Friendscript

on not saying your lines

Over at Bustle, Rebecca Fishbein asks: “Is Therapy-Speak Making Us Selfish?” The three profiled subjects sound a bit like people who were already very difficult and latched onto this language, rather than the other way around, like the friend who shows up half an hour late to a dinner party, then berates the host for making her feel unwelcome later. I find it hard to believe this behavior was so out of the blue that her selfishness could really be attributed to her language, though the language probably makes it much more exasperating.

While Fishbein calls this “therapy speak,” I think it’s maybe more accurate to attribute this kind of language to the advice columnist “script,” which I guess I started noticing in the 2010s from websites like Captain Awkward. Now people write into Dear Prudence and so on asking for scripts for how to express their feelings to some third party. “I need a script for a sensitive comment toward my partner (both women, late 30s),” goes one recent one, about …