Swipes make my blood boil.
You know the ones: ten tidy squares, soft colors, a bold headline promising emotional enlightenment.
“5 Signs You’re an Empath.”
“7 Ways to Regulate Your Nervous System.”
“3 Steps to Stop People Pleasing.”
Yuck. Please.
Apparently the tangled, contradictory work of being human can now be digested before someone finishes their coffee. Just swipe through and voilà—trauma resolved.
Clean, efficient and algorithm-approved. But life doesn’t work like that.
People are messy. Stories wander. And most of our healing is not something we’d want to post, but rather, tend to in private.
But what really gets under my skin is how profoundly impersonal swipes are. Something deeply human gets turned into content. The complexity of being alive gets flattened into pastel squares engineered to travel neatly through an algorithm.
And the more you swipe, the more “engaged” you are online—while often becoming less engaged with your actual life.
Swipe culture calls that connection, but I call it disconnection.
Therapy isn’t swipeable.
In therapy, no one knows what the next sentence will be. The deeper parts of being human refuse to cooperate with swipe culture—or fit neatly inside a graphic.
In fact, therapy invites the opposite.
We are encouraged to show up as our least polished, least curated versions of ourselves. Messy. Uncertain. Unfiltered.
It can be frightening, and also a little miraculous.
Because somewhere in that unedited space, without the graphics, the headlines, the tidy summaries, something real finally has room to emerge.