Therapyspeak

Upper Middle’s “Therapyspeak Survey” looked at the ways in which members of the Oat Milk Elite use and react to clinical language in non-clinical situations. Words like “self-care,” “trauma,” “boundaries,” and “gaslighting’ may be pervasive in open-plan offices and well-appointed suburban homes, but that doesn’t mean they’re embraced. To the contrary, our data suggests therapyspeak bothers people – specifically high-earning men and people whose parents went to therapy.

Inside a clinical setting, these words are tools. Outside, they are often perceived as weapons.

MOSTLY TALK (CONTEXT)

Engaging in therapyspeak does not require going to therapy¹, but experiences with therapy do color reactions to that kind of language. Though 78% of survey respondents had attended therapy – a number likely skewed by the topic – only 41% remained in treatment. Just over half (56.6%) described therapy as helpful, fewer (15.7%) as life changing, and 12.1% as disappointing or unhelpful, most often citing a lack of connection (45%) or practical advice (30%).

Talk therapy was dominant (85%), followed by family (39.8%) and psychodynamic (13.9%). Many also reported using medication (39.2%) or professional coaching (22.3%) for mental health support.

SPEAKING FEELS TO POWER

Therapy participation and satisfaction both rose with income. Among those earning under $125,000, 65% had been in therapy; among those earning over $250,000, 94% had. High-earners were twice as likely to remain in therapy even though they were the least likely (20%) to find it life changing – suggesting they use it as maintenance rather than intervention. Depression (58%) and relationship strain (52%) dominated among lower-income respondents; stress (55%) among middle-income; burnout (41%) among high-earners. These differences deeply informed feelings about therapyspeak.

Use of therapyspeak closely tracked income and profession. The suits (strategists and finance/ops types) were three times more likely to say they “never” used it (24.2%) than creative types (7.1%) and seven times less likely to say they used it “frequently.” Service and care professionals (doctors and client-facing professionals) were also more likely to use it frequently (11.1%). In other words, therapyspeak was common among middle-income professional communicators – a lingua franca for managing stress and expectations.

But not everyone is in the business of managing stress or expectations. Men earning over $250,000 or with net worth above $1 million largely viewed therapyspeak as performative, inauthentic, or manipulative (62%). They were also the most likely to agree that clinical language “makes people harder to get close to” (61%) and the least likely to report using therapyspeak outside the therapists’ office (4%).

The higher the income, the more resistant respondents were to therapyspeak and the more likely they were to have been in therapy.²

Curiously, anti-therapyspeak execs might be the ones best positioned to benefit from therapyspeak being used in the office. Scholarship on therapeutic culture — starting with William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956) – suggests therapyspeak privatizes distress and deflects structural critique. It just so happens to also provide the vocabulary for complaints about “emotional labor.” And yes, most of the people complaining are women.

PROTEST LANGUAGE

Therapyspeak is gendered. Women were more than twice as likely as men to use therapeutic language frequently (10.4% vs. 4.2%), nearly 10 points higher in occasional use (40.9% vs. 31.2%), and three times less likely to say they never use it (9.6% vs. 29.2%). Almost half (47%) of women found therapyspeak “helpful” or “clarifying.” This amplifies professional gaps, given that creative and service work skews female.

Women – especially in people-facing or creative roles – tend to narrate emotion in therapeutic terms. Men, particularly at higher income levels, reject that vocabulary in order to devalue that labor. As sociologist Eva Illouz wrote, emotional life now “follows the logic of economic exchange.” The data show a white-collar pseudo-underclass describing its anger at being undercompensated for emotional labor.

That underclass isn’t entirely gendered. It includes many men tasked with emotional labor or in search of psychological safety. Roughly half of respondents reported a mental health diagnosis. Gender gaps narrowed significantly among this group, though men with diagnoses were more likely (45%) to keep them hidden³. Those who experience emotional labor as a constant drain, feel compelled to articulate that feeling.

UNDOMESTICATED TERMINOLOGY

Skepticism of therapyspeak runs deeper outside the office than in it. There are two reasons for this. The first is that therapyspeak can and is weaponized in relationships. The second is that the people who do this don’t seem to know they’re doing it. While most respondents (57.2%) said they’d heard someone use therapyspeak to justify bad behavior, only 7.2% admitted doing so themselves. The gap between self-perception and observation—forty percentage points wide—suggests not just manipulation be self-delusion and self-justification.

Children of parents who went to therapy are especially skeptical of therapyspeak. They were less likely than others to use it often (5.9% vs. 17.1%) and more likely to react negatively to it. Their reactions were more extreme overall, but a narrow majority of all respondents (55.4%) agreed that “therapy culture makes people harder to get close to.”

Most of those exposed to therapyspeak believe the language used to codify emotion can also create distance – that honesty and intimacy are not the same. This is not a new critique: In 1979, Christopher Lasch argued that therapeutic culture eroded external sources of meaning (religion, civic life, extended kin) and made homes into sites of psychological maintenance⁴. Emotional satisfaction replaced moral obligation, leaving individuals both freer and more fragile.

CONCLUSION

Lauren Berlant used the term “cruel optimism” to describe ideals that reproduce their own constraints. Therapy’s ideal is being “well-adjusted,” an impossible and arguably inhumane goal. Lower-income therapy patients are more likely to be depressed than high-income therapy patients. That’s not a failure to be well-adjusted. It’s a reaction to material circumstance. 

 Released into the wild, it doubles as both a language for describing emotional labor and a tool for internalizing those demands as self-surveillance. As the rejection of therapyspeak by the sons and daughters of the therapized suggests, this can lead to well-articulated, well-intentioned narcissism.

Therapyspeak best serves the interests of highly compensated professionals who use it with therapists, not coworkers or families. It deflects structural critiques by turning them into personal problems. It is therefore a productive annoyance for many people, specifically men, in positions of power. 

None of which is to say therapyspeak is bad or useless. The vast majority of respondents use it occasionally and for good reason: it’s the language best suited to describing our largely unsuccessful attempts to manage ourselves.

TOP 5 UNDERDISCUSSED DIAGNOSES

5. Compulsive Reframing Syndrome (CRS) – The inability to let anything be bad without search for a “growth opportunity.”
4. High-Functioning Sublimation (HFS) – The inability to express emotion through any medium except Powerpoint.
3. Present Fatigue Disorder (MFD) – The burnout that comes from being consistently in the moment.
2. Personal Narrative Disorder (PND) — The need to share in the context of discussions where no one gives a shit.
1. Mr. Oedipal Syndrome (MOS) - When you unconsciously compete with your father for the affection of a talking horse.