"Therapy-speak struck me as something of an American phenomenon: the preserve of the Duke of Sussex and his wife, plus anyone else who has spent too long in California." Photo / CBS
"Therapy-speak struck me as something of an American phenomenon: the preserve of the Duke of Sussex and his wife, plus anyone else who has spent too long in California." Photo / CBS
Opinion by Charlotte Ivers
OPINION:
I have been to three and a half therapy sessions in my life. The less said about the half the better. Looking back, the early signs of trouble were clear.
“I’m sorry,” I told the therapist plaintively, halfway through the first session. “You must find this all veryboring. Another middle-class white girl who is a bit weird about perfectionism and a bit sad about her boyfriend. How groundbreaking.”
As I recall it, she tilted her head sympathetically — the type of sympathy that says “the fact that you have said this implies the existence of a rather bigger personality flaw than perfectionism” — and said, “You aren’t paying me to find you interesting.” This, eagle-eyed readers will note, is not a denial. So now I have a magazine column instead.
This makes me rather unfashionable. The world and his wife are doing therapy nowadays, as far as I can tell. Sometimes the world and his wife are doing therapy together. Loads of my mates have a therapist. More than one man I have dated recently has told me that he has mentioned me in a therapy session. I hope these men tipped their therapists well after that.
All this is good, probably. Cracking through the hard shell of the English stiff upper lip feels beneficial. But there are some unintended consequences. “You should write about people weaponising therapy-speak,” a friend suggested a couple of months ago. A male friend of hers had just been dumped but the experience had felt rather more like an HR tribunal. “It’s not you, it’s me” is rather passé now, it turns out. Instead this man had been on the receiving end of “I need to make sure I have an intentional relationship” and “It is important that I establish boundaries within my life”.
"If you spend hours dissecting the many and varied ways your parents or anyone else since have screwed you up, you eventually come to the conclusion that nothing is your fault." Photo / Fa Barboza, Unsplash
This is a broader social trend, my friend insisted. Increasingly she was noticing people using words previously confined to the clinical setting in their everyday lives. Sometimes those words would be used to justify behaviour that, rather ironically, would be enough to land anyone on the receiving end in therapy.
I wasn’t hugely convinced. Therapy-speak struck me as something of an American phenomenon: the preserve of the Duke of Sussex and his wife, plus anyone else who has spent too long in California. Since I don’t live in Los Angeles and try to avoid anyone who does, I figured I’d be immune from this trend. Surely we stoical, down-to-earth Brits would not fall for this new-age nonsense?
But, of course, where America goes the rest of the world follows. Increasingly I notice this phenomenon washing up on our shores. I keep hearing from people who have found themselves ghosted by a friend, and on further inquiry are told that their ghoster was “practising self-care” or “needed to set some boundaries”. People bailing on their best mate’s birthday dinner last minute, saying, “I need to preserve my energy.” People refusing to talk to their friend about said friend’s problems on the grounds that they are “at emotional capacity” dealing with their own.
At its most extreme this tendency can slide into the worst kind of narcissism. If you spend hours dissecting the many and varied ways your parents or anyone else since have screwed you up, you eventually come to the conclusion that nothing is your fault. I recently heard about someone blaming her ADHD for the fact she kept cheating on her boyfriend. This is insulting to people with ADHD — though not, I suspect, as insulting as it is to her boyfriend.
I have to say that I find the whole thing rather unnerving. Everybody is responsible for how they treat people. Apart from me, obviously. I’m special. Sorry, I’m joking. Or at least I think I am. I can’t help but feel that this is not what the therapists were intending to happen — the good ones, anyway. These sorts of words — and the concepts behind them — were designed for helping people to understand themselves better, not for hurling at loved ones or for justifying thoughtless behaviour.
More than any of this, I am struck by the fact that joy and fulfilment comes largely from our relationships with others. Yes, it is lovely when those relationships are easy. But they are perhaps more meaningful when we are forced to support each other through tough times, or when we stick together despite getting on each other’s nerves. I think that’s what I’d tell people if I were a therapist: that if you try to be kind to those you care about, even if you sometimes fail, things will work out OK in the end.
And if my clients tell me they disagree, I will throw them out of my office. We need to set some appropriate boundaries. I’m practising self-care.
