Are we abusing therapy-speak in our relationships to avoid accountability?

At a time when awareness around mental health has percolated across age groups, there are fears of partners evading crucial conversations about boundaries and rules

The opinions about mental health and the awareness around it can be more or less slotted into two sets—first, a sigh of relief that we’re finally able to structure our past and present and possibly find answers to why we are the way we are without questioning our sense of reality. But the second set—and this is the conservative one—is skeptical of reading too much into things. Does it really matter what your boundaries are if you can’t get even the most basic work done, they might argue. Or that boomer boss who might be pretty insensitive about your deteriorating mental health when their priority is to get through a deluge of deadlines. 

Either way, therapy has helped us take stock of our lives. It has made us cognisant of not taking everyone—including ourselves—for granted. But to what extent does this filter in our romantic relationships? These are relationships, as can be universally accepted, that bring out practically all our sides. There is no hiding our real emotions in a relationship, no room for manicuring how we feel when we feel. So, when the manicuring and censoring indeed happens, it sounds off.

Recently, a TikTok video of a psychiatrist went viral after she shared a step-by-step procedure of how to break a friendship. Needless to say, she was massively trolled online for suggesting to use phrases like “I don’t have the capacity to invest in our friendship any longer.” The way the trolls saw it, the psychiatrist was suggesting to not be like a living, breathing friend with real, complicated emotions but more like an Human Resources (HR) manager informing their employee about the official reasons why they’ve been fired. 

What happens when the same template is followed by you or your partner? Where you might sit them down and drag them across the nails of not “having the capacity” to hold a relationship, or of their behaviour “sabotaging” your mental health, or not wanting to answer their legitimate questions because you’ve set “boundaries” about them? 

This is the world of the ‘HR-ification’ of relationships and we’re probably living in the thick of it. What happens next?

Yearning for empathy 

For Belinda, a 29-year-old graphic designer based in Pune, self-care triumphs over everything else. She tells The Established that it is certainly not at the expense of someone’s else’s pain and she tries not to be selfish in her pursuit of self-care. 

“This had to be done because in my last relationship, I always prioritised my partner and it completely wrecked me. I lost a sense of reality and self and had become a sad, weaker iteration of him, out of sync with who I truly am,” she says. “When I bring this up in the first few dates with new men, they get defensive for reasons I will never understand and apprehensive that they might be dealing with an explosive woman who will bulldoze over their feelings.”

What is the distinction, then? When do we know that we’re being unreasonable with our understanding of all things mental health? According to relationship counsellor Ruchi, awareness and information will always have two sides. On the one hand, it will help people to understand the current situation better but on the other, will most definitely be used to manipulate, too. 

“To give you an example, if you watch a real crime documentary, do you think people get informed about what can happen in a situation like that or do they take notes and start committing crimes? Information will always be used differently by different people. Not everyone who watches true crime becomes a serial killer,” explains Ruchi. 

The way she looks at it, the whole talk about mental health topics like trauma, self-care, setting boundaries, and red and green flags is increasing (and rightly so). An individual who avoids responsibility and accountability is likely to weaponise these terms to justify their behaviour to themselves and others. 

“As a counsellor, I witness every day what and how people cherry-pick from their therapy sessions. People who are genuinely concerned about their mental well-being become more empathetic, help their partners to grow with them, and improve their relationships with themselves and others. People who don’t take any accountability in therapy and display entitlement, grandiosity, and a lack of empathy, end up learning these terms to get more manipulative in their own relationships,” she explains.

The world of boundaries 

In The New Rules of Marriage: What You Need to Know to Make Love Work by Terrence Real, a book that focuses on how to set boundaries that promote intimacy and growth in relationships, the author argues that while setting boundaries can be a way to create safety and foster vulnerability in a relationship, boundaries need to be flexible and adaptable in order to meet the changing needs of each partner. But there is a fine line in this flexibility, too. Almost like following the ‘give a finger and they take the hand’ situation, it’s a constant push and pull in how we express our mental-health needs.

In Controlling People: How to Recognize, Understand, and Deal with People Who Try to Control You by Patricia Evans, we realise that not all boundaries are necessarily healthy. In fact, controlling behavior can be a form of boundary-setting that is unhealthy and abusive. Such behaviour, Evans clarifies, can be subtle and difficult to recognise, but often involves making others feel guilty, afraid, or ashamed.

Psychiatrist Era Dutta told The Established that regardless of your mental health condition and the way you define it, using a therapist’s lingo in a relationship is tricky territory because the conversation, then, might end up seeming robotic. 

“If every time you have a fight, you become your partner’s therapist and tell them that they are being a certain way because they have childhood issues or trauma, it’s not healthy at all. Even in therapy, we broach these topics only when the person is absolutely ready. How can you self-diagnose and bombard them with it when they are clearly not ready and you have no way of knowing when they will be?” she says. 

When it comes to weaponising therapy-speak, Dutta says that she has been noticing another unfortunate trend, where the couple, with their own personal therapists, often create a war of expert options, pitting one therapist against the other.

“She could say that my therapist feels you are gaslighting me, and he could potentially say something along similar lines. This is where the responsibility of therapists comes in because they cannot be judgemental and need to look at situations neutrally, ” she adds. 

To put it simply, Dutta says that therapists need to have accountability and tell their patients to not over-identify with a mental-health term they might not fully understand. The same was learned the hard way by Swasti, a 23-year-old bank manager based in Noida. 

“I would get frustrated and try to diagnose my partner in the middle of a fight because I knew every single detail about his life, including the emotional abuse he had faced at the hand of his parents,” she says. “I realised that it put him in an extremely vulnerable position, as I kept shaming him for not seeing a therapist, and even as I did, it came across as he needed to have one because he was more damaged than me. In the long run, this was absolutely unsustainable and toxic on my part; I should’ve known better.”

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