Let’s start with the good. It is a guide on how to do “the work,” and it is in many ways insightful. So much has to be done with regard to developing emotional maturity, putting boundaries in place, moving past trauma, and “reparenting.” The journal prompts are also quite good for better understanding parts of yourself. Holistic psychology is valid, and it’s worth a read to that end.

Unfortunately, the bad significantly outweighs the good. If I can be entirely honest, I think that LePera might be managing a cult. She seems to be an expert at branding to a certain category of people. Now, I don’t think that her fan base is entirely limited to white, middle class people, but rather anyone who drinks the total self-reliance Kool-Aid. Moreover, the “#SelfHealing” and #SelfHealers" branding is profoundly off-putting and participation in her retreats, etc. feel (from what LePera says) to be more like a cult of personality than a serious way to improve mental health.

The deeper problem is that the whole underlying framework is liberal bullshit. LePera, probably unknowingly, reinforces some of the deepest problems in capitalist society through the privatization of mental health. The whole idea of “#SelfHealing” is profoundly individualistic and removes people from the possibility of developing some larger collective organism beyond themselves. People show up as individuals and only as individuals. Yes, there may be gatherings, there may be “interdependence,” and I do admit that codependency and enmeshment are problems, but the idea that healing is wholly about navigating the Self is damaging. That’s not to say that we don’t need to do the work. We do, but we need to do it together in a way that challenges larger limiting, institutional structures. Gender, class, race, sexuality: The way we understand these categories today are fundamentally capitalist, and reinforcing the cult of the individual simply reinforces them.

I know that LePera didn’t write a book to challenge the system, but her refusal to write more than a paragraph about the limitations of her “brand” of holistic psychology and its cult of individualism means that the book will only take you so far.