therapy speak

there's a feeling trapped somewhere in my blood vessels. a feeling which is flowing through me while i remain painfully unaware of its existence. in a way, that makes me writing about it an irony, or a paradox, i have no idea. i once again circle back to self-abandonment, something i have written about earlier, but i come back to it from the other side. your six is someone's nine. today their nine is mine. how often can one justify making someone else function according to their boundaries and needs as 'healthy' and at what point does the needle deflect slightly towards something which many might term 'selfishness'? with a large section of population (larger than before) going to therapy or self-diagnosing themselves (harsh truth) or doing both, there is a pseudo-awareness about one's psychological state of affairs which might cross the thin line between knowledge/awareness and pretentious erudition. i am in no way trying to undermine people who are in the profession and who are genuinely trying to help others. what i am trying to undermine is the ease with which clinical language is so casually used to describe persons and situations which are far from the purview of those terminologies, especially by these persons themselves. there is a general need for attention and validation of all human beings. the easiest way to be at the centre of both of these things is to look like you need it more than others. what facilitates this is when people are adept at 'therapy speak', a term which refers to the use of psychological or mental-health related language in everyday conversations. 'therapy speak' can be either positive or negative; positive 'therapy speak' could sound like someone validating you without agreeing with you, someone willing to show up for you, someone giving opinions after asking you if you need them while negative 'therapy speak' could sound like someone bringing up words like 'trauma', generalising medical terminologies to explain erratic or unusual behaviour, or over exemplifying boundaries as a means to protect themselves while hurting or invalidating others. sometimes people actually aren't aware of the language they must select to express weird, uncomfortable or indescribable feelings and so they reach for the vocabulary they've recently learned. i have encountered numerous people who weaponise this negative 'therapy speak' in order to manipulate the other person into thinking that they are the ones being insensitive or rude. here, it is important for you to have observed, for long enough, these individuals and their capacity to resort to the weaponisation of such terminologies. a repeated pattern of bringing up terms like 'trigger', 'trauma', 'gaslighting' etc. when confronted with a valid argument gives away the disguise in which they hide their defence mechanisms. but again, it is impractical to villainise someone without considering that what feels like weaponisation to you might just be someone learning to speak about themselves. however, i won't lie. the truth is that it bothers me. it bothers me that in a quest for self-awareness and healing, people choose to use these facts which they learn about themselves only to portray themselves as weaker amongst their closed ones. therapy is supposed to empower you. even if the internet is teaching you something about your mind or emotions, it is not your cue to misattribute and misuse that information to, even if subtly or unknowingly, manipulate the ones who care for you. and i realise that this often unconscious weaponisation of 'therapy speak' says something much deeper about all of us. i could be wrong about this, but it signals a strange call for help from someone who is stuck between knowing their struggles but not willing to get out of them because somewhere along the way, those struggles started to define them. and much like a warrior braves their battle scars, we want the world to see our scars even if the battle has ended long ago. this isn't about someone specific, its about all of us. our scars are important and it is inevitable to not look at them. what is possible, however, is that we don't attach ourselves to what they remind us of. ultimately, moving on is all about letting a thought, a memory or an emotion arrive but not letting it stay. -k Comment Subscribe