Weaponizing Psychobabble

When Knowing the Language Isn’t Doing the Work: The Weaponization of Psychobabble

Let’s just say it: you can know all the language—talk about your nervous system, trauma responses, “boundaries,” “attachment styles,” “somatic regulation,” and still be a hot mess in relationships and in your roles in the larger collective. And worse? You can use that language to deflect, defend, or manipulate instead of doing the real, gritty, uncomfortable, embodied work of healing.

Yep, I’m talking to you, “Conscious Bro.”

You know the one. He’s the guy who talks about polyvagal theory over coffee, name-drops Gabor Maté in casual conversation, meditates daily—but hasn’t apologized to anyone in five years. Instead of taking accountability, he claims someone’s pain is “their trauma projection.” It’s the person who says, “I’m setting a boundary,” when what they really mean is, “I don’t want to look at how my behavior harmed you” or “I am going to avoid vulnerability at all costs, try to control you, and use my therapist’s language to make you feel small and stupid.”

Weaponizing boundaries is one of the most common ways I see this playing out. Boundaries are sacred. They’re essential. But they are not a free pass to avoid intimacy, vulnerability, or reckoning with your own shadow. Boundaries without compassion and introspection become walls. Barbed wire fences, even.

Psychobabble as Armor

It’s not just men—though patriarchy does reward male avoidance with spiritual-sounding get-out-of-jail-free cards. It’s all of us. We absorb the language of healing (which can be incredibly empowering), but if we stop there, it becomes a sophisticated form of bypassing.

We say:

• “That’s just my attachment style” instead of “I’m terrified of being honest about my needs.”
  
  
• “I don’t have capacity for this” instead of “I’m avoiding conflict because I don't want to feel shame.”
  
  
• “I’m being triggered” as a shutdown, instead of an invitation to take responsibility for our own healing edges.
  
  
• “This is your old trauma” as a way of deflecting when our behavior has caused harm.
  
  

When language becomes a shield instead of a bridge, we’re no longer connecting—we’re defending.

Knowing ≠ Healing

Look, I get it. Learning the language feels like progress. And in many ways, it is. Naming our patterns is powerful. But naming is just the start. Healing happens when we sit in the muck of our shame and grief. When we notice how our bodies brace, when we stay with the discomfort, when we pause before projecting, blaming, ghosting, or spiraling.

This is why I keep saying, “Trauma dosn’t give a shit what you know.” You can read all the books, and know all the “hot takes” on the latest psychotherapeutic trends, but you sure as hell can’t Instagram-quote your way into healthy relationships.

Shadow Work Is Not a Vibe

Shadow work is messy. It’s the moment you realize the person you hurt doesn’t care that you can explain your nervous system. They care whether you can repair, show up, and grow.

Shadow work is:

• Admitting when we’ve caused harm
  
  
• Sitting with our internalized superiority or entitlement
  
  
• Noticing how we center ourselves in conversations meant to hold others
  
  
• Asking “How might I be avoiding something uncomfortable here?”
  
  
• Feeling the gut-punch when someone sets a boundary with us—and not retaliating with therapy-speak
  
  
• Deeply looking at our ancestral and collective wounding and how we are playing out the “trauma triangle” roles of “Bully, Victim, Rescuer” on both individual, relational, and collective levels. 

 Let’s Get Real

Healing doesn’t always smell like palo santo or come with a frequency music Spotify playlist (although despite my 20-year old self’s big time judgment on the matter, I am a person that listens to frequency music now🤦🏼‍♀️😉). But real healing is a wise kind of hard. It’s in your guts, your body, your relationships. It’s in the places where you flinch and want to run. It’s in your choice to stay, to look, to feel into those not-so-pretty parts of ourselves and it is in reclaiming the parts of us that have been harmed and learning to tend to them.

So if you’ve been using the language of healing as a way to avoid healing—this is your loving call-in. You are always and already enough and you have some work to do.

We all do.

Now take a breath. Go sit with the part of you that gets defensive. The one that wants to argue or justify or intellectualize. Hold that part with curiosity. Ask it what it’s protecting.

And then?

Do the work.