Notes On… Therapy as Camp

Therapy, like camp, is an exaggeration of real life meant to reveal a deeper truth.
It’s a performance of honesty inside a performance of structure.
It is both earnest and stylized, both deeply sincere and quietly theatrical.

A client enters the room playing the role they’ve always played:
The Good One.
The Angry One.
The Bitch.
The Broken.
The Healer.
The Villain.

And therapy, like camp, asks:
What if we lean into the role just enough to expose its edges?
What if we name the costume?
What if we adore it for its survival brilliance, even as we start to slip it off?

Camp, as Susan Sontag wrote, is about love of artifice.
But in therapy, we love the artifice not to preserve it, but to compassionately dismantle it.

We don’t laugh at the defense.
We fall in love with its necessity.
We don’t mock the dramatics.
We witness the pain that made the dramatics essential.

In this sense, therapy is the highest camp.
It is exaggeration used to unearth authenticity.
It is stylized survival slowly turning back into spontaneity.
It is a sacred stage where you get to try on new ways of being-awkwardly, extravagantly, earnestly.

Camp knows that seriousness and absurdity are never far apart.
So does good therapy.
The moment someone bursts into tears laughing at their own ancient pattern?
The moment a truth slips out sideways in a joke?
The moment a client says, "This feels ridiculous,” we say, "Yes. And you're still safe."

That’s camp.
That’s healing.

Therapy honors the drama without getting swallowed by it.
It allows the performance until the performer feels safe enough to step down from the stage.

Because underneath every defense is desire.
Underneath every performance is presence.
Underneath every carefully crafted identity is a person who just wants to be loved without auditioning.

It doesn't strip away the costumes by force.
It lets the client choose,
moment by moment, layer by layer,
to come as they are.

And when they do, it’s the most beautiful, subversive, holy performance of all:
Being human, without apology.