Vomit, Values, and the Mid-80s Escape Hatch
Steven C. Hayes will tell you the zeitgeist of the mid-1980s was a gift. What he won’t say out loud is that it was a get-out-of-jail-free card. Back when MTV was splicing together music videos and wheat grass juice was billed as a revolution, he was busy repackaging aversion therapy — yes, the kind that made gay men gag into buckets — as something nobler. He misunderstood what it meant to be gay, then misunderstood what it meant to have “values.”
But in Hayes-land, misunderstanding is half the fun. If you can’t define what you’re doing, you can brand it. Call it “flexibility.” Call it “values.” Call it whatever the insurance companies will reimburse. The philosophy? A thin layer of Machiavellian glaze: keep the jargon thick enough and no one will notice you’re skating on vomit.
The Great Values Switcheroo
“Values,” in Hayes’ rhetoric, is not about ethics or love or that old-fashioned thing where people stand for something. It’s about maneuverability. Think of it as psychological parkour: vaulting over evidence, flipping off accountability, and landing in a grant application with both feet planted in “innovation.” Flexibility, in this frame, doesn’t mean adjusting to reality — it means reality adjusting to you.
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If that sounds like Machiavelli in a lab coat, that’s because it is. Hayes didn’t stumble onto moral philosophy by accident. He recognized the market wanted therapy that sold as liberation but billed like medication. A flexible therapy is a therapy that never has to admit failure. If patients deteriorate? That’s their “journey.” If the model doesn’t replicate? That’s “context.”
The Mid-80s Zeitgeist: A Fog Machine for Responsibility
It’s important to clock the timing. By the mid-80s, the APA was sweeping its history of pathologizing homosexuality under the rug. The culture was chasing “authenticity” in aerobics tights. If you said “paradigm shift” with enough conviction, people gave you tenure. Hayes used that fog machine to walk right off the stage, leaving behind the mess of vomit buckets and calling it “progress.”
The thing about zeitgeist is that it can be misused. Wheat grass juice was supposed to cleanse your liver, not your conscience. Hayes mistook the haze for absolution.
Image as Method
Underneath it all is a simple trick: the science never quite matches the stagecraft. Hayes talks about himself as though he is both the patient and the prophet, revisiting his past “panic attacks” like they were the Dead Sea Scrolls of psychology. It’s therapy as self-branding, research as performance art, science as marketing deck.
And if you think that sounds harsh, remember: this is a man who managed to turn gag-inducing aversion experiments into a lifelong career about “acceptance.” That’s not just reframing. That’s spin at Mach-speed.
