Commentary on the kindergarten of the healing industry

My commentary on the embedded link and comments thread:

Watching all the somatic cool kids fawn and coo.

Part of the reason im so mad is that a bunch of yall took western colonial ideas, corrupted non western practices, sold them to a greedy, privileged class of people who claimed superiority using labels like trauma, ptsd and attachment, and are just now realizing the absurdly low long term cultural efficacy of your money making and status jockeying strategy.

Colonial therapy produces colonial “healing”. Your worldview, biases and preferences are colonized ghost protocols. You weaponize animism, ritual, healing and somatics and cry victim when your cash cow dries up. You demand leniency for your ignorance. And you still line the pockets of people who merely confirm your biases. You still want money and power, even knowing that the science proves they narcotic. You still entitled as fuck.

"Meet them where they're at" = "there's a position in the cult for you"

disaster capitalism for the soul.

Congratulations on being a shareholder in the publicly owned MODERNHEALINGCORP, where you can force us all into your tiny ass view of reality.

accountability also means being accountable for how you spread a poisonous worldview and profited from it. How you continue to siphon wealth into the pockets of people with garbage facilitation skills. How you still get up and do the minstrel dance for a seat at the table. How you participate in various forms of ostracism to benefit your “brand identity”.

the level of dissonance and dissociation is fantastical.

author

Kai Cheng Thom on Instagram: “I said what I said. I love somatics and it is my preferred way of working relationally, but I am also quite worried about its potentially pseudo-scientific elements - particularly the tendency to oversimplify and reduce fundamentally complex aspects of human experience. I particularly want to reject the ways that somatics is sometimes used in ways that feel uncomfortably close to bioessentialism or biological determinism - to reify ideas that are actually quite disturbing in their historic origin. I don’t believe that the vagus nerve is responsible for the entirety of my socio-emotional experience. I prefer not to think of my emotions as needing to be “regulated” in the way that the heat in the engine of a car needs to be regulated. I don’t think that trauma theory or trauma sensitivity should be used as an excuse for avoiding important conversations. And I really don’t want to be part of any movement that moves towards fundamentalism, purification politics, or orthodoxy as its preferred way of being.”

August 24, 2023