Posts Tagged ‘psychobabble’

Are You Authentic?

Monday, October 24th, 2022

We have noticed a gush of social media posts about “authenticity” or “being real” and thought it might be an appropriate subject for this blog.

Authentic:
– worthy of acceptance or belief
– conforming to an original
– not false or imitation
– true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character
– being really what it seems to be, genuine
– genuineness as a reflection of the true person and not simply of a professional acting in a role

[Ultimately from Greek authentikos, from authent?s perpetrator, master; from autos self + -hent?s accomplisher, achiever.]

Checking it out, we also noticed a surfeit of psychological and psychiatric dialog about authenticity. Apparently the subject is not so well understood, given the excessive amount of scholarly discussion and argument over it. An example is “What the new science of authenticity says about discovering your true self“, a recent article we saw from a psychologist who claims that “it can be challenging to find your authentic self.”

We think the real challenge is recognizing what is authentic in spite of all the psychobabble.

One’s Real Self

We would like to think that everyone would agree with the statement that they are themselves and not someone else. So we can call one’s own self or personality “oneself,” or one’s “identity,” or one’s “beingness.”

Interestingly enough, a person has the ability to combine with or take on parts of another. When done willingly and knowingly, we call this “acting” and extol this ability in actors and actresses.

However, when done unwillingly or unknowingly, this becomes a problem and could be called a “facsimile personality.” Without detouring into the mechanics of how this occurs, we note that a person can display the characteristics of one or more personalities in addition to, or in place of, their own. In extreme cases this might produce a “split personality” or certain symptoms of so-called schizophrenia.

Psychiatric Confusion about Authenticity

Some psychiatrists notice that some thoughts and feelings are genuine expressions of oneself, and some are expressions of mental trauma or the side effects of psychiatric drugs. However, we do not find an effective psychiatric process for self-discovery, or an effective method for recognizing or rehabilitating authenticity.

We do find a lot of psychiatric psychobabble, so instead of burrowing down the rabbit hole of psychiatric mumbo-jumbo, let’s just get down to what we can do about it.

Practical Aspects of Authenticity

The subject of facsimile personalities is extensive, and not something we are going to fully address here. However, we can address some aspects which might prove useful in our original quest for authenticity.

There are three elements that bring about an Understanding of oneself, others, and the world around you. These three elements are Affinity, Communication, and Reality. After all is said and done, authenticity is recognizing what is real. And in no small measure, recognizing what is inauthentic and unreal about psychiatry.

Beware the Psychobabble, it gyres and gimbles!

Monday, September 12th, 2022

We read this quote in a “scholarly” psychiatric article: “Polyvagal theory in psychotherapy offers co-regulation as an interactive process that engages the social nervous systems of both therapist and client.”

We call it “psychobabble”, which means “the language that psychiatrists and psychologists use that sounds very scientific but really has little meaning.”

So not only does it use words that no one else will likely understand, but aside from that it has little or no real meaning. The main point of such tangled terms is that anyone can be said to have some form of insanity just by saying a big word. The psychiatrist is the “authority” who sounds impressive but cannot cure anyone’s emotional turmoil.

Well, let’s look at it more closely.

Polyvagal: relating to a theory that specifies two functionally distinct branches of the vagus, or tenth cranial nerve.
Co-regulation: when two people are interacting they continuously affect each other emotionally.

So somehow, when a psychiatrist or psychologist is conversing with a patient, their vagus nerves interact.

The vagus (Latin for “wandering”) nerve stretches from the head, through the neck and chest, to the abdomen. Besides connecting to the various organs in the body (heart, lungs, stomach, intestines, etc.), it conveys sensory information about the state of the body’s organs to the central nervous system. This means that the vagus nerve is responsible for such varied tasks as heart rate, intestinal contractions, sweating, keeping the larynx open for breathing, and so on.

Psychiatry targets the vagus nerve, as part of an “it’s all in the brain” strategy to make their pseudoscience seem more scientific.

But if you buy in to the cry that “it’s all brain” then you have abandoned your humanity, and your spirit, in favor of chemistry; you have bought into the reductio ad absurdum argument that there is no objective reality, it’s all in your brain. And thus we get one psychiatric brain theory after another, in the futile hope that shocking the brain and the nervous system can put some sense into the mentally disturbed.

Of course, once the psychopharmaceutical industry gives all its attention to the brain, then the brain is miraculously transformed into the seat of consciousness, and altering consciousness with drugs becomes commonplace. And we get the disastrous psychedelic psychiatric movement, where magic mushrooms will lead you to a better life; or we get an antidepressant that makes the bad feelings go away for a time (it makes ALL feelings go away, the good and the bad.)

And you can be sure your psychiatrist isn’t really communicating with you, except to hear for which symptom he can prescribe a drug and bill your insurance.

It isn’t, however, the brain. It’s Life. Don’t fall for the psychobabble!

No one listens to me.