Okay, so today I’m going to talk about a specific term and idea that popped into my mind like within the last day and it was it was first sparked by a comment and on an Instagram post that stated something I don’t remember the direct quote, but it was something along the lines of why do we let therapy terms exist in real life? And I was like, wow, that is such a good question because once I thought about it, I realized in therapy how these terms such as like, I don’t know, like even something as simple as toxic. Toxic is not a ubiquitous experience. You know, one person to label a relationship toxic might not reach the characteristics that another person might use to define their version of toxic.
But this word is used as if people understand it the same way they understand a cup. Like most people you could hand them a cup and they’ll know what a cup is, right? They can draw you a picture of a cup and tell you what a cup is used for if they can’t find it. Like they’ll be able to describe the term in such broad in like, such a broad understanding of the concept of a cup, right?
But then something as niche as toxic, you know, a term generally used to define like hazardous chemicals or something radioactive or whatever, they just say toxic, okay, a toxic experience. And then these experiences, no matter how similar one’s experience might be to another, they’re both going to be perceived very differently. You know, very differently. They’re just going to be ingested differently based off of their own different experiences.
So then this idea of toxic and then attributing any definition to it without having a concrete definition answer where we could go and draw a toxic situation or describe a toxic situation in such clear terms where everybody would agree on it, right? I don’t, but I don’t know, I just think these, these two words are used with the same command, like the cup and toxic, like a simple cup, like these, they’re used on search, the same command that by, well, at least a lot of people on social media, you know, because that’s where I’m seeing it. But social media has then influenced our outside lives. But specifically on social media, I see these terms like toss and thrown around as if it’s like, everything in the world becomes part of this idea or part of this new term.
And it was like, does it cloud our vision, collectively, as now we’re influenced to believe that this is a negative thing, and that is a negative thing. Of course, there are things that are inherently negative. But then when it comes to terms where we can’t define in such a concrete manner, you know, like we could all agree, an act of physical violence is violence. And that’s why it’s against the law.
But we can’t quite agree on what makes a relationship toxic. But we still cast the same type of judgment on people throughout social media. You know, that same feeling of anger to where, oh, he’s in the wrong, and this person’s in the right, and this person’s wrong. And like, this idea of us believing they’ve done something wrong.
But fundamentally, these are like two different, two different like matters, but they’re weighed on the same scale. Is that just a problem with our ability as humans to, you know, objectify our, our experiences? I don’t know. Try objectifying your experiences sometimes.
And I was just about to say try objectifying your experiences. What if people lack the ability to objectify their experience? What does that mean for their perception? Interesting.
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