In this book a therapist warns against damaging effects of ‘therapy-speak’ in everyday conflicts

When I began treating Erika, her relationship was on the rocks. She spoke about communication issues and patterns in fights with her partner that made the relationship difficult to navigate. When I asked her for details about what the fights were like, she painted me a troubling picture. She explained that she tried her best to see her partner’s side of things, but that if her version of reality ever conflicted with his, he would accuse her of “invalidating” him, “gaslighting” him, and “activating his trauma.” Over time, she had grown quite frustrated, because she felt like she couldn’t share her side of the story without being accused of causing psychological harm.

It became clear that the dysfunction in her relationship could not be solved just by working with Erika alone, so I referred her to couples therapy. In the meantime, I encouraged Erika to focus less on the actual definitions of gaslighting, invalidation, and trauma. Instead, I suggested, it would be best to focus on emotionally regulating herself, supporting her partner when she could, and repairing hurt feelings before sharing her side of the story. I hoped that this would allow Erika’s partner to hear her better.

Like so many others, Erika was tempted to assume that her partner was automatically right just because he used therapy-speak. I assured her that she was allowed to disagree with him. She was as entitled to her version of events as he was, and a good couples therapist should be able to help them work through this. When I asked her about when he began using these terms, I was originally suspicious that he might have just started therapy. She explained that he wasn’t in individual therapy at all. Erika noted instead that he spent a lot of time on TikTok watching mental health influencers and enjoyed many of the self-help pages on Instagram.

It’s common for people to adopt therapy-speak when they begin their counselling journey. When people start going to therapy or learning about mental health, they acquire a new vocabulary with a lot of jargon. They assume that all these fancy new terms and their complex corresponding concepts make them more emotionally intelligent. Take it from a practising psychotherapist: I have been fluent in therapy-speak much of my adult life, but I did not develop emotional sophistication simply because I acquired new vocabulary words. Instead, I had to learn how to integrate the awareness that therapy jargon gives me and apply it to different situations in the right way. Knowing the definitions of new words doesn’t mean you necessarily have the insight to use those words correctly or understand how to apply the concepts.

One year, during Thanksgiving, my family and I got into an argument. My brother and I wanted to go out for breakfast, but my mom feared this would spoil our appetites for an earlier Thanksgiving dinner. I don’t remember how or why things escalated, but I was still in my first year of graduate school, and in my emotional overwhelm, I encouraged everyone to name their feelings and their conditions of satisfaction. Conditions of satisfaction are what a person wants and needs to feel like they have had a satisfactory experience. My suggestion was not well received. I remember my younger brother telling me to “stop talking like a goddamn therapist” because “it wasn’t helping.” I felt hurt by his response at the time, but looking back with hindsight and humour, it’s exactly what I needed to hear.

Maybe my family could have benefited from pseudo group therapy that day, but no one wanted it at that moment. There were other ways to resolve the tension. I understood the terms I used, in contrast to Erika’s situation. But I was using those terms to take control of the situation and assert myself as the more emotionally intelligent, levelheaded person. Even if Erika was an invalidating gaslighter, her partner’s deployment of this language did not help their relationship. Erika’s fights could have been processed without the psychological jargon. She could have been called selfish, inconsiderate, entitled, or some other word that would have helped me, as her therapist, better help her see how she was showing up in her relationship, according to her partner. In some ways, her partner’s use of psychological jargon made my job harder, not easier, because he wasn’t using layman’s terms.

I have thought long and hard about why people find therapy-speak so alluring. One possible temptation for using therapy-speak is that it’s an appeal to authority – a logical fallacy in which someone refers to reputation or expertise as the only or primary support for their argument, without providing any other evidence or reasoning. Perhaps it is easier, when in conflict, to use psychological jargon. After all, psychology apparently knows something essential about human beings. The problem is that psychology, like any other discipline, has its pitfalls. Psychology used to tell us that women became lesbians because they were envious of men’s phalluses and that autism was caused by emotionally distant mothers. What psychological findings are popular today that we will look back on with embarrassment?

Toddlers call one another stupid heads, but people who spend too much time consuming mental health–related content often use the word narcissist very loosely. It appears to be an insightful and sophisticated slight, but in reality it is neither – and using the word this way is unfair to the survivors of narcissistic abuse. If you use therapy jargon as an appeal to authority, I hate to break it to you, but it doesn’t necessarily make you seem emotionally intelligent.

Another reason that using mental health language is so attractive is that it can be very effective in morally justifying whatever it is you’re arguing for. Part of the reason, as David Brooks has argued in Bobos in Paradise, is that we live in a society in which health has replaced morality as the standard for goodness. Today, Brooks observes, people talk about “the things that are forbidden [as] unhealthy or unsafe. The things that are encouraged are enriching or calorie-burning. In other words, we regulate our carnal desires with health codes instead of moral codes.” Have you ever noticed this? People will justify making certain choices and cite their mental health as an adequate justification. For example, deciding to cut off a family member is stripped of any moral or ethical implications when your mental health is on the line. In today’s world, we judge cigarettes because they cause cancer, not because nicotine is a vice. We judge junk food because it’s metabolically unhealthy, not because you are indulging in gluttony for eating it. As mental health becomes more in vogue, there is a great temptation to use therapy-speak less as a tool for explaining reality and more as a tactic for justifying what we believe to be right or wrong.

These trends are not without real risks. The only thing more concerning than my patients’ loved ones hurling therapy-speak-related accusations was how quickly my patients internalised those labels. Once I had a consultation with a man who was concerned he was a narcissist because, after his son was born, he mistakenly thought he would be able to go to the gym in his usual routine and leave his wife at home with the baby. Was she in the right to feel angry that he was leaving her at home, with- out considering that she would be in charge of childcare on her own? Sure. Did what she said to him warrant his reaching out to a therapist to rule out a narcissistic personality disorder diagnosis? I don’t think it did. Lots of men have struggled with adjusting to fatherhood long before therapy-speak took hold of culture, and something tells me that lots of men will continue to struggle.

If you use therapy-speak to convey emotional intelligence, then consider this: Learning therapy-speak is a bit like learning to play an instrument. You probably can’t learn it well completely on your own, and you will almost certainly need someone with education or experience to teach you. When you start, you will be confined to rigid chords and notes. After a while, when you’re more practised, you can riff to your own tune and add your own style.

For example, when you start learning about mental health, you may be confined to rigid ways of thinking and speaking: for example, “I hear that you’re feeling…” (Note the “I” statement combined with the use of the active-listening skill to foster a sense of empathy.) Over time, you can better showcase your emotional intelligence by combining that practice with your personality. How would I say that to my loved one and some of my patients? I would not say, “I hear that you’re feeling sad.” I might say, “Dude, I totally get it. That sounds like a total bummer!” In this way, I take my knowledge of “I” statements and reflective listening and put it in my voice. If I can do so at the right time and in the right way, I am taking my knowledge and insights about mental health and applying them effectively. As you can see, accomplishing this takes much more than simply knowing the definitions of certain terms. It requires time, practice, empathy, and humility.

As the years have gone by and my therapy skills have sharpened, I have learned that there’s a big difference between talking like a therapist, on the one hand, and utilising my knowledge of human emotion and behaviour to skillfully navigate conflict while speaking like nobody but myself, on the other. In my opinion, every therapist worth their salt knows how to take their knowledge of psychology and apply it to their conversations. They also know that we often need to be careful before using diagnostic psychological language.

My advice to everyone is to be careful when leveraging therapy-speak against people in your life. It may provide a brief authoritative flair but will not necessarily lead to productive dialogue or any sort of lasting relational cohesion. Also be careful when leveraging therapy-speak against yourself. As someone who is basically fluent in therapy-speak, let me tell you, it doesn’t always.

Excerpted with permission from Psychobabble: Viral Mental Health Myths and the Truths to Set You Free, Joe Nucci, HarperOne.