![]() It’s one that would affect you at a physiological level. People encounter stressful situations regularly - and those experiences shouldn’t be discounted - but there are other ways to describe a tense relationship with the in-laws instead of the word “trauma.” “I’ve given the example of arriving late to a job interview and feeling flustered because there was traffic,” Tenaglia says. In reality, traumatic events are often severe, like abuse or mass shootings. Through an extended game of telephone, the word “trauma,” for example, has practically shifted from “an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape, or natural disaster” to an umbrella term for all things upsetting, according to Tenaglia. ![]() ![]() Like most terms that hit the cultural zeitgeist, the definitions of therapy-speak words morph as they’re passed through the lexicon. However, the context of the vernacular has shifted. As more mental health vocabulary became mainstream, people were able to name their experiences in concrete terms. The prevalence of therapy terms has been a net positive in the normalization of mental health, Nasir says. Instead, mental health professionals urge, you should embrace nuance and avoid pathologizing normal - albeit annoying or painful - behavior. You can feel stressed without experiencing trauma. A friend can be selfish and not a narcissist. “There are gradations of the human experience,” says therapist Israa Nasir, and therapy-speak terms are often the most extreme ways of describing those experiences. Life is not as straightforward as therapy-speak purports. As a result, your relationship may be at a standstill, with neither party knowing how to make progress to mend it. In calling your mother a narcissist when she isn’t, for example, you might be inadvertently dismissing other important aspects of your relationship that don’t clearly map to that definition. While these terms can prove validating for people who can now put a name to an experience, therapy-speak can eliminate all nuance from a conversation. Dubbed therapy-speak, the phenomenon has introduced new vocabulary to the masses, but many definitions have become muddled in the process. As more people sought out mental health treatment, especially during the height of the pandemic, and more therapists shared psychological concepts on social media, a greater portion of society writ large was introduced to therapy vernacular. Terms ordinarily confined to psychological settings have increasingly made their way into the mainstream. “Pop psychology sometimes lacks a clear definition.”)ĭo you have a question or idea for Even Better? (“It’s referring to trauma from one’s mother, is my understanding,” she says. Mental health professionals recoil at the incorrect usage of “trauma,” “gaslighting,” “boundaries,” “trigger” - and even manufactured labels, like “mother wound,” says Jacquelyn Tenaglia, a licensed mental health counselor. “Narcissist” is just one term clients are using colloquially with friends and therapists. Brown then emphasizes the differences between a difficult family member and using a mental health diagnosis in order to judge someone, encouraging the client to instead use more specific language to describe the relationship. Usually, the client describes a person who may be selfish or self-involved, but not someone who demonstrates the clinical definition of narcissistic personality disorder, marked by “ a pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy,” according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. She’s a total narcissist,” to which Brown would invite the client to elaborate on what the term “narcissist” means to them. A client might say “I have the worst relationship with my mother. In the therapy room, licensed marriage and family therapist Moe Ari Brown has recently been in the business of definitions.
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