Have you been processing the mental load of insecure attachment? Is your emotional labor triggering a toxic trauma response? Did gaslighting shatter your coping mechanisms? Are you—shudder—“holding space”? If so, bad news: As a society, we have reached capacity for therapyspeak, the mealymouthed argot of a million self-assured TikTokers.
You don’t need a BetterHelp membership—or even a trial code lifted from a podcast ad—to be inundated with confidently declaimed pseudo-psychology. It seems to be in the ether, popping up everywhere from mandatory corporate trainings to preschool classrooms. But while it may be cute to hear a toddler sing a song about the importance of setting boundaries, it’s a lot less cute to hear an adult speaking like a toddler: mannered but firm, ignorant yet utterly convinced of their own righteousness.
There’s an old meme about how straight men would rather do literally anything—get really into Civil War reenactments; punch a side of beef, then run up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art; close the Strait of Hormuz—than go to therapy. For the first time in my life, I regretfully have to hand it to straight men.
Like many terrible things, we can blame therapyspeak on America’s stupidest decade: the 1970s. Back then, it was called psychobabble, but it wasn’t any less annoying; think long-haired waifs in enormous glasses yapping endlessly about the wisdom of their analysts. The concept survived the hedonistic ’80s, the grimy ’90s, and the low-rise aughts only to reemerge in the social media age with a new name and a more sinister purpose. Therapyspeak devotees believe that slinging around terms like “pathologizing” and “compartmentalizing” signifies their own deep emotional intelligence—a quality that their mind has inextricably linked with moral superiority.
Isn’t it odd, though, that the most selfish people you know always seem to be the ones who are armchair diagnosing their friends and family with personality disorders? I’m reminded of the minor scandal that erupted a few years ago when an A-list actor allegedly wrote private messages to his then girlfriend telling her that if she needed to post photos of herself in a bathing suit, he was not the right partner for her. Elsewhere he wrote, “I’d love to know before the premiere so I’m not put in the position of publicly flaunting our love if my boundaries are going to be continued to be disrespected. That would be hurtful and triggering for me.” The girlfriend was a professional surfer; the bathing suit photos were, for her, evidence of another day at the office.
And that’s the real problem with therapyspeak. At worst, it’s employed by those who want permission for—or, dare I say, to enable—bad behavior. “I’ve done the work,” therapyspeak says. “Therefore I can act like a jerk, but nobody is allowed to be mad at me.” As any toddler can tell you, the impulse to do whatever you want while suffering no consequences may be the most deeply human one there is. But therapyspeak couches this very understandable behavior in a thick layer of malarkey, putting plausible deniability between the speaker and the meaning of what they’re actually saying. It obfuscates where it should illuminate, a feint toward radical transparency that’s inherently dishonest.
