Near enemies of the truth, and psychobabble

Like many therapists, I have mixed feelings about the proliferation of psychobabble online. Psychobabble is the (non-)technical term for pop-psychology terms like speak your truth, trauma bonding, gaslighting, and my personal favorite, triggered. “I just feel so triggered when you acknowledge that my ex-boyfriend exists. Could you not do that?” 

If we think about this in terms of on-the-ground psychotherapy, a lot of it comes down to how specific words and concepts actually feel to any one individual. For example, while initially I found the whole red flag, green flag, pink flag, beige flag, and green-flag-with-purple-polka-dots discourse exhausting, I’ve grown interested in it. Several of my patients are very invested in understanding the concepts of the red, green, pink, and beige flags (I’m sure there are others), and I’ve realized that they never organically learned — on a felt level — what it means when their whole self and body say things like, “Hmmm… That felt uncomfortable,” or even, “Oh, hell no.” 

The whole flag conversation feels like a way of turning to an external set of criteria that will help you out when your internal criteria have their wires crossed. 

Near enemies

One of my favorite concepts within Buddhism is near enemies of the truth. Near enemies are emotions that feel very close to the brahmaviharas, but don’t quite hit the mark. I believe there are many more, but some of the traditional ones are these:

Desired Virtue: Equanimity

Near Enemy: Indifference, disconnection

Desired Virtue: Lovingkindness

Near Enemy: Conditional love

Years ago, when I was more within the Hindu/Yogic traditions, I came across the work of Hareesh, or Christopher Wallis. Wallis is someone I genuinely respect within the Western yoga world, and I don’t say that lightly. He translates Sanskrit, and he has in-depth knowledge of the history of yoga and other Indic religious traditions. To be clear, Wallis is coming from the yogic angle, not the Buddhist angle. But years ago, he started a fantastic series on his blog called “Near Enemies of the Truth,” which later evolved into a book. He dissected a wide range of the feel-good phrases in religious and spiritual traditions outside of the monotheistic realm. Phrases like “listen to your heart” and “all paths lead to the same goal” abound. They often land on the hearts and ears of people who are suffering, and they sound like a relief. 

But these are trite little bits and bobs that actually reinforce some of the deepest-rooted poisons in Western culture, like individualism and neo-liberalism. 

Near enemies in psychotherapy

In the past decade or so there has been an explosion of psychological discourse on social media. Some current trends that make me gag are “lucky girl syndrome” (law of attraction bullshit) and the conflation of random or impulsive thoughts (“I wonder what would happen if I pulled that fire alarm lever?”) with intrusive thoughts. Intrusive thoughts are typically associated with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and may mean that a person cannot stop themselves from thinking about raping someone, or having sex with a family member, or molesting a child. Intrusive thoughts are, to be frank, upsetting as fuck, and no, your sudden impulse to point the hose at your spouse while they walk past you is not one of them.  

Many of these trends often proceed from — and then reinforce — a polarization. One example is the phenomenon of self-diagnosis. Many of us see social media videos and posts that have some information about a specific diagnosis — like ADHD, Dissociative Identity Disorder, and others — and because some of the symptoms match our experience, we conclude that we have that mental health disorder. 

On the one hand, there are myriad online social spaces that will almost always give a thumbs up to self-diagnosis and point out that competent mental health assessment and treatment is inaccessible to many. 

On the other hand, there are healthcare providers who are concerned that people are misdiagnosing themselves, and the providers may reflexively reject the self-diagnosis of anyone who presents saying, “I’m pretty sure I have X.” 

Essentially, the trend bifurcates into two oversimplified responses: “Self-diagnosis good,” or “Self-diagnosis bad.” 

I have my concerns about self-diagnosis. It’s often attached to a long list of assumptions that I consider all “near enemies”: “speak your truth,” “you are the expert on yourself,” and “the customer is always right” all come to mind. But I also want to make it clear that the confidence many healthcare providers have — that they are the arbiters of accurate knowledge — is what I would also call a near enemy in the psych world. In some ways, we can’t help it. Having had just a taste of differential diagnostic training on ADHD specifically, I’m now keenly aware of how many different disorders can look superficially the same. Once you gain this kind of knowledge, you can’t help feeling frustrated by oversimplifications. But at the end of the day, we have to remember that we are working with a human conceptual framework, with its own rules, its own physics, and it’s not perfect. 

I also like that people are becoming much more aware of human psychology. Mental health counseling and addictions treatment are becoming more normalized, and that’s a good thing. Many of the patients I’ve had over the years who self-diagnose and/or analyze their lives with social media are working their asses off therapeutically and emotionally. They are often my hardest working patients, and they’re a joy to work with.

So my position on psychobabble is . . . complicated. I hear it, and my intellect immediately starts arguing with it. But something problematic which proceeds out of a polarization will not be remedied with a polarized response. To wit, it’s complicated. I can’t make a blanket statement that will answer, forever and all time, “Is my husband/wife a narcissist?” 

But man, if you come into therapy telling me you’re about to start manifesting abundance in your life, we’re gonna have a talk.

If you made it this far . . . nice! It’s great for your brain to finish reading something this long. Now maybe check in with yourself to see if you want or need to stay on a screen right now. If you do need to stay on-screen right now, maybe think about when you can schedule screen-free time. 

On mindfulness, and “mindfulness”

For the past decade or so, I’ve had a growing interest in 1) Buddhism, 2) Buddhist philosophy, and 3) Buddhist psychology. These are three quite distinct domains, which have a tendency to get smooshed together in the United States. Let’s take them one at a time:

1. Buddhism itself. Buddhism is a religion. I know, I know. Your drug dealer says it’s “just a life philosophy, man,” but hear me out . . . He’s wrong. About many things.

2. Buddhist philosophy: Buddhist philosophy, like Indic philosophy generally, is a rich, complex mesh of mathematics, physics, metaphysics, ethics, and more. And yes, Buddhists argue with each other. When you believe that the human understanding of reality itself hinges on discourse, you argue.

3. Buddhist psychology: This is the very messy territory I’ve been wading deeper into lately. Because while much of Buddhist psychology, as we understand it in the West, was introduced via Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and Jon Kabat Zinn’s work, Buddhist psychology of course goes back much farther and, again, there’s a great deal of disagreement amongst the various schools.

Satipatthana Sutta

The word “mindfulness” itself is the modern English word or translation of the Pali word sati. Sati refers to memory: the Wikipedia translation of sati is “to remember to observe.” 

The Satipatthana Sutta is a Pali text. Its title means simply, The Discourse on the Establishment of Mindfulness. As you can probably guess, this puts it in both the 1) Buddhism as religion, and 2) Buddhist philosophy buckets. 

There is potential to have a very long conversation about cultural appropriation here. I’m opting not to dive into that too deeply here, mostly in the interests of time and space. That being said, I do have mixed feelings about the particular path by which mindfulness-based techniques came to the United States. Jon Kabat-Zinn was seminal in this regard. Kabat-Zinn studied with a number of Buddhist teachers. Generally, I feel grateful for his work in developing Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. MBSR is an effective, non-pharmacological intervention that helped put mind-body medicine on the map. It got people to take seriously the health impacts of stress. And it taught people to slow down, and listen to their bodies. All of which I love.

Recently, though, I came across this quote. Which I did not love. Regarding teaching mindfulness, Kabat-Zinn said this:

“I wanted to offer instead a kind of translation of a universal understanding or approach that was never really about Buddhism. The Buddha himself wasn’t a Buddhist, and the term Buddhism is an invention of Europeans. And, of course, Buddhists could really care less because it’s all about non-duality."

That last bit pissed me off. It seems to conflate all Buddhists — from Malaysia to South Korea, India to Japan — and ascribes to them the beliefs of (you guessed it) your drug dealer who says, “Whatever, man! It’s all love!”

Saying that Buddhists couldn’t care less because [insert pet stoner phrase here] is like saying that American Christians have no concerns about the US losing its cultural identity, because you talked to a bunch of priests and pastors. Talk to Christian clergy — or Buddhist monks — and you will walk away with a very different view of Christianity in America, or Buddhism in Asia, than if you spoke to non-ordained Christians in America or Buddhists in Asia. Not to say the clergy and the monks don’t have a right to their opinions, but they generally have different views than the everyday folks. 

It’s fair to say that the Buddha wasn’t Buddhist. But you know what? The people of Vietnam certainly are, and it matters to them. The nearly 10,000,000 Buddhists who remain in India are Buddhists, and it matters. 

And then I caved

Somewhere along the line, even though I get angry about the slicing and dicing of Buddhism into convenient, consumable little bites, I genuinely fell in love with mindfulness meditation, and — as cliché as it sounds — trying to bring mindfulness into my everyday life. 

On top of all of this is my work as a psychotherapist. What I’ve found, over and over, is that I can’t make heads or tails of any psychology that doesn’t take account of the human mind/heart, and body. For that, I need Buddhist psychology (which does indeed go much deeper than mindfulness) and somatic psychology. Embracing mindfulness has allowed me to ground myself and my patients, and it has been an absolute lifeline when it comes to working with stressor-related disorders (MBSR is, again, incredibly effective) as well as addictions. I can honestly say I wouldn't know how to work with addictions without Mindfulness-Based Relapse Prevention.

If you wanted to learn more about the history of Buddhism in the US, you kind of can’t dive into this without talking about race. A great book on the topic is Be the Refuge, by Chenxing Han. Roughly two-thirds of Buddhists in the US are Asian or Asian-American, a fact that is often unknown to the White folks who are interested in or even practicing Buddhism. I don’t agree with every take on things Han has (I mean, I don’t agree on everything with anyone), but she offers important corrective information on the cultural history of Buddhism in the US.

As before, I want to offer you a quick invitation to pause. Maybe close your eyes,, and consider whether you want or need to stay on your screen after this. If it’s time for a break, maybe step away from your screen, let your eyes adjust, and have a quick stretch. I swear, the internet will still be there when you get back.  :) 

I do not do silver linings

I confess that I enjoy making my patients laugh. One of the easiest ways to do so is to share my honest opinion: life absolutely sucks, a large proportion of the time.

And I mean it. I think it’s profoundly confusing, exhausting, emotionally painful, and excruciatingly boring to be human. Either that, or we numb ourselves to it. I think it’s hard to be a person. As a result of my cheerful pessimism, there is no faster way to piss me off than by saying the phrase:

Focus on the positive!

Whenever I hear this phrase, I always imagine a smiling young woman saying this to me, with some hideous GLIB in her voice. But I’ve certainly heard it from my share of irritating Boomers. If and when anyone ever tries to silver line shit for me, I have a strong urge to punch them.

But let’s think about this a little more methodically. What I want to do is draw a distinction between what folks generally mean by the phrase, “focus on the positive,” and what I think of as finding or cultivating goodness, dignity, and beauty.

A pox on your “Focus on the positive”

“Focus on the positive” generally means something like…try to find something good in your life, and place your attention on that, and try not to place your attention on the bad things. On the one hand, this isn’t a completely misguided approach (despite my grumpiness). Negativity bias is a well-documented psychological phenomenon, and there’s a strong argument that evolution resulted in negativity bias due to its evolutionary advantage. You are more likely to survive if you spot problems and do something to either resolve them, or at least reduce their negative impacts. There isn’t a lot of evolutionary advantage to, say, taking deep breaths and relaxing your shoulders and feeling a surge of gratitude for you and your family’s and your  pets’ good health. 

On top of all of this, there is research that suggests that folks with depressive disorders both 1) tend to make more negative predictions about the future, and 2) are actually inaccurate in their predictions. Whether this is a chicken-or-the-egg issue is up for debate. While I would never tell a patient to “focus on the positive,” if someone in therapy enjoys a lot of great things in life (safety, material comfort, financial stability, a romantic partner and or friends and family, good health, etc.), and they spend every minute of every session complaining, I’m certainly going to draw attention to this. I tend to believe that mood precedes thought (not the other way around), and I would start to wonder if they had a depressed mood that needed help. I would also — if their negativity bias was super-duper strong — encourage them to try to at least catch their negative, complaining, or critical thoughts and try to not feed them further. 

“See the inner nobility and beauty of all human beings”

This concept is offered as “a first principle of Buddhist psychology” by Jack Kornfield. And here’s what happened when I read it the first time: I rolled my eyes and put the book down and didn’t pick it back up for about ten years.

In my defense, I was going through a rough breakup, and the idea of seeing the “inner nobility and beauty” of my ex made me want to gag. And I’ve discovered that Kornfield maybe isn’t always the best teacher for me. He veers pretty close to “focus on the positive” sometimes, and I just don’t vibe with it.

But… Life happened. And somewhere along the line, I realized I’d never been taught to see the nobility and beauty in myself, and that made it near impossible to do so for other people. I also think it helped that I eventually encountered people who advocated not just for more typically feminine positive traits that align with this principle (compassion, kindness, love, etc.), but also for more typically masculine traits that align as well. Things like dignity, self-respect, honor, and ferocity are all traits I appreciate a great deal, and I’ve come to see them as perfectly aligned with Kornfield’s principle.

This is what I’ve come to think of as cultivating goodness, dignity, and beauty. And one of the ways you can cultivate these qualities is by — surprise! — focusing on them in others and ourselves.

From an ethical and even a justice perspective, it’s important to clarify that this doesn’t entail naïveté or permissiveness. I can see and honor the dignity and value of even those in prison. And I can believe that some of them need to remain there to protect the public. I can see and honor the goodness and beauty of political opponents, and still firmly, actively oppose their efforts. Kornfield calls this sacred perception, and he describes it this way:

“To see with sacred perception does not mean we ignore the need for development and change in an individual. Sacred perception is one half of a paradox. Zen master Shunryu Suzuki remarked to a disciple, ‘You are perfect just the way you are. And…there is still room for improvement!’” 

Marsha Linehan almost certainly borrowed from these principles when she developed some of her basic assumptions within Dialectical Behavior Therapy, including, “Everyone is doing the best they can,” and “Everyone could be doing better.” 

If you’re interested in reading more on negativity bias, I recommend this article. I don’t love the use of the word overcome in the title, but I do think that negativity bias needs to be addressed. And if you’d like to dig deeper, I recommend this podcast episode by Kornfield.

And as always, this is your quick invitation to pause. Close your eyes and ask yourself, “Do I want or need to stay on a screen right now?” And if you do need to stay on-screen right now, maybe think about when you can schedule some time off-screen to give yourself a break. Remember: breaks are good.

:)

Hello!

Hi there! I’m a psychotherapist and mindfulness/yoga facilitator in private practice in Seattle, Washington. Before I became a therapist, though, my primary focus was on writing, literature, and philosophy.

As a practicing therapist, most of my psychology-related reading and thinking is oriented towards what I can use in sessions with patients. At the same time, I find that some of the fields I read in — particularly psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience — just keep providing so much interesting material, I can’t even begin to explore it in therapy with folks.

In therapy sessions, it’s important to me that intellectual concepts be usefully applied to my patients’/clients’ lives. For example, in EMDR, the theory is that it works by taxing working memory, and that somehow allows the brain to “re-process” past trauma. That’s important for the actual, clinical use of EMDR.

But then, outside of sessions, I wonder things. Like, what does it even mean to “re-process” something? Also, what does it mean for humans to have these different parts of their brains that sometimes do and sometimes don’t talk to each other? Is this what a theory like Internal Family Systems means by “parts”? If there are physical correlates to different parts of ourselves, does it make sense to think of humans as somehow multiple? And how does (or doesn’t) IFS map onto systems like Yoga, Samkhya, and Buddhist psychology?

Another example that comes up frequently has to do with spirituality. I have patients who fall across all kinds of spectrums, both politically and religiously. If a patient believes, say, that after we die, we go to a place like heaven or hell, how much does it matter to me if that doesn’t align with my own beliefs? Personally, I incline to thinking we either simply cease to exist, or in reincarnation. What do I believe a soul or spirit is, if anything? Does anything of us persist past death? Frequently, I think my own beliefs are completely irrelevant in therapy. I’m there for my patients’ well-being. I think of these things, but I don’t want to turn therapy into a philosophical debate, so I’m careful to keep things clinically focused.

But I want somewhere to explore these things!

So that’s my plan for this blog. I make no promises in terms of frequency. I will generally try to keep things on the short side. I have a lot of other writing projects at this time — one Substack going, possibly another on the way, and a collection of essays I’m working on — so I’m a little busy! Also, I don’t want blog posts here to take readers more than a few minutes. Think of the posts here as tasters, with maybe some suggestions for further reading if you’re interested.

So, as a preview, here are some of the topics I’ll be writing about here:

• Buddhism and Buddhist psychology and philosophy

• Existentialism, and existential psychology and psychotherapy

• Somatic theory and psychotherapy

• Neuroscience, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science

• Yogic philosophy, including Vedanta and Samkhya

• Political psychology and behavioral economics

• Ecopsychology and ecosophy (fancy term for eco-philosophy)

• Technology, cyberpsychology, and philosophy of technology

• Note: This is one of my strongest interests right now. I’m thinking a lot these days about AI and AI ethics; how social media has changed our brains; how young men are being sucked into some very, very dark spaces; how the internet is impacting democratic pathways; and how cancel culture impacts both the individuals that get canceled, and those of us who keep our mouths shut for fear of the same.

Also, I might do some cross-posting with my Substack(s) or other website(s), if the topics feel aligned.

So that’s it! A quick intro to what you can expect to find here. Oh, and — side note — I cuss. I debated over trying to be more professional, but I need to enjoy this process or I won’t do it, so there. In the same vein, I plan on keeping comments off (all blogs should have their comments off), but you can always feel free to reach out directly to me via the contact form here on this site. I likely won’t have information in my blog posts about my availability, but I do try to keep my website and Psychology Today profile up-to-date with that info.

AND LASTLY. . . Sometimes at the end of a post, I want to offer you a quick invitation to pause. Maybe close your eyes, take a slow breath, and consider whether you want to stay on your screen after this. Maybe you do! And maybe it’s time for a break, time to stop scrolling and clicking and reconnect with the real world. I’m a big fan of breaks. We all need them.

:)

Coming Soon!

Eeeek! A new blog for 2026!!!