"I'm Offended":

Detoxifying Woke Mind Games

“I’m Offended”:

Detoxifying Woke Mind Games

by Steven Goldsmith MD

You, a man, are enjoying a drink at the local watering hole with a female date you recently met on an online app. (Feel free to reverse either or both sexes.)

“I’m going to vote,” you say, “for Keyser Soze for President. “He’ll clean up the corruption, get rid of the bad guys.”

Her face blanches. “You what? I can’t believe you would do that. Do you know his attitude toward women? He’s such a pig.” She drains her glass of Prosecco. “You’ve deeply offended me. I feel so triggered and hurt and uncomfortable. I’m not feeling safe right now. I’d like another glass.”

Guilt and embarrassment flood you. Not to mention confusion and anxiety. Fear that she or one of her acquaintances will cancel, out, or dox you. You must be a bad person to have said that. Teetering on the verge of contrition, mind racing, you grasp for excuses for your transgression. Begin to stammer an apology. But stop in mid-sentence. Because it dawns on you. This is bullshit. For a few seconds, when your guard was down, your date had almost mind-fucked you into compliance with a wokester’s wet dream: (a) your assumption of responsibility and blame for someone else’s thoughts, feelings, or behaviors and (b) an associated disavowal of your own thoughts and feelings. Close call. But if you are the sort of person who speaks your mind, you will encounter this process again and again in our mentally ill society. So, as a Board-certified psychiatrist, I wish to impart tips that could help immunize you against woke mind games that result in a derangement of human interaction.

Potential accusations by wokesters range from the abovementioned to (especially with the “misgendered”) “You’re trying to erase my identity” to the emotional blackmailing “I may kill myself.” But whatever the precise wording, they are not honest expressions communicated in good faith with the goal of a better understanding or rapprochement. Rather they attempt to control you through assumption of victimhood. Wokeness is all about power. In woke psychopathology, victimhood licenses the aggrieved individuals to at once disempower you and empower themselves in two ways. First it entitles them to project blame onto you for their distress and in the process manipulate you into guilt, shame, or fear of exposure. Second, because woke doctrine parses the world into bad oppressors and good victims, victimhood awards moral superiority, virtue points, to those who cling to it. Cry-bullies.

Woke self-victimization confers another social and psychological advantage. It excuses any responsibility for one’s thoughts, feelings, and actions, externalizing that responsibility to society as a whole or to other individuals. It is always someone else’s fault for wokesters’ trash. One of Disney’s producers reportedly blamed audiences’ sexism for the box office failure of the company’s woke films, The Marvels and the latest Star Wars. In response to almost universal ridicule of Jaguar’s latest ad, their managing director, Rawdon Glover, accused critics of “vile hatred and intolerance.” These self-appointed mandarins of aesthetic taste knew better than potential patrons what was good for them, an attitude betraying their aim not to entertain and give people what they want but instead to impose their values and, if possible, indoctrinate them. Power. Control.

A basic psychological truth refutes this pathology, so basic that many don’t appreciate it. So basic that lessons learned from this refutation apply to the rest of life. When learned, they can make an enormous difference in your mental health and relationships.

It is this. No one can cause and therefore be responsible for someone else’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It is a principal precept of cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy, or CBT. And it is common sense.

Take this sample scenario. Joe complains, “My boss makes me so angry I get headaches and I can’t sleep. I’ve been there three years and he has never f-ing said anything positive about my work.” Why is Joe’s anger his creation and responsibility and not his boss’s. Five other men in Joe’s position may have five disparate reactions. One may shrug off the boss’s behavior, knowing he himself is doing a good job and, besides, maybe the boss is just that way or has other things on his mind. Another may become anxious, fearing that boss’s behavior means he is on the chopping block and will become unemployed. Yet another may feel guilt over not performing more to the boss’s liking. Another will worry he’s making minor mistakes and will start triple-checking everything he does so as to be perfect. Another may feel depressed, thinking he’s a failure and a loser. And so on.

In short, external events and other people never cause you to have particular thoughts or feelings. Rather, it is the meaning that such events have for you as an individual, your interpretation of the meaning of these events that generates your thoughts and feelings. That is not only a basic tenet of CBT but of the Stoic philosophy of ancient Greeks like Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Seneca. You and not your boss, spouse, politicians, or your favorite sports team (correction: except one team I have in mind) create your thoughts and feelings. They are your creations. They are the movie you have produced and directed and written. Others’ interpretations are their movies.

Fortunately, CBT and other psychotherapies can teach you how to detoxify your interpretation of events so that your reactions to them no longer trouble you.

Regarding your reactions to woke accusations, several suggestions:

1) Recognize that you are not engaged in a normal conversation in which logic and good faith on both sides can prevail. Rather that you are the target of a bad-faith power trip designed to emotionally blackmail you;

2) if the accusations seem disproportionate or distort reality, recognize that those distortions are not your creations but those of the accuser, and you are not responsible for them;

3) beyond your initial attempt, do not continue to argue the point or defend your position because a feature of woke psychopathology is that any denial of accusations merely confirms them, e.g. your denial you are a racist confirms you are so racist as to be inured to your bias;

4) if you know you have said something that would have been offensive to a balanced person (e.g. obscenities, scurrilous racial epithets) an apology is warranted; but if you know you didn’t, do not apologize, even if you fear cancellation or doxing—especially if you fear cancellation or doxing. Apologies are the essential nutriment of emotional blackmail. Life is too short to live it on your belly while trying to bolster the mental health and self-esteem of others. Simply acknowledge that the other party is upset with you and that the two of you will have to disagree about whether you have committed a capital offense.

I wish all my subscribers, followers, and other readers a healthy, fulfilling New Year.

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