i started going to therapy when i was eleven. i stopped in high school, which was probably exactly when i needed it most, and that's also when i got deep into psychology and got on social media for the first time. so instead of going back, i started typing my symptoms into a search bar. adhd, ocd, autism, bpd, ptsd. every time i came across a new one i was completely convinced that was the one that explained everything.

this week is about what those labels were actually doing for me. they made existing a lot more comfortable, and they made growing optional. we get into the barnum effect, which is why a vague list of symptoms can feel like it was written personally about you, and why the exact same thing happens with astrology, psychic readings, and every personality test on the internet. medical student syndrome, which my abnormal psych professor warned us about on the first day of class and which i fell straight into anyway. what actually goes into diagnosing somebody, and how little of it looks like a search result. and then self handicapping, which is the part that got me. if i can blame it on the label, i never have to change.

then the honest part, because i've done this. i made a whole episode called "he's not mysterious, he's avoidant," so i'm not standing outside of this one. what i've landed on is three levels. a hypothesis about yourself. a verdict about yourself. a verdict about somebody else. one of those is how people get diagnosed at all. one of them is what was happening in the threads i had to leave.

then the tool. a boundary is a rule about what you will do. if your sentence is about what they have to do, it's a request, an ultimatum, or an exit. all three are allowed. you just can't call them a boundary. the word is not the end of the work. it's the beginning of it.

then, like always, your care package.
live with care 🤎

research credited in this episode:

Forer, B. R. (1949). The fallacy of personal validation: A classroom demonstration of gullibility. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 44(1), 118–123.

Haslam, N. (2016). Concept creep: Psychology's expanding concepts of harm and pathology. Psychological Inquiry, 27(1), 1–17.

Berglas, S., & Jones, E. E. (1978). Drug choice as a self-handicapping strategy in response to noncontingent success. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(4), 405–417.

Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M.,Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428.

American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.).