Maybe they're not a narcissist. Maybe they're just in Tesco.

When Everyone Has a Therapy Word for Everything

There was a time when somebody could simply be difficult. They could be selfish. Moody. Thoughtless. Controlling. Frightened of commitment. A bit exhausting. Now, apparently, we need a diagnosis before we've finished our coffee.

He's a narcissist. She's avoidant. That's trauma. You're triggered. They're gaslighting you. You need boundaries. It's your attachment style. Your nervous system is dysregulated.

And somewhere, presumably, an ordinary human being is still allowed to have a bad day.

We have become remarkably fluent in the language of therapy. Scroll through social media and you could be forgiven for thinking you've accidentally enrolled on a psychology degree.

There are attachment styles and trauma responses, red flags and green flags, inner children and emotionally unavailable partners. There are people explaining how you walk, sleep, argue, text, apologise, choose partners and load the dishwasher, and what all of this apparently reveals about your childhood.

Some of this is useful. Words can give shape to experiences we have struggled to understand. There can be enormous relief in discovering that something you've experienced has a name.

So that's what was happening. I'm not imagining it. Other people experience this too. Language can open doors. But sometimes it can close them as well. When a label becomes the whole story

Imagine somebody doesn't reply to your message. Once upon a time, you might have thought: That's annoying.

Now there are considerably more exciting possibilities. Perhaps they're avoidantly attached. Perhaps you're anxiously attached. Perhaps their silence has activated your abandonment wound. Perhaps your urge to send another message is a trauma response. Perhaps they're emotionally unavailable. Perhaps you're codependent.

Or perhaps they're just in Tesco choosing a watermelon.

Human beings are complicated. This is inconvenient because social media rather prefers us in easily digestible categories. A sixty-second video doesn't have much room for: It depends.

Therapy does. Because the interesting question is often not: What label can we give this? It is: What is actually happening here?

“My ex was a narcissist”

Narcissist has become one of those words that seems to have escaped from the consulting room and started wandering around unsupervised. Sometimes it is being used accurately. Sometimes it describes genuinely harmful patterns of behaviour that deserve to be taken seriously. And sometimes what somebody really means is: My ex behaved badly.

The same is true of words such as gaslighting, trauma, triggered and toxic. These words have meaning. When we stretch them until they describe almost every unpleasant human experience, something peculiar happens. We don't make the experiences more serious. We make the words less useful. Not every disagreement is gaslighting. Not every selfish person has a personality disorder. Not every uncomfortable feeling is trauma. Not every relationship that ends was toxic. Sometimes people hurt us without having a diagnosis.

Sometimes we hurt other people without being one either. That may be harder to package into a neat little Instagram square, but it leaves considerably more room for being human. The comfort of knowing what we are.

Labels aren't only things we give other people. We give them to ourselves. I'm an anxious attachment. I'm a people pleaser. I'm avoidant. I'm an overthinker. Sometimes these descriptions help us recognise patterns.

But notice the difference between:

“I tend to become anxious when I feel someone pulling away.”

and: “I'm anxiously attached.”

One describes something you experience. The other can quietly become something you are. And once we've decided what we are, we have a remarkable talent for collecting evidence. Every unanswered message proves it. Every relationship becomes another exhibit. Every difficult feeling gets filed in the correct drawer. The label that initially helped us understand ourselves can gradually become the fence around us.

Therapy should make you more curious, not less Good therapy isn't about handing you an increasingly impressive collection of psychological terminology. It's about understanding you.

Why does this particular situation affect you so deeply? Why do you become frightened when somebody pulls away? Why is saying no so difficult? Why do you feel responsible for everybody else's feelings? Why do you repeatedly find yourself in relationships where your own needs disappear? Why does criticism land like a punch while praise seems to evaporate before you've properly heard it?

Those questions are slower. They don't make particularly good reels. But they can lead somewhere. Because you are not a collection of symptoms downloaded from the internet.

You have a history. Relationships. Experiences. Contradictions. Ways of protecting yourself that probably made sense somewhere along the way. Therapy gives us the time to become curious about those things rather than rushing to decide which box they belong in.

And then there is the internet.

There is another part of this conversation that deserves considerably more space than I'm going to give it here. More and more people are using social media to work out what might be “wrong” with them, sometimes recognising themselves in videos about ADHD, autism, trauma, personality disorders, anxiety and other mental-health conditions. And increasingly, people are also turning to AI for psychological advice, emotional support and answers about their mental health.

Both raise some genuinely interesting questions. They also raise some concerns. So I'm going to resist trying to squeeze that entire subject into the bottom of this article like an overpacked suitcase. I'll return to social-media self-diagnosis and AI mental-health advice separately, because they deserve a conversation of their own.

Perhaps we don't need a word for everything. There is something wonderfully human about wanting to understand ourselves. We want explanations. We want to know why we keep doing the thing we promised ourselves we wouldn't do again. We want to understand why certain people get under our skin, why particular relationships feel so powerful and why old feelings sometimes appear in completely new circumstances. Psychological language can help us do that. But the word is the beginning of the conversation. It isn't necessarily the answer.

You don't have to arrive to therapy knowing your attachment style. You don't need to know whether what happened to you “counts” as trauma. You don't need a diagnosis.

You don't even need a particularly articulate explanation of what is wrong. Sometimes people begin with something much less impressive: I keep ending up here. I don't understand why I react like this. Something doesn't feel right. I don't want to keep doing this.

Those are perfectly good places to start. Because therapy isn't about finding the correct psychological word for you. It's about discovering what lies underneath the words.