Therapy speak has replaced actualapologies... "i don't have the capacity for this" is just a nicer way to leave
Therapy speak has replaced actual apologies... "i don"t have the capacity for this" is just a nicer way to leave
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Therapy speak has replaced actual
apologies... "i don't have the capacity for this" is just a nicer way to leave
Every word in that sentence is correct and the sentence is still doing something dishonest.
The message arrives at 11pm and it is beautifully constructed. I have been doing a lot of work on myself and I am realizing I need to protect my peace right now. I do not have the capacity to hold space for this, I hope you can respect my boundaries. It is calm. It is unimpeachable. There is no sentence in it you could argue with without sounding like a monster, and that is not an accident, that is the design. Because underneath the vocabulary the actual content is, I am leaving and I would prefer not to be discussed. Which is a legitimate thing to do. People are allowed to leave. The dishonesty is not in the leaving, it is in the packaging, because the language has been borrowed from a clinical setting where it means something specific and repurposed into a setting where it functions as armour. In therapy those words describe your internal state to a professional. In a group chat they operate as a verdict on somebody else, delivered in a register that makes disagreement look like a violation. And the person receiving it is left holding a message that says nothing happened to you, and also does not ask.
The clearest example of the drift is the word boundary, which has been almost entirely inverted. A boundary is a statement about your own behaviour. It is, if this keeps happening i will leave the room, if you call me at 2am i will not pick up. It governs you. What it has become in practice is a rule for other people wearing therapeutic clothing, my boundary is that you cannot post about that, my boundary is that you do not talk to her, and at that point it is not a boundary, it is a demand with better pr, and everybody involved can feel the difference even if nobody can say it.
Same with gaslighting, which described a specific and genuinely awful thing, someone systematically making you doubt your own perception of reality, and now regularly means my friend remembers the evening differently to me. Same with trauma, now applied to a bad
internship. Same with narcissism, which is a personality disorder affecting a small slice of the population and has somehow been diagnosed in roughly one hundred percent of exes. The cost of this is not pedantic. Every time a word gets stretched to cover the ordinary, it loses the strength it had for the extraordinary, so the person actually being gaslit, in the real sense, now has to fight through a wall of eye rolling to be believed.
Where it does the most damage is the apology, because therapy speak has produced an entire genre of apology that contains no apology. It goes, I am sorry you felt hurt, I was in a really bad place, I was dysregulated, I was operating from my attachment wound. Read those again. Every one of them is a report on the speaker. The first one relocates the problem into your feelings rather than their action, the rest offer a causal explanation that quietly functions as an exemption, because a wound is not a choice and you cannot be angry at a nervous system. So the conversation ends with you comforting them about the thing they did to you, which is an outcome so efficient it is almost impressive. A real apology has an unglamorous shape and everybody knows it when they hear it. It names the specific act, not the feeling it produced. It has no if in it. It does not explain, or if it explains it does so after and marks it clearly as not an excuse. It says what will be different. And it does not ask for forgiveness in the same breath, because demanding immediate absolution is just one more thing being asked of the person you already took from.
And the reason this is worth writing about rather than just sneering at is that the overcorrection came from somewhere real. Most of us grew up in houses where nobody apologised to a child, ever, where the apology was a plate of food appearing wordlessly outside your door two hours later and you were expected to understand, where you were told nothing bad was happening
while something bad was happening. A generation raised on that got handed a vocabulary for the inner life and grabbed it with both hands, and that was genuinely progress, not a joke. The failure is only that the vocabulary started arriving instead of the behaviour. Naming a pattern is not the same as changing it, and being fluent in attachment styles is not the same as being reliable. So keep the words, they are useful, and use them for what they were built for, which is describing yourself in rooms where describing yourself is the task. But when you have hurt somebody, drop the register entirely and say the boring version. I did this, it was not okay, here is what i am doing differently. It is worse writing and it is a much better apology, and there is no framework in the world that does the part where you actually stop.
-Maitrayee Repal