What sort of words do you think of when I mention the phrase “therapy speak”? Gaslighting? Trauma-dumping? Triggered? Even words like toxic, perhaps. Or, and this is a personal favourite: self-care. In recent years, these terms have started cropping up everywhere: on TikTok, Instagram and sometimes even in our personal lives, especially within romantic scenarios, where we have to balance another person’s “needs” against our own.
These shiny, businesslike phrases have become catch-all ways to describe the way others treat us, and how we ought to treat ourselves, ostensibly from the mouths of therapists. Words like “boundaries” have dominated headlines this month after alleged messages between the actor Jonah Hill and his ex-partner Sarah Brady were published online, in which he says she should not post pictures of herself in a bathing suit, go surfing with men, or have friendships that he doesn’t approve of, among other things, if they are to continue to have a relationship (demands that, to me, seem far-removed from anything a therapist might endorse as reasonable “boundaries”).
Therapy speak being used to justify poor behaviour in relationships is nothing new. But as these terms continue to proliferate, what seems to be missing from the conversation is the fact that many of them don’t seem to come from actual therapy at all. As someone who has cycled through three different therapists in as many years, I don’t recall a single moment in which words like “toxic”, “narcissist” or “gaslighting” were used in a session.
Hill was in therapy for many years – he released a film about it on Netflix, Stutz – but this doesn’t necessarily mean that therapy itself is responsible for the way he is said to have spoken to his ex-partner, nor that any therapist presented him with the tools.
Many of these terms do have early, important roots in psychotherapy – the word “triggered”, for example, was first used by psychologists as a way to describe those who were suffering from PTSD after the first world war, while the term “trauma-dumping” was widely popularised by psychotherapist Janina Fisher in her 2017 book Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors. But today’s therapy speak seems to have developed a life of its own online, entirely separate and unrelated to real-life therapeutic experiences.
Often peddled by TikTok life coaches and relationship influencers, these “internet terms” are used to endorse a brand of advice that essentially boils down to: “Don’t compromise, be selfish and immediately dump anyone who gives you even a hint of discomfort.”
Indeed, psychotherapist India Haylor says she is noticing a wider trend of boundaries becoming “misappropriated demands or ultimatums masquerading as ‘boundaries’”. “Healthy boundaries tend to be broader, more flexible, inclusive and respectful and will include propositions such as gratitude, open communication, space and honesty,” she says. “I would also suggest that they are, above all, requests and not demands.”
From my own experience, therapy rarely focuses on the behaviour of another person, but rather how that behaviour might have made you feel, and why. Some of my most enlightening sessions have been when I have been led to my own conclusions. Therapy doesn’t usually resemble Ted talks whereby you are instructed how to “cut off toxic people” who are “trauma-dumping” on your “self-care” day (in the same way a TikTok video might).
Psychotherapist and author Susie Orbach thinks that we ought to avoid using terms like “therapy speak” altogether, simply because so many of these words have become “like psychobabble”. Every therapist will have their own specific way of relating to their client, Orbach explains. There is no one-size-fits-all approach.
“Therapy is about finding the right words between you and the person you are working with: hearing her or his or their words, and the inflections and timbres and being aware of what is and can’t be said,” she tells me. The idea of therapy speak, then, doesn’t really align with the nature of therapy to begin with, which is a specific relationship between the client and therapist, with its own particularities and context.
Even outside romantic relationships, terms like “boundaries” and “holding space” have led plenty of people to approach their interpersonal relationships like business transactions. We might cut people out of our lives prematurely after a single disagreement, or consider regular support as too much “emotional labour”. Therapy speak offers an odd way of relating to one another, prizing disconnection over the messy ebb and flow of real life. It’s rife, yes, but let’s not pretend that actual therapy is at the crux of it.
Daisy Jones is a writer and author of All the Things She Said
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
