Doing the Work

How therapy-speak became the love language of the modern workplace

- By Amanda Montell

During the pandemic, Katherine Sorensen, 28, scored a copywriting gig at a tech company. The role was remote, so there were no cushy couches or team happy hours. Instead, the most striking part of Sorensen's new job was what her new workplace sounded like. On her first day, she noticed a glossary of mental-health-themed terms that seemed to pop up over and over in conversations, like self-care, toxic, and boundaries. In lieu of in-person introductions, a day full of virtual one-on-one welcome meetings with people from different departments was arranged for Sorensen. During one of them, she could see in the video that a coworker's home office had a poster that read, "Having feelings is cool." She very quickly got the memo that to thrive at the company, she was going to need to become fluent in its dialect of therapy-speak.

Over the past decade, language derived from the mental-health field has surged in mainstream usage. In 2018, toxic was named the Oxford word of the year. (Gaslighting made the shortlist as well.) According to the Google Books Ngram Viewer, which shows graphically how often terms and phrases appear in a select corpus of books and publications, use of the word trauma in printed text has steadily swelled since 1900, peaking in around 2015. Usage of the phrase setting boundaries began to rise around 1980 and appears to be still climbing.