Holding Space for Therapy Speak

I'm at capacity here...

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We need to talk more about mental health is just “Thoughts and Prayers” for people who own Pelotons. There are a number of reasons to goof on the online mental health community, and all of them are honestly pretty solid. Many of these have to do with the way they act—grandiose but aggrieved and petty-prickly. And now that their specific wince-inducing neuroses have ascended to the mainstream, it’s easy to see this shit everywhere: They are centering themselves, they want to feel seen and heard, they are setting boundaries, they are sitting with their discomfort, and they are being present. Then, at some point, for reasons that are hard to parse, the internet decided that it wasn’t enough to prioritize your mental health, but we also need to diagnose every emotion and behavior, to give a name to any and every dynamic. We are triggered, we catastrophize, we have Impostor Syndrome, we’re pressing on the wound, we have our coping mechanisms, we’re stuck in codependent relationships, we’re at capacity, we’re breaking up with “toxic” friends, and we’re dealing with avoidant attachment styles. Our emotional labor is too much to bear. We’re fragile. We’re holding space. We’re doing the work. We need to be better.

The stagey and inauthentic and shallow nature of many online communities owes a lot to how stagey and inauthentic and shallow its most prominent influencers seem to be. Many of these conversations around mental health are giving this “LOOK AT ME” energy, mostly because social media understands mental illness, like it does any topic, as a facile synopsis of itself and leverages it for the needs of competitive morality. The pursuit of online clout corrodes and intoxicates and all that, but it also makes people weird.

Take this New York Times piece on the “recovered memories” movement, which shattered many lives and is a perfect example of how dangerous decontextualized pop psychology can be. Scroll through TikTok and you’ll see an endless barrage of people identifying with their mental illnesses: Hot Girls Have ADHD, fun flavours of autism, whatever the fuck #neurospicy is. But this deranged rhetoric has gone beyond glamorizing psychological disorders into some harmless behavior patterns expressed through lib identity politics; people are competing with each other to determine who is more mentally ill, so they can leverage and instrumentalize their suffering to accentuate their brand. This dynamic highlights how warped and strange this discourse has become, with videos about “aspie supremacy” and “neurotypical privilege,” or those struggling with being “autigender,” and posts that beg the question of what it’s like to be an autistic person of color, or philosophical conundrums about whether it’s worse to be neurodivergent without pretty privilege or to be someone who isn’t “neurotypical passing.” White people talk about ADHD like it’s Jim Crow.

Therapy is the most quotidian and widest-ranging object of this culture’s obsessions. I’ve been to therapy on-and-off for a few years, and it can be an enlightening experience that leads to personal growth if you’re committed to accepting that sometimes you are wrong and that you might be the asshole, and then take the tools provided to improve yourself. A good therapist will help you face your soul and reenter consciousness with a sense of renewal and rebirth. But I suspect most of these people struggle to separate what they want from a therapist from a broader understanding of what they need from a therapist. Many go into therapy expecting it to be a struggle sesh of constant validation and laundering their sense of guilt, to be spoon-fed some vapid empowerment about how it’s okay to not be okay without any caveat to get your shit together at some point. Insta-therapy will never tell you that you might not love yourself completely, that some pain is never healed and you need to learn to live with it, narcissistic self-focus isn’t healing, coddling is just as destructive as neglect, and emotional regulation requires discipline.

Instead, therapy concepts like self-care and boundary-setting have leaked into social media, and because everything communicated on there is a copy of a copy of a copy, it manifests into trite mantras about self-advocacy and self-actualization. TikTok therapists like Nadia Addesi and TherapyJeff offer tips for those struggling with anxiety, self-esteem, and people-pleasing. “Therapy Speak,” which I could only describe as the psychosis of a Tumblr blog fused with the cadence of an HR manager, is found everywhere from group chats to dating apps. There are Twitter threads offering a template for telling friends in need of support that you’re “at capacity” and TikToks that outline how to break up with friends, which sounds like you’re the casualty of a mass layoff. One time, I asked a woman I met on Hinge if she’d like to go on a second date, and she ended her rejection text with “Best of luck going forward” (just ghost me at that point, it would be less degrading for both of us). Sure, this language is an impersonal hell mode of soulless diction, but it also helps submental narcissists advocate for their needs whenever they feel overwhelmed or want/need to cancel plans or end relationships that no longer serve their interests.

My friend’s girlfriend made him go to therapy, and after a few months, he was saying shit like, “You telling me to clean up after myself is making me feel inadequate, and it infringed on the boundaries I’ve set. I cannot do self-care if I have to focus on your needs over mine.” When people use therapy as an excuse to indulge in whatever labels or victimhood status they’ve predetermined for themselves, it just equips them with language to describe and justify their shortcomings. I lived with a couple and watched them get into a fight once, and the man said, “This is your issue to work out, I’m going to step out and call someone,” then the woman recused herself from the conflict to fill out a DBT worksheet. I’d rather remain celibate for the rest of my life than ever share an experience like that with my partner. There were 19th-century Irish couples who drank and threw chairs at each other who had healthier relationships.

As a general rule, vague statements are vague for a reason. When intentions and emotions are couched in euphemism and obfuscatory language, you are almost certainly dealing with some cynical and obvious bullshit that dare not speak its name. A lot of this manipulated therapy speak approaches avant-garde poetry, but it also portends something more sinister. Follow the money, and lurking in the background of this discourse is a billion-dollar “wellness” industry that conditions us to pathologize normal emotions, #girlboss culture that advocates a very narrow-minded form of empowerment, a self-improvement industry that seems palliative compared to a degenerating global economy, and Instagram quasi-mysticism that traps people in feedback loops of constant affirmation. How this cohort responded to Kanye West is indicative of how they view mental health: The man is both an antisemitic asshole and someone who seriously needs help, but the hair-trigger response of I have mental health issues and I don’t act this way not only makes a mockery of the concept of neurodiveristy, but it’s also a bit of a tell. Their sympathy and empathy for mental illness extends to a glorification of maladaptive quirks and benign personality flaws, and only if this behavior falls within the realm of liberal political correctness. This all creates a bizarre amalgam of vague spiritualism, a corrosive vision of adult success, and a self-serving sense of selective compassion.

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There are many compelling reasons why a reasonable person might not want to spend much time on social media. The hours and anxiety and doomscrolling are soul-crushing, because the broader implications that would drive you there are also soul-crushing. How online discourse can or cannot alter the broader course of things is a bigger and bleaker question, but online affirmational culture has spent so much time validating people who struggle with mental health while making it a frivolous topic. Pop psychology has provided a menagerie of easy-to-grasp labels and jargon to pathologize everything, and it’s convinced me that the DSM has become astrology for neurotics. These people will ruminate on their traumas and disorders until they consume their entire existence, then call it “healing.”

The self-care industry is dedicated to the proposition that everyone should live a life that’s free of guilt and shame so they can enjoy a frictionless path toward self-fulfillment. It has created a mutant mysticism, which holds that if one’s desire is pure enough, any person can manifest their goals in a conveniently abstracted display of cosmic power. It has also created a fantasy realm of self-care and self-actualization that allows people to pretend that there is no such thing as a good-faith conflict between sincere people, that different desires cannot contrast with one another, that people don’t have conflicting perceptions of their destinies that would preclude us from getting what we want all the time. A more well-adjusted person—or someone who took constructive lessons from therapy—would be equipped with the self-awareness and introspection to understand that the default state of adulting is not getting what you want, but affirmation culture cannot countenance this reality. Its basic conception of how the world should work is antagonistic to accepting disappointment or negative emotions. It’s disturbing to think this is Ayn Rand laundered through yoga mats and granola spirituality.

A lot of these Instagram therapy memes want to desperately convince you that the world is full of various types of monsters and traumas: People who are irredeemably “toxic” and must be excised from your life, or anything that obstructs your pursuit of whatever you want is, necessarily, caused by systemic injustice. They create an expectation that any negative event is a matter of psychological harm and emotional violence, rather than an inevitable aspect of existence. People who share this type of drivel will post a caption like, “I just saw a TikTok about how [NORMAL THING] in childhood is a sign of [WORD I JUST LEARNED] and I can’t stop thinking about it.”

Therapy speak has convinced people to treat relationships as transactional, and that it is somehow “healthy” to abruptly cut people off for being a bit annoying or because they have trouble dealing with complex feelings. To be clear, this isn’t a matter of distancing yourself from an abuser or manipulator or someone who has demonstrably been a net-negative for a lengthy period; these “break up” posts concern themselves with don’t waste time on others who don’t make you feel good all the time. This is ironic, considering these people consider themselves empaths and lament about how society has been corrupted by capitalism, but they’ll run their social circles like a cutthroat business. A lot of these therapy addicts seem unable to accept that other people have different ways of working through psychological challenges, and for all their talk of “neurodivergance,” it seems genuinely baffling to them that other minds might operate differently from theirs. Anyone in therapy should be the first to understand that weaponizing language through fake niceties while fucking over the people closest to them is extremely damaging.

All of this is liberal-coded because it is articulated through terminology that overlaps with social justice rhetoric. It doesn’t help matters that there is a swelling tranche of people in the modern progressive coalition who treat tough love as stigma and shame, confuse resilience for privilege, and pretend that hyper-vigilant manners policing is holding people to account. But this type of politics advances a vision of a society that operates like it’s governed by an HR department, where if we better regulate language and thought, we will create a kinder and happier world. Instead, we are left with mandatory therapeutic maximalism and an attendant tyranny of affirmation.

The resistance to therapy/affirmational culture is assumed to be right-wing, because any deviation from the most literal reading of left-liberal dogma is reflexively interpreted as an expression of conservatism. But the rise of self-help politics is also a phenomenon of what could be described as the soy right. Its leading influencers espouse the importance of bodybuilding and becoming an alpha, gorging on red meat, and foregoing seed oils. To overcome the globalists, you must train your body and mind and lift yourself above the masses. Break through the authoritarian excesses of the woke mind virus through stale and hackneyed bigotry, repackaged as “cool” and “countercultural.” The failure of conservative individualism to ameliorate the wreckages of modern capitalism is transmuted into another opportunity for self-improvement: Become your own bank by investing in crypto, become your own educational institution by homeschooling, establish your own community by building frontier communities in red states.

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It may be tough to discern from the left’s profoundly malfunctioning moral compass, but one of my foundational assumptions as a progressive is that we’re individually and collectively responsible for each other’s material well-being. We have a duty to build the kind of society that addresses everyone’s basic needs, where everyone can expect a baseline standard of living and our civil liberties are respected equally—regardless of race, sexual orientation, religious faith, or gender identity. It is patently absurd to expect society or strangers to feel obligated to ensure everyone enjoys a consistent state of positive gratification and social validity. The medicalization of everything, the casualization of trauma, the fusion of mental illness and identity, the assumption that unhappiness is an injustice, the insistence that all conflict is abuse—all of it is not only infantilizing, but it makes the left look like a coalition of insufferable pussies. Caring for others means helping them reach a place of self-respect, self-reliance, and self-resilience. And it’s not from a lack of compassion, but precisely from a place of empathy and respect.

The incentives and insanities of social media require a “good” progressive to co-sign every tenet of Marxism and left-wing culture war calamity, but there are ways to stay true to your principles while pushing back on the nonsense of affirmation culture:

• It is society’s responsibility to provide everyone with access to medical care, including mental health. Society has no meaningful ability to protect you from negative feelings.

• If you are struggling with mental health, it is society’s responsibility to give you the tools to manage it, but it is also up to you to use those tools to become the best version of yourself.

• Therapy is generally good, but it is ultimately whatever you make of it—and that depends on whether you find a therapist who will actually challenge you. Also, not everything needs to be therapized.

• Pain and suffering are unavoidable aspects of being a grown-ass adult. Teaching others to be resilient is an act of respect, and cultivating resilience within yourself is an essential component of personal growth.

• Your pain is important, but everyone hurts to some degree. Your pain should be taken seriously, but it does not lend you any special privileges over others.

• You are not your pathologies or your sickness, and positioning yourself as a perpetual victim is a self-negating and pathetic way to go through life.

• If you are struggling with mental health or trauma, and those around you are trying their best to be kind to you, setting up a checklist of unrealistic behavior standards is an asshole move.

• Self-diagnosis is unhealthy, regardless of context.

• Sometimes we need to be told that what we believe is stupid, that what we want is unrealistic, that our expectations are unrealistic, and that how we behaved is inexcusable.

• Sometimes feeling a sense of shame is healthy and can be an effective check on garbage behavior.

• Not getting everything you want is inevitable, not an injustice. People who don’t give you everything you want are not necessarily “toxic.” However, you are within your rights to be unhappy about it.

• It is perfectly reasonable to be unhappy about experiencing a setback.

• Some people are just assholes—not narcissists, not toxic, not BPD, not sociopaths, or whatever tendentious medicalized term you just read online. Sometimes you’re the asshole.

• Insisting that others treat you with kid gloves will only guarantee that you will behave selfishly and without care for others.

• Disagreement, when expressed in language, is almost never violence.

• Find love and acceptance from the people closest to you, as they are the best equipped to help you; trying to gain affirmation from strangers via social media is unhinged and delusional.

• Your feelings ARE valid—it doesn’t mean they’re right.

Sometimes you feel like an impostor because you have this nagging, subconscious, intuitive understanding that you have benefited from the cosmic happenstance of being born into privileges imposed on us by a reality created by everything that’s ever happened—or maybe you’re genuinely bad at your job. Sometimes the person you’re dating isn’t a narcissist; they just don’t reciprocate your level of interest and maybe they never will. Sometimes you don’t have ADHD, maybe your job is soul-crushing. Sometimes your boss isn’t a manipulative sociopath, maybe you aren’t qualified for the promotion you think you deserve. Sometimes you’re just sad that life didn’t turn out the way you wanted or that the world continues to get crueler in stupider ways and stupider in crueler ways, and you’re suffocating under the weight of that unhappiness on the subway ride home from work. Sometimes you’re clinging to this faint hope that there’s a greater purpose to your existential dread, but there isn’t. Sometimes you’re just another decent human filled with the pain of consciousness. All of us are suffering in some way.

Through all the emptiness and aimlessness, through the atrocities and failing economies and genocides and mobilized hatred and rogue technologies and madmen and doomsday clocks and bullshit jobs, through dealing with all sadness and mental prisons and broken dreams, there is still us. And while we’re still alive, we have the power to re-frame and re-imagine the world we live in. If we can ease the burden of suffering across time, if we can tilt the axis of madness and meaninglessness a little closer toward a greater sense of kindness and love, we might not end suffering, but we can dampen its effect and channel it toward a greater good. We can share in the suffering and struggle together. Maybe then, we can create a purpose for ourselves and understand that life may be random but not meaningless.

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