#6 Too self-aware

When therapy-speak feels more like a hindrance than a help

Happy Monday readers,

I took a brief hiatus from Poochie Writes. Mainly because I moved house and then went on a holiday, but also because writing can sometimes feel like another thing I should be doing. As the self-help guides tell me: you need a creative outlet.

This is just one of the many rules I impose on myself to be a good human. Going on holidays and taking a break from the work/weekend rhythm got me thinking about what other rules I’ve internalised and judge my behaviour on. Today’s newsletter is where I landed.

---

When therapy-speak feels more like a hindrance than a help

Last month I had a week off in Lombok. It was the first holiday where my sister, friend and I felt like we could resist the urge (or sometimes the pressure) to hit the town and be young and fun while overseas. We felt proud that after 10 days, we barely scratched the edges of a hangover – notwithstanding a consistent bloat from a steady stream of pina coladas.

My mum, who miraculously joined the trip after an expired passport saga, insisted she didn’t mind us going out. She was happy as Larry to stay by herself. But truthfully, we wanted to join her. A desire that was reinforced when we discovered the bedrooms had smart TVs and therefore access to all streaming services (!). My friend suggested we watch the latest dating reality show on Netflix, The Ultimatum: Queer Love.

We cringed through the first episode, but it didn’t take long for the four of us to be slinking back to our rooms every night to watch it, after a ritual clove cigarette and Bintang. This is often the pattern with reality television. You judge it (and those who consume it) until you’re a few episodes in and deeply invested.

The concept of The Ultimatum is so convoluted that the show’s creators need to rehash it every episode. Five couples enter the show all facing the same predicament. One person has issued their partner an ultimatum: we either get engaged or we break up. To push them to decide, the original couples switch partners and enter three-week trial marriages to explore a different connection with one of the other contestants. After coming back together with their original partner (for another three-week marriage trial lol), they must decide to either a) get engaged with their original partner, b) get engaged with their new partner, or c) walk away single. All pretty simple.

The show provided us with ample content to debrief over breakfast.

Mal is so avoidant. Vanessa is a narcissist. Lexi is really controlling. Yoly and Xander are becoming co-dependent. Tiff has anger issues. Rae can’t express her feelings. Aussie is shocking at communication.

As we therapised the contestants and their ‘toxic’ relationship behaviours, we noticed the contestants were also well-versed in therapy-speak. I need to feel seen and heard by you. You’re projecting right now. We need to communicate more. I’m triggered. You’re triggered. That’s a boundary. I have to learn to sit in this discomfort. You’re not holding space for me. I need to let love in.

This language, while intending to convey self-awareness, felt contradictory. A device the contestants utilised to convince whoever was listening (and themselves) they had a self-aware handle on things. While the fire – the conflict, the emotions, the betrayal, the hurt – kept burning around them.

Distanced from these people, their relationships, and their upbringings, it felt easy to critique their behaviour from our ivory tower (the villa). In the same way it felt natural to join the recent Jonah Hill pile-on. I cringed at and made fun of the ‘psychobabble’ coming out of these people’s mouths, but couldn’t deny the links I saw to my own discourse.

In her 2021 article in the New Yorker, Katy Waldman introduced the term ‘therapy-speak’ to describe the language of the therapist’s office entering the mainstream. While not a new phenomenon – terms like “hysteria”, “shell shock,” and one’s “inner child” all reflect the psychoanalytic approaches of their day – Waldman says there is something more permeable about the current breed of “Instagram therapy” we are consuming through our screens. “It’s as though”, she remarks, “the haze of our inner lives [is] being filtered through a screen of therapy work sheets”.

My fascination with therapy-speak surfaced long before therapists became social media influencers. I was a teenager and my older sister was in her first years practising as a psychologist in Melbourne. Like all things which no longer carry purpose but seem too important to throw out, she left a stack of psychology books in a shelf in our family home.

I remember turning through the pages and feeling like I was reading information that I shouldn’t be. Powerful truths that belonged in the hands of trained professionals, which gave meaning to the inexplicable feelings I was experiencing. The relief that came with knowing there is method to the madness of life was addictive. I took away one clear message: there is a way to live life right, without feeling crap.

And I continue to turn to psychology as a way to fix my problems: relationship issues, insecurities, anxiety, uncertainty. It started with going to therapy, and continued with buying books, subscribing to self-help podcasts and lately, scrolling through therapy-style content on Instagram. A friend and I recently exchanged screenshots of our Instagram explore pages. The colourful thumbnails on our grids were filled with identical psychology ‘how-tos’, as though the algorithm was tracking our inner psyches (this is probably true).

Click bait titles like:

‘Things happy couples do differently’

‘Five signs you’ve met your soulmate’

‘What I wanted in a partner in my 20s versus my 30s’

‘Are you anxiously attached or is their behaviour causing anxiety?’

‘Eight things to say after emotionally hurting someone’

’15 dating green flags’

As someone who actively embraces and encourages conversations around mental health, I’ve started to wonder if therapy-speak is actually helping me. I feel like I have more awareness than ever on what constitutes healthy human behaviour, and what a fulfilling relationship should look like, but this has almost fed into a sense that I am not doing enough.

I need to slow down. Feel grounded. Reduce my screen time. Feed myself from the inside out. Be alone without feeling lonely. Connect to my inner child. Sit with my feelings. Speak my truth even when it feels uncomfortable. Find the movement I crave. Set boundaries with my time and energy. Be present with every meal and conversation. Practice good sleep hygiene.

Then when navigating dating and relationships (you heard about my Instagram algorithm), there is an increasingly rigid set of criteria to meet. A partner should be empathetic and securely attached and strong boundaried and allow me to be myself and be up for difficult conversations and be committed to their own and our mutual healing.

I’ve noticed that when I inevitably fall short of these standards, I judge myself and others for getting it wrong. 

Preeminent psychotherapist Esther Perel notes the TikTokified, ‘how-to’ nature of contemporary psych content is attempting to transform abstract psychological theories on highly complex matter into oversimplified, absolute rulebooks.

“On one hand”, Esther says, “there is an importance in gaining clarity when you name certain things. On the other hand, there is a danger that you lose all nuance, that you’re basically trying to elevate your personal comments and personal experience by invoking the higher authority of psychobabble.”

Over time – somewhere between the therapy room and Instagram reels – therapy-speak became the solution to all our problems. As Lily Scherlis argued in a recent article, therapy-speak – words like ‘boundaries’ – “implies the possibility of transcending the basic ickiness of being in relationship to others, as well as the strain of day-in, day-out labour.”

It's the idea that if you do enough therapy and use the right lingo, you can evolve into a smooth, shiny, emotionally mature and self-actualised individual. And if you encounter someone else who has done the same, you will be able to meet and have a frictionless and pain-free encounter.  

All the noise, through our earphones and screens and conversations, leaves little room for mistakes, suffering and learning through experience. Which kind of goes against the only thing we know for certain: that we are all flawed human beings who will continue to go through hard things and feel uncomfortable emotions. And a healthy and vital individual must be fully present to this pain. To love, is also to lose. To feel connected, is also to open ourselves to disconnection. To hope is also to feel disappointed. 

Being present to both sides of the coin demands much more vulnerability. A word so overused these days it’s lost its true meaning: to take an emotional risk.

This week, I received a text as I was walking to work. It was an apology from a close friend who had dropped out of contact, which made me feel sad and cry. My emotional response was unexpected. I had been convincing myself all week that I wasn’t bothered by her actions. Swallowing my tears, I entered the office, already rationalising my moment of suffering into a neat, processed story.

“I just got a text from a friend that made me really emotional” I joked. “She’s been hanging with her boyfriend a lot and I think it tapped into some abandonment wounds”. But the emotion, too raw, surfaced again. My two colleagues listened and sat with me and my teary eyes. And the feeling, painful for those moments, eventually passed.

My scepticism of therapy-speak is not a critique of therapy itself. In fact, what troubles me is that psych language and labels are distracting us from what we really need to navigate and stay present in this messy, complicated, relational world: support from and true intimacy with other humans.

Relief from our individual problems comes from taking emotional risks and opening ourselves to friends, colleagues, family, teachers and of course, therapists. People who will listen without judgement or an agenda, and remind us that whatever we’re feeling is a deeply human response. For me, I think this is going to look like reading less neat and snappy Instagram carousels and instead, getting better at articulating what is actually going on for me to people I trust.

I bumped into a couple of friends at a party on Saturday night who I hadn’t seen for yonks. They mentioned they’d been reading my newsletter! These moments really make my day. I hope this one spurs some thoughts for you.

Emma / Pooch x