June 12, 2005
Yeah, yeah, yeah - D&D, blogs, video games, rock-n-roll
So my buddy Andy posted that his therapist thinks his blog is dangerous for him because he doesn't "have appropriate emotional boundaries" and he talks too much. Err, wait, and because he talks about things that should "be processed internally." My response?
Bollocks!
First of all, I've seen nothing in his blog that was actually so personal that I wished he hadn't shared it. On the other hand, back in the day, I remember running across an early version of a blog written by someone else I went to high school with. Bobby, I'll call this other guy. Well, Bobby wrote many posts about all the women he wished that he'd boinked. And then about all the reasons these women turned him down, because it sure didn't have anything to do with his personality, it all had to do with their character flaws. (Of course I am ranting about this from memory and Bobby could have been whining about other things, too.)
So, I do recall Bobby ranting about things that I really wished he'd left inside his brain or perhaps shared only with his therapist. I mean, he shared things with the internets that were just ewwww.
Of course, the internets are, for the most part, free speech central and I have no gripe with that at all. But, there were some things that I wished he'd kept to himself. Or at least enabled comments so that others could point out where he was being a gigantic ass and where he had good points.
One of the people commenting on my friend Andy's site pointed out that most therapists seem to think that journalling is a good way to process through information/feelings/ideas. And all of these posts from Andy and his minions friends simply flashed me back to high school and the loads of ultra-conservative christians who decided that D&D type games were evil and were going to cause children to go insane. You know, the same types of people who have decided that violent movies, that video games, that rock-n-roll, that Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis, that /insert hobby here/ is going to cause children to go ballistic and kill people, have wild sex, do drugs, /insert parents' greatest fear here/ just from being exposed to said bad influence. The internets are bad, chat rooms are bad, email is bad, the web is bad.
WHATEVER!
Look folks, it's really simple. Anything in this life can be abused. We can abuse food, each other, games, hobbies, sex, blogs, life the universe and everything. But assuming that blogs (or D&D or food or whatever) is inherently bad and going to cause others irreparable harm is just stupidity.
Now maybe his therapist was talking about a particular post and a specific concern. Fine. But maybe this is just another case of folks who don't understand something condemning what they don't understand. It seems to me that someone with a blog and a therapist is already looking at any potential problems with abusing whatever activity/substance.
My concern is far more about this general trend across the generations . . . why is it that the older generation (or those who associate with the older generation) are always so sure that something a little different from how they grew up is "obviously" Not a Good Thing??? Why must we get so inflexible as we get older?
*sigh*
Posted by Red Monkey at June 12, 2005 9:50 AM |
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HA! The therapist probably feels threatened by the blog! Given that the point of therapy is to talk about one's life to the point that one comes to consciously understand their own motivations, blogging could easily be seen as a cheap, albeit public, form of self-therapy.
Yeah, there's such thing as TMI, but that's usually the stuff people don't want to read. Someone finding their way through sincere self-understanding--that's incredibly personal, an seriously the kind of stuff a therapist coudl not hear from one an dthen turn around and talk about with someone else, but that's usually some of the most interesting stuff on the nets.
p.s. Your text ad on WWdN was a hoot!
June 21, 2005 8:09 PM
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naiah said: