There’s a particular kind of wince I do these days, usually somewhere around the third scroll of my phone, when I see the word “boundaries” being used to justify someone ghosting a friend over a slightly late birthday text.
Therapy language has escaped the counselling room. It’s out there now, roaming free across social media, dinner parties, and increasingly tense group chats, doing a job it was never quite designed for. Some of this is genuinely wonderful, more emotional vocabulary in the world is, broadly, a good thing. But a fair amount of it has drifted so far from its original meaning that I sometimes feel like the person standing at passport control, quietly checking whether the word being used actually matches the concept it claims to represent.
So, in the spirit of gentle repatriation, here are three terms that get thrown around constantly, what they’re supposed to mean, and what’s usually lost in translation.
“Holding Space”: Less Mystical Than It Sounds
I’ll confess a personal weariness with this phrase, largely because I’ve heard it used to describe everything from a genuinely attuned therapeutic presence to someone sitting in silence next to a colleague’s desk for four minutes while looking faintly uncomfortable.
Properly understood, holding space is a fairly precise idea, borrowed originally from psychoanalytic thinking about containment. It means being present with someone in their distress without needing to fix it, minimise it, or make it about you. It’s the difference between a friend who says “that sounds really hard, tell me more” and a friend who says “oh god, that happened to me too, and worse, actually, let me tell you about it” before you’ve finished your sentence.
Holding space requires a kind of sturdy stillness, staying with someone’s difficult feeling without flinching away from it, and without rushing to make it more comfortable for yourself. It’s genuinely hard to do well. Most people, myself included on a bad day, default to fixing mode within about ninety seconds, because sitting with someone else’s pain and doing precisely nothing about it is one of the more counterintuitive skills a human being can learn.
What it doesn’t mean is simply being present, or listening politely, or agreeing to hear someone out. Those are lovely things too, but they’re not the same as holding space, and calling every instance of basic attentiveness by that name tends to flatten a genuinely useful concept into something indistinguishable from good manners.
“Triggered”: A Word That Deserves Better
Somewhere in the last decade, “triggered” quietly split into two completely different words that happen to be spelled identically.
There’s the clinical version, which describes something quite specific and often quite serious: a stimulus, a smell, a sound, a particular tone of voice, that activates a trauma response in the nervous system, pulling someone abruptly out of the present moment and into a state that belongs to an earlier, unresolved experience. This isn’t mild discomfort. It can involve a racing heart, dissociation, a flood of panic that seems wildly disproportionate to whatever just happened, precisely because it isn’t really about what just happened at all.
Then there’s the colloquial version, which has come to mean roughly “I found that mildly annoying,” deployed with an eye-roll and often a fair amount of irony. “I’m so triggered by people who don’t reply to messages,” someone will say, entirely tongue-in-cheek, and everyone laughs, and no harm is done.
The trouble arrives when these two meanings get tangled together in earnest, because they describe genuinely different experiences requiring genuinely different responses. If a client tells me something triggered them, one of the first things I want to understand is which version we’re talking about, a passing irritation, or a nervous system genuinely transported somewhere it didn’t consent to go. Conflating the two doesn’t just muddy the language. It can make it harder for people experiencing the clinical version to be taken seriously, because the word has been so thoroughly softened by its casual cousin.
Worth knowing, too: being triggered isn’t a character flaw or a sign of fragility. It’s a nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems do, protecting you based on old information, whether or not that information is still relevant.
“Boundaries”: Not a Wall, and Not a Weapon
This is the one I hear misused most often, usually in one of two directions.
Sometimes “boundaries” gets used as a slightly nobler-sounding synonym for simply avoiding conflict altogether, cutting someone off, going silent, disappearing from a relationship without explanation, and then describing the whole manoeuvre as “protecting my peace.” That’s not a boundary. A boundary is a stated limit, communicated to another person, about what you will and won’t accept or participate in. Disappearing without a word isn’t a boundary. It’s an exit, dressed in more fashionable clothing.
Other times, boundaries get used as a way of controlling someone else’s behaviour rather than managing your own. “My boundary is that you’re not allowed to be upset with me,” someone will announce, with real conviction, apparently unaware that this isn’t a boundary at all, it’s a demand that another person’s internal experience conform to your comfort. A genuine boundary sounds more like: “If you raise your voice at me, I’ll end the conversation and we can pick it back up later.” Notice the difference. One is about what you’ll do. The other is about controlling what someone else feels or does, which was never really available to you in the first place.
A proper boundary, psychodynamically speaking, is less about building a wall and more about clarifying where you end and someone else begins, a concept that sounds obvious until you’ve spent any real time in a family, a friendship group, or a relationship where those lines were blurry for years. For people who grew up enmeshed with a parent’s moods, or responsible for managing someone else’s emotional weather from a very young age, “boundaries” isn’t a lifestyle aesthetic. It’s often the first genuinely new skill they’ve had to learn as an adult, and it tends to feel more like grief than empowerment for quite a while before it feels like freedom.
Why the Blurring Happens (And Why It Matters)
I don’t think this drift is anyone’s fault, exactly. Language always gets reshaped by whoever’s using it most, and therapeutic vocabulary has become genuinely mainstream in a way it wasn’t a couple of decades ago. Mostly, that’s progress. People have more words now for internal states that used to go entirely unnamed, and unnamed feelings tend to run the show far more than named ones do.
But precision still matters, particularly with words that carry real clinical weight. If everything mildly uncomfortable becomes “triggering,” and every act of avoidance becomes a “boundary,” and every moment of basic attention becomes “holding space,” the words stop doing the specific, useful work they were built for. They become a kind of social currency instead, a way of signalling emotional literacy rather than actually practising it.
The antidote isn’t gatekeeping the vocabulary, exactly. It’s staying curious about what you actually mean underneath the term you’ve reached for. Next time you catch yourself reaching for one of these words, it might be worth pausing for a beat and asking: is this genuinely what I’m describing, or is it the nearest fashionable phrase that happened to be lying around?
Reaching Out for Support
If you’ve noticed yourself borrowing therapy language without quite knowing what’s underneath it, or if you’d simply like some support in understanding what’s actually going on for you, in your own words rather than borrowed ones, that’s exactly the kind of work therapy makes room for.
At Serenity of Mind Therapy, I offer psychodynamic therapy both online and in-person at my therapy rooms in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, and Crowborough, East Sussex. Together we can slow down and get properly curious about what you’re actually feeling, rather than reaching for whichever word sounds most convincing.
If any of this has resonated with you, you’re very welcome to contact me here.