Are you doing the work? Do you need time to heal? Are you showing up for yourself? Do you hold space? Is it a safe space? Do you feel triggered? Are you an empath? Or co-dependent? Maybe you’re processing trauma? Whether I’m talking your language or making your eyes roll to the back of your head it’s impossible to deny that we’ve reached peak therapy speak.
Words and phrases borrowed from therapy have moved out of clinical settings and become mainstream, peppering hashtags, headlines and heated arguments. It’s everywhere from Prince Harry’s memoir to Taylor Swift’s lyrics and Emma Watson’s 22rd Instagram birthday post. Even Holly Willoughby spoke of “a desire to heal” when she returned to her role at This Morning in the wake of her former co-host Phillip Schofield’s revelations that he had lied about his relationship with a much younger colleague.
“We are therapising our intimate relationships, stripping them of warmth and compassion, reducing important heart-to-heart conversations to what it would look like as a 20 second reel created by a mental health professional on TikTok or Instagram,” says Dr Smriti Joshi, clinical psychologist at mental health app Wysa, who points towards recent research showing that 33 percent of young people would seek mental health support from TikTok compared to 25 percent from CAMHS support and 21 percent from teachers.
“The challenge also comes when unregulated social media uses therapy terms, as we start to believe they are valid and safe, but they may not be.” It seems we can’t get enough of words such as trauma, boundaries, narcissism and healing – applying them liberally to any situation we fancy in the name of self-care: they’re seductive, loaded with a sense of authority, drama, depth and in many examples, implied moral superiority. You can’t just dislike anyone — they must be toxic while disagreements frequently end with accusations of gaslighting.
To question the proliferation of therapy speak can — if Twitter is anything to go by – be interpreted as abusive, or the sort of thing Jeremy Clarkson might do. Yet the tide is turning. Last summer The Washington Post ran a story entitled ‘Online creators are de facto therapists for millions. It’s complicated’. Then ‘templates’ of how to break up with people in the name of self-care began popping up on TikTok – most notably a video by New York-based clinical psychologist Dr Arianna Brandolini in which she recommended using phrases such as “I’ve treasured our season of friendship, but we’re moving in different directions in life… I don’t have the capacity to invest in our friendship any longer”. Her advice was slammed by viewers for being “heartless” and sounding like an HR memo, which suggested that therapy speak loses its lustre when we’re on the receiving end. This year a viral piece called ‘Is Therapy-Speak Making Us Selfish’ by author Rebecca Fishbein hit a nerve.
For the most part, critics of therapy speak aren’t against what these words and phrases fundamentally mean or the need for therapy to exist. Given 1 in 4 people in the UK experience a mental health problem each year, the language used by psychotherapists or psychiatrists within a professional setting is necessary. Rejecting burnout culture and behaviour that once we’d silently put up with - misogyny, sexual abuse, bullying, racism – and categorising the impact of such incidents is long overdue. For many people the lexicon of therapy has provided a way to adequately voice their experiences.
As Dr Khanya Price-Evans, a consultant psychologist says, “there is a lot of genuine distress and the world’s quite a lonely place; is therapy speak a way to engage people and connect?”
But, there is the sense that we are increasingly in thrall to an endemic language of trauma: it is overused, misunderstood and semantically stretched by unqualified people in everyday situations, shoring up a culture of pathologising everything or facilitating selfishness and irresponsibility. We can’t even agree on what constitutes terms such as ‘trauma’, ‘violence’ or ‘abuse’. Alice*, 35, lent her friend of 20 years “a lot” of money only for the friend to become evasive about repayment to the point that she stopped communicating. “She said she felt harassed by me and not entering into dialogue was an essential boundary put in place for her own safety,” says Alice. “I was like, OK, but what about my right to have a straight answer about where my money is? Am I abusive – which is what she called me – or is she manipulative? Like, how convenient, you have put up a boundary which absolves you of accountability.”
Therapy speak is overused, misunderstood and semantically stretched by unqualified people in everyday situations
Dr Price-Evans acknowledges that ‘boundaries’ have become a particular problem. “[Boundaries] were once used therapeutically as tools but can now be used selfishly when people simply don’t want to do something,” she says. “The rigidity of [boundaries] has become very crude. Interrelation and interpersonal boundaries [as opposed to fixed cultural boundaries] used to be gentle perimeters - more flexible - but they have become this extremely blunt tool.” So, who ‘wins’ when two boundaries clash? “In those situations you have to ask, is your boundary more important than the relationship?” says psychotherapist and author Hilda Burke.
While therapy speak used indiscriminately in the wild breeds confusion, with many words hackneyed beyond definition, we persist using them because they invoke morality, while simultaneously protecting us from judgement, guilt or obligation. It seems there is always a word to excuse self-serving or obnoxious behaviours.
This resonates for Burke, who believes people increasingly use therapy speak as a shield. “It seems like it can’t be challenged because it brings a patina of validity,” she says. There is also evidence that therapy speak has been weaponised – just look at the pervasive way we diagnose people as narcissists and sociopaths and speak of having been gas lit without any regard for or understanding of the clinical criterion.
“Very few of us are qualified to make judgements on what mental health or behavioural issues people have,” says Burke. “I see therapy speak misapplied and people with no training or authority misdiagnosing themselves or others. It’s not helpful.”
It does however speak to a trend in cutthroat absolutism – reducing life to victim vs villain narratives in which we are desperate to prescribe, to diagnose, to identify. We don’t want to sit with the grey and complex landscape of nuance. Psychologists know that stress eases when we blame other people for our pain. But we risk robbing ourselves of agency and self-reflection while forgetting that no one views the same scenario in the same way.
Every expert I spoke to stated that prioritising one’s own needs was not selfish, but they also agreed that life shared with other people is about flexibility, community and compromise. When it comes to the pursuit of self-care Dr Joshi explains that “The intent is key… is it a genuine need or a way to shut down or block out difficult conversations or conflicts?”
Is this the end for therapy-speak? Given a language’s prime purpose to communicate and help make sense of the world, these words are failing – and badly.
