All the university staff meetings I have been at where we "orientalize" breathing with yoga stuff but don't deal with things like the suppression of dissent over genocide
*You’ve* named it. I am nowhere near as articulate or knowledgeable as you…I sense BS in my gut and struggle mightily to express it — ironic, since I work at a university. My writing is often messy (not an apology) because institutions shape discourse and I function inside one. Worked hard as daughter of immigrants to gain entry and I can’t always “see out.” But I know that now. I am happy to have found your page.
Random thought 4: Your analysis also applies to DBT, dialectical behavioral therapy, which was “invented” by a white woman “diagnosed” with a personality disorder who then went on to sell this to others. DBT asks the disordered “patient’ to monitor, interfere with, and catalog all his/her/their emotions in real time and often, throughout the day. More parsing, labeling of defective thinking, the self as a specimen. Often court ordered, a money-maker. And of course, those assigned it are the most vulnerable and terrified that they won’t get off probation/get kids back/stop self-harm/finish college, etc. I have had so many young women come to office hours and confess, “I have a personality disorder,” then cry. Just this week a student wrote in a journal exercise: “As a sufferer of BPD, I know there are no happy horizons for me.” She is bright, affable, lovely. Grandfather lived through Armenian genocide. Tangential perhaps, or right on point, mental “illness" is continuing intergenerational wounding.
As a social worker in my previous work, I find the diagnosis of BPD absolutely abhorrent. You can get a “diagnosis” for that, but not trauma with results in CPTSD. It’s what’s wrong with you, but not what the abuser did to you.
Oh for sure, that’s what Mary Ainsworth's “Strange Situation” was, a child’s caretaker abusing / abandoning them, and the child’s distress not being interpreted as a rational response to systemic disruption.
Yall, why do we have “Presidents of the U.S.” and it’s in the 21st century of knowledge, virtuality, and digital world (with its consequences) that we have not had a President or mainstream news outlets magnify into the subject of mental health, let alone spread awareness, conversations, or invitations to discuss mental health & illnesses? We’d advance so much faster as a society that might just better understand itself (i vs. other/other vs. i), the more that I ponder and mentally investigate the possibility of such a world.
You’re hitting on something Joshua. It’s absurd that in the 21st century, with everything we know about mental health, not a single U.S. president has made it a real priority. But let’s be honest—if they did, would it actually be about helping people, or just keeping them functional enough to keep the machine running?
At a press conference on August 12th, 1986, Ronald Reagan said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” Reagan was using that to gut social services, but there’s a deeper point: when the state decides to "care," it’s never just about care. It’s about control. If a U.S. president suddenly championed mental health, what would that actually look like? More funding for therapy, or just another way to medicalize discontent, slap a diagnosis on suffering, and keep people docile?
Because real mental health reform would mean asking why so many people are sick in the first place? Why capitalism grinds people down, why burnout is the norm, why entire generations feel like they’re drowning. But that’s not a conversation they want to have. It’s easier to push "awareness," to sell mindfulness apps and resilience training, than to admit the system itself is the crisis.
If something feels impossible, that’s exactly why it needs to be insisted on. If a world where mental health is actually taken seriously sounds utopian, that’s not an argument against it. It’s a sign of how deep the problem runs. So the goal isn’t just to get mental health on the agenda—it’s to make sure it’s not just another state-sanctioned coping mechanism that lets everything else stay the same.
Not being sarcastic at all. BPD is caused by a child’s caretaker(s) abusing / abandoning them, and that’s exactly what Mary Ainsworth did. I thought that’s what your question / comment was, but i looks i didn’t fully understand what your comment’s point.
I don’t doubt that she had “it." I question the construction of personality disorders…and if you listen to the podcast, there is reference to the inventors of attachment “disorders" constructing attachment theory referented by their own childhoods, which were white and upper class, at least for Bowlby. Many people have been harmed by this label. BPD fails to contextualize emotional distress as a response to relational trauma, attributing it to personal failings, most often in women. It is a sexist diagnosis that has little basis in evidence. Put differently, *something that can arise only in relationship is nonetheless characterized as an organic individual defect.* Also see Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness by Bruce M. Z. Cohen.
The gender bias is definitely messy and deserves attention, but I wouldn’t dismiss the disorder entirely. Pete Davidson has the same diagnosis, and so does my cousin and my sister. I’m not sure where you heard about personal failings, because Cluster B disorders are often, if not always, connected with trauma. The trauma aspect isn’t completely ignored in the science. By the way, your bio says you teach at college. Do you specialize in psychology?
Judith Herman, MD. Trauma and Recovery is a limited but good starting point. I’m arguing that the diagnosis is a construct. I don’t know anything about your family members nor would I profess to assess them. BPD has long been a point of contention in the psychiatric community. It is a label that is slapped on persons (most of whom are women) who have difficulty in therapy and treated as a constitutional disorder. Many persons who have been identified as BPD have instead complex drama, a diagnosis that is only now getting traction (and while trauma is not a construct, the treatment of complex trauma is one that focuses on individuals – and that’s another whole discussion). The history of the DSM is very fraught. I won’t treat these diagnoses as if they are scientific truths because they aren’t. If they were, would the DSM change them yearly? I’m an academic with a science background - human subject protection in research/epidemiology – and teach about how science is not “neutral.” Or objective. The scientific “method” is not value-free. That is my point. PS I could write a whole thing on the idea of a human being as a “subject” — this wording comes from the Nuremberg Code, post Nazi “doctors” trials — and the history of epidemiology, which began in Britain as a way not to measure disease incidence but to measure the wealth of the state — this is in the early 1800s. I’m not judging anyone, just sharing what I know/think.
I experienced an early separation from my caregivers that left an imprint on my system and I have been haunted by a sense of ’inadequacy’ in relation to this ‘secure attachment/ideal citizen’ metric. As a student of psychology at A-level (17 years old) we covered attachment theory and a teacher said “if your parents weren’t around during this stage, forget it”, I went to the bathroom and it was the first panic attack I ever had. My body held an inner knowing about what I had been through and society had just determined what that was going to mean for me and who I was. My brain and nervous system deviate from the “norm” to a massive extent. I have been doing my best to unlearn the negative view of self I’ve been conditioned to internalise but your article has now helped play a massive part in that unlearning. There are so many ways to live there are so many ways to bond there are so many ways to relate and who gets to decide which is more valid. These hash rigid surface level rules strip us of our own capability, self knowing and lead us into shame instead of action. If the discovery of secure attachment was so groundbreaking why has its use not gone into building spaces, ensuring resources and hubs of community and connection for people without it to be able to find it today amongst each other? Perhaps because it’s not truly about health and helping people but imposing a pathologising view on the masses. “Only one way is right = their way”. I do believe there is a biological basis of bonding required for the development of a healthy psyche but Neuroplasticity shows the ability of humans to grow and flourish. There have been some interesting studies about the helpfulness of communal theatre and performing arts in traumatised people, I personally have benefited from being able to attend a grassroots inclusive women’s football club. As a massively dysregulated person who has and could collapse under the weight of the labels determining my worth and who I am, I am finding my way. These labels are heavy. I read once that 80% of our ocean remains unmapped and unobserved. When we try to label everything and impose rules and laws mindlessly we remove the ability for nuance and the mystery, power and magic of organic life.
This is a powerful reflection, and I want to honor both the pain you’ve carried and the insight you’ve cultivated in response to it. What you’re describing—the early separation, the panic attack upon realizing what attachment theory seemed to declare about your fate, the slow unlearning of internalized inadequacy—these aren’t just intellectual realizations; they are felt truths, lived and embedded in the nervous system. The way you describe your body’s inner knowing in that moment is profound. It shows that even before the mind could fully articulate what was happening, your system already understood it as a verdict being passed on your existence.
And yet, what I hear in your words is not just a rejection of that verdict, but a deep reclamation of something beyond it. You’re not simply resisting the rigidity of the “secure attachment/ideal citizen” model—you are actively discovering alternative pathways to connection, healing, and self-knowing that exist outside of those imposed frameworks. That’s what’s so powerful about your response. Instead of remaining trapped in the binary of “I either fit or I don’t”, you are mapping the vast uncharted space where life actually happens.
Your question—if secure attachment is so groundbreaking, why hasn’t it been used to build the structures that could create it for those without it?—is sharp, and it exposes the limits of individualist psychology. A model that only tells people what they lacked, without providing the conditions to build what they need, is not a model of care—it is a model of classification, of sorting people into categories that often do more harm than good. Your intuition here is correct: if the goal were truly to support human thriving, we would see more structures designed to nurture attachment beyond the nuclear family model, more communal spaces for belonging, more ways for people to find regulation and connection outside of the early-life window that psychology often insists is final.
But what you’re doing—through football, through grassroots community, through rejecting the weight of labels and finding ways to move beyond them—that is the real work of neuroplasticity in action. Not just as a biological process, but as a lived practice of reshaping the meaning of your own experiences. You are not simply saying, “I refuse to be defined by this.” You are saying, “I am discovering new ways of being in the world, and in doing so, I am proof that these models are incomplete.”
I love the ocean metaphor you bring in at the end. 80% unmapped, unknown, unexplored. That’s exactly it. When we fixate on rigid models of human development, we risk mistaking the map for the territory, forgetting that there is so much more to the human experience than what has been charted, studied, or defined. What you are doing is not just resisting labels—it is embracing the vastness of what hasn’t yet been named. The mystery, the nuance, the unfolding potential of life itself.
I hope you continue exploring, questioning, and reclaiming your own space in ways that feel meaningful to you. And I hope you keep mapping the unknown—because in doing so, you’re not just finding your way, you’re proving that there are so many more ways to exist than the ones we’ve been told are valid.
I loved reading this conversation. I started writing a reply but it got so long that I think I will write my own substack piece to express it more generally. Stay tuned. I just want to say thank you both so much for your insights shared that resonated with something deep in me.
Random thought three: I was in a psych ward for depression. Most of the ppl in it with were trauma survivors, including veterans, rape survivors, and persons alleged to have “personality disorders.” One day we had mandatory yoga (to calm our vagus nerves) with a guy whose name I thought was Dave until I realized it was Dev (he changed his name from Bob or Joe or Bill to Dev) and put his hands all over the women in the circle as they were breathing in one nostril and out the other. I had the fantasy of kicking him in the head if he came anywhere near me and also had the thought that my fantasy was evidence of my mental ill health. The machinery of Otherness.
Your fantasy was likely a natural response to not wanting to be touched by a total stranger which is completely normal and acceptable. Some clinicians would call this an “intrusive thought” but it doesn’t need to be pathologised. An important question is how did you relate to and integrate that fantasy? Did you take the message from your body/mind that you were desiring and requiring a boundary and bodily autonomy? Just because someone is a yoga teacher does not mean they have a right to touch you if you don’t want them to. Were you able to communicate your need for that boundary clearly or did you wait to see if he would touch you first and then do your best not to kick him?
Appropriation of yoga, an ancient religious practice commodified in the West, in a psychiatric facility, in this case by a white guy with a stolen name. No, I didn’t name the boundary because there aren’t any in public funded psych wards. When I was released, I wrote a story about it. If you’ve ever been in a psych facility, you know it is an enterprise of othering. No person worth their salt would touch persons who have survived trauma unless they believe they have the right to do so. Three Generations, No Imbeciles. War Against the Week. Nice histories of institutions and the eugenics movement to eradicate “defectives” by corralling them.
i’ve always felt disconnected to attachment theories—being a child of immigrants in the U.S. with a father who “abandoned” us to move back home to Liberia / Ivory Coast. everything about my presumed avoidant/anxious attachment style felt drawn up by that experience but also felt colonized. but i never had the words to properly discuss or describe it until now…
there’s so much more to say here, but for now i’ll leave it with THANK YOU!
I'm so happy you found connection with my writing. Migration within colonization is such a difficult circumstance. Like you have revealed, there are so many other layers that we must take into consideration, into context. I hope to hear your story one day about your story, and your father's story.
I’ve listened to this three times. The more that I see your perspective, the more I can’t unsee it 😭
It’s refreshing, rather freeing to see the ways western colonized society creates attachment ideals and mental health standards. So thank you for making this 🐉
Glad to hear it resonated with you. It's this strange sensation of putting words that we didn't know that we already knew. The challenge then is figuring out what comes after—how to navigate relationships and selfhood without being bound by those imposed ideals. I appreciate you taking the time to listen, reflecting and writing in.
I’m so grateful for this article. I legitimately just had a therapy session an hour before happening upon this article in which I expressed dissatisfaction with talk therapy for someone like me, who has multiple (maligned) intersecting identities. I told her that fighting for my right to exist and feel happy and whole feels like a Sisyphean task in a world that structurally and systemically seeks to psychologically annihilate people like me. Thank you for giving words to the vague discontent I’ve been feeling with modern psychology.
Anika, I really appreciate you sharing this. Your frustration with talk therapy resonates deeply—especially for those of us whose identities and experiences exist outside of the frameworks psychology was built to serve. When the world itself is structured to invalidate certain existences, therapy often risks becoming an exercise in ‘adjustment’ rather than genuine liberation. The focus shifts to managing distress rather than questioning the structures that create it.
Your insight about ‘psychological annihilation’ is crucial. So much of what gets pathologized as individual struggle is actually a rational response to systemic conditions. And yet, psychology—particularly in its most institutionalized, clinical forms—tends to locate suffering within the individual rather than seeing it as relational, historical, and political.
What would it look like if therapy didn’t just teach us to ‘cope,’ but instead gave us tools to map, resist, and strategically navigate power? If instead of centering resilience, it centered refusal—refusal to internalize the world’s distortions, refusal to let frameworks of pathology define our struggles?
I’m curious—has there ever been a moment, inside or outside therapy, where you felt truly seen? And what was different about that space?
Kia ora/Greetings Ayoto, I was born in the 50’s and my primary employment on leaving school was to train as psychiatrist nurse on land taken from my tribal people by the colonial government in the late 1920’s in my homeland of Aotearoa otherwise known as New Zealand. Maori as indigenous have since 1975 as a date where law defines a new timeline of living in colonial space and we as indigenous have had five decades of a court or commission inquiry on such things as the confiscation of land either by war or my law. Moving from land theft back to working in a white constructed mental health facility where mental was weaponized as a young Maori and a woman I left after five years refusing to take the last exam because I saw then the worst as I said in 1977 of the white man’s medicine. I was I thought but as you write it was replaced or added to by psychology. Great article and trust you don’t mind but after subscribing on my free Substack subscription I have emailed the article to my address and lawyer assigned to the Waitangi Tribunal Inquiry on Maori women and the “Crown’s” relationship since 1840 and its effects. Need I say there has been little comfort assigned our way. Thank you for your submission to the discussion worldwide we have as indigenous deconstructing and reapplying the impact of colonialism. Na Mihirawhiti
Kia ora Mihirawhiti, and thank you for sharing this powerful reflection. The weight of what you describe—the forced removal from ancestral land, the imposition of colonial legal frameworks, and the violence embedded in so-called ‘mental health’ institutions—speaks to the depth of systemic harm that psychology has often served to reinforce rather than heal. Your refusal to take that final exam in 1977, seeing the full extent of “the white man’s medicine,” is a profound act of resistance. It’s a testament to how insight is not just something found within these institutions, but often in the act of rejecting them.
The continued inquiries of the Waitangi Tribunal highlight exactly what you describe: that so-called “reparations” within a colonial system rarely provide real comfort, because the underlying structure remains unchanged. That you are bringing this conversation into those legal and historical spaces is deeply significant—because as you know, these struggles do not exist in theory alone, but in the ongoing reality of land, body, and history.
I’m honored that you found resonance in my piece, and I deeply respect the work you’re doing to deconstruct and reapply the impact of colonialism. If psychology, as you say, has replaced psychiatry as a new colonial tool, then what do you see as its decolonial counterpoint? What models of care—whether rooted in whakapapa, whenua, or wairua—offer the restoration that these imposed structures never could?
Thank you again for sharing your story and for bringing this into a larger indigenous dialogue. Ngā mihi nui.
This is incredible, thank you. Someone commented on DBT and how it is so violent and exhausting all day to ruler smack yourself into acting different. (My paraphrasing). Ive actually done DBT and it was! and I had the thought— in Buddhist practice, we also incline the mind… so what’s the difference? Is this still a cousin to what you’re discussing about AT?
Then I realized, inclining my mind toward kindness has a natural outcome of evicting hatred from my mind. As opposed to AT that is instant result (act different) oriented. In practice, I’m not saying my mind is wrong when I do this. I just incline my mind toward kindness. With Buddhist practice, for me, there is no pathology to fix. There is only knowing what’s happening when it’s happening. There’s a gentleness. And also! One could create the quality of violence even in this small inclination—by simply adhering to the “I’m broken fix this mind” AT quality you’re discussing.
It’s not just the AT itself, it’s the quality of the mind this theory can create. Once it is created i can use this quality even on gentle things and still feel broken. Wow. Thank you so much for this eye opening discussion.
The quality of mind that cultivates is a really sharp comparison. Once a framework trains us as broken, even the gentlest practice can become another site of self-punishment. The legacy of pathology-driven models haunts us. Maybe the real movement out of this is precisely what you describe, an awareness that doesn't impose change, that doesn't intervene but allows. From there, the mind inclines towards compassion not as a command but as an inevitability.
That means a lot—thank you. There’s something powerful about realizing that what feels like an individual struggle is actually shared, structural, part of a larger pattern. If these words helped articulate something that’s been hard to name, then I’m grateful they reached you at the right time. Wishing you clarity, solidarity, and all the language you need for what comes next.
Random thoughts on listening to this a second time. “Glissant” great word. This is the chapter of El Kurd’s Perfect Victims where he talks about laughing at “Gotcha” questions like “Do you want to throw Israelis into the sea?”- using humor to “exile the prestige of the podium." Second random thought: The family court system in the US is built on its self-defined work serving the “best interests of the child.” An echo of same language as the eugenics movement and its expression in the US’s highest court: In 1927 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr decreed it was “better for all the world” to sterilize “defective” people than to pay the costs of "executing their degenerate offspring." Ironically, the survivors who have come forward to share their stories of being sterilized as Black, brown, immigrant, and poor children received checks for nomimal amounts…just as the men of the Tuskegee “study” of untreated syphilis received $25 certificates for “participating” in a project to show the unique impact of this STI on Black bodies. The survivors of the Guatemalan “study” were less fortunate, as they were infected in prison and their suffering was photo-documented. The “other” is always a specimen and trauma is always a constitutional defect in tolerating that “otherness” — the ourborus of which you speak. It is built into the mortar of the educational institutions with podiums for DEI “talks” and the courts that administer “justice."
incredible musical labor of love. thank you for creating this. your style makes it feel so easy to follow through the connections and so powerfully calls out to what exists so we can see it in ways necessary. i also had never heard of the consideration of relationship between self through language and the unknowable, how there will be aspects, realities and truths that will always remain out of our grasp. that to demand translation and defining is antithetical to how life exists. this is a realization ive carried within me though i never was able to articulate it. it destroys my spirit knowing how the way white supremacy has numbed, and traumatized countless into believing, accepting this is all life can be - unimaginative, deadly cold machinerary for twisted pleasures of control.
i hope beings continue to remain and more turn to where our hearts truly reside. because they are not home in our bodies, but outside of them.
I’m a white woman who’s been processing a childhood spent as the family scapegoat, and while I know you were writing about systems built to pathologize nonwhite people, I couldn’t help but feel a shock of recognition as you described the anxious attachment “type” and the effect of internalizing the gaze. I feel a little guilty because I immediately made your article about myself, but you described me to me. So thank you. I’m going to reread it with an eye towards not making it about me, because it’s important to me that I do that. I also now want to read everything you cited, so I anticipate a few trips to my local university library.
I appreciate this. The way these functions train us all, though differently, to see ourselves through an external gaze, to manage perception, to contort for survival. So the question isn't whether you 'should' or 'shouldn't' relate, but what kind of identification is at play? Maybe instead of trying to undo recognition, we can sit with it. What does it mean that you saw yourself here? What does that tell us about how these systems organize perception, injury and adaptation across different positions? Guilt doesn't bring more inspiration; maybe curiosity is the more useful response.
Libraries are always a good idea though, the best reading stays with you long after you’ve closed the book.
Thank you for making this, for interrogating these concepts. Psychology, the pathologizing…It is so violent, and the way it is championed is exhausting.
All the university staff meetings I have been at where we "orientalize" breathing with yoga stuff but don't deal with things like the suppression of dissent over genocide
Yes, it’s time we begin to name the elephant in the room
*You’ve* named it. I am nowhere near as articulate or knowledgeable as you…I sense BS in my gut and struggle mightily to express it — ironic, since I work at a university. My writing is often messy (not an apology) because institutions shape discourse and I function inside one. Worked hard as daughter of immigrants to gain entry and I can’t always “see out.” But I know that now. I am happy to have found your page.
The power is removed once we start naming the constraints. It starts somewhere, somehow. Glad to be in conversation with you.
As am I
Random thought 4: Your analysis also applies to DBT, dialectical behavioral therapy, which was “invented” by a white woman “diagnosed” with a personality disorder who then went on to sell this to others. DBT asks the disordered “patient’ to monitor, interfere with, and catalog all his/her/their emotions in real time and often, throughout the day. More parsing, labeling of defective thinking, the self as a specimen. Often court ordered, a money-maker. And of course, those assigned it are the most vulnerable and terrified that they won’t get off probation/get kids back/stop self-harm/finish college, etc. I have had so many young women come to office hours and confess, “I have a personality disorder,” then cry. Just this week a student wrote in a journal exercise: “As a sufferer of BPD, I know there are no happy horizons for me.” She is bright, affable, lovely. Grandfather lived through Armenian genocide. Tangential perhaps, or right on point, mental “illness" is continuing intergenerational wounding.
you point out many interesting connections. thank you for writing in.
As a social worker in my previous work, I find the diagnosis of BPD absolutely abhorrent. You can get a “diagnosis” for that, but not trauma with results in CPTSD. It’s what’s wrong with you, but not what the abuser did to you.
Oh for sure, that’s what Mary Ainsworth's “Strange Situation” was, a child’s caretaker abusing / abandoning them, and the child’s distress not being interpreted as a rational response to systemic disruption.
I can’t tell if this is a sarcastic comment or not, but the point that I’m making is that science is not neutral or objective.
Yall, why do we have “Presidents of the U.S.” and it’s in the 21st century of knowledge, virtuality, and digital world (with its consequences) that we have not had a President or mainstream news outlets magnify into the subject of mental health, let alone spread awareness, conversations, or invitations to discuss mental health & illnesses? We’d advance so much faster as a society that might just better understand itself (i vs. other/other vs. i), the more that I ponder and mentally investigate the possibility of such a world.
You’re hitting on something Joshua. It’s absurd that in the 21st century, with everything we know about mental health, not a single U.S. president has made it a real priority. But let’s be honest—if they did, would it actually be about helping people, or just keeping them functional enough to keep the machine running?
At a press conference on August 12th, 1986, Ronald Reagan said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” Reagan was using that to gut social services, but there’s a deeper point: when the state decides to "care," it’s never just about care. It’s about control. If a U.S. president suddenly championed mental health, what would that actually look like? More funding for therapy, or just another way to medicalize discontent, slap a diagnosis on suffering, and keep people docile?
Because real mental health reform would mean asking why so many people are sick in the first place? Why capitalism grinds people down, why burnout is the norm, why entire generations feel like they’re drowning. But that’s not a conversation they want to have. It’s easier to push "awareness," to sell mindfulness apps and resilience training, than to admit the system itself is the crisis.
If something feels impossible, that’s exactly why it needs to be insisted on. If a world where mental health is actually taken seriously sounds utopian, that’s not an argument against it. It’s a sign of how deep the problem runs. So the goal isn’t just to get mental health on the agenda—it’s to make sure it’s not just another state-sanctioned coping mechanism that lets everything else stay the same.
Not being sarcastic at all. BPD is caused by a child’s caretaker(s) abusing / abandoning them, and that’s exactly what Mary Ainsworth did. I thought that’s what your question / comment was, but i looks i didn’t fully understand what your comment’s point.
Thanks for clarifying.
You seem to doubt that she had it, why?
I don’t doubt that she had “it." I question the construction of personality disorders…and if you listen to the podcast, there is reference to the inventors of attachment “disorders" constructing attachment theory referented by their own childhoods, which were white and upper class, at least for Bowlby. Many people have been harmed by this label. BPD fails to contextualize emotional distress as a response to relational trauma, attributing it to personal failings, most often in women. It is a sexist diagnosis that has little basis in evidence. Put differently, *something that can arise only in relationship is nonetheless characterized as an organic individual defect.* Also see Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness by Bruce M. Z. Cohen.
The gender bias is definitely messy and deserves attention, but I wouldn’t dismiss the disorder entirely. Pete Davidson has the same diagnosis, and so does my cousin and my sister. I’m not sure where you heard about personal failings, because Cluster B disorders are often, if not always, connected with trauma. The trauma aspect isn’t completely ignored in the science. By the way, your bio says you teach at college. Do you specialize in psychology?
Judith Herman, MD. Trauma and Recovery is a limited but good starting point. I’m arguing that the diagnosis is a construct. I don’t know anything about your family members nor would I profess to assess them. BPD has long been a point of contention in the psychiatric community. It is a label that is slapped on persons (most of whom are women) who have difficulty in therapy and treated as a constitutional disorder. Many persons who have been identified as BPD have instead complex drama, a diagnosis that is only now getting traction (and while trauma is not a construct, the treatment of complex trauma is one that focuses on individuals – and that’s another whole discussion). The history of the DSM is very fraught. I won’t treat these diagnoses as if they are scientific truths because they aren’t. If they were, would the DSM change them yearly? I’m an academic with a science background - human subject protection in research/epidemiology – and teach about how science is not “neutral.” Or objective. The scientific “method” is not value-free. That is my point. PS I could write a whole thing on the idea of a human being as a “subject” — this wording comes from the Nuremberg Code, post Nazi “doctors” trials — and the history of epidemiology, which began in Britain as a way not to measure disease incidence but to measure the wealth of the state — this is in the early 1800s. I’m not judging anyone, just sharing what I know/think.
I experienced an early separation from my caregivers that left an imprint on my system and I have been haunted by a sense of ’inadequacy’ in relation to this ‘secure attachment/ideal citizen’ metric. As a student of psychology at A-level (17 years old) we covered attachment theory and a teacher said “if your parents weren’t around during this stage, forget it”, I went to the bathroom and it was the first panic attack I ever had. My body held an inner knowing about what I had been through and society had just determined what that was going to mean for me and who I was. My brain and nervous system deviate from the “norm” to a massive extent. I have been doing my best to unlearn the negative view of self I’ve been conditioned to internalise but your article has now helped play a massive part in that unlearning. There are so many ways to live there are so many ways to bond there are so many ways to relate and who gets to decide which is more valid. These hash rigid surface level rules strip us of our own capability, self knowing and lead us into shame instead of action. If the discovery of secure attachment was so groundbreaking why has its use not gone into building spaces, ensuring resources and hubs of community and connection for people without it to be able to find it today amongst each other? Perhaps because it’s not truly about health and helping people but imposing a pathologising view on the masses. “Only one way is right = their way”. I do believe there is a biological basis of bonding required for the development of a healthy psyche but Neuroplasticity shows the ability of humans to grow and flourish. There have been some interesting studies about the helpfulness of communal theatre and performing arts in traumatised people, I personally have benefited from being able to attend a grassroots inclusive women’s football club. As a massively dysregulated person who has and could collapse under the weight of the labels determining my worth and who I am, I am finding my way. These labels are heavy. I read once that 80% of our ocean remains unmapped and unobserved. When we try to label everything and impose rules and laws mindlessly we remove the ability for nuance and the mystery, power and magic of organic life.
This is a powerful reflection, and I want to honor both the pain you’ve carried and the insight you’ve cultivated in response to it. What you’re describing—the early separation, the panic attack upon realizing what attachment theory seemed to declare about your fate, the slow unlearning of internalized inadequacy—these aren’t just intellectual realizations; they are felt truths, lived and embedded in the nervous system. The way you describe your body’s inner knowing in that moment is profound. It shows that even before the mind could fully articulate what was happening, your system already understood it as a verdict being passed on your existence.
And yet, what I hear in your words is not just a rejection of that verdict, but a deep reclamation of something beyond it. You’re not simply resisting the rigidity of the “secure attachment/ideal citizen” model—you are actively discovering alternative pathways to connection, healing, and self-knowing that exist outside of those imposed frameworks. That’s what’s so powerful about your response. Instead of remaining trapped in the binary of “I either fit or I don’t”, you are mapping the vast uncharted space where life actually happens.
Your question—if secure attachment is so groundbreaking, why hasn’t it been used to build the structures that could create it for those without it?—is sharp, and it exposes the limits of individualist psychology. A model that only tells people what they lacked, without providing the conditions to build what they need, is not a model of care—it is a model of classification, of sorting people into categories that often do more harm than good. Your intuition here is correct: if the goal were truly to support human thriving, we would see more structures designed to nurture attachment beyond the nuclear family model, more communal spaces for belonging, more ways for people to find regulation and connection outside of the early-life window that psychology often insists is final.
But what you’re doing—through football, through grassroots community, through rejecting the weight of labels and finding ways to move beyond them—that is the real work of neuroplasticity in action. Not just as a biological process, but as a lived practice of reshaping the meaning of your own experiences. You are not simply saying, “I refuse to be defined by this.” You are saying, “I am discovering new ways of being in the world, and in doing so, I am proof that these models are incomplete.”
I love the ocean metaphor you bring in at the end. 80% unmapped, unknown, unexplored. That’s exactly it. When we fixate on rigid models of human development, we risk mistaking the map for the territory, forgetting that there is so much more to the human experience than what has been charted, studied, or defined. What you are doing is not just resisting labels—it is embracing the vastness of what hasn’t yet been named. The mystery, the nuance, the unfolding potential of life itself.
I hope you continue exploring, questioning, and reclaiming your own space in ways that feel meaningful to you. And I hope you keep mapping the unknown—because in doing so, you’re not just finding your way, you’re proving that there are so many more ways to exist than the ones we’ve been told are valid.
I loved reading this conversation. I started writing a reply but it got so long that I think I will write my own substack piece to express it more generally. Stay tuned. I just want to say thank you both so much for your insights shared that resonated with something deep in me.
Random thought three: I was in a psych ward for depression. Most of the ppl in it with were trauma survivors, including veterans, rape survivors, and persons alleged to have “personality disorders.” One day we had mandatory yoga (to calm our vagus nerves) with a guy whose name I thought was Dave until I realized it was Dev (he changed his name from Bob or Joe or Bill to Dev) and put his hands all over the women in the circle as they were breathing in one nostril and out the other. I had the fantasy of kicking him in the head if he came anywhere near me and also had the thought that my fantasy was evidence of my mental ill health. The machinery of Otherness.
Your fantasy was likely a natural response to not wanting to be touched by a total stranger which is completely normal and acceptable. Some clinicians would call this an “intrusive thought” but it doesn’t need to be pathologised. An important question is how did you relate to and integrate that fantasy? Did you take the message from your body/mind that you were desiring and requiring a boundary and bodily autonomy? Just because someone is a yoga teacher does not mean they have a right to touch you if you don’t want them to. Were you able to communicate your need for that boundary clearly or did you wait to see if he would touch you first and then do your best not to kick him?
Appropriation of yoga, an ancient religious practice commodified in the West, in a psychiatric facility, in this case by a white guy with a stolen name. No, I didn’t name the boundary because there aren’t any in public funded psych wards. When I was released, I wrote a story about it. If you’ve ever been in a psych facility, you know it is an enterprise of othering. No person worth their salt would touch persons who have survived trauma unless they believe they have the right to do so. Three Generations, No Imbeciles. War Against the Week. Nice histories of institutions and the eugenics movement to eradicate “defectives” by corralling them.
wowwwwww. this truly needs to be read worldwide!
i’ve always felt disconnected to attachment theories—being a child of immigrants in the U.S. with a father who “abandoned” us to move back home to Liberia / Ivory Coast. everything about my presumed avoidant/anxious attachment style felt drawn up by that experience but also felt colonized. but i never had the words to properly discuss or describe it until now…
there’s so much more to say here, but for now i’ll leave it with THANK YOU!
I'm so happy you found connection with my writing. Migration within colonization is such a difficult circumstance. Like you have revealed, there are so many other layers that we must take into consideration, into context. I hope to hear your story one day about your story, and your father's story.
I’ve listened to this three times. The more that I see your perspective, the more I can’t unsee it 😭
It’s refreshing, rather freeing to see the ways western colonized society creates attachment ideals and mental health standards. So thank you for making this 🐉
Glad to hear it resonated with you. It's this strange sensation of putting words that we didn't know that we already knew. The challenge then is figuring out what comes after—how to navigate relationships and selfhood without being bound by those imposed ideals. I appreciate you taking the time to listen, reflecting and writing in.
I’m so grateful for this article. I legitimately just had a therapy session an hour before happening upon this article in which I expressed dissatisfaction with talk therapy for someone like me, who has multiple (maligned) intersecting identities. I told her that fighting for my right to exist and feel happy and whole feels like a Sisyphean task in a world that structurally and systemically seeks to psychologically annihilate people like me. Thank you for giving words to the vague discontent I’ve been feeling with modern psychology.
Anika, I really appreciate you sharing this. Your frustration with talk therapy resonates deeply—especially for those of us whose identities and experiences exist outside of the frameworks psychology was built to serve. When the world itself is structured to invalidate certain existences, therapy often risks becoming an exercise in ‘adjustment’ rather than genuine liberation. The focus shifts to managing distress rather than questioning the structures that create it.
Your insight about ‘psychological annihilation’ is crucial. So much of what gets pathologized as individual struggle is actually a rational response to systemic conditions. And yet, psychology—particularly in its most institutionalized, clinical forms—tends to locate suffering within the individual rather than seeing it as relational, historical, and political.
What would it look like if therapy didn’t just teach us to ‘cope,’ but instead gave us tools to map, resist, and strategically navigate power? If instead of centering resilience, it centered refusal—refusal to internalize the world’s distortions, refusal to let frameworks of pathology define our struggles?
I’m curious—has there ever been a moment, inside or outside therapy, where you felt truly seen? And what was different about that space?
Kia ora/Greetings Ayoto, I was born in the 50’s and my primary employment on leaving school was to train as psychiatrist nurse on land taken from my tribal people by the colonial government in the late 1920’s in my homeland of Aotearoa otherwise known as New Zealand. Maori as indigenous have since 1975 as a date where law defines a new timeline of living in colonial space and we as indigenous have had five decades of a court or commission inquiry on such things as the confiscation of land either by war or my law. Moving from land theft back to working in a white constructed mental health facility where mental was weaponized as a young Maori and a woman I left after five years refusing to take the last exam because I saw then the worst as I said in 1977 of the white man’s medicine. I was I thought but as you write it was replaced or added to by psychology. Great article and trust you don’t mind but after subscribing on my free Substack subscription I have emailed the article to my address and lawyer assigned to the Waitangi Tribunal Inquiry on Maori women and the “Crown’s” relationship since 1840 and its effects. Need I say there has been little comfort assigned our way. Thank you for your submission to the discussion worldwide we have as indigenous deconstructing and reapplying the impact of colonialism. Na Mihirawhiti
Kia ora Mihirawhiti, and thank you for sharing this powerful reflection. The weight of what you describe—the forced removal from ancestral land, the imposition of colonial legal frameworks, and the violence embedded in so-called ‘mental health’ institutions—speaks to the depth of systemic harm that psychology has often served to reinforce rather than heal. Your refusal to take that final exam in 1977, seeing the full extent of “the white man’s medicine,” is a profound act of resistance. It’s a testament to how insight is not just something found within these institutions, but often in the act of rejecting them.
The continued inquiries of the Waitangi Tribunal highlight exactly what you describe: that so-called “reparations” within a colonial system rarely provide real comfort, because the underlying structure remains unchanged. That you are bringing this conversation into those legal and historical spaces is deeply significant—because as you know, these struggles do not exist in theory alone, but in the ongoing reality of land, body, and history.
I’m honored that you found resonance in my piece, and I deeply respect the work you’re doing to deconstruct and reapply the impact of colonialism. If psychology, as you say, has replaced psychiatry as a new colonial tool, then what do you see as its decolonial counterpoint? What models of care—whether rooted in whakapapa, whenua, or wairua—offer the restoration that these imposed structures never could?
Thank you again for sharing your story and for bringing this into a larger indigenous dialogue. Ngā mihi nui.
This is incredible, thank you. Someone commented on DBT and how it is so violent and exhausting all day to ruler smack yourself into acting different. (My paraphrasing). Ive actually done DBT and it was! and I had the thought— in Buddhist practice, we also incline the mind… so what’s the difference? Is this still a cousin to what you’re discussing about AT?
Then I realized, inclining my mind toward kindness has a natural outcome of evicting hatred from my mind. As opposed to AT that is instant result (act different) oriented. In practice, I’m not saying my mind is wrong when I do this. I just incline my mind toward kindness. With Buddhist practice, for me, there is no pathology to fix. There is only knowing what’s happening when it’s happening. There’s a gentleness. And also! One could create the quality of violence even in this small inclination—by simply adhering to the “I’m broken fix this mind” AT quality you’re discussing.
It’s not just the AT itself, it’s the quality of the mind this theory can create. Once it is created i can use this quality even on gentle things and still feel broken. Wow. Thank you so much for this eye opening discussion.
The quality of mind that cultivates is a really sharp comparison. Once a framework trains us as broken, even the gentlest practice can become another site of self-punishment. The legacy of pathology-driven models haunts us. Maybe the real movement out of this is precisely what you describe, an awareness that doesn't impose change, that doesn't intervene but allows. From there, the mind inclines towards compassion not as a command but as an inevitability.
Truly one of the best pieces I have read for a long time. Thank you for putting words to what many of us have been struggling with.
That means a lot—thank you. There’s something powerful about realizing that what feels like an individual struggle is actually shared, structural, part of a larger pattern. If these words helped articulate something that’s been hard to name, then I’m grateful they reached you at the right time. Wishing you clarity, solidarity, and all the language you need for what comes next.
Random thoughts on listening to this a second time. “Glissant” great word. This is the chapter of El Kurd’s Perfect Victims where he talks about laughing at “Gotcha” questions like “Do you want to throw Israelis into the sea?”- using humor to “exile the prestige of the podium." Second random thought: The family court system in the US is built on its self-defined work serving the “best interests of the child.” An echo of same language as the eugenics movement and its expression in the US’s highest court: In 1927 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr decreed it was “better for all the world” to sterilize “defective” people than to pay the costs of "executing their degenerate offspring." Ironically, the survivors who have come forward to share their stories of being sterilized as Black, brown, immigrant, and poor children received checks for nomimal amounts…just as the men of the Tuskegee “study” of untreated syphilis received $25 certificates for “participating” in a project to show the unique impact of this STI on Black bodies. The survivors of the Guatemalan “study” were less fortunate, as they were infected in prison and their suffering was photo-documented. The “other” is always a specimen and trauma is always a constitutional defect in tolerating that “otherness” — the ourborus of which you speak. It is built into the mortar of the educational institutions with podiums for DEI “talks” and the courts that administer “justice."
incredible musical labor of love. thank you for creating this. your style makes it feel so easy to follow through the connections and so powerfully calls out to what exists so we can see it in ways necessary. i also had never heard of the consideration of relationship between self through language and the unknowable, how there will be aspects, realities and truths that will always remain out of our grasp. that to demand translation and defining is antithetical to how life exists. this is a realization ive carried within me though i never was able to articulate it. it destroys my spirit knowing how the way white supremacy has numbed, and traumatized countless into believing, accepting this is all life can be - unimaginative, deadly cold machinerary for twisted pleasures of control.
i hope beings continue to remain and more turn to where our hearts truly reside. because they are not home in our bodies, but outside of them.
“[Our hearts] are not home in our bodies, but outside of them.” — thank you for your poignant reflection, mercury
Ho-ly shit. This is blowing my mind as a "ptsd/neurodivergent" human. Have to send this to my therapist.
I'm glad to be of service. Though maybe not everything needs to be run past the therapist-warden. Sometimes, our own recognition is enough.
I’m a white woman who’s been processing a childhood spent as the family scapegoat, and while I know you were writing about systems built to pathologize nonwhite people, I couldn’t help but feel a shock of recognition as you described the anxious attachment “type” and the effect of internalizing the gaze. I feel a little guilty because I immediately made your article about myself, but you described me to me. So thank you. I’m going to reread it with an eye towards not making it about me, because it’s important to me that I do that. I also now want to read everything you cited, so I anticipate a few trips to my local university library.
I appreciate this. The way these functions train us all, though differently, to see ourselves through an external gaze, to manage perception, to contort for survival. So the question isn't whether you 'should' or 'shouldn't' relate, but what kind of identification is at play? Maybe instead of trying to undo recognition, we can sit with it. What does it mean that you saw yourself here? What does that tell us about how these systems organize perception, injury and adaptation across different positions? Guilt doesn't bring more inspiration; maybe curiosity is the more useful response.
Libraries are always a good idea though, the best reading stays with you long after you’ve closed the book.
Thank you for making this, for interrogating these concepts. Psychology, the pathologizing…It is so violent, and the way it is championed is exhausting.
You're welcome O. Orca. I hope that as we share understanding, it takes off some of the load for us to process.
This has healed something in me. Thank you