Therapy Speak Is Ruining Your Relationships
You're not "setting boundaries." You're just being difficult.
Your ex isn't a narcissist. They were just a bit shit and it didn't work out.
You weren't "triggered." You were angry, and now you're hiding behind clinical language because anger makes you look unreasonable.
Welcome to 2025, where everyone's got a therapist's vocabulary and nobody's got the courage to just say what they mean.
The New Power Language
Somewhere in the last five years, we turned psychological terminology into tactical weaponry. And it's working brilliantly - right up until the moment you realise you can't actually have a relationship with someone when every disagreement gets pathologised.
"You're gaslighting me" used to mean something specific: a deliberate, sustained pattern of making someone doubt their reality. Now it means "you remember things differently than I do" or "you disagree with my interpretation" or, let's be honest, "you're winning this argument and I need you to stop."
You're not being gaslit. You're in a normal human conflict where two people remember the same event differently because that's what humans do. But frame it as gaslighting and suddenly you're the victim of psychological abuse rather than someone who might be wrong about what time you said you'd be home.
Same with "narcissist." Clinical narcissism is rare. Proper personality disorder rare. But your mate who takes a lot of selfies? Narcissist. Your ex who didn't love you the way you wanted? Narcissist. Your colleague who got the promotion? Raging narcissist.
We've turned "person who hurt me" into "person with a personality disorder" because it's easier to diagnose than to grieve.
Here's what makes this particularly strange: most of these words don't even come from therapy. Not real therapy, anyway. They've been lifted from pop psychology, TikTok therapists, and Instagram infographics - then given authority by the assumption that this is how actual therapists talk.
Let's call it what it is: therapy-slop. The bastardised, oversimplified, weaponised version of psychological concepts that's been through the internet blender so many times that it bears almost no resemblance to actual therapeutic work. It's slop because it's been rendered down to nothing - all the nuance boiled off, all the context stripped away, leaving just the words with their most inflammatory possible meanings.
And it's everywhere.
In my therapy room, nobody's diagnosing their ex. We're not trading terms like "narcissist" or "gaslighting" like they're Pokemon cards. When someone arrives saying "my partner's a narcissist," I'm not interested in whether that's clinically accurate. I'm interested in what happened to you in that relationship. What did it feel like? Where did you lose yourself? What are you still carrying?
The work isn't about labelling someone else's pathology. It's about understanding your actual experience.
But the internet's decided therapy is about diagnosis and terminology. So now everyone's walking around with this vocabulary they think comes with therapeutic authority, using it to avoid the very thing therapy is actually for: feeling what you feel and saying what you mean.
When Insight Becomes Weapon
The cruellest thing about therapy speak is how it lets you avoid responsibility whilst sounding enlightened.
"I'm not apologising - I was having an amygdala hijack." "I can't help my reaction - it's my attachment style." "I need to prioritise my mental health right now" (translation: I'm dumping you but making it sound like self-care).
You've learnt the language of self-understanding and turned it into a dialect of avoidance. Every piece of difficult feedback becomes a boundary violation. Every reasonable expectation becomes an unrealistic demand on your nervous system. Every consequence of your behaviour becomes someone else's failure to hold space for your healing.
This isn't therapy. This is therapy vocabulary in service of not changing.
I sit with clients who've been told they're "toxic" by partners who learnt that word from TikTok. I work with people whose exes diagnosed them with disorders based on Instagram infographics. I see the wreckage of relationships where both people were so busy identifying each other's psychological dysfunctions that nobody bothered to just talk about what actually hurt.
"You need to regulate yourself before we can have this conversation." "I'm going to need you to take accountability for your trauma response." "This relationship isn't serving my highest self."
These are real things people say now. With a straight face. To people they claim to love.
The Tyranny of Being Triggered
Let's talk about "triggered" specifically, because this one's doing the most damage.
A trigger, in actual therapeutic terms, is when a current situation activates an old trauma response - your nervous system genuinely can't tell the difference between now and then. It's not a choice. It's not just being upset.
But we've turned it into this: any uncomfortable feeling is a trigger, and if you trigger me, you're basically re-traumatising me, which makes you an abuser.
So now you can't give your partner feedback because it might "trigger" them. You can't disagree with your friend because they're "triggered" by confrontation. You can't have a normal human reaction to someone's behaviour because you need to be "mindful of their triggers."
Everyone's walking on eggshells calling it trauma-informed relating.
Here's the uncomfortable bit: if everything triggers you, nothing's actually triggering you. You're just upset, which is normal. If your partner asking you to do the dishes is triggering, that's not about the dishes and it's not about trauma - it's about the fact that you haven't actually dealt with whatever needs dealing with.
Real triggers need real work, usually with a real therapist. They don't need your housemate to whisper around you like you're made of spun glass.
Boundaries Aren't Walls
"I'm setting a boundary" has become the most popular way to avoid negotiation whilst sounding healthy.
A boundary is about what you'll do, not what other people must do. "I'm not comfortable discussing my relationship history with you yet" is a boundary. "You need to stop asking me questions about my past because it's invasive" is a demand dressed as a boundary.
See the difference? One is about your behaviour. One is about controlling someone else's.
We've confused boundaries with barriers. Real boundaries are where you end and I begin - they're about protecting yourself, not controlling others. But now "setting boundaries" means "making unilateral decisions about our relationship and you're toxic if you question them."
"I've decided we're only seeing each other twice a week now - I'm setting boundaries." "I need you to never bring up [completely normal relationship topic] - that's my boundary." "I'm going to do whatever I want and you have to be fine with it - boundaries."
That's not boundaries. That's just being difficult and calling it personal growth.
A real boundary sounds like: "I'm not available for late-night phone calls anymore." Not: "You're not allowed to call me after 9pm." See how one's about you and one's about them?
The Vulnerability Industrial Complex
Then there's the performance of vulnerability itself.
"I'm going to be really vulnerable with you right now..." [Proceeds to make carefully curated disclosure designed to elicit specific response]
That's not vulnerability. That's a hostage situation dressed in therapy language. Real vulnerability is risky precisely because you don't know how it will land. The minute you announce it, you're managing it.
We've turned "doing the work" into a personality trait. An identity. Something you mention in your dating profile between yoga and sourdough.
"I've done a lot of therapy" becomes a weird flex. Proof you're self-aware. Proof you're a catch. Proof you're further along some imaginary path than the people who haven't spent thousands on therapy.
But some of the most stuck people I see are the ones who've done the most therapy. They can name their attachment style, map their family system, explain their defences - and they're using all that knowledge to avoid actually changing.
What You're Actually Doing
You're turning relationships into clinical assessments instead of human connections.
You're diagnosing instead of feeling. Labelling instead of grieving. Analysing instead of actually dealing with the hurt underneath.
Your ex isn't a narcissist - they just didn't love you properly and that's devastating. You're not being gaslit - you're in a relationship where you're not being heard and that's lonely. You're not triggered - you're angry and scared and sad, which is what humans feel when things aren't okay.
The therapy speak lets you skip over the actual feelings and go straight to the diagnosis. Which is exactly what you accuse other people of doing to you.
Here's the test: if you can't say what you mean without therapy vocabulary, you don't actually know what you mean yet.
"You're gaslighting me" → "I feel like my reality isn't valid to you and that's frightening." "This triggered my abandonment wound" → "When you cancelled last minute I felt terrified you were pulling away." "I need to set a boundary" → "I'm not okay with this and we need to talk about it."
The first versions are shields. The second versions are vulnerable. Guess which one actually creates connection?
What Gets Lost
Real intimacy requires risk. Not the performed vulnerability where you announce you're being vulnerable - actual risk, where you don't know if the other person will understand, where you might get it wrong, where you could look foolish.
Therapy speak protects you from that risk. It creates a language barrier between you and anyone who might hurt you. Keep everything clinical, keep everyone at arm's length, and call it emotional intelligence.
But you can't connect through bulletproof glass.
The people you love aren't diagnostic categories. Your relationships aren't case studies. Your hurt isn't a disorder and their hurt isn't abuse and sometimes two people just hurt each other in that stupid, ordinary way that humans do.
Sometimes you're not triggered, you're just upset. Sometimes they're not a narcissist, they're just selfish. Sometimes it's not a trauma response, it's just your personality. Sometimes you're not setting boundaries, you're just being controlling.
And sometimes admitting "I'm hurt and I don't know why and I'm probably overreacting but it still feels awful" is more honest than any therapy speak could ever be.
What Actually Happens in Therapy
None of this is to say that therapy doesn't have its own language - it does. But it's nothing like what you're using in your text arguments at 2am.
Actual therapy language is boring. It's careful. It's about creating space for your experience rather than explaining it away. When I'm working with someone, I'm not handing them diagnostic labels for their ex or teaching them to identify everyone else's disorders.
I'm interested in what's happening right now, in this room. What you're feeling, what you're avoiding, what patterns keep showing up. The technical language exists, but it's in service of understanding, not weaponising.
The words that have escaped into the wild - "gaslighting," "narcissist," "triggered," "boundaries" - have been stripped of their nuance and turned into relationship grenades. They sound clinical enough to feel authoritative, vague enough to apply to almost anything, and damning enough to end an argument.
That's not therapy. That's just another way of avoiding the actual work of being human with other humans.
Where This Leaves Us
Your relationships are dying from psychological sophistication.
You don't need better therapeutic terminology. You need the courage to just say what you actually mean. To be angry without making it clinical. To be hurt without making it a syndrome. To want things from people without turning your wants into their disorders.
The people in your life aren't case studies. They're just people - flawed, complicated, sometimes hurtful, occasionally lovely people. And you're allowed to be hurt by them without pathologising them. You're allowed to be angry without calling it a trauma response. You're allowed to want things without framing it as boundaries.
Maybe try just being honest instead.
If you recognise yourself in this and want to work on actually saying what you mean, rather than diagnosing what everyone else is doing wrong - that's the work. Email hello@talktoluke.com
