When 'Therapy Speak' Invades Actual Therapy

"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."

Many couples apply clinical and therapeutic labels to everyday conflicts, calling ordinary miscommunications 'gaslighting' or asserting diagnostic labels without clinical evaluation. Therapists report frequent misuse of terms such as gaslighting, boundaries, triggered, trauma bond, and attachment-style categories, often influenced by social media descriptions. Misapplied labels can conflate feeling invalidated or disagreeing with manipulative abuse, and can obscure whether a partner has a genuine mental-health condition. The widespread casual use of labels like 'narcissist' and self- or partner-diagnoses stretches clinical concepts into commonplace relationship complaints.

Read at The Atlantic