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Words like attachment styles, trauma, boundaries, and triggers have become commonplace among younger generations as therapy becomes more normalized and people learn a new vocabulary to express complex dynamics and relate in ways they may not have understood before. So, what could go wrong?
Unfortunately, a lot. The rapid rise of so-called therapy-speak has seen a dark turn as it has been linked to loneliness and ruined relationships, and it has been weaponized to justify manipulative behavior. Intrigued? Click through to learn more about the dangers of this widespread phenomenon.
“What you call therapy-speak, we used to call psychobabble—it's a new word for an old concept,” psychotherapist and relationship expert Esther Perel told Vanity Fair. Still, it has become more prevalent than ever before because, thankfully, therapy no longer has such a stigma.
Therapy has become a sign that someone is evolved, self-aware, and self-reflective. CNBC notes that a study from Hinge found 86% of daters are more likely to go out with someone a second time if the person mentioned they go to therapy on the first date.
With so much self-centered analysis, we risk neglecting the feelings of people around us. Perel explained, “There is such an emphasis on the 'self-care' aspect of it that is actually making us more isolated and more alone, because the focus is just on the self.”
There's a popular example shared on TikTok making fun of the unexpected downside of “protecting your peace” and “cutting out toxic people,” which shows people at home on yet another weekend, alone and bored.
Therapy-speak also provides intellectual, sterile terms to help people avoid any kind of conflict or discomfort because they claim they have “set a boundary” and are “honoring themselves.”
Even worse, communication can be shut down with inarguable terms like “gaslighting,” specifically when used by someone who simply doesn't like what another person is saying. “You have a different opinion, and I bring in a term that makes it impossible for you to even enter into a conversation with me,” Perel explained. “Labeling enables me to not have to deal with you.”
Many are also coming online to share the cold, wordy ways people are ending friendships because they no longer have "a capacity to invest," sounding more like an HR rep than a friend.
Things like love-bombing and narcissism are absolutely helpful to be aware of (and unfortunately quite common), yet equipping people with this false sense of being able to diagnose or label others can be much more harmful and leave a lasting emotional impact on a person.
These therapy phrases and terms are rooted in sincere, healthy, science-backed approaches to mental health, but they can also unfortunately become easily warped when people start taking advantage of them.
Many therapists chimed in after it was revealed that Jonah Hill claimed to be setting “boundaries” with his ex-girlfriend and professional surfer Sarah Brady because he felt “triggered,” though his boundaries included telling her not to surf with men, model, post pictures of herself in a bathing suit, or have friendships with women “who are in unstable places.”
Jeff Guenther, a licensed professional counselor from Portland, Oregon, explained in a viral video that Hill's therapy-speak “masks controlling behavior under a commonly accepted positive concept—in this case, boundaries—making it harder for the person on the receiving end (Sarah) to challenge it.”
Boundaries are not a free pass to dictate what a person can or can't do, or to infringe on someone else's autonomy or individuality, much less their career, friends, or profession. It's not a rule you can set for someone else to satisfy your insecurity.
Guenther explains, “A boundary is a healthy limit a person sets for themselves to protect their well-being and integrity. It is a rule or guideline that one creates to identify reasonable, safe, and permissible ways for others to behave towards them and how they'll respond when someone passes those limits.” Psychologist Danit Nitka wrote in Connect Psychology that, “It's about knowing where you end and others begin. Knowing what's yours and what's not.”
Unfortunately, Hill is far from the first or last person to use therapy-speak to try to justify controlling behavior. In the wake of the news, many women came forward detailing the emotional abuse they experienced using some of the very same terms.
A healthier, less manipulative approach in the Hill-Brady case would have been for the actor to express how Brady's actions made him feel without using ultimatums about what she should or shouldn't have done—and without shaming her for the very photos he initially liked. It's okay to express that certain things make you uncomfortable or insecure.
On the one hand, it's incredible that social media has normalized therapy for an entire generation. On the other hand, therapy is a highly nuanced and contextual conversation that is not meant to empower people to self-assess or assess others via 30-second videos.
It has never been easier to share our private feelings and have them affirmed by people online, giving the illusion of truth and validity. Part of a real therapist's job is to help validate a patient's feelings by listening, but it's also to let them know when they're expressing a false reality. With social media, the latter hardly occurs.
If social media is someone's only entry point into therapy, most of which strips nuance from complex psychological concepts, people are left with rough and often skewed ideas of complex terms which they then try to use on themselves and the people around them.
It's important to note that we cannot view therapy as proof that someone is healthy or sincere either. The sad truth is that many people can use therapy and the lingo they pick up there to justify their selfish or manipulative behavior.
What began as an attempt to learn specific vocabulary that could help us more accurately address our issues is backfiring as overuse and misuse drains these important concepts of their meaning. Our conversations are becoming muddled with vague, meaningless terms, or terms whose meaning has become warped.
Chatelaine spoke to psychologists Saunia Ahmad and Hillary McBride about often misused mental health terminology and their actual meanings. “Gaslighting” is sometimes misused when there's a difference in how two people perceive reality, but it's actually a specific kind of abuse aimed at making victims feel “crazy” and like they can't trust their own experience of violence, so that the violence can continue.
Increasing numbers of people are suspecting their partners of being narcissistic because they display a lack of empathy and an extreme self-importance, but narcissism is actually a rare personality disorder and the truth is that we've all demonstrated narcissistic traits in our lives.
Often used to describe a connection between people for having gone through a trauma together, trauma bonding is actually a deep, neurobiologically-driven emotional attachment between an abuser and their victim in which the victim continues on the relationship and even protects the abuser because the trauma bond makes them feel like their abuser is meeting their needs and providing for them.
Used colloquially as a way to say that you're not “over” something or that a memory still haunts you, PTSD is actually an exposure to real or threatened death, injury, or violence, which causes mood swings, flashbacks or nightmares, avoidance, and hypervigilance.
You may have heard it used to describe excessive cleanliness or orderliness, but it's actually a mental health disorder where a person experiences obsessions (distressing thoughts or urges) and/or compulsions (repetitive behaviors in response to an obsession).
Meg Walters at Refinery29 put it best, “Is the real appeal of therapy-speak that we seem to tidy things up so much that we are able to elevate ourselves above the thorniness and complexity of real emotion? That we can convince ourselves that nothing we feel or do is ever wrong?”
Walters adds that we can reframe canceling on someone last minute by telling ourselves that we're setting boundaries, or we can justify silencing a friend who is texting us in distress because we're reassessing our capacity. It also makes it impossible for people to call us out.
We are obviously in dire need of help to make sense of our emotions and process behaviors in a healthy form as our mental health is under constant attack. At the same time, older ways of making sense of the world and ourselves in it (i.e. religion) are falling out of favor, so people are turning to science.
Author Tara Isabella Burton cites Eva Illouz, a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in her New York Times piece to argue that the problem at the root of it all is that we have withdrawn too far into subjectivist individualism, which Illouz explains “means that our emotions have become the moral ground for our actions.” We essentially feel entitled to make demands or behave in certain ways purely because of our feelings.
As Burton writes, “The pursuit of private happiness has increasingly become culturally celebrated as the ultimate goal,” and becoming one's “authentic self” has become simply giving in to all of your desires and neglecting everyone else. Instead of jumping to isolation, we should try to work things out, take accountability, be present with our emotions, and embrace discomfort. It's much less lonely!
Sources: (Vanity Fair) (CNBC) (Connect Psychology) (Refinery29) (The New York Times) (Chatelaine)
The dangerous rise of "therapy-speak"
How our rapidly advancing vocabulary might actually be ruining our relationships
HEALTH Mental health
Words like attachment styles, trauma, boundaries, and triggers have become commonplace among younger generations as therapy becomes more normalized and people learn a new vocabulary to express complex dynamics and relate in ways they may not have understood before. So, what could go wrong?
Unfortunately, a lot. The rapid rise of so-called therapy-speak has seen a dark turn as it has been linked to loneliness and ruined relationships, and it has been weaponized to justify manipulative behavior. Intrigued? Click through to learn more about the dangers of this widespread phenomenon.