Talking to the Gods Doesn’t Make You Special: Power, Money, and Ethics in Spirituality and Wellness Professions
While I was finishing up my Master's in Clinical Mental Health Counseling, I was working six days a week between my unpaid internship, the supervision classes for which I paid, and my coffee job. It was during this time that a New Age-y friend of mine asked if I'd go with him to a presentation on healing modalities. Grateful for the opportunity to just spend time with a friend, I agreed.
We went to a small room in which a man gave his presentation with some kind of setup that appeared to be so he could video record the lecture and he could post it online. It was a talk that he, or his group, gave on a monthly basis—a free lecture to introduce people to their healing process.
Over the course of an hour and a half, this man gave us a charismatic argument, including personal testimony, to the core thesis of their work: pain is not an indicator of a real problem in the body, but a relic of unprocessed childhood trauma. Rather than allowing pain to limit our potential, we could process and transform it through their structured process of journaling childhood trauma.
Leaving, I felt electrified by the presentation — it was exciting to imagine a life unconstrained by physical pain, and to imagine psychological healing could affect medical and physical conditions so. Some of the science referenced was valid, I knew, having read Panksepp’s studies showing that twenty minutes per day of journaling about one's feelings has demonstrated results in decreasing the overwhelming intensity of those feelings and increasing personal resilience and wellbeing.
After the high wore down, I also noticed some wariness creep in, and a more sober doubting voice. My own experiences of pain often caused me to avoid physical activity because I feared injury, and it was interesting to imagine I could just ignore it and try the things. Yet that seemed to simplify a complex phenomenon like pain in a way that seemed unlikely. Though pain is influenced by our mood states and the meaning we ascribe to it, it is also a way our bodies communicate to us. I learned this later when I finally could afford physical therapy for some longstanding issues, and learned that pain was an indicator of some underlying imbalances that needed correction. Thank goodness I didn’t just ignore it, or I might’ve really hurt myself.
What’s more, this man’s presentation seemed to go back to Freud for a causal explanation of human suffering. The first five years of your life, and how your parents treat you, essentially sets the blueprints for everything you struggle with later. This jumps over years of psychological research and therapeutic innovation, and ignores everything we know about contributing factors such as experiences of oppression, the structure and function of the brain, diet, and so much more.
Such thinking naturally proceeded to my biggest feeling after the presentation: annoyance. I had spent years of hustling and going into debt to get a degree to become a therapist, which involved writing a shit ton of papers, learning multiple perspectives of understanding human psychology, learning how to read and write research, and hours of self-reflection. By now it was clear to me that no one theory is enough to explain the entirety of human suffering. Each approach is a lens that reveals important truths and insights and obscures others. Yet here was this person presenting a too-good-to-be-true rendition of healing, citing a few books he’d read to market his apparently simplistic but likely helpful healing work.
This story illustrates some phenomena that will not soon be going away, which I will explore in this essay. To speak of broad trends that thread through a number of different wellness and spiritual professionals — coach, healer, counselor, guru, teacher, therapist — I want to offer an artificial duality, two separate circles that intersect and overlap with each other.
In one circle, there are the healers who innovate treatments and make bold and unverifiable statements based on their charisma or some books they've read. These healers who eschew and critique the Western medical system, with some valid critiques, and whose work does bring a measure of relief and freedom to their clients or disciples. They tend to bolster their intuitive insights by peppering in scientific and psychological jargon with a sort of confident knowing — “quantum reality," “shadow," “trauma," — while simultaneously rejecting the mainstream medical establishment and apparatus of accountability and review within the scientific and psychological disciplines. In this category I think not simply of healers but also people who present themselves as coaches, spiritual teachers, and gurus. Let’s call them the mystic healers.
In another circle, there are the healers who have invested into more mainstream, established traditions of healthcare. Folks who have letters beside their names and a vested interest in gatekeeping and protecting the privilege of their position after years of labor and advocacy to get taken seriously by the medical establishment and society at large, to get paid, to be treated as having an expertise of value. Their training is expensive. Their labor is both costly and undervalued, which makes them really cranky when people who have not done the work claim to be able to do what they do. At the furthest edge of the circle would be those who only believe a therapy is valid if it’s been researched and verified as an “evidence-based practice.” Their work is constrained and shaped by rigorous codes of ethics and standards of practice that may feel oppressive at times but also respond to a history of real harms done by therapists to their clients. Let’s call them the mental-health establishment.
In the field where these circles overlap are practitioners, spiritual and scientific, credentialed and self-proclaimed, who engage in ranges of practice from effective to incompetent, ethical to unethical. When making a general statement that applies across these circles, I will use “practitioners.” And when speaking to those who might be called patients, clients, disciples, students—those who desire to receive the work—I will use the term “seeker.”
And also in that space where mysticism and the establishment overlap is me: long-time student and teacher of the Western magical tradition who makes a living as a mental health counselor. A person who saw concerning activities in my religious communities that prompted me to get more training, but also found that many of the skills that made me a good therapist were ones I learned in my much cheaper spiritual training to be a priest.
This essay emerges from listening to Jennings Brown's very intriguing podcast series on spiritual guru Teal Swan, along with reading Hanzi Freinacht's thought-provoking article “The Astrology Precariat, the Yoga Bourgeoisie, and The Integralists: Spirituality as a Class Magnifier." Both pieces of media speak to the desperation that exists for both personal healing and spiritual meaning, and how that desperation with a lack of access to quality and ethical mental healthcare and spiritual work creates a vulnerability to unethical or inept practitioners. To parse out a process for discerning whether a practitioner is ethical or malign, competent or a huckster, we need to detangle some tensions within these circles around issues of marketing, power and authority, psychoanalytic theory, and the problems with catharsis-based healing.
Marketing and Money
Freinacht's article and Brown's podcast both speak to the lack of access to quality spiritual support and mental healthcare available to low-income seekers, and how that vacuum leaves some vulnerable to predatory hucksters who promise much, demand much, but offer little.
Having spent three years in community mental health doing my best for low-income people, and then leaving when I felt I could not do my best work within that system, I am part of the dilemma. While I offer some sliding scale spots, my time is expensive and not always accessible to those without insurance. Working for myself has taught me that I cannot survive if I do not value my labor and ensure I am paid for it. It has also meant learning to market my work.
My opening story included a marketing strategy—the free introductory workshop to promote paid work. This is quite a common one in coaching and wellness circles, one that I've employed to good effect in my own practice. It relies on a tactic of providing just enough value and connection to get people interested, with a promise of bigger results if they invest the money. If that’s unsettling or disturbing to read, I don’t blame you. Marketing has always made me queasy.
The problem is, for a healing process to work, you need an effective practitioner; a seeker who is willing to give the process an earnest effort; and a collaborative relationship between them. That seeker needs to feel a certain connection with the practitioner. When you lay out a process in its entirety and make it available for free and accessible to all, only a small amount of very motivated and self-directed seekers take advantage of it. When you shroud a process in mystery and demand a high level of money or investment to get access, that mystique and elitism gives the process enough appeal to get some folks very interested, but those seekers tend to be the status-seekers who place more value on having access than they do on the work itself.
It’s a big ask to get someone to believe enough in you and the work you offer to be willing to spend money for it. People who don't know you or your reputation tend to be reluctant to commit to an extensive workshop course, or therapeutic relationship, so having a gentle way to introduce them both to you as a person and your approach is useful in establishing the connection that gives folks the confidence to invest in your work. For successful psychotherapy, one of the most significant factors is a strong therapeutic alliance between therapist and client. If you don’t believe that your practitioner is competent and cares about you, no matter how competent they actually are, you may not get as much benefit in your work with them.
So the work of marketing is as much the work of forming connections with people who will benefit from your work as it is the work of getting paid for that labor. That strong personality, that charismatic presence, whatever it is we exude connects with what the seeker is seeking for themselves. For those of us who practice ethically, we remember that a great portion of our interpersonal power and influence in the healing or teaching relationship is given by the seeker to us, loaned to us unconsciously, that we may help them to rediscover it for themselves.
Neither mystic healer nor mental-health establishment has the power to “do” healing or liberation to another person. Rather, the practitioner works with the seeker to create the conditions necessary for their body and soul’s innate healing to do its work efficaciously.
But the work of creating those conditions is labor. It takes physical, mental, emotional, and moral effort to be an effective, disciplined practitioner whether we are mystic healers or mental-health establishment. When our needs are not being met, the temptation is there to use the power and influence we have on loan to get our seekers to meet our needs for us.
The needs of business and money often feel in tension with the values of effective, ethical practice. Human beings do not heal on a schedule that can be formalized, turned into a recipe, and repeated in a cost-efficient way. And, at the same time, the human beings who provide the healing services cannot eat the joy of being of service, cannot house their children under the rooftop of seeker gratitude, cannot feed the hungers of their own need from the hungers and need of their seekers. If the business collapses, or if the practitioner cannot afford food or healthcare, they cannot support their seekers either.
A lot of ethical and passionate providers are out there going broke failing to get attention to their powerful services, or working themselves into resentment and burnout by failing to ask for the money that would make their labor sustainable. And, of course, thanks to the capitalist New Age and self-improvement movements emerging from the Baby Boomer era, there a lot of bullshit artists are out there making shit tons of money and social capital while providing the most lukewarm, jargon-addled bullshit that promise great results and in practice look like multi-level marketing schemes of self-actualization.
These days it feels like all of us doing wellness and spiritual work are hucksters. Especially as we’re trying to get established, we are constantly on the grind to get new clients, build our networks and brands, make sure that we have money to keep the lights on and keep food on the table.
Power and Authority
Issues of money, marketing, and pay in relationship to healing and spiritual work are the earth element that gives foundation for the spiritual healing fires to burn cleanly and strongly. Commerce is the coldness that makes the warmth of the healing relationship possible. Without a clear contract of exchange of values — labor for money or other compensation — a practitioner without ethical boundaries may begin asking for more and more from their charge, and the seeker may not feel free to say no without fear of retribution or losing the relationship that is so important to them.
Most of us who have worked for a small business owner has experienced some variation of this, being asked for work beyond our job responsibilities, or being asked to make personal sacrifices for the good of the business. “We’re so close, we're like family, could you pick up my daughter from school on your way in today?" “I really need help on my website, could you work on it?” These questions may feel innocuous but it's not a power-neutral negotiation. A practitioner has different forms of power, but their influence can still warp the exchange such that a relationship runs the risk of exploitation.
As problematic as the mental health establishment can be, what we do have are ethical codes and bodies of governance to hold providers accountable. We have mandated expectations for ongoing professional development that includes courses in ethics and, in Washington state, evaluating and treating suicidal ideation. Therapists learn early on that we cannot sit with all our clients’ experiences alone without encountering our own biases and blindspots, and we need to continue learning and consulting with each other to check these blindspots throughout our career.
Mystic healers, on the other hand, may adopt a posture of paternalistic knowing and confidence that feels reassuring. In Brown’s podcast I heard Swan talk about her self-awareness of the risk of cult dynamics in her group. She named quite clearly and precisely the ways she had built a community of people who would do anything for her without question. Her conclusion: “That’s what makes me safe.” This particular line was an echo for me, having recently listened to the Conspirituality Podcast’s bonus episode on Mark Walsh, the proprietor of The Embodiment Conference. The podcast cites a post Walsh made on his own Facebook confessing all the violent fantasies he experiences during the day, indicating that his being able to recognize and admit to this makes him “far less dangerous … than every smug pseudo-saint who feigns disgust reading this.”
The echoes of these two statements appear to draw upon the same mystic healer interpretation of Jung’s shadow theory. Mystic healers in general seem to have collectively agreed that all psychological insight peaked with the fathers of the psychoanalytic tradition. (Although they neglect poor Adler, another major psychoanalytic father whose theories of social power make him a worthy companion to social justice discourse.) This interpretation of shadow theory is that being aware of one’s malicious, malevolent, and anti-social qualities makes one safer or less dangerous than those who repress them. Jung himself talked about the need to make the shadow conscious rather than dispel it—it is the consciousness that reduces the control the shadow has over our personality.
So while I do not disagree, I feel wary of how this self-awareness gets deployed as a way of deflecting concerns. “I can’t possibly be running a cult because I’m very clearly aware that what I’m doing looks like a cult.” Becoming aware of shadowed elements of self — work that is never complete — is necessary but not sufficient if one is not held in a community of support and accountability, and receptive to that accountability. Acting a guru-like figure who recognizes no elders or peers and claims to a special spiritual knowing that no one else has or may effectively question, with no code of ethics or accountability process, is quite dangerous.
The most egregious mystic healers become so enamored of their own feelings of certainty and disciple worship that they feel free and empowered to determine what is true for others. Such power is exerted through giving nonconsensual and invasive “readings” of the people around them, while simultaneously rejecting anyone else’s capacity to read them. In truth, there are also unethical mental-health establishment folks who enact the same kind of power onto their clients through interpretations and aggressive reframing of the client’s problems, who approach therapy from a paternalistic posture that disempowers and infantilizes their clients and may stir up more problems than we settle.
This is one of the reasons why it is considered bad clinical practice to diagnose a person you’ve never met. As a therapist, when you only hear your client’s side of the story, our unchecked assumptions and unhealed wounds may lead us to want to say with unearned confidence that we know for a fact their parent has a specific personality disorder. But we cannot know that, especially secondhand. We can only wonder and be curious.
In recent decades the mental health establishment has been moving away from the model of the paternalistic expert toward what is known as the “recovery model.” In this model, wellness is a collaborative process the therapist engages in with the client, working toward the client's goals, not positioning the therapist as unquestionable expert who knows what’s really true.
Something like this model also exists among ethical mystic healers who offer the same humble posture, able to speak fiercely to their own truth while being humble and curious about their students’ truths. Such teachers recognize they are co-walkers on the journey who help their students to engage in practices that help them find their own spiritual capacities. These are practitioners who seek consent before giving psychic readings, who demonstrate humility in their perspective, who cite their sources, who keep counsel with peers to hold them accountable and challenge them, and who receive criticism and pushback from their students with curiosity rather than brittle defensiveness or anger.
In practice, most of us have moments when we’re the experts giving information and moments when we are the co-walkers looking at the questions together. After eight years of practice I feel confident in my ability to speak to the functioning of the nervous system in response to stress and what practices can help decrease stress. I feel confident that I can recognize and point out certain emotional states in my client. What I can never know without learning from my client is the inner reason why those states occur, the story of their lives, the experiences of their childhood.
Whenever you are working with a practitioner who displays only confidence without curiosity, beware. When they only tell you what is true about you without asking you to check it out for yourself, without listening when you disagree, then they have dismissed your own self-authority and self-expertise. How can you trust a person to be accountable to their shadow when they do not accept feedback or accountability? When they claim to have access to information greater than you that you cannot fathom or access?
Such a posture is not one of helping you to step into your own liberation and power. Even the gods, with their vast perspectives, have limits and cannot always know what is good for us in our human bodies. There is no being with whom we are not allowed to disagree.
Never is this more dangerous than when the revered mystic healer and the seeker are stuck in their work together. Ethical practitioners are willing to acknowledge when a student’s problems are beyond the scope of their expertise and need other support. Unethical teachers blame the seeker for failing to receive their teaching and healing, sometimes communicating that there isn’t hope for the seeker at all.
There is little more devastating to a recovery journey than to destroy hope that change is possible, and if you are going to step into the work of caring for someone’s spiritual or emotional growth then you need to be cautious of this when communicating limits and concerns about the work. We can have limits, we can say our work is not the right fit for their needs, we can say we can no longer support the seeker, or they need additional support. To say there is no hope is a curse.
Trauma
The human psyche is remarkably pliant, and the inner world finds a language to communicate with us based on our expectations. If the facilitator of the healing work expects there to be a childhood memory of trauma, the psyche will construct one. Psychospiritual healing work is deeply symbolic and non-rational. These imaginal experiences are as much dream as memory, offering a symbolic representation of an emotional experience that needs to be witnessed so it can be healed and transformed.
Believing that all your problems in life come from specific childhood traumas is a kind of psychoanalytic fundamentalism. Trauma healing does not and should not require the same standards of evidence as a criminal justice investigation. We don't need an image to be concretely related to a specific life event for it to usefully embody an emotional experience that needs processing and releasing.
Jennings Brown does an excellent review of the dangers and controversies around false memories and how concerned therapists participated in creating the Satanic Panic by helping their clients to “discover,” meaning invent, memories of ritual abuse for which there was no evidence. He extends that history to his concerns that Swan’s Completion Process similarly encourages clients to create memories of childhood trauma to explain present-day distress.
In my own healing work, I've had moments where I was able to experience and re-shape painful autobiographical memories into things that were more livable, in ways similar to Swan’s Completion Process. I've had moments where I saw images of my younger self in situations that never happened in real life, but those images elicited real emotional reactions that affected me and needed care.
And I've had some wonderfully mythic, emotionally rich moments that could never have literally occurred. My favorite was an experience in which my imagination showed me a scene of finding a falcon trapped in a tree’s roots. I helped the falcon to get free, and then it got into a fight with the tree. The falcon was angry at being trapped and said so. In response the tree got weepy and sad, saying how it only trapped the falcon because it loved him and wanted him to be safe. The falcon snapped, “Doing it because you loved me doesn’t make it okay.”
In terms of the relational symbolism, everything within that vision was profoundly insightful into a pattern of relationship I’d experienced throughout life. There are a number of people to whom I wished I had said what the falcon was finally able to say. Witnessing this was profoundly liberating. The vision was emotionally true though it was not situated in a biographic moment.
What trauma work has taught us about how the nervous system responds to threats, and how that response over time affects the nervous system, is invaluable. Yet, when you look at research on anxiety, acute shame, and chronic loneliness, you may notice that its symptoms have a lot of overlap with trauma responses.
This is because the nervous system’s vagal system is a threat response system. What we experience as a threat, we treat as a threat. If you own a car and see someone kick it, your body responds as though they were preparing to assault you. Being socially shamed or isolated is another kind of threat to our social selves, and our stress response treats it as such.
Clinically, “trauma” is a very specific kind of stressful event that involves experiencing an existential threat coupled with an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness. As often happens with useful concepts, research and popular awareness have stretched the meaning of the concept in ways both clarifying for some problems — it’s very informative to look at oppression as trauma — and confounding for others, with people having emotional distress and believing they’re supposed to find a biographical childhood abuse event to explain it. What’s more, the posttraumatic symptomology we express may well be something inherited from the trauma of previous generations.
At times I wish we collectively had stayed with the word “stress” to talk about events that cause wear and tear on the nervous system, instead of allowing the mission creep of “trauma” to encompass so many disparate stressors. But that battle is lost.
Catharsis versus Process
Even if all our problems were rooted in trauma we cannot remember, it is worth considering for a moment that there are very good reasons for our forgetting. To survive trauma and develop workable personalities, we develop parts of us that use what skills they have on hand to suppress and mitigate overwhelming emotional pain until we’re in a place where we have enough stability and support to meet and heal it.
The biggest rookie mistake for practitioners is to think that if we go straight to the pain and heal it, everything else will fix itself. We imagine the traumatic pain is like an anchor pinning the seeker to the bottom of the ocean floor. Once we’ve helped them remove it, they will rise naturally to the top, shedding all their other protectors of self-harm, addictions, overwork, and so forth. And if they don’t know they have an anchor, of course it seems helpful to first tell them they do.
Here is another tension between catharsis healing and process healing. Catharsis healing prioritizes ritual, drama, singular events, emotional intensity, and harsh direct feedback with ultimatums. Sometimes it looks like taking psychedelics, or doing grandiose processes, or weekend intensives. All of these are useful but insufficient for sustained long-term transformation, and may be dangerous to someone who does not have a strong support system and safety and stability in life. To disrupt the system and flood a person with buried traumatic feelings, without a strong container and support system to help them process and integrate these feelings and memories, could make things vastly worse. If a person really is holding on to an anchor, taking it away from them without helping them learn how to swim is a cruelty.
A process of recovery is slower, it’s methodical, it’s contained. It is showing up to therapy every week, or doing one’s physical therapy exercises, or going to recovery meetings and following the discipline. It’s doing daily meditations and prayers. These processes are less flashy and dramatic, less satisfying, but more supportive. This long-term work gently restructures the self to be able to process the buried pain, if that’s a goal the client has. Process helps the seeker develop the habits, relationships, and supports in life needed to release suffering and the need for self-protection.
Though I differentiate these approaches, they are better considered allies than enemies. Done well in tandem, catharsis and process greatly enhance each other’s efficacy. Even the hucksters who promise catharsis tend to be hiding the fine print. They say, “Come to this expensive weekend intensive and be transformed forever.” Then the weekend is over, and they say, “Now come to our monthly classes to keep the work going. And then pay for this other expensive weekend to deepen your work.”
Conclusion
Once I wanted to imagine that the mystic healers out there were all bullshit artists, but now I find that to be its own oversimplification. One complexity is, many offer work that is effective and resembles other kinds of therapy considered evidence-based in the mental-health establishment. In some ways, the efficacy makes what bullshit there is more dangerous, when good healing work entices desperate people to become enamored with an unethical practitioner who exploits their seekers to meet their own needs without a transparent agreement and mechanism of accountability.
The other complexity is that all healers and teachers need to engage in figuring out their ethics and needs with regard to marketing and money. When we treat marketing and money as this horrible and disgusting reality, we continue to have our most ethical and excellent practitioners going unnoticed while the hucksters and predators suck up all the attention. And yet what is ethical practice and what makes money are always going to be in a tension with each other, requiring reflection and accountability.
The concerns I trace seem to be most obvious in the figure of the unethical mystic healer huckster, but of course the mental-health establishment is not free of unethical practitioners and predators. It simply has more clearly established gatekeeping and accountability structures, many of which have been rejected by the mystic healers.
If you find you are connecting with someone who looks like a great teacher, coach, healer, or therapist, who is not credentialed or a part of an established community, here are some questions I would want to investigate to help assess the risks in working with them. I would feel quite heartened if the answers were easily accessible, like on the practitioner's website or in documentation provided.
What is the model of care or teaching? As in, if you are to be their client or student, what is expected of you — participating in regular classes, multiple sessions, weekend intensives? How much do these cost and how are you expected to pay? What resources are available to those with decreased means or availability? If you are expected to purchase supplies, materials, or travel tickets, are there low-cost options available? Are they willing to make accommodation and find alternative approaches based on your need, or do they respond to requests for accommodation in ways that appear to make you wrong for needing accommodation?
Who are the teachers of this practitioner? Where did they learn the techniques they use? What relationship do they currently have with these teachers? What is their Code of Ethics that guides their practice? Do they have a community of human peers or elders to whom they can turn for consultation, referral, support, or accountability? Is there a clearly named human being or organization to whom you can speak if you have concerns about the teacher or leader’s conduct?
How does this person respond to disagreement, criticism, challenges, and confrontations from their students, clients, or disciples? Do they demonstrate humility, curiosity, and self-reflection? Do they shame, condemn, or ostracize questioners? Are such questions or challenges simply ignored? If they make truth claims, are they willing to provide evidence to support those claims (research, books, other sources)? Are they willing to admit what they do not know?
Are students, disciples, or clients encouraged to stay connected to their families, partners, and friends outside of the group? Is there a message of separation that exalts the teacher and group as the only source of truth or goodness, and positions the rest of the world as corrupt, wrong, or flawed? Does the teaching or healing work to make your current life better, or is there an expectation at some point that you will need to uproot and radically change your life?
Where are they physically located? Is it onerous and expensive to access them? If they are living in a country or region in which they were not born, do they have a relationship with the land and the people who live in the country? How did they choose this location, and what motivated them to be in a place other than their country of origin? What do they understand of the political and economic realities of their place of location?
Anthony Rella
Anthony Rella is a witch, writer, and psychotherapist living in Seattle, Washington. Anthony is a student and mentor of Morningstar Mystery School and a member of the Fellowship of the Phoenix. Anthony has studied and practiced witchcraft since starting in the Reclaiming tradition in 2005. More on his work is available at his website.