There is a new, special kind of person in this world: the TikTok therapist. They’re the person who, after a 30-second video, has diagnosed their ex, their boss, and their barista with a whole suite of personality disorders. It’s annoying at a distance, but one man on Reddit just found out what it’s like to be held hostage by one in his own kitchen.
Our narrator, a 34-year-old man, was just trying to have a nice weekend. His 24-year-old sister-in-law, “Suzy,” came over for dinner and drinks, fresh off a breakup with her boyfriend of two years. And the “sole purpose of her visit was to vent about him.”
Now, we’ve all been there. We all have to listen to our friends and family rehash the drama. But this wasn’t just “he’s a jerk.” This was a full-on, non-stop, one-woman psycho-analysis. No matter how many times the husband and wife tried to change the subject, she brought it right back to her ex.
The guy, at his limit, just left the room. A perfect, sane, and adult response. But he was betrayed. By his own stomach. His wife got hungry and asked him to start dinner early. So he was dragged back to the kitchen, which has a large island counter, where the two women sat drinking wine. He was now a captive audience.
And every single word out of Suzy’s mouth was a buzzword. “Narcissist.” “Gaslighting.” “Toxic.” “Disregarding boundaries.” It was a non-stop stream of “psycho-babble.” This man, who was just trying to cook, was being subjected to a live-action, unsolicited podcast.
He tried, folks. He really did. He tried to change the topic. He tried turning on music to drown her out. She just talked over it. He finally, gently, suggested they might be “more comfortable on the couch,” a beautiful, polite way of saying “please get the f*ck out of my kitchen.” But Suzy insisted she wanted to “watch me cook,” which was a baldfaced lie, as she was only paying attention to her wine and her own voice.
Then, she made her fatal mistake. She tried to drag him in. She described something her ex did and asked him, “if it sounded like something a narcissist would do.” He, a smart man, said, “I wouldn’t know, I’m not a psychologist.” She insisted. He deflected. She insisted a third time.
She poked the bear. And the bear… oh, the bear was done. He snapped. He turned to her and delivered a line of such brutal, fiery honesty it belongs in the hall of fame.
He asked her, in a “very sharp tone”: “Do you have a degree in psychology, Suzy? Are you a therapist? Or are you just regurgitating terms you heard on Tik Tok? Just call your ex a fu#$ing a**hole and move on or get out of my kitchen, my God.”
I am giving this a standing ovation. This is the comeback we all dream of having.
Predictably, his wife “scolded” him. Suzy called him an a**hole and stormed out. He got the whole “she’s going through a breakup, you have to be nice” speech. And this is where the story would normally end, with him as the bad guy.
But then… the edit. The glorious, beautiful, vindicating edit. The wife and husband had another talk. It turns out Suzy, in her “breakdown,” revealed a few new, tiny, insignificant details. Like the fact that her ex broke up with her after he found her “Finsta” (a fake, secret Instagram) and read the “messages she was getting and sending from other guys.”
She wasn’t a victim of “gaslighting.” She was cheating. Or at least, being wildly inappropriate. She wasn’t just “venting”; she was lying by omission. She was building a false narrative, co-opting the language of real trauma to paint herself as the innocent party, when she was the one blowing up her own life!
The wife, to her eternal credit, “laid into Suzy pretty hard” for lying to them. And then… she apologized to her husband.
So, is he the a**hole? No. He is a hero. His BS-detector was just so finely tuned that he smelled the bullsh!t before he even knew what kind of bullsh!t it was. He wasn’t just “snapping”; he was the only one in the room allergic to lies.