Maybe the People Who Cuss Aren’t the Problem

I’ve been cussing more lately. Maybe I have more to cuss about. Maybe I’m tired. Maybe it’s menopause and I’m just becoming a grumpy old woman. Whatever the reason, I fucking love a good cuss word, and sometimes you just need to let one rip.

I’ve also felt judged for it, so when I ran across someone on TikTok claiming that people who swear are more authentic, I did what I usually do and went looking for the actual research.

It turns out the relationship between profanity and authenticity is more interesting than I expected.

I no longer apologize for the way I talk. People generally know how I feel and where I stand, and I think that’s kind—they get to decide whether they’re okay with it. I call that informed consent.

Also: bah humbug.

How I Found My Way Back to Cussing

I wasn’t always this comfortable with it, especially after I became a mother.

When I had children, I wanted to be the perfect mom. I watched what I said around them. We even had a swear jar. Before either of my kids turned ten, they heard me completely lose it and cuss exactly once: when my car got towed in San Antonio.

In my defense, getting your car towed in San Antonio will bring out parts of you that even Carl Jung couldn’t explain.

My youngest defied that swear jar every step of the way. He’s also one of the most unintentionally honest people I know, and it gets him in trouble constantly. Sometimes he doesn’t understand why. Sometimes I think he understands perfectly well and just doesn’t want to play along.

Maybe that’s the autism. Maybe that’s just him. Probably both.

Either way, he’s the one who brought me back to my roots.

He was ten when the pandemic hit. I was homeschooling a kid with special needs during a worldwide crisis, staring at a computer screen and wanting to tear my hair out. One day, he started cussing at the computer.

So I did too.

I haven’t really stopped since.

Now we cuss with each other, and honestly, it’s become a love language—not language meant to wound, but the kind that lets something raw escape before it turns into something sharper.

There’s a real release in a well-placed curse word. It can be a way to express frustration, absurdity, or affection without pretending everything is fine and without actually trying to hurt each other.

I’ve heard plenty of pretty words dressed up as kindness that were far crueler than any cuss word ever was. Cruelty doesn’t become kindness just because it’s delivered calmly, and love doesn’t stop being love because it shows up wearing profanity.

When I say “kiss my ass,” I mean it with love.

He calls me a monster. I tell him, “Thank you. I try very hard to live up to my dreams.”

Some families say, “I love you to the moon and back.”

Apparently, we have our own dialect.

What the Research Actually Says About Profanity and Honesty

A 2017 study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science had the rather spectacular title “Frankly, We Do Give a Damn: The Relationship Between Profanity and Honesty.”

Across three studies, the researchers found that people who swore more also tended to be more honest.

One study compared 276 participants’ self-reported profanity use against a measure of socially desirable responding and dishonesty. Another looked at the language of nearly 74,000 Facebook users and found that heavier swearers also showed linguistic patterns previously linked to honesty rather than deception. A third looked at the same relationship at the state level and found it held up there too.

Before anyone starts cursing at strangers as proof of their moral character, that’s not what this proves.

Correlation isn’t causation. Swearing doesn’t make someone honest. Liars swear. Assholes swear. Manipulative people can swear beautifully. Plenty of people who never curse are extraordinarily genuine.

But the researchers proposed that profanity may sometimes represent less-filtered expression.

We Learn Very Early Which Parts of Us Are Acceptable

Most of us weren’t just taught language. We were taught presentation.

Don’t say that. Don’t sound angry. Be polite. Calm down. Watch your tone.

Some of those rules are genuinely necessary. Living among other humans requires restraint and consideration, and I’m not suggesting that every thought deserves to come flying out of your mouth just because it’s true.

But somewhere along the way, a lot of us stopped being able to tell the difference between regulation and suppression.

Regulation says: I know what I’m feeling, and I’m choosing how to express it.

Suppression says: I’m not supposed to feel this.

Those are not the same thing.

A perfectly placed curse word can be remarkably honest. “I am frustrated” and “I am so fucking frustrated” technically communicate similar information, but experientially, they’re not even close.

One reports the emotion. The other actually lets you feel the size of it.

Profanity Can Carry Emotional Information

Words aren’t just definitions. They carry intensity, history, culture, relationships, and rhythm.

That’s why “that hurt” and “that fucking hurt” don’t always mean quite the same thing. The second one might be carrying grief, disbelief, betrayal, or the exact moment someone finally stops minimizing what happened to them.

As an Austin therapist, that’s what interests me about this—not because swearing is inherently therapeutic, but because congruence can be.

There’s something powerful about the moment a person’s outside language finally matches what’s actually happening inside them.

Sometimes that comes out beautifully. Sometimes it’s eloquent. Sometimes it’s quiet.

And sometimes it’s simply: What happened to me was really fucking wrong.

For someone who has spent years softening everything—making pain more palatable, turning anger into understanding, and translating violations into explanations—that sentence can be more than profanity.

It can be the end of self-abandonment.

Swearing Doesn’t Mean You Have a Bad Vocabulary

Here’s another stereotype worth killing: the idea that swearing reflects a limited vocabulary, as if knowing more words would eliminate the need for those ones.

Research by psychologists Kristin Jay and Timothy Jay found evidence against that assumption. People who could generate more taboo words also tended to demonstrate greater verbal fluency overall.

Knowing a spectacular number of ways to swear doesn’t mean you don’t know other words. You might just have a particularly colorful section of the dictionary available to you.

Profanity can absolutely be lazy. So can almost any language.

But sometimes “fuck” isn’t a failure to find a more precise word.

Sometimes it is the precise word.

What Does This Have to Do With Shadow Work?

Probably more than you’d think.

Carl Jung used the term shadow for the parts of us that never became incorporated into our conscious identity. We tend to picture the shadow as the dark stuff—aggression, envy, rage, sexuality—but it isn’t necessarily bad.

It’s often just whatever we learned we weren’t allowed to be.

If your identity became the nice one, anger might end up in your shadow.

If you had to be the responsible one, neediness might go there.

If belonging required obedience, defiance might go there.

If you learned that being loved meant being pleasant, agreeable, composed, quiet, or “good,” an enormous amount of ordinary humanity may have gotten shoved underground. Often, the language goes with it.

“I’m disappointed” is acceptable.

“This is fucking bullshit” might not be.

“I’d prefer you didn’t do that” is acceptable.

“Don’t fucking treat me like that” might feel dangerous.

That doesn’t mean the second version is always the wisest thing to say. It means that somewhere along the way, you may have learned you weren’t even supposed to be the kind of person who could think it.

Shadow work was never about becoming more aggressive, vulgar, or rebellious. It’s about becoming capable of recognizing that those parts exist in you too.

You can feel rage without becoming abusive. You can want attention without being narcissistic. You can feel desire without shame. You can hate someone for five minutes without being a hateful person. You can think fuck you and still choose to behave according to your values.

Knowing what’s actually happening inside you gives you more choice, not less.

You can’t consciously regulate something you refuse to admit exists.

The Polite Self Has a Shadow

This is especially relevant for people who built their identities around being good—the good daughter, the good mother, the good Christian, the good therapist, the good employee.

There’s enormous psychological safety in goodness.

If I’m kind enough, useful enough, accommodating enough, and forgiving enough, maybe nobody will reject me.

So we build an identity around the acceptable parts of ourselves and quietly exile everything that threatens it.

Anger becomes “frustration.” Rage becomes “disappointment.” Desire becomes “I don’t know.”

A boundary becomes a lengthy explanation.

“No” turns into a 700-word apology.

Eventually, we get so reasonable that we can’t even hear ourselves anymore.

That’s not authenticity. That’s editing.

When Polish Hides the Shadow

Some people are deeply invested in appearing polished, appropriate, and reasonable. They know exactly the right language, the right tone, and the right presentation.

Plenty of them are genuinely kind—but sometimes the presentation protects them from ever having to look underneath it.

That’s the difference between polish and shadow.

We reject the crude word while quietly keeping the contempt behind it. We reject the angry outburst while keeping the superiority intact. We reject what looks ugly while staying remarkably uninterested in the ugliness we might actually be enacting ourselves.

Shadow work isn’t about whether you say a curse word. It’s about whether you can look at the parts of yourself that don’t fit the person you believe you are.

Can you recognize your own selfishness, superiority, pettiness, jealousy, or cruelty? Or does maintaining your identity as a good person require those qualities to always belong to somebody else?

That’s the danger of confusing polish with goodness.

You can have impeccable manners and terrible self-awareness. You can use all the correct words and still never take responsibility for anything. You can speak softly and still be cruel.

And yes, you can swear every third sentence while being genuinely willing to look at your own shit.

Profanity isn’t authenticity. Politeness isn’t inauthenticity.

The real question is much more uncomfortable than either one:

How much of yourself are you actually willing to see?

Sometimes the Shadow Swears

Profanity can be performative too.

You can swear to intimidate. You can swear to shock. You can build an entire identity around being “unfiltered,” and that identity can end up just as curated as being impeccably polite ever was.

But sometimes profanity shows up when the filter drops just enough for something real to slip through:

Maybe the important part was never the profanity.

Maybe it’s the I.

For people who learned to organize themselves entirely around other people’s feelings, needs, and approval, the word I can be far more transgressive than the word fuck.

Authenticity Is Not an Excuse to Be an Asshole

None of this means shadow work gives us permission to say every cruel thing that crosses our minds.

Authenticity doesn’t absolve us of responsibility. “I’m just being honest” has justified an extraordinary amount of unnecessary harm over the years.

Integration means letting all of yourself into awareness while still choosing how you behave.

The part of you thinking "fuck you" gets a seat at the table. It just doesn’t automatically get the microphone all the time.

That’s the difference between self-expression and self-awareness. It’s also the difference between letting a feeling be true and letting it become an excuse.

Maybe the People Who Cuss Aren’t the Problem

We often confuse polished behavior with good character. We confuse being agreeable with being kind, composure with maturity, and silence with self-control.

But people can be impeccably polite and still behave dishonestly. They can use therapeutic language while dodging every bit of accountability. They can say all the right things and still leave you doubting your own reality.

Meanwhile, the person saying, “This is fucking bullshit,” might be the only one in the room willing to name what everyone else is pretending not to see.

Again, swearing doesn’t make someone honest, and not swearing doesn’t make someone repressed. The research isn’t a personality test based on how often someone says “shit.”

What it does is give us a reason to question some of our assumptions about language, goodness, and authenticity.

Maybe a curse word occasionally tells us that someone has stopped prioritizing presentation over truth. Maybe it gives an exiled part of the self a voice.

Or maybe it just feels fucking good to say.

I don’t need everyone to like the way I talk, and I don’t need to swear in every room, with every person, in every circumstance. Context still matters.

But I’m no longer interested in treating my own voice like something I have to keep sanitizing in order to be considered good. I feel better, being a whole human being with both the polite and loving part of me and the messy angry me too. 

People are allowed to hear me clearly and decide whether I’m their cup of tea. You're allowed to be heard too. That’s not rejection prevention or perfect presentation.

That’s informed consent.

Maybe it’s knowing what’s true inside you, consciously choosing what to do with it, and finally letting go of the idea that the polished version of you was ever the whole story.