Guru Psychotherapist Unleashes Polyvagal Theory, Exposes Hidden Trauma. What Could Go Wrong?
Nicole LePera has convinced millions of followers that advances in polyvagal theory make conventional mental health treatment obsolete and a waste of time.
Those of us who cling to evidence-based mental health treatments may be missing all the action, but what do we want to do?
Mental health professionals may be losing the ability to talk to each other and to get a microphone when we try to communicate to non-professional audiences.
Nicole LePera, A.K.A @The.Holistic.Psychologist, has over 2.6 million followers on Instagram.
That is undoubtedly more than the total membership of all the major professional organizations in the world where scientific evidence for the effectiveness of psychotherapy interventions is likely to be first presented and debated.
2.6 million is within the range of the size of some mega-church congregations of televangelists preaching the Gospel online and on cable television. This is a more apt comparison.
If you are looking for clues on how Nicole LePera got so many followers, you can sample her latest thinking (March 2021) in an interview with Tom Bilyeu, who himself has 2.1 million followers on Youtube. The video is titled
Psychologist’s Tools For Reprogramming Your Subconscious Mind | Nicole LePera on Impact Theory
The 1-hour interview is almost entirely LeaPera talking speech-pressured, rapid-fire with an intensity I could not bear, even with the speed turned down. Bilyeu is wearing a tee-shirt with “Occupy Mars,” and is against a background of an incredible collection of Marvel action figures. He mostly just nods with a solemn look, with only brief periods of more animated agreement.
I really had wanted to capture and convey what so many people now think psychotherapy is about. i could get through more than minutes of this video at a time.
Fortunately, there was an option to capture a transcript. I did not see how to add punctuation in a way that preserved some sense of the delivery. So here is an excerpt with only the modification of the “i’s” being capitalized:
What I came to realize is that the reason why we can’t change is stored in a very powerful part of our mind called our subconscious so that upwards of 90-95 percent of the time that I think is now the sighted percentage right of our day that we’re not really paying attention or that we’re in autopilot and what I’ve realized is in that autopilot are all of these pathways right neurons that fire together wire together if we’ve practiced pathways most of us from from childhood and beyond we get kind of these ruts as I call them in our subconscious so just to contrast from my conscious mind I have insight I can use my past break and inform patterns that I want to change into my future yet unbeknownst to most of us we’re slipping back into that autopilot…
Maybe I am just jealous, but I don’t think that I would want to keep so many so many followers happy who are flocking to this kind of communication.
I would not want to risk being canceled or cybermobbed if my writing happens to offend just a tiny few of the more unhinged people who inevitably slip into millions of followers. I have enough online harassment in my life already.
I doubt many of LePera’s followers would change their minds if her specific claims miserably failed evaluation in scientific research that has survived rigorous peer review. Yet, these same followers may be ready to attack, often ferociously, anyone who presents contrary evidence or who otherwise challenges their faith in the @The.Holistic.Psychologist.
I have put myself in that situation many times, sometimes defiantly wanting to counter nonsense, sometimes inadvertently. Things can get wild fast.
“We” might think only a small proportion of LePera’s 2.6 million followers are credentialled and educationally prepared to evaluate for themselves whether a particular form of therapy is pseudoscience.
Maybe, but I’ll be careful in not assuming I have attracted the consensus of a “we.”
I would not be surprised if LePera attracts a lot of MSWs and PsyDs who have just not been adequately exposed to being “evidence-based.” These clinicians obtained their degrees and credentials to practice therapy with instructors and supervisors who are partially or totally entranced by an alternative/complementary/integrative experiential perspective.
I just need to travel to the nearby Chestnut Hill, PA Weavers Food Cooperative. I can see that a lot of the patrons are filling their baskets with CBD and homeopathic remedies and other placebos. Most are better dressed than I am and drive more expensive, later model, bigger cars.
At least at the Co-Op, I can assume some amount of college education, and surely some professional degrees.
I am not brave enough, but if I did an exit poll of patrons leaving the co-op, surely there would be considerable endorsement of the statement “I can breathe myself to empowerment” and knowing looks, consistent with LePera’s preaching than I would like to hear.
I don’t presume I am confronting 2.6 million LePera followers who are not very smart people. “We” have had a profound ideological and cultural riff established.
Personally, I would settle for a much more select group of interested and interesting people to follow me than LePera has, but I would not mind more people giving what I write some causal attention.
She does not cite any research whatsoever, but LePera preaches that conventional mental health treatments, like evidence-based therapies and medication, are ineffective and unnecessary. Instead, she strongly endorses polyvagal theory, which she says offers salvation from the state of sin (actually disease) that a lot of us don’t even know we are in.
Wikipedia is a place to start in defining polyvagal theory, but not a place to stop. The entry for polyvagal theory opens with a banner warning:
This page may present fringe theories, without giving appropriate weight to the mainstream view, and explaining the responses to the fringe theories. Please help improve it or discuss the issue on the talk page.
Yes, someone please do us all a favor and reconcile the page with a scientific understanding of the actual function of the vagus nerve.
Before going on to quote the controversial but immensely popular psychiatrist, Bessel van der Kolk, the Wikipedia entry further cautions that:
Polyvagal theory (poly- “many” + vagal “wandering”) is a collection of evolutionary, neuroscientific and psychological claims pertaining to the role of the vagus nerve in emotion regulation, social connection and fear response. While not endorsed by state-of-the-art social neuroscience,[1][2][3][4][5][6] it is nevertheless popular among some clinical practitioners and patients.[7]
I’ll have more to say about our scientific understanding of the vagus nerve versus the claims of polyvagal theory in my next Medium article. For now, I am stuck. I am troubled that millions of people are under the influence of LePera.
Aside from being an influencer with perhaps the largest following of any psychotherapist in social media, LePera is a licensed to practice psychology in Pennsylania with restrictions on what she can tell prospective patients about their treatment options.
I wonder why she renews her license and risks the scandal of getting it revoked for her attracting patients with misinformation. Surely, some of the things she says would be actionable.
Talk show host, Dr. Phil McGraw wisely gave his license up to protect himself from anyone making a formal complaint about his handling of patients on his TV show.
Like almost all practicing scientists and evidence-based mental health professionals who have weighed in on the topic, I consider the polyvagal theory to be utterly discredited junk pseudoscience as it is used to justify therapeutic interventions and self-help exercises.
If you are reading this, it could be because you are already among the few hundred followers that I have been accumulating, which is minuscule compared to the millions LePera routinely reaches. Or you might have found me through links I posted on social media.
But if you had been blindly depending on recommendations provided by Medium for what you read, chances are that you would never have found me.
Impersonal, mechanically applied rules, called algorithms, determine the recommendations that you receive from Medium.
Medium algorithms greatly favor glibberish, scientifically unreliable, and even nonsensical, clickbait stories that have received attention from people whom Medium decides are like you from the enormous amount of Big Data the platform gathers from everyone accessing the platform.
Articles that attract traffic claim that readers don’t know something that they should, especially when this information is something about themselves that the article claims is hurting them.
Articles do especially well if they relate this kind of self-help and therapy mind stuff to things going on in the body, including the physical brain, associations that an ordinary person could only barely grasp or must depend on some outside authority to interpret for them.
Mostly, people will settle for “Experts say…” or “Science says…,” ignoring that science does not have a desktop computer or its own voice.
It is easy to forget that is scientists with their fingers on their keyboards and tongues to wag who say something. There is usually a lot of disputing of the very notion that “Science says” anything final.
What you believe that everybody else believes about mental health and therapy is an illusion that social media has created, just for you. Algorithms conjure up a picture of who you are from what you look at on social media, as well as who your friends are and what they look at.
A few clicks on links to gurus spewing out outrageous claims will trigger you to get more like them recommended to you, crowding out any more reasonable stuff that is too modest in claims, bland, or too technical to interest most people.
Medium is constantly gathering information about you and the social media activity of people you identify as your friends. The platform may not come up with the lowest common denominator with what it recommends, but it does seem to get damn close.
Perhaps I could put my integrity aside and write an article that slavishly praised polyvagal theory and explained how I had discovered the role of hidden trauma in my life and yours.
The traffic to my story and followers would pick up, but it would still be like trying to attract customers to a decent roadside restaurant just opening on a country road in the middle of nowhere. The competition is that stiff and the prospect of getting noticed is that bleak.
If you were just curious and entered
A lot of these articles would be nearly identical, as if the authors had plagiarized the same sources, except where the author told a personal story of how once they were lost, but now they are saved.
The story is likely simple. An author heard from friends or read something about the powers of polyvagal theory and uncovering hidden trauma in social media. This led them on a journey, in therapy or otherwise. They traced their unhappiness and problems in their current life back to some previously unnoticed lapses in the unconditional love that one should be able to expect from one’s parents. Bingo, some astonishing insight was the result and the author felt compelled to share it with others.
Maybe you could follow instructions that you can easily find on Instagram or YouTube.
In many of these videos, you would be told to take a deep breath and exhale. You would then directed to detect whatever telltale signs occur in your body’s response, like chills or tension in your right arm or left or maybe an urge to tap your finger or pass gas. The manipulation is to suggest you do something, pay attention, and expect to experience a sensation, no matter what it might be.
You are then asked to consider whether your parents had ever praised your attractiveness or paid you too little or too much attention or any of maybe a half dozen other things that could have inflicted hidden trauma.
Inevitably, you have a bodily sensation that as you were instructed to expect, and then you pursued vague clues to solve the puzzle of why that sensation was the one you came up with.
Anyone could conceivably construct a new memory and probably agree that they had never thought about their parents in quite this way before.
It is a game of suggestion and support for the confirmation of some waiting insights with a particular bias. Guru therapists have been playing at least since Fritz Perls established a pseudo-intimacy with his exercises and then frolicked naked, hitting on his female followers in the baths at Esalen in the 1960s.
A generation of gurus claimed to have been inspired by this exclusive spa, down the cliffs from the highway at Big Sur.
It helps if wannabe gurus who were born too late can claim some wisdom was passed on to them from someone who was at Esalen back then.
If all went well with this experiential self-experiment, a hidden trauma would be uncovered, or at least one could be claimed that could not be contested. What right do skeptics have to question the truth of someone else’s lived experience?
Although it helps an aspiring guru to have some kind of Ph.D. and be called “Dr.,” telling exciting stories of a struggle toward self-discovery is sufficient to begin preaching and attracting a flock of followers on social media.
What if you followed these instructions and this fabulous outcome is not what you experienced? You might still be saved from what is wrong with you.
Someone who cared enough about you or maybe just a partner who was frustrated with you could ask why you can’t let go of your unhappiness. That question is grist for some more instruction, maybe you go into therapy or a massage with a guru if you are blessed enough to have a guru agree to treat you. Sometimes letters of recommendation work.
Someone who failed the first time and remained lost or someone failing many times before being saved is an even better story of struggle and eventual redemption and healing.
In my next article, I am going to try to break any spell that the @The.Holistic.Psychologist cast over you by unpacking a couple of sentences from her that I found here.
Before you get to read my next Medium article, here is something you can do
Why don’t you first read the whole story about LePera? See if you are persuaded by her without further contamination by my skepticism of your experience? Maybe you will even be so convinced by the article that you won’t want to read my critique. I’ll risk that.
LePera says:
“We’re just now beginning to talk about things like polyvagal theory to understand how trauma impacts the body and entire nervous system. Many of us are living in bodies that keep us stuck in states of disease, and we aren’t even aware of them.”
You have had the first jab of my skepticism. My next Medium article will be the second.
We are not talking about spreading the deadly COVID virus, only steadily endemic woo-woo. How about risking exposure to it before getting my second jab?
Here is an exercise in which LePera empowers followers and fends off stress by controlling their breathing and directing attention to the alleged parts of the nervous system that they are directly stimulating. Try it. Are you profoundly changed? If not, how about if you try it again? Are you ready to adopt it as a daily practice?
I hope that I persuade you that this is a pseudo-shamanistic placebo ritual that interferes with informed consumer and policymaker choice of best value health care. It is also killing the ability of everyday people to talk about and resolve problems in their everyday lives.
I wish I could take a poll of where you stand right now.
__ Lost
__Saved
__Skeptical