The Language of Healing
Someone slid into my DMs recently. Her friend had joined a women's circle and then, slowly, the language changed. She didn't say, “my friend is different now.” She said the way her friend speaks now feels cultish. Which, linguistically speaking, is an incredibly interesting choice of words.
She also told me she thought she was going crazy because she could no longer understand what was being said. Conversations started sounding like they contained an invisible layer of meaning she no longer had access to. Until she read my posts. And suddenly, the fog lifted.
That is already part of the phenomenon. Because what changes in many New Age spaces is not just belief. It's vocabulary. And vocabulary is never neutral. It decides who sounds evolved, who sounds unsafe, who sounds healed, who sounds “triggered,” and who still tragically communicates in direct sentences.
This is usually the point where New Age folks get defensive. And when I posted about this, some did indeed get defensive. Which is not a problem for me because the conversations that make New Agers defensive are almost always the most interesting ones. Partly because they reveal where language stops being expression and starts becoming social regulation. And partly because I enjoy observing what happens when someone asks a perfectly reasonable question in a room full of people who refer to disagreement as energetic failure.
The two most common responses were predictable. The first: it's not cultish just because people don't understand it. The second: when people genuinely grow, their vocabulary naturally changes — so what's the problem?
Both are worth taking seriously. And both miss the point.
People who grow often change how they speak. That's true of anyone who reads more, travels, falls in love, loses someone, changes careers. Language expands with experience and that's beautiful. But there's a difference between vocabulary that expands your ability to describe experience and vocabulary that replaces ordinary speech with approved terminology. Growth language tends to make you more legible to the people around you, even if some words are new. Capture language makes you legible mainly to the people already inside the room.
And the “they just don't understand it” defence is even more telling. Because incomprehensibility, in these spaces, is often worn as a marker of depth. If you don't understand, that's your limitation. Your unprocessed edges. Your resistance to growth. Your unhealed inner child. Your low vibration. The possibility that the language itself might be doing something other than communicating — that it might be performing wisdom rather than producing understanding — rarely gets to land. Because the framework already interprets your confusion for you.
What's often happening in New Age spaces is linguistic capture. A slow replacement of ordinary speech with language that sounds more conscious. Emphasis on sounds. And then reality starts reorganising around that sound.
Language also determines what counts as experience in the first place. What sounds wise. What sounds unsafe. What sounds healed. And who suddenly has “more work to do.” Spiritualised language doesn't just create belonging inside a group. It can create disorientation outside of it too.
I know exactly what the woman in my DMs meant when she said her friend's language felt cultish. Partly because I grew up in what could reasonably be described as a soft cult environment — where vocabulary was also part of the structure. But also because I spent more than a decade inside New Age wellness spaces as a yoga teacher. Long enough to recognise the pattern when the language starts closing in on itself.
Every community develops shorthand eventually. That part is normal. But something shifts when the vocabulary stops being descriptive and starts becoming moral. When certain phrases begin replacing ordinary human reactions rather than helping us describe them more clearly. When the wording becomes predictable before the thought has even fully formed. When everyone starts sounding like the same sentence generator.
It doesn't have to look like the obvious cinematic version of cultism where people wear robes, isolate from society, or follow a single authoritarian leader with suspicious eye contact, bank accounts in the Cayman Islands and a podcast microphone.
More often it looks like repetition replacing reflection, vocabulary becoming identity, questioning reframed as “resistance to growth,” or disagreement translated into emotional or energetic deficiency. In other words: language stops being a tool for thinking and starts becoming a filter for belonging.
The woman in my DM said her friend now says “Can you make space for me” instead of "Are you free today?" "Can you make space for me" is not the problem. It's a fine sentence. It sounds heartfelt, emotional, slightly ceremonial, and still human. It can even communicate care. But the shift is what it replaces. Because now the language is doing something other than communicating.
Let's look at it for a second, just for fun.
“Are you free?” used to be enough to coordinate two nervous systems in time and space. Now the same request carries a different weight. Availability becomes energetic, capacity becomes emotional, and refusal becomes interpretive. “I can't make space right now” – the reasonable answer – starts to sound like a spiritual deficit. “I'm busy” starts to sound almost… pre-evolved. The person cancelling (because we all need to cancel sometimes) is suddenly left with something larger than simply having cancelled. They are left with an energetic label.
This is not an accident. It's atmosphere created by language. And atmosphere is how control works when it doesn't want to look like control. New Age wellness spaces are very good at atmosphere. Soft voices. Warm lighting. Words like “held,” “safe,” “supported.” Everything gently dissolving conflict before it can fully articulate itself.
New Age wellness feels open.Which is exactly why it becomes difficult to notice when it turns closed.
You are not overworked. You are dysregulated.
You are not structurally unsupported. You are out of alignment.
You are not angry because something unjust is happening. You are unprocessed.
It sounds gentle and translates structural realities into personal ones. A removal of friction.
The woman’s friend from the DM is probably not inside anything extreme. That's the misunderstanding people often reach for when they hear this critique. She is inside something more ordinary: a shared grammar that slowly starts to feel like reality itself. Which is usually where questioning becomes difficult. Because questioning the grammar starts to feel like questioning yourself.
There is a reason certain phrases become socially sensitive to interrupt. Try asking “what do you mean by holding space?” in the wrong room and watch how quickly the temperature shifts. It's not an aggressive question. But it interrupts coherence. And coherence, once established, starts behaving like something that needs protection. “You're triggered” is one of those protective moves. It shifts the conversation from content to condition. From what is being said to what is supposedly happening inside the person saying it. Efficient. And it ends the sentence without answering it. Which is often the point.
The more uncomfortable question is not whether spiritual language is good or bad or evolved or not. That framing is too clean. The question is what kind of reality it produces once it becomes default. What becomes harder to say. What becomes easier to dismiss. What stops being structurally visible because it has already been translated into something internal.
Find the questions that carry social penalty in any community and you've found the power structure. In wellness spaces those questions tend to be:
Who built this framework, and who profits from it?
Whose ancestral knowledge was this before it became a course?
What does “we are all one” mean to someone whose body is still treated as a target?
Why does “holding space” so often require the person with less structural power to absorb the discomfort of the person with more?
When a phrase cannot be questioned without someone diagnosing your vibration, it is no longer a tool. It's a gate.
So back to the DM.
We don't need to rescue anyone from vocabulary. We also don't need to pretend vocabulary is harmless. We stay with something more inconvenient: she is speaking a language that creates belonging in one context anddistancein another. That is not an individual failure. It is how groups form.
And the real tell is not the vocabulary itself. It's what happens when you don't use it. What you risk being read as. Unaware? Unhealed? Not that evolved? Not doing the work Or the most flexible diagnosis of all: not aligned.
With all these questions I believe that’s the real shift underneath all of this: that power learns to speak in the language of healing. And once it does, it becomes very hard to name. Because the moment you name it, you become the problem.
Energetically speaking.
Many of us know how quickly in New Age spaces disagreement becomes misalignment, discomfort becomes dysregulation, and structural critique becomes evidence of personal woundedness. In New Age control no longer sounds authoritarian. It sounds compassionate. It sounds like someone who just wants you to do the work.
Which is much harder to interrupt when control has learned to sound compassionate.
