Against Therapy Speak

Just talk like a person!

Therapy speak is all the rage, particularly among Gen-Z, of which, despite my worldly wisdom, I am a card-carrying member! Gen-Z endlessly discusses boundaries, red-flags, gaslighting, self-care, holding space, and so on. What was once relegated to the offices of therapists has become mainstream and in vogue. (Unrelated: not being a paid subscriber is a boundary and a red flag—👏do👏 better.) Therapy speak has taken over the world. It is one of the core differences between how the younger generations communicate and how the older ones do.

And yes, I know, half of substack has already complained about it in some form or another! But it’s irritating enough that I shall add to the chorus of voices complaining. Therapy language should be restricted to the therapy room! If you’re not a psychologist, you shouldn’t sound like one!

Therapy speak warps people’s interpretations of various interactions. If you have a friend who is doing something annoying, it’s not just annoying. No, it’s a boundary violation. They have violated a boundary. You have drawn a clear line (no chemical weapons in Syria) and they have violated it (by gassing the Kurds) (okay, actually that’s a pretty legitimate boundary!). You have every right to be angry! They haven’t just done something slightly objectionable—no, they have induced trauma!

If you disagree with someone’s interpretation of an event, you aren’t just wrong. You are gaslighting. You are trying to trick them into thinking they’re crazy. You are a demon from the pit of hell (well, probably hell has multiple pits, but you are from at least one of them), designed to fool those of sound mind into thinking they are not of sound mind. And so on.

(Which is to say, if you think someone is gaslighting you, you are imagining it—and should probably see a shrink!)

I think that the therapy-speak linguistic infestation is pretty bad! Were I able to unilaterally dictate Gen-Z linguistic norms, I would get rid of therapy-speak in an instant, probably while changing such norms to be more shrimp related (I haven’t yet decided how I’d tie in shrimp welfare to standard norms of discourse, but you know I would find a way.) Therapy speak has a variety of concrete downsides, aside from just being irritating!

First of all, therapy speak pathologizes normal interactions. Each of the instances of therapy speak that has entered our public lexicon—gaslighting, gatekeeping, violating boundaries—denotes a serious violation of norms. To gaslight is not a minor offense. You haven’t just been overzealous in your disagreement. No, you have done something evil, something for which you must repent.

But most human interactions aren’t like that. Most infractions are minor. The solution to problems is not generally to bring the linguistic equivalent of a nuclear bomb to a minor disagreement, but instead to explain to the person with whom you have conflict why you didn’t like what they did. The following, though too often the standard approach, is a recipe for complete disaster:

1. Have an ambiguous term that describes conduct which often resembles normal human conduct.

2. Throw that term around with great frequency.

3. Treat having that term applied to you as being a capital offense.

This is how therapy speak normally plays out. People never say “so and so provided a slightly misleading picture, but it did not rise to the level of gaslighting.” No, it is always gaslighting or something similarly nefarious. Gradations of wrongness are ignored.

But gradations of wrongness are important. Disagreeing with someone’s interpretation of events is not an unpardonable sin, but instead a quite banal feature of ordinary interaction. If people pattern-match normal disagreement with trying to trick people into thinking they’re crazy, then they are far less likely to dispassionately and reasonably evaluate disputes with others on their merits. By dramatically raising the stakes of an argument, the odds of an amicable resolution drop dramatically.

A second major downside of therapy speak is that when people think of everything through the lens of a therapist, this often results in blowing one’s own problems out of proportion. Rather than thinking “I’m nervous about this upcoming event,” people think “I have anxiety about this upcoming event.” Anxiety isn’t mere nervousness, but instead something very serious, something that needs to be addressed.

Excessively focusing on one’s dread of an event makes one dread the event more. The reason children get so distressed about upcoming shots is not typically that shots are wildly unpleasant. It’s instead that, because they get terrified about the upcoming shot, they focus on it excessively, as if getting a shot is akin to being beheaded. Only a small portion of the misery comes from the shot itself—most comes from the anticipation of the shot. If you excessively fixate on things that are a bit unpleasant, you will inevitably find these things more and more unpleasant, until they escalate to a horrifying crescendo of misery.

If there’s something unpleasant coming up, it’s wise not to think about it too much. But therapy speak encourages people to both linguistically throw the upcoming event out of proportion—describing it as a source of trauma—and reflect on it endlessly. This is not a recipe for tranquility. Children would surely hate shots even more than they already do if adults described them as deeply traumatizing, told them to reflect on the trauma of shots before having them, and worried constantly about various innocuous bits of the world reminding people of the unpleasantness of shots.

It’s no wonder that 72% of Gen-Z girls said “mental health challenges are an important part of my identity.” Just like getting people to constantly think about race makes them more racist, getting people to constantly think about mental health makes their mental health worse. The more one pathologizes a problem, the more severe that problem becomes.

Note: I’m not against therapists using therapy speak. Some things really are traumatizing, and therapy can help people deal with trauma. But one should only use such language when describing things that are genuinely traumatizing—genuinely within the purview of a therapist. As an analogy, I’m in favor of doctors sometimes performing amputations, but I wouldn’t favor random amateurs with no training doing it routinely, whenever they have a disagreement with someone!

The third big problem with the widespread use of therapy speak is that it can be used to justify any behavior, no matter how bad! For example, suppose that you pull a John Edwards and have an extra-marital affair while your terminally-ill wife is dying. There are plenty of items of therapy speak that can be marshalled in favor of such behavior. Edwards was engaged in self-care/taking time for himself/burnt out/preserving his mental and emotional well-being/being in touch with his inner needs.

And yes, in some sense he was doing all those things. But the fact that you are doing something for your own well-being does not give you unfettered license to do it! Most immoral things, in fact, are done for one’s own benefit!

Almost any instance of immoral activity can be justified using therapy speak. I asked Chat-GPT to do an impression of Jeffrey Dahmer using therapy speak to defend his cannibalism, and the result was pretty hilarious:

Hi. I’m Jeffrey, and I just want to say: I’m really working on living my truth.

You see, for a long time I suppressed a lot of my authentic self because of society’s very rigid and cannibalism-negative norms. But healing isn’t linear, and eventually, my inner child needed to feel safe enough to, well, eat other people.

I know that might sound “bad” to some folks, but I invite you to challenge that binary thinking. Instead of labeling behaviors as “good” or “evil,” what if we just noticed them? What if, instead of “murder,” we said I was creating non-consensual intimate space? What if “dismembering corpses” was just processing somatic trauma through hands-on work?

Let’s talk about boundaries. People kept trying to leave me. I had abandonment wounds. So I held space for them — literally, in the fridge. I wasn’t being controlling. I was creating secure attachment.

Was it perfect? No. But perfectionism is a trauma response.

And yes, I consumed people. But I’d argue we live in a society that constantly tells us to consume others — emotionally, sexually, economically. I just made that metaphor literal. In a way, I was critiquing capitalism.

I’m not asking for forgiveness — just compassionate witnessing. I need you to see the hurt little boy underneath the human bone altar.

Because at the end of the day, I wasn’t a monster.

I was neurodivergent, touch-starved, and practicing radical embodiment.

Now, in ordinary circumstances people do not use therapy speak to justify murderous cannibalism (people rarely go out of their way to justify murderous cannibalism, as they tend to keep their eccentric culinary habits a secret!) But I do think that people use therapy-speak to justify more minor infractions. Nearly any instance of selfish behavior can be justified by “taking time for oneself.” To give an example from a Grazia daily article titled “Has Therapy Speak Made Us All Rude People And Bad Friends?” (um, probably not, though maybe it has made some people rude and bad friends):

A friend of mine was recently seeing someone fairly consistently. They had plans to see each other again when all of a sudden, radio silence. After two weeks of unanswered calls and texts, my friend sent one last Hail Mary saying how rude this behavior was. The other person finally replied, citing a “bad mental health day” for the reason they ghosted. Let me be clear: I am in no way diminishing mental health issues. I am simply asking at what point we have allowed this vernacular to eclipse all sense of human decency.

Now, I don’t think this is some grand crisis. It doesn’t mean that, as some writers have suggested, no one has a personality anymore (no one???). But it is, I think, one reason why Gen-Z is more miserable than previous generations, and one way that bad behavior is justified. Treating every issue in one’s life like a therapy problem causes lots of needless sadness. Therapy-speak should be confined to the office of a therapist. If you treat all your problems as sources of trauma, every infraction as gaslighting, every item of rudeness as narcissism, you are likely to end up needlessly miserable and alone.