Beautiful essay. It's rare to find words that carry such heart and truth these days. I have more to reflect in coming days. Thank you for sharing your words with the world, Jeremy.
Your essay is an act of devotion. It gestures toward a more humane, daring, and dignified form of therapy, rooted not in procedure, but in presence; not in optimization, but in love. You describe the possibility of being met in our full humanity, without scripts, scales, or fixes. That kind of encounter, you rightly suggest, may be the closest many of us ever come to grace.
And yet I find myself wondering—not whether you’re wrong, but whether the vision you’re defending can bear the weight of the world we live in.
You are not mistaken that something has gone wrong. Our society is suffering not just from chemical imbalances or trauma histories, but from a more profound estrangement—from each other, from language, from shared meaning. The bureaucratization of care, the psychologizing of suffering, and the thinning of friendship and ritual all contribute to a quiet despair that many experience not as a crisis but as the default condition of their lives. In this context, your call for a real conversation that is undefended, unplanned, and unmechanized is not just noble. It is necessary.
But necessary is not the same as sufficient.
For many people, especially those living with conditions like OCD, PTSD, or major depression, the tools you critique—diagnoses, protocols, structured methods—have been life-saving. They are not substitutes for relationships but often prerequisites to them. A person drowning does not first need to be understood; they need something that floats. You gesture toward the soul; others simply need to survive the morning.
To reject these methods wholesale, even in the name of love, risks replacing one form of abstraction with another. We must be careful not to romanticize intimacy in a way that obscures the ordinary labor of healing. Even the most skilled therapist cannot offer unconditional presence to every client, nor should they. There is no intimacy without limits, no trust without structure, and no depth without preparation. What you call encounter, others may experience as ambiguity, even exposure. In some cases, the effort to “be real” can become its own subtle form of coercion.
And then there is the moral question: what kind of culture are we forming through our practices of care? A society cannot be built solely on unmediated encounters. We also need norms, institutions, and shared moral language. We need durable commitments that survive our moods and hold us accountable to one another. Without these, even our most sincere efforts at healing risk collapsing into an expressive individualism that may be a beautiful solitude, but is solitude nonetheless.
Finally, I worry that your vision of therapy, though sincere, may at times ask too much of both therapist and client. Not everyone comes to therapy seeking transformation. Some come to repair, to stabilize, to endure. And that is not a failure but a form of wisdom. There is quiet heroism in simply continuing.
But I do not write this to diminish your vision. I write because I share your longing for deeper conversation, for moral seriousness, and for human dignity that isn’t flattened into a treatment goal. What you describe is not merely a method but a kind of faith. And perhaps what we need most now are people willing to defend such faith, even as they come to terms with its limits.
So yes, keep pressing us toward something more tender, more courageous, more honest. But remember, too, that not all silence is evasion. Not all methods are masks. And not all healing looks like revelation. Sometimes it looks like someone quietly choosing to live.
Hey brother. Thanks for such a thoughtful reply—as always. I appreciate you pressing against my ideas here and more than anything your camaraderie in it.
I do want to clear a few things up. Firstly, I'm not looking to create some ideology that can "bear the weight of the world we live in." The world we live in is crushing its own lungs under various dogmas, the main one, which needs no defense and has plenty of defenders, being scientific materialism.
If protocols are helpful to people, that's great. My first belief is we should all be ourselves, not something I want you to be. I had very severe OCD for more than 30 years, so I want to dispel the myth that the only way to deal with it is evidence-based therapy. That's scientific myth, not fact. (I've read a lot of those studies, which originate in dog torture, and will write about that in my next series, probably later this year.) We limit people when our imagine that what some people need is just to get to another day, while others are fit for meaning and depth and love. I believe as Nietzsche did that we all have a particular genius. So maybe at times. I'm not rejecting those methods. I'm calling them what I believe them to be. Let's call them what they are and if we still choose to use them, okay then.
I believe you're creating illusions when you say on the one hand, here, is intimacy (not my words), and other the other is the ordinary labor of healing. That's an entire worldview you're creating with that one sentence that I'm not supportive of. I also never called for unconditional presence (that's just another system—why should it be unconditional?) or intimacy without limits. I'm calling for realness in the context of therapy, not sleeping with clients. There is no coercion because nobody is required to be "real" in any particular way. They can just be themselves. The idea that realness is coercion is an overlay of thinking that being real means something specific.
I think maybe you're misunderstanding what I mean by encounter. Maybe I didn't explain it well enough. I'm talking about treating each other with the most profound dignity. We're living through empire collapse, ecosystem collapse. I think we'd be okay if we encountered each other a bit more. If I'm reading you correctly, it sounds like you're in favor of controlling people to some extent, which is the basis of most psychotherapy and a sinful-human-oriented view. If we don't control ourselves and others, we'll go to crap. I don't think that's our problem. We've been controlling children, the earth, animals, ourselves, and each other for too long. If there's one place we can stop doing it, it's therapy.
And I suppose if it asks too much of therapist and client, well, okay, my question is: Why not ask that of ourselves and each other?
Beautiful essay. It's rare to find words that carry such heart and truth these days. I have more to reflect in coming days. Thank you for sharing your words with the world, Jeremy.
Thanks for reading, Tara. Appreciating you stopping by during these humble beginnings :)
Your essay is an act of devotion. It gestures toward a more humane, daring, and dignified form of therapy, rooted not in procedure, but in presence; not in optimization, but in love. You describe the possibility of being met in our full humanity, without scripts, scales, or fixes. That kind of encounter, you rightly suggest, may be the closest many of us ever come to grace.
And yet I find myself wondering—not whether you’re wrong, but whether the vision you’re defending can bear the weight of the world we live in.
You are not mistaken that something has gone wrong. Our society is suffering not just from chemical imbalances or trauma histories, but from a more profound estrangement—from each other, from language, from shared meaning. The bureaucratization of care, the psychologizing of suffering, and the thinning of friendship and ritual all contribute to a quiet despair that many experience not as a crisis but as the default condition of their lives. In this context, your call for a real conversation that is undefended, unplanned, and unmechanized is not just noble. It is necessary.
But necessary is not the same as sufficient.
For many people, especially those living with conditions like OCD, PTSD, or major depression, the tools you critique—diagnoses, protocols, structured methods—have been life-saving. They are not substitutes for relationships but often prerequisites to them. A person drowning does not first need to be understood; they need something that floats. You gesture toward the soul; others simply need to survive the morning.
To reject these methods wholesale, even in the name of love, risks replacing one form of abstraction with another. We must be careful not to romanticize intimacy in a way that obscures the ordinary labor of healing. Even the most skilled therapist cannot offer unconditional presence to every client, nor should they. There is no intimacy without limits, no trust without structure, and no depth without preparation. What you call encounter, others may experience as ambiguity, even exposure. In some cases, the effort to “be real” can become its own subtle form of coercion.
And then there is the moral question: what kind of culture are we forming through our practices of care? A society cannot be built solely on unmediated encounters. We also need norms, institutions, and shared moral language. We need durable commitments that survive our moods and hold us accountable to one another. Without these, even our most sincere efforts at healing risk collapsing into an expressive individualism that may be a beautiful solitude, but is solitude nonetheless.
Finally, I worry that your vision of therapy, though sincere, may at times ask too much of both therapist and client. Not everyone comes to therapy seeking transformation. Some come to repair, to stabilize, to endure. And that is not a failure but a form of wisdom. There is quiet heroism in simply continuing.
But I do not write this to diminish your vision. I write because I share your longing for deeper conversation, for moral seriousness, and for human dignity that isn’t flattened into a treatment goal. What you describe is not merely a method but a kind of faith. And perhaps what we need most now are people willing to defend such faith, even as they come to terms with its limits.
So yes, keep pressing us toward something more tender, more courageous, more honest. But remember, too, that not all silence is evasion. Not all methods are masks. And not all healing looks like revelation. Sometimes it looks like someone quietly choosing to live.
Joshua
Hey brother. Thanks for such a thoughtful reply—as always. I appreciate you pressing against my ideas here and more than anything your camaraderie in it.
I do want to clear a few things up. Firstly, I'm not looking to create some ideology that can "bear the weight of the world we live in." The world we live in is crushing its own lungs under various dogmas, the main one, which needs no defense and has plenty of defenders, being scientific materialism.
If protocols are helpful to people, that's great. My first belief is we should all be ourselves, not something I want you to be. I had very severe OCD for more than 30 years, so I want to dispel the myth that the only way to deal with it is evidence-based therapy. That's scientific myth, not fact. (I've read a lot of those studies, which originate in dog torture, and will write about that in my next series, probably later this year.) We limit people when our imagine that what some people need is just to get to another day, while others are fit for meaning and depth and love. I believe as Nietzsche did that we all have a particular genius. So maybe at times. I'm not rejecting those methods. I'm calling them what I believe them to be. Let's call them what they are and if we still choose to use them, okay then.
I believe you're creating illusions when you say on the one hand, here, is intimacy (not my words), and other the other is the ordinary labor of healing. That's an entire worldview you're creating with that one sentence that I'm not supportive of. I also never called for unconditional presence (that's just another system—why should it be unconditional?) or intimacy without limits. I'm calling for realness in the context of therapy, not sleeping with clients. There is no coercion because nobody is required to be "real" in any particular way. They can just be themselves. The idea that realness is coercion is an overlay of thinking that being real means something specific.
I think maybe you're misunderstanding what I mean by encounter. Maybe I didn't explain it well enough. I'm talking about treating each other with the most profound dignity. We're living through empire collapse, ecosystem collapse. I think we'd be okay if we encountered each other a bit more. If I'm reading you correctly, it sounds like you're in favor of controlling people to some extent, which is the basis of most psychotherapy and a sinful-human-oriented view. If we don't control ourselves and others, we'll go to crap. I don't think that's our problem. We've been controlling children, the earth, animals, ourselves, and each other for too long. If there's one place we can stop doing it, it's therapy.
And I suppose if it asks too much of therapist and client, well, okay, my question is: Why not ask that of ourselves and each other?