Therapy speak is the incorrect use of jargon from psychology, especially jargon related to psychotherapy and mental health. It tends to be linguistically prescriptive and formal in tone.
Therapy speak is related to psychobabble and buzzwords. It is vulnerable to miscommunication and relationship damage as a result of the speaker not fully understanding the words, as well as using the words in a weaponized or abusive manner. Therapy speak is not generally used by therapists during psychotherapy sessions.
Motivation
Although the use of therapy speak may be unconscious, a variety of different motivations have been identified in different situations.
People use therapy speak because it makes themselves or their emotions sound more important or superior. In this sense, the use of therapy speak may be no different from academese, which is jargon needlessly used by university professors and other academics to make themselves sound educated. This can come across as the speaker being condescending and unkind. Therapy speak may be used in other ways to claim social status, e.g., by engaging in conspicuous consumption under the guise of self-care.
The motivation may be to win an argument, or to prevent people from questioning why they have issued a demand.
Therapy speak is sometimes used by "deeply insecure" people to mask their discomfort, avoid conflict, or to create distance in a relationship. Instead of saying something clear, like "I don't want to be friends any longer", they may use therapy speak and instead say something vague like "I don't have the emotional capacity for a relationship". It may be used as a defence mechanism to put emotional distance between them, their feelings, and the situation. They may be hoping that using therapy speak will elicit more sympathy, or at least tamp down overt criticism of themselves. Because it can distance the speaker from culpability for what they say and do, it has been compared to the jargon used in businesses in human resource policies and similarly formal corporate communications to employees.
People also use therapy speak to cover up being controlling. Rather than using the language of psychology to describe oneself, the speaker uses it to judge others.
Another motivation for using therapy speak is to get more support. Some people may find that their needs are more likely to be met when they use therapy speak (e.g., "I was traumatized by the traffic jam this morning") than if they use ordinary language (e.g., "I felt stressed because the traffic made me late").
Among people who are dating, using therapy speak may be an attempt to signal that the speaker is emotionally mature or financially stable. Talking about psychotherapy during a first date may increase the likelihood of a second date.
Employers may use therapy speak as well as psychology-based activities, such educational sessions about burnout and stress management, to address some complaints from employees. This may be considered psychwashing (whitewashing a bad situation through psychology), as it redirects attention away from the problems caused by the company (e.g., poor management, overworked employees, low pay) towards problems with the individual (e.g., feeling stressed because the work is pointless and poorly paid).
Effects
Therapy speak can be associated with controlling behavior. It can be used as a weapon to shame people or to pathologize them by declaring the other person's behavior (e.g., accidentally hurting the other person's feelings) to be a mental illness, as well as a way to excuse or minimize the speaker's choices, for example, by blaming a conscious behavior like ghosting on their attachment style, rather than working to change the behavior.
Like other forms of pop psychology, therapy speak can result in miscommunication. When people use the same word to mean different things, they may have difficulty understanding each other. For example, someone might talk about trauma bonding, thinking that it's the emotional bond between survivors of a shared experience; the actual meaning is the emotional attachment of abuse victims to their abusers. Using the word to refer to a relationship between abuse survivors will confuse people who believe it refers to an abuser–victim relationship, and vice versa. Therapists may deal with this by asking the speaker to define the word or explain it in more detail. It also impairs communication by substituting a superficial judgement for clear communication.