Save Your Therapy-Speak for Your Therapist

By Ben Hant

Trauma. Toxic. Codependent. Self-care. We’ve heard it all before. Therapy-speak, the rapid importation of psychological terms into personal contexts, invades the way we speak to each other. Social media, especially TikTok, promulgates this linguistic tick most of all. These big words give us a veneer of intelligence and rationality with which to explore our personal issues, but it carries real consequences for ourselves and the way we interact with others.

First, therapy-speak is a method of labeling our feelings in conversation with others. It’s a toolkit for communication, but a limited one. The set of words imported from psychology into interpersonal vernacular is inherently restricted, meaning that our use of these terms is over-general and often misplaced as we continuously recycle the same words despite describing entirely new and different circumstances. If the only tool we have is a hammer, everything becomes a nail. That’s why therapy-speak communication—often in the form of several-paragraph-long texts or midnight confessions—feels repetitive and derivative. 

Therapy-speak, similar to other forms of communication derived from academia, presents a unique masquerade of credibility to our conversations. This credibility, however, interrupts the listener’s ability to challenge the speaker. For instance, if your friend tells you that something hurt them, you want to inquire more to learn why. However, if they tell you that an issue caused them trauma, the situation immediately becomes too serious to pry into. Even if the situations are identical, the overuse of words like trauma in a colloquial context makes the conversation overly serious. Therefore, it is a tool to shut down a conversation, a verbal weapon to be invoked when communicating from a defensive position. Whoever uses therapy-speak automatically views themself as the victim, making whomever they are speaking to, or about, the oppressor. Real-world dynamics, however, are much more complicated, and therapy-speak prevents people from seeing that.

Many such defense mechanisms exist, but therapy-speak represents a unique missed opportunity, as people most often invoke it when they feel emotional and require the support of others. However, when people use it in the name of emotional vulnerability, it functionally ends the conversation and limits their ability to actually connect with the other person. This vocabulary masquerades as emotional vulnerability but, if anything, is quite the opposite.

When we pose issues in cookie-cutter vocabulary, we fail to see the nuance of the situations we address. When labeling others as toxic and misconstruing all unfortunate occurrences as “trauma”, we resign ourselves to distancing our closest friends for situations that could’ve maturely been discussed. These conclusions should come after numerous sessions of actual therapy, but when people learn these terms from popular culture, they begin to label their issues immediately—a conclusion that is just as often wrong as it is satisfying. Without the proper education on psychological terms, these conclusions become sacrosanct, and any opposition to them becomes “gaslighting”, even if it exists to reach actual understanding. 

Without knowing what these terms mean, dramatic labels lead to an unnecessarily dire consequence. Namely, they tell us to cut off our friends and even family for the slightest misgiving. That, in my eyes, is far too high a price in the name of mislabeling our feelings. On TikTok, we’ve seen the rise of general and vague statements about the overarching prevalence of trauma in everyday life. In the nebulous world of therapy-speak on the internet, people label attending school, parental punishment, or even the mere act of being born as trauma. There is no doubt that traumatic events can drastically change our lives and perceptions, but the overuse of such a term trivializes true trauma.

On the largest scale, overuse of these words drains their meaning. The more frequently people discuss the “co-dependency” of their partner or how they engage in “self-care”, the more nebulous and vague the meanings of these words become. The roots of self-care lie in acts of service that help strengthen our bonds with the people and communities around us, but now it means everything from being alone to putting on a facemask to casual substance use. Where its meaning was initially specific and clinical, its popularized meaning describes actions that we merely enjoy doing regardless of whether or not it’s actually healthy. 

The desire to use therapy-speak is understandable. We, as knowledge-seeking humans, desire to gather information, and naming our feelings is one step forward in that process. However, when that name is misguided and wrong, it diminishes meaning, sows division, and limits our ability to actually connect with the people around us. 

So what may the solution to this etymological epidemic be? Well, like most things, it helps to listen to the people who practice the application of these terms for a living. In other words, go to actual therapy. A therapist—a good one, anyway—can help you discover that you may be using these terms wrong and that it may be hurting your relationships with the people around you. While plenty of people still weaponize what they learn in therapy, learning from professionals is the best chance for us all to learn to better communicate with each other and feel comfortable enough not to put up our verbal defenses. Otherwise, lean into your instinct to cringe when you hear people use vague platitudes to describe their emotions and encourage yourself to be honest and vulnerable. Avoiding these words altogether isn’t a surefire way to repair your connections with others, but it’s a first step toward open and non-confrontational communication.

If I hear therapy-speak, I normally have no choice but to hold my tongue. But if I hear one more person say that the person they are talking to is toxic, that the class they are in caused them trauma, or that their self-care is half a bottle of wine, I might need to actually talk to my therapist about it.