‘Gaslighting,’ ‘Toxic,’ ‘Trauma’: How Therapy-Speak Is Changing Family Life
10th September 2026
In 2022, Merriam-Webster declared gaslighting its word of the year after searches for the term increased by more than 1,700%. “It’s a word that has risen so quickly in the English language, and especially in the last four years, that it actually came as a surprise to me and to many of us,” said Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster’s editor at large. “It was a word looked up frequently every single day of the year.”
There is a rapid rise in Americans framing ordinary life through the lens of therapeutic language. And as the categories of the therapeutic expand, ordinary life increasingly appears pathological. We now speak casually of toxic people, trauma, narcissists, emotional safety, triggers, boundaries, and gaslighting. Some of this cultural shift can work toward the good. Mental illness has become less stigmatized, and people who once might have suffered silently feel freer to seek help.
Yet every cultural correction invites overcorrection. While it’s a good thing that those who need therapy seek it, the unchecked spread of therapy-speak and the ease of self-diagnosis carry serious cultural and relational costs. A challenging friend or relative can be dismissed as toxic. If someone pushes back on my perspective, I can either engage in self-reflection or accuse that person of gaslighting me. Therapy-speak makes it difficult to distinguish between genuine psychological manipulation and ordinary human conflict. The ordinary frictions of life turn into catastrophes.
“Therapy” is a scam. Our knowledge of how people think and react to daily situations is about at the level of medieval knowledge of disease. We can see what people do, and there are a multiplicity of theories as to why, but we have no actual knowledge, because the human mind is a complex system, and (like all complex systems) involves so many components that they cannot be either understood or predicted with our current level of technology.
Sure, it can help some people, just as medieval chirurgeons helped some people get well, but that’s more a lucky coincidence than a ‘scientific’ practice. Going to therapy is about as accurate as casting your horoscope, and for the same reason—little of it has actual science behind it, but is rather extrapolation from the favorite theories of people whose problem isn’t what they know but what they know that ain’t so.