It’s Not Therapy’s Fault That Your Friends Are Jerks

Are you in the right space to receive information that may hurt you? People are blaming therapy for their relationship problems again.

Sometimes they start little interpretive dance routines! You don’t have to engage them. Photo by Obie Fernandez on Unsplash

Greetings, reader. I’d like to thank you for being vulnerable and authentic enough to click on this blog post. If you’re not at capacity, and can hold appropriate space, I’ll explain: Last Friday, an article by Rebecca Fishbein entitled “Is Therapy-Speak Making Us Selfish?” went viral. In that piece, Fishbein relates multiple stories about people who used “therapy speak,” the pop-psych-TikTok lingo of intimacy — “boundary,” “toxic,” “trauma response,” you get it — to navigate breakups or arguments.

The stories Fishbein relates vary widely. One is about a twenty-something who was a few minutes late to a friend’s birthday dinner, and who claimed she felt “unsafe and unloved” when that friend gave her the stink-eye. Another story is about a young man who stopped speaking to his parents and asked his sister not to intervene on their behalf; the sister accused him of acting “like he’s the only real person in the world and everybody else has to do exactly what he says to make him safe.”

One of these stories is drama between some probably-drunk recent college grads. One sounds like the…