Exquisitely Dangerous
Click here to listen to the New Books Network interview with Judith & Elizabeth
Judith: Your language in this book, just your titles, like Angerland….Cheer up Love, Professional Cannibalism, Guillotine Logic, Don’t Get Defensive, Revenge Therapy, MILF Therapy…Oh this one, Stop Dancing for Daddy….talk to me about language and finding a common language or not.
Elizabeth: I’m an interdisciplinary writer and people always say oooh that’s really exciting but people mishear you and it’s hard to get published …..speaking politically and freely has become a lot less attractive to all of us so people speak in code all the time and we don’t call it in the way we used to bravely do. My language is heavily influenced by experience of being an organizer in the former soviet union in the 1990s which is that ridicule is the only way of dealing with authoritarianism. Also finding the human as quickly as you can…I used to be a very heavy smoker and spent a lot of time in trade union smoking rooms and they are the funniest places in the whole universe because like therapists, trade unionists come from the shadows…they don’t think people are ‘nice’..
Judith: Right
Elizabeth: But if you’ve ever been part of industrial action you also know that you never know who is going to show up for you – you never know who that person is going to be …So from an organizer’s perspective using this playful but provocative language it really is interesting what happens. About who comes to you, who rejects you, who hates it, who loves it, who engages – it’s not the people that you think. I genuinely wrote this book for therapists to be able to take to their supervision groups and say ‘I don’t like this, I like this, can we talk about this please?’ - to open up a discussion. In trade union education the first thing you do is not tell people what their problems are, it’s to ask them in their own words what their lives are like and what the solutions are, it’s to open it up and say in your own words what is the problem, much like therapy…..having the confidence in each other to describe our own experience as the most important indicator of what’s wrong…..it is very powerful to open up these conversations.”
The year after a book is published is the tumbleweed era – as people buy the book and it sits on that pile of books, vying for precious attention. Then the first thing someone says about your book on Linkedin is that it’s too fat, or too small, not enough/too much and an obligatory list of whaddabouts and what ifs. At the same time friends and publishers get increasingly annoyed at your neglectful disassociation from your own book, as you watch with undiluted envy the cool-kid authors maintaining that they don’t do publicity.
I guess if you are reading this blog you know I have an inherent ambivalence about my own likeability and whether anyone will ever read UberTherapy. But it’s also that there has never been a time when talking critically about AI and platformization, as an un-influencer woman opens you up to the seventh circle of dialogic hell. So as the AI wildfires started to burn at the end of last year when the book came out and we started to take sides on whether Claude can do therapy better than humans, I did kind of want to put a wet blanket over my head and run.
Then people start to read UberTherapy. Not the people I expected or necessarily know and then nine months in you do your first book launch and interviews and people start talking about you and your book baby.
Gulp.
And then one day therapists - mainly in the US right now where UberTherapy is an undeniable reality - start to read the book. Some have started to take it to their supervisions and CPD and then someone says something nice about you and it feels like your book might have legs and the feet to hit the professional ground running.
A few weeks ago, just as I was about to put a match to my Linkedin profile as I promoted the book’s online launch, a US therapist who I don’t know describes my book as ‘exquisitely dangerous’ and I have the entirely unique experience of being seen on Linkedin.
I’m just going to say it, I’m not remotely humbled. I am full of joy that the book could resonate with some people who have read it, enough to open up a debate about money, shit and shame and the trajectory of uberization in therapy.
What I have learned so far is that every interaction about my book has its own quality. In the case of this discussion with New Books Network talking to Judith was both hilarious, rude and very much two women of a certain age being open to taking their gloves off (or lace cuffs and corsets if you accept the metaphor of therapy existing in Versailles pre-revolution).
Thank you to the therapists who are reading the book, talking about it and taking it on the chin that its time to talk about UberTherapy. There is something exquisitely dangerous about resisting the guillotine logic of AI and saying what is on our minds.
Enormous thanks to Judith and to Justin who did my first generous interviews allowing me to say things the way I wanted to. To James and Martin for treating me like a welcome equal in a discussion about The Great Uberization. To Robert, Jumanah and Claudia for starting the discussion at The Relational School with therapists in the UK. To Andrew and Linda for doing my one and only actual book launch during a heatwave and engaging deeply and critically with the ideas in the book. To Jumanah, Taylor, Julia, Miguel, Jonny, Linda and Andy for taking the time to read and write and for encouraging other therapists to take the risk of engaging with UberTherapy.
To follow the debates about UberTherapy go here uber-therapy.org.
If you’re an UberTherapist and want to be part of a MuchBetterHelp launching in September 2026 join our mailing list here.
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@UberTherapy.bsky.social @ubertherapies