In recent years, we’ve noticed an influx of users on social media showing themselves prioritizing their self-care practices and using “therapy speak” to highlight their healing and emotional growth, but is it performative? Are we healing through self-care or avoiding deeper emotional issues by performing holistic health online? One woman has the answer to that question. RaQuel Hopkins is the founder of the Success is Complicated lifestyle brand. She is an HR professional, licensed mental health expert, published author, life coach, and holds a Bachelor of Science in Business, an MBA in International Business, and a Master’s in Clinical and Mental Health Counseling, and happens to be a viral sensation known as The Capacity Expert on Instagram.
Her work (and popular viral videos) is focused on transcending traditional coping mechanisms to promote genuine thriving and capacity building in individuals and organizations. She urges us to think beyond therapy and speak to get to the root of the emotional healing necessary. Although her opinions about mental health and a no-nonsense approach to wellness may be controversial, they have resonated with thousands, including notable celebrities and tastemakers like Charlamagne tha God, Laverne Cox, and Erica Campbell. In just one week, she skyrocketed from 3,000 to over 300,000 followers—because she’s saying that mental health isn’t just about feeling good, which most therapists won’t, and what everyday people might need to hear.
She also decodes the illusion of healing through leveraging terminology specific to therapy with words like boundaries, capacity, and gaslighting —it’s about doing the work instead to understand why you may not have the emotional capacity or bandwidth to deal with a specific situation, person, or place, instead of simply saying it and closing yourself off from that clarity, or working through why you may need boundaries to protect yourself.
With her teachings, she advocates for us to be emotionally resilient, not use self-care as an emotional crutch, and dismantle “toxic therapy culture” so we can heal genuinely from the inside out. We spoke to her about what she perceives authentic “self-care” to be, how to regulate yourself emotionally, and when you should exit therapy.
ESSENCE: How do you describe self-care?
RaQuel Hopkins: Self-care, in its purest form, is not about doing less but doing more. It’s the outcome of being more grounded. Self-care should reflect your alignment, mental clarity, and ability to stay present, even when life isn’t perfect. It’s less of a tool and more about how you choose to show up in the world.
With your content online, you’ve alluded to there being a toxic culture surrounding therapy. Can you expound upon that?
So, not so much that therapy is toxic. It’s more about how we’re using things that are supposed to be tools to facilitate growth from a mental health standpoint. Our society tends to destigmatize shameful things, and guilt is created around mental health. There should be no shame around having mental health.
Boundaries are not something that we’re taught as therapists. They’re a tool that we offer people depending on their level of growth. However, boundaries cannot be a substitute for self-trust. You have to trust yourself in terms of what you want and need. I believe in therapy. It can be beneficial. Not everybody needs treatment, but anybody could benefit from it.
We know that you believe in therapy, but some of the content that you’ve said in your videos highlights how “therapy speak” can turn into toxicity. What do you mean by that?
So, we should start with language first. Research tells us that language shapes our perception and affects how resilient we become. Our goal in therapy is not necessarily to create a “safe space.” It is to build rapport with our clients. Not so that you feel comfortable. When we talk about self-care, it is not to make people feel better. The goal is to support people in becoming better. When you come to a mental health professional, the understanding, or at least the understanding for me, is that my client is coming to me because they are struggling with something right now and transitioning.
Your approach is real talk when it comes to mental health and therapy. Given what you mentioned about language, do you think sometimes mental health professionals use too soft language or coddle the client, which doesn’t get to the root of the healing?
Yeah, we’re creating a lot of emotionally fragile people. And when I say emotionally fragile people, I mean some people are ending up in a society and not knowing how to navigate change, discomfort, and conflict, and the foundational skills are missing. Even the way that we talk about healing, for example, right? Some people are not coming into therapy to heal; what people are usually coming into treatment for is that they want to learn to navigate life with a sense of confidence and grace, no matter what life throws at them. I want to feel like I can pick myself up and continue to move forward.
My goal is to bring us back to the center so that we can continue to be more resilient people. When I talk about capacity, for example, when people say that they lack the capacity, we see that we’re cognitively not flexible and have not developed. That’s really what it means. There’s no other way to sugarcoat it.
I think it’s interesting because sometimes we can use therapy as a practice, but also the terminology surrounding it as a cop-out. We also tend to weaponize those specific terms we learned in therapy against those we’re in relationships with.
Sometimes you don’t want to do what you claim you don’t have the capacity for, which is fine, but just say that. And sometimes it is that you don’t have the capacity. When you become a mom, you must create new skills. You become a wife, you’re going to have to develop a new set of skills. I even have to make capacity since it’s going viral. There are days when I genuinely feel like I don’t have the capacity. But it’s one thing to be a therapist, a coach, an HR professional, and a professional content creator, and it’s another thing to cross over into this viral space. I must develop the capacity to continue to show up as I do, especially with some things I say.
It’s normal not to have the capacity. It’s how you say, “I don’t have the capacity.” Ask yourself, “Am I acknowledging that I can’t open myself up and continue to grow and evolve?” Because change affects our mental health.
Thank you for that. This is an excellent segue into self-care. As I mentioned before, self-care for many people includes their therapy practice, the different core tenets of healing they learn in therapy, and their hope to apply those to other self-care practices. So, with that said, why do you believe that self-care has morphed into avoidance?
It’s because we’ve made our various moods and feeling better; the focus, and not the actual mindset, that carries you through life. No matter how beautiful it is, it can never replace real reflection, adaptability, or growth, just like therapy. I’m not a fan of attending therapy for years, because that’s not the goal. The goal for a therapist is to get you to a point where you can live autonomously and independently, and try to learn to trust yourself.
Now, there are nuances, depending on what a person may be dealing with. If we’re talking about mental illness or medication, that’s a separate thing. However, therapy, like self-care, is a tool, and whenever the tool no longer serves its original purpose, it’s no longer a tool because it leads to a lot of avoiding. I always tell people that therapy is not the gym for your mind. Life itself is the gym for your mind.
What do you think are some tenets of real and not performative self-care?
Self-care takes discipline. Self-care is the work that no one sees honestly.
It’s exercising, consistently moving your body, and actively communicating. If you need someone to talk to, reach out. It’s doing those things. You do not necessarily have to share your entire healing journey process online. We have gotten into this habit of constantly sharing online about attending therapy, and it’s become like a badge of honor—the more we focus on doing, the less we end up becoming.
Self-care should be your lifestyle.