Intellectualizing The Healing

unpacking therapy-speak and the limitations of mental health content

I'm not sure about your algorithm, but I regularly stumble across podcasts, Instagram carousels, TikToks, and reposted soundbites that help contextualize experiences that made me feel alone, ashamed, and misunderstood for many years. It's almost as if scrolling on Instagram and TikTok provides a mini therapy session by validating my feelings. Mental wellness and trauma-informed content affirm my choice to set boundaries, reparent myself, and give myself grace as I continue the arduous practice of healing. As positive as this shift is, there are some drawbacks. For starters, social media content is not a replacement for therapy, and an increase in content doesn’t automatically translate to an increase in collective mental awareness. We can engage with content that defines issues we’re working through, but putting a name to a problem doesn’t always result in an incisive understanding of how it relates to our personal issues. It’s not uncommon for people to have confirmation bias, cognitive distortions, or to create self-fulfilling prophecies. I don’t see many conversations in these spaces that address the narratives we create about our interpersonal relationships that don’t account for our blind spots. We can like, share and comment all we want, but how much of that activity shows us where we are falling short, not just the flaws of people who have harmed us?

In many ways, this trend is representative of a collective shift in generational attitudes toward mental wellness and what constitutes unhealthy relationships, specifically in familial systems. Within this shift is a decreased tolerance for people who cannot be accountable for their actions and fail to do "the work" to recondition themselves into more self-aware people. Writing people off as "toxic" and recalling moderately unpleasant experiences as "traumatic" (even if we minimize the real meaning of trauma in the process) has become a trend. In general, useful information spread via social media is often truncated to cater to the limited attention span of users. This results in a diluted understanding of psychological concepts, which then become regurgitated buzzwords (the misuse of the word ‘gaslighting’ is a great example of this). People often engage in therapy-speak without knowing how to do the uncomfortable work of speaking to the heart and relating to deeply flawed people on a human level. This is not an attempt to trivialize anyone’s lived experiences or the significant breakthroughs they’ve had from this type of social media content. My hope is that we reexamine the limitations of therapy-speak as a tool for proactively healing ourselves and our relationships.