The Cult of Personality and Toxic Positivity

Part 2-LuLaRich

A few months ago, Amazon Prime released a documentary called LuLaRich. It's a look into the operations and structure of the LuLaRoe company. I'd heard of LuLaRoe from facebook friends who liked their products and I love documentaries, so I sat down and watched it. I should say I binged the whole thing in an afternoon while my husband was working out of town. It was fascinating.
I'd had very little contact with Multilevel Marketing companies personally, but I had friends who sold Colorstreet and Pampered Chef. I had tried Cutco as a summer job while I was in college. My parents got a very nice set of knives out of the experiment. I never made a dime. I think that soured me on MLMs very early (this would have been 1990 or so). To watch and hear these women on the LuLaRich documentary talk about how they were pressured to buy product and recruit, I understood how they felt from personal experience and part of me wondered how they'd fall for it for as long as they did. I knew within a few weeks that I was never going to make money with Cutco and cut my losses—or I should say my parents' losses since they paid for my "demonstration kit." And that investment had been only about $200, not the thousands LuLaRoe got for their "onboarding packages."
The positive presentation notion that LuLaRoe expected from their "retailers" was also familiar. I remember riding to a training event in my supervisor's Acura when Acuras were just becoming a status symbol and listening to her talk about how she'd just bought the car after six months selling Cutco. I heard similar stories on the LuLaRich documentary. Everything was "because of LuLaRoe" in the documentary, and my supervisor's success was "because of Cutco." Thinking back on it now, I am so glad I didn't spend any more time than I did with the company. I can't deny that Cutco knives are awesome. My husband and I have several that were gifted to us by a friend who is currently working for them and we love those knives, but the culture of "catch 'em and secure 'em" is something I am glad is no longer part of my life.
After watching LuLaRich, I sat and thought about what I'd seen and heard and some very disturbing connections started being made for me. The part where the company representatives talk about getting money to onboard (remember, this is about $5000 at the time) from family, opening new credit cards, and even selling breast milk sounded too much like what my "coach" had said to me regarding her mastermind. Then there were the constant positivity reminders from the LuLaRoe representatives, something echoed by the former sales reps in their segments.
Hearing the company owners berate and belittle reps who were asking for better inventory was, I feel, the equivalent of the blame I heard from my coach about why I wasn't as successful as I wanted to be. The LuLaRoe owner said, "Your inventory isn't stale! You're stale! You're not working your business hard enough." My coach reminded me that my weight was part of why my energy wasn't aligned with the wealth I was seeking. It was also my fault that I hadn't yet released everything that no longer served me and allowed money blocks from my childhood and even past lives to keep me from being as wealthy as I could be.
The similarities were simply too much for me and it has really taken me a couple of months to wrap my head around this similarity between MLMs and Spiritual Coaches. It is especially important to me to clarify this for myself because I am a Spiritual Relationship Coach. I don't want to be doing to my clients what my "coach" did to me. On the surface, one would think there'd be no similarities between spiritual coaching and MLMs, but at the core—the important place—they are far more similar than I am comfortable with.
Both foster an environment of toxic positivity. Toxic positivity is, according to Quintero and Long, "the over generalization of a happy, optimistic state that results in the denial, minimization and invalidation of the authentic human emotional experience."
Remember me sharing that my coach focused on positive affirmations, meditation, and gratitude to "align" with the income you wanted for yourself? When that wasn't working, her recommendations to me were focused on how I could be more positive. Bear in mind, at the time, I was journaling at least three points of gratitude and at least three positive intentions every single day. I was conscious of and stopped myself several times each day to be in the moment and express my gratitude for whatever was happening in the moment. And yet, I was still scraping for every penny and had not one steady client for my relationship coaching.
I was so focused on increasing positive energy and living in what I wanted for myself that when our car literally died in the driveway after the drive from Texas to Georgia, I forced myself to focus on the fact that I was grateful for the car reaching our home and not leaving us stranded somewhere along the way rather than how we were going to handle losing the use of the car and where the money to pay for the repair was going to come from. I know that this might seem like a good thing, but it denies that my heart was broken by having "yet another thing," happen to drag us further into the abyss. It didn't allow me to really face the problem and work through my own emotions connected to this issue. True, I didn't break down and stress myself into a hole, but I also didn't actually deal with how I felt about the situation.
Both LuLaRoe and my coach forced positive outlooks on those who were vulnerable and hoping to be successful with the help of the company or coach. This forced positive outlook encouraged the sellers of LuLaRoe and me to stay silent about struggles. LuLaRoe consultants were encouraged to post only positive things on their social medias and make sure they tagged #becauseoflularoe on each of those posts so everyone could see their "success." They weren't supposed to post about the debt they incurred because of LuLaRoe. In fact, they were asked to delete anything that was less than positive, especially if it was because of LuLaRoe.
On my side of this examination, I remember the admonition to "live like you already have what you want." This was code for live in positivity, no matter what's actually happening in your life. If I wanted more financial success, I had to live like I already had it (something LuLaRoe also encouraged their consultants to do). Sure, there were tiny warnings to not go out and spend money you didn't have, but that was often followed up quickly by yet another email inviting the reader to sign up for the next greatest Mastermind, something that cost between $600 and $5000.
I was encouraged to let go of the painful things in my life and clear the blocks to my happiness and success that I was holding onto. I can't tell you how many meditations I listened to that were supposed to help me do exactly that. I even wrote some myself that were for clients to help them do what I was unable to do. As of yet, none of that has changed my financial situation.
However, seeing these connections for myself—that of spiritual coaching and MLMS—has changed how I approach my own coaching style and how I speak to clients.

Quintero, S., & Long, J. (2021, March 12). Toxic positivity: The dark side of positive vibes. The Psychology Group Fort Lauderdale. Retrieved December 25, 2021, from https://thepsychologygroup.com/toxic-positivity/