Just before my 18th birthday, I was ghosted by a close friend of seven years. Even as it took weeks to sink in that this was, in fact, ghosting and not just flakiness, it felt like a shock. We’d been in close contact for months beforehand, talking and texting from week to week; as Winter Break drew nearer, we started to make plans for my birthday and the holidays. And then: nothing.
There was, of course, the usual pain you’d expect to feel over losing a friend you’ve known for years. I was heartbroken. I was confused. In the unraveling of a years-long friendship, I was left panicked and desperate to know if I’d done something wrong. I wanted at least some idea as to what was going on, and most of all, I wanted my friend back.
The self-care sides of Instagram, Pinterest and the like taunted me with various quotes that read something like “You don’t owe anyone an explanation,” or “You don’t owe anyone your time, energy or love.” Though these sorts of posts are tailored for self-improvement —for empowering the reader to cut out toxicity and take care of their needs — they only seemed to make me feel worse about my predicament. While I knew I wasn’t owed anything, my former friendship was meaningful. It was built on love, energy and time, and for it to fizzle out with no closure felt heart shattering.
These self-care, inspirational messages exist beyond just inspirational quotes, too. They prevail in, for example, a viral TikTok of a psychologist demonstrating how to break up with a friend. In the TikTok in question, Dr. Arianna Brandolini plays two characters, where the first questions why her friend has been pulling back and if she’s done anything wrong. Meanwhile, the second calmly and almost robotically explains that while she’s “treasured the season of (their) friendship,” she nonetheless doesn’t “have the capacity to invest in (their) friendship any longer.”
This TikTok has faced criticism for its condescending tone, which isn’t difficult to notice when it sounds less like a way to communicate boundaries with a friend and more like an email from your workplace to inform you that you’ve been laid off. When Friend A asks if she’s done something to cause her friend to withdraw, Friend B ignores the question in favor of stating that she gets “that it might be hard to understand.” While only a hypothetical, no room for discussion is left as therapy speak takes center stage.
“Therapy speak” is a new and fairly broad term, but it most frequently refers to the dialogue derived from therapy that we now use in our everyday lives. This is not necessarily a new phenomenon — terms like “defense mechanism” or “projection” have persisted in our language since the birth of psychoanalysis more than a century ago. Even so, we now live in a time where mental health and therapy are considered increasingly important and, as such, certain terms like “love bombing” or “emotional labor” are found more and more in our day-to-day lingo.
“Gaslighting” is perhaps the most popular of these sorts of terms. While relatively new to our everyday lexicon, it’s a term that can be found across the internet. Originating from the play “Gaslight” (which was adapted to film twice), gaslighting specifically refers to the manipulative practice of making a person question their perception, often by manipulating the reality around them.
The term “gaslight” rose to popularity throughout the 2010s and was even proclaimed the Merriam-Webster dictionary’s word of the year in 2022. It has even been adopted into phrases like “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss.” In its broader use, “gaslighting” has come to mean more than its precise origins and can now describe lying or an inability to take accountability.
Bringing therapy and mental health into greater focus has, without a doubt, been a net positive for us all, but that doesn’t mean this progress has come without some trade-offs. As psychology and its terms have become more popular, meanings often become broader than their original intended precision. Dubbed as “pop psychology,” this more generalized knowledge runs the risk of misuse when put into practice.
Therapy speak is a powerful tool. In the context of a clinic, these terms can be a means of better identifying emotions or empowering oneself to take a specific course of action. Even without the help of a therapist, learning terms like “love bombing” or “gaslighting” from friends or the internet can incite someone to recognize and overcome the abuse they face.
But, when used by nonprofessionals — as therapy speak often is — these terms can just as likely be unintentionally or intentionally misrepresented. On one hand, one may use therapy speak because they believe it to be the best form of communication. For someone unsure of how to navigate a difficult conversation, therapy speak offers the appeal of a calm tone rather than an emotionally-charged message.
At the same time, one might also intentionally use therapy speak for manipulation. Because therapy speak stems from a field of professional study, using it lends rhetorical credence to one’s words. Take, for example, a friend who cancels and rearranges plans in the name of “setting a boundary” and self-care, or an abusive mother who uses the perfect socially approved language to justify her behavior and demonize everyone else’s.The important thing to recognize about therapy speak, however, is that although these terms stem from professional areas and are perhaps more lexically complex, they also have the ability to oversimplify situations. People are complicated, and relationships between people are even more so. Therapy and the words that come along with it are means of working on ourselves, not a way of getting others to work for us. So the next time you think about setting boundaries and your “emotional bandwidth” or the “season of your friendship” with a loved one, remember that therapy speak isn’t the only correct way to have a healthy discussion. Open yourself up to a two-way dialogue and the rest will follow.
Audra M. Woehle is an Opinion Columnist who writes about gender and sexuality in popular culture. She can be reached at awoehle@umich.edu.