Josiah Robinson

Thank you for your service

🧵A defence mechanism I regularly encounter in the therapeutic space (but which is entirely under-theorised) is what I would term 'internalisation bias', wherein somone persistently attributes all difficulties, failures & negative experiences to a perceived internal flaw, defect...

Which helps makes sense of why family of origin shapes defenses, distortions, and issues.

Some families respond to humor, others to overworking, others to physical aggression, others to acting out.

An overwhelmed child has to find a working strategy to stay connected.

Geist reframes defenses as a way of maintaining relationship in the face of overwhelming + disorganization feelings and events.

It’s a less pathological, more understandable way of approaching the ways people shutdown, avoid, and lash out.

They’re still striving to be seen.

When a child or patient feels traumatically disconnected, defensive structures become the child’s best way, in her overburdened psychological state, of seeking out the lost connectedness.

- Geist (2016)

The life jacket that once kept you afloat can turn into a concrete vest that sinks you.

Many mental-emotional-relational-habitual problems begin as good-enough fixes for real problems.

Then they calcify, getting rigidly over-applied and creating new problems of their own.

Psychological theory can serve descriptively, even if it can’t serve mechanistically.

The map is not the terrain.

One session or one series of interpretive comments is never curative; we know that therapy is an implicit and explicit process that evolves slowly.

Geist (2016)

Today I’m starting what may be my last, last week of classes. Ever.

Happy Monday, y’all.

Friends I have to admit I’ve been slacking on my Bluesky game.

I’m not an Elon fanboy I just can schedule tweets easier than these posts.

I’m not convinced the goal of grief is to never cry or be sad about it again.

Instead, healthy grief may aim to:

1) securely hold sadness, loneliness, anger, relief, and other loss-oriented feeling states

2) flexibly move in/out of those feeling states without getting stuck

It’s a good morning to celebrate the death of death.

Neuro-bio-psycho speak distances us from subjective experience.

This can be good. Creating labels, categories & theories to wrangle + contain feelings too overwhelming to face.

This can be bad. Retreating to labels, categories, & theories to avoid feelings needed to heal.

I’ve really grown to love group therapy.

It can be a little difficult to get the group dynamic off the ground, but once we’re up and running groups can do some deep, impactful work.

I (& others) tend to do what I call “retreating to theory” in difficult therapy / counseling moments.

Theory *should* help us categorize, explain, & act in light of the experience-near, subjective, emotional, relational moment-to-moment.

It can also help us anxiously run away.

Folks rightly emphasize that suffering can lead to psycho-spiritual growth.

Suffering can yield a good thing, but that doesn’t mean suffering itself is good.

We should hold both:

1) the not-quite-rightness and brokenness of suffering

and

2) the big-G Goods that it may yield.

Have a half-baked article connecting acedia (sloth) to boredom as the vibe of our age.

Acedia & boredom have an existential flavor that includes neglect of obligations to the gifts + relationships we receive.

We’re disconnected from meaning, not just lazy & under-stimulated.

Integration is an act of gratitude, as it connects varied gifts to their Giver.

This equips us to thank and honor God (Rom 1:21), and orient these gifts towards God’s purposes, which is the proper response to the Giver.

“My therapist told me x, it CHANGED my LIFE, here’s what you NEED to KNOW”

These posts often feel shallow because they are.

A therapy’s tweetable nuggets are impactful & moving because they’re embedded in a relational-emotional process.

That can’t be reduced to pithy sayings.

Much dysfunctional grief is driven by feeling too little, not too much.

Christ’s defeat of death frees us to feel death’s pain + devastation more deeply.

It enables us to mourn more intensely + authentically, not to anxiously avoid by slapping a “but heaven!” sticker on death.

Good conversation talks about what is said between us.

Good therapy talks about what *is not said* between us.

While none of us ever welcomes grief or bereavement, both are inevitably parts of living and in this way shape the mourner.

Berzoff (2003)

A certainty-craving conscience manages anxiety + ambivalence of uncertainty by black-and-white thinking.

It also projects that intolerance of uncertainty onto others.

So it assumes disagree-ers are on slippery slopes because it thinks others can’t hold nuance either.

Power just went out at my counseling center.

Time to bust out every light/dark and seen/unseen metaphor I own.

In good therapy / counseling, each session usually feels more like small ball than the World Series.

Flashy, life-changing sessions do happen, but they’re outnumbered and cultivated by the mundane and regular.

Therapists that share client quotes on social media, in session with someone confessing their deepest, darkest secrets and vulnerabilities:

Clients in pain often look for someone to blame.

Maybe their parents, partner, God, themselves.

We clinicians can also get sucked into this, joining them on fact-finding missions to uncover who’s at fault.

Therapy / counseling may often start here, but it shouldn’t end here.

But tbh that fits me as I engage most of PsA. Not into it deep enough or an experienced enough clinician to commit 100% to any theory or school, especially as I work across very different settings.

Will be interesting to see how I land as I settle into career/practice more.

Haha I can see that. I really only know his theory and some small interactions and I know those draw some attention and critique.

I’ve seen some commentary on his views online, too. Had a great training even if I’m not 100% sold on 100% of where he’s at.