People who use therapy language to avoid intimacy aren’t healing. They’ve just found a more sophisticated way to keep everyone at arm’s length while sounding like they’re letting them in.

The most emotionally unavailable person in your life right now probably knows more about attachment theory than your therapist did fifteen years ago. They can name their triggers. They can identify their patterns. They can tell you, with startling precision, why their mother’s emotional volatility shaped their adult difficulty with vulnerability. And none of it is bringing them any closer to you.

This is the quiet trick of our therapeutic moment. We’ve been told for years that the language of self-awareness is the doorway to intimacy...