A great deal of psychological whiplash has been collectively felt by the women continuously liberated since the mid-20th century.
Their entry into the workforce and approach toward an ideal egalitarianism is happening in the same short time that humanity is making exponential technological leaps. There is likely a causal arrow here, and it’s likely that the arrow runs bidirectionally.1 Every action has its equal and opposite; this law can often be applied to the mental substrate as much as the physical.2 An enormous social displacement is occurring, much more for the women of the West, and as such there is an equal psychical displacement.
One of the many effects that could be examined here is that of therapy speak. We have little need for a definition; like pornography, you know it when you see it. Therapy speak is a symptom of the psychological distress of immense change. In itself it contains the seed of a larger theory on the evolution of language as a result of digital technologies, which will be the subject of future essays. In this piece, I’ll wander through the “validations” and “affirmations” of those ultimately ineffable experiences that therapy speak so desperately tries to reduce. We’ll arrive at a theory of this turn.
1.
I’m looking at two ingredients in the recipe of therapy speak, burnout and the feminine, although there are irreducibly more. A central conviction you’ll find throughout these dispatches are that any given social phenomenon is itself a product of a vast web of other social phenomenon. I won’t be reducing any to a single cause; instead, I will theorize only about those I find visible in hopes of some partial understanding.
We can understand burnout through philosopher Byung-Chul Han: Burnout results from the ceaseless individual quest for self-actualization within a particular, mimetically-derived society. He calls this the “achievement society,” where each individual is an “achievement subject.” This is the lot of the middle-class coaster, with a new goal set in the immediate aftermath of every achievement and perpetuated reflexively. They grind the science olympiad to get into a selective university to get a credential that opens the door to a career that authentically reflects what they are aiming to become. The rub, however, is that one does not ever truly become — rather, the subject grows “tired of having to become [her]self.”3
I think the postural difference between the sexes at the onset of this type of society is quite clear. It is a man, you see, that has stood atop mountains and surveyed the unknown for centuries. Within an exceedingly short few decades, the path up that mountain had been equally opened to women and the reflexive bullwhip of the achievement society activated.
I withhold value judgements on the theoretical quality of broad egalitarianism. But it is not opinion to point out the velocity of change for women was necessarily faster than that of men. The whiplash must to some degree account for the gender disparity in diagnosed depression.4
The second ingredient, then, is that which lends the mind its femininity. Contrary to what is, I think, the pop-history understanding of patriarchy,5 women have long been associated with groundedness and practicality. It’s Werther who shoots himself with overtly symbolic pistols over unrequited love and the “Wanderer” hikes up a mountain while the caretakers tend the estate. The popular understanding is not wholly inaccurate, though. As Chesterton says, the most dangerous wrongs are those closest to being right. The feminine is rightly associated with emotions, but the modern thinks of emotions as overwhelming sentimentality. Emotions are thought to be fuzzy where thought — their supposed counterpart — is thought to be clear and distinct.
“In their deepest essence,” writes scholar of esotericism Richard Smoley, elucidating an ancient association of the Gospel of Mark with the Lion, a symbol of emotion, “the emotions are swift, direct, and ruthless—like a lion. They can size up a situation instantaneously, much more rapidly than can the rational mind.”6
The feminine ingredient can be understood as an internal priority toward emotion. This emotion is embodied and coherent, sensitive but not hysteric, attuned but not directionless. Femininity anchors a friendly conversation while the rational masculine slouches with unfocused eyes, calculating chess moves for a correspondence game, divorced from the present moment.
2.
Han’s go-to metaphor for the achievement subject is that of the entrepreneur. They are in an internal growth mindset, constantly looking for operational advantages and uncapitalized efficiencies. The modern subject Han has in mind is always taking the time to focus on themselves, to practice self-care. They seek betterment; they are always doing The Work.
Here is the theory: Therapy speak is a linguistic method for self-analysis and optimization analogous to quantitative methods for business analytics.
For those blessedly not in the know, the business analyst quantifies the totality of the organization and finds by induction ways to maximize the bottom line. Everything is put into a spreadsheet and given an exact numerical weight. They optimize in search of higher returns. Nothing in the organization is free from quantification.
So we apply this logic to the entrepreneur of the self, the achievement subject, and conclude that she too must optimize, leaving nothing of her own internal organization out of the reduction to quantity. As such, those emotions that cohere in the feminine psyche need to be quantified; this is the function of therapy speak. An emotion is “validated” or “affirmed”, one “honors” the feelings of another. You can imagine these verbs as functions in an algorithm, bestowing a binary 1 upon the particular category of feeling the coming input matches.
Consider the classic: “I’m sorry, I’m actually at emotional capacity and don’t think I could hold space for you. Could we connect at a later date?” I don’t need to point out the quantification here, but we can note how easily this would map onto an employer’s Slack response to your request for a raise, with only slight adjustment in diction.
You may have noticed a fuzz over the logic here. Therapy speak is speech from one person to another; and yet, so far the analysis has regarded only the individual subjectivity. This is because the realm of emotional optimization is the corrupted realm of human relationship. Therapy speak began as a tool for use in professional therapeutic context;7 it has since been exported for use in any context (totality of the organization, remember). And like all language, therapy speak shapes the thing that gives rise to our words in the first place, the very seat of our subjectivity. So, the achievement subject seeks to validate and affirm her own emotions even as she employs others to perform those same functions. In this way, interior activity mirrors the spoken word.
3.
How well does it work? Does therapy speak successfully optimize the entrepreneur of the self? The answer is yes, by way of nominative reduction. In the process of therapeutic validation, an entire universe of internal motion is passed through an algorithm and conquered. She gives a name to this universe — say, “hurt” or “pain” or “anger” — and the archeology is complete.
Where once our language was implicitly metonymic it is now wholly demotic. A metonymic device would imply that the word “hurt” is a sign pointing to something that necessarily transcends verbal expression. Demotic language is the objectifying language of empirical sciences, and under its hegemony “hurt” means nothing more than itself and its synonyms.
From Northrop Frye: “The modern use of language has been driven increasingly to define the objective reality of the world, on the assumption that ‘objective’ means real, because it allows of such a consensus, and that ‘subjective’ means unreal because it does not.”8
Demotic language is a necessary condition for business analysis; and so it is necessary for entrepreneurship of the self. You must be exactly precise about everything in this world, and most especially about yourself, if you’d like to achieve as demanded. It is not good to have emotions, those ineffable and profound things; it is good to be emotionally intelligent, to manipulate emotions as objects with utility.
Therapy speak is the nominative reduction of subjectivity. In particular, it reduces those parts of relationships that must never be reduced. Validations and affirmations always have and always will take place among friends in a richer, fuller form when they are not made explicit and rendered miniscule. “Thank you for sharing with me, I will try to hold space for you during this difficult time to affirm your pain” — this is cringe.
A tragic example of the success of therapy speak is that a woman seeking a serious romantic relationship will certainly maintain a distance from any suitor if every vulnerability is demystified by this language. It ensures that she remains free to focus on herself, practice self-care, and continue along with the brisk pace of egalitarian achievement.
End.
Being human is characterized by necessary mysticism. We can either grow tired of becoming ourselves or embrace that there is always more to being.
Therapy speak opposes mysticism. A business cannot be made mysteriously efficient. Its opposite, then, is faith. Faith that underneath the mystery that is the richness of emotion is a meaning. We must have faith that our friend sharing in our life is reaching across the subjective divide and relating, even if she does not say so.
Anything less than faith is numbers; anything numerical is dead.
I find the tragedy of therapy speak is that it is used unintentionally. We’ve theorized here in an attempt to understand, but those people propagating the language do not. It is a sad consciousness that negates its emotionality with scripts. It must be very lonely in there.
For a thrilling presentation of evidence supporting this arrow, I suggest reading the g/acc "Blackpaper".
The only time this law doesn’t apply — that is, the only time you do not reap what you’ve sown — is through God. That is (a) meaning of Christianity.
Alain Ehrenberg quoted by Byung-Chul Han in The Burnout Society
I just read an article this morning on contagious neurological disorders that spread over TikTok. It contained illuminating evidence, for my purposes: “Bartholomew says that out of the 3,500 likely cases of MPIs that he has identified through history, ‘I would say 98 percent of them are majority female.’” I think the form of therapy speak is contained within the form of social contagions, which are, as we see, feminine.
In reality, an eternal backward projection.
From Richard Smoley’s Inner Christianity
From @defaultfriend: “[Therapy speak was] created for people who have severe difficulty with normal and healthy relationships. Even a few years ago, to even be referred to a group like this you needed to have shown a history of severe relationship disturbances.”
Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature
I agree with a lot of what you're laying out here, but I maintain that the forgotten piece of therapy speak is that it emerges post-Boomer parenting-- post-narcissism-like-the-world's-never-seen-before. Now, one interpretation is that therapy speak is itself a symptom of narcissism, but it's also a *reaction* to it. I do think there is something real to "I'm at emotional capacity." The twin of the autistic, emotionally detached therapy-speaker is the BPD friend (or even Devouring Mother) who eschews these new norms, who is the Rebel, who says "A friend should be there no matter what," but is not a friend at all: she's a perverted expression of Friend, who indeed is asking too much, is too loud, too big, too emotional, too self-absorbed. The autist shrinks, becomes an automaton.