At the time, these remarks stung. Now, I find them quietly funny. They have the quality of people scrabbling to regain a sense of safety that relied, rather crucially, on my not noticing things. A sort of emotional scrambling about, accompanied by phrases like “It’s not that deep” or “stop making a fuss”.
Because what actually happened was far less theatrical and far more destabilising. I began to notice patterns — how certain relationships depended on my emotional availability, my silence, my instinct to smooth things over. I began questioning roles I had inherited without ever consciously consenting to them. And the moment I did, the atmosphere shifted. Systems, it turns out, do not enjoy being examined from the inside. They prefer you cheerful, accommodating, and ideally not asking awkward questions.
The response was swift and instructive. Wanting space was reframed as selfishness. Asking for clarity was labelled overthinking. I was accused of navel-gazing by people who had built entire identities around never looking inward at all. You’ve changed, they said — ominously, as though I’d joined a cult rather than acquired a vocabulary. You were easier before. Which, on reflection, was rather the point.
What is often omitted from these conversations is how much effort precedes walking away. I did not arrive there lightly. I tried — repeatedly — to talk things through. I explained how certain dynamics made me feel, asked for different outcomes, hoped for better conclusions. More often than not, these attempts were met with a shrug, a joke, or the suggestion that I was making a mountain out of a molehill. When dialogue is persistently refused, distance stops being dramatic and starts being practical. Sometimes it’s not a flounce; it’s just slipping out quietly before anyone suggests you’re being difficult.
On my way out of certain relationships — without spectacle, without slammed doors — I was told that therapy had made me unhappy. That I had been better before I started asking questions. One person even said, with genuine concern, “I think all this self-work is making you isolated.” As if ignorance were a form of contentment I had foolishly opted out of. As if happiness were synonymous with keeping the peace.
This is where the charge of self-absorption begins to unravel. Because it rarely emerges in a vacuum. It tends to surface precisely when someone stops performing the role they were assigned. When they no longer absorb everyone else’s needs without complaint. When they begin to disrupt the emotional economy of a family, a friendship, a system that depended on things staying exactly as they were.
Understanding the self is not the same as being self-absorbed. If anything, it often produces the opposite effect: clearer boundaries, more honest communication, a greater capacity for meaningful connection. If that reads as selfishness, it may be because it is being judged against an old moral framework — one that equates self-erasure with virtue and calls it maturity.
So yes, perhaps there is such a thing as too much therapy. Anything can become performative when divorced from thought. But what we are witnessing now feels less like excess and more like recalibration. A cultural response to decades of emotional suppression. A refusal — particularly among younger generations and women — to inherit roles that require endless accommodation and very little understanding in return.
And if that unsettles institutions and individuals alike, prompting muttered remarks about all this therapy stuff or people these days, it may say less about therapy culture and far more about the systems it quietly threatens.
