Trauma, triggers, gaslighting: Why, as a therapist, I’m troubled by social media’s ‘therapy-speak’

Most such persons on social media do better (read: Gain more followers) when they neatly package human emotions into terms with which we can diagnose ourselves or others conveniently, and then accept or dismiss any relationship or interaction in our lives with that as a valid basis. We bear the cost of missing out on nuance and context by creating more isolation for ourselves, contrary to feeling the espoused empowerment. There is a misinformation overload which we deal with by isolating ourselves from information and people that don’t suit us exactly.

Let’s be clear: Everything is not a trauma response; everyone you have an aversion to is not a narcissist; every experience of feeling angry or petrified is not triggering; and someone who disagrees with you is not toxic or gaslighting you.

This isn’t new, though. Psychological diagnoses have been woven into pop culture and language for a while now. Anyone finicky was branded “OCD”; someone emotional was “bipolar”. Psychology is about making sense of people’s inner lives, so how can the language not make its way into everyday parlance?

The problem occurs when it is misused. In this case, the language that masquerades itself as therapy or therapeutic insight deviates widely from its essence. Therapy is intimate and relational, keeping the client at the centre. Social media content, on the other hand, ensures the content creator is the centre of focus and encourages overgeneralised diagnoses, akin to reading a horoscope — applicable to everyone. Therapy’s purpose is to peel back a person’s layers and make one’s own experience knowable and not shroud it in technical jargon and ambiguity. More than anything, therapy isn’t easy. It’s deep, emotional work that doesn’t neatly package your inner world for you.

Take, for example, boundaries. Good mental health involves having a sense of self and purpose along with healthy social connections — not one at the cost of the other. But how do we achieve this when we are advised to hold “firm boundaries”, often taken to mean cutting someone inconvenient out of your life? This binary view fails to communicate that a boundary is interrelational; it means taking into account your needs and the needs of the other. Meaningful therapy will help you create awareness with compassion for the self and the other and find ways to live that support you in navigating the complex relationships that make up the richness of our lives. There is space to hold multiple perspectives and not just be wedded to the singular idea of our own healing self.

Therapy-speak only confirms our yearning to know ourselves and the worlds we inhabit, and our discomfort with uncertainties and hence, our scramble for the labels of certainty. I wonder: How else can we talk about the things that leave us feeling confused, vulnerable, scared, fragile, alone and entirely human? How else can we ask for connection? Is pathologising ourselves and others with psychological lexicon the only way?

We need to build our vocabulary of emotional language. We have this great advantage as Indians where most of us speak more than one language — I wonder if we could make use of our bilingualism to nuance and contextualise our unique range of experiences.

I have struggled to know my position when confronted with this — I meet it daily in the therapy room when clients bring in their knowledge and diagnoses from social media. However, as I step away from my concerns and reflect on the larger societal structures, I recognise something. Mental health has been steeped in silence and stigma for years. I believe this excessive therapy-speak is the pendulum swinging the other way, and perhaps inevitably so, before we can find a middle ground. Given that mental health is still largely minimised and caricaturised, it might be a while before we come to adopt psychological language more meaningfully and usefully.

I hope that as more trained therapists and therapeutic services become accessible and affordable, our conversations will reflect this change. I hope that we reach out to those who are suffering, with generosity and compassion, not judgement and labels. I hope that we learn to go deeper into our understanding of the self and not just skim the surface. I hope we recognise that explanations offered as generalisations in places like social media do not define us and how life needs to be. I hope they help us, instead, resolve or learn something about ourselves in a way that allows us to make choices that lead to a robust sense of well-being in this world. I hope that we recognise that healing will not happen between us and a screen. It will happen when we examine who we wish to be and act accordingly.

The writer is a senior psychologist and couples/family therapist practising in Delhi/NCR