The Cult of Personality and Toxic Positivity

Part 1-The Beginning

In September of 2019, I came across an ad on Facebook inviting me to participate in a free intuition week with a "coach" I'd had no contact with previously. I did a little research and watched some things from this coach's Facebook page and found her likable enough, so I signed up for the intuition week.
At that time in 2019, I was transitioning from freelance writing work to a more spiritual business plan and I was wanting to work actively to improve my intuition and learn to trust it more than I had up to that point. The outline for the workshop I signed up for seemed the perfect fit. It would include a breaking money blocks meditation session, a learning to trust my intuition session, and a connecting with my "soulmate client" session. All things I was looking to work on. I admit that I enjoyed the workshop quite a lot and felt connected with the coach leading the workshop.
Fast forward to December 2019 and January 2020. My husband and I were in Texas, staying with his family for the holidays. I had been a member of the free facebook group sponsored by the coach since the workshop in September. I had recommended this coach to several other people and many of them joined the same group. I felt like I was making progress in my spiritual connection to my intuition, but honestly, the money blocks remained (or at least that's what I thought was going on, based on feedback from the coach), and I was having a lot of trouble connecting with consistent clients. Spiritually, I felt better, but my finances were not improving at all.
Then came the email from the coach and the live facebook broadcasts touting the benefits of joining the coach's "private empowerment group." And look! You can join for half price this month. The price goes up next month, but you can spend $22 to join today, right? I listened to the coach and the women in the group who extolled the virtues of the group and how much their business improved when they joined and I took $22 from our ever dwindling bank account and joined while we were in Texas. I found value in that group, but it had diminishing returns in the long run.
Then came the pandemic. My husband and I likely caught COVID in New Mexico on New Year's Eve when we attended a large, crowded party at a casino (something we would never have done had the president shared that the virus was already spreading at that time—one of the first documented cases and deaths was in New Mexico, near where we attended the party). When we arrived back in Georgia, I was sick. I stayed sick for about six weeks, struggling to breathe for weeks on end and coughing until I threw up. It was a tough way to start a year my husband and I had believed would be a great year for us and our film projects.
The pandemic meant I needed to improve my business even more quickly than I had thought to do so. I turned to my "coach" and got a bunch of meditations to try and lectures on how I had to focus on what I wanted, not what I didn't, before the universe would listen. I also got "advice" on how taking better care of myself physically (read—lose weight) would make a big difference in how my energy aligned with what I wanted. Later that year, I attended Intuition Week again, and was tremendously disappointed when the content was nearly identical. I was also disappointed that my efforts to participate and maybe even lead the small group I was working with during the workshop were downplayed and downright rejected by the "coach." The fact was that in the nine months between the sad beginning of 2020 and the second intuition week my business showed basically zero improvements. I was still trying to attract my "soulmate clients" and fighting to be grateful for even the worst of what was happening in my life and the world. I began to doubt the "coach" and what she was "teaching" me. I suffered fatigue when it came to the constant litany of positive thinking and writing intentions and using affirmations and being grateful to show the universe what I wanted and then being open to receive it when nothing was coming into my life.
All the onus was on me to be "worthy" and "available" to receive the positive changes I was trying to "manifest." And the majority of the advice my "coach" was giving me was to listen to her "reboot" meditations every day and stay positive. In the meantime, I was paying her $44 a month for the privilege of her somewhat limited input and membership in her private group. I was an active participant in that group, contributing to the quality of discussions, offering my support to the other women in the group, and even sharing free resources I created based on the activities in that group.
Thinking there must be something missing, when the emails came after the intuition week inviting me to join her "Mastermind" program, I seriously considered it. I applied and had the "call" with the coach. I listened to her explain that if money was the only thing stopping me, I should find the money and take the leap. Bear in mind, this was a $5000 program. At the time, if it hadn't been for pandemic relief and unemployment benefits, my husband and I would have been starving and homeless. The coach recommended that I ask family members for the money, get a new credit card and put the mastermind on it, or sell something I didn't need in my life anymore. When I clearly expressed my situation and my hesitation to beg my family for money, she changed her tune a little and recommended I wait until the mastermind opened again in January and save money until then. The call ended very quickly after that.
Not long after, I began feeling uncomfortable with the coach and her groups. I no longer felt joy when there was a live scheduled or a spontaneous one popped up in my feed. I no longer felt seen by the coach. When I was reprimanded for not removing every single mention of my own business from a free journal pdf I provided to the group (I missed one), I decided I was done paying for the "privilege" of adding value to HER group when it really wasn't helping me anymore.
It had become about money. It was no longer (if it ever had been) about women finding their way in spiritual based businesses. It was about what this coach could get out of us, not what she was giving us in return for the money we gave her. I was depressed and uncomfortable when I thought about the coach and the group, so I canceled my subscription to the private group and unfollowed the coach in most ways. Part of me felt that the failure must be me—since that was what this coach had been telling me for a year—so I stayed in the free group for a while and kept getting some of the emails the coach sent out every week.
I then spent a lot of time thinking about why what the coach had been able to do didn't work for me. Why was she so successful and I was barely keeping my head above water. She talked about the big ticket masterminds she had attended and how much they had helped her. She talked about putting a $10,000 mastermind on her credit card without talking it over with her husband first and how she'd made back that money in less than six months. She talked about the hundreds of thousands of dollars she was making every month and I was feeling so inadequate. I was working the hotlines and trying to get coaching clients for my Relationship Coaching business and barely scraping by. Other than having financial resources I didn't, I didn't see any difference between me and the coach. I began to believe wholeheartedly that it had to be something within me that made me unable to find the same kind of success that this coach had.
I'm here to tell you I was wrong!