Heal Your Inner Child, Leave the System Alone

The self-help industry sells the idea that what was done to you is yours alone to fix, because moving the burden onto the injured person is easier, safer, and more profitable.

I went down a rabbit hole this week after reading a New York Times article on Nicole LePera, who built one of the largest wellness brands on the internet under the name The Holistic Psychologist. According to the article in the Times, she has millions of followers, four books with titles like How to Do the Work and How to Be the Love You Seek, and a paid membership community, the SelfHealers Circle, that at its peak was enrolling tens of thousands of people a month at roughly twenty-seven dollars a head. She has real training, a clinical psychology background out of Cornell and the New School, and she used it to tell her audience that traditional therapy does not work and that the healing they needed could only come from inside them.

In February, one of her two co-founders, Jenna Weakland, filed a verified complaint in Maricopa County Superior Court in Arizona against LePera, her wife Lauren Galvin, and a publishing entity the complaint alleges was created to route a book deal away from the company Weakland co-owned. The filing describes an operation run on psychological abuse, intimidation, and fear, and includes an allegation that LePera shoved Weakland down a flight of stairs. None of it has been proven, the defendants have not been found liable, and what I am describing here is what the article reports the complaint alleges.

Hold the allegations next to the business for a second, though. This is a woman who taught several million people how to identify an abuser, how to spot the coercive pattern, how to know when the environment is the thing hurting you, and the complaint says her own house was the thing it warned you about.

I am not interested in the schadenfreude; I am interested in what the whole genre is doing, because I have been living inside this question for months while I work on a book proposal about why we hate victims and excuse victimizers. Everything in our system is built to do that, and the wellness industry has figured out how to charge you for the privilege.

I spent years as a domestic violence attorney, representing women in divorce and custody proceedings while the men who beat them sat across the table, and I have also lived in a house where violence was ordinary. So when someone tells me the answer is to go back and reparent my four-year-old self, what I hear is the entire burden being quietly relocated onto the smallest person in the room.

I cannot go back and heal that child. Nobody can. It is a fool’s errand, and it sends me off on a mission that will not fundamentally change anything, because whatever happened is already woven into me. You can set a broken arm, and it will still ache when the weather turns, and that is what healing actually looks like: learning to live and move with an ache that, to me, is part of the arrangement.

What the industry sells instead is a renovation project with no completion date, which is exactly why it is so profitable. Gisèle Pelicot, the woman in France whose husband drugged her and invited dozens of men to rape her while she was unconscious, said something much more transformative; she said, “shame must change sides.” Every dollar spent on somatic baths and inner-child work and affirmations recited at your own reflection is a dollar not spent forcing shame to change sides. It’s busy work, keeping the victim busy with self care while the person or system that injured them goes unexamined and unaccountable.

Take domestic violence, since that is where I did the work. Restraining orders do not work. I can tell you that from years of watching them not work, from the calls where the police explained that he was forty-four feet away and the order says fifty, from the cases where by the time anyone came back she was dead. What would work is consequences, actual custody, actual time, for the overwhelming majority of cases where a man is the danger. We do not do that, and the reason is not that we lack the resources; it is that the people who would have to change the law are the ones the law currently protects.

Or take reporting. People do not report abuse at higher rates because the system punishes them for reporting, since reporting can mean losing your children, your housing, your income, your immigration status, your custody. We have built something that lets abuse move freely and constrains almost everyone trying to stop it, and the law itself was never designed to hold us in the first place. Women, children, poor people, Black people, we had no access and no redress for most of this country’s existence, and the system still runs the way it was originally built to run.

There are places to intervene that we refuse to touch. Hospitals see nearly every parent at the moment a child is born, and it would cost very little to talk to each parent separately about physical safety and back it with somewhere real to go, with community support and money attached, so that a woman who says she is afraid to take this baby home has an actual door in front of her. We tell ourselves that would be government overreach, but the government is there for the divorce, the custody fight, the criminal case, and the funeral. We say teaching teenagers what a healthy relationship looks like belongs to parents and churches, when it belongs to all of us, because all of us pay for it later.

We are so afraid to challenge the systems that we keep piling weight onto the people the systems already crushed, stacking it up like Jenga. Work five jobs, get the kid to school, regulate your nervous system, and do all of it inside an economy openly designed to produce losers, because producing losers is how it produces winners. We know that, and we write policy pretending we do not.

This is the same misdirection as imposter syndrome. You are told your discomfort at work is a private psychological defect when it is a predictable response to being competency-checked over your race, your gender, your age, your accent, and the difference matters, because a mechanism you can name has a structural fix while a personal wound has only programs or subscriptions for you to purchase.

I cannot go back and heal that child, and neither can anyone selling me a program that claims otherwise, so I would rather spend the years I have changing the conditions that made her than paying somebody to walk me back into a room I already got out of, but that’s just me.