I’ve Had Enough Of Therapy Language

Too much of a good thing can be really, really annoying

“There’s a stigma around discussing mental health.”  

This is something I hear people say a lot, both online and in the media.  Let me just come right out with what I think: No there isn’t.  At least, not anymore.  Sure, in decades past everyone was tacitly encouraged to keep their private feelings to themselves.  But I don’t think this was borne out of any malicious intent or system of oppression.  Instead, the reality was simple: nobody wanted to hear that shit.  Everyone had their own problems going on and they weren’t interested in hearing about the problems of the people around them, let alone complete strangers.  It was a misguided self-preservation tactic more than anything.

But as Millennial culture (a culture rooted in performance and exhibitionism) became ascendant, that started to change.  And once it changed, it changed drastically.  We’ve now reached a point where, as

Freya India

pointed out in a recent Substack post, “We aren’t just identifying with and glamorizing our mental illnesses.  Now we seem to be competing over who is more mentally ill.”  The many examples of this phenomenon are well documented by Freya here.  And yet, even though discussions around mental health are totally out in the open, and as every corporation and start-up makes a big show of “mental health awareness,” people still try to claim that we are discouraged from publicly discussing mental health.  Charlamagne Tha God did it on Bill Maher just a couple weeks ago.

I’m sorry, but this is straight up not true.  Not only are we not discouraged from publicly discussing mental health, we’re practically incentivized to do so.  We’re incentivized by likes and comments and follows and shares and attention and sympathy.  Publicly discussing our mental health struggles temporarily makes us the main character in someone else’s story.  They have to drop everything and tend to our emotional needs.  It’s perverse.

And look, this isn’t me dispensing some 1950s style advice and telling everyone to “Suck it up.”  If you’re genuinely struggling, you need to talk to someone about it.  But that doesn’t mean you need to talk to everyone about it.  It feels like we can’t do anything in moderation in this country.  Everything has to swing between two extremes.  We spent decades bottling up our emotions and behaving like characters in the first season of Mad Men.  That wasn’t good.  But now we’re overcompensating by unleashing a firehose of feelings on anyone who happens to cross our path.  That isn’t good either.  There’s something to be said for only sharing your problems with those closest to you, whether it be friends or family or a licensed professional.  You don’t have to broadcast it to the public, casual acquaintances, or random coworkers.  There’s a difference between repression and modesty.

What’s really bothering me about this whole thing though is something I’ve started to notice only recently.  It’s the subtle integration of therapy language into everyday life.  We’re now so aware of mental health that we all talk like therapists.  This next sentence is going to sound insane, and is a pretty big left turn, but bear with me.  Nowhere is this shift in language, and the negative consequences that come with it, more apparent than on the most recent season of Vanderpump Rules.

For those who need a quick primer, Vanderpump Rules is a reality show about a group of servers and bartenders who work at a Los Angeles restaurant called SUR (or, at least, they used to work there before being reality TV stars became their full time job).  They date each other, they lie to each other, they cheat on each other with each other.  The show is a huge mess, which is why it’s been so successful.  VPR reached its apex (or nadir, depending on your point of view) last year when one of the main characters (Main personalities?  Main cast members?  I don’t know how you would describe these people), Tom Sandoval, cheated on his long-term live-in girlfriend Ariana with secondary cast member Raquel (Now known as Rachel.  I told you this show is a mess).  This cheating scandal somehow caught the perfect wave of attention and public scorn and ended up as a top national news story in the spring of 2023, earning the moniker #Scandoval.  It even had its own tab on CNN.com for a while.

The most recent season, which just finished airing on Bravo, ostensibly deals with the fallout from this cheating scandal within the friend group.  What it’s really about though is the way that people weaponize therapy language to avoid taking accountability for their own actions.  Everyone in this group, both wrongdoers and those they have wronged, hide behind a wall of self-help buzzwords in an attempt to avoid personal responsibility and deny their true motivations.  Everyone is playing a game, and they’re doing so by playing the victim and daring anyone around them to challenge their narrative.

The words keep popping up again and again.  Everyone is talking about their trauma, and the healing they’re doing from their trauma, and the healing journey they’re undertaking to heal from the trauma they’ve dealt with, and the boundaries they have to set to go on their healing journey and heal from all of this trauma they’ve experienced as wealthy, attractive, famous people living in Los Angeles.  And if you don’t agree with the things they’re saying or doing, well, you don’t have the right to do that because you haven’t experienced their trauma and blah blah blah ad infinitum.  

The prime exemplar of this behavior is Ariana, the ultimate Woman Scorned.  When the cheating news broke last year, the entire Internet rallied around her in support.  She became this sort of untouchable figure that you don’t see much of online anymore.  The Internet is a place where everyone has their detractors, but not Ariana.  And all season long, she weaponized that support against her friends in order to get back at Tom for cheating on her.

She straight up tells them, including her closest female friends, that if they decide to be friends with Tom or even spend time with him, she won’t speak to them anymore.  And what justification does she give for this?  It’s the boundary she needs to set to heal from the trauma of her relationship imploding.  At no point does anyone forcefully push back on this request.  No one, least of all Ariana, will come out and say what her true motivations are; she’s incredibly angry at Tom (as she has every right to be) and is using psychological warfare against her friend group to isolate and punish him.  They’re collateral damage in a zero sum game she’s playing with her ex.  But, of course, she’s using all of this therapy language, which has become a trump card no one dares to defy, so most everyone goes along with it.

Then there’s Ariana’s partner in the Longhouse, Katie.  She’s become Ariana’s most ardent supporter, but this is only done in an attempt to get back at her ex-husband, Tom Schwartz (a different Tom), who is Tom Sandoval’s closest friend and business partner (The two Toms own a bar called TomTom.  I’m including all of these asides not only as an explanation for people who don’t watch the show, but also to remind those who do watch it just how silly the whole thing is.  We’re so immersed in it, we sometimes forget).  The shield Ariana has constructed with her therapy language is so massive and so impenetrable that Katie is able to hide behind it as well.  You see, Katie isn’t being spiteful towards Tom Schwartz as revenge against him for being an inattentive husband, she’s simply supporting Ariana on her healing journey.  And she dares you to say otherwise.

I’m coming down pretty hard on these two, but they are far from the only culprits.  There’s the man of the hour himself, Tom Sandoval.  This season, Tom makes a big show of doing the work he needs to do to better himself and learn and grow from his mistakes.  These actions are questionable in their authenticity and undeniable in their cringe.  “I spent the morning journaling,” Tom mawkishly tells a friend in one scene.  

He participates in a breathwork class, on camera of course, and ends it by screaming and crying, hoping to convey some sort of catharsis or purification.  He’s performatively pensive all season long, trying his hardest to get people off of his back and think he’s a changed man.  But you can see the resentment bubbling under the surface the entire time.  This man is furious.  He’s furious at his friends for dining out on his misfortune (they all sold a lot of merch and podcast ad space because of him), furious at himself for messing things up so badly, and furious at the general public for vilifying him to the degree that they did.  No amount of public journaling can obscure that fact.

I could go on and on about every cast member.  Tom Schwartz wants things both ways.  He wants to stand up for his friend, but also for everyone to get along.  Scheana’s bogged down in some kind of warped neurotic state, and places a good share of the blame on Sandoval because of the trauma he brought to the group.  The only one who calls things as they are is Lala.  Unfortunately, this season she’s busy finding a sperm donor because she wants another kid but doesn’t want to have to worry about a potential custody battle if she and the theoretical future baby daddy ever break up.  So something in the milk ain’t clean there either.

I say all of that to say this.  These people clearly have massive behavioral issues.  Maybe they were like this to begin with, or maybe being on a reality TV show for so long made them this way.  In a recent New York Times Magazine profile, the journalist notes that Tom Sandoval stops talking whenever an airplane flies overhead, just like you would while filming a scene, but there isn’t a camera anywhere nearby.  Bravo has clearly broken his brain.  

And as the cast spirals deeper into their pathologies, they’re able to sidestep truly confronting and overcoming their problems by talking the talk of therapy instead of walking the walk.  They claim that what they’re doing is for the benefit of their mental health, but in reality, it just reinforces their issues under the guise of growth.  All of their real problems are left unattended, and nothing ever gets solved.  A healing journey isn’t a journey at all if you keep going around in circles.  

Alright, I’ll admit, I got off on a pretty big tangent here.  I think I really just wanted to share my feelings about this season of VPR (Clearly, I have many!), but felt the need to cloak it in the exploration of a larger social issue.  No one is immune from the desire to lie to themselves.

I meant what I said though.  By integrating therapy language into our daily lives, we’re doing ourselves a disservice.  It allows us to think we’re working to change and improve our mental states, but doesn’t demand anything more than words.  Genuine growth comes from acknowledging and confronting something difficult.  And sometimes, the most difficult things to confront are your true feelings and motivations.  We all lie to ourselves and those lies hurt us and the people around us.  Never lose sight of the fact that we are all capable of being our own Tom Sandoval.