- Videos teaching people therapy-originated concepts like "boundaries" are becoming more and more popular online.
- TikToker Nancy Wu recently went viral claiming "over-therapized" friends who ghosted her misused therapy-speak.
TikTok has long been a fount of self-help content and general lifestyle advice. The "TherapyTok" subculture is full of both professional therapists and self-anointed mental health experts who try to make therapy tools accessible.
In some ways, therapy culture has gone mainstream.
However, there has been a new wave of backlash to what's commonly referred to as "therapy-speak," or terminology like "emotional labor" and "self-care" that's often used in clinical sessions. With the TikTok-ification of therapy, some believe therapy-speak has backfired to the point where people are deploying this sensitive language in meaningless or manipulative ways. While people have criticized the increasing proliferation of therapy-speak for years, the discourse has taken off this year after the release of text messages that purport to show actor Jonah Hill misusing therapy lingo like "boundaries" in a controlling way with his ex-partner.
Dr. Isabelle Morley, a licensed clinical psychologist, told Insider that while increased mental health awareness is overall a good thing, therapy terms can be weaponized "for people to justify certain decisions or blame and label people."
A recent video about friends being so-called 'over-therapized' has reignited the conversation
The discourse reached a fever pitch on TikTok last week with a viral clip by a woman who said her friends who ghosted her were "over-therapized" because they called her good deeds an act of manipulation.
@funkshe Not hating on therapy. Ive seen the same therapist since 2019 and shes done everything from saving my life to being my career coach #storytime #endingfriendships #nyc #therapy ♬ original sound - funkshe
Nancy Wu, a tech worker from New York, told Insider the saga began when her two best friends from middle school visited her a couple of years ago. She let them stay at her place and ended up paying for all their meals, she said in the video, because they have "liquidity issues," and she didn't want them to worry about cost. She thought they had a great time, but immediately after the trip, they ghosted her.
When she confronted them months later, she said they attacked her with concepts they learned from therapy.
"They said, 'The way that you paid for everything on our trip was manipulative. You don't serve me anymore'," Wu recalled in the TikTok, which has been viewed over 1.3 million times. "Almost 20 years of friendship down the drain."
Wu made a follow-up video where she offered more context: She said she was not in the best mental state several years ago, frequently calling them for emotional support. But that her friends often "made fun of her for" it.
Wu told Insider she thinks her friends have lifted concepts from therapy — like people "serving" each other, or needing "emotional breaks" and being "emotionally exhausted" — to stir up undeserved resentment for an issue that she already apologized for and thought was resolved.
"Those friends saw this idea of emotional debt, where if I was the one always going to them for advice when I was down and it seemed unequal because they didn't go to me for advice as much, then I owed an emotional debt to them," she said. "I just think that's so ridiculous."
By buying all their meals while they were visiting, Wu believes her friends thought she was using that to "pay off" the debt.
Morley, who's had clients be confronted by friends and peers with similar therapy-speak, said what often happens is people fixate too much on perfecting others. While she said it can be empowering to call out hurtful behavior, it can be "mostly unproductive."
"People should focus on what is within their control to do or change instead of putting it on other people," she said.
@itszaarinb Dont infringe on her self-care time #selfcare #intellectual #weaponizedmediocrity #thatfriend #redditstories #annoyingfriend ♬ original sound - Z
Criticism about being 'over-therapized' has become a punchline on TikTok
In addition to people recounting their own unhelpful therapy-speak incidents, numerous users have made skits making fun of the ubiquity of this type of language. In one video from late July, a user pretended to be a person who was going to break up with her boyfriend because he broke his foot and intruded on her "self-care time" by asking for a glass of water.
Another popular clip from March, by the account @alexandrawideeyes, featured a comedy "POV" sketch pretending to be the sort of friend who "weaponizes therapy language." The video featured words like "projecting" and "violating my boundaries," and the poster imagined refusing to Venmo her friend for a movie ticket because the person "gaslighted" her into seeing it.
Morley believes part of this backlash is coming from therapy language being overused — with many negative consequences, like friend breakups or added tensions, as a result. Plus, she said that part of therapy is meant to be internal work, or things you can do to quietly take care of yourself.
But now, "everyone is explicitly taking everything from their therapy and putting it on the table," she said. Instead of accepting temporary unevenness in a friendship or giving a little less when they feel burned out, they'll announce that the friend is encroaching on their boundaries.
Wu is ambivalent about the TikTok-fication of therapy and its associated vernacular. On the one hand, she thinks it's great for therapy to "become less stigmatized." The only bad thing, she noted, is when people don't think critically about the terms they're using. Wu said she has been in therapy since 2019 and thinks the resource can be great if it helps you accept your resentments and move on.
"There's no such thing as too much good therapy," Wu said. "The problem is that there are media trends around these therapized words, where everyone uses the word 'weaponized' and 'serving me' and 'emotional labor,' and those words go around and make people … develop resentment towards their friends, their jobs, their families, just because they learned this new language."
Morley said that most of the time, people don't intentionally mean to abuse therapy-speak. It may just be that people love cognitive shortcuts to understand themselves and others better. Because most people aren't licensed psychologists, tossing a label on a person or issue like "narcissist" or "sociopath" is a lot easier.
"When I tell somebody what you're experiencing or doing is emotional abuse, I understand everything that goes behind that," Morley said. "But people who are adopting therapy terms don't know the context or weight of what they're using and it's getting misconstrued."