546 - Therapy Myths That Hurt Your Relationships (with therapist Joe Nucci)
Welcome, Joe!
We’ve all seen therapy-speak tossed around on the Internet, especially on social media. Today we’re joined by Joe Nucci, licensed psychotherapist, to discuss these myths and the surprising negative effects they can have on your relationships.
Joe is a licensed psychotherapist and content creator. His debut book, published by Harper, is called Psychobabble: Viral Mental Health Myths and the Truths to Set You Free. It's available wherever you get books starting September 23rd, 2025.
During this episode, we bust some myths with Joe and chat with him about the following:
What’s the biggest therapy myth that you fell for yourself?
Was there a particular moment in your career that you started feeling concerned about this phenomenon?
How do you deal with the hate mail from people insisting that you are invalidating their experience by not being on board with things like self-diagnosis?
How does therapeutic language actually get in the way of couple’s communicating better?
How can we tell if it might be helpful or harmful to seek a diagnosis?
Do we run the risk of re-stigmatizing mental health issues?
What’s the line between being understanding of a loved one’s diagnosis while also holding them responsible for their behavior?
Are you a total bummer at parties correcting everyone on their terminology?
Check out Joe’s website and find him on Instagram @joenuccitherapy!
Transcript
If you find any transcription errors, please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking about how therapy myths and therapy speak could not only be making your mental health worse, but also could be getting in the way of having healthy relationships. And we're very excited to be joined by a special guest today, Joe Nucci, Joe Nucci is a licensed psychotherapist and content creator. His debut book is called Psychobabble: Viral Mental Health Myths and the Truths to Set yout Free. It's available wherever you get your books starting September 23rd. Joe, thank you so much for joining us today.
Joe: Hey, thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to talk with you all.
Dedeker: So I want to know first personally, is there a therapy myth that you have fallen for yourself?
Joe: Ooh, what a great question. I think I've fallen for a lot of them at a certain point in time. You know, there's this thing called med school syndrome, where when like people go get their MD, like, like a doctor, not just a therapist, they go to school, they start learning about all these diseases, and they actually, not in a hypochondriac sort of way, like they think they're catching them, but they think they already have these, like, rare diseases, but I've heard it. Yeah. Yeah. But the more experience they get, it kind of starts. Starts leveling out. And I know that when I was in grad school, I was diagnosing myself with all sorts of stuff.
Dedeker: Yeah.
Joe: Like, I am. I've been officially diagnosed with ADHD, so that that is one I can confidently claim. But I know when I was in grad school, I'm learning about bipolar, and there's some overlapping symptoms in those diagnostic clusters. I'm like, well, is it this? Is it this? And I remember a professor just reassuring me that, you know, it's like, the more you learn about this stuff, the more you're gonna get a little bit better at it, a little bit more accurate, and I I think it's a fun note to open on because my approach to my content in my book is, look, mental health just got destigmatized. We're kind of in this interesting moment where it's popularized and there is a lot of harmful misinformation floating around, right? But I think we can also have a little bit of grace and compassion with it because, you know, if you just learned what depression was like a year ago, like maybe you're going to misuse it, et cetera. And so as I think about that, I think in terms of the myths that I talk about in the book, I think that myth number one, everybody needs to go to therapy. I used to certainly sincerely believe that now I kind of take the tune like I write about in the book. I think everyone could hope to benefit from it, but not everybody needs it. I think it's okay to rely on coaches and other types of support. There are other ways to benefit your mental health. That's another chapter. And the truth of the matter is from like a social justice perspective, we don't have enough therapists to treat all of the people who do have diagnosed mental illnesses. So while I think it's a It's something I used to say with a lot of, you know, righteousness and confidence. I'm not totally sure that one holds up to scrutiny.
Dedeker: No, that makes sense.
Jase: Well, a great point on both sides of that.
Emily: Yeah, absolutely.
Dedeker: I'm curious. So you don't need to out your age in the sense of telling us the exact years you were in grad school, but I'm curious about a snapshot of like when you were first learning to become a therapist, what the state of the union was as far as the rise of the Instagram therapist was, like the rise of mental health information crashing into social media.
Joe: Yeah. So my understanding is that self-help and mental health got really big on social media kind of during lockdown, like during COVID-19. So circa 2020. And I was actually finishing grad school at the time. And so I had my head in books. I wasn't really paying attention to self-help memes and stuff like that because, you know, I had an essay to write and I had a clinical caseload and my internship, and I was just busy. And it really wasn't until I started posting content at this point, that was like two, two and a half years ago, that I really started to pay attention to it myself. And so that was kind of my first real introduction to it when I started to look at it more closely. When the rest of the culture, when the rest of the world started paying more attention to it, I was also learning about it, but I was in grad school. I wasn't necessarily, you know, sending reels to my friends and classmates at the time.
Emily: And was there a particular moment in your career when you started feeling a little bit more concerned about this? Psycho babble thing that you're talking about here and people maybe misusing it or people using it in their relationships in a way that is maybe maladaptive to those relationships.
Joe: Yeah, you know, it's something that kind of happened pretty slowly and all at once at the same time. I just feel like over time I started to notice I'd be in a coffee shop or walking by a table at dinner and you would just hear the girl go, well, you know, he's a little bit on the spectrum or, you know, something about gaslighting or something about narcissism or whatever it is. And it just started to happen with more frequency and I just remember being like, oh, well, That's kind of weird, but then it started to happen more like when people would call me to seek psychotherapy, like in the consult call, they would have these buzzwords that were kind of defining the problem that they were coming with. And then I think it was one day a loved one of mine, a girl who was actively dating, really wanted to be in a relationship, met someone that really, really liked her. He sounded great. And she goes, I think he's love bombing me. And I remember being like, what does that mean to you? Like, what do you think that term means? And my understanding of that situation, and they ended up dating, by the way, but it was just kind of like, it sounds like this guy really likes you and he's being super honest and open and vulnerable. And I understand that going fast can be bad, but so can being super avoidant and not putting yourself out there. That can also be bad. I know that you all think a lot about relationships and a belief I've arrived at is that one of the reasons why this kind of language seems to creep into relationship stuff. Like, it creeps into relationship stuff, work stuff, family stuff. Why? Because these are all domains of our life that we just don't have as much control as we'd like. We don't have as much control over ourselves and our feelings and what other people do. And I think psychology and mental health can sometimes be an appeal to Authority, you know, as a way to kind of hold on to that control. And it can certainly be insightful. You know, I'm not saying don't think about psychology. I love psychology. Like, I'll riff about, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll. All day. But I think that, you know, it's, I think people, you know, if your relationship is uncertain or you're on your journey of love or whatever it is, like, of course you're going to gravitate to that influencer or that book that thinks that if you just have this insight, then you'll, you'll know, you'll know.
Jase: Something you didn't and you'll have more control.
Dedeker: Yeah.
Jase: I've been thinking, too, about what you.
Joe: Mentioned about, what did you say it was?
Jase: MD syndrome or something like that for the med school student syndrome. Med school student syndrome.
Joe: Yeah.
Jase: Because I've definitely encountered this with friends of mine who've gone to medical school where they go through that phase of thinking they have all all sorts of genetic disorders or all sorts of different things wrong with them. And I think it's an interesting case where it's not even just that they're getting misinformation, it's just that they're getting information they didn't have. And so they're trying to fit it into their worldview. And some of that includes themselves being like, oh, maybe it's this, maybe I have that, maybe I have this. And I could see that if we're in this time where talking about mental health has been destigmatized, that regardless of whether the information we're getting online is accurate or not, we're like those first-year med school students, just like getting all the info, but we don't have the context yet for understanding it. So we're totally much more likely to self-diagnose.
Joe: I mean, it makes sense to me. I think that the thing that's similar to being an MD or being a practitioner of therapy is these are both crafts, kind of like law or something. It does take knowledge, but then it takes practice with the application. I read a lot of books and learned a lot of terms and frameworks before I sat down in front of my first patient. But sitting down in front of the first patient, it didn't matter that I had read about what countertransference looks like. So for those of you that don't know, that's like the thoughts and feelings I have about my patient. That's like my stuff. I read about that. I read about all the ways to think about it and navigate it. But, you know, it was very different the first time my supervisor pointed out that I was letting it get the better of me.
Dedeker: Right?
Joe: Like that actually took practice applying these things. That's a great point.
Dedeker: Yeah. So I want to start getting into some actual myth busting. The way that you've laid out your book is very simple and very accessible in just like, here's a myth, and here's a myth, and here's a myth, and here's a myth. And so along this vein of living in a time where we're finally destigmatizing mental health as a topic, you place these two myths back to back. There's the myth that receiving a diagnosis is terrible, and there's the myth that your diagnosis is your identity. And I would love for you to share more about both of those.
Joe: Yeah. My understanding of people who come to therapy, as I've experienced them as their clinician, is a lot of times this conversation about diagnosis causes a lot of nervousness. It can provoke a lot of anxiety. And that's because people fear being labeled that they're quote unquote, crazy. But the truth of the matter is that the way diagnosis is used in a psychotherapeutic setting is that it's used to inform a treatment plan. So a lot of people, you know, they don't want this label. They don't want to be told that they're, again, quote unquote, crazy. But what I write about in the book is I say that's actually not the worst thing that can happen to you. I think. I think it's because if you have an accurate diagnosis and the treatment plan works, that that means that therapy works, and that means your well on your way to not needing therapy anymore or going to therapy less and not letting your symptoms bother you as much or whatever it might be. But there, there are cases out there, and maybe even to people who are listening to this, where the diagnosis was wrong. And so the treatment plan didn't work. And so you're spending time and money kind of going down a road that ultimately wasn't helpful, or what's going on is so complex that they can't label, they can't name whatever it is. And so sometimes you'll see people with multiple diagnoses or maybe it's kind of manifesting as one thing, but then it's actually another thing. So, you know, a favorite term on the internet is this idea of complex PTSD or C PTSD. Yeah. And that can look like ADHD or certain other types of stuff. And so getting a diagnosis, again, assuming that it's accurate, I actually think it can be a wonderful thing. And if it's accurate, a lot of people often feel like they have a lot of relief because they can go read about it. They can go follow creators. They can go like learn on their own. Like they're able to name this thing that's been bothering them. You know, once I had somebody coming to see me and they go, my mind just keeps on going to stuff like that might happen and it's always really bad and it won't let me not think about these things. Like what's wrong with me? And I go, are you describing anxiety like this person had never felt it before? Which I thought was so interesting is just someone who's dealt with that himself. And so even just being able to name it, at least for this case, that was just relieving right there.
Dedeker: Yeah, so we did a whole episode about that. I just looked it up, our episode 487, where Jase, you were sharing about how your depression diagnosis was actually the best thing that ever happened to you. And I think that's the thing that we're talking about right now. Yeah.
Jase: And it's interesting too, because I remember the first time I ever went to a therapist was in college. And it wasn't quite sure. And I went in being like, I want a diagnosis. I want to understand what this is so I can do something about it. And my therapist at the time, the one that I had, was very anti giving me a diagnosis, because I think he was more like, I don't want you to focus on just getting this thing and then latching onto that identity, maybe. I don't know what it was, but he was very much like, no, let's just look at what's happening and deal with that rather than trying to give it a label. And then Fast forward many years later, the depression thing didn't come up during that. It was still helpful, but didn't quite get there. And then much more recently, just last year, it started with a new therapist and was explaining to her some of my ruminations and recurring thoughts and things like that that were going on. She's like, well, yeah, it sounds like you have depression. I was like, what?
Joe: Wait, what? What are you talking about?
Jase: That can't be right. No one's told me that before. What do you mean? I don't know about that. No, that's too simple. It can't be that. It doesn't seem to fit what I thought the symptoms were. I kind of pushed back on it a lot, and it took her sort of convincing me. I wouldn't want to say convincing, but, you know, discussing it with me. And then it changed within that one session from some resistance to kind of a holy shit, like, oh, there might actually be something to do about this. And the reason why I say it's the best thing ever is that for me, getting that depression diagnosis makes it so now I experience much less of being a depressed person. Than I did before getting the diagnosis, which I think goes counter to this idea that I get my identity and now that's me. I'm a person with depression. Whereas I almost feel like I'm actually less the person with depression than I was before I knew that I had it because I wasn't getting treatment. But also, yeah, put you on the path of treatment. Exactly. That's what I mean. That's what I mean, that I was.
Joe: Able to actually get effective treatment. Yeah. Well, here's a metaphor I sometimes use with my patients in my practice, often ones who are struggling with depression or something related. I wonder if it resonates with you. Basically I say, cuz oftentimes I think before people have the diagnosis or they've accepted the label when they're kind of in that stage that you were describing, they can often be really hard on themselves for not meeting all their goals or for struggling at work or in their relationships. And the metaphor I'll use is I'll say, if you like were sick with the flu, like if you had a fever, Would you be so hard on yourself that you haven't like mowed your lawn in a few weeks? Like maybe it's actually okay that you don't worry about mowing your lawn and let's actually just like get you in the shower. Like let's actually get you like cleaning up the kitchen and, and exercising again or whatever it is because you, you're sick or you're just coming off of a sickness. You're not at a hundred percent yet. And it's one of the, it's one of the weird paradoxica