#291: Josué, Lara, and Link discuss an article ‘Streamers are not your Therapist’ shared by a community member. We cover streamers, parasocial relationships, and how context matters to therapeutic relationships.

Josué Cardona 0:07
Welcome to GTradio on the Geek Therapy network, here at Geek Therapy, we believe that the best way to understand each other and ourselves is through the media we care about. My name is Josué Cardona, and I’m joined by Lara Taylor.

Lara Taylor 0:20
I never know, and never know why you gotta throw me off hey everyone.

Josué Cardona 0:25
and Link Keller?

Link Keller 0:27
Hello,

Josué Cardona 0:29
hello. Alright, so today we’re talking about an article that was shared with us by Bryce, who reached out to Geek Therapy on Facebook, and asked what we thought about this. It’s an article that says streamers are not your therapists on ritual motion. And I think we’ve talked about this in the in the past, it’s definitely worth talking about. Often, every now and then I think it’s, it’s a, it’s important. So I kind of gave Bryce my my thoughts about it. I’m, I’m curious what what you think about this article? Basically, or I can review it real quick, which is basically that, you know, the Let me see the headline says that the streamers you’ve been watching starts to feel more like a personal friend, someone you could ask for advice or confide in. And basically the author is saying like, don’t, don’t do that. Just stop. Just don’t streamers are not your therapist. I have feelings about about the about the, the author’s opinion on it, I have I have my own. So what do you what do you think in reaction to it?

Link Keller 1:48
I think it does, it does suck to ask strangers to be your therapist is not not a cool thing to do. And

Josué Cardona 1:56
why? Why?

Link Keller 2:01
Because you don’t have the context for that kind of relationship.

Josué Cardona 2:09
mmhmm.

Link Keller 2:10
your relationship with your therapists. I mean, granted the past year with COVID, everything’s been a little bit different. But traditionally, you have a space that is dedicated and a time that is dedicated to having that interpersonal relationship with your therapist, as opposed to them being available anytime that they are online. Is is very different. Also, most streamers aren’t trained to be therapists, that it’s not fair to ask people to do things that they aren’t trained in.

Josué Cardona 2:45
Also, Lara’s off the clock.

Lara Taylor 2:48
I am off the clock. I don’t give out therapy for free. Damn, yeah. Um, yeah. I mean, not only link you said, strangers aren’t your therapists, friends, aren’t your therapists. It’s not okay to just dump that on friends, too. So even if you go to your friend’s stream and start asking advice. That’s not necessarily good, either.

Josué Cardona 3:16
That’s, yeah, that’s where that’s where, right around there is where I started having. It gets complicated for me. Because you may have a relationship or some sort of relationship parasocial relationship right with, with a personality on on Twitch or a streamer or, you know, any anyone else who you see online and

Lara Taylor 3:39
a tiktoker

Josué Cardona 3:40
a tiktoker I think that relationship can be meaningful. And if they are in a in a place where they are going live and want to engage with the audience, then then yknow, like maybe, maybe we’re kind of maybe we’re not friends, friends, but we’re kind of, we’re friendly, right? Like, there is a relationship there. So we can talk about stuff, maybe we can confide. And that’s where I, I, I don’t know that. It’s always someone. I don’t know if that people are looking for a therapist, or the things that you would go to a therapist for when you’re engaging in those relationships, because a lot of those things you might just be going to a friend for. Right, right. It’s like you, my friend, I’m gonna go. I have a therapist, and I also have friends and I talked to my therapist. My therapist relationship is one thing and my friends. My friend relationships are very different. And we wouldn’t necessarily talk about the same thing or I wouldn’t expect the same things. But that’s where there’s like, there may be a line there may be something in there that does get. There are relationships with therapists that aren’t healthy in their relationships with friends that aren’t necessarily healthy and there are lines that we tend to cross. in both areas, there are boundaries there that often get violated, I guess is is a is a is the only word I can think of like you cross these lines. And it might it might be just, it may not be dangerous, necessarily. But if you can’t tell the difference, right? If it’s like, oh, I don’t know, like, I feel like my therapist is my friend, just like, my friends are my friends. And but they give me better advice? Like, I don’t know, it’s like, once you’re looking for, like, looking for advice is also like, depends on what you’re asking me advice about? Because I might ask

Link Keller 5:39
i feel like most therapists, I would say that they they don’t like to give advice. as a concept.

Lara Taylor 5:47
I don’t I don’t give advice.

Josué Cardona 5:50
I hope that is true. universally. It is it is not. But, but that’s a good point. That’s a very good point. But you’re still going with a problem, right? So like coming to someone with a problem or even asking for an opinion or thoughts or anything or? Yeah, it’s it’s that’s kind of where I have issues with that. I don’t disagree. streamers are definitely not your therapists. But what you’re looking for in those relationships or any parasocial relationship? Is, is Yep, there’s, there’s two sides there that we’ll get into. But that’s kind of what I what I told Bryce, when he wrote to us on on Facebook, it’s kind of my, my take on it.

Link Keller 6:38
I mean, I think that there are certainly, like rare instances where where people are, you know, outside of online, they’re friends and one of them streams. And then one of them always shows up to support that stream or whatever, and maybe having more intimate conversations in that space than you would otherwise. But I feel like for a majority of people, they are watching the streams of people they don’t know, personally. And so the parasocial relationship is is a big, big, big part of it. So

Josué Cardona 7:19
yeah, yeah. That’s it. What How would you define? We’ve done this a million times. But how would you define a parasocial relationship?

Link Keller 7:26
A relationship with a fictional or semi real character? That is, by function one directional.

Josué Cardona 7:41
Yeah. We just got a comment from gian, which we, you know,

Lara Taylor 7:50
in true gian fashion, it’s like a little mini novel. side of my

Josué Cardona 7:57
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So so I was gonna make a joke about that. Right. So we’ve been broadcasting on Twitch, right. And I don’t always announce that at the beginning of every episode. But pre podcast listeners, right, but we’re recording. We’re broadcasting live on Twitch. And, and I don’t know, I think there’s some amazing relationships that we’ve built through the Geek Therapy community through streaming through our discord through the Facebook group. And, I mean, I haven’t met in person, most people that I that I, that I appreciate so so much from the community. gian, we appreciate him so much that we can make fun of him. So we’re gonna do that. Now. He He is the reason why we started the f...