In talking with some acquaintances and viewing videos of people who are clearly struggling to cope, I'm often distracted by their use of language that abstracts away from human-to-human conflict. Their focus has been repackaged into sterilized abstruse terminology. It's as though the emotions and suffering have been packed away into the basement and they are trapped upstairs in a nonstop web of psychological chatter that is facilitated by their therapists.
Freya India points out the increasingly common problem of therapy buzzwords in a communication to Ayishat Akanbi, a writer:
I’m very skeptical of therapy-speak, unconvinced it even helps us open up. More often I think it actually closes down our ability to have honest conversations.
But you got to the heart of what bothers me about it, the insincerity. If someone tells me about their “fearful-avoidant” attachment style or how they are learning to “hold space” for others, I find it hard to feel anything. But if they tell me about their hurt and heartbreak, or how they are trying to be less selfish, I’m listening. We are talking human to human now.
As you write, “We’re encouraged to describe even ordinary interpersonal conflict in the language of pathology and melodramatic categories. So we start treating every slight like persecution because exaggeration is the only way to make pain legible.”
But I’ve been wondering lately if two things are happening at once. On one hand, we have this therapeutic group-speak, this exaggeration of suffering. But on the other hand, I think we are also losing the ability to talk about actual pain.
The writer Samuel Kronen, in a piece about chronic illness, put it like this: “There still appears to be a lot of unrewarded suffering in the world and our culture can seem pretty cruel and callous toward the vulnerable…If anything, I think our screen-addled, instantly-gratifying, digitally-intoxicated culture actually makes people less sensitive and conscious of suffering in certain ways, contributing to a more casual cruelty.”
I think he’s right. We might pathologise ordinary feelings and exaggerate small slights, but we also seem unwilling to accept genuine suffering. We can’t seem to cope with it. It’s hard, for example, to have a sincere conversation about something like family breakdown. I hear so many young women talking about their attachment styles, about “reparenting” themselves and healing their inner child, but not so much about the pain of divorce. I think this is why, as a culture, we have ended up with so much therapeutic advice and so little wisdom. Because we aren’t speaking about our problems in any recognisably human way. Maybe we are trying to make things easier on ourselves. If you phrase your problem as “anxious attachment”, you need a therapist. If you phrase it as your parents’ divorce, you need a difficult conversation with your dad.
As I read India's email to Akanbi, I was reminded of a book I read in college: The Myth of Mental Illness (1961), by Thomas Szasz. I think Szasz overstated his case in his book, but he did draw necessary attention to whether metaphoric terms like "mental illness" been literalized to unduly justify psychiatry's authority, turning common problems of living into impenetrable diagnoses, often harming individuals by stripping them of agency and responsibility for their actions.
