#FirstWorldProblems, which used to carry their own hashtag when hashtags hit the social scene as chic emblems of sarcasm, are similar to Rob Henderson’s concept of “luxury beliefs”. Henderson describes luxury beliefs as those that are essentially only nuisances of the elite, as those lucky enough to be affected by such minor problems lack perspective as to more grave challenges faced by those of lower socioeconomic status and income. The concept of “burnout” has become the yellow fever of White upper-middle-class women, as those in blue-collar jobs or labor-industry jobs likely do not experience pseudo-symptoms of “feeling like an imposter”, “compassion fatigue”, or diminished cognitive functioning resulting from a “drained social battery”. While I wholly believe that burnout can and frequently does occur in helping fields, as the demand will always be too high for us to appropriately tame, we have begun admiring our problems versus making attempts to remedy our internal pain. This is a glaring sign that, perhaps, we are more fortunate than we’re willing to admit; the blue-collar classes working double what we work but getting paid a fraction are, I’m sure, too busy and too exhausted to spend time developing new pathologies for the exhaustion resulting from a day’s work.
First World Problems are as minor as they are trivial. In the developing world, its populations are either starving, thirsty, or infected, and are primarily concerned with their survival. In America, we deliberately twist our emotional undies into knots over problems related to wanting to be our “authentic selves”, one hundred percent of the time, or finding an “ism” in most everything we disagree with or refuse to accept. In Michael Easter’s book “The Comfort Crisis”, he explains a concept called “Prevalence-Induced Concept Change”, which can otherwise be known as “problem creep”. Problem creep refers to our tendency to create more problems for ourselves when there’s a general absence of them, which requires us to lower the threshold of what’s considered “problematic”. To illustrate through use of an example, a legitimate instance may be that of taking on too many clients knowingly lacking the appropriate staff to effectively treat them. A pseudo-problem quite relevant to behavior analysis is demanding that every clinician be certified in “Neurodiversity Affirming Practices”, thereby creating a shortage simply because we’re excluding a large group based on a makeshift concept that carries minimal clinical weight or efficacy. Yes, queen. Slay.
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Behavior analysts seem possessed by their hankering for turning most every interaction into some perverse rendition of Mario 64. Our effectiveness and compassion as therapists are no longer governed by adherence to an ethical code and positive outcomes, but to the counterfeit competence we attempt to flaunt on social media. While each subdiscipline is different in terms of the toxicity of its modern-day culture (i.e., psychotherapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy, behavior analysis, social work), there is one common thread amongst the fabric of today’s clinicians: they are both lazy and dumb, and they adopt a series of backwards approaches based on guesswork. Further, they are successfully able to play their incompetence off as eccentricity or “paradigm shifting”. Allow me to explain. One of the most successful therapeutic approaches is that of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). CBT rests on the premise that much of our emotional suffering is due to faulty or unhelpful ways of thinking. Treatment, then, requires the individual to readily confront their own thinking patterns and challenge any thoughts that may be contradictory, counterproductive, or completely irrational. Uh oh, I said it: irrational.
Today’s clinicians widely seem to believe that no behavior or thought is irrational so long as it is aligned with “someone’s truth”. That behaving as if you’re in a twisted version of Grand Theft Auto, except more panicky and cowardly, is indicative of “standing in your truth”, something only the brave queens are capable of doing as they live in a society rigged by crusty white men. Gamification refers to the application of typical elements of game-playing into real-life scenarios, a highly effective technique used in online marketing and social media networks. Let’s return to Mario 64. Imagine your bouncy Italian plumber reaching for his coins, replete with an adorable sound effect and your overall score visible on the screen. Gaining of points advances your European laborer to the next level, conditioning you to continue erratic efforts toward gaining points… all while having a blast. These elements are clear in real life: social media posting is heavily influenced by how many “likes” a user gains, much like a reel only goes “viral” if it reaches a pre-determined level of “views”. Many have spoken about audience capture, or the manner in which our behavior becomes entirely governed by what our followers want to see. This is unfortunate and a social burden for the layperson, let alone for the clinician whose clinical decisions are guided by online groupies versus critical thought.
Critical to CBT is embracing accountability and radical transparency as to our faults. This requires both maturity and a thick skin, two variables I fear behavior analysts and clinicians are encouraged to shed themselves of. In a tragic reversal of CBT’s most critical principles, we’ve seemingly taken to instructing people to pathologize most everything difficult as symptomatic of “trauma” or a “narcissistic employer”, to diagnose any person we disagree with as a “Nazi”, and to thoroughly absorb the conception that we are delicate beings who require delicate treatment. The shallow information spread like a stinging contagion on social media, for example? Almost all of it relates to “set those boundaries with your employer, achieve that work-life balance, boo-boo!” while providing exactly zero skills related to building rapport, developing a repertoire of respectful self-advocacy, and being flexible when our proposals are rejected. I’m certain behavior analysts touting these adorable, platitudinal nuggets of advice do not exercise any of them in real life, as they’d undeniably recognize life is far more layered and complex than the elementary scripts they peddle as guidance. Frankly, I think this stems from immaturity as well as laziness. The flagrant use of comparing people to Nazis and Hitler, for example? This is likely due to the fact that the only history they recall is that of the Holocaust, so their “brave” “insults” hurled whenever possible at least play the part of being historically accurate. Hook, line, sinker, queen! Now, tell me this: do you know who fought in World War II? The Battle of Gettysburg? Oh, oh, oh, is Vietnam a country or a state?
Graduate programs are equally to blame for generating swaths of therapists more concerned with their online “influence” versus their effect on clientele. While I believe the concept of therapists lecturing their clients about racism and sexism is overblown by the media, I do contest that we’re in a common sense poverty, of sorts. We’re sweating through an intellectual drought in which we’re convinced our thirst is quenched only by people who agree with us and our hollow clinical approaches on platforms like Twitter or Instagram. To use myself as an example, I was labeled a Nazi, White Supremacist, and Eugenicist by hundreds of people within my field of behavior analysis, all for bringing up what should be basic history about Nazism and eugenics. Not only did this illuminate the utter stupidity and entitlement of today’s clinicians, it further cemented my notion of a common sense scarcity: how wildly pathetic is it that professionals need to be told to regulate their emotions before taking action? That things they recoil at are not necessarily bad, or that people they don’t like aren’t unethical, narcissistic, or “harmful”? Instead of focusing on their own clients and attempting to solve larger systemic problems within the field (which, trust me, are abundant), they thought their best course of action would be an online howling mob. And these are people the public is trusting to work with their children. Oh, queen, bless your heart. I’ve been told that’s a Southern translation for, “you fucking moron”.
There is no hope left for clinical fields other than starting from the ground up. I wholly believe that even a radical reform of behavior analysis would not be enough to unravel the series of illogical knots its therapists have reinforced. We are not trusted for our intellect and our expertise but for our opinions, many of which are adopted without thought and propagated without a hint of analysis. That’s funny, too, considering we are supposed to be behavior “analysts”. This weekend’s Unpopular Conference sadly highlighted much of our deranged priorities: topics included talk of equity in institutions and essentially condemning management for being in positions of “power”, a luxury belief if there ever was one. While I do understand that some manners in which people attain leadership are unfair and even discriminatory, I still find it mildly irritating that this is what we choose to pour our minimal brain cells into. What do our clients matter, anyway?
Another conversation that arose during the conference was between myself and another speaker, in which I addressed her concerns about my bringing up Daryl Davis. Davis, a black jazz musician, has become well-known for his candor and stoicism in personally attending Klan meetings and conversing personally with high-ranking members of the KKK. In understanding their perspective and respectfully questioning their stances on racism, over 200 KKK members turned in their robes to Davis, which he now proudly keeps in large piles in his closet. This is a profound example of not only what bravery and courage look like in the face of danger, both literal danger and immense emotional hatred, but how fragile we’ve become in our own approaches to clinicians we disagree with. The speaker confronted my mentioning of Daryl by essentially stating that this was “his story to tell”, that I “didn’t provide context” about why Daryl took this communicative approach, and how I “borrowed” his style and imposed it upon others to use for themselves. This struck me as odd for a few reasons, the main one pertaining to the fact that this argument made minimal sense.
Prior to outlining Daryl’s conversation tactics, I provided context and examples of various logical fallacies and manipulative language tactics in conversation, which this speaker used herself in addressing me (I’m certain she didn’t realize it). One that was continuously used was the red herring fallacy, in which the individual continuously detracts from the topic and attempts to steer the conversation in another direction when they’re essentially “caught” stating something inaccurate or false. In this speaker’s case, most any question I asked resulted in her stating, “Well I just won’t answer that”, or “I don’t want to take away from you time”, or, the best one, “I’m not emotionally invested enough in this conversation”. I’ve heard this last excuse before from several behavior analyst “influencers”, in which they attempt to attack some portion of myself or my argument and, when called out, suddenly seem “uninterested” in the very conversation they started. Again, I want to believe that these instances of verbal sleight of hand are mere defense mechanisms that go largely unnoticed until someone else brings our attention to them. This being said, I find it incredibly sad that our field sees a back-and-forth like this, which was essentially discussing semantics, to be a revolutionary example of communication. It was not revolutionary, it certainly wasn’t profound, and I can’t believe people would consider this to be something anxiety-provoking. I’ve felt my heart rate rise more rapidly in an undergraduate algebra class.
Believe it or not, behavior analysts, the most strategic way to reach an ever-increasing demand is not to focus on race, gender, and disability status. My clients have unbelievably challenging roads ahead of them, and will likely struggle for the remainder of their lives, as will many of the clients of practitioners reading this piece. To focus on semantics and our luxury beliefs, like in the above example of getting upset over what I assume to be a White-looking individual talking about a Black man as a prolific exemplar, does not progress our clients towards independence. The silent majority who trembles at the sight of most any conversation that isn’t fluffed and decorated with buzzwords are also not advancing our field towards scientific, objective reality, or even away from proposed interventions about as legitimate as psychic readings and horoscopes. We so often engage in activities that make us feel productive versus actually being productive, playing a hopeless trick on our mind and forever trapping us into a loop of our own demise. Yes, it happens to everyone… including me. But I also recognize where my faults lie and develop measurable plans for how to improve upon these shortcomings--- I do not demand that society and my entire field bend to meet my personal emotional needs. That is infantile, self-absorbed, and selfish, and any behavior analyst who informs us otherwise is one that cannot and should not be trusted with the valuable lives of the people we serve.
Can behavior analysis save the world? Only if we start over. Now if only those chicks who want to burn down the patriarchy could smarten up and help us burn down stupidity…
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