On How to Do the Work

Let’s start with the good. As a guide to doing “the work,” it’s insightful in many ways — there’s a lot here on emotional maturity, on setting boundaries, on moving past trauma, on “reparenting,” and the journal prompts are genuinely good for getting at parts of yourself. Holistic psychology is valid, and for that the book is worth reading.

Unfortunately the bad heavily outweighs the good. If I’m honest, I think LePera might be running a cult. She’s an expert at branding to a particular kind of person — not exclusively white and middle-class, I’d say, but anyone who drinks the total-self-reliance Kool-Aid — and the “#SelfHealing” and “#SelfHealers” branding is deeply off-putting, with the retreats and the rest sounding, from her own descriptions, more like a cult of personality than a serious approach to mental health. The deeper problem is that the whole framework is liberal bullshit. LePera, probably without meaning to, reinforces some of the deepest problems of capitalist society by privatizing mental health. “#SelfHealing” is profoundly individualistic; it cuts people off from any larger collective beyond themselves, so that they show up as individuals and only as individuals. Yes, there are gatherings, and talk of “interdependence,” and I’ll grant that codependency and enmeshment are real problems — but the idea that healing is wholly a matter of navigating the Self is damaging. It isn’t that we don’t need to do the work; we do, but we need to do it together, in ways that challenge the larger institutional structures that limit us. The way we understand gender, class, race, and sexuality today is fundamentally capitalist, and reinforcing the cult of the individual only reinforces them. I know LePera didn’t set out to write a book that challenges the system, but her refusal to spend more than a paragraph on the limits of her own brand, and its cult of the individual, is exactly why the book can only take you so far.