Nick Taber

They tell you what you can do with your body and when. The people who have power over us are themselves very disconnected from their bodies.

Conventional schooling and child rearing pull us out of the truth of the body and into our heads.

They often force us to sit in small desks inside for much of the day. They use fear and insecurity to shape us. They pathologize and shame full emotional expression.

The issue with social emotional learning isn’t that self-awareness and relational skills aren’t important. They’re among the most important things. It’s that you don’t actually help people with these things when it’s nonconsensual and used to control you within a power imbalanced relationship.

The situation with kids in the US is getting dramatically worse. Techno-dystopian behavior management systems and social emotional learning have become virtually universal. This will likely severely damage if not destroy the creative, economic, and leadership potential of future generations.

Many helping professionals who think that they're "emotionally intelligent" and vulnerable and have probably read Brene Brown, actually are very scared of significant emotional depth and do not know how to truly support you in what you're going through.

The fact that you don't easily fit in to a culture that rewards emotional & spiritual bypassing over understanding & processing pain & grief is the good news. It means you've outgrown what makes most people out there sick & afraid.

That happens a lot to trauma survivors.

I don't think you can be for social justice in any meaningful sense when the essence of what you're promoting is disconnecting people's feelings from the reality of their experiences.

It's been fascinating to see many incredibly oppressive "support" interventions for kids co-opt social justice rhetoric. It's like, "We're not oppressing the most vulnerable people in society, did you see our DEI buzzwords?"

What do you mean by this?

And I would say for kids, it might be inherently oppressive, with some exceptions and nuance.

It’s not “about oppression”, it can be oppressive.

I seriously doubt it’s really teaching kids emotional literacy or social awareness in any meaningful sense. It’s likely just shifting the authoritarian control of the school system into something more invasive, more deeply damaging.

I think Social Emotional Learning in schools (and much of psychotherapy for kids, as well) might actually be worse for kids than overtly punitive measures like detentions, suspension etc. because it colonizes their inner lives. What could be a bigger crime against someone than that?

The school system, in terms of its structure, really doesn’t care if you learn or not. All that anxiety and fear it generates to control you is entirely counterproductive to learning.

and make the situation drastically worse for everyone. That’s what’s often happening with these educational consultants, mental health professionals, “treatment” programs etc.

When these crises happen with teens and their families, it’s generally hard for me to blame the parents. Who I struggle to have compassion for are these people who position themselves as loving experts, who often have far greater deficits than the parents, take their money,

YouTube video by Nick Taber How Does Behavior Modification Affect the People It's Done To?

How Does Behavior Modification Affect the People It’s Done To?
youtu.be/2j_RrP5Vr7w?...

Stop interacting with people who carry provoking spirits. Not every soul is sent to uplift you. Some are sent to distract, to derail, and to test your alignment. Protect your peace like sacred ground. Your spirit was not made for constant warfare.

YouTube video by Nick Taber How Does Behavior Modification Affect the People It's Done To?

“Take conventional school, for example. Behavior modification is basically the lifeblood of how that system works, even though it is not explicitly stated as such.”
www.youtube.com/watch?v=2j_R...

It could mean that they won’t have regard for your agency and power if they previously served as a glorified prison guard/mind police.

I think a big red flag when evaluating a potential therapist is if they have a lot of experience doing non-consensual therapy (e.g. at involuntary treatment facilities, mandated therapy, therapy at schools, therapy for kids, etc.).

The current mental health system is like an un-self-aware, emotionally immature person with some sociopathic tendencies. Not all bad, but in serious need of some shadow work and readjustment of its relationships with others.

I'm leaning toward the position that "authoritative parenting" is basically just authoritarian parenting with more fake smiles and fake warmth. You could argue that this is worse because it adds a layer of mindf*ck to the destructiveness of authoritarianism.

YouTube video by Banyen Books & Sound The Rise of Coercive Psychiatry ~ Investigative Journalist Rob Wipond

"Schools are predominantly using involuntary commitment as a punishment tool, a control tool, and a helping tool...The fastest growing population of people being involuntarily committed is children and youth."
www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMV3...

It's amazing we've tolerated this explosion of dystopian surveillance technology over youth. I guess it's Silicon Valley's way of "giving back" by investing in "ed tech".

YouTube video by ThinkingAllowedTV Theodore Roszak : Towards an Eco-Psychology (excerpt) -- Thinking Allowed DVD w/ Jeffrey Mishlove

"If you look beyond the modern, Western schools of psychiatry, you find that in traditional societies...it is understood that sanity and madness have to be defined always in relationship to the natural habitat."
www.youtube.com/watch?v=83VH...

This is part of why I think some of the more dogmatic criticism against the “wellness industry” is very problematic. It’s like, let people do what works for them. Measured criticism of it is great and essential, but don’t denigrate things unless you want to be part of the problem. 4/

I think it’s analogous to how Western aid groups go into developing countries, effectively tell them that the way they raise their children is inferior and tell them Western schooling is superior. 3/

It’s part of why it took so long for me to take seriously the practices, ideas, and perspectives that I truly needed because I was essentially indoctrinated to dismiss them. This creates shame for people.2/

The state sanctioned dominance of the mental health field creates a knowledge hierarchy whereby other ways of approaching these problems get marginalized. Approaches that may be exactly what some people need. This is a real problem. 1/