DEAR CLEMENTINE: Wellness or cult?

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“Dear Clementine

I’m writing to ask for advice on how to help a friend who has fallen into a rabbit hole with the wellness industry and people claiming to be channels for medical advice. Over the past four years, my friend has become further convinced of the medically unsound things propagated by this community, and it has impacted her life in serious ways - not least of which is following what I consider to be an extreme diet in order to treat a pre existing issue. Whenever I try to speak with her about it, she tells me I don’t understand. I can feel our friendship fracturing almost beyond repair and I’m ashamed to say I’ve withdrawn from her as a result. How can I help her, or is it too late?”

Chapters

• 0:00 Navigating Wellness Industry Cult Mentality
• 9:40 Understanding the Grip of Manipulation
• 18:37 Navigating a Challenging Friendship

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Today's episode of Dear Clementine is brought to you by Home Beauty. Home to the world's greatest primer. Come home to your skin with Home Beauty. Hello, lovers, it's Monday and that means it's time for another episode of Dear Clementine with me, your host, clementine Ford. Dear Clementine is your one-stop shop for the advice you may not want but you absolutely need to listen to. I'm the mother you never had, the sister you always wanted and the auntie who always listens. Today we're talking about cult mentality, what to do when a friend gets swept up in it and how to let things go. I'm recording this on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation and remember, wherever you are, know whose land you're on. Let's get to today's question.

Speaker 1: 0:58

Dear Clementine, I'm writing to ask for advice on how to help a friend who has fallen into a rabbit hole with the wellness industry and people claiming to be channels for medical advice. Over the past four years, my friend has become further convinced of the medically unsound things propagated by this community and it has impacted her life in serious ways, not least of which is following what I consider to be an extreme diet in order to treat a pre-existing issue. Whenever I try to speak with her about it. She tells me I don't understand. I can feel our friendship fracturing almost beyond repair and I'm ashamed to say I've withdrawn from her as a result. How can I help her, or is it too late? Okay, so, just from the outset, I just want to tell people that I had to paraphrase a lot of that and condense it from a really long email where the person who sent it in gave me a lot more email, where the person who sent it in gave me a lot more specific details about what is going on exactly with this case, and it does sound extreme. It also sounds like her friend has become, has fallen prey, basically, to grifters in the spiritual slash wellness industry. She asked me to exclude some of the more identifying details because she's worried about, I suppose, about her friend hearing and feeling identified in some way. So I've done as best as I can to summarize it in a question that kind of hits on all of those points, without giving any identifying details away. Giving any identifying details away. If you haven't heard of medical channeling before though essentially it's someone who claims to have a quote, unquote channel to the spiritual realm, channel to guides, to archangels. There's lots of different ways that people frame this uh a channel to like an external, uh, higher power that passes information through them to other people. Now, this is kind of a tricky question for me to answer because it's sort of I feel implicated in many ways because I am drawn to aspects of the spiritual community.

Speaker 1: 3:08

I'm certainly not drawn to wellness grifters, to anyone who is trying to profiteer no medical training whatsoever, who claims to be able to offer medical advice to people who are vulnerable, who are battling real physical problems sometimes emotional ones too, but really physical ones and who claim to have access to some kind of higher knowledge that you know our medical industries here just can't possibly understand. You know, I lost my mother to cancer when I was 26 and she was 58. And I would have tried anything at the time and in fact I did try a lot of things. You know, you get on the internet and you Google whatever you can and you think you won't do it when you're kind of just in your rational mode. But when you're facing the inevitability of losing someone that you love, trust me, many people will get on the internet and buy a fucking unproven tea from Canada that promises to coagulate the cancerous tumor and, you know, pass it out through the bowel. That sounds insane. Because it is insane, it's crazy. Of course that is rubbish, but of course I was going to try it, because at the time you think, well, there's nothing else, there's nothing else, so why not just try this tea?

Speaker 1: 4:38

My point is that people who operate in this sphere as snake oil salespeople, as charlatans, as grifters who say, well, I can meditate and access higher knowledge from my particular guide who inevitably, because this industry is so filled with white, racist, money-hungry, self-absorbed egomaniacs money-hungry, self-absorbed egomaniacs inevitably really also draws on some pretty troubling stereotypes and often cultural appropriation. Those kinds of people have no shame Well, they have no shame, but they also have no specific shame about exploiting vulnerable, desperate people who are either just looking for an answer to their own impending mortality or to help save a loved one. I think they're truly dangerous and the fact that they seem to be able to operate completely without any kind of regulation is deeply worrying to me. Having said that, the disclaimer here is that I, you know, I read tarot cards, I meditate. I'm definitely drawn to spiritual exploration. I definitely have had some very strange experiences myself. I've had weird experiences, to be honest, that have that are kind of unexplainable in some ways, and I and I have found, you know, that visiting, say, a medium or visiting someone who works with Reiki or does like energy healing, I've had some extremely profound positive experiences with that. So I don't want to sit here and offer judgment and not acknowledge that because people who are followers of mine or fans of mine or who are aware of that side of me it's just, it's going to bring us inauthentic and I don't want to lie to you about it.

Speaker 1: 6:40

Having said that, anyone who presents themselves as some kind of expert or practitioner in the spiritual realm space, who offers medical advice or creates a parasocial bond and relationship with people who are, essentially they're ripping off to believe that, unless they continue to subscribe to a person's views or to subscribe to a person's messages, that somehow they're causing themselves harm, they're potentially undoing all of the positive work we've done up to this point. If, if the cancer comes back, if the Crohn's comes back, if the insert medical malady that we have been quote unquote, treating with meditation comes back, then it must just be your fault for not believing enough, it must be your fault for not following the protocol enough. It is deeply, deeply unethical, it's criminal as far as I'm concerned, and I can appreciate why the person who was asked this question feels so frustrated. Because when you're operating in this space with people who have thrown themselves wholeheartedly into wanting to believe what it is that they're being told, wanting to believe that following a particular diet will fix a physical ailment for which there is no evidence whatsoever that this diet will help, but that somehow has been channeled from an extraterrestrial being, it's, I mean, you're dealing with members of a cult, you're dealing with someone who has been so successfully brainwashed that not only are they clinging onto this unfounded belief, but they're also looking to and fawning over and celebrating the guru, the spiritual guru, who has presented them with this hope. That's really what it comes down to. That's what a lot of these grifters are trading in it's hope. Unfortunately, hope is a very, very persuasive currency and you know when we can apply the sunk cost fallacy to anything that we put our time and energy into. The sunk cost fallacy also applies to hope and faith in. You know, whether it's a spiritual diet, a meditation program, a spend $3.99 to do my course and you'll be a changed person, whatever it might be, if people sink enough time, energy, money and belief, faith and hope into whatever it is that they've bought into, that some spiritual grifter has suckered them into, then it becomes increasingly difficult to extract them.

Speaker 1: 9:40

I think it's really admirable that you want to help your friend and you want to, you know, save her from doing any further harm to herself, physically and medically, because she's clearly completely abandoned any kind of sane you know, evidentiary, supported medical advice that she's been given for this very specific disorder that she has, which is which does require treatment, and she's abandoned all of that because she believes and wants so desperately to believe and she can't be faulted for that, you know. You can't be faulted for wanting so desperately to believe that you can just fix yourself if you try something different, if you have, you know, like I said, if you have that faith. I think that that's what makes these people so insidious and so evil really is, because you can't blame the people who get sucked into it for wanting to believe that there is a way to make what it is that they're going through better, to make it either go away or to heal them, or to to stop the inevitability of what it is that they've been told will happen from happening. So I think it's really admirable that you have you know, you've asked this question that even after a number of years, where it seems very clear that your friend is not willing to begin to unpack the brainwashing that she's been subjected to, that she's really very clearly taken or allowed to take deep hold of her and the anger that she feels towards you for questioning it and for not understanding and for making it much harder for her. Because part of this contract that we kind of make with ourselves when we do, you know, fall prey to these schemes, is to sort of not look behind the curtain, to not point out that the emperor is not wearing any clothes, and we want other people around us to support that viewpoint, because it makes it easier for us to believe that that is true. And if we believe that it's true, if we believe that what we've thrown ourselves into is based in fact and that has been entered into from both sides with pureness and love and the desire to help rather than a one-sided kind of extraction of money, if we can believe that and have everyone around us commit to believing that too, then it maintains the hope, the bubble of hope that we have erected around us to stop us from having to deal with reality. I don't have exactly the same experience as you of someone falling down this particular hole, but I think that there are similarities between this and, say, falling down a Trump hole, falling down any kind of conspiracy theory hole.

Speaker 1: 12:44

You know my father, who I no longer speak to. He has in the last 10 years but really like ferociously in the last five years become a wildly different person from the person I knew growing up. He is extremely anti-LGBTQIA now very transphobic, very like, aggressively violent in his rhetoric about, you know, this sort of grotesque kind of transphobic protection thing that we've got to protect women from the trans scourge. And I can tell you for a fact that while he may have met trans people, he has not been in any kind of situation in his life or environment where he's been quote unquote forced to accommodate trans people. So it's purely an expression of his own privilege and entitlement and policing and maintenance of his own space, his own authority in that space and the authority that cis transphobic men claim to determine who is and isn't the real risk to women.

Speaker 1: 14:01

You know, when feminists like me talk about men's violence against women, I'm ridiculed, I'm mocked, I'm dismissed as being paranoid, insane, man-hating, etc. Etc. The same men who will make those claims about me, will you know they'll go on Sky News for a start. Many of them are commentators on Sky News. But the same men who will make that claim about me somehow are all about women's protection when it means they can exercise their rampant, disgusting transphobia.

Speaker 1: 14:30

Part of why he is like that and it's not the full part I'm not abrogating any responsibility from him it's his choice to do it. It's his choice to maintain those beliefs and to say things that you know. Even the hymn of 15 years ago would, would think if he heard them. If he heard those things coming out of someone else's mouth, he would be horrified. But part of what makes him so enthused about that narrative now is that he almost exclusively watches Sky News. In fact, it's a source of pride at his house that that is the only news network they have on.

Speaker 1: 15:13

And I imagine him and everyone like him who is not at all respected by the Sky executives. They don't care about their audience. They think their audience are idiots and they rely on them being eager, hungry little trash monsters who will just feast on any garbage they can. They rely on that I just imagine them all like lying next to their TV with their ear angled up to it and just a steady stream of sludge pouring into it and then coming out their mouths. That's what it feels like when people are brainwashed to that degree where you're listening to them regurgitate shit that you know you've heard a million times being said by disingenuous, willfully misanthropic, entitled money-hungry fiends who, as I said, treat their audience like absolute buffoons and know that they can tell them anything and they will suck it right up.

Speaker 1: 16:17

It is like dealing with someone in a cult, and there are many reasons why I don't speak to him anymore, but one of the reasons is because you get to the point where you realize there is absolutely nothing I can say or do more than I have already said or done that can dissuade him from eagerly sucking this nonsense up, because he's fundamentally told on a daily basis that he is important, that you, the loyal viewers of sky, he amongst them only they know what's really going on, only they see the reality. They, the little guy who also happens to be the one that should be in power, and these marginalized minority groups are taking it away from you, like all of this fundamentally works on him and people like him, because it reassures them that they are not losing their primacy in the world, the way that they feel that they are, and it's impossible to reason with people when they get to that stage, because they will not ever give up that little kernel of validation where they feel like they're a part of a gleeful little club that truly sees and understands the way that the world is, and they all want to believe that every single one of these Mark Latham type characters that are pouring this garbage into their ears, that they're the same, that he would have them over to his house for a dinner or that they would go I don't know play golf together or something that old white men do, and that they could be friends. That they could be friends and I mean it's very parasocial. I have accepted that he is a lost cause, and the reason I say that and tell that story is because, even though the details differ, you may be at the point where you need to accept that what your friend has decided to continue believing is, at this point, her choice, and it's not a choice that will help her in the long run or even the short run. It's definitely not a choice that she's making wisely and she is definitely from reading your longer email 100% massively being exploited.

Speaker 1: 18:37

But you have laid all of that out to her. You've shared your concerns out to her. You've shared your concerns. You've told her in quite specific detail and with evidentiary backup that what she's being misled in is a kind of a con. It's a con job, and none of that has worked. All it's done, as you said, is worked to drive a wedge further and further between you. It feels to me like the time may have come for you to accept that she is making her own decisions here and she will continue to make her own decisions, and nothing you do or say will change that. All it will do at this point, it seems, is bring more stress and more concern and more guilt into your life, because, no matter what you do, you'll never be able to save her. That doesn't mean that you have to close the door entirely.

Speaker 1: 19:34

I think that it's a similar situation to if a friend is partnered with someone who is either toxic or outright abusive, and it's so hard for people to leave relationships like that. But we keep the door open for them, even if we can't continually show up every day. In some of those relationships when you're trying to help a friend, you can't continue to show up every day because it does get to the point where it's, it begins to compromise your own integrity and your own safety. But you can keep the door open. You can say to her listen, I've made my feelings clear. I understand that you are seeking help and alleviation and liberation from these, from this diagnosis, and I and I truly understand why you want this to be true.

Speaker 1: 20:28

I believe that you're being exploited. I believe that that exploitation is more than just emotional, that it will harm you physically, but at this point there's nothing more I can do or say to convince you. So, unfortunately, I'm going to have to step away from our friendship for a little bit, and I say that with love. I will always be here for you If you ever need me. If you realize one day that what I'm saying to you is true and that it does come from a place of real love and you do need my help and support, I will be there for you, no questions asked. But for now, this is not a situation that I can continue to endorse or support, and I wish you well.

Speaker 1: 21:15

You know it's all very well and good for us to want to save people, to save our friends, to save our family members, to save them from whatever it is that may be really harming them, but we don't have control over everything, and just as we don't have control over a terminal illness, like with my mother, a tea from Canada was not going to save her life, but I tried. I tried my hardest, right to the end, but we just don't have control over everything. In fact, we don't have control over most things. At some point we have to broach acceptance in ourself, and that is true also of friendships where the fracture or the potential end here is not because of external sources, but because of choices that our friends are making, choices that we can't condone, choices that we can't stand by and watch and be continually ignored. When we try and help that, for our own well-being and for our own sense of safety, we do have to take a step back, and that's okay. You don't have to feel guilty for that. You don't have to feel guilty for that. You don't have to feel ashamed.

Speaker 1: 22:26

Friendship has to be a two-way street, not all the time, but it has to be a two-way street in terms of an exchange of ideas. It can't just be one person taking on the burden of another person forever. I think you need to let yourself off the hook here. You need to go easy on yourself, give yourself a break and recognize that this is just a period in your friendship in which an ebb is necessary for you both to salvage whatever may be left of that friendship. If you continue down this path, you'll destroy it completely and, like I said, you may just need to keep that kernel alive so that the door is open if she ever wants to walk through it later on and ask for your help. I hope that's helped. I wish you love and peace and for everyone out there listening, I want you to know that there is never a problem or situation too big or too scary that you have to handle it alone. And if you'd like to send a question to Dear Clementine, you can reach me on untetheredpod at gmailcom. All of these details are in the liner notes. You can also support my podcast on Patreon, which is at Clementine Ford on Patreon or on Substack, which is at Clementine F.

Speaker 1: 23:47

Don't forget to rate and review the show. I love a five-star rating. Tell your friends Mondays is where we gather for love and hugs and a little bit of rejuvenation. I also have episodes on Wednesdays and Fridays. Different vibe on those. Wednesday is a conversation episode and Friday is a rundown of the week's news. So tune in and if you subscribe to the show, you will never miss an episode Until next time. I hope this podcast has found you well. Yours sincerely, clementine. Thank you.