Tea and a Truth Biscuit: Gray Rock Isn’t Healing: Why Therapy-Speak Is Keeping You Stuck

You know I love a good boundary. I also love a clean, honest own-your-sh*t moment. What I don’t love? Watching pop-psych buzzwords get tossed around like glitter to avoid accountability.

Somewhere between TikTok micro-lessons and “my therapist said…” brunch debriefs, we turned therapy-speak into a hall pass for bad behavior, ghosting, and spirituality sidestepping. A lot of it started with good intentions, but it’s getting messy—and women in our community are feeling it. Recent coverage even flags how trends like gray rocking (useful in specific situations) are being oversimplified and misapplied online. The short version: nuance matters and context matters..

Let’s clean it up—with love, truth, and Holistic Scaffolding™.

The Lie: Pop-Psych as a Shield → Stuckness

Words like boundary, gaslighting, and trauma are real and important in the right context. But misusing them to dodge discomfort? That’s not healing—that’s hiding.

• “Boundary” gets used as a velvet rope for avoidance (“I’m protecting my energy” = “I’m avoiding the conversation”).
• “Gaslighting” becomes a catch-all for “they disagreed with me,” which drains the real weight of what actual manipulation looks like.
• “Trauma” has become the catch-all for anything uncomfortable. But here’s the thing: you don’t need a shrink to define trauma for you. YOU get to decide what cut you deep, what scar is still tender, and what you’re ready to face. The real question isn’t what counts as trauma—it’s whether you’re willing to learn from it, process it, and move the f*ck on.

Truth Biscuit: If your “healing” vocabulary keeps you from growth edges and stuck in the same loops, it’s not healing. It’s a f*cking façade.

The Tell: Avoidance Dressed as “Self-Care”

Here’s how you know the language is running you (not serving you):

• You announce boundaries on Instagram but never actually communicate them to the person involved.
• You label uncomfortable feedback as “gaslighting” so you don’t have to self-reflect.
• You go no contact, not because it’s the most ethical choice—but because you don’t want to have a challenging conversation.

The Gray Rock Reframe

The internet makes everything look like a lifestyle trend—case in point: Gray Rock*.

What is Gray Rock? The Gray Rock method is a short-term strategy for dealing with manipulative or difficult people by making yourself as uninteresting and unresponsive as possible—like a gray rock. The goal is to give them nothing to feed on: no drama, no emotion, no reaction.

Here’s the deal: the Gray Rock method is marketed as a survival tool for “unsafe” people—ex-husbands, toxic coworkers, dysfunctional families. But here’s where I’m going to piss some people off: your True Self is never unsafe. Your True Self can’t be manipulated, controlled, or diminished. Ever.

What feels unsafe is your human self—the one still carrying layers of programming, generational trauma, and bullsh*t conditioning. That part of you panics, freezes, and reaches for tactics like Gray Rock. And hey, if you need that tactic in the moment, fine—use it. But don’t mistake it for empowerment. Don’t make it your identity.

👉 The point isn’t to become a rock. The point is to remember you’re already whole. Gray Rock might keep the noise down temporarily, but your evolution comes when you stop outsourcing safety to a tactic and start reclaiming it from your own damn Alignment with your True Self.

The Fix: Awareness → Accepting All of You → Alignment

That’s the Holistic Scaffolding™ path. No shortcuts. No bullsh*t.

1) Awareness

Name what’s actually happening inside you—without the shield.

• What feeling am I trying not to feel?
• What conversation am I afraid to have?
• What would change if I told the microscopic truth?

2) Accepting All of You

Stop cherry-picking your “spiritual” parts. Your neediness, jealousy, control, rage, numbness—bring all of it. Acceptance ≠ approval; it means you stop exiling parts of yourself and start integrating them. That’s how you get your full power back.

3) Alignment

Alignment in Holistic Scaffolding™ = thoughts, words, and actions congruent with your True Self. No more fear-based choices.

Call-Outs You Might Need Today

• “It’s a boundary.” Cool. Did you speak it clearly to the person—and follow it with consistent action? If not, it’s a private preference, not a boundary.
• “That was gaslighting.” Are you describing manipulation…or just your discomfort with being challenged?
• “I’m cutting them off.” For your human’s safety? Or so you don’t have to tolerate the discomfort of adult repair?

Wisdom Nugget

If it keeps you small, it isn’t a boundary—it’s more bullsh*t avoidance.

Wisdom Wand: The Zero F*ck Scale (A Taste)

So how do you know when your therapy-speak is helping…or when it’s just avoidance dressed up as self-care?

That’s where the Zero F*ck Scale comes in. This Wisdom Wand is simple, savage, and ridiculously effective. Instead of hiding behind the word “boundary” or “trauma,” you measure how many f*cks you’re actually giving away—and whether that energy is moving you forward or keeping you stuck.

👉 If you’re pouring out all the f*cks and still looping in the same story, you’ve just diagnosed yourself: it’s not healing, it’s avoidance. The Scale cuts through the noise and shows you exactly where to reclaim your energy.

This tool is too good to shrink into one Truth Biscuit. I wrote a whole blog on it so you can go deep, track your triggers, and actually watch your growth in real time.

➡️ Read the full Zero F*ck Scale TnT here

Why Your Feed Is Drowning in Therapy-Speak

The internet is like gasoline—it doesn’t just spread ideas, it sets them on fire. Effective, great tools like Holistic Scaffolding™ often get lost in the noise, while gimmicks and poor viral advice are often mistaken for gospel. That’s what’s happening with therapy-speak. Words like “boundary,” “gaslighting,” and “trauma” have gone from useful in context to wallpaper you can’t escape.

And Gray Rock? A legit short-term strategy turned into a TikTok lifestyle. Cute for clicks, but can keep you stuck in a bullsh*t repeat cycle if you start living by it.

We don’t need more shortcuts. We don’t need generic hacks. We need context, discernment, and Alignment—the kind that comes when you stop outsourcing your power and actually do the work.

Your Move (Today, not next Monday)

Pick one place you’re hiding behind a word. Run the Zero F*ck Scale on it. Take the smallest aligned action. If it scares you a little and frees you a lot—you’re on the right track.

You don’t need more jargon. You need you—unfiltered, aligned, and willing to do the work.

I love all you people.

Love and ((HUGS)),

Laura Foster

• Read more about “Gray Rock” here:
  https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/grey-rock#definition