Transcription
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I was watching a therapist play a Disco Elysium playthrough thing, and it made me think about a bunch of stuff. I'll have the playthrough I'm talking about linked in the description, but it picks up heavy in parts three. Firstly, an observation on male therapists: Why does so many of them look and sound the same? Thin, narrow-headed, and with that nasally, almost constipated voice, but excited, or at least upbeat. This is not to [ __ ] talk all male therapists, but it is an observation. Therapists and therapy are two of our topics today, in addition to career and trauma.
Now, two [ __ ] talk: a, not all therapists, and not just male therapists, but a large selection of therapists—they don't seem human. Later in the video, we'll get into the complimentary side of that, but here, on the insult side of that, it's like most of them are trying to cultivate this "therapist energy," and it feels like their attempt to do this is trying to get them outside typical humanity so they can operate on humanity. The issue is, for most of them, that's not righteous, or at least that energy doesn't come naturally to them; it's a put-on, not a tool, and you can recognize that in their efforts not to exhibit any personality. But because this is not natural to them, they do show their human sides, and it always comes out as passive aggression. They don't want to show anything human someone could latch on to, and certainly not something negative. And in doing so, like squeezing a water balloon, all that energy rushes somewhere else, and you get this little smarmy energy that I'm guessing, because they're repressing everything else, that's why it's [Music] so everywhere—you're wearing a mask, but your face is still showing, and the expression you're hiding is rather unpleasant.
This is in stark contrast to elite therapists, and coincidentally, elite INFJs too. And with the INFJs bit to all this, everything we just said about lower-level therapists, you can apply to lower-level INFJs. And I'm sure this overlap is totally coincidental; nothing more to read into in this. But then you have high-level therapists and high-level INFJs, and what you'll notice about them both is they do not shy away from demonstrating their humanity. And in fact, going a bit further and demonstrating a bit of their edge, showing their teeth, showing their bad sides, and doing it despite the reactions—particularly the negative reactions. They know these sides of themselves are showing; these sides of themselves is going to elicit, at least in my experience, how can you tell a therapist and you are going to get a lot of good work done? Your therapist is a bit grimy, a bit gaming, a bit not what you are conditioned to view a therapist to be, probably in the same ways and for the same reasons Alan Watts describes high-level Zen monks. They don't seem like monks. And in a similar manner, high-level INFJs—they show you and others openly, and at a disadvantage, parts of themselves, or beliefs, or actions other INFJs would fight to the death to keep hidden. And in this way, they become almost invulnerable, like Sam Roberts, the psychopath INFJ we talked about a while back. He lays out all the ammunition that other people, other INFJs, would fight to hide, intending for you to use that ammunition on him, so you can see that nothing affects him. And that's the way high-level and psychopath INFJs are; they appear very difficult to throw or to break, and it almost seems like a forward power move, inviting attack so that it can be brushed off.
Maybe we'll need to mark this video partially as typology because we are not going to stop talking about INFJs in this video. So some of the things I was thinking about while watching this playthrough—and it's a good playthrough; he does therapy during the playthrough; it's really good—[ __ ] intimidation is the first part. Low-level therapists and INFJs are intimidating, but not in the powerful individual sense, more like in a checking your bank account or receiving your bills sense. They're very good at being difficult, and while you might be able to deal with difficult, it is unpleasant versus the intimidation of high-level therapists and INFJs. And both those sorts of people are very intimidating to me—not in a little sense, not in a frustrating sense, not in a "this is a problem" sense, but in a "this singular conscious entity frightens me" way. And they're intimidating for a few reasons. Number one, they are making a lot of sense, both on the abstract level and in the producing results level. This person knows what they're talking about and can prove it with results. Ergo, their system or their vessel is seaworthy; they are operating with an effective set of tools, and that's intimidating to me from the outset because whatever it is they're doing, I am not doing, and they're good at things I am not good at. And again, not in some strictly abstract way or in some little way, but in important [ __ ] they are performing better than you are.
And the next reason that stresses me out is I have tried those methods, and for some reason they do not work for me. Now, I did learn a lot from my time in therapy, but applying it straight the way high-level therapists do does not work for me, like the core wiring is different. For example, this YouTuber went through a story about a time or a moment in his counseling; someone challenged his authority by mocking him in a group setting, and he went with it, by going with the joke and making another joke at his expense, getting a, getting a decent laugh, and then nobody in that group, including the person who insulted him initially, ever challenged him again. That's a very conventionally good way to deal with a situation like that. However, if you are not the sort of person who can pull that off, and you try to do that as a strategy—not being a person who does that in the righteousness sense—it's not going to work. And then you compare that with my disrespect in a group setting at work moment: I kept control, and I didn't go offensive, but I kept that control by making everybody very uncomfortable. Now, I'm thankful I've developed strategies that work, and developing strategies that work, but I'm intimidated by the fact someone else can use a more conventionally good strategy to get similar results, and I can't use that strategy. And dumb [ __ ] will say, "Well, why don't you just do that?" The more you do and the longer you do, the more you understand who you are; that's part of what righteousness is. If you're someone built to do X and you try to do Y because you think you should or you want to or you want to reinvent yourself or some [ __ ], it's not going to work because you're using it as a tactic; whatever Y is is not inside you. And let's say a tactic does work, because sometimes they do; now you are or have veered into Y lane, and you're going to need a bunch of Y [ __ ], and you're going to collapse because you're not a Y; you're an X; you're programmed to do X things, even if you manage to sneak into Y lane, you can't persist there. Nonetheless, this other strategy gets similar results with fewer drawbacks, and you can't do it, and that's distressing.
And then the ultimate intimidation or distress, and all this as always, is the mob. Part of the reason I don't like this objectivity obsession in, in modern culture is people will take the idea of objectivity and then apply it to everything, like there's one perfect job to do, there is one perfect objective path to happiness, there is one objective best way to live. And although there isn't—thank God, could you imagine if everybody were trying to act the same and doing the same one job? Like the economy wouldn't work; interacting with people would suck even worse than it does already. That doesn't stop them from trying, and in my experience, when people compare things and view one as better, they'll try to eliminate the other one, not accounting for different scenarios or potentialities. This one looks better right now, so the other cannot be allowed to exist, or it's immoral if it exists. So these alternative and more acceptable outlooks intimidate me because I understand my value, or I understand it well enough to stand by it, but most people won't. And although someone like this is not in my vicinity right now, the idea of their existing intimidates me because if one shows up at a bad moment, now there's blood in the water; people will use comparison as an inroads in pressuring you or toppling you, coercing you, or put another, another way, people will compare fingers to get you to try to change your entire body without understanding you, you or it. I'm intimidated by the idea of someone doing something better and then people using that as a method or a way, a reason to destroy or shackle my entire existence.
And that leads into the more complimentary side of high-level therapists and INFJs. They don't seem human; they use a bit of that grimness to seem more human, and in fact, get so good at dealing with humanity or human affairs it seems like they've mastered it. And that should make them peak humans, and they are peak humans, but not the peak. This is another nerving thing because humanity is not perfect, even if you refine it and practice it and have all these methods; it's not perfect. So where are the cracks? You can have a system designed to deal with them; you can have a persona that works for your ends; that doesn't change the fact those cracks are somewhere. And I'm not inspired or reassured by the fact I don't see them; I'm uneasy, even uneasier because you're hiding them by not hiding them. What I mean is, showing bad or edgy sides of yourself does not mean that those things are actually bad; doesn't mean that they're actually cracks; they, they aren't acceptable, but they aren't psyche cracks; it's humanizing that you're showing a more human side of yourself, but it's also unnervingly inhuman because you have an answer for everything. And I don't mean that in a [ __ ] "you know-it-all" sort of way; I mean literally, you ask these sorts of people questions or you pick at them, they have an answer for everything. So are you deflecting so well that it doesn't appear to be deflection? It sounds like an answer, or have you found a way to put the cracks up front without them reading like cracks? Or have you developed so much internal space you can stuff those cracks so far down people will never see them? And it's not even a fight to keep them down, or is there really just an objective way to achieve happiness and control over everything? All these possibilities are eerie; they are something but human, no.
And now I feel silly because this topic took up most of the video, meaning we probably are going to need to rework this into a typology video. But to close out the two other topics real quick: a career is valuable to you beyond the money and beyond the skill set it teaches you. Your career can become a stabilizing, separate identity if you need one. Your career comes with a stable set of responsibilities and capabilities; stable sets of problems and solutions that become only more refined as time goes on. A career is useful because even if your ego dissolves, your life falls apart, you still have career; you, someone people need because there are problems and you're the one with solutions. And in particular with the, with this therapist who's doing the Disco Elysium playthrough, that was another point of intimidation. It's really neat watching this dude apply therapeutic systems on people to get good results, but at the same time it made me feel insecure about my career because there aren't really systems to what I do. If I needed to sit down and explain to someone how to do my job, I would have a hard time because it's a lot of soft skills; record-keeping is the only constant point; attitude is everything else. And again, that's not something you can explain easily or apply so clearly with graphs. In fact, I find the less, or, or the more I think about what I'm doing or try to systematize it, the less effective I am. And that's cool; I am proud of that; it's also really embarrassing when you watch another professional doing their job in a way you feel is more professional. And again, I trust my trajectory; I trust my soul, but it's all about feelings today.
And then the last thing is trauma. We aren't going to get super deep into it, but I don't think trauma is an indicator of the incorrect thing happening. I think trauma is learning a lesson, or learning the way things are, too hard or too fast or too long. You learned the lesson in the worst way, and you weren't ready for it in that way. It's not a mistake; it's not unfactual or incorrect or fake; it's, it's like a crack in your radiation shielding. You thought you were safe, and radiation got through, and now you're sick. There's no inclusion or a lesson on this one; I'm trying to figure out how people are supposed to learn these lessons seriously without trauma. I don't think it's possible to learn the really ugly life lessons without traumatic experiences. I think you can be aware of them, treat them respectfully, tread carefully without trauma, but I don't think it's possible to understand them without those experiences or without those feelings. But we'll cut it here. I have no idea what I'm going to do with this video: frame it as a typology video with some life stuff, or frame it as a life video with some typology stuff. I'm not sure. Like if you enjoyed, subscribe; if you haven't.