Isabel Brown (16:07)
I. I am not cut out to watch reality tv. You guys must all have heart attacks every single day. Are people all this psychotic in reality television? No wonder everyone's stress levels are so high in society. How did we get here? So she doesn't feel bad. Doesn't feel bad for Dakota at all because he was a man getting beat. Oh, and by the way, I wish they kept the Bachelorette on the air because at least then I would have gotten to watch. How many men compete? 22. 20 something men get beat in the by a woman. That's a good plot. We should put that on television. This video. A hundred thousand likes. One hundred thousand likes agreeing with this girl who says the only people she really feels bad for are the kids. Having to watch this. Not because mom is hitting dad. That's not enough reason to feel bad, but because dad had the audacity to record it. And as this trend continues to blow up and take over my social media feed and I've had to do the pain painstaking research of understanding who all these people are, I'm realizing that there are videos like this. Not just talking about exes saying I didn't beat up my ex enough or my ex was so horrible I wish I hit him with a chair. Women are actually making what they think are funny videos. Pretending to hit their current boyfriends fiance's husbands in the head with chairs, thinking that this is somehow funny. Caption for legal reasons, this is a joke. Me, after I clean the whole house, load the car, pack for everyone by myself while he naps. Look, ladies, I get it. Men are helpless. Sometimes you have to do the lion's share of prepping the family when it comes to laundry and cooking and getting everyone out the door to go to the zoo and packing your kids for summer camp and making sure lunch boxes are full with ice packs in them. I get it. It's frustrating. I share those frustrations in no way, shape or form Is it ever funny as a result of that stress to make a joke video? I guess for only for legal reasons. Is this a joke to abuse your husband? It's not funny. Maybe I'm the minority who thinks that. I certainly seem to be the minority on TikTok, where hundreds of thousands of people are liking these videos. But ask yourself for a minute, what would happen if the sexes were reversed? What would happen if a man made this video with the caption, for legal reasons, this is a joke, joke pretending to beat his wife with a chair. That guy would probably already be in prison. For the record, like, there's no questions, ifs, ands or buts about any of that. He would have been treated with a legitimate threat, prosecuted for it, and probably been in prison. But what's really interesting to me about all of this is not that reality TV is psycho. We already knew that. Hence why I don't watch it. It's the reality that this seems to be a cultural manifestation of how we are treating legitimate mental illness and like psychotic breaks in people. Not just famous celebrity who are on your TV every day and dominating Instagram culture and influencer worlds, but normal people who now think this is also funny and justifying it on social media. The Free Press did a really interesting deep dive a few days ago about the women in Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. Basically making the case that the danger of modern therapy and therapeutic conversations we're having with psychiatrists is that it is actually frying people's brains through the affirmative care model into affirming their delusions. 24 7, 360 and I think most people hear affirmative care. They think gender transition and pushing people into castrating themselves. That's probably the most extreme version of this. But if you really do a deep dive into modern therapy, it is so obvious to me that people are just being told everything they want to hear from their licensed psychiatrist who wants to affirm them into thinking they are the center of their universe and create an entire generation of malignant clinical narcissists. The way they open this article is amazing. By the way they said this. Voltaire famously joked in the 1700s that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. A similar critique could be made of Hulu's show the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which just dropped its fourth season classic. The nine women who star on this incredibly popular show, a group of online influencers styling themselves as Mom Talk, don't lead secret lives at all. They're almost pathologically incapable of privacy. They mostly aren't wise. Well, the show often lists their partners as baby daddies or exes, and while most of them grew up in the Church of Christ Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, they're not really that Mormon like Taylor Frankie Paul, who before being cast as the Bachelorette was one of the more controversial figures on this show for being a soft swinger, basically hooking up with people outside of her marriage, which is the most Christian Mormon thing you could possibly do. But they do a deep dive into Taylor Frankie Paul and all the other women on this show in this article that I highly recommend. We'll put the link for you guys in the comments. Comments that blew my mind about how the worse her behavior gets, the more unhinged this woman becomes, the more therapy inflicted her language has also become. She seems to justify everything that she's doing which we see on TV because her whole life is filmed all the time with terms like boundaries and the narrative. She diagnoses other people with so called mental health conditions. She says it's time to break the cycle of generational trauma. Just like four seconds after screaming at her mom on tv. TV who rips off her microphone and walks away in tears. And she's not the only woman doing this. This seems to be an epidemic of the reality TV stars on this show who are using terms like putting in the work, setting a boundary, holding space for something. And I love how they boil down the essence of this deep dive into this Every conflict is framed through the therapy. Speak language of boundaries and trauma and every terrible decision arrives with its own pseudo scientific justification. So reactive abuse is completely justified because it's just a trauma response. It's you drawing boundaries against someone who is inflicting emotional abuse on you. You are always the victim because everything in life is always happening to you. Therefore there are no consequences of your actions because you're just responding in kind and holding space. One of my favorite journalists, which I know is a hot take to say, but she is a legitimate journalist. Abigail Schreier covered this years ago in her book book Bad Therapy, basically making the case that therapy today does not serve the purpose it was originally intended to serve in society, but instead is just affirming people's mental illness further into that thing. And a lot of that does have to do with the affirmative gender care model that we've all bought into as a society. When someone says I'm dealing with gender dysphoria and we say yes you are, guess we'll help you cut off your penis and your breasts today to make you feel more like yourself. We've basically copied the same mentality into oh, you're depressed. Yep. Cool, let's make you more depressed. Oh, you're anxious. Yep. Cool. Let's affirm that a little bit more and make sure you know that you're being heard. Let's hold space for that and now we have essentially fried the brains of an entire generation, mostly of women who are regularly going to therapy and using this therapy speak, who now are taking to the Internet to justify abusing their boyfriend's fiance's husbands simply because they're men. Men are the aggressor and you're just responding in holes, holding space for how you should react to set boundaries to generational trauma. This makes me never want to go to therapy a single moment in my life, even if someday I may actually need it. But maybe it's a good wake up call sign for all of us to see how horrifying the end result of this constant affirmation actually is. Maybe it's time for all of us to reevaluate what role we actually allow therapy to play in society. So, new rule for life. Stop joking about beating your husband on the Internet. It's not funny. It's not cute, it's not feminist. It's abusive actually, and just evil. And maybe quit your therapist if you find yourself remotely agreeing with or justifying this behavior. I am still continuing my boycott of reality TV after this. This just totally cemented to me. I never want to watch a single minute of any of these shows. I would much rather pray. Frankly, these women need our prayers. But it begs the question, is therapy and maybe reality TV as part of it, frying people's brains, particularly women? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
