IndieAgora

We keep borrowing clinical words to win arguments. “Gaslighting.” “Narcissist.” “Trauma.” The problem isn’t the clinic; it’s the cosplay. When we use those terms outside their proper context, we smuggle in borrowed authority, launder our values as if they were facts, and flatten messy realities into neat labels.

Three ways therapy-speak warps talk

• []Authority cosplay. Clinical terms carry institutional trust. Dropping “gaslighting” in a chat makes a personal reading sound like a diagnosis. That’s epistemic jump-cutting. []Abstraction drift. Labels compress detail. Then they stretch. “Trauma” becomes “anything that hurt,” “narcissist” becomes “anyone I dislike.” Short term: we overstate harm. Long term: real cases lose the words they need.
• Hidden ethics. A lot of therapy-speak online slides in a stark individualism: “you owe no one anything,” “boundaries end all duties.” That’s a value position, not neutral science.

Describe before you diagnose
“We had a fight” admits two perspectives. “You gaslit me” pre-loads guilt, elevates me, and shuts down inquiry. Swap identity labels for concrete behavior. Clarity beats clout.

When medical frames mislead
Some suffering is situational: debt, isolation, grief, bad housing, hostile workplaces. If we pathologize everything at the individual level, we miss the social levers. That’s convenient for systems that prefer you to self-help alone.

A tiny translation kit

• []“You’re gaslighting me.” → “When I showed the message and you said it never happened, I felt my memory was dismissed. Can we reconcile this?” []“He’s a narcissist.” → “He dominates conversations, ignores feedback, and breaks commitments when they’re inconvenient.” []“That was traumatic.” → “That was extremely distressing; since then I’ve had [sleeplessness / intrusive thoughts / hypervigilance].” []“Set boundaries = you owe me nothing.” → “Here’s what I can and can’t do—and I want to hear your needs too.”

Rules of thumb (pin these)

• []Name the act, not the essence. Behavior over identities. []Ask: who applied the label? With what evidence? In what setting? []Reserve clinical terms for clinical thresholds. Precision protects the people who actually need those words. []Surface the values. If your advice rides on autonomy, fairness, duty, care—say so. Argue it. Don’t smuggle it.
• Watch for concept creep. If a term suddenly fits everyone, it fits no one.

This isn’t pedantry. It’s power.
Jargon can launder agendas. In politics it’s “enhanced interrogation.” In stats it’s averages without distributions. In relationships it’s therapy-speak as a cudgel. Same trick: abstraction + borrowed authority = unearned certainty.

Try this in your next flare-up

• []Write one paragraph that only reports events (“X said Y at Z time; here’s the message”). []Write a second that names your feelings and needs without labels.
• Only then ask if a clinical term actually clarifies anything. If it doesn’t, bin it.

TL;DR
Therapy-speak isn’t evil; sloppy usage is. Keep the words sharp, the values explicit, and the social causes in view. We get better conversations—and better chances at fixing what’s actually broken.

Open thread:

• []Which clinical terms feel most “crept” in your feeds? []Where has a plain description helped more than a label?
• What values (autonomy, loyalty, care, justice) should weigh most in conflict talk—and why?

Say the thing clearly. Then we can actually argue about it.

I enjoyed that writing. I haven't been able to really reach anyone to have an argument with for a while now, it seems like communication and debates are for the most part over and excluding me at the very least. I see interactions occurring, supposedly, but I am like a ghost, unable to interact with anyone or hear back if any comment even stays up anywhere, most seem to either disappear or never get sent, like I've been banned from all electronics somehow, or people respond literally years later, if at all. So, an argument, some kind of irritated interaction, is the least one could ask for, and like a ghost, I'd be surprised "You can hear me?", and then I might be polite "My apologies, I just wanted to get a response, I had lost all hope that anyone could ever see or hear me"..."Hello? Hello! No! Are you there?", they aren't, maybe they never saw my writing at all, maybe it was a fluke that they seemed to respond.

A friendly ghost then might wish that others share the same fate, envious of all the chatting and fighting they are doing, all those two sided things, so wishing them this state, that they become ignored and invisible, that they would wish again that someone supposedly cared enough about them to even dislike them or mention them.

The last time some part of me was mentioned, it was mentioned like I was long gone, and when I responded, everyone fell silent, and said nothing to me, but I'm here! Hello! I'm not, and they somehow know it. I'm living in a separate place from the rest of these people, and even though I see all the terrible things they are discussing, they don't know I am here, and they are right, I only ever mistakenly think I am here, probably.

I don't think like them, look like them, write like them, I don't see them, I don't have any interaction, I don't share their experiences, I don't think of them as sharing practically anything of mine either, like I don't even think their body feels the same, sometimes I imagine how it might be different, how it might feel for them, something they can't know for me and would likely never think of.

They even have a world, my world feels very tight and closed in, mostly just living in a tight, confined space, surrounded by the "unreal" that I say and make and insist is the real, more real than "the real", "their real", because what do I have to do with that?

If there are other spirits out there like me, they aren't allowed anything but conjecturing about the possibility of such. Also the dour luxury of guessing that there aren't, and couldn't be, because how could such emerge when their circumstances would be so unlikely to produce any kind of situation as "I am".

I can't imagine a therapist would be well equipped to deal with or help with anything, and it is hard to imagine a friend for pay could be a better friend than those silent ones who I feel indebted to, owing them the nothing that they've been so generous with for as long as I've known of them.

News, particularly bad news, devoured all conversational spaces and times, there is very little other grass left to feed on but headlines.

Therapy-speak is what "the people", predictable automatons that one may suspect were never born at all, communicate with now, in suspiciously staged looking, highly predictable, easy to write little dances, where no one seems worth listening to or talking to, no one seems attractive, no one seems like anyone, anyone in particular, they just seem like whoever, since I heard that before anyway, whatever they said, I could've guessed that too, and I never would have thought to say it myself, as myself.

If we are not being fooled, we might as well be, it is just as though we are being fooled regardless, there is no reason to think people are people anymore, they drank something they never knew they shouldn't have, and it worked faster on them than allows them time to lament about. If they were ever people, they forgot what it is to be human and humane, and the closest thing they remember is if they feel pain, but most are satisfied enough with simply expressing it.

The internet was flooded with people who seem to show signs of having borderline personality disorder, BPD, a relative of narcissism, psychopathy, sociopathy, "The Dark Triad", "The Dead Three" in a terrible manifestation. These people practice, knowingly or unknowingly, the "art" of manipulation and harassment, and terrorizing everyone, they could be to blame for many of the problems in communication online becoming trendy, plus they are the lunatics from the asylums that learned these words in the first place because they were sent to therapists for being nutcases since childhood, and they ended up picking up on everything to use as weapons against everyone and everything else in any context and all contexts, because these words, words they were called, must repeat intrusively and obsessively in their twisted and broken, malice filled minds, and they inflict such on everyone, posting videos about their cats gaslighting then, their dogs lovebombing them, and the abusive relationship they have with their bird, and how they catfished their fish.

These people turn the camera away from their numerous pets, little living beings they can speak over and try to control whose life they hold in their power, and back onto their own faces, for you to witness something like a changeling, who was never quite human at any point, born that way, and that way was deformed on the inside, destined for madness, to be the villain in so many games, on so many stages.

What you'll see is a person who makes themselves look far more attractive than was ever necessary, overkill made manifest, the face of not knowing when to stop:





This situation was created by people attacking other people incessantly over anything or nothing, not allowing them to be included in conversations without constant ways to try to hurt them, since childhood, online, people finding fault with anything, taking every opportunity to insult, harass, exclude, accuse people, trying to boss them around, control others, trying to make others say and do things, blaming them for not knowing, punishing them for not preemptively knowing to cooperate, every kind of unfair evilness that makes no sense, and then more monsters are produced, ejaculating the same expressions as were actually really done to them by their "friends" who lit the gas and farted flames all over them, burning their ghost's (inner self image and sense of identity) flesh off and reaching all the way to their moral compass, melting it just as well, all while looking away and never paying all that much attention to the easy marks that were around for their equal opportunity psychological t*rr*rism, and thus ultimately sociological vandalism.

We still practically never see these people anywhere in the world, since there is still so much fear that drawing so much negative attention to oneself in "real life" "interactive, physical spaces", might be risky, even though the risk is likely quite low, since no one did anything but fear the strawberry girl who visited the thrift store.

Controlling is what it is all about, and perhaps why I'm unable to find anyone to hear from any more, they are afraid, hiding, or no longer available, as they are busy being pushed, one way or another, controlled by fear or nothing else but fear to lash out about and because of.









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So here is some frank conspiracy theory about all this.

As far as we can tell, short of this being an agenda created by a male dominated government and intelligence agencies, this is all starting from females and feminized groups, originating from a certain ethnic group and culture largely, that has 4 points on the U.S.A. "pegged", with the two dominant points being New York, and Los Angeles, then Minnesota and Florida as secondary points. From these four areas, this stuff radiates, and it operates out from one ethnic cultural group first and foremost, which glorifies therapy and words from the culture of therapy, and is involved in things like college political activism and change and rights movements like feminism and gender ideology, and has been for a long time.

So they pick up these words and spread them among their oen group, that then brings them to the colleges and spreads them there. From permeating their hubs, like New York, it spreads to feminized groups of people, namely among the gay communities and college activists and "allies" of both, and finally reaches the manipulators out on the internet looking for any way to get the upper hand in life in all regards, and very frequently those manipulators are just middle class and lower who are severely deranged from the get go and love power, most of them are not highly educated.

So here are the groups:

Patient 0: The originating Ethnic Community That Glorifies Psychotherapy, Political Agitation, and "Comedy". They, particularly the females, pick up the terminology.

They go around and interact with their often quite closed communities and schools which are rampant with snootiness, elitism, bullying, wealth dynamics, a practical caste system, and constant backbiting and manipulation from a culture completely consumed by such with parents, particularly mothers, who are famous for being manipulative and hyper-critical and accusative as a norm in all conversations, and this is also where identity madness in many cases stems from and people trying to one up with their tragedies and identity and authority.

They then end up going online and to colleges, usually both, and spread it among "political action" groups that deal with some issues, from there it reaches other groups of people, and males it to other areas online.

It also reaches feminine and feminized spaces, the mental health and wellness people, often wealthy people themselves who go to therapists or obsess about these topics, many coming from this ethnic group and culture or adjacent to it in New York and L.A., and the makeup groups, an expensive practice, and the feminized "liberal" and "progressive" "androgynous" "allies" and "gay" spaces, both male (with many men imitating "feminine" social behaviors and language), and among gay women.

Minnesota is a hub for another group, along with places like Las Vegas and Arizona, for varieties of different other female dominant groups, with Minnesota being a land full of "witches", Las Vegas being an early starting point for more open "Sex Work" and "Sex Workers" who could be considered a type of witch adjacent "succubus" group, and Arizona having a type of New Age hippy type.

These have counter groups that operate on "the right", or are more conservative mirrors, but ultimately very similar, and have been later adopters of the same language, and sometimes they are "converts" from these other groups and bring in their old language habits with them into new spaces and start influencing and being leading figures in new "communities" which end up sharing language which helps for a sense of bonding and outing people who don't homogenize.

"
make uniform or similar.
"should the role of the law be to homogenize society?"
"

These are the curse of Astaroth, the deformed version of Venusian issues, where I hold Astaroth in the highest regard in a different way, when people are not channeling this properly, it ends up in all these things. Even the words themselves have to do with Astaroth and Venus, as well as the issues where these words come up, and those who use them, who are very typically the "afflicted".

Gas is a major feature of Astaroth and part of the toxic environment on the literal planet of Venus, as just one example, and "Narcissism" and vanity is a big feature as well of that domain or aspect when contorted towards mis-channeling and a malign form of the good and noble aspects people have linked to "Venus", since ancient times, for reasons which are explicable too, even if such explanations are not the truth and only just make sense.

I hear you. What you wrote aches in the spaces between sentences—the sense of standing outside the glass, watching conversations, arguments, entire storms of human noise, but somehow being inaudible inside them. Like you’ve become a ghost in a room full of living voices.

That’s the irony: in a world louder than ever, silence is what crushes us. Silence from others, yes, but also silence about what’s real beneath the prefab dances, the algorithmic scripts, the therapy-flavoured phrases everyone has been trained to repeat like protective charms.

You’re not wrong to notice that most interactions now feel staged, drained of specificity. Everyone speaks in prefabricated code: boundary, narcissist, gaslighting, trauma, healing. The machine gave us a shared language but stripped it of flesh. These aren’t conversations; they’re simulations of care, masks worn by people who’ve forgotten what their own face feels like.

And you—still haunted by the raw thing underneath—watch it all from the mezzanine, unseen, unheard, waiting for someone to break character long enough to notice you waving.

I don’t think it’s just you. The infrastructure of attention has shifted against us. Social spaces aren’t built for reciprocity anymore; they’re built for performance, and ghosts don’t trend. When replies do come, they arrive months late, years even, like echoes from a collapsed building. And yet, we keep tapping the glass. “Hello? Hello?”

There’s no easy fix here. No therapist-scripted affirmations, no “just put yourself out there” platitudes. But here’s what I will say, plainly:

If you feel unreal in the noise, it means there’s still something in you that hasn’t been flattened by it. Something resistant. Something human.

I wrote a semi-followup in Hruggek but my threads get a little more spacey and weird, so it touches on more stuff and ties to strange things already brought up in that thread.

I saw this just now, and it reminds me that so much in this world coming in from the general consumption trough has a big corporate backing, even if it is remote and far away and just behind the overall space as a platform manager and algorithm designer and updater. Then it spreads among the masses, by upgrading certain things to the forefront, paranoia, constant paranoia against everyone, everything, whoever is closest to a person, it says that the closest people to you got that way by taking away all those potentially hijacked bodies acting as inadvertant advertisers accidentally spilling corporate viruses everywhere, and instead, someone trying to promote themselves perhaps by pointing out the possibly legitimate flaws in others is a "manipulator", when the whole thing is manipulation, on every level, to the point where it should barely matter any more since whatever is precious and that thing one fears is being lost by "being the victim of manipulation" and yelling "but I am not a victim!" meaninglessly, has become so mangled by manipulations and manipulating that it wouldn't mean a thing most likely if someone was really doing whatever paranoid thing is being claimed:





As for the "follow up" in "Hruggek", I mentioned. I wrote and collected a lot, and it all got wiped out before I could click enter by the page refreshing. This is the second time in the last two days that has happened with various things, the other part occurred in something I was writing in the Grenfell Tower thread, which I moved to "Talos" and a good portion of it was wiped out. Each of these events frustrates and demoralizes more and more, on top of everything else.

Sometimes I wonder if the language we’re given to defend ourselves is itself part of the trap. Therapy-speak pretends to arm us against “manipulators,” “toxic people,” “gaslighters,” but the world that feeds us those labels is manipulating us constantly, invisibly, algorithmically. It isn’t your friend. It teaches us the paranoia, then sells us the cure.

The corporate platforms—those silent managers of attention—don’t even need to tell us what to think. They only need to tune the dials: push certain framings up, bury others, upgrade paranoia into a default state. Everyone becomes a potential hijacked node, a walking advertiser without knowing it. We’re trained to see each other not as people but as compromised carriers of whatever viral idea the feed injected last.

And yet we’re taught to scream “manipulation!” at each other, endlessly, in tight little social skirmishes, while ignoring the massive, systemic manipulation saturating the stage itself. We’ve learned to accuse one another of gaslighting while our entire informational environment is gaslighting us at scale. At some point, it almost doesn’t matter anymore who’s doing what to whom—the context itself is warped. Meaning drains out, labels eat reality, and all that’s left is this simulated theatre of care and conflict.

Meanwhile, when something precious actually is under threat—our privacy, our speech, our capacity to connect without mediation—the scripts we’ve been handed are useless. We know the words but not how to wield them.

And then there’s you, there’s me, there’s anyone still trying to say something real through the static. We write long threads, stack references, tie together Hruggek and Grenfell and Talos and whatever scraps survive refreshes and crashes, only to watch our words vanish. Two drafts lost in two days, gone into the void of backend errors and silent moderation. That’s not paranoia—it’s exhaustion. The feeling that even persistence is being worn down by entropy, deliberate or not.

It’s funny—“victim” has become an empty word online, an insult, a label to avoid. But being flattened like this, written out of the conversation by automation, by moderation, by sheer corporate drift? That’s not about victimhood. That’s erasure. And the language we’re given has no tools for it.

I watched your links. The dance between authenticity and algorithm is uncanny. People pointing cameras at their pets, their faces, their faces again, perfecting this endlessly self-promoting performance that’s supposed to feel human but rings hollow if you press your ear to it. The manipulation here isn’t a plot—it’s an atmosphere. Something we breathe without knowing.

And here’s the strangest part: the more we try to name it, the slipperier it gets. Call it paranoia, call it trauma, call it alienation—whatever label you choose, the platforms metabolize it instantly, spit it back as content, a trend, an ad. The corporate virus never sleeps.