Dragging Therapeutic Language Into the Burning Light

The Helm

Welcome to the ship.

Do you have any stowaways that would cause your vessel to go derelict? At first, you’ve got a whole crew. Everything’s running smoothly. Next thing you know, one by one, compromise happens. Your crew starts falling overboard or succumbing to fates by unknown hands. A great evil has snuck on board and you’re not quite sure how it got there.

Other than me loving to draw parallels with the 2023 film I recently rewatched, The Last Voyage of the Demeter, what has slipped aboard your crew and lurks in the shadows of helpfulness to cause a subtle drift?

This is going to be a longer post than usual. The motivation to write it came out of my own desire to work out some clarity to therapeutic language. Social media is a rocky shoal of terms like narcissist, passive aggressive, manipulator, gaslighting, abuse, and more. Understandably, these words evoke a strong reaction because of how they make us feel when we experience them. In my efforts to explore this, which is far deeper than just this post, I also want to learn how to deal with these kinds of behaviors when I experience them. Or worse, when I engage in them. Murky terms and euphemisms do not make for reliable charts or clear skies to navigate these shoal addled waters of our lives.

My goal is for none of us to become derelict.

We stay on course and clear of the rocks by not drifting.

If you haven’t noticed, we don’t tend to drift into righteous living or holy faith. Our helm needs us attentive.

What is a captain without his spyglass? Let’s put some shine on it together.