The Rise of Therapy Speak

No matter where you spend your time, online or off, you’ve encountered some form of therapy speak. Maybe it comes from a friend who loves processing their therapy with others; maybe it suffuses your TikTok FYP; maybe your friends or family members have been using it to try and describe how they’re trying to foster and maintain healthy relationships; or maybe you’ve just been keeping up on the latest celebrity gossip. It’s everywhere — and as you’ll find in this episode, tracing its proliferation will lead you in so many fascinating (and complex!) directions. I’ll be real: I knew this episode would be interesting; I didn’t know it would be this interesting.

As soon as I heard about the new podcast Bad Therapist — cohosted by psychotherapist Ash Compton and New Yorker journalist Rachel Monroe — I knew they’d be the perfect people to help answer all of your questions about therapy speak. This is complicated shit! We’re talking about language that is often super useful to people… but can also be weaponized (GAH, THERAPY SPEAK) to inoculate those using it from critique. Weirdly, I feel like it’s the perfect New Year’s Day episode? I can’t wait to hear your thoughts about all of it.

Show Notes:

• Listen to Bad Therapist! Start with the intro ep (just 12 minutes); my fave ep thus far is the one on “Shadow Work”

• Read Rachel Monroe’s stunning collection of writing at The New Yorker

• An overview of Ashlyn Harris’s “disassociating” comments re: her relationship with Ali Krieger

• A smart piece on the Jonah Hill therapy speak / connection to his therapy documentary

• The famous/infamous/memeable Wicked “holding space” junket interview with Tracy E. Gilchrist (and the subsequent breakdown of the meme with Grande and Erivo)

• The Rachel Aviv book Ash and Rachel mention is Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us

• The 2005 Vanity Fair profile of Jennifer Aniston that lives in my head rent-free

• Nicole Daniels is the comedian I mention re: non-profit boss impersonations. Here’s a recent fav:

• And here’s the TikTok that opened the show

We’re currently looking for your questions for future episodes about:

• Pre-Teen/Tween Influencer Culture

• RUNNING CULTURE (you can take this in any direction you’d like — good, bad, ambivalent, we’re talking to Raziq Rauf so it’s gonna rule)

• Pivoting from my beloved Paul Mescal…..can we just talk about Irish Pop Culturification (including Paul)

• Budget Culture + Specifically Budget Rules You Want/Need To Destabilize or Break Entirely

• Getting into old movies!!!! Tell us why you want to get into them, why you find it difficult, and a few recent-ish movies so we can hand-pick recommendations for you

• Contemporary ideas of self-care (remember this newsletter?)

• Dad culture, whatever that means to you

• Anything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segment

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (this is the subscriber-only form!)

For today’s discussion: What part of therapy speak do you find useful and/or grating? Why do you think it bugs you — or what has it helped explain?

I’ll also add that we tried to be very, very careful in the way we talked about terms, diagnoses, and experiences that are often very personal and very sensitive (for very good reason!). I hope we can be thoughtful about the way that we talk about all of this here in the discussion, too.