Psychobabble: The Downside of Therapy Talk
Joe Nucci exposes how viral therapy culture distorts mental health—and what real healing looks like.
Listen now on Apple Podcasts or Spotify:
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but therapy-speak has gone mainstream. On social media, and in personal and professional communication, you might hear phrases like “I’m triggered,” “I’m traumatized,” “I’m being gaslit.” But as common as that kind of jargon is becoming, it’s not necessarily helpful, especially for those experiencing true mental illness.
is a licensed psychotherapist, author, and content creator whose new book, Psychobabble: Viral Mental Health Myths & the Truths to Set You Free, takes aim at the myths and misconceptions of therapy culture. Pick up a copy on Amazon and read on for five of his big ideas:
1. Psychotherapy heals mental illness, not “problems of living.”
Therapy works, but it doesn’t work for everything. Somewhere along the way, as mental health got destigmatized, we started to believe we could apply therapy to more than just mental illness. We started to believe it could save us from more than depression, trauma, and addiction. We started to believe that it could make us the ideal partner, the perfect parent, or help us achieve profound psychological comfort in all aspects of life.
Unfortunately, there is no pill and no therapeutic intervention that can erase all of life’s struggles. And yet, therapy is often marketed as a cure-all for anything life throws at you.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with going to therapy to vent or if you’re bored or lonely. Furthermore, therapy can be quite effective in helping you with subclinical or nondiagnostic problems, like dating issues or struggles with a life transition.
But there is a big difference between needing therapy and being able to benefit from it. Knowing where that line is can be really helpful in terms of maximizing how to get the most benefit from your therapy journey. It makes you a smarter consumer of therapy services and better at navigating self-help misinformation. Maybe you need to go to therapy, or maybe the answer to your problem can be found elsewhere. If you’re not sure, speaking to a qualified therapist can help you figure that out.
2. Mental health is about agency, not identity.
One of the dangers of therapy culture going viral is that mental health has become a form of identity and social currency. In certain places, mental health has become popularized. People collect labels like badges, flaunting their self-awareness:
“I am anxiously attached.”
“I am neurodivergent.”
“I am an empath.”
In the book, I share a patient’s story that is all too common. She could articulate every piece of her psychological history. She was practiced at naming her emotions and fluent in therapy-speak. But she wasn’t changing. She wasn’t healing. She was stuck and suffering from it.
She didn’t need more self-awareness. While becoming self-aware is often the first step, the magic of therapy isn’t about the analysis; it’s about translating that insight into action. It is about having hard conversations, naming her needs, and making the call she’d been avoiding for weeks.
“Diagnosis is a doorway, not a destination.”
Mental health shouldn’t be about figuring out “what” you are. It’s about being able to transform your attachment style, optimizing your life around your neurodivergency, or harnessing your empathy in an adaptive way. It’s about building your capacity to be better. Diagnosis is a doorway, not a destination. A diagnosis is useful in the sense that it informs a treatment plan.
Holding onto your diagnosis as an identity without building the capacity for agency is just taking extra steps to stay exactly where you are in life. That is not the promise of the mental health field. The promise is to transform what you can and accept the rest as problems of living.
This week, Book of the Day is brought to you by Robert Glazer, an award-winning CEO, and #1 Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Compass Within: A Little Story About The Values That Guide Us. Robert is the host of The Elevate Podcast, a conversation show where Robert talks to top leaders, authors and thinkers —such as Daniel Pink and Susan Cain—about how to lead effectively and perform at the highest level. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
3. Therapists are not value-neutral.
Therapists are taught to be nonjudgmental, but nonjudgmental doesn’t mean value-free. Every therapist brings a worldview into the room. They have their own pasts, politics, and values.
A bad therapist will pretend that they are perfectly neutral. This kind of therapist is blissfully unaware of how their own personal lives impact the work you are trying to accomplish in the session.
A good therapist will be aware that they are not a blank slate. They are self-aware enough to consider how they might say something that’s more about them than about you or why you are seeking their help. They will withhold sharing when it’s not clinically appropriate.
But a great therapist? A great therapist can be simultaneously aware of how their past or personal values might influence them while honoring that your past and life philosophies may differ. They may even talk about their differences to assist in your healing.
“A good therapist will be aware that they are not a blank slate.”
The unfortunate truth is that some therapists feel emboldened to let their personal worldview encroach on their patients’ worldview. Some therapists see themselves as activists advancing a certain agenda. It could be political or philosophical. It might mean encouraging a client to end a relationship, label a parent as toxic, or reframe social dynamics as systemic harm. Sometimes that’s warranted. But sometimes it’s projection.
4. Tragedies don’t always result in trauma.
Trauma is real, but so is the casual misuse of the term. Not everything bad that happens to you is a trauma. It’s inaccurate to say that events are traumatic in themselves because two people can get into the same car accident and one will develop PTSD while the other one will not. A trauma response is not about the past. It’s about the present moment and your current relationship to the thing that happened to you.
Sometimes, pain metabolizes naturally. Sometimes, people move forward without assigning their suffering a trauma diagnosis. And that’s not repression—it’s capacity. By insisting that everyone has trauma, we risk flattening a wide range of emotional experiences into one narrow framework. We must consider the dynamics of grief, growth, and the full range of negative human experiences that shape our lives.
Disappointment, regret, embarrassment, and heartbreak are hard, but they are not necessarily traumatic. Calling them trauma can subtly reinforce the idea that we are fragile and need clinical intervention to process every difficulty. This rebranding is surely good for therapists who want a steady stream of patients, but the idea culturally undermines resilience and turns the lens inward in ways that are often disempowering.
5. Therapy-speak can be medicine, or a weapon.
One of the best things about therapy is that sometimes, when you name something—when something becomes conscious through language—that thing no longer has power over you. I’ve seen firsthand how being able to name trauma or abuse can provide relief almost instantly. I’ve personally experienced the agency I’ve gained from being able to articulate a dynamic that was previously ineffable.
But if language can heal us, it can also hurt us:
A patient once said, “I’m drawing a boundary,” right after cutting off a friend without explanation. Was it a boundary? Or was it a way to avoid a hard conversation?
“He gaslit me” sometimes means “He disagreed with me.”
“I’m dysregulated” becomes shorthand for “I don’t want to talk about this.”
We think we’re speaking the language of healing. Sometimes, we’re just dressing up our defenses. Sometimes, using psychology jargon is just a logical fallacy—an appeal to authority. When we do this in a way that allows us to be more disconnected from ourselves and from each other, that is the opposite of the promise of the field of mental health.
Learning these concepts is a little bit like learning a new language. At the beginning, it’s important to stay rigid with your grammar and pronunciation. Over time, as you become more fluent, it’s less about the words you use and more about how you use them. It’s not about labeling gaslighting correctly or incorrectly. It’s about knowing how to handle it when somebody disagrees with you and knowing what to do if somebody is trying to gaslight you.
 | A guest post by
|
I look at it a little differently, maybe because my past has caused me to already have super-agency in my life. When I started therapy 2 years ago I suffered from PTSD. EMDR really helped that, and I have kept going with it. I also read a lot about the trauma response because of an abusive childhood I don't remember (probably because I was dissociated). This work was very important to me because I'd recovered from aggressive cancer and it seems clear that repressed anger and other such things increase recurrence. I did learn through therapy that instead of blaming other people for bad things they did, I always blamed myself for not being able to prevent them from doing it. I learned to take that anger that I was directing toward myself and put it back on the person who deserved it. That was an insight that a lifetime of self-analysis didn't come up with.
But in parallel, I took my decades long meditation practice to another level with a daily Tao practice. And I found a dichotomy. Whereas therapy is about naming emotions and feelings, and about telling a story which integrates your experience, Tao teaches that all that matters is the present moment, and that words and stories get in the way of experiencing the present moment. I found myself caring less and less how to name or describe a feeling, or what story explained what was going on and helped me feel better about things. Instead for the first time in my life I was able to be be present.
I still have some very stressful things in my life that I am trying to change. So I still go to therapy. But I'm no longer obsessed with trying to "figure things out", and I'm increasingly just happy to simply be alive.
And yes, despite a lifetime of trauma I am not "traumatized" because I've never liked labels, especially medical labels which lock you into a model which often barely approximates truth.
In a social worker who reluctantly became involved in mental health treatment. An excellent experience, but I’m careful to identify in my private practice of 40 years that I’m a social worker, and as such, I believe that environment and relationships and opportunities need to be dealt with logically and with some hard choices. Not some hard choices, always hard choices. I also believe that unless seriously damaged in brain or psyche, and by that I mean, soul, people have the wisdom within them to see the right direction. I’m not the kind of therapist that doesn’t give advice, lets people consider really horrible choices that will lead them to danger or regret beyond coping. And I also believe that it’s really easy to become a therapist who enables the weakest part of somebody which disable their strength. So thank you for this lovely article and your book looks intriguing. I intend to read it.