I’ve admired Ayishat’s thinking for years, so this conversation felt like a long time coming. We spoke about the rise of therapy-speak and how it can make us seem open while actually keeping us closed off, how suffering is performed and competed over online, and how we are forgetting to speak like human beings.
Paid subscribers can access the full conversation, where we go on to talk about our critiques of the progressive left, why online communities are such poor substitutes, and where young people might turn to find wisdom and integrity today. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
And please, subscribe to Ayishat here:
Freya India: Ayishat, you recently wrote a thoughtful piece called The Offensiveness of Group Speak, about the conformity of our language. One of the examples you give is the rise of therapy buzzwords like trauma, toxic and gaslighting. I’ve written a lot about this too. I’m very sceptical of therapy-speak, unconvinced it even helps us open up. More often I think it actually closes down our ability to have honest conversations.
But you got to the heart of what bothers me about it, the insincerity. If someone tells me about their “fearful-avoidant” attachment style or how they are learning to “hold space” for others, I find it hard to feel anything. But if they tell me about their hurt and heartbreak, or how they are trying to be less selfish, I’m listening. We are talking human to human now.
As you write, “We’re encouraged to describe even ordinary interpersonal conflict in the language of pathology and melodramatic categories. So we start treating every slight like persecution because exaggeration is the only way to make pain legible.”
But I’ve been wondering lately if two things are happening at once. On one hand, we have this therapeutic group-speak, this exaggeration of suffering. But on the other hand, I think we are also losing the ability to talk about actual pain.
The writer Samuel Kronen, in a piece about chronic illness, put it like this: “There still appears to be a lot of unrewarded suffering in the world and our culture can seem pretty cruel and callous toward the vulnerable…If anything, I think our screen-addled, instantly-gratifying, digitally-intoxicated culture actually makes people less sensitive and conscious of suffering in certain ways, contributing to a more casual cruelty.”
I think he’s right. We might pathologise ordinary feelings and exaggerate small slights, but we also seem unwilling to accept genuine suffering. We can’t seem to cope with it. It’s hard, for example, to have a sincere conversation about something like family breakdown. I hear so many young women talking about their attachment styles, about “reparenting” themselves and healing their inner child, but not so much about the pain of divorce. I think this is why, as a culture, we have ended up with so much therapeutic advice and so little wisdom. Because we aren’t speaking about our problems in any recognisably human way. Maybe we are trying to make things easier on ourselves. If you phrase your problem as “anxious attachment”, you need a therapist. If you phrase it as your parents’ divorce, you need a difficult conversation with your dad.
I wonder what you think. Are we talking about our pain too much, or not enough? Has therapy-speak made it harder to talk honestly about our problems? And do you think its rise might reflect a deeper cultural discomfort with suffering itself?
Ayishat Akanbi: There is a way to talk about pain that draws people in and another that makes them glaze over. Therapy speak increasingly does the latter. It has given us a way to say something without really saying anything.
At least this is the strong impression I get when I talk to people. There is now a pressure to be seen as “doing the work” and identifying trauma responses, attachment styles, and renaming all sorts of things as boundaries has become a facade of self-awareness.
Therapy-speak has become what luxury brands are to fashion, a way to signal refinement. It’s meant to suggest you’re doing the work, that you’re emotionally literate, even when the words themselves say very little.
We name behaviours, gaslighting, avoidant, love-bombing, but rarely talk about what actually happened. In fact, asking for clarification comes with the risk of being told you’re ‘invalidating’ someone.
Somehow we’ve come to believe naming the problem is the same as reckoning with it, as if diagnosis is a substitute for dialogue.
We talk a great deal about “mental health” but in a way that feels oddly detached. It’s not the same as talking about pain. People speak openly about depression and anxiety, but much less about how those conditions shape their outlook, distort their sense of self or affect the way they treat others. Those parts tend to be left out.
Probably because it’s harder to be honest about those things and still claim the moral high ground. You can’t have disordered thinking without sometimes behaving in disordered ways.
But most conversations about mental health are outward facing. They are used to control how others engage with us. What they’re allowed to say, how they’re supposed to respond, where our boundaries lie. We invoke mental health to ask for accommodation but rarely to invite self-interrogation.
It’s become a way to set the terms of engagement, not necessarily to deepen understanding of ourselves or anyone else.
So yes, all and all, the rise of therapy speak has not made it easier to talk about pain and suffering, it’s made it easier to pretend that we are being open while still remaining hidden. And perhaps this is because we’ve forgotten or never learned how to share pain in a way others can truly hear.
There’s no way of saying this without sounding cringeworthy, but I also feel you can sense when someone has suffered, sincerely suffered. Not always, but a lot of the time. In my experience they tend to have more grace, and an understanding that each of us is suffering in our own way.
The way I see it, therapy culture increasingly insists that suffering only counts if it comes with a label. If you’re neurotypical, or don’t have a diagnosis, you can’t possibly understand what it’s like to be misunderstood, in pain, or an outcast.
I’ve been following you for a long time and I feel like this has been a theme of your thinking over the years, this hoarding of suffering. You once wrote, “The foundation of a lot of conflict seems to be the inability to say, ‘we are both uniquely struggling’ instead people want to claim a monopoly on suffering.” You have said that suffering isn’t a contest, that trauma isn’t a tournament. As you put it, “It’s clear that suffering is written into the small print of existence. What distinguishes us is what we choose to make from misery.”
This feels like the heart of your resistance to wokeness too, this attempt to possess and perform suffering, what you have called “competitive oppression conversations”. I see the same impulse in therapy culture. Wokeness is a competition for collective suffering; therapy culture for individual suffering. I guess my argument is that neither really brings relief. Maybe your pain is worse, maybe naming it helps. But to compete with it, to weaponise it, to package it up and market it, no. You end up suffering all over again every time you try to insist you have it worse. Life can be brutal, but I know people who have been hurt beyond belief and don’t try to compete with their pain, don’t try to own it. They know that there’s a danger in that. We get attached to the things we own, and that includes our suffering.
I wanted to ask you about wokeness because I first found you through your critiques of the progressive left, but I noticed that you also distanced yourself from the anti-woke crowd. I respect that. In fact I’m impressed that you didn’t write your book about the culture war. These days I’m more impressed by the things people choose not to do, the opportunities they choose not to take.
So what made you step back from both sides? There’s this competition for suffering, but what else? For me I found wokeness insincere and often absurd, but I was just as disheartened by how little morality and character was mentioned among anti-woke commentators. Lots of people complaining about culture and younger generations without ever looking at their own lives. Never setting an example and then wondering where the examples went. As you put it, very little self-interrogation. But, as one of my favourite writers Paul Kingsnorth put it, “There is no battling the world, only ourselves.”
Is that how you feel too? Or were there other reasons you held back?