There is a strange thing happening in modern relationships. The vocabulary of therapy has slipped into everyday relational life, and it now shapes how couples talk about themselves. Words like empathy, safety, curiosity, respect, communication — all of them originally intended to illuminate a process — have become the language people use to diagnose each other. The relationship becomes colonised by therapy-language, and partners begin speaking about the relationship as if this is the same as being in the relationship. It isn’t. The vocabulary becomes a layer sitting on top of the actual interaction, often obscuring what is happening between them.

In couple therapy, you see this distortion immediately. The therapy-language is almost never neutral. It is usually used by one partner, often the one who initiated therapy, and it comes with an air of psychological sophistication. They talk about emotional safety, attunement, validation, or their partner’s lack of curiosity about their experience. They present themselves as someone who has “done the work,” who has insight, who has processed their history, while the other becomes the one who “hasn’t yet.” It’s a seduction for therapists — the language mirrors ours, so it feels informed. But beneath it sits a familiar dynamic: one person defining the other.

This is the core problem. Therapy-language in a distressed couple is rarely descriptive; it’s performative. It functions as a relational move. It positions one partner as psychologically competent and the other as deficient. It turns complex interactional patterns into personal failings. “You’re not empathic.” “You don’t make me feel safe.” “You’re not emotionally aware.” These are not observations; they are verdicts. They shift responsibility away from the speaker and onto the partner, as if the entire relational difficulty can be traced to the other person’s lack of psychological development.

What gets missed is the behaviour itself — the actual interaction unfolding in real time. Relationships are built on conversation, on the way two people respond to each other, on the small actions and inactions that accumulate. The pursuit, the withdrawal, the interruptions, the interpretations, the silences, the timing, the tone — this is the architecture of a relationship. Therapy-language can float so far above these moments that it becomes a convenient escape from them. The partner describing the problem is often participating in the very dynamic they are naming, but the language gives them the illusion of being outside it, as if they are analysing something they are not part of.

This is where definitional privilege becomes important. In many distressed couples, one partner assumes the right to define the meaning of events, the emotional rules of the relationship, and the psychological interpretation of both people’s behaviour. They use the vocabulary of therapy to legitimise that authority. The other partner quickly finds themselves in the one-down position, responding to evaluations rather than engaging in a mutual conversation. Once one person controls the definitions, the relationship becomes structurally skewed, no matter how elegant the language sounds.

For us as couple therapists, the task is not to take the therapy-language at face value. It is to look at what it reveals about the pattern. Language is behaviour. The way it is used tells you who is positioned where, who gets to author the narrative of the relationship, and who is left carrying the weight of the problem. Healthy relationships do not emerge from the correct psychological vocabulary but from the quality of interaction — the observable, moment-to-moment behaviours that two people enact. Whenever therapy-language begins to dominate, it is usually a sign that the relationship has lost contact with itself.