My therapist is probably in her forties or fifties. She has kids and lives in the very small town that I do. She comes into my job and always says hi when she does. She’s faced some pretty amazing challenges in her life including a medical event that nearly killed her and forced her to learn how to walk again well into adulthood. She’s kind, personable, open, and an amazing listener—everything a good therapist should be.
She’s also a Normie™. She’s not chronically online so I have to tell her the meaning of every colloquialism I happen to use that she doesn’t understand. Her eyebrows kind of pucker in the middle while she drinks her coffee if I’m telling her about Twitter drama that has gotten stuck in my head and I’m trying to dislodge it. She has to ask for clarification when it comes to internet-driven cultural norms and why people do things like tell you to kill yourself over what she considers to be completely innocuous statements. She is completely baffled by the bizarre behavior of internet denizens and especially the behavior of children on Twitter who go about trying to tell people what to do or how to live their lives. She’s unendingly tickled by what people on Twitter think therapy does or what it’s meant for.
I’ve been seeing my therapist, let’s call her Dr. Trudy, since late 2020 after a bunch of proshippers decided that I was the devil and had to be eradicated for my radical views on -checks notes- anti-censorship absolutism. Around the same time as that debacle, I was absorbed into a group that I like to call the “Skull and Boners Club” (they don’t call themselves that) who very happily took me in and provided a community in which I could repair what had been done to me. Mental and emotional damage stemming from drawn-out hate campaigns and abrupt abandonment from friends I’d known in real life were slowly being healed with the power of true and complete understanding. It wasn’t just this community but the close and enduring personal friendships made within those circles—namely K—, C—, and A—, who really took me under their wings and encouraged me to make about it. Don’t cry about it. Make about it. The Skull and Boners Club contains some of the most amazing transgressive artists I’ve been blessed to know and the most important aspect of them is this: I don’t even have to make transgressive art to belong there. And Dr. Trudy? Normie Extraordinaire?
She loves them.
Many people on the internet, especially antishippers, do not understand the benefits of therapy and what individualized therapy means for people who are undertaking the task of going through it. Aptly named Twitter user kazhatesyou wrote in one popular antishipper thread: “ ‘My therapist said it’s ok 🥺’ bitch fuck you AND your therapist 😒” [sic], highlighting just how removed critics can be from the point of therapeutic activities, especially in regards to art therapy. In Sue Grand’s monologue The Reproduction of Evil, she highlights the nature of pain—whether it be physical, mental, or emotional—as being beyond linguistic capabilities and discusses the nature of healing as being something that is larger than what therapeutic discourse can provide. In regards to talk therapy, if there is progress being made and the narrative is moving forward, there is still hope that the focus on pain can be poured into a new function—that of mourning. This manifested in my own therapy experience in a relatively self-aware fashion, as my therapist mentioned another book called Bittersweet by author Susan Cain who writes about the value of sadness and its role in our everyday lives. But what if talk therapy hits a wall? What if words become meaningless to the patient because their pain truly is beyond linguistic capabilities? Imagine this: You have a horrible stabbing pain in your gut. It won’t go away. They give you a pain scale from one to ten. You choose seven. It doesn’t matter. You’re too “composed” for the witness to believe that you’re at a seven so they write down a three instead. Tests show that there’s nothing happening inside you but the pain persists. You are doubled over. You are screaming that it’s a ten. Nobody thinks it’s a ten. They think you’re being dramatic for attention. Even if it was still a seven, the prolonged nature of it is driving you mad. It is all you can focus on. It is all you can feel. According to Grand, to be in pain is to experience revelation. To witness pain is to doubt that revelation.
This is where art comes in. Art, whether it be in the form of painting, pastels, drawing, writing, sculpting, dance, or any other medium, can provide a visceral outlet for powerful emotion and can also provide a community that pulls together folks in a common thread of understanding on a level deeper than that of a superficial “like and dislike” plane. Impressionist artist Jody Fallon of Central Pennsylvania creates stunning and uniquely disturbing works of art which are both haunting and mesmerizing, pulling upon imagery inspired by horror sci-fi and emotions unearthed by his time in the United States military and beyond. There are a great many people who would not understand Fallon’s works, seeing them as needlessly gruesome or relatively pointless, but for those who can see into the anguish, love, hope, and despair of his works, the pieces are particularly meaningful, especially to those who have oft felt misunderstood. Fallon explained in an interview for blog “Upon a Midnight Dreary” his work The Menagerie:
That piece for me is about all of these misfits and oddballs coming together in place where they can just be whatever they are. I’d like to think it is an invitation for the rest of us freaks and oddballs out there to come together.
I heard Rick Berry say once that to be a freak in a group of other freaks is one thing. But, to be a freak alone is very very difficult because you will always be found out. That stuck with me somewhere I guess.
Twitter user ANT1TAECLUB asked in regards to proshipper art (presumably regarding heavy or dark themes), “on what planet would a licensed therapist suggest such an unhealthy coping mechanism? and even if this was the case, telling them to share it beyond themselves?” Handily, ArtTherapy.Org is able to answer these questions right on their “What Is Art Therapy?” page, explaining that: “According to research, art therapy helps people feel more in control of their own lives, and helps relieve anxiety and depression, including among cancer patients, tuberculosis patients in isolation, and military veterans with PTSD. In addition, art therapy assists in managing pain by moving mental focus away from the painful stimulus.” (Each of those links is to an article or scientific paper by the way, thanks ArtTherapy.Org!) It’s important to note that art therapy isn’t just about making art but also consuming art or writing that can provide a sense of understanding. In Susan Grand’s work, she discusses the critical aspect of loneliness as an instigator of the victim-to-perpetrator pipeline toward the reproduction of evil—without this loneliness, the tendrils of evil have a more difficult time spreading into the human condition. That is: deep community is often key for preventing a generalized resentment toward humanity, and the understanding that one is not alone in suffering is sometimes all it takes to transmute pain to a healable sadness. This is further supported by Cain’s work in Bittersweet, Frankl’s work in Man’s Search for Meaning, and even by an incredibly accessible work of philosophy by Rachel Wilkerson Miller, The Art of Showing Up.
In my scenario, having been plucked up by a community as wholesome and understanding as the Skull and Boner’s Club, I consider myself incredibly lucky. Dr. Trudy doesn’t believe in luck but she’s come close when it comes to the timing of that particular bit of cause and effect. Nearly every single session we get to talking about the various projects and deep philosophical/spiritual/creative discussions that the Club hosts and how these conversations deepen our sense of communal connection and make us all feel a little less alone when we can speak freely and just be our normal freaky selves in a place that can not just validate us but challenge us to create when we’re having those big feelings about really difficult things. Dr. Trudy has overwhelmingly supported interaction with, consumption of, and creation of transgressive projects with and without collaborators, stating that she thinks that my kinky, sexual, and sometimes gory Nazisploitation projects are “[…] useful and worthwhile” within the context of my therapy and their function within my life and my community. As a Normie™, her opinion on whether or not other people care for what I make is succinct and brooks no argument: They can mind their own business.
Many antishippers will bluster on and on about “illegal” material (none of what we make is illegal in the United States) or claim that something is different (read as: bad) because it contains a penis or a vagina, as though these things aren’t included within the realm of the human condition and don’t deserve to be included in difficult and oftentimes messy works regarding sexual trauma. Some will claim that these works aren’t what they mean, claiming that they would be able to tell what was a work regarding trauma (worthy of artistic praise) versus mindless kink while simultaneously suggesting that they somehow would become the Goebbels of media control to personally rubber-stamp every single thing “allowed” on the internet. Remember folks, censorship is a shotgun, not a scalpel, and you will never be in charge. As for Dr. Trudy, whether or not art has a sexual component to it is utterly irrelevant compared to the manner in which it is has created a scaffolding for personal and communal catharsis. For Normie™ therapists, this is standard operating procedure and there really isn’t anything the internet haters can do about it. Keep making weird art and keep sharing it—you never know what evil might be subdued in having come across it.