[Kizzie]

Article about Tony Robbins, the well known motivational speaker who has been accused of being abusive - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/janebradley/tony-robbins-self-help-secrets.

The #MeToo movement has triggered reckonings inside a wide range of professions where men hold sway. Scandal after scandal has engulfed Hollywood giants, politicians, and CEOs, forcing a major change in the politics of sex and power. But the self-help industry, which generates billions of dollars every year, has faced little scrutiny.

Licensed professionals who treat mental health issues must undergo extensive training and follow strict ethical guidelines governing their relations with their clients. Self-help coaching requires no such qualifications or standards. But it creates a potent recipe for the abuse of power, setting its leading lights up as godlike figures with answers to life’s most painful questions, and placing the supplicants who seek their wisdom in their thrall.

[Kizzie]

Keith Ranier, founder of NXIVM which "billed itself as a personal development training organization with a humanitarian mission" - https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/escaping-nxivm.

Daniel Shaw, a New York-based psychoanalyst and psychotherapist who has helped cult survivors and their families for 20 years and has spoken with more than a dozen ex-NXIVM members, compares the recruitment by a charismatic leader to falling in love.

"There are red flags, but you don’t want to see them," he says. "And you learn to sort of put those things somewhere in the back of your mind.

"And the more you want to stay involved … the more you have to disassociate, so the mind becomes very disconnected."

[Kizzie]

I thought of Byron Katie's The Work when I read your post BH, which to my mind is an attractive but twisted way of thinking b/c it provides a false sense of control. It's similar to why/how so many of us come to believe as children that we deserved the abuse/neglect and that if just act differently, figure out how to behave in a certain way we'll get the love, kindness, caring, safety .... we need/want/deserve. If we accept it was not us, that we did not have control over what happened it means the universe is a random, frightening and painful place and that is a difficult reality to face, particularly without having had love, care, belonging, support, safety....