We are living through a therapy-speak moment. Words that once belonged in a therapist’s office, boundaries, triggers, attachment styles, capacity, have become everyday friendship vocabulary. With social media offering an endless stream of advice on how we should communicate, feel and behave, it can seem as though there is a therapeutic diagnosis for everything.
Up to a point, that is a genuinely good thing. Having the language to say this hurts me, I need something different, or this doesn’t feel healthy is powerful, and it is language many earlier generations simply didn’t have. As one writer describes it, her own mother reacts with something like awe at the vocabulary now used casually to name emotional needs, a shift from a time when those needs often went unspoken.
The trouble starts when the language meant to build healthier relationships gets used to do the opposite. “Protecting your boundaries” has become one of the year’s defining phrases, but therapists point out that it is frequently misapplied, deployed to shut down conversations, avoid discomfort or justify simply doing what we want, rather than to set a genuine limit that a relationship can be honest about.
The distinction matters. A real boundary is about what you will do to look after yourself, not a tool for controlling someone else’s behaviour or dodging accountability. When the term slides into the latter, it can leave the people around us confused or dismissed, which is the opposite of what boundary-setting is supposed to achieve.
None of this means retiring the vocabulary, it means using it with more care. Therapy-speak has given a lot of people a way to advocate for themselves, and that is worth keeping. The task now is to make sure the words still mean what they were meant to, so that “protecting your boundaries” stays a way of building better relationships rather than an excuse to opt out of them.
