#pseude

Having spent the past year experimenting on his friends and family (without their consent, of course) and probing just how far he could push an ego until it fought back, this liesmith finds that many Americans have grown accustomed to a person baring his soul and spilling his guts at the drop of a hat, and that baring and spilling is now so commonplace that it causes a stir if does not occur as expected. Instead of being a rare, cathartic event during which one party helps the other deal with or process a traumatic or important event, baring and spilling has become as routine as saying Thank You to a door held open out of politeness – if it does not occur, the person who refuses to bare and spill is looked upon with contempt, and treated with disdain. (This bad habit has an evil twin: that of saying “I Love You" 70 times a day to persons one doesn't really love quite enough to merit saying it to them constantly.) Taking his experiment one step further, the author has stopped baring and spilling to persons to whom he had previously talked unfettered about everything, which has lead to a variety of changes in a number of relationships.

In part, he blames daytime television shows for this overall shift in American habits; their tendency to thrust behavior previously reserved for the therapist's office before the eyes of emotionally-repressed Ynki housewives seems to have helped convince these women to search for the same kind of emotional release in their relationships with girlfriend and husband. (Rarely if ever do the daytime hosts warn of or outline the risks associated with undertaking psychological counseling on one's own.) Guests to these talk shows would routinely break down, releasing their pent-up angers and fears and joys and proclaiming how wonderfully purified they felt after having bared their souls. Housewives whose lives are often ruled by routine soon became addicted to the idea of release and emotional excitement without fully understanding the dangers associated with unassisted, amateur psychology. Some stones are best left unturned, and some secrets were never intended to leave the mental closets in which they reside, but the addiction to backyard pseudo-psychology grew, and spread; it has become so intricately enmeshed in our current society as to be one of its more common features. Today, we seldom accept statements at face value or respect the right of our counterpart to his modicum of privacy, preferring rather to keep prying and peeling back the layers until – for good or ill – we have peered into the tenderest folds of our victim's most dark and dismal core. (The author is guilty of this behavior, just like most other Americans.)

People who pry so incessantly rarely care about helping others lessen emotional turmoil or improve mental well-being; they care more about the power they feel watching a being just as fragile as they are flounder about before he descends into a spiritual malaise of his own making. How, though, might one avoid the trap of the pseudo-psychologist and maintain a pure and honest heart? By staying quiet, politely refusing to play along, and keeping one's business to oneself. We who understand the raw and awesome power of full disclosure, therefore, sparingly spill and barely bare; some beasts are simply best left chained.