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”).
