Fluent in a language they never had to earn. That’s the vibe now. Terms like “trauma response” and “emotional labor” dropped into casual conversation like everyone just got back from inpatient treatment, when really, they’ve been mainlining Instagram carousels and podcast clips edited to sound like gospel.
The lexicon of survival, picked clean and repurposed as performance. Real therapy teaches discomfort, contradiction, the slow work of personal responsibility. What we have instead is the fast-food version: easy to consume, emotionally empty, and somehow always about someone else.
It’s not that therapy-speak is wrong, exactly. It’s just become imprecise from overuse, like a good knife dulled by too many amateur hands. People say “boundary” when they mean avoidance. They say “holding space” when they mean “I want to talk and be congratulated for listening.” Accountability has become a kind of vibe, serious in tone, vague in content. Even the word “trauma” has been stretched so thin it now includes everything from generational violence to getting a passive-aggressive text message.
And underneath it all is the quiet thrill of moral superiority, because if your pain has a name, then your behavior has a pass.
This is the part where someone usually says, “It’s better than saying nothing.” Maybe. But we’re not saying nothing—we’re saying everything, constantly, loudly, in the same dozen therapeutic phrases rinsed and recycled until they mean nothing at all. And somewhere in that flood—actual honesty, the kind that doesn’t sound good, doesn’t trend, doesn’t make you look wise or wounded… starts to feel impolite. Or worse: unstable.
I’ve said the words too. “I don’t have the capacity.” “I need to protect my peace.” “That’s a boundary for me.” These phrases feel good in the mouth… calm, precise, medicinal. They make you sound like someone who has done the work. But a strange thing happens when you speak in this borrowed tongue long enough: you forget what you were actually trying to say. That you’re tired. That you’re annoyed. That you don’t want to go. That you were hurt, and maybe it wasn’t that deep, and maybe it was, but either way, you’re allowed to just say it without submitting a psychological affidavit.
We’ve started to confuse self-awareness with self-justification. You can ghost someone now and call it “self-preservation.” You can shut down a conversation and call it a “boundary.” You can be cold, withholding, and vaguely cruel—and as long as you narrate it in the right tone, with the right words, you’ll be applauded for being evolved. It’s not deception. It’s just emotional capitalism: give the illusion of transparency, earn the reward of never having to actually reveal anything.
Nothing kills a conversation faster than someone saying, “This feels unsafe.” It’s quiet, it’s polite, and it’s a full shutdown dressed as vulnerability. You’re not allowed to say, “No it doesn’t.” You’re not even allowed to look confused. The rules of engagement have changed… you’re not being heard, you’re being handled. And you’ve just been filed under problematic.
People have learned to say cruel things in a voice so soft you’d think they were doing you a favor. Low, careful, slightly sad. Like they’re breaking bad news gently, except the news is about you, and it’s not news.
Opinions now arrive with a clinical tone, framed as reactions the body had, not choices the person made. You can’t challenge someone’s feelings when they’ve stripped them of authorship. If it’s just their nervous system responding, you’re not debating, you’re destabilizing.
It works because we’ve all silently agreed to treat therapeutic language as a kind of moral shield. You’re not allowed to respond to it directly. If someone says they’re protecting their peace, you can’t ask what from. You’re just expected to step quietly out of frame. If they say something isn’t aligned, you’re not supposed to notice that it used to be, right up until you became inconvenient.
There’s a strange violence in how polite it all sounds. Not direct enough to fight with, not honest enough to learn from. Just clear enough to end the conversation and make you feel like the unstable one for wanting to keep talking.
We don’t reward clarity. We reward the clean exit—the illusion of resolution, handed off like a gift, while the fallout stays behind with the person who didn’t say it first.
You forget, sometimes, that none of this is therapy. It’s just therapy-shaped. It looks like insight. It sounds like healing. But no one’s circling back. No one’s sitting with anything. It’s just one person delivering a monologue in a very calm voice, and the other person trying not to react too strongly in case they get labeled unsafe.
We’ve confused emotional language with emotional presence. They’re not the same thing. One makes you sound prepared. The other requires you to actually be there.
You can hear it everywhere now… that voice. Measured, practiced, emotionally hygienic. The tone of someone who’s equal parts life coach and cult survivor, speaking in revelations they’ve already monetized. It doesn’t invite conversation. It delivers conclusions. The phrasing always lands in that just-right way, designed to sound brave but never messy. Every sentence ends in a self-affirmation. Every moment is a breakthrough you can preorder.
And maybe that’s the part that finally broke something open for me, the realization that I was starting to do it too. Not to manipulate. Not to win. Just because I didn’t know how else to talk about anything hard without sounding like I was trying to win.
So now we’re all fluent. We say the thing. We name the feeling. We exit with grace. And still, somehow, no one feels any closer. You walk away from the conversation proud of how well you navigated it, only to realize later that you said absolutely nothing.
You were calm. You were clear. You were correct.
You were also nowhere to be found.
File Under: All tone, no actual intimacy.
The Ash Files—Where life’s unexpected moments get filed away—sometimes neatly, sometimes under “figure it out later.” From writer/creator ASH, expect weekly musings, honest stories, and a reminder that no one has life entirely figured out [least of all me].✨
as a psych degree holder, THANK YOU
"And underneath it all is the quiet thrill of moral superiority, because if your pain has a name, then your behavior has a pass." Love this, brilliant piece Ash very much echoed a lot of my feelings on "trauma" or therapy speak bleeding into normal life