Author’s note: Therapy Jeff has, as of April 22, posted an apology video on his Instagram account. It is worth noting that the original Threads post is still live, and that the same apology video has not been posted on any other platform. This post was written prior to the apology video, though it is my opinion that nothing in the post needs changed as a result of the apology. This is not meant to be a commentary on the apology, its timing or content.
Okay, for this next part, you’re going to need to imagine me sitting on a porch in a rocking chair, sounding 80 years old:
Back in my day, the days of my YOUTH, in the very early days of the internet and social media, we were cautioned as young adults to be careful about what we put online. Don’t share photos in your bathing suit, for instance, or getting wasted with your friends, because employers were bound to look at these things and they won’t hire you.
Then later on, as a business owner, being judicious about what we put online was about getting or losing or keeping clients. And while it IS truly astounding to me that some people feel comfortable sharing, from their whole-ass business account with their whole-ass business name, about the COVID vaccine being filled with 5G or Hillary Clinton being a lizard person, things have changed considerably from The Days Of My Internet Youth. First, while a whole lot of people mistakenly believe that “taking a stand online” while being associated with a business leads to “losing half your customers”, there’s never been any data to support this happening (ever).1 But also, there seems to be a sort of bell curve in extremes that is happening with online activity overall. In one camp, we have many millennials I know (myself included) who have become more guarded about what they share online, changing their usernames, removing identifying photos, not putting up pictures of their kids, culling their past posts…all in response to real fears about sharing data with tech companies, being doxxed online and losing your job, being cancelled, whatever.
And in another extreme, we’ve seen a lot of “oversharing” becoming pretty normal (as well as the repeated subculture backlash to it). Women pushing back against the idea that it’s not possible for a woman to be taken seriously as a professional while also celebrating their sexuality. People who own pillow companies ranting and raving on Newsmax. Complete strangers on the internet sharing things that make you wonder if the journal factory exploded, and how maybe we need to make shame popular again.
People are out in these streets baring, sharing it all. But is this a net positive? Are there some people, more specifically, some professions2 who need to be on social media…a little less?
Enter Therapy Jeff. If you do not know Therapy Jeff, he is a 45-year-old licensed marriage and family therapist in Portland, Oregon, who founded and, until recently, owned TherapyDen, a popular online directory to find a therapist. He is also a popular internet personality, boasting 3M followers on TikTok, and 1.5M on Instagram (that he swears call themselves “Jeffies” but wow I have never heard anyone call themselves that and I would mercilessly make fun of them if they did). There is some question about Therapy Jeff (and that is how I will continue to refer to him, more on that later) and his current situation: Some report that he closed his private practice in order to pursue being a “therapy influencer,” while an interview from early this year suggests that he still sees several clients per week, but has closed his caseload to new clients because he’s doing that paid therapy influencer thing.
There is also a longstanding whisper network about Therapy Jeff and some perhaps questionable personal behavior in the Portland dating pool. There are multiple alleged3 posts about him in the Portland “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” Facebook group, and several other “therapy influencers” and licensed therapy professionals have been calling him out for some time.
And this weekend, Therapy Jeff went and did something particularly unwise (stupid). After the recent (justified) outraged response at CNN uncovering a “rape academy,” along with other private group chats around “how to rape” a partner without them knowing, Therapy Jeff shared an ill-advised (dumb) post to his entire platform on Threads:
Now, to be clear, I believe that this topic is a complicated one. As someone with my own history as a victim of sexual violence, and having spent decades volunteering with organizations devoted to helping victims of sexual violence, but also organizations that work to rehabilitate criminal juveniles, I feel comfortable saying that the questions of rehabilitation and prevention are complicated ones that deserve real care, consideration, and deep thought.4
And they should be asked in rooms of professionals5 who do this work. Not in rooms of The Whole Internet.
But if that was Therapy Jeff’s only offense this weekend, a nuanced discourse could have been attempted.6 As it stands…this was not Therapy Jeff’s only offense this weekend. More receipts emerged, including one around a response he had to a question posed by a spicy content creator, asking people with penises about preferences for a specific sexual technique. The response he provided around his own preferences was, ahem, highly graphic (read at your own risk).
Now, of all the things I need to know about strangers on the internet, how they like their intimate bedroom scenes to play out is pretty high on the list of Things I Not Only Do Not Need to Know, But Wholly Prefer Not to Know.7 About a therapist dispensing therapy advice? This feels like a whole new animal. Which begs the question: Should people who work in professions that require licenses, which require oversight for ethics compliance & can strip people of their licenses for violations, be allowed to also be paid influencers and professional content creators? Maybe even beyond “allowed,” since late-stage capitalism waits for no one and everyone tryna get that bag…should it be considered a violation of ethics?
Prior to Therapy Jeff’s, ahem, disclosure, I’m not sure I would have even thought twice about this question. Had I been asked, I probably would have said something like:
From a marketing perspective, why shouldn’t they be allowed to be paid content creators? It’s a job, they’re marketing their services, this is one more way to promote their practice and attract new patients.
Like Therapy Jeff has said, licensed professionals creating therapy (or medical or law-related) content makes those things more accessible to an audience who may be underserved, underinformed, and not know where to begin.
And of course, as Therapy Jeff ALSO says, if licensed professionals aren’t making the content, SOMEONE will, right? For every guy out there telling young men to beat their faces with a hammer for more defined cheekbones, surely we also need another guy, a licensed professional, telling people that maybe put down the hammer and go to therapy instead?
Even from the, ahem, “sexual technique” angle, it could be argued that Therapy Jeff is a marriage therapist and may want to illustrate that he is Totally Cool talking about sex in marriage therapy, even if it seems shocking to the rest of us. He, uh, certainly seems to think there’s, um, nothing weird about it.
But then I started reading through The Discourse around these posts, much of it from other licensed therapy professionals, and I started wondering about my own arguments–what ARE the ethics of this, really? When a licensed professional in a specific field, especially in a field like therapy, is less “doing therapy” and is instead prioritizing being a paid content creator/influencer under the credibility of the authority his license lends him, where does some of this muddy area start to feel a little more like sludge than water? For instance:
While creating “therapy content” online could be an effective marketing tool for your practice, take it from me: Creating content at the scale required for a paid content creator is a LOT of work. There isn’t really a way to both “promote” your practice full-time and actually HAVE that practice full-time. So at some point, “promotion of services” gives way to “the promotion is the service.”
Maybe the content does make therapy (and other specialties) more accessible, but when we promote accessibility as the end goal with no guardrails, the impact can be detrimental. How many people do you know using therapy-speak in totally inaccurate ways, if not harmful and abusive ways? They’re learning it somewhere, and chances are, the people wielding it in harmful manners aren’t the ones actually going TO a therapist, so much as they’re deciding consuming enough “therapy content” makes them basically professionals.
There is also the ethical concern of this gray area that Therapy Jeff likes to invoke a LOT, which is, “I’m A therapist, but I’m not YOUR therapist.” Which, on its face, sounds reasonable…but what is the point of therapy content if you are not, to some degree, “giving” therapy (or at least advice) to your audience…while knowing nothing about them? While I’m not yet in school for it, it seems to me as a decades-long patient that a therapist’s job is to first listen and seek to understand BEFORE dispensing advice or guidance. Isn’t “creating therapy content” basically just skipping over that critical first directive? Doesn’t it mean that you’re creating content for people you don’t know, who aren’t your patients, and isn’t that, at the very least, irresponsible when you KNOW the power you have as a licensed authority in your space…when you’ve built your entire brand specifically to wield this very authority?
This last part is one of the biggest reasons that his sexually graphic (or any illicit content shared by a licensed professional) is highly problematic: There is a power dynamic created when someone is a licensed professional building a brand specifically rooted in that authority. It says, “I am important. I am qualified. I AM an authority in this space and my license shows that I have earned the right to be listened to.”
Therapy Jeff is, of course, allowed to Also Be A Human and want to respond to spicy questions online to make himself all tingly, but doing it from his professional brand platform, from a place of authority, is seriously questionable and highly inappropriate…especially when it could be seen by any of his patients, who have to go to a session and look him in the eye knowing something like his BUTTHOLE PREFERENCES. This is, of course, a real problem with licensed professionals sharing personal opinions in social media space at all - I can’t count how many times I have seen licensed therapists weigh in on sexual assault allegations in ways that blame the victim or suggest that it was shared responsibility. Your patients could see this. And if they’ve lived through this trauma, how do you expect them to trust, ever again, that you are listening to them without blaming them, that you are not offering guidance from a place of disbelief?
But finally, and most importantly, the reason this should be a conversation about ethics, is that we have to follow the money.
If you’ve been with me for a while, you’ve heard me repeat it over and over again: Professional content creators/influencers are paid for their content, and platforms pay them for that content based on the volume of engagement their content receives.
As Therapy Jeff says in his interview, some months he makes $3k and some months he makes $50k. Now, this admission is designed to convince us of the precariousness, the volatility of his choice to be a professional creator: He is somehow the vulnerable one here, since the platforms he’s on, or the audience he’s built, could decide at any point that his work is no longer worth it. “You are in charge here,” is the message. “I could simply not have a job tomorrow or pay my bills tomorrow because of your volatility.”
But the message BEHIND the message is one that I’m gonna pull back the curtain on: Some months he makes $3k. Some months he makes $50k. And the difference between those months is whether or not his audience found his content engaging. The difference is how many people interacted.
The real issue with this is that we see already, in our day-to-day (and as discussed in issue #2), people trying to get their content monetized are posting obviously terrible takes designed as ragebait, they’re stealing high-engaging posts and stories from other platforms and passing them off as their own, they’re creating “argument spaces” because they get more engagement…they pay the bills. We know that rage receives more engagement than joy. And more engagement is more money.
This is why we should be skeptical of ANY content created from ANY influencer or paid content creator. They are being paid not just to make content, but content that PERFORMS, that gets comments, likes, shares. Your interactions with their content translates to actual currency for them.
For a therapist, a doctor, a lawyer, a veterinarian, a dentist, any licensed professional reporting to a board of ethics: This is cause for concern. In this case, and in the case of any licensed professional monetized by platforms, creating content that gets them paid, Therapy Jeff’s “job” isn’t therapy or being a therapeutic professional. His job is being a performer, and one whose livelihood depends on “ratings,” as it were–even TV & film & stage performers are paid a flat rate for their talent & work. Therapy Jeff is paid on whether or not you engage with his content. And where post monetization fails because of low engagement, paid product or brand sponsorships and ads fill in the gaps (as well as individual consumers paying for his “premium content,” which…seems like exchanging money for access to a therapist?). We should be concerned about licensed professionals being paid to say a product or service is good8, because it begs the question: Is it actually true? Or does the money do the talking? And when they are leaning on the authority given to them by their license, it whispers the former in your ear while the latter fills their pocket.
Even for Therapy Jeff’s original hotline post quandary, people are understandably very upset and they’re telling him so…and he’s making money off their pain and anger. Already this hotline take has eclipsed all his other content on Threads. His other most popular posts hover barely under 1k comments; this one has 3.3k comments. His Threads account has fewer followers than all his other platforms (317K), but his account has seen 5M recent views. Even if his content is causing harm (and several commenters indicate that it is), there’s no reason for him to take it down; it’s a guaranteed payday for him.
When there is money to be made in engagement, when it is our job and how we pay our bills, trafficking in engagement, we are all human: It is easy to be inclined to say outrageous thing, highly controversial things we don’t even believe, or even harmful things that will pay those bills in a bigger way. It’s dangerous when it’s Joe Rogan or Clavicular, or when it’s Alex Jones claiming that he’s a “character” or Fox News hosts claiming that they aren’t sharing the news, they’re simply performing…it’s even more dangerous when it’s a licensed professional who has built an entire brand around people trusting his authority as a licensed professional.
Licensed professionals don’t need to be limited to their jobs as an identity. They are whole humans that have lives and interests and other passions and sex lives. But when they build their entire brand around their license AS an identity (like “Therapy Jeff”), there is more here to consider. It is a drum I beat constantly: We cannot both desire things like attention, power, influence, and then abdicate fault or responsibility when people heed that power and influence. Power does not come without taking responsibility for what happens when we wield said power, when our livelihoods depend on said power. To build a platform on “Trust me, bro” and then, when that person does trust you, to their own detriment, respond with, “Why’d you trust ME?? You don’t even know me!!” is disingenuous and irresponsible at best, but for a therapist, it’s simply not ethical. Therapists have a responsibility to their patients and the communities they serve, even when those communities are online, being served by “therapy content.” Maybe if it’s really about making therapy content more accessible to everyone, it should be a joint, communal effort, with many different kinds of therapists creating peer-reviewed, panel-approved content, put out under the umbrella of a governing body.
For now, I guess I’ll just stick to my own therapist, whose sex life I very gratefully know absolutely nothing about.
1i just gotta cook here for a minute: This take is dumb and bad and you should stop repeating it. It’s not rooted in any data, it never has been, it assumes that your audience is 50/50 on extremes of the political spectrum, that all of them would change their buying behavior based on the political statements of a brand, it assumes that you want customers not aligned with your values, and it assumes that you won’t gain MORE customers who ARE aligned with your values after taking a stand. ALL OF THOSE ASSUMPTIONS ARE BAD ONES
2like idk, heads of state
3alleged, because the group is a private one that bans sharing of information shared within the group
4harm reduction is a vast and complicated topic, as is restorative justice and abolition. as angela davis argued in “are prisons obsolete?”, much of the ideal setup in an abolitionist environment is only possible in structures that look nothing like the ones we live in now in the united states. it is also important to note that restorative justice AND abolition prioritize care for the victim, which was one of the chief complaints about this recommendation from Therapy Jeff: making care for the victims a priority was not on display here
5it is important to have these discussions in rooms of professionals if for no other reason than that each therapist has their own specialty, and therefore, their own universes of ignorance on certain topics that other professionals would be able to weigh in on WITHOUT causing harm to patients or feeding false stereotypes held by the general public. in this case, not only did Therapy Jeff not pay any respect to a “trauma-centered” approach, he also kept calling out “intrusive thoughts,” a hallmark condition of OCD. the implication in his statements, repeatedly, was that people with “intrusive thoughts” may act on them, and a hotline could be an intervention step. this is wholly untrue of people with intrusive thoughts, this idea that “thoughts lead to action”; as a matter of fact, it is part of the agonizing struggle so many of us with OCD face: the irrational fear that, because we think it, it must mean we will DO it. and that is absolutely, profoundly untrue. by posing this question to the public and not to other professionals who could fill in his ignorant spots, he reinforces and SPREADS negative and harmful stereotypes about OCD and people who have intrusive thoughts, further marginalizing an already seriously misunderstood diagnosis, as well as potentially activating readers with OCD to worry (and consequently obsess) over whether their intrusive thoughts will become action.
oh and also, he’s a professional and it’s concerning that he needs to Whole-Internet-Crowdsource this information.
6let me just pretend like this was ever a possibility please
7i think it’s safe to say that things like “butthole preferences” should stick under the “solicited” category of information vs the “unsolicited/passive scrolling” category of information
8i understand that the common argument about this is, “well what if they really believe in the product and they use it themselves?” then i want to see them using it without a paid sponsorship. do you really think selena gomez uses grocery-store-shelf shampoo brands on her hair? do you think lisa vanderpump and kelly clarkson fill their homes with wayfair furniture? so why would you assume that a doctor really uses the supplement they’re shilling?