big feelings & therapyspeak

feelings don't fit in the body. they stretch skin, shake limbs, & twist the face, seeking form in expression. this outward movement creates the illusion that feelings come from within. such a sharp distinction between what is within & without is untrue though. all feelings have their roots in the material conditions that the body is entangled in. & that’s the actual reason feelings don't fit in the body. they don't belong there.

words arrive like angels, giving feelings not just wings, but meaning. once a feeling finds its words, there is no stopping the movement. because above all, a feeling is a call to action. something must be done about it. something must be done.

even when i take my feelings to the feelings doctor, all they can offer me are words. this is a lack of boundaries, that is a trauma response, & they've seen it all before, so it's going to be okay. i’m just a statistic, an example, a case study in their textbooks, & they seem almost bored, i think, so maybe my abnormal is a normal. it has to be if there's a word for it.

the year was 2026 & another generation gave up on their parents. some tried to prove they would have done better & ended up breathless & bruised. some paid a stranger to take the impact as they unravelled, collapsed, & tried to separate the pieces of their broken heart that they wanted to keep from the pieces they wanted to pretend were never theirs to begin with. eventually, all the therapists wrote memoirs about everybody's secrets after swapping out the names & the academies added the memoirs to the next batch’s syllabus.

of those that walked out of the therapists’ offices, many found themselves strangely afflicted. particularly those that never found other words for some feelings before therapy. suddenly, the words & meanings for the feelings they discovered in that private room floated around their head like life rafts. as they clung on for dear life, they took themselves to their friends & partners & tried to explain their woes in these new words, only to be met with confusion & fear. they were accused of ‘weaponising’ therapy language.

how does one weaponise a word? perhaps they throw it across the room like an arrow, with an aim for the heart & force enough to pierce flesh. perhaps they spit it. or perhaps they forget to consider how the person standing opposite them understands the word. “but my meaning is correct! my therapist said so!”

but if you remember the story so far correctly, the words didn't belong to the therapist or the academies they studied from. they belonged to people that the therapists wrote their memoirs about. the source remains the messy cocktail that is human emotion.

therapyspeak is only dangerous insofar as it is boring. it robs us of the joy of finding poetry in our feelings. of letting a stream of light illuminate the inside of our minds, when, for a moment, it doesn't matter what a feeling means. it simply flows through you. therapyspeak, like any language, only offers words for us to play with on our own terms. if the feelings never belonged to us in the first place, of course they refuse capture by our words, therapyspeak or not.

somewhere far away, in the four walls of a classroom, broken children discover words to make sense of their own brokenness & the brokenness of their times. the site of diagnosis blasts open from individual bodies to systems. schizophrenia becomes alienation under capitalism. hysteria & bpd become protests against patriarchy. & only fascism is pathologised. the translations multiply until every feeling knows what it's about. & something must be done about it. something must be done.