Therapy speak isn’t selfish, but who’s it serving?

“Our focus on categorising it as good and bad or right and wrong is dancing around the real core of this issue.”

Type ‘therapy-speak’ into your Google search bar and you’ll find a suggested word: ‘selfish’. Click enter and you’ll find a sea of think pieces that have labelled therapy-speak as “downright hurtful” or “unbearable”. Therapy speak is a tool taken from the clinic couch and popularised online, first made famous by a notorious 2019 Twitter thread.

With a conversation framework for when you can’t ‘hold appropriate space’ for someone else’s emotions, therapy speak has remained an evolving part of our online language. For anyone craving introspection or an escape from being trauma-dumped, therapy speak is essential, giving us the legitimacy of pop psychology to diffuse unwanted attention or uncomfortable moments.

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But when our lives have no space left to hold for loved ones, that’s when it becomes a concern. In its essence, therapy speak equips us to protect our own peace, giving us the permission to actually make the boundaries we need. The perfect ammunition for the political right’s cries of ‘cotton wool culture’, therapy speak has naturally sparked controversy – most recently, in the form of reported text messages between actor Jonah Hill and his ex-girlfriend, Sarah Brady. 

“Surfing with men”, “posting pictures of yourself in a bathing suit” and “friendships with women who are in unstable places” are among the list of ‘boundaries’ Jonah allegedly sent to Sarah. She posted this text, among others, as a “warning to all girls” with partners who may be weaponising therapy speak as a form of emotional manipulation.

Our focus on categorising it as good and bad or right and wrong is dancing around the real core of this issue. Why are people craving emotional peace and quiet? The trend of therapy speak isn’t isolated to heterosexual romance – it’s becoming an increasingly common tool in our platonic, professional and interpersonal lives.

It’s too simple to say we’re all just overindulging in our emotional crutches. After the last few years, needing ‘more space’ in our relationships seems ironic. We’ve spent years of lockdowns with nothing but too much space.

It’s likely our current reality isn’t affording us the room to accept one another’s humanness. In fact, we can barely deal with our own. Stress levels and financial strain are increasing. Our lives demand a much higher emotional output than ever before as we overdose on information from new perspectives with every swipe.

Therapy speak isn’t a lazy cop-out. Most of the time, it’s an honest statement about our emotional reality. We simply don’t have it in us to be there for one another as we struggle to be there for ourselves. Now we actually have the vocabulary to opt out of life’s hard moments and steer clear of exhausting conflict. 

Sadly, it’s the connection that ends up as the casualty. Our rising stress rates are joined by rising rates of loneliness. Community continues on its steady decline as people report feeling more disconnected than ever.

This is the heart of therapy-speak’s tragedy: as our lives get worse, we’re also opting out of the moments that have the most proven chance of making them better. The emotional work of relationships is the line item to cut as our free time lessens and emotional endurance weakens.

In our moments of doom scroll fatigue and disillusionment fever, our reliance on therapy speak means we aren’t authentically connecting over our lived experiences. Instead, we’re suffering in silence as we mistake emotions for burdens. Our lack of exposure to one another’s emotions could make us feel like those around us aren’t experiencing or maybe aren’t entitled to the same thoughts, stresses and struggles.

As warned by therapist Lori Gottlieb in her conversation with The New Yorker, therapy speak runs the risk of transforming a “deeply relational, nuanced, contextual process [into something] ego-directed, as if the point were always, ‘I’m the most important person and I need to take care of myself’.”

When this becomes the standard, we say goodbye to the conversations we need to have for us to thrive. We cut off the chances of collaboration, resolution and support. Instead, we operate in silos. 

Dependence on it could take the connection out of our lives – the one thing that tends to be our saving grace. Our culture is already bordering on an era of hyperindividualism, and cutting ourselves off from experiencing one another’s humanity isn’t going to be the cure. The practice of therapy speak isn’t as selfish as it’s been painted, but that doesn’t mean it’s our saviour either.

For more on therapy speak, head here.