To Therapy Speak, or Not to Therapy Speak?

Do you have the emotional capacity to hold space for me to trauma dump for a sec?

First of all I have to say a huge Happy Birthday to my little brother (and bestie) Ben!!!! I’m travelling to Wellington today to see him, and to take him to The 1975 tomorrow (AHH - YES YOU’LL BE HEARING ALL ABOUT IT.) So I’m going to keep this intro short and sweet!

For everyone who wants to follow my travels (and see all my concert content) the best place to do that is on our Close Friends (which all our paying supporters get added to!)

LOVE YOU, LUCE XXX

• To Therapy Speak, or not to Therapy Speak?

• What’s going on in Sudan?

• SpaceX Starship: Elon Musk's firm postpones launch of biggest rocket ever

• Harry Styles & Will Ferrell Set As Final Guests On ‘The Late Late Show With James Corden’

• If you saw a celebrity walking down the street, would you go up to them or not?

To Therapy Speak, or Not to Therapy Speak?

Lately, online I’ve been seeing a bunch of discourse around Therapy Speak - or the ways that we now use formal ‘therapy-adjacent’ language in our day-to-day lives. First of all, can I just say how seen I feel that the internet held space for me to dive deep into this topic? (Lol Therapy Speak joke — hope that didn’t get lost in the medium.)

But for real tho - I bought my Nintendo Switch, started making beaded bracelets and suddenly began talking about my ‘inner child.’ I got into an argument with a dude in a bar a few weeks back about the definition of ‘gaslighting.’ I’m on a constant quest for ‘boundaries.’ Hell, Laura and I have ROOTED therapy speak in our last few episodes of Culture Vulture when we’ve talked about ‘attachment styles,’ ‘love languages’, ‘and ‘emotional intelligence.’ For someone who has been to therapy and… it wasn’t for me, it weirdly kinda feels like Therapy Speak is the vocab to my life.

Here’s an excerpt from the 2021 New Yorker article that kicked this whole convo off:

“If we are especially online, or roaming the worlds of friendship, wellness, activism, or romance, we must consider when we are centering ourselves or setting boundaries, sitting with our discomfort or being present. We “just want to name” a dynamic. We joke about our coping mechanisms, codependent relationships, and avoidant attachment styles. We practice self-care and shun “toxic” acquaintances. We project and decathect; we are triggered, we say wryly, adding that we dislike the word; we catastrophize, ruminate, press on the wound, process. We feel seen and we feel heard, or we feel unseen and we feel unheard, or we feel heard but not listened to, not actively. We diagnose and receive diagnoses: O.C.D., A.D.H.D., generalized anxiety disorder, depression. We’re enmeshed, fragile. Our emotional labor is grinding us down. We’re doing the work. We need to do the work.”

I’m not really here to say whether our adoption of Therapy Speak is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing, because a) it’s not going anywhere, and b) that doesn’t actually help anyone. What I will say is as a person who lives in this world, I know how important it is, and how good it feels to be able to attempt to name how we’re feeling (hence why Bel and I often use made-up words because sometimes they don’t already exist!!)

I’m also not surprised that the language we use around mental health is becoming more widely used, because the state of mental health in the world is… not good. More people are trying to find language to talk about it because more people need to.

There are a few things that could be true when we think about this. One is, when therapy is unaffordable and inaccessible to A LOT of us, maybe the normalisation of these terms (if used correctly) is a good thing? More of us might be learning (on the internet or IRL) how to explain our feelings and why we might be feeling them instead of ignoring it/shutting ourselves off to ourselves and our mates.

Another thing that could be true, is that - as Katy Woldman put it in her New Yorker article - maybe this inaccessibility to real therapy means that Therapy Speak is co-opted by the (often) wealthy and white, which is why it can feel so…. cringe:

In the United States, basic mental-health care remains a luxury item; there’s a reason that the most fluent speakers of the trending argot tend to be wealthy and white. This may explain some of the irritation that therapy-speak occasionally provokes: the words suggest a sort of woke posturing, a theatrical deference to norms of kindness, and they also show how the language of suffering often finds its way into the mouths of those who suffer least.

Some other downsides that I’ve seen (or think) about our use of Therapy Speak era are:

• That it makes us ‘selfish.’ That we weaponise things like ‘needing boundaries’ and ‘not having emotional capacity’ as a tool to get out of things we don’t want to do or to be a dick. (But as a reminder, we can all be selfish, and sometimes it’s ok because you literally get ONE life. Also that selfish people exist outside of Therapy Speak and may just use this language to do asshole things and feel morally good about it. That sucks.)

• We erode or cause the original meanings of once helpful words to mean something they REALLY don’t. Think about how often we use the word ‘gaslighting’ incorrectly (Rubes and I once did a whole podcast about this.) Characterising everything bad in our life as ‘traumatic,’ and accusing everyone of being a ‘love bomber’ or a ‘narcissist’ means that these terms that were once useful in therapy to name complex things, lose their oomph, become trivialised, or even start to mean things that they don’t. Not good!

• It can feel like bringing HR speak into your life/friendships and sometimes a barrier to authentic communication - Bel especially hates this.

• Sometimes ‘understanding ourselves’ through buzzwords can allow us to avoid looking deeper at what’s actually going on and (Therapy Speak incoming) ‘doing the work.’

To full-circle this small section of thought starters (no answers - sorry!), I just got off the phone with Bel and during our chat, we discussed which one of us had the ‘emotional capacity’ to take on a certain thing (and at the moment I did.) This felt like an extremely clear, productive and caring way that we look after each other, and we only needed two words to explain that ‘hey - I’m going through a lot right now/have a lot on my plate right now so for X Y Z reasons I can’t do this.’ If I wasn’t halfway through writing this section I wouldn’t have even thought twice about it, but since I am, maybe Therapy Speak is a situational thing and the way it’s used/perceived is all dependent on who you use it with and whether they’re on the same page as you?

If I had more than a simple hour in my morning to muse over all of this I probably could have brought you a hypothesis and a conclusion for whether Therapy Speak is Good or Bad, but I guess for now I’ll leave you with this simple trauma dump xox

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🗺Some stray headlines🗺

Sudan Erupts in Chaos: Who Is Battling for Control and Why It Matters (The New York Times)

“Gunshots erupted outside apartments and rockets screamed across city blocks. Smoke engulfed planes at the airport and shells crashed into a military tower. Two rival Sudanese generals have transformed a city of five million people into an arena for their personal war.”

• THIS IS A REALLY GOOD ARTICLE EXPLAINING WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SUDAN RN

• “The clashes have pitted a paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces against the Sudanese Army, reflecting a longstanding rivalry between Sudan’s two top generals who have been vying for dominance.”

• Live updates are here.

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Out of this world (or not)

SpaceX Starship: Elon Musk's firm postpones launch of biggest rocket ever (BBC)

• What happened: SpaceX’s attempt to launch the ‘most powerful rocket ever’ into space has been postponed for another 48 hours at least.

• The problem: “It appears to have been caused by a frozen "pressurant valve", Musk tweeted.”

• The goal: “The aim is to send the upper-stage of the vehicle eastward, to complete almost one circuit of the globe.”

• “It's designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. He envisages flying people and satellites to orbit multiple times a day in the same way a jet airliner might criss-cross the Atlantic. Indeed, he believes the vehicle could usher in an era of interplanetary travel for ordinary humans.”

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Harry Styles & Will Ferrell Set As Final Guests On ‘The Late Late Show With James Corden’ (Deadline)

• To be clear I care about this for Harry reasons, not so much for James Corden reasons

• Also for those still holding out hope I do NOT think there will be a 1D reunion

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Today’s mundane poll:

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