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You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist is a podcast for seekers, dreamers, and questioners that intimately explores the human experience. Your host, Stephanie Winn, distills years of wisdom gained from her practice as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. She invites guests from a broad variety of disciplines and many walks of life, including researchers, writers, artists, healers, advocates, inventive outliers, and creative geniuses. Together, they investigate, illuminate, and inspire transformation - in the self, relationships, and society. Curious about many things, Stephanie’s uniquely interdisciplinary psychological lens tackles challenging social issues while encouraging personal and relational wellness. Join this journey through the inner wilderness.
Swell AI Transcript: 130. Maral Salmassi.mp3
Maral Salmassi:
Woke culture demands ideological purity from its members, even if it requires overlooking the patriarchy, misogyny, and homophobia present in cultures they perceive as oppressed. This is a moral and logical fallacy, of course, stemming from internalized guilt and shame where they feel compelled to support the Palestinian cause as a way to absolve themselves from perceived privilege. Ironically, as homosexuals, they would be thrown off the next tall building if they were to step foot in places like Gaza or the West Bank.
Stephanie Winn: You must be some kind of therapist? Hello, we're doing something a little bit different today. I'd like to introduce you to my friend, Meral Salmasi. She is a brilliant thinker who I met on X where she posts very thoughtful videos. Meral and I originally had a conversation that I thought was fascinating and that I would have loved to share with you. But something happens, and this is the sort of thing that can happen every now and then in the podcasting world, that someone has some afterthoughts about what they shared. I know I often find myself in this position because I really enjoy talking with my guests or hosts when I'm a guest and sometimes I forget that there's an audience listening and I share things that in retrospect I wish I hadn't because I was just vibing with my guest and not thinking about the audience. Uh, so I certainly know what that feels like. And after our conversation, which I loved morale, just had some second thoughts about sharing some of what came out in that conversation publicly. And I wanted to respect her privacy, but this is a woman of tremendous integrity. And she said, I feel so bad. Let me make it up to you. Let me record a whole separate thing for you to share with your audience. So she designed. this sort of dense chunk of wisdom that you are about to hear asynchronously. So it's not part of a conversation with me. And she recorded it just for you, for my audience. Now, I think it's also important context here that English is not Merle's first language. In fact, it might not even be her second language, if I understand correctly. She is Iranian and German. So she lives in Germany. And so she's multilingual, And you can hear that in her lovely accent. And so I think it's just all the more impressive the way that she puts her thoughts together. But she is one of these people who feels most comfortable putting her thoughts together in writing beforehand. And so she actually scripted this and then read it for you. It's very thoughtful. It's very dense. I feel like the concepts in what you're about to hear could be elaborated on you know, in over the course of a whole hour. So there's just a lot of content packed into a few minutes. Now, what what does this woman speak about? Well, she has an interesting perspective, being a German citizen of Iranian descent, being familiar with some of the pitfalls of Islam, some of the pitfalls with wokeness, she has tremendous insight into cluster B, psychology, emotional intelligence. And when we were planning for this asynchronous video that she recorded, she, uh, well, it occurred to me that this episode would be released on October 7th. And that date obviously has a certain significance in the culture and is relevant when we're talking about things like, you know, what does the woke American or German, for that matter, what is the woke Western left not understand about Middle Eastern culture war stuff, you know, so for example, queers for Palestine is a term that has come up in my conversations with morale, and she decided to comment on that here. So you're about to hear her insights into wokeness, cluster B, sadomasochism, and the idea of queers for Palestine. I hope you enjoy listening to Meral as much as I do, and I'll follow up after she has what she has to say and share my own thoughts afterward.
Maral Salmassi: Thanks for having me on your channel, Stephanie. It's a pleasure. Due to scheduling conflicts, I had to deviate from the original format and prerecorded this session. However, the advantage is that it allowed me to prepare more thoroughly. In our previous conversation, we touched on the sadomasochistic tendencies within the Woke movement. Today, I'll explore this further with specific examples such as Queers for Palestine and the interplay between sadistic domination and masochistic submission. Queers for Palestine present a complex and contradictory case. These LGBT activists support the Palestinian cause, even though in many Muslim-majority countries they face systemic discrimination and even the death penalty for their identity. German psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm offers a valuable framework for understanding the psychological roots of sadomasochism within Bogue culture. In his books, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness and Escape from Freedom, Fromm argues that the repression of authentic emotions especially those tied to vulnerability, fear, and desire, creates inner conflicts that manifest in destructive or self-destructive behaviors like sadomasochism. The Queers for Palestine movement fits perfectly into France's framework, connecting sadomasochism to human experiences of powerlessness, alienation, and a need for security. The sadistic aspects involve the projection of their internal conflict onto others, their aggressive control of the narrative, and the punishment of descending voices. Feeling powerless or conflicted, they identify with their oppressors as a coping mechanism for their subjugation. The psychological shift leads to sadistic behaviors where these activists adopt the values of their oppressors, taking pleasure in abusing and silencing critics of the Palestinian narrative. The masochistic dynamics of self-sacrifice and submission to the cause allow them to feel morally righteous even as they deny their oppression. Vogue culture demands ideological purity from its members, even if it requires overlooking the patriarchy, misogyny, and homophobia present in cultures they perceive as oppressed. This is a moral and logical fallacy, of course, stemming from internalized guilt and shame where they feel compelled to support the Palestinian cause as a way to absolve themselves from perceived privilege. Ironically, as homosexuals, they would be thrown off the next tall building if they were to step foot in places like Gaza or the West Bank. These dynamics create a powerful psychological mechanism that allows these activists to navigate their internal conflicts, maintain ideological purity, and control their ideological narratives. In my view, these behaviors reflect deeper psychological issues, often resembling traits of cluster V personality disorders, particularly borderline personality disorder. Social media has created a need for constant external validation. Vulnerable young people are relentlessly exposed to judgment and reward systems which drive the rise of identity fragmentation. The pressure to craft a socially acceptable self mirrors the unstable identity seen in borderline personality disorder. It is a significant driving element of extreme social or political positions in identity-related movements. Social media platforms like TikTok encourage and reward polarizing content. reinforcing a binary thinking process known as splitting. This is a hell mark of borderline personality disorder, where everything is viewed as either entirely good or entirely bad with no middle ground. In Vogue Council culture, this is amplified. People are either good allies or irredeemable enemies. The normalization of narcissistic tendencies within specific ideological movements, such as the Vogue, where group identity is elevated above individual empathy, is a significant red flag and should be taken very seriously. Their need for validation enables aggressive policing of ideological purity with little tolerance for diversity of thought, reflecting the fragile ego often seen in narcissistic personality disorders, under cluster B, where self-worth is contingent on external validation. It is no exaggeration to suggest that society is suffering from a pandemic of narcissistic personality disorders. To curb the rise of what I see as inherently pathological and entropic dynamics fueled by vocism, we need clear standards and consequences for actions that undermine constructed discourse and societal cohesion. That would include sanctioning behaviors like public shaming, harassment, and aggressive policing of others' beliefs. As part of school education, we must encourage critical thinking, cultivate emotional intelligence, and teach media literacy, while balancing the need for free speech with protecting individuals from aggression. This will be key to achieving lasting change. I hope this analysis helped shed some light on the paradoxical behaviors we see today. Thank you, and I look forward to continuing this conversation soon.
Stephanie Winn: All right. And we just heard from Maral Salmasi. See, I told you that was going to be dense. Don't you feel like you need to listen to it several times? I actually took notes so I could sort of keep track of some of the themes that emerged while Maral was speaking. So she tied together several concepts. She talks about the sadomasochistic tendencies within the woke movement and what this has to do with cluster B traits and behaviors. I thought it was significant that she named splitting. Now splitting, for those who aren't familiar, is considered one of the psychological defenses in psychodynamic theory. We all use psychological defenses to protect us from overwhelming emotional experiences. And within psychodynamic theory, there's sort of a hierarchy of psychological defenses ranging from more mature to less mature. So for example, a more mature psychological defense would be something like sublimation, where one channels their energy into something productive. So Feeling angry and going for a run, feeling sad and making a beautiful song out of that sadness would be examples of sublimation, of effectively channeling one's emotions. Humor is also considered a more mature defense. Things like rationalization and intellectualization are kind of in the mid range, but on the more adult side of things, these are things we all do, but towards the bottom of the sort of hierarchy of the relative psychological maturity of psychological defenses, we have things like splitting and projection and other defenses found in cluster B personality dynamics. I want to tie this in with another concept that I also teach alongside this type of material in my course ROGD Repair. So this is a concept of gameable heuristics. You know, that's kind of a mouthful. I'll break it down for you. And my friend Jake Wisconsin recently asked me about this on his podcast noggin note. So I'm really grateful to Jake for kind of picking up on that term and digging into it. But gameable heuristics is the term that I use to describe when we have a mental shortcut that we take or a rule of thumb, so a heuristic, some kind of belief that oversimplifies reality, that is gameable, in other words, that can be hacked, where if someone essentially knows the rules of the game, they can use that knowledge to their advantage and exploit it. So for example, the slogan, and a lot of slogans are like this, but like one example of a slogan would be vote blue no matter who. Now I'm not saying I disagree or agree with any particular political stance, but if all someone needs to do to earn your vote, or to earn your trust or respect or tribal membership, or your sympathy or anything, is to say that they belong to a certain team, or that they identify a certain way, then that is pretty clearly a gameable heuristic, right? This is sort of the perfect mechanism for a Trojan horse to get through the gates, for a wolf in sheep's clothing to mix metaphors, right? People are who they say they are is another one of these gameable heuristic slogans that you see a lot of on the woke left when it comes to gender identity politics? Well, it's it creates such an obvious loophole. For those of us with our critical thinking skills intact, we see, well, if you create a society in which everyone agrees with the slogan, or the slogan is defining the policies, at least that govern the workplace and the legal system, the slogan people are who they say they are, so that the logic of self ID then you are creating something that is very easily exploited by predators and those with ulterior motives. But there are just so many beliefs that immature people can hold that qualify as gameable heuristics. So what does this have to do with splitting and borderline traits and what Miral was talking about? Well, she was essentially talking about splitting as this borderline trait that's part of woke cancel culture that divides people into good and bad. And Jonathan Haidt also talks about this along with Greg Lukianoff in The Coddling of the American Mind. They talk about the three great untruths. And one of those is that people can be divided into good people and bad people. And so where the gameable heuristic part and the splitting come together is that whenever someone sort of agrees with this logic that there's really such a simple way to determine who the good people are and who the bad people are. I mean, first of all, that some people are all good and some people are all bad, right? And second of all, that it's easy to know who's who. I think that creates a huge, massive loophole for exploitation. And then I think that's where the sadomasochism comes in. So again, coming back to and echoing what Meral just said, if you ascribe to a worldview that is gameable, that is easily hacked, that says, the world is made of good people and bad people, the good people are all good, and the bad people are all bad. And I can tell who's on what side. simply by which tribe they claim to belong to, you know, what political party they vote for, where they stand on gender self ID, or any number of issues. Right. And then, you know, this fits very neatly to with the drama triangle, which I also teach about in ROGD Repair, victim, rescuer, rescuer and persecutor. Right. So it's this idea, I know who the victims and the rescuers are, those are the good guys. And they're all good. And I know who the persecutors are. And those are the bad guys. And they're all bad. So if you ascribe to that worldview, you are creating a huge loophole for your own exploitation. And then I think that's where some of the sadomasochistic dynamics come in. So what do I mean by that? Well, I'm just sort of free associating and riffing here, but I'm thinking about some of my experiences being a mental health counselor in Woke, Oregon. In times that, for instance, people were victims of crimes, but chose not to contact the police or exercise any of their rights or protect themselves. Because, and I quote, Black Lives Matter. So here's a slogan, this gameable heuristic. Is it true that black lives matter? Of course, it's true that black lives matter. But it's not just a simple, it's not just a statement of fact, it's also a slogan that carries all this political meaning associated with it about what team you're on. So it's a gameable heuristic, right? And when people use this slogan, black lives matter, it ties in with a whole worldview about the nature of relationships between black people and police. that influences how people feel about their own rights to protection, self-determination, using the legal system, and punishing people who commit crimes, right? So I've seen ways in which people were essentially behaving against their own self-interest, behaving in masochistic ways, allowing themselves to be harmed, martyring themselves in the name of an ideology. And so there's an inversion happening in someone's mind in that moment. Right? They are the victim, but they have a worldview. So they're, they're the victim of a physical crime. Let's say I'm giving an example. This is something I saw variations of in Oregon. They're the victim of an actual crime. that has done damage to their person or property or threatened their emotional security by, let's say, a close call. There's a variety of examples possible here. And let's say the perpetrator of that crime just so happened to be Black and the victim was not Black, right? So then there's a contrast between the worldview that the person subscribes to which splits people into good and bad. And the good people are the victims and the rescuers and the bad people that are the persecutors. And so the good people are, in this case, black people and their lives matter. And then the bad people are the cops. Right. And then the person themselves becomes a victim. But the thought of doing anything to protect themselves, such as calling the police, asking for help reporting a crime, asking for any kind of justice in their life to protect them from the persecutor, that here, threatens their worldview, because that would in their worldview, put them into the persecutor role, because now they are a non black person putting a black person in jail, nevermind the fact that that person committed a crime against them. So then where does the anger grow? Where does the trauma go? Right? If we're taking someone who's an actual victim of a crime here, who may be feared for their life, at one point during the crime, Where does that trauma go if they're not seeking justice? If they don't feel that they can protect and defend themselves using the powers that be? Could that be channeled into a continuation of the sadomasochistic dynamic? Another way of thinking about it is coming back to this concept of psychological defenses. There's one called reaction formation. This is really interesting. I like to think of reaction formation as the pearl forming in the oyster. So there's the grain of sand, there's the irritant, the thing that should not be there, the thing that's bugging the oyster. What does the oyster do? Well, the oyster doesn't have the strength to eject the sand or the mechanism to do so. So the oyster creates a substance and creates a pearl out of that sand. Reaction formation, I think of like that pearl. So it's, there's something that's bothering you, maybe something you don't like about someone, but you find your actual thoughts, feelings, and positions unacceptable for some reason, because you've been socially conditioned to find that particular emotion unacceptable or maybe in the situation. So you repress it and actually invert it into the opposite. So for example, I think you see this a lot amongst like, good Christian women in middle America, the type who have very, like, agreeable, sweet, nurturing personalities, the type who are raised to always be kind. When they cross paths with someone who really bothers them, instead of just openly acknowledging to themselves, you know, I really don't like her. And let me try to not have that other person in my life. This type of woman, I'm just giving an archetype here, I'm not talking about anyone in specific, You know, she's so irritated by that feeling of how much she hates this other person, but it's so incongruent with the type of person that she thinks she is. So it's ego dystonic, right? So what does she do instead of just distancing herself from that person, especially if it's someone she can't get away with, like someone she works with at church? She becomes overly sweet. She becomes saccharine. She goes over the top. She starts baking cookies for this woman she hates. That's reaction formation. It's when we do the opposite, not as a coping skill, as in dialectical behavioral therapy, because there is a time and a place for that. There is a time and a place for opposite action. But reaction formation, it's this fomentation, if you will. I'm not sure if that's an actual word. Fomenting? I don't know. but it's something is happening, that emotion is metastasizing and morphing into an emotionally charged pearl that maybe looks shiny and pretty on the surface, but is not actually that sweet inside. So reaction formation. Right? So if someone has been a victim of a crime, and they have masochistic tendencies, or they tend to be a martyr, right? This sort of person I gave the example of the victim of a crime who won't do anything to protect themselves because they don't want to be the they don't want to participate in black people ending up in prison, even if you know, they were a victim in this situation. The reaction formation starts to look something like Stockholm syndrome. I'm using a lot of psychological terminology here, but I'm bringing together several concepts, sort of like Meral does. So I hope you can bear with me here. Stockholm syndrome is when we form an attachment to our abuser. It's an evolutionary adaptive mechanism that when we're trapped, and women are especially vulnerable to this because throughout history, women have been captured. by warring tribes. They have become impregnated by their rapists. Women have been in much more situations throughout history than men have that have forced them to find a way psychologically to convince themselves that they are happy or in love or otherwise okay with some situation in which they've been harmed. So Stockholm Syndrome, like reaction formation, is sort of an inversion of the natural feelings and reactions that one might have. So I think that's where some of the sadomasochistic energy is coming from and going to, if you will, that people are martyring themselves for a cause because their worldview prevents them from protecting and providing for themselves You know, I gave the example of a victim of a crime because I think it's a very stark example. But there are a lot of other ways that woke ideology can cause people to act against their own self-interest. So, for example, if someone believes in, you know, land acknowledgement and giving land back and that all Americans who are not Native Americans don't deserve to be here, let's say that's a person's political belief. But what that person's really passionate about and loves deep down is gardening. And what they've always dreamed of was owning land. Is this person going to be able to proceed with their dreams of purchasing land and building their dream garden? Or are their own beliefs about how oppressive it is to own land going to stop them from pursuing their dreams? Same with capitalism. You know, there are things people want that cost money. But if they believe that money is the root of all evil, if they believe we'd be better in a communist utopia, are they going to be able to aspire? Are they going to be able to pursue those personal goals? So there are a lot of ways that woke beliefs are parasitic, causing the host of the parasitic idea to act against their own self-interest. That's where the martyrdom and the masochism comes in, making way for the sadism. So there's that gameable heuristic. If your worldview is that simplistic, then you're leaving the door open for predators to come in. and you believe that you deserve it because you're a martyr, you're a masochist, you're an oppressor, you subscribe to a belief system that tells you that you deserve to be punished or that you don't deserve this, that, or the other. But then again, where does all the anger go that you would naturally feel from being mistreated? Maybe it manifests as your own sadism. And so this is what Mural pinpoints so beautifully. in her speech, right? She talks about the sadistic tendencies, a projection of people's own inner conflict onto other people, punishment of dissent, aggressive control of the narrative and identification with the oppressor. So tying in the sort of Stockholm syndrome side of things as well. We also see a lot of punishing on the woke left. This is something I noticed, one of the things that led me to my breaking point before I became a public figure and a podcaster, just as I was seeing the woke left kind of eating itself in the therapy world with that Facebook group that I've talked about on this podcast before. You heard me laugh about it with Dr. Kamenetsky, if you listened to that episode, the therapist in private practice Facebook group with the woke bullies and all of their rules, like rules against what they call dirty deleting, right? Which is a projection of malintent onto the simple act of someone deleting a post because you weren't sticking around to be held accountable. Because people didn't want to be punished, right? So there was a lot of sadism that I was observing in that. But when I reflect on that kind of sadomasochism, it's this entitlement to act out and punish others that's driven in part by denial of one's own needs, right? That their worldview isn't allowing them to just be a whole person to What's that saying? What's that poet? Um, let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. So actually that just gave me an idea.
null: I just looked up the poem. It's by Mary Oliver.
Stephanie Winn: And I think that that poem is a good way to end this dark, short episode on a positive note. So this is Wild Geese by Mary Oliver. You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile, the world goes on. Meanwhile, the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile, the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, No matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting, over and over announcing your place in the family of things. I hope you enjoyed this episode of You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist podcast. To check out my book recommendations, articles, wellness products, guest episodes on other podcasts, consulting services, and lots more, visit SomeTherapist.com or follow me on Twitter or Instagram at SomeTherapist. If you'd like to go deeper, join my community at somekindoftherapist.locals.com. Members can dialogue with other listeners, post questions for upcoming podcast guests to respond to, or ask questions for me to respond to in exclusive members-only Q&A live streams. To learn more about the gender crisis, watch our film, No Way Back, The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care, at nowaybackfilm.com. Special thanks to Joey Pecoraro for our theme song, Half Awake. If you appreciate this podcast and want more people to find it, kindly take a moment to rate, review, like, comment, and share on your platforms of choice. Of course, just because I am some therapist doesn't mean I'm your therapist. This podcast is not a substitute for medical advice. If you need help, ask your doctor or browse your local therapists online. And whatever you do next, please take care of yourself. Eat well, sleep well, move your body, get outside, and tell someone you love them. You're worth it.