Guest Blog: Conversations in the Age of Therapy Speak

“Conversations in the Age of Therapy Speak”

by Hannah Caplan

As the stigma around therapy continues to fade and people speak more openly about their experiences, the language of therapy has quietly slipped out of the consulting room and into everyday conversation. You hear people referring to their “attachment style”, or explaining an argument as a failure to “respect boundaries”. We’ve all picked it up to some degree.

Social media has sped this process along. People are more open about therapy, which is a good thing, but it also means quite specific language is now everywhere, slightly warping as it spreads. You’ll see people confidently diagnosing their ex, themselves, or strangers they’ve never met, until those phrases become common parlance.

On the surface, this is progress. It’s great. We are more emotionally literate than we used to be. There’s more openness, more awareness, more willingness to examine how we relate to each other.

But there’s also a subtle pressure to get it right. To use the correct terms, to have the informed take, to sound like you understand what’s going on. Everyone wants to be thoughtful, but also, if we’re honest, to sound thoughtful.

And somewhere in that, the language can start to do more than just describe a feeling, it can control it.

It can be a genuinely helpful tool in the right context, but it can also be a tool for manipulating, shutting down a conversation. Even if used correctly, it can make words feel clinical, muddying what you’re trying to say or masking what you’re actually feeling.

It’s easier to say “I’m processing something” than it is to say “I’m hurt”, or “I’m angry”. Taking a beat before a gut reaction isn’t a bad thing in itself, but it can create a small gap between what we feel and what we actually say out loud.

That tension sits at the centre of my debut play, THIS IS NOT ABOUT ME., which follows two twenty-somethings trying to make sense of a relationship that has already begun to unravel.

Grace and Eli are both very fluent in this language. They can analyse their patterns, identify their triggers, and explain their relationship in real time and on paper, they should be excellent communicators. But they’re not.

There are moments where they say all the right things and still miss each other entirely. Conversations that feel considered, and use all the “right” words, still don’t land, and the audience watches them go round in circles. It’s not that they don’t have the vocabulary, it’s that the vocabulary sometimes becomes a way of avoiding the thing they’re actually trying to say. Then there’s the raw outbursts of emotion that, in comparison, feel harsh and reactive, perhaps a reaction to the sanitised language used up to that point.

The more I started paying attention to conversations around me, the way people tell stories, and how those stories shift over time, the more I found myself thinking about how much of that comes down to language. Not in a dramatic way, just in the small choices. The words you use, the parts you include, the parts you don’t. You can take the same moment and tell it in a way that feels quite different, depending on how you frame it.

The play explores that as well. Grace is writing a play about her relationship with Eli as we watch it unfold, a play within a play (intense, I know). But it let me sit inside that question of authorship: if two people share an experience, who gets to decide what it was? And what happens when one of them turns it into something public? Into art?

We all do a version of this all the time. Retelling things to friends, to family, online. It’s rarely a perfect replay or entirely neutral. It’s shaped slightly in the telling, not necessarily on purpose, but because we’re deciding what matters as we go. And the language we choose becomes part of that shaping. It sets the tone, the emphasis, the version of events that sticks. You can end up with two versions of the same thing that both feel completely valid, and still don’t quite line up.

I don’t think the language itself is the problem. If anything, it’s an incredibly useful tool. But like any tool, it can be used to clarify or to obscure.

What I keep coming back to is that moment where you realise that, despite having all the right words, you’re still not quite being heard. Or, slightly worse, that you’re not quite hearing the other person either.

And unfortunately, there isn’t a neat bit of vocabulary that fixes that.