“Having suddenly become aware and literate about our own mental health, and our infinite difficulties communicating, even with people we love, we have come to see therapy as a fix-all,” writes EvaWiseman.
The tweet you’re referring to went, “How do I tell the 18yo that using me as a therapist and a crisis counsellor isn’t healthy for either of us? He has no consistently supportive adult voices in his life except ours. But I’m conscious of the femme labor paradigm it’s reinforcing that I’m the ‘parent’ confidant.
The phrase “emotional labour” was a trigger. Originally used to describe how employees are expected to be cheerful in front of customers, it has evolved to loosely define “women working on unpaid tasks”, like mothers being in charge of buying birthday presents, or girlfriends explaining #MeToo. Its use by this tweeter sent many spiralling, and partly this is a language thing.
But I think the main reason so many people were so tickled and incensed by this one parent’s shitty afternoon was because we, as a culture, are currently obsessed with therapy. Having suddenly become aware and literate about our own, and our infinite difficulties communicating even with people we love, we have come to see therapy as a fix-all. And, for some, a replacement for the trickier parts of relationships.
I asked Eleanor, a friend currently training as a psychotherapist, what she’d thought of that tweet, and she replied in a voice note that took a whole bus ride to hear. She was typically balanced, even as she ate her lunch. “Therapy isn’t the answer for everything and it’s far from accessible to everyone,” she started. “And the reality is, it takes practice to be able to communicate well.
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