RL Peeves
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Thanks to everyone for investing your time in my little gripe. I do honestly appreciate it. The matter is further complicated (or not) that I am an Operations Manager and he is a team member, so it skews power balance and things, I guess. Maybe.
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@Kestrel The online support-groupies I used to groupie with. Some of them were, for whatever reason, unable to go no-contact, and of that set was a subset who played Emotional and Verbal Abuse Bingo. There were quite a lot of cards made up where each little square was some common hurtful behaviour. It was a Thanksgiving event to compare results and ‘win’ chocolate bars. You might play it with your family.
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It’s complicated; every client is different, etc, etc., caveat, caveat…
Therapy, at its core, is helping someone to make a change.
Often, what a client thinks they need or want to change isn’t at all what they need to change, and it’s part of a therapist’s job to help a client explore those unseen avenues.
Admittedly, my scope is typically working with survivors of domestic abuse—there’s something delightfully fulfilling about being a Safe Male Figure in someone’s life for, perhaps, the first time. But the intention is the same: Help a client uncover maladaptive or dangerous behaviours, thought patterns, etc, and then with time help them overcome the need for such strategies, untangle the core of their particular problems while also helping them mitigate the impact of their, for lack of a better term, symptoms.
If all a therapist does is validate and ego-boost, they’ve failed both the client and themselves. That’s an emotional fluffer, not a therapeutic partner.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
So… like everything in education, it’s not really possible to repeat the “Mississippi miracle” because no one can agree on what led to the gains.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/12/01/how-much-of-mississippis-education-miracle-is-an-artifact-of-selection-bias/ <-- Article breaking down the statistics used and how different sides choose to read and interpret the data to draw different conclusions.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/mississippi-education-miracle/686731/ <-- More on the X factor that can’t just be copy-pasted
https://educationwars.substack.com/p/overselling-the-mississippi-miracle <-- It is just complicated! And we will see if Mississippi can keep it up.
Yeah. I’ve worked in educational research and it turns out that successful implementation of programs across cohorts is incredibly difficult. Even if it’s being implemented the same way as a successful iteration (and this hardly ever happens for another whole host of reasons), you often don’t see the same results because there are real human factors involved. Relationships between teachers and students, neighborhood trust, neighborhood/family risk factors (turns out kids have trouble concentrating on ANY education when they’re starving or afraid for their safety), and just…so many other things.
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You just NAILED what ticked me off hard at our training yesterday when I couldn’t pin it down.
The cohort I work with is dramatically different from what the rest of the schools have. We don’t have any physical boundries, so right away all of our students have directly chosen to attend at my building. We have maybe three families out of an average class size of 27 that doesn’t regularly communicate or has socio-economic issues that prevents them communicate being as active as they want in their child’s life. Even then, they all provide transport to and from our building daily which means most times we have SOME point of contact with the adults in the child’s life. The other schools don’t have that. We have 95% attendance at PT confrences. They are lucky with 30%.*
Asking us and them to do the same things and expecting to measure outcomes is a complete disservice to them and drags us down also because it prevents us from reaching upwards for what our kids can do. They can’t come and ask “what are you doing different” because 9/10 times we aren’t doing anything- our parents are.
*I want to be clear there is NO BLAME from me for these parents. They are doing their best to simply survive. Their kids are doing the same. The schools are doing as much as they can to support them where they are.
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@junipersky Absolutely.
There’s a lot I could say about industrialization as an epistemological framework and how it doesn’t always do education and human welfare justice. But this is not the place for it!
Just, I absolutely understand your frustration and share it.
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@Pavel I getcha there.
But if the client is lying to you, you can’t really help them explore reality. And that’s not your fault. And one thing abusers often do is present things with the roles reversed so they’re the victim who needs validation. (My ex succeeded in doing with his therapist, and with a significant portion of my friends’ group. He soon began to abuse them, so they all went, “Oh shit, G was right,” and dropped him hard, but years later some of those friends are still ashamed and uncomfortable and this is sad to me because it wasn’t their damn fault.)
I think for therapists it’s kinda like that thing where opiate addicts try to sue doctors who prescribed for them based on their lies about pain. The doctors turn around and sue them for fraud. (This is why, in more recent years, those transphobes who think it’s a gotcha to ‘prove’ that gender-affirming care is over/wrongly prescribed by lying about their gender to a doctor and getting a script, as if not having magical truth-detecting powers is malpractice, have just written dumb articles about their fraud where they don’t mention their informed consent form, and not gone to court.)
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Most of my peeves these days are AI related, here’s another one:
I hate that I’ve stopped using em-dashes even when they’re objectively the best punctuation choice in a sentence, and that I’ve mindfully changed my intuitive writing style, in order to avoid being interpreted as AI.
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@Kestrel I hate that people assume that too. But you can have my em-dashes when you pry them from my cold, dead, fingers. Along with my “it’s not this, it’s that” comparisons, and my sentence parallelism, and my triplets.
I’m not Kenyan, but otherwise this is apt: I’m Kenyan. I Don’t Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me.
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@Faraday Amen. It’s getting weird in my practice, too, when empathetic statements and self-accountability start to sound like AI-level sycophancy.
“That must feel frustrating” or “I can see how that would be intolerable” or even “I think I remember you mentioning this before” have started to ping AI hypersensitivity.
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