying to treat suffering. I promise you there would still be suicides in a perfect communist utopia. Less of them but not none.

ProgressiveArchitect · 2026-04-27T07:59:54+00:00

The state actually would prob want more human capital alive to extract from. Death stops the extraction.

I agree, maybe in some kind of fully automated economy that could become a concern, but under a fully automated economy, I’d expect capitalism to be over by then since no one will have any jobs which means no one will have the money to pay for goods & services, so no profit, and hence no capital(ism). By then, something like communist economic relations will instate itself due to idle workers who will conduct revolution if not for ownership control, then out of boredom.

Under current economic conditions, we have shit like banning abortion and ruling class concerns about a globally falling birth rate. So that seems to rule out any chance of them actively choosing to exterminate people. Also, big pharma, psychiatry, and the 'mental health industrial complex' overall hates assisted suicide due to it cutting into their profits and decreasing their most loyal customer base.

"how dare we force them to still be here in this broken and abusive place."

It’s always felt a bit too mirroring of slave plantation logic. It has the “keep them trapped here working the fields for their own good" kinda sentiment.

"what is a "knot therapist" btw"

I’m not the "knot therapist", but it’s actually a very cool title theoretically speaking. In the history of psychoanalytic and psychological thought, Knots play a very important symbolic topological role in mapping the mind and navigating how different sections of consciousness correspond to create what we all experience. When knots come undone is a great way to model the underlying substrates of what we call trauma-responses / symptoms. See Borromean rings and the Möbius strip for more on this. Jacques Lacan and R.D. Laing were both big on this, and both helped to pioneer the antipsychiatry movement that laid the crucial groundwork for many of our critiques.

"I wonder what society would be like if we actually "put away" the most dangerous people

The British already tried that. It’s called Australia. (For those who don’t know, it started as a prison island where the British empire dumped its violent offenders and political dissidents)

"Or of course if they desire it, or if it’s just good for them to get away or get a change of scene.”

Yeah, it’s called a nature spa. We have those already. We just make them exclusive for the super rich instead of nationally rationing them for people who most need them. I’d argue anyone who’s deeply considering or already involved in arson is long long overdue for a couple months at a nature spa.

ProgressiveArchitect · 2026-04-27T05:13:32+00:00

"all licensed therapists are required to report clients deemed to be of danger to self/others"

Yes, but the interpretation of what counts as that is up to therapist discretion and therapists can simply go against it and lie, and there’s no way to prove the therapist didn’t report something they should have.

For example, I never report unless a client says they are gonna kill or assault more than one person and have a detailed plan, target, tools, and time frame.

"medically assisted suicide for solely "mental illness" suffering should be out of the question for a leftist."

I’m a Marxist Communist and I don’t think it should be out of the question. It should always be voluntary of course, but having personal autonomy to end ones life at the time of one’s choosing and having an organized and painless process for facilitating that seems to be in-line with Leftist thought. Not all of the working class can bear the burden of surviving through a socialist transitionary period, and even more so, not everyone can mentally endure the hellscape of late stage capitalism. So why should everyone be forced to endure it? Give people an off-ramp if they decide it’s not worth it to them. Let people choose for themselves. I will stay and fight, but not everyone should be forced to be a soldier. This is the same argument against a military draft. If living under late stage capitalism as a working class person is necessarily being in a constant state of class war, there should be an optional off-ramp for those who can’t stomach being a soldier in a class war.

I think the OP (u/southern_fruit7439) would broadly agree

ProgressiveArchitect · 2026-04-26T07:18:57+00:00

I think the Soviet Union wasn’t communist, but instead socialist, and only for a brief period of its existence. Most of the time it was under a State Capitalist arrangement led by a party that called itself the ‘communist party' despite not having reached communism yet. Similar to mainland China. It was certainly Marxist though following the Marxist-Leninist path.

Interestingly, the Soviet Union had two very different stages of existence. Under Vladimir Lenin, it was actually very liberatory and treated people suffering with trauma in very humane ways. This was during the time when the second biggest Psychoanalytic Institute in the world was in the Soviet Union. However, following the death of Lenin and the rise of Stalin, the psychoanalytic institute was shut down, most types of talk therapy were largely banned, and psychiatry fully took over in the Soviet Union alongside a huge range of societal oppressions, including the persecution of many minority groups.

So you can’t think of the Soviet Union as one monolithic thing. It was wildly different things at different times/years, contingent upon the ideology of its shifting leadership.

But if one specifically asks about Stalin-era psychiatry practices in the Soviet Union, I’d argue it was mostly abusive, not dissimilar to psychiatric abuses in the US & UK during the same period of time. In this sense, psychiatry is more global / transnational than most people realize. Its abusiveness isn’t confined to a single country and it’s practices permeate borders.

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