To think therapy-speak has ruined how people talk to each other?

In a yoga context, it’s surely that space of time when you’re trying very hard to hold in a resounding smelly fart.

How would it help me?

You're obviously not in queer media

That sounds far more like it would help you - understanding attachments and patterns of behaviour / than what we can understand by “tosser” which just closes any understanding down

No you can be your ‘authentic self’ 😂 in the holding space.

‘Best’ example I ever saw of restaurant purple-prose was in Australia, when the cheese I ordered came from the milk of cows that grazed on meadows watered by mountain dew, that were milked by vestal virgins at rosy-fingered dawn, and the cheese was then rind- washed in spring water..etc. etc.

Ok, an exaggeration, but not by much - and when the cheese arrived it was - I swear - a one inch square just plonked on a plate, no garnish, nothing. After that intro, I burst out laughing!

No-one I speak to personally does this (so far!), but I hear it a lot online, and it's off-putting. I take an instant mild dislike of people who use terms like 'holding space' and 'unpacking' (unless used literally).

I don’t know. This one is really useful at work when trying to get someone realise by themselves that their idea is crap.

I blame gastro pubs.

Hear me out - when pubs started getting “gastro-ed” in the early noughties and rewrote their menus to have more adjectives than nouns.

I’d grown up with pub menus that read “Chicken and chips” or whatever, only for it to become “Succulent, oven-roasted, free-range, tender chicken cooked to perfection accompanied by hand cut home grown perfect potato chunky chips and emerald green, fresh, sweet, and rotund peas’

And so on and so forth. Now we’re drowning in superfluous, vague and increasingly meaningless words. It’s like the Tower of Babel again.

Me too.

IMO we are overdue for a ‘Plain English’ campaign, to counteract not just therapy-speak, but also corporate-speak, psycho-babble and all varieties of jargon where there’s a perfectly good PE alternative.

I think some “therapy speak” has been so helpful in pinpointing difficult concepts, and some of its a bit naff. I suspect that the anti woke brigade are very anti therapy and its language, and are likely to include it in its many targets.

But there will always be a point in language evolution where the misuse irritated those who were around for and adopt the original or most-recent meaning.

’Narcissist’ was not the psychiatric term it is today when it first entered into that terminology. It was first used in the late 1800s to describe sexual perversion or an obsession with yourself as a sexual object. Then into 20th century it was coined as a ‘god complex’

A very classic example of this sort of thing is ‘blood is thicker than water’ – the actual origins means the complete opposite, not just a mangling but a complete reversal.

Therapy speak does my nut in.

I had a friend who termed a lot of people a 'narcissist' - even his own 6 year old son ffs!! I looked up the definition of the term and saw hundreds of articles telling you to cut off every narc in your life. That advice would leave me with 50% less of my own family and friends iny life - and I'd probably have to cut myself off too!

I hate it. Oh and 'learnt behaviour' can do one too. Oh I've learnt 'xyz behaviour' from my awful parents and it's ruining my life.

I think therapy speak just gives you clever sounding jargon to excuse your poor behaviour or bitch about others.

True about the evolution of language. But I still maintain that this thread isn't about the language used, it's more about the current misuse of improperly understood terms.

If I call a stool a chair the meaning might well migrate so that stools become known as chairs in the future - but that doesn't negate the fact that my calling a stool something that it is currently not known as will irritate everyone in the present.

That’s EXACTLY how language evolves. It’s a warping and adaptation through generational differences, migration, technological advancements, cultural exchange … to name a few. Words and phrases take on new meaning – they are adopted, discarded, shortened, mispronounced.

There are myriad examples of this through the history of language.

Regardless, OP’s post was about the new phrase ‘holding space’, not understanding it or finding it insubstantial.

But this isn't about the actual language used, it's about people using phrases they imperfectly understand, or understand only through the translation device of Tik Tok and other SM to describe and diagnose their own behaviour and that of others.
Watching an Influencer on Tik Tok talking about how 'triggered' she is that she's being told by a 'narcissist' parent to get a proper job and earn some money leads other youngsters to have an even more overinflated idea of their own importance and ability to doss around the house all day than they already have. And they'll yell 'narcissist!' at any parent who tries to make them go outside.

Language moves on. It always has and it always will. No point getting annoyed about it.

Never heard ‘holding space’ before.
But it sounds like I would hate it. I agree the over analysis of every minor detail/thought/behaviour is ridiculous. I feel like we have arrived at a point in the human race where we cannot just ‘be’ and accept that if something/someone/a situation/a feeling etc etc is not either perfect or explained in a medical diagnosis, we go mad overthinking it all. What an epic waste of time on the planet!

If I may, why don’t you describe it like that?

I am an expert / have professional experience of working with domestic abuse cases.

I have experience of domestic abuse.

Or similar. Why reduce it to a glib and limited social media phrase like “lived experience”?

It’s only a few more words needed to clarify yet makes for better human communication with space for nuance.

I think people have always struggled to communicate difficult issues clearly - therapy speak, though often irritating, is a symptom not the cause.

@ThisLimeMoose I agree with your concept and your title

I actually saw two threads saying similar things in recent months, but they got taken down.

However, "holding space" isn't something I've come across in real life. I only know about the expression because of Ariana Grande's interview experience!

hopefully this thread won't get taken down. So yes, I think people who absorb a lot of this stuff in pop psychology are actually ruining friendships and maybe other relationships. They're linking motives to things when a lot of us don't have a hidden agenda. The gigantic pile of therapy cliches may not even be understood by the people using the terms.

There are some good examples on here. I have reached a stage where if someone says to me that they have PTSD I don't know if they actually have it or if they are exaggerating or making a weird joke. This is particularly noticeable when you meet new people (which I've done a fair bit in the last couple of years).

there's a couple of comments on here that I'm not sure if they are jokes or not! There are some hilarious comments on here as well.

Well, I’m a therapist and I have never heard this phrase.

You’re glossing this by ‘with’ (“experience with”) rather than ‘of’.

You have experience with abuse by hearing others’s experiences of abuse, and listening to them. You do not have experience of abuse.

“Lived experience” means experience of, in plain English.

But in a professional context, I might well be asked "do you have any experience with Domestic Abuse?" As in do I have experience carrying out direct therapeutic work with survivors or perpetrators, working with children impacted by DA, carrying out Risk Assessments, contributing to safety plans etc. I have a lot of experience with these things, which involves a great deal more than "hearing about Domestic Abuse from others" but its absolutely not the same as having lived through it myself. Some colleagues may have all of the above experience as a professional, but they may also have "lived experience". That's why the distinction is helpful in the world I work in.

It's not as black and white as pp is right and im wrong or vice versa. I'm giving an example of why the phrase is used a lot, and is not entirely tautological, in my particular area of work.

I’d never heard the term before tonight. I’ve just checked on Amazon and there are hundreds of books on the topic. I guess many are self-published. Also a few towel rails, shelves, luggage racks and other more conventional holding spaces.