By Stacy Lee Kong

I don’t know what your Twitter feed looked like last weekend, but mine was inundated with opinions about a Bustle article that asked if ‘therapy-speak’ is making us selfish. The piece started with an anecdote about a 24-year-old woman, Anna, whose friend broke up with her by texting the following: “I’m in a place where I’m trying to honor my needs and act in alignment with what feels right within the scope of my life, and I’m afraid our friendship doesn’t seem to fit in that framework. I can no longer hold the emotional space you’ve wanted me to, and think the support you need is beyond the scope of what I can offer.”

The story felt like it was either specifically crafted to incite outrage, or a possibly-fake r/AmITheAsshole post with an obvious answer: yes, you kinda are an asshole if your friendship-ending text could be mistaken for an HR memo. But it wasn’t fake. In fact, the piece went on to detail the experiences of several other women whose friends had leveraged similar language in hurtful ways. One described a former friend who used her boundaries as the explanation for why she should be the only one to dictate what they did when they hung out. Another described a couple who she and her wife had been close to that started pulling away without explanation. When confronted about their ghosting, they accused her of being an abusive narcissist. (The other couple split up and eventually reached out to say they’d been projecting.)

While it can be entertaining to ‘eavesdrop’ on this kind of behaviour, this article points to a larger trend that I’ve been thinking about for a while now. I first noticed it in 2019 with the ‘ask your friends if they have the emotional capacity before you trauma dump’ discourse, which argued that you should check with your friends before you confide in them. At the time that seemed like a pretty normal thing to do, though it was couched in overly formal language. But since then, we’ve had several more discourses around boundaries within friendships (don’t ask your friends to help you move, FYI, or to pick you up from the airport), and I’ve noticed tons of advice on TikTok and Instagram that adheres to the same theme. And yeah, obviously boundaries are important. But there’s something super weird to me about how, at its core, all this guidance uses the idea of self-care to promote individualism. So, I want to think about what it means that we are increasingly being encouraged to think of ourselves as little islands instead of part of communities, and why that matters—especially right now.

For starters, ‘therapy-speak’ is a bit of a misnomer

As the Bustle article explains, “in recent years, therapy concepts like self-care and boundary-setting have shown up everywhere online, with Instagram accounts and other social media communities sharing mantras and advice advocating for self-actualization. TikTok therapists like Nadia Addesi and TherapyJeff offer tips for struggling with anxiety, self-esteem, and people-pleasing. ‘Therapy-speak’—prescriptive language describing certain psychological concepts and behaviors—can be found everywhere from group chats to dating apps. Now, we have more language to advocate for ourselves and our needs, whether it be canceling plans when we feel overwhelmed or ending relationships that no longer serve us.”

Having this language, and greater societal acceptance around advocating for ourselves, is objectively good. The problem is the way we’re learning about these terms and then applying them to our own lives. Yes, Addesi (a Vaughn, Ont.-based registered social worker and psychotherapist) and TherapyJeff (a licensed counsellor from Portland, Oregon) are professionals… which is why they’re clear that they aren’t providing therapy, they’re posting content about mental health. But does everyone who comes across their posts while scrolling through the app understand that means it's general, or that these creators are navigating the same limitations and challenges all content creators face, including the tyranny of an algorithm that encourages people to post the things they think will perform best? I don’t think so, tbh. What’s more, for every Addesi and TherapyJeff, there are approximately seven million unlicensed dating coaches, relationship coaches, life coaches, career coaches and wellness coaches (and I’m sure other types of coaches that I’ve never even heard of, not to mention all the general randos just giving unqualified advice) who are using this language without the training or expertise to fully understand what they mean or how they work… and spoiler alert, that means they end up encouraging their audiences to employ bastardized versions of these concepts in their own lives and relationships, even if they don’t actually apply.

And okay, I get why this happens—actual therapy is often inaccessible for a variety of reasons (cost, stigma, a shortage of therapists that pre-dates the pandemic but definitely got worse after), but more and more people are struggling with their mental health, so yeah, they’re going to look for support somewhere. It’s also just very attractive to think there are particular scripts that we can use to protect ourselves from ever getting hurt. (False! But attractive.) This type of language has been growing in popularity in various online spaces for years now, most notably in r/RaisedByNarcissists, which helped terms like ‘narcissist,’ ‘scapegoat’ and ‘no contact’ go mainstream. It now has 865,000 members, so it’s not exactly a niche community, but as with so many things these days, I think we can credit TikTok’s ultra-specific algorithm for really super-charging this conversation. And since the app is very good at serving us a never-ending fire hose of content targeted to our exact interests, even if we start out conscientiously looking for mental health advice from experts, it’s very likely we’ll end up absorbing some pseudoscience in our search for support.

Consuming this content doesn’t actually make us healthier or better adjusted

The obvious problem with that is inaccuracy, which is why we seemingly need regular reminders that lying is not gaslighting and garden-variety selfishness is not ‘textbook narcissism.’ I’d also argue that most of the content we’re consuming about mental health is framed around whiteness, even when it’s not explicitly advice. There’s a lot of talk about boundaries, narcissism, toxicity and triggering behaviour, but not a lot of understanding around culturally specific ideas of family responsibility, respect or even just how different communities express love. For example, white people have spent a lot of time criticizing Michelle Yeoh’s character, Evelyn, in Everything Everywhere All At Once as a terrible, toxic abuser, and listen, she definitely wasn’t perfect. But, TikToker @anachr0nism recently did a great job of explaining how these videos misunderstood the relationships in movie because of their creators’ white gaze.

Even more than that, though, I think there’s something dangerous about the way this proliferation of mental health-related content leads to an erosion of meaning for these concepts. Think about what happened to the term ‘self-care,’ which didn’t just become commodified, but actually luxurified. As Kathleen Newman-Bremang explained in a 2021 Refinery29 article, “when Audre Lorde first wrote about self-care in her 1988 essay collection A Burst of Light, the activist and poet was battling cancer while still doing work that continues to inform and inspire movements of resistance. We all know the Lorde quote that dominates our timelines. It’s so prevalent, it’s become a cliche. But what Lorde initially wrote in full was anything but banal: ‘I had to examine, in my dreams as well as in my immune-function tests, the devastating effects of overextension. Overextending myself is not stretching myself. I had to accept how difficult it is to monitor the difference. Necessary for me as cutting down on sugar. Crucial. Physically. Psychically. Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.’”

For Lorde, self-care was a political act that required her to grapple with the expectations placed on her as a Black woman by society, her communities and, I think, herself. She had to unlearn deeply internalized messages about productivity, ambition and who deserves or is entitled to rest, because otherwise she would die. And she’s clear: self-care is really hard. But by the early 2000s, the concept had become about ‘treating yourself’ and ‘feeling good.’ The last line of that passage—“caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare”—became fodder for art prints and IG posts, aesthetic attempts to signal radicalism. But the actual meaning of Lorde’s essay had been so diluted that the term could refer to anything, as long as it was nice.

I’d argue that a similar erosion is happening with concepts like boundary-setting, especially when the recommended consequence for a transgression of your boundaries is to cut the offender off. Only in this case, the end result isn’t a Goop-esque listicle of $200 face masks and crystals that promise to ‘raise your vibrations’—it’s no small amount of cruelty with a side of social isolation. As clinical psychologist Darby Saxbe says in the Bustle piece, “there’s an extent to which defining a lot of boundaries and being very quick to abandon relationships that aren’t optimal actually sets people up to be a lot more isolated and lonely.”

While our relationships should not be transactional, they should be reciprocal. Actual friendship doesn’t just mean being there for fun stuff, it also means being part of a support system, offering encouragement, helping the people we love through their hard times—and feeling confident that they’ll do the same for us. And sorry, but you just can’t build that kind of deep connection without learning how to navigate conflict, not to mention sometimes doing things that are inconvenient or annoying.

… And maybe this is a good place to note that almost all of these so-called coaches are creating content that promises to help us feel better as a promotional tool for their courses or workshops or insert-expensive-product-here. So yeah, my most cynical self definitely wonders if these people are actually invested in helping anyone, or if they’re dropping bad advice like breadcrumbs because they know that’s the easiest way to create repeat customers.

I’m worried about the larger implications of these messages

This goes beyond the interpersonal consequences of using this type of language when it’s not warranted. Like… how does this messaging encourage us to actually think about our place in the world? One of the women in the Bustle story talked about how her brother had ghosted their parents for months, saying, “he created this whole thing about his safety, his boundaries, his rules. Obviously that’s important, but it’s like he came into it with the framework like he’s the only real person in the world and everybody else has to do exactly what he says to make him safe.”

We don’t have the brother’s side of the story, but if this woman’s read of the situation is accurate, then this perfectly illustrates the issue with applying these terms to your life without guidance from a professional. How do you decipher whether the things your parents do that you don't like are abusive or just normal annoying parent shit, and whether cutting them off is about mental health or just following a generic framework because that’s easier and cheaper than therapy.

And can we also dig a little deeper into the ‘only real person in the world’ thing? Because I think that’s what makes me the most uncomfortable about all of… this. The natural consequence of engaging in this type of thinking is that we deprioritize other people’s ‘realness,’ and I really wonder how that is going to (or maybe already is) affecting our wider behaviour. If we see other people as secondary characters in our lives, only valuable for how they interact with us, how can we possibly have empathy for those we do not know? Or, to be more practical: If we don’t see other people as ‘real,’ will we vote for candidates who espouse policies that don’t benefit us directly? Will we care about funding social services we don’t need (right now), upholding laws meant to prevent discrimination we don’t face or making more ethical shopping choices to protect people we’ve never met?

Because the fact is, for many people, the answer to those questions is already no, and we are currently seeing the consequences of that self-interest play out in every part of our society. So… I don’t think we can actually afford to get worse.

✨ Episode 3 and 4 of Making Our Own Way ✨

I took last week off from writing the newsletter, so I didn’t get to tell you about episode three of Making Our Own Way, which featured fashion designer, tailor and craftsperson Warren Steven Scott, who makes the coolest earrings. We chatted about building a career in Canadian fashion as an Indigenous person, why joy is an important part of his aesthetic and what success means to him.

And this week, episode four features Melissa Falconer, a self-taught visual artist whose pop-art style portraits of people like Michelle Obama, Chadwick Boseman and Issa Rae regularly go viral. I’m a huge fan of her work, and was so happy to talk about how she used social media to build her brand, why she didn’t grow up thinking of art as a potential career (even though she was the type of kid who watched Art Attack and then actually made the crafts!) and where she finds inspiration.

And Did You Hear About…

How grocery stores are using loyalty programs to accumulate data on you—and then selling it to advertisers.

This smart analysis of Pedro Pascal’s popularity, including how a good chunk of it veers into the territory of weird, racist fetishization. (This does not apply to those Twitter threads of Pedro Pascal as increasingly random science-adjacent things, though. Those are okay.)

Why everything in fashion is kinda puffy right now.

Writer Rainesford Stauffer’s excellent personal essay on ambition, hard work and OCD.

A trio of Twitter threads that I found entertaining this week: this one of unforgettable insults. Also this one, in which a cranky academic tells people to stop using pop culture references in the titles of their journal articles and Academic Twitter aggressively disagrees. Lastly, this extremely gossipy one🍿.

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