Pages or listeners, I thought I would answer the patron questions.

Let's get to it.

This first question is from patron Manny.

She writes, Hey, Dr. Kirk, I got very upset this morning when reading this article on Refinery29.

Just getting to this article, it's called Has Attachment Theory Gone Too Far by Vicki Sprat, June of 2022.

Has Attachment Theory Gone Too Far.

Okay, I'm just going to read this and provide my thoughts.

So the article starts with a sort of lay person introduction into Attachment Theory.

Then it goes on to talk about how many people will witness, people throwing around attachment theory online, on TikTok,

while in conversations, while on dating apps.

They write about how you might hear someone say, Oh my God, I went out on a Tinder date with someone,

and he's so avoidant, or even just reading someone's profile, someone might say, Oh, that person sounds like they're very preoccupied.

So the lingo and the concepts of attachment theory and specifically attachment styles has infiltrated popular culture,

which this author says is uncomfortable to witness.

And what I'll say there is similar to my take on how people on TikTok will seemingly be acting as though they suffer from very different psychopathologies.

Most notably the associative identity disorder when they probably do not suffer from that disorder is my stance on that is that when we raise awareness, you know, me and others,

thousands of others within my field over the past several decades have been trying to raise awareness about psychopathology and attachment theory and mental issues and how psychotherapy can help and da da da.

And we have been successful. We have been successful in raising awareness and destigmatizing therapy for a lot of people. I think things are really different now in 2022 as opposed to when I first started out as a therapist.

I mean, I would say most people in the 90s when I told them that I was a therapist had a very, very uncomfortable reaction to me.

And whereas today people are like, Oh, I have a therapist this color. So now that's Seattle. It's obviously not the entire world.

But things are changing and it's because we've been advocating and speaking out about this for a long time.

So there's a benefit to that, but there are some side effects, if you will, to that benefit, which is that people will try to capitalize on the popularity by either believing they suffer from a disorder when they do not or by just flat out lying because they see people getting attention.

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