Jason Shepherd

Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist from USA, currently living in UK. I specialize in Narrative Therapy and working with the LGBTQ+ community. (He/him)

[Jason Shepherd @JShepherdLMFT]

Hi, everyone! I'm a Narrative therapist from the USA, currently living in the UK. I've created this account to help me develop more of an online presence, and to give myself a space to discuss my thoughts on mental health and social justice.

[Jason Shepherd @JShepherdLMFT]

My heart is filled with so much grief and anger right now. I implore everyone who feels the same: please, please don't give up hope. When things get this bad, we've got to hold on to each other and help pull one another through. We will fight this and we will change things.

[Jason Shepherd @JShepherdLMFT]

@HeyTiffanyRoe Exactly.

[Tiffany Roe • Therapist @HeyTiffanyRoe]

No amount of external validation will give you self-worth. Self-worth is established through your own consistent loving self-care behaviors. Boundaries. Self-respect. Meeting your needs. Living aligned w/ your values. Self-compassion. Self-knowledge. Being a loving parent to u.

[Jason Shepherd @JShepherdLMFT]

You need and deserve gentleness, even if the people in your life don't give it to you. Give it to yourself, and then you'll never have to go without it.

[Jason Shepherd @JShepherdLMFT]

@DrGipps @JamesACMumford That's fair enough. I don't personally find much value in the "right/wrong", "good/bad" labels because, to me, they distract from what's actually important here--the suffering. But if we're just using different words to describe the same thing, then there's no real disagreement.

[Jason Shepherd @JShepherdLMFT]

@DrGipps @JamesACMumford experience, and if we measure based on that, we get what, to my mind, is a more stable metric for judgment, which is the actual consequences of those values put into action. (Of course, the complexity of consequence is its own issue, but that's for another day.)

[Jason Shepherd @JShepherdLMFT]

@DrGipps @JamesACMumford demonstrably aren't equal. I don't feel the need to label one set of values "good" and the other "bad", because I don't feel those labels are particularly useful; anyone can call anything "good" or "bad" based on how they feel about it. But what isn't as subjective is actual

[Jason Shepherd @JShepherdLMFT]

@DrGipps @JamesACMumford an absolute morality in that judgment.

[Jason Shepherd @JShepherdLMFT]

@DrGipps @JamesACMumford I mean, when you say "he shouldn't have valued what he did", the question that comes into my mind is, "why not?" And the obvious answer, to me, is "because that increased human suffering". Again, that seems like enough to me; I don't feel anything is missed by not including

[Jason Shepherd @JShepherdLMFT]

@DrGipps @JamesACMumford I guess I'm of two minds on that; on the one hand, I think the world would be a better place if we did, and on the other hand, I don't think I'm in a position to be making judgments on what others should and shouldn't aspire to. So, "yes, but", I guess.

[Jason Shepherd @JShepherdLMFT]

@DrGipps @JamesACMumford his family instead of his career. He uses the words "wrong value" to describe making his career the priority, but you could just as easily frame that as "prioritizing my career would cause more suffering for my family". That seems like a perfectly serviceable metric.

[Jason Shepherd @JShepherdLMFT]

@DrGipps @JamesACMumford It just means that when you make your choices around what values to orient your life towards, one of the factors influencing that choice is your estimation of the suffering those values cause (or alleviate)--which is exactly what he describes doing when he chooses to prioritize