Beyond Psychobabble

in praise of raw experience over interpretation

The National Assembly Taking the Tennis Court Oath by Jacques-Louis David, 1791

Today, people often choose to interpret life rather than share their direct experience. This tendency, the modern urge to constantly decipher events using psychology or frameworks, is exhausting. It’s like trying to mold every event into a predefined shape, leaving little to no room for the vibrancy of raw, unfiltered moments.

I’m certainly guilty of this myself. For a while, early in my recovery, when I had a marriage cratering towards divorce, I took refuge in the Buddha, which for me meant retreating into the stability of “witness consciousness,” nobly practicing my non-attachment. Turns out, if you’re a dude with testosterone levels naturally soaring in the four figures (forgive the modesty), it’s shockingly easy to watch your recent matrimony crumble when you’ve mastered the art of “observing” how all phenomena, particularly emotions, are transient…

Do you see what I just did there?

Bingo, I totally psychobabbled my experience! Granted, what I wrote isn’t completely without merit. But let me offer you an alternative view.

The truth is, during my early recovery, as life kept shaking my core, I was overwhelmed by chilling fear. The humiliation of job loss consumed me. Even more piercing was the panic that a whole decade had vanished, each hour consumed by pretending to be someone I was not in an office building and chasing highs in the Tenderloin’s streets. And now, my marriage to a beautiful, healthy, young woman was disintegrating right in front of me. Hadn’t I borne enough already? The agony was all-encompassing, attacking me in all directions. So, I didn’t allow myself to even come near it.

Ever had that friend who disappeared for a year working and gallivanting around Saudi Arabia? Of course you have—the one who returned as an honorary Riyadh resident. Suddenly, every conversation starts with, “In Jeddah, we’d be sipping tea with the camels until sunrise.” And he’d casually drop the classic, “Arab culture is like advanced minimalism compared to our overcomplicated Western lives.”

After suffering through enough Saudi stories to last a lifetime, you and the gang realized it was time to stage an intervention. With hearts of gold, you sat him down and told him: “Dude, let’s pump the breaks on the optimal sand-to-tea ratio, shall we? We don’t want to fucking hear about Saudi Arabia anymore. No one cares!”

Similarly, when your friend only speaks in frameworks and ideas, the experience is much like listening to your mate who won’t stop rapping about his escapades in some foreign, distant land. It’s hard to relate to; even more challenging to trust. Both dudes are tragically unaware of what they are projecting, of what they are hiding—of the false boundary they’ve erected in their psyches so glaringly visible to everyone but themselves.

It’s understandable that we’re inclined to distance ourselves from the potency of our present-moment experience—especially in relationships. It feels secure to do so, and in an ironic twist, like a more straightforward way to move through life.

Returning to my progression from a hardcore psychobabbler to a guy who’s now *slightly* more aware of it: In those early days of recovery, what I uncovered beneath the surface of my stories and philosophies was sheer terror, the kind that shakes your very existence, making you doubt everything and believe God to be a colossal fabrication. I suppose many of us bear this primal dread of what truly resides within us—or even worse, that the identities and traits we hold onto so dearly aren’t real in the way we once thought.

One might define mental masturbation as a sort of dance where we skirt around the core, cautiously avoiding direct contact with experience, only to translate it later with intricate jargon that always misses the essence, the one taste of life. It’s clear that our culture has been enamored by this spectacle of “personal processing” theatrics and intellectualism for a while now.  

But here’s the exciting part. I can sense a vibe shift—people are genuinely fatigued by all the cerebral self-indulgence. Even somatic therapists no longer feel the need to distill every uplifting emotional experience—no matter how sublime or mysterious—into the terminology of being in a state of “ventral vagal regulation.” The victim mindset that hides behind tangled language is passé; what’s now en vogue is the poise of a main character who speaks candidly while remaining engaged with the larger narrative. Even those of us prone to overthinking are discovering the grace and freedom of expression without our masks. If a guy like me can learn to drink the Pacific Ocean in a single gulp, I’ve no doubt you can taste unadulterated life, too.