What Is The 'Card Declines At Therapy' Meme Taking Over Twitter And TikTok?

The idea of companies taking back the services they've already provided customers has long been a joke in pop culture. Take, for example, this riff on it drummed up by SpongeBob.

This is essentially the idea behind When Your Card Declines At Therapy, a popular riff on the concept that's seen a resurgence in memes in recent weeks, as people imagine how a therapist might undo the mental health work done in a therapy session.

Where Does The 'Card Declines At Therapy' Meme Come From?

The joke has been a Twitter meme for years before returning to vogue in 2024. In the summer of 2020, Imagine Your Card Declines became a popular phrasal template, though it was not associated with a specific business. Instead, people thought of clever ways a variety of businesses might revoke the services they had already provided.

During that time period, it seems a popular, now-deleted example read, "imagine yo card declines at therapy so they start a roast session about yo personal problems." Occasionally, tweets like this saw reposts over the following four years before surging in early 2024. In early February, posts imagining therapists re-traumatizing their patients because they couldn't pay for their session started gaining thousands of retweets.

How Has The 'Card Declines At Therapy' Meme Evolved?

Unlike the original "Card Declines At" meme, the current "Therapy" variation has taken on many forms. In addition to traditional, written punchlines, several users have taken the template and added various sad scenes from media.

It even migrated to TikTok, where users have made the unofficial anthem of the template "remember you" by Dominurmom.

The expansion of new mediums suggests the meme is more popular now than in its original iteration, but the increased specificity means there's likely only so many punchlines one can make before the joke becomes stale. Still, the 2024 resurgence of the meme has been a surprising entrant into the current meme landscape, meaning perhaps some older snowclones are ripe for updating with the emergence of video as a viable means to expand on memes.

For the full history of When Your Card Declines At Therapy, be sure to check out Know Your Meme's encyclopedia entry for more information.