The Word You Reach For: What a New Survey of 1,426 People Reveals About Gaslighting, Trauma and the Limits of Therapy-Speak

You already know most of the words in this piece. That is rather the point.

You are scrolling back through a text thread at twenty to midnight, thumb hovering over the message where you called your ex “toxic”, wondering — just for a second — whether that was quite the right word. Earlier that same week you typed four words into a search bar: is my mum a narcissist. You described Tuesday as “traumatic”, though nothing actually broke that day, only something that hurt. You called a friend’s long silence “gaslighting” without ever quite deciding whether that was really what happened. None of this makes you dishonest, or dramatic, or wrong to have reached for those words. It makes you ordinary. It makes you part of the most striking shift in how people talk about their inner lives in a generation — and a new piece of research says you are very far from alone in it.

The words we cannot stop using

In September 2024, the therapy provider Thriveworks commissioned the research firm Researchscape to survey 1,426 adults across the United States about the language of mental health. The findings, published in 2025, are hard to read as anything other than a snapshot of you and everyone you know: 95 per cent of respondents said they hear therapy-derived language in their daily lives, whether from friends, family, social media or their own inner monologue. This is no longer clinical vocabulary confined to consulting rooms. It is the language you use to describe an argument with your sister, a difficult manager, a bad date.

The same survey asked people which of these words they thought were being overused or misapplied — used, in other words, more loosely than their original clinical meaning allows. “Gaslighting” (deliberately making someone doubt their own perception of reality) and “triggered” (having a strong emotional reaction linked to a past experience) tied at the top, with 38 per cent of respondents flagging each as overused. “Toxic” followed closely at 37 per cent, then “narcissist” — a term that, in its clinical form, describes narcissistic personality disorder, a specific and relatively rare diagnosis — at 31 per cent. “Trauma” came next at 25 per cent, followed by “OCD” (obsessive-compulsive disorder, a diagnosable anxiety-related condition involving intrusive thoughts and compulsive behaviours) at 24 per cent, then “self-care” and “boundaries” tied at 22 per cent, and “codependent” at 17 per cent.

Read that list again and be honest with yourself: how many of those nine words have you used this week? Not in a clinical sense. In the ordinary sense — the WhatsApp-message sense, the venting-to-a-friend-over-coffee sense.

Where all this language actually came from

The pattern the Thriveworks survey caught in a single snapshot has a name, and it was given to psychology a decade earlier by an Australian researcher who watched it happening in real time. In 2016, Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, published a paper in the journal Psychological Inquiry called “Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology.” Haslam’s argument was simple and, once you have read it, almost impossible to unsee: the concepts you reach for to describe psychological harm have been quietly stretching for decades, and they are still stretching now.

He described this stretching happening in two directions at once. The first he called horizontal creep — a concept expanding sideways to absorb experiences that were once considered entirely separate. “Abuse” once meant physical or sexual violence; it now routinely includes emotional neglect, financial control and coercive control (a pattern of controlling, isolating or intimidating behaviour within a relationship). “Bullying” once required repeated, intentional acts by someone more powerful than you; it now stretches to cover a single unkind comment or an argument that got out of hand online. The second he called vertical creep — a concept reaching downward to include milder and milder versions of itself. “Trauma” once described events that threatened death or serious injury; it has crept down to include a disappointing childhood, an awkward performance review, a friendship that fizzled out. “Prejudice” has crept from open discrimination down to an unconscious flicker of bias lasting a fraction of a second.

Does any of that sound familiar — a memory you would have shrugged off as “a rough patch” ten years ago, that you now quietly file under trauma? You would not be alone, and you would not be making it up. You would simply be living inside the same cultural current Haslam mapped nearly a decade ago, one that has only accelerated since — carried, this time, not by clinicians and textbooks but by TikTok explainers, Instagram infographics and the algorithmic churn of a billion small, well-meaning posts about “healing.”

Why this drift is not automatically bad news

Before this starts to sound like an argument for going back to keeping quiet, it is worth being fair to the words themselves. Concept creep has a genuine upside, and Haslam is careful to say so. Widening the definition of abuse to include coercive control and financial manipulation did not weaken the concept — it named something real that had no name before, and gave people permission to seek help for harm that used to be dismissed as “just how marriages are.” Recognising that bullying can be psychological as well as physical has protected children who would once have been told to toughen up. Naming “microaggressions” gave language to a thousand small, cumulative injuries that were previously invisible precisely because no single instance looked serious enough to complain about.

If you have ever finally had the word for something — a relationship, a childhood, a boss — and felt the strange relief of it clicking into place, you already know this. That relief is real. A word that fits can be the first rung of a ladder out of something you did not previously have permission to name.

What gets lost when a word means everything

But a word stretched far enough eventually loses its grip. This is the part of the research that matters most for the way you actually talk, day to day, to the people you love. When “trauma” describes both a car crash and a cancelled brunch, the word stops doing useful work. Not for you. And not for whoever is trying to work out how much support you actually need. When “narcissist” describes both a diagnosed personality disorder and a partner who forgot your birthday, it becomes harder, not easier, to have the conversation that might actually fix things. When “toxic” describes both a genuinely abusive relationship and a friendship that has simply run its natural course, you lose the vocabulary to tell the two apart — and so, often, does everyone around you.

This is not an argument that your pain is smaller than you think it is. Your pain is not the question here. The word is. It is an argument that the word you reach for shapes what happens next — whether you go to a friend, a GP, a solicitor, or nowhere at all — and a word that is too big to be precise can send you down the wrong path entirely.

Perhaps you’re the parent holding this particular exhaustion: a teenager who has started diagnosing the whole household from a phone screen, calling a strict bedtime “controlling” and a difficult day “trauma”, while you quietly wonder whether you’re watching your child develop emotional vocabulary or lose the ability to tell discomfort from harm. Perhaps, instead, you’re the one mid-argument with a partner who just called you “toxic”, caught somewhere between feeling accused and feeling, for the first time, understood. Or perhaps you’re about to sit down with a GP, rehearsing the word you’ve settled on for months, unsure whether it is the right one to say once you are in the room. Whichever it is, the relief of finally naming something and the risk of naming it wrongly can both be true at once. That is precisely what makes this so hard to sit with.

The consequences are not only relational. Researchers studying “concept creep and psychiatrisation” — the process by which ordinary variations in mood and behaviour come to be understood through a clinical lens — have raised a further concern: that when everyday distress is routinely reframed in diagnostic language, you may start to see yourself as more fragile, and your coping resources as smaller, than they actually are. Calling a disappointing week “traumatic” does not just describe your week. Over time, it can start to write the story of how resilient you believe yourself to be.

A practical way through — reclaiming the words without abandoning them

None of this means retiring the vocabulary. It means using it the way a locksmith uses keys — matched carefully to what you are actually trying to open, not thrown at every door in the hope one of them turns. Here is a way to start doing that this week.

• Name the behaviour before you name the diagnosis. Instead of “she’s a narcissist,” try describing exactly what happened: “she interrupted me three times and changed the subject to herself.” The behaviour is something you can act on. The label often is not.
• Ask yourself what the word is doing for you. Is “toxic” helping you set a boundary, or is it letting you avoid a harder, more specific conversation about what you actually need to change?
• Reserve clinical terms — OCD, narcissistic personality disorder, PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) — for clinical conversations. If you genuinely suspect one applies to you or someone close to you, that suspicion is worth taking to a GP or a qualified professional, not settling in a group chat.
• Sit with the feeling for one breath longer than usual before you reach for the biggest available word. Often a plainer sentence — “that hurt me” or “I felt dismissed” — says more, and lands better, than the clinical shorthand.
• Notice when a word is being used as a weapon rather than a description. “You’re being toxic” ends a conversation. “I felt shut out when you did that” tends to open one.

Before you take this to your next family argument

Here I want to slow down, because clarity without compassion is just pedantry, and compassion without clarity helps no one. So here is what this research cannot tell you, and what matters before you use any of it to win a point at Sunday dinner, or against yourself. The Thriveworks survey measured perception, not accuracy — it tells you which words people believe are overused, not which specific uses of them were actually wrong. It is self-report data from a general US adult sample, so it cannot tell you whether the person in your life who called something “gaslighting” was mistaken or exactly right; only you and they can work that out, ideally together. And Haslam’s concept creep framework describes a broad cultural pattern, tracked mostly through American and Australian sources. It was never built to diagnose the conversation you had this morning. It cannot do that job, and it was never meant to.

So use this carefully. It is a lens for looking at the language around you with a little more curiosity. Nothing more than that. It is not a checklist for deciding who in your life is using words correctly. If you are worried that a relationship in your life involves narcissistic abuse, coercive control, or genuine trauma, this article is not a substitute for speaking to a GP, a qualified therapist, or in the UK, a service such as your local NHS talking therapies service or, for domestic abuse specifically, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline. The point of precise language was never to make you doubt real harm. It was to help you — and the people trying to support you — tell it apart from everything else.

It was not there, and now, sometimes, it is everywhere. That is the strange arithmetic of concept creep: a real and useful expansion of what you’re allowed to name, stretched, in places, past the point where the word still tells the truth.

The word that actually fits

Next time a word arrives fully formed in your mind — toxic, narcissist, trauma, triggered — try holding it for the length of one breath before you say it aloud. Ask yourself what, specifically, just happened. You may find the truer word is smaller and plainer than the one you first reached for, and considerably easier to build a repair from. You spent years learning this vocabulary because you needed it. It is worth spending a little more care making sure it still means what you need it to mean, for the conversations — and the people — that matter to you most. The right word is usually smaller than you think. It is almost always still there, waiting, once you slow down enough to find it.

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Source: Nick Haslam, “Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,” Psychological Inquiry, 2016 (University of Melbourne); Thriveworks/Researchscape survey of 1,426 US adults, fieldwork September 2024, published 2025.