In Defense of Nuance
How Therapy-Speak Fosters and Challenges Intimacy
Disclaimer: I’m not a therapist, just a millennial still out here realizing stuff. In this piece, I stick to widely circulated, basic therapeutic concepts—nothing too niche or clinical. That said, if you feel I’ve misrepresented anything I discuss, I’m open to thoughtful feedback!
If social media is a river, therapy-speak is one of its spindly tributaries, flooding the terrain of genuine intimacy with buzzy, clinical platitudes. It’s meant to illuminate, but more often, it obscures, patronizes, insults, and alienates. This is also true of the river itself. As Jia Tolentino said in 2019, “[social media] promised connection and induced mass alienation1.”
I'm hardly the first to critique my generation’s use, misuse, and abuse of “therapy-speak,” not to mention social media writ large—but let’s briefly set aside the forest and look at one tree. (New metaphor!)
There was a fleeting moment when it felt like integrating therapy-speak into personal dynamics went as unchecked as the ubiquity of millennial pink. It’s hard to pinpoint when that shifted. Maybe when the internet balked at Melissa Fabello’s recommended script for setting boundaries in friendship2. Maybe when people en masse started noticing that “gaslighting” had become shorthand for “hurting my feelings.” Maybe when verbal discourse stopped being “conversation” and became “dialogue.”
A quick Google search confirms that therapy-speak critiques began to proliferate around 2021 through 2023 in publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, etc. Still, it’s a slippery thing to pin down—like any so-called “vibe shift”—because it might feel more real than it ever was. But the discourse took hold, and the shift was felt by many. And in culture, felt is often as real as it gets.
Like many of my peers, I juggle existential dread while bristling at generational doomsday forecasting. I could make compelling arguments against this next statement, and yet: I genuinely hold somewhere in my heart that across millennia, we humans are what we are. Political landscapes, social structures, technology, and modes of communication may change, but we have the same desires, the same goodness, the same capacity for harm, and the same fatal flaws.
Which is only to say: while the mechanisms of communication and word choices have changed, the underlying, aching desire for closeness remains the same. I want to discuss the modality, not declare that we’re doomed because we use it.
Whether derived from actual therapy or an earth-toned carousel on Instagram, therapy-speak hasn’t just entered the lexicon. In this, the year of our Lord 2025, it has entered the house, pulled up a chair, helped itself to dinner, and likely outstayed its welcome.
At its best, therapy-speak offers shorthand for complex behaviors and dynamics. There’s relief in being handed a tidy way to describe something murky—especially when it’s both descriptive and clinically grounded. It may even facilitate a faster pathway to intimacy. Instead of having to drone on to a new friend about the soul-crushing dissolution of your most recent relationship, you can say, “he gaslit me.” In three words, you have a mutual understanding without having to trot out painful anecdotes or text receipts.
At worst, therapy-speak flattens and decontextualizes. That’s assuming, of course, that the user even gets it right. Let’s keep harping on gaslighting—a favorite villain in the pop-therapy canon. The term didn’t even originate in a therapeutic setting, but was informally adopted by therapists before the internet caught wind of it, used to describe a specific form of emotional abuse.
"Gaslighting" denotes the intentional effort to make someone question their memories and even their mental soundness to control their behavior (if not steal their fortune—it’s also a great movie!). However, gaslighting is often conflated with remarks that are merely cruel—or even used to describe simply having different perspectives on a situation.
Gaslighting is also thorny because, by its actual definition, it assumes intent. There’s a reason it may have been better left in the hands of a (relatively, hopefully) objective therapist. In short, when deployed accurately, gaslighting describes the experience of having your subjectivity dismissed and devalued. Used incorrectly, it can villainize someone for merely disliking their subjectivity—or hurtful choice of words.
Some therapeutic concepts, like boundaries, are conceptually less slippery. However, they become dangerous when they carry a moral value or are used as periods rather than commas. I can have a boundary where I need space after fighting with my partner, but if I don’t communicate how much space (just not discussing the conflict? separate bedrooms?) or for how long (20 minutes? 24 hours?), it’s not just a boundary, it’s a wedge. Naming a boundary is also not a declaration that the boundary is fundamentally correct. It may be what’s needed to stay regulated in the moment, but that’s not always the end of the story.
As much as the boundary is a guardrail for the person you’re communicating with, it can also invite you to look internally and ask why. Why is conflict so destabilizing to me that it necessitates isolation? Why is my need for space more important than my partner’s need for closeness and reassurance in the wake of an argument—is it actually?
I’m certainly not advocating that we all run out and stretch our boundaries to accommodate others’ desires. In certain contexts, boundaries are healthy reflections of self-knowledge. But they’re also not good or bad, nor are they excuses to shut out loved ones. They’re a communication of non-negotiable needs, but also an opportunity to ask ourselves why we hit the wall when we do.
Similarly, understanding our attachment style is not a permission slip to withdraw, smother, or reject. It’s a framework to understand when and how we feel emotionally safe with others and how we respond to rejection—real or perceived.
I find therapy-speak particularly insidious when it’s leveraged in conflict. That’s not to say it’s always bad and never helpful. If it isn’t clear by now, I yearn to make sense of gray areas and validate concurrent, not conflicting truths. It’s probably my Libra Rising. Just kidding! Sort of. Another frequently misunderstood framework, albeit a more fun one.
But conflict is fertile breeding ground for wielding therapeutic language as a moralistic, didactic, and prescriptive cudgel. I understand that sometimes, therapy-speak is just a harmless shortcut. If you tell a new friend, “We broke up cause he gaslit me,” what you might really be saying is, I see him as the bad guy; it didn’t end well—and even if that’s (in my humble opinion) linguistically lazy, ok, sure.
Likewise, if I tell someone, “I don’t pick up the phone after 9 pm, that’s just a boundary for me,” that’s not actually a guarantee I won’t rally in an emergency. I could just be saying, I value my rest in today's parlance. If we can forgive that people used to unironically use “groovy” to mean “cool” or “good,” I guess we can hold space (haha) for therapy-speak too. We’re porous creatures, and language evolves—sometimes faster than our ability to interrogate it.
THAT BEING SAID, we must also acknowledge that even now, therapy-speak can carry more weight than messier language choices. It still exists within the framework of medicine, of prescription. Therapy-speak floats between self-help and medicalization. It abuts diagnosis and the fraught, still widely misunderstood realm of mental illness. It does not exclusively live within the language of personal connection. Using it subtly, but tangibly is calling in an expert opinion. It hints at the idea that we’re not dealing with disagreement but pathology.
Because of that, therapy-speak runs the risk of positioning its user as the arbiter of truth—it assumes, sometimes even declares, that one person understands the person they’re in conflict with better than that person understands themselves. It’s using language typically reserved for someone who willingly entered a space where they’d be understood in this framework and forcing not just disagreement or anger on them, but analysis.
People go to therapy to ask: Why can’t I commit? Why am I so quick to anger? Why haven’t I realized my potential? And to be guided by someone who has studied these frameworks and has no personal attachment to or investment in them. We enter relationships and bare ourselves, warts and all, in exchange for closeness.
Another piece of the puzzle to bear in mind is that, as I previously suggested, many of us derive our knowledge of therapeutic language and concepts not from actual therapy, but from social media. And while there’s still nothing more obnoxious than being on the receiving end of someone self-righteously quoting their own therapist, at least they have a respectable primary source.
Social media, by contrast, tends to flattens complex ideas into slogans, memes, and bite-sized moral pronouncements.
Not to denigrate the democratization of knowledge, but if someone’s understanding of narcissism, say, only comes from TikTok—a platform engineered to reduce the most nuanced subjects into viral sound bites—then they’re not just inappropriately leveraging therapy-speak. They’re deploying a hollowed-out, cartoon version of it.
For instance, on social media, “narcissist” often gets applied to anyone who sets boundaries, seeks validation, or displays confidence—behaviors that, in context, might be entirely healthy, or simply rooted in the supposed narcissist having an autonomous inner world that has nothing to do with you. He didn’t Venmo you for dinner? Narcissist. She posted a selfie the day you were sad? Narcissist. Your coworker always talks about themselves and doesn’t ask questions? Narcissist. The clinical meaning collapses into a vibe.
When the source material is simplified to the point of caricature, it’s no wonder that discourse becomes a race to diagnose, label, and distance. That’s not dialogue, it’s triage.
I don’t believe using therapeutic language is inherently manipulative. I do it myself, and sometimes, it’s the best language we have available. However, the stakes change in conflict, and the framework it invites can reshape the conversation more than we realize.
A recent conflict nearly ended one of my closest friendships. Like most knock-down, drag-out situations, it began with an inciting incident (committed by me) that unraveled years of unspoken hurt and anger. We take on roles in every dynamic, and in this specific rupture, I was the one who caused harm, and my friend was the injured party. However discomforting, this wasn’t a situation where I tried to flip the script. I owned that I did not provide my friend with the love and support she deserved in a moment of immense pain. Rather than acting as her rock, or simply asking how best to support her, I chose to withdraw when I suspected that I was not wanted or needed.
While my friend had valid reasons to be angry, I experienced the conversation as a nonstarter as the terms of repair were, from the outset, shaped by a rhetorical sleight of hand. The language of healing and accountability—therapy-speak— was used to mask an a conclusion that had already been made. I wasn’t being invited to make amends so much as to submit—to accept not only the harm I caused, but a prescribed explanation for why I caused it, one that cast my intentions, character, and emotional instincts in the worst possible light. Though I tried to remain present and accountable for the harm I could co-sign, I experienced a shift from guilt to disorientation as my friend’s messages became increasingly elliptical and, yes, mired in therapeutic concepts.
We engaged in a circuitous exchange of shifting rhetorical goalposts for several days. Explain what you did became just own your mistake, became you’re centering yourself, became it’s not just the action, it’s the pattern—then round and around again. I tried to separate the recent hurt from our friendship's nearly decade-long history. I could take full responsibility for my failure to be supportive in recent months, but I found it impossible to cede to the sweeping claim: this is how you’ve always been, and here’s why. Especially the why. It wasn’t framed as “This might be painful to hear, but it’s my experience.” It was: “This is who you are.” There’s a difference between being told your actions were hurtful and being told your lack of self-actualization is the problem. The first invites repair. The second forecloses on it.
In a different era, my friend might’ve said, “You’re a bad friend. You’re selfish.” That’s a nonstarter, but it’s also direct. When someone says, “You’re acting out of an unprocessed wound you don’t understand,” it leaves just as little room for engagement, yet it’s cloaked in insight. You can squarely refute “you’re bad” with “no, I’m not.” But when you’re asked to take accountability while also defending your basic self-awareness—proving you know your own feelings, proving that not every joke or misstep is proof of pathology—you’re being led through a doorway of resolution, only to fall through a trap door into the same basement of emotional banishment.
But do I believe that this conversation would have been more productive in the absence of therapy-speak? Not necessarily. It may have been mercifully shorter and more straightforward. I wrote earlier and maintain that we are what we are. The things that made my friend disinclined to forgive me or even really hear me out (aside from the hurt I caused) were not shaped by therapy-speak. However, therapy-speak—intentionally or not—morphed our exchange into an optical illusion of empathy.
I did not simply experience being on the receiving end of someone’s anger. However uncomfortable, that’s an inevitable part of life and often necessary for relational healing—or sometimes, closure. What I did experience was something different: a dynamic in which one person spoke with the authority of diagnosis, as if their understanding of me superseded my own. When that happens, the relationship stops being mutual and becomes hierarchical. There’s a key difference between remorse and repentance, and relinquishing one’s right to self-definition.
Aside from some personal revelations I’ll keep to myself, something I have taken from that exchange is that the language of diagnosis and clinical insight does not belong in a space where both parties are vulnerable, subjective, and invested.
We are not meant to speak in calm, clinical, emotionally distanced ways with our loved ones because we’re not their therapists. I’m not advocating for uncensored rage, but therapy is neat and observational by design; it’s a healing modality. Relationships are two-sided, emotionally charged, and messy—that’s why they’re beautiful and agonizing. Unlike a “therapist-client” dynamic, true intimacy is built and sustained by equals consensually coming to the table together.
At the same time, society and interpersonal dynamics evolve. We become more thoughtful and complex—individually and in the macro. And as therapy becomes more common and destigmatized (a net good, on the whole), it makes sense that we would imbue our interactions with our expanded consciousness. If I say to someone I’ve hurt, “I don’t want to defend my actions, I just want to explain them,” I’m not diagnosing that person or excusing myself, but distinguishing intention from impact. This is something I may not have been aware of without therapy or outside of a therapy-conscious culture.
At its best, in conflict, therapy-speak or therapeutic awareness is a tool to exercise, and sometimes verbalize, more self-awareness about what’s going on and why you’re reacting the way you are. At its worst, it can pervert legitimate grievances into totalizing theories of why the person who hurt you not only did what they did, but who they are.
I’m not making a call for us to all eradicate therapy-speak from our vocabularies, because it isn’t fundamentally good or bad. It’s a framework with the power to be expansive and foster healthier connections, but it can also be a weapon to alienate and punish. And yes, it does have some more appropriate settings than others, but the proverbial genie is out of the bottle.
For better or worse, therapeutic language is now tethered to the language of intimacy. And despite its eroded meaning and potent potential for cringe, it isn’t entirely worthless. There’s also always something. Just as organized religion can build community, foster humility and generosity, and enrich life with ritual and meaning, it is also used to justify control and violence. So too with therapy-speak.
As ever, and as with anything, I challenge others—and myself—to remain self-curious but not obsessed, critical but not flagellating. And to remember that the last thing we need is anything else—be it technology, belief systems, or language—that drives us further apart.