The Rise of Therapy Speak

Culture Study Podcast

Anne Helen Petersen

Fashion & Beauty, Society & Culture, Arts

4.6 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 1 January 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

No matter where you spend your time, online or off, you’ve encountered some form of therapy speak. Maybe it comes from a friend who loves processing their therapy with others; maybe it suffuses your TikTok FYP; maybe your friends or family members have been using it to try and describe how they’re trying to foster and maintain healthy relationships; or maybe you’ve just been keeping up on the latest celebrity gossip. It’s everywhere — and as you’ll find in this episode, tracing its proliferation will lead you in so many fascinating (and complex!) directions. I’ll be real: I knew this episode would be interesting; I didn’t know it would be this interesting.

As soon as I heard about the new podcast Bad Therapist — cohosted by psychotherapist Ash Compton and New Yorker journalist Rachel Monroe — I knew they’d be the perfect people to help answer all of your questions about therapy speak. This is complicated s**t! We’re talking about language that is often super useful to people… but can also be weaponized (GAH, THERAPY SPEAK) to inoculate those using it from critique. Weirdly, I feel like it’s the perfect New Year’s Day episode? I can’t wait to hear your thoughts about all of it.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone. This is Anne. This is a special New Year's Day episode of the Culture Study podcast. At first, we were like, do we want to put anything out on this day? It's kind of a weird day. Also, we want to avoid like any sort of, I don't know, cliche or gross resolution content. But then we figured out that we were taping an episode about therapy speak
0:22.2	and how in a weird way this is a perfect episode for the beginning of the new year. And there's
0:28.7	also a great ask and anything discussion at the end, which is actually about resolutions. So
0:33.4	stay tuned. This is a really fun and interesting and complicated episode. I know that sounds weird. It's all three things at once, but it's possible. And I can't wait to hear your thoughts.
0:45.0	Thank you for feeling comfortable to share that with me. But I will respectfully be withdrawing my engagement on this specific issue in order to maintain the emotional bandwidth required to keep my growth and health and well-being furthering in this current period.
1:06.0	So I respect you to go forward with that in your own space, but I will be withdrawing my engagement
1:13.5	in this current instance.
1:22.5	Hi, everyone.
1:23.6	This is the Culture Study podcast, and I'm Anne Helen Peterson.
1:27.1	I'm Ash Compton, a licensed
1:28.6	psychotherapist and cultural theorist and the co-host of the podcast Bad Therapist. And I'm Rachel
1:33.8	Monroe. I'm a writer at The New Yorker and also a co-host of Bad Therapist. I love the show.
1:39.0	It's perfect listening for when you're making dinner. And it's just a perfect accompaniment and calming because you two are also friends.
1:48.1	And I always love that in a show when the people who are doing the show are actually friends.
1:52.8	Yeah, there's a deep bed of references.
1:56.1	We try not to do, right, a lot of lore.
1:58.6	Try not to do too many inside jokes.
2:00.9	Well, my favorite was like in the intro to the show, you do like this 12 minute, like basically like this is what the show is going to be.
2:09.9	And you talk about your own bad therapists. And the story about the person in Baltimore who, Rachel, you were going to them and all of your friends
2:20.1	were also going to them and like to so that Ash could get the reference you said the name of the
2:25.5	person and then you bleeped it out after the fact like it's exactly how if I were describing a story
2:30.5	to my best friend like how I would do that so I really loved that but can you just say a little bit about how you, like how I would do that. So I really loved that.
	...

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