The Rise of Therapy and the Fall of Accountability

Image Credit: Pexels (Alex Green)

Gaslighting. Toxic situations. Boundaries. We have probably heard these words misused and run over.

What started in clinical spaces has spilled into everyday life. Therapy language is now everywhere. It is in TikTok's about ending friendships, tweets about emotional labor and Instagram captions about protecting your peace. But while words like trauma response and self-regulation are thrown around with ease, real emotional accountability is often missing.

And Black Gen Z may know this better than anyone.

“I think a lot of us have tools that we do not know how to use,” said Tina Ashiofu, a provisional psychologist and cofounder of the mental health collective Ilera. “I have a toolbox in my house that has hammers and screwdrivers. I just do not know what to do with them. That is how we are with this language. We know the words. We just do not know how to apply them.”

The mismatch is easy to spot. Someone misses a deadline or forgets a birthday, and instead of apologizing, they say they were dysregulated. A friend gets called out for ghosting and responds by saying they are protecting a boundary. Another argument dies as soon as someone says, “That is your trauma talking, not mine.”

In a moment where social media rewards emotional fluency, therapy speak has become both a trend and armor. It offers a way to sound self-aware while sidestepping the discomfort of growth. Ashiofu described how people use clinical terms as a way to exit conversations early. “It’s almost like an escape,” she said. “If I just tell you, ‘Excuse me, that is toxic behavior,’ then I’m out. I don’t have to tell you what you did was wrong.”

And just like that, the conversation ends.

This dynamic is evident online, where therapy language is often used without context. “They’ll listen to that 30-second clip of somebody saying something they’ve learned over 30 or 40 sessions, and then take that and that’s all they’ve absorbed,” Ashiofu said.

Therapy Language as Currency

On the internet, knowing the right terms has become a kind of emotional currency. Fluency in therapy language signals maturity. It makes people sound like they are doing the work, even when they are not.

“For some, therapy speak becomes a tool to assert social status or maturity,” the Counseling and Wellness Center of Pittsburgh explains. “In certain contexts, especially in dating or on social media, mentioning therapy or self-care can signal emotional intelligence or personal growth.”

But emotional intelligence is not something you post. It is something you practice. And when that practice is missing, the words themselves start to get used as weapons.

“There are a lot of people who have not been to therapy, but they use the language,” Ashiofu said. “They do not understand what it is. They do not truly know what it means. But because they know if they throw in the lingo, it kind of stumps the other person, especially if that person also does not know how to respond.”

Some of the misuse is rooted in misunderstanding. According to Psychology Today, “Thanks to social media, once-obscure psychological terms are now widely used—but often distorted.” In one classroom session quoted by the article’s author, students admitted that using mental health terms casually “makes it sound like it’s not something serious.”

The issue is not just the vocabulary. It’s how we use language to represent ourselves, to navigate relationships, and sometimes, to dodge the mirror. “Therapy speak can be a strategy to elicit sympathy,” Counseling and Wellness notes, “or get more support than they would by simply acknowledging they were stressed or late.”

For Black Gen Zers, who often sit at the intersection of cultural pressure and historical silence around mental health, the stakes are even higher. Many are learning to articulate emotional needs for the first time, while also fighting against performative healing.

Performing Healing While Avoiding Growth

Naa Okailey Okaitey, a Ghana-based psychologist and mental health educator, sees it too.

“Accountability means you are acknowledging the impact of your actions without being defensive or trying to justify that you are not wrong,” she said. “It is owning your actions and the consequences of your actions.”

She has also seen people avoid that ownership by hiding behind trendy terms. “Half of the time, they do not even understand the concept they are using. But because it is trending, it looks fancy. So many people just use these words without knowing what they really mean.”

One of the most misused words, she said, is gaslighting. “It is a psychological manipulation,” she explained. “When someone does something wrong and then wants to deny it or flip the situation back on you. That is gaslighting.”

But now people use the word for anything that feels uncomfortable.

“Sometimes when you are just acknowledging people’s opinions and they do not match yours, they will say, Why are you gaslighting me?” Okaitey said. “We all cannot agree on everything. That is not gaslighting. That is called being an adult.”

Boundaries or Just Avoidance

There is a fine line between setting a boundary and just avoiding someone. On social media, the two often get confused. Ending a conversation or cutting someone off can get dressed up in the language of self-protection.

“Boundaries are clear. Boundaries will give you closure. Boundaries will be communicated,” Okaitey said. “Avoidance is ghosting. It is using silence to disconnect. It will not give you closure.”

Ashiofu explained it this way. “The way I like to teach boundaries is that they are rules you set for yourself. Not what someone else is supposed to follow. If I tell my brother not to speak to me a certain way and he still does, my boundary is that I stop the conversation. That is me enforcing it.”

Emotional Awareness or Just Good Vocabulary

There is a performance that happens when people learn the terms but not the work. It shows up in someone who uses the phrase emotional labor but still avoids every hard conversation. It shows up in someone who says they are doing the healing but will ghost without a word. It shows up in someone who says they are holding space for others but cannot stay in the same room with discomfort.

“It is easier to call something a trauma response than to admit you just did not feel like showing up,” Ashiofu said.

Okaitey pointed to the lack of emotional self-awareness as the core issue. “Start learning about yourself,” she said. “Start having a relationship with yourself. Because until you do, you will keep running from situations and using therapy speak to cover it up.”

And not everything online deserves to be adopted. “Just because something is trending does not mean it applies to you,” she said. “If you need help understanding it, speak to a professional.”

When the Internet Helps and When It Does Not

Still, both experts agree that therapy language can be powerful when it is backed by real growth.

“Social media has done more good than harm,” Ashiofu said. “It has given people words to describe what they are feeling. It has allowed people to have conversations we were not having before.”

But growth does not come from a caption. It comes from what happens after the phone is down.

“Feedback or even criticism is an invitation,” Okaitey said. “It is not an attack on your identity.”

She said many young people treat emotional maturity as a performance. They think it means having everything together. But true maturity, she said, is about honesty and vulnerability.

“You always will not have it figured out,” she said. “Gen Z should start normalizing making mistakes and learning from them.”

She said many clients in their twenties already panic about turning thirty. They feel they are late in life. But that pressure to perform can stop people from growing.

“Making mistakes is not a death sentence,” she said. “It is an opportunity to learn.”

Back to the Work

There is nothing wrong with learning therapy language. It can be powerful. It can open doors. It can name what we were never taught to name. But if we do not back it up with honesty and reflection, it becomes a mask.

But healing does not happen through language alone. It happens in the quiet, frustrating, unpretty work of being wrong and making it right. It happens when you stay in the room.

Calling something a boundary does not make it one. If there is no conversation, no ownership, and no follow-through, it is not a boundary. It is avoidance with better branding.

Naming your patterns is not the same as diagnosing yourself. “Self-diagnosis is like getting to a murder scene and saying someone committed a crime without any investigation,” Ashiofu said. “You don’t skip the steps in between.” Awareness matters. But real healing takes more than posts and vocabulary. It takes process, reflection, and a professional who knows what to ask.

For Black Gen Z, therapy is not content or another social media buzzword. It is a way out of silence. The point is not to sound healed. The point is to become whole. And that means staying when it gets uncomfortable.