The therapists are being gaslit by gaslighting—they’re being told that it’s happening, but it’s not.
Jonathan Alpert, a therapist in New York and Washington, D.C., told me he saw a couple recently who used the term gaslighting to describe nearly every disagreement they have had. “Let’s say one person forgot to pick up groceries or didn’t accurately recall a conversation; the other would say, ‘Oh, you’re gaslighting me. This is psychological abuse,’” he said. “But they weren’t. They were just having what I would consider pretty normal miscommunications.”
Isabelle Morley told me that she has seen a similar pattern at her Massachusetts practice, where people accuse each other of gaslighting at least once a week. What they’re talking about is rarely actual gaslighting, a form of abuse that involves manipulating someone else’s reality. Instead, Morley said, these couples tend to mean that they feel invalidated or just disagree.
Gaslighting is just one of the “therapy-speak” terms that couples therapists told me their clients are misusing, typically after seeing descriptions of the ideas on social media. Other common, wrongly applied terms include boundaries, triggered, and trauma bond. Some clients proclaim to their therapist that their partner has obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, autism, or ADHD, even though their partner hasn’t been clinically diagnosed with such a condition. Attachment styles—the theory that people have different ways of maintaining relationships—have also entered the arena: Alpert had one client who complained that her husband had “avoidant attachment,” and he, in turn, accused his wife of having “anxious attachment.” Alpert said that “neither of the labels was accurate.”
None of these phrases, according to Terry Real, a therapist based in Massachusetts, is used as frequently as this one: “I’m the spouse of a narcissist.” True narcissistic personality disorder is marked by, among other traits, an abnormally high sense of self-importance and a lack of empathy. And in reality, it’s very rare. (Dena DiNardo, a therapist in Philadelphia, told me, “I don’t know if I’ve sat in front of true narcissists in couples therapy.”) Still, the therapists I spoke with said that their clients seem very sure this unusual diagnosis must apply to their spouse. “People are incredibly confident in these conclusions and are not curious, are not open to discussing them and figuring out if they’re accurate,” Morley said. “They’re coming in as the experts.”
People have been observing for a while now that therapy-speak has been creeping into everyday life. The nine couples therapists I interviewed for this story told me that this language is affecting actual therapy too. They said that rather than clarifying a couple’s predicament, these terms tend to shut down conversation and turn spouses against each other, because people generally get defensive, not collaborative, when they’re called a gaslighter or narcissist.
Most of the therapists I spoke with said they are glad that people are learning more about mental health. They also acknowledged that people have been misusing psychological terms for practically as long as psychology has existed. Before the advent of social media, people picked up these ideas in self-help books, psychoanalysis, and pop culture. Real said that in the past, couples came to him and said to each other, “I’m dysfunctional, and so are you” or, “You need to look at your issues.”
But many of the therapists told me that too many people get sucked into social-media videos and posts about pop-psych concepts that they then misapply to their own relationships. Instagram slides suggesting that you might be married to a narcissist, for example, can be reassuring when your husband seems kind of selfish and you’ve always wondered why. But checking the accuracy of that statement can be difficult. “It’s a feedback loop,” Hannah Khoddam, a therapist in Southern California, told me, “that never has any challenges.”
Finding words to describe a loved one’s frustrating behavior can feel clarifying, but it can also become a form of “medical-student syndrome,” Morley said, referring to the phenomenon in which doctors in training misdiagnose themselves with the disorders they study. Instead of learning the textbook definitions of psychological disorders, however, laypeople are absorbing the oversimplified versions, then diagnosing their spouse. Alpert told me about a client who insisted that his girlfriend had borderline personality disorder, a rare and serious mental illness. When Alpert asked the man why he thought that, the client said, “‘Well, she gets so emotional when we argue,’” Alpert said. “And come to find out, he had Googled borderline and came up with all these articles and checklists online.”
Another source of all the therapy-speak is other therapists. “I see this tendency more in couples where one member has done a lot of therapy,” Rebecca Howard Eudy, a therapist in Boston, told me. In trying to understand their relationship, some of these clients dish to their individual therapist, who attempts to explain the partner’s behavior without ever having met the person. Real said, “The bane of my existence is often individual therapists who ‘empower’ their clients right out of potentially workable relationships.” Some people, in other words, will come in armed with the idea, in many cases gleaned in individual therapy, that their spouse’s rather normal behavior is actually pathological.
Spouses’ attempts to diagnose each other can become a problem in couples’ sessions, these therapists said, because they distract focus from the dysfunctional patterns that both members of the couple are likely perpetuating. If you call your spouse a narcissist, the takeaway is seemingly that they are the sum total of the problem, and that you have little role in the matter. “It’s really hard to make progress when people are saying it’s always the other person because ‘they’re borderline’ or ‘they’re a narcissist’ or ‘they’re love-bombing me,’ as opposed to, ‘I’m clearly contributing to this dynamic in some way,’” Morley said. She added that to label someone in this way is essentially to say, “I’m not gonna change anything about our relationship. You have to change your personality or change all your behaviors to stay with me.” The labeled partner may feel cornered, and dialogue essentially stops.
Another problem is that therapy-speak can exaggerate the severity of what might be typical conflict. Everyone, after all, interprets things differently; everyone is a little bit self-centered. This doesn’t mean everyone needs psychiatric help. Staying married to a narcissist is hard to imagine; staying married to someone who is merely “not always considerate” is how much of America gets the mortgage paid every month.
In some cases, this exaggeration can lead salvageable relationships to divorce. Not every marriage is going to work, of course, and some people should probably leave their spouse. But Andrew Hartz, a clinical-psychology professor at Long Island University and the founder of the Open Therapy Institute, told me, “It feels like almost everybody I know who’s divorced, their ex-partner had something”—as in some sort of diagnosis, genuine or perceived. As Real sees it, wrongly convincing yourself that your spouse is mentally ill, and deciding to end your marriage based mostly on the assumption that their “condition” is intractable, can have serious consequences. “These are families we’re talking about,” Real said. “There are children involved.”
Therapists told me that correcting misused therapy-speak can be difficult because many people’s conception of a counselor is, essentially, that they’re a nice person whom you pay to co-sign your grievances. “I think a lot of therapists are shy about challenging too much,” Hartz said. Some of the therapists I spoke with push back on their clients anyway. DiNardo told me that she says something like this: “Okay, cool, you’ve got this word; you’re using it. It’s two years later. Do you feel any better?” Irina Firstein, a therapist in New York, told me she urges her clients to be more precise: Rather than say they have a “boundary,” for example, they should tell their spouse exactly what they need and why. Several of the therapists I spoke with have written books denouncing the overuse of therapy-speak: Morley’s They’re Not Gaslighting You came out in May; Alpert is publishing Therapy Nation next year.
Sometimes, however, counselors just let the therapy-speak happen. This language appears to be here to stay. Instagram and TikTok have billions of users. More and more people are in individual talk therapy, learning a new vocabulary to apply to their lives. I’ve got issues, which originated decades ago as a psychological euphemism for I’ve got problems, is now so much a part of the lexicon that it no longer registers as originating in therapy. Perhaps gaslight and narcissist are headed there too. Morley said that even after she corrects her clients, they will sometimes still say something like, “He gaslit me. I know, I know; not, like, real gaslighting, the other kind of gaslighting.” At least—as a therapist might put it—that’s progress.
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