The Covertly Disempowering Teachings of Gabby Bernstein
she’s never met a snake oil she doesn’t want to sell
Recently I hosted a lively conversation about signs and the Recovered Memory Movement and corrupt spiritual leaders and trauma and judgment and Big Pharma and mediumship and much more over on Instagram. For all of its flaws and Hellmouth tendencies, it’s still the best platform for some of these discussions. However, not everyone hangs out there. I rarely do anymore.
So… in order to continue to build a reference library on the tactics of evil, I’m capturing the same ideas here to add to The Great Dismantling. If you’re interested in the original stories, you can find all eight installments (yes, eight) by starting here.
If the eight segments on Instagram didn’t give it away, this is a lengthy unraveling. Grab your favorite mug, and fill it to the brim before you begin.
She Sounds Vaguely Familiar
And… we’re finished.
Only kidding. In this clip (taken from “The Truth About Spiritual Teachers”), Gabby emphatically states that she is not a guru even though she makes every effort to position herself as one. This was the Cliff’s Notes version. For the one where I’m paid by the word, keep reading.
With her 1.4M followers on Instagram and 273K subscribers on YouTube, Gabby Bernstein has been one of the most highly requested “spiritual leaders” for me to review. Holding a list of names that will take me decades to address, hers bubbled to the top with sustained and frequent interest.
While you might not recognize Gabby by name, you’re likely familiar with some aspects of her teachings as they’re an amalgamation of the work of others. Her influence on those starting their journeys in the self-help and motivational space is also uncanny. Gabby wannabes spring up everywhere. For that reason, we’re spending an inordinate amount of time on one person.
She’s neatly amassed a ton of bad ideas into a single place for us to deconstruct. Thanks!
If you go no further, let me sum up the entirety of Gabby’s career in a single sentiment, “I know how to make money, and I’m going to keep making money.”
I warn you in advance, this piece is not happening without some serious snark. While I’ve never been a huge Gabby Bernstein fan, sitting through these videos has left me with a mouth full of sand. To watch someone with such hollow teachings garner huge notoriety as a self-help and spiritual leader is just ick. I lack more eloquent terms for it. I’ve been as gracious as I can, but my tolerance quickly grew thin. Her condescension and sense of superiority is endlessly tiring.
Cards on the table. Back in the day, I tried to like Gabby. Friends in my circle swore by her teachings and extolled the wisdom of her books. More than one of her then five bestsellers lived on my shelves as I read through them hoping to be as excited about her work as my contemporaries.
In the same way that I picked up Big Magic wanting desperately to understand the hype, made it through three chapters only to close the book, baffled by why people thought Liz Gilbert was such a genius, I never found value in Gabby’s books. I even attempted Big Magic in audio format read by Liz herself thinking maybe I was missing the right emphasis. Nope. That was an excruciating drive to Chicago with her as my copilot.
Gabby is part of the ‘Spiritual It Crowd’ — or at least she was when I stopped paying attention to her. There was a squad that stuck together and promoted each other’s work. Marie Forelo, Kris Carr, Danielle LaPorte, Marianne Williamson, Terri Cole, Kate Northrup, Jessica Ortner and a few others who are slipping my mind all cycled through the group.
Each of these women was (and is) well packaged and knew how to play the publicity game. Their ideas may not have been the strongest, but they knew how to present them in a way that would speak to women their age. In essence, they had something that you might want and were supposedly (big emphasis on supposedly) a few steps ahead of you on the spiritual growth journey.
Plus, their names were everywhere. Everywhere!! They knew how to make the rounds on the podcast circuit, land in loads of publications, and get their books into people’s hands. Hats off to their publicists.
So there’s always been this pressure with someone like Gabby that if you’re not a fan, you’re the one missing something. You’re not spiritually evolved enough to understand the profundity of her message.
With a few years of distance and a lot more perspective, I realize that isn’t at all the case. Her teachings kind of suck and are mainly regurgitations of past authors and spiritual figureheads wrapped up in a tall, thin, blonde package dressed in designer clothes. I’m not pulling punches with this one.
While Gabby’s not the biggest name nor one with a robust following, we’re spending a fair chunk of time on her because she garners a lot of media attention.
There’s a lot of trickle down from her teachings — in part because she’s a compilation of the ideas of others and simply repackages long standing spiritual teachings — but also because there are a lot of women modeling themselves and their businesses and lives after hers.
As we move through her career, we’ll observe her self reinvention with every book she publishes. My sense is that she has a churning audience that’s constantly rolling over with each new launch. A Course in Miracles is the foundation for much of her belief system and her early teachings That’s then coupled with what she learned in the Twelve Step Program along with the teachings of Abraham Hicks, which make a notable appearance midway through her career and are then joined by a whole host of nonsense on trauma.
I’m including her books chronologically as they appear over the fifteen plus years she’s been on the scene in order to offer a better understanding of how her belief system morphs — or as my mom used to say, every time she finds a new hula hoop. All book covers are pulled directly from the “Gabby Bernstein Book Guide” on her website.
You have to give it to her, she’s a prolific writer. Ten books in fifteen years is no small feat. However, if memory serves from listening to an interview from 2018 that lodged in my memory, her editor does some heavy rewrites. Plus, every new book is an expansion on a single chapter from the last one. Still, that’s a lot of published work.
My aim is to focus on the ideas, not Gabby herself as much as I can. Sporting conjecture about how her Botox cycle syncs with her podcast tour to determine the order of filming gains us nothing — not that I would EVER wonder such a thing.
What I find most irksome about her teachings or those like them — Abraham Hicks, Mel Robbins, Jay Shetty, and so on — is that they’re only telling one side of the story. When we talk about the Law of Attraction, yes, it’s true that energy begets energy.
Being an incredible beacon of joy and love in the world can attract wonderful things. It can also result in attacks and slings and arrows. This isn’t a reflection of who you are or the energy that you are emitting. But folks like Gabby would have you believe that it is and label it as an egregious shortcoming.
Life isn’t always smooth sailing. We’re meant to ride the waves as best we can.
Gabby’s Emerging Career
The entirety of Spirit Junkie is based off of the teachings of A Course in Miracles and is touted as a contemporary retelling for Gabby’s generation. If you’re not familiar with the source material, A Course in Miracles is a text channeled by Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford throughout 1965-1972 and ultimately published in June of 1976.
This sucker is thick. It’s often discussed as a modern Bible, which in my opinion, it certainly is not.
What many won’t tell you is that there is strong speculation that the CIA had a hand in this ‘channeled’ work. Yeah, you read that correctly. Thetford (one of the channelers and scribes) was a senior psychologist for the CIA, specifically working on “personality development on the research side” of MK-ULTRA.
What cracks me up is that Thetford’s close friend Carol Howe writes an entire piece trying to debunk the myths linking A Course in Miracles, the CIA, MK-ULTRA, and Thetford but really only raises more questions and possible connections. Read it here, and decide for yourself.
If for some reason you aren’t familiar with MK-ULTRA, enjoy this incredibly hard to read FOIA document. They’re not big fans of paragraphs or carriage returns. For a more digestible overview of the unbelievable (yet totally and utterly fathomable) government program that was/is MK-ULTRA and their massive fixation on psychic abilities and mind control, this piece by NPR is far easier to read than the FOIA document.
I’ll likely delve into a full examination of A Course in Miracles and its possible links to all this jazz as a separate discussion, but know that it’s shady. So for Gabby to use it as the base for her entire career should raise some eyebrows.
Side Note: This is also the basis of Marianne Williamson’s work who was a mentor to Gabby when all of this nonsense was being written. They’re friends to this day. And yes, she’s on the list.
Side Note to the Side Note: In looking over the outline that I have for all of this, I find myself wondering if Oprah is a CIA asset put in place to pacify the spiritual masses and keep them on a hamster wheel of self-doubt and deprecation. Plausible, don’t you think? It would explain a lot about who and what she’s endorsing. Look at the volume of bad ideas she’s been pushing since the 80s and the circle of friends she keeps, many of whom have been convicted for numerous sexual assaults. We’ll get to that in a minute.
Then I started wondering if guys in khakis would make their way through the woods and knock on my door menacingly for even mentioning the CIA, but I realized office casual is really an FBI thing. (This is a joke referencing Whitmer’s fake kidnapping that may or may not land. If I have to explain the joke, there’s a good chance it isn’t actually funny. Can we pretend that it works?)
Back to Spirit Junkie.
Pay attention to the phrasing in the introduction to Spirit Junkie, particularly this wording —
The book literally dragged me to the counter. No joke. I physically felt the book dragging me to the register. It felt strange and yet oddly comforting.
– Gabby Bernstein, Spirit Junkie
We’re going to hear it again in Gabby’s retelling of this story during her TEDx talk and then in a completely separate incident describing the writing of The Universe Has Your Back that she recounts during her SuperSoul Sessions speech.
The verbatim wording of the narration of this ‘experience’ is unsettling to me. It reminds me of a coordinated lie when everyone’s story is a little too crisp. The fact that this is the specific language Gabby uses multiple times to describe the inspiration and initiative to write her books has all sorts of alien and demon related red flags going up in my mind.
Plus, if you watch as many police procedurals as I do or have ever seen an episode of Lie to Me, you know that a suspect’s alibi is immediately deemed a lie if the retelling is identical every time.
Add More ~ing and Spirit Junkie launched Gabby’s speaking career. It would be another six years before she landed on Oprah’s tour. One of her early talks that gained some traction on the internet is “How to Be a Miracle Worker” for TedxFiDiWomen (that’s Tedx Financial District Women in case, like me, you needed a translation). What Gabby has to say here is pretty indicative of her early work and lays out themes that remain relevant for years to come. Let’s break it down a bit.
Reminder. We’re going into far more detail with all of this than perhaps Gabby herself warrants because these ideas are all over the internet. Their prevalence is staggering. And when bad ideas are this ubiquitous, you start wondering if you’re the crazy one for questioning them. You aren’t.
What first strikes me about this talk for Tedx is Gabby’s Regina George demeanor. There’s such a mean girl vibe that drips from her words and body language. The second thing that grabs my attention is that these ‘spiritual truths’ are what she was peddling twelve years ago, six years before Oprah’s tour, and yet she still hasn’t integrated them into her life today. Ten books later and she’s still struggling with the same themes while standing on a stage saying she has THE definitive answers to them.
Gabby’s not much further along than when she first started speaking about her spiritual views. Perhaps she talks a good talk but certainly isn’t living it. Why should anyone listen to her? She claims to have all of the answers, but they aren’t even working in her own life. It’s one thing to say that you’re exploring with everyone else and share your journey. It’s altogether different to say that you categorically have the answers and that people need to follow YOUR five steps for a spiritual foundation or whatever list she has in her most recent books. Just wait until we get to the Lewis Howes interview, and she throws out everything that she’s been touting for over a decade.
My sense is that I’m constantly being lied to with whatever fabrication Gabby thinks will sell her story. In this case, it’s the deletion of her TEDx outline. Having been habitually lying for more than a decade, I’m not sure that she’s even aware that she’s doing it. (I say that after watching far more hours of Gabby than I ever desired.) If confronted with this suspicion, she would likely have yet another excuse — pardon me, reason — why she is the way that she is since none of her actions ever seem to be her fault.
I’m jumping the gun a little with this assertion because you really need the context of how her messages evolve over the years to see where I’m coming from on this one. However, I want you to keep it in the back of your mind as we move through what I’m about to share.
Also keep an eye on her body language throughout her interviews. The lies are slightly less obvious in her stage performances, but when she’s one-on-one with someone, her tells speak volumes. When she doesn’t believe her own words there is inevitably a nose touch, hair touch, neck touch, or copious arm rubbing. Her demeanor also shifts and becomes more aggressive. She does not like to be questioned. The most obvious examples of this show up in her Impact Theory interview with Tom Bilyeu. He’s one of the few folks who seems to give voice to his doubts.
Okay, back to the video at hand.
My truth. My truth. My truth. We hear this constantly from Gabby. It’s one of those phrases that has taken the internet by storm. I am not a fan. A bunch of words have been conflated and are now being referenced as “my truth” — two big ones being ‘experience’ and ‘opinion.’ Of course, that might be because we’re not supposed to have opinions anymore because that would be judgy, but we’ll get to that. I discuss the concept of relative truth and how we’re steering away from fact based discussion in this video.
The undercurrent of Gabby’s work that hasn’t disappeared, is the following —
I have arrived because I have a credential that says that I’m doing something great in the world, but meanwhile I felt totally emotionally bankrupt.
– Gabby Bernstein, “How to Be a Miracle Worker” for TedxFiDiWomen
By the way, the “something great” was club promotion for her cousin’s nightclubs in New York.
This is still the energy laced through everything Gabby does. Like me! Like me! I am important — even though I’m immensely insecure. She has no actual self worth. Careful who you look to for guidance. No amount of New York Times bestsellers or appearances with Oprah will ever create an innate confidence.
From what I’ve read through excerpts, Gabby starts almost every book stating that she’s overcome all of her insecurity and shortcomings. Except, every time she acts like this is the first time she’s done that with no acknowledgement that the last three books claimed the same thing and promised they were the Holy Grail to fix it. She’s revisiting it with every new topic she pens. Oh, and she wants your money.
When addressing the story of hitting her rock bottom, there’s the very surface level question of whether the incident actually occurred as a voice speaking to Gabby or if she is quoting someone she met during recovery from her cocaine addiction. In a video by Keya’s World, Kaya points out a post from October 2, 2020 that reads —
Fifteen years ago today, a stranger in at a recovery meeting gave me a promise. She promised me that if I stayed clean and sober I would live a life beyond my wildest dreams.
So which one was it? A woman at a recovery meeting or an inner voice? I don’t believe that it’s both. Is God referring to Gabby as “girl” like some character who has read one too many issues of Cosmo? Doubtful.
This is what I mean by Gabby reinventing her stories based on what is getting traction. It’s far more compelling to say that an inner voice told her this supposedly moving sentiment than Marsha at the local AA meeting. An inner voice sells a lot more books. An inner voice gets people to sign up for courses. An inner voice puts Gabby above the rest of us because look at these impressive abilities that she has. (That’s sarcasm.) No one's heard of Marsha.
My other big issue with this exchange is that oof does it sound like aliens or demons. Can you say Faustian bargain? This line in particular really jumps out at me —
I heard an inner voice, a very authoritative, loud inner calling that said to me, “Get your life together, girl, and you will live beyond your wildest dreams.” And I’ve been listening to that voice ever since.
– Gabby Bernstein, “How to Be a Miracle Worker” for TedxFiDiWomen
I’ve interacted with a lot of ghosts and galactics both in my personal life and on behalf of other people. Not once would I describe their support as sounding authoritative, which I keep hearing as authoritarian. So there’s that. Sometimes a relative will get a bit pushy, or we’ll run into an over zealous ghost, but there’s always a sense of ushering not pushing that accompanies this.
So yeah, I would say that this is the classic ploy of when aliens and demons step in to assist.
Here’s the other piece of this puzzle that never gets mentioned. In her own words as pulled from Spirit Junkie, “I was once a strung-out drug addict seeking self-worth from the outside world.” The addition of drugs (in this case coke) and alcohol in the mix means that the voice it’s almost inevitably beings who aim to manipulate. It’s a bit of a, “Here, we’ll do all of this for you, and in return you can feed us by corrupting others with our message.”
I don’t want to discount the profundity of having something outside of you intervene in those precarious circumstances. Lives can be saved. However, in those moments of struggle, the beings there to support you almost always come across as gentle and soothing, not a booming voice saying, “I am the great and powerful Oz.” Are there exceptions to this? Yes. But based on the collection of Gabby’s work and the other red flags that I see, this is not one — which then calls into question the source of this voice beyond whether it is a human at a recovery meeting.
Remember, this is an experience that has influenced the full scope of Gabby’s work.
While I don’t see demons sitting in the audience of Gabby’s lectures the way I do with Teal Swan or aliens walking around her workshops as there are at Joe Dispenza’s retreats, I can sense them watching. There’s this feeling of Gabby being a puppet on a string doing someone else’s bidding.
And oof, the monitoring. These beings are observing everyone that interacts with Gabby. I keep trying to trace the energetic strings back to them but lose them halfway. They know enough to not let people find them.
You’re getting a few raw form notes at my dad’s insistence that I leave this section even though it was slated to be pulled.
My Raw Notes
// Story of hitting rock bottom and hearing the voice telling her that she will be successful beyond her wildest dreams. Coke addition. Was it God? Was it aliens? // with the presence of drugs, it calls into question the source of that voice // I’m not discounting that God talks to people. I very much believe that He does. But looking at the trajectory of her career and the other messages that she shares, that sounds far more like aliens than God to me. //
Here’s another story that is totally suspect, not just because it starts with Gabby’s telling nose touch, signaling that she’s lying. Gabby recounts what Marianne Williamson told her to start her on this path. Except, the wording by Williamson in the foreword of Spirit Junkie reads to me like, “Welp, I don’t remember any of this, but I guess I’ll take Gabby’s word for it since she’s built her career around it.”
Here’s the contrast between the way these two tell their stories —
The phrasing at the just shy of eight minute mark in this recording is what I suggested that you keep an eye on from the start. Remember, Gabby claims to have thrown out her outline for this Tedx talk and is presenting completely extemporaneously. And yet, her wording in her speech is almost a direct quote of her book.
Where things get more interesting is that six years later during her SuperSoul Sessions talk, the way she describes her laptop encounter is almost verbatim what we hear here even though it’s an entirely different ‘spiritual’ encounter. Even the self-satisfied look that the audience may sorta kinda be hooked is the same.
Again, this language calls into question the intentions of the ‘advice’ of the voice that Gabby chooses to heed. Does a loving benevolent being really “drag you to the counter” like an impetuous child? Not in my experience. All of this force sounds much more like aliens than anything I would choose to let within five thousand light years of me.
Things get more problematic when Gabby starts defining terms. “The primary principle of A Course in Miracles is that a miracle is a shift in perception.” What!?!?!?
I talk a lot about loss of language and shifting of definitions. It runs rampant through the dodgy spiritual crowd but is by no means limited to their reach. This one though. Oof.
You know what a miracle is not? A shift in perception. Here’s how a miracle is actually defined —
Miracle | mir·a·cle /ˈmirək(ə)l/
noun: miracle; plural noun: miracles1. a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.
2. a highly improbable or extraordinary event, development, or accomplishment that brings very welcome consequences.
3. an amazing product or achievement, or an outstanding example of something.
If you can take words and change them to mean whatever you want them to mean, no one can challenge you. You’re no longer having a viable discussion. An apple is a pear is an orange is a watermelon and none of them is a fruit.
Joe Dispenza does this all the time in order to sound more intelligent. Our national media implements this strategy to divert attention from what they don’t want us to question. Gabby rewrites definitions to add an air of superiority to what she comprehends and the unwashed masses don’t. But mostly, Orwell called it.
I actually published a piece on the degradation of language as it applies to freedom of speech last month. It focuses on the political side of the issue, but ultimately all of these conversations intersect. I would love to hear your thoughts on it.
Just pausing to say, what is this nonsense —
And what happens to each of us, each of us in some way shape or form have chosen the ego, the fear based mind, and have chosen what The Course refers to as “the tiny mad idea.” Each of us at some point in time in some way, we have chosen this tiny mad idea. And as The Course says, we detoured into fear, and it was like a descent from madness into littleness. And that negative voice, that fear based voice, that one tiny mad idea becomes like a virus in our mind and it takes over our reality and it blocks our truth…
And this is how the ego works. The ego works in so many vicious ways. A Course in Miracles [says] the ego is suspicious at best, vicious at worst. And each of us have this horrifying belief system within us. And so it is our job, it is our duty to release those blocks. Release those fear based belief systems.
– Gabby Bernstein, “How to Be a Miracle Worker” for TedxFiDiWomen
Degrading of the ego is part of the cult programming. While an over-inflated sense of ego is undesirable, the ego is also what keeps you protected against those who wish to manipulate you. By definition, it’s “a person's sense of self-esteem or self-importance.” You need that intact.
But to say, as it does in A Course in Miracles, that the ego is, “Suspicious at best, viscous at worst.” Wow. Danger. Danger. Danger. That’s someone trying to pull something over on you. I’ll save a deeper examination of this for when we discuss Eckhart Tolle since dismantling of the ego is foundational to his work. This single speech by Gabby is so riddled with bad ideas that if we fully expand on every single one, we’ll be here for days.
I had my doubts earlier in her presentation, but when Gabby explicitly paused to reiterate that she was standing on that stage delivering this speech with no outline, it fully dawned on me how dubious I am that this wasn’t a memorized script. Add to that the intentional pauses where she anticipates a cheer from the audience and only reluctantly receives one, and this is a lot more rehearsed than she wants us to think. Also, her intonation. Eek. I can’t.
What I’ve also noticed throughout all of her interviews is the lack of fillers or pauses. It’s bizarre.
Even the most polished public speakers have a handful of those scattered throughout an eighteen minute stint on stage. She has none. They don’t even exist in what are supposedly casual conversations, unless she is visibly flustered and lying. I don’t entirely know what to make of it, but it doesn’t sit well with me.
This is compounded by her incredibly deliberate hand motions and gestures. I get it. She has a theatre degree from Syracuse. She knows how to carry herself on stage. Acting is an excellent foundation for learning stage presence and public speaking, but this is not a spontaneous way that people speak.
The pauses. The hand motions. The emphasis. I don’t buy it.
She’s selling, not sharing (as she always claims).
I happened to start this Gabby Bernstein dissection the same day that I watched Tucker Carlson interview Alex Jones after Joe Biden’s March 7, 2024 State of the Union address. It was interesting listening to Gabby’s speech contrasted by Alex Jones talking about the evils of lying. What Gabby is presenting on stage is part of the culture of lies that we’re not supposed to question. She can’t even be honest about an eighteen minute speech. Why trust her about anything? (Yes, I will keep echoing that sentiment.)
Toward the end of the “How to Be a Miracle Worker” talk for TedxFiDiWomen, we see the first seeds for Gabby’s next book, May Cause Miracles. You’ll begin to notice that she often builds her presentation endings like this. Much like Mel Robbins, there’s typically a catchy phrase that becomes the title of the next book. She also starts scattering them through her interviews, presumably to test the traction with her audience and plant the seeds for the next book she wants to sell them.
But what is most striking is that Gabby ends the Tedx speech and the SuperSoul Sessions speech the same way. Here are clips from both for comparison.
At the end of watching Gabby’s Tedx talk, my dad walked over to me and said, “Screw this stuff! This is what life is all about!! I think that we should get a trampoline for the dogs,” while showing me a video of a dog relishing life as he bounces on a trampoline. He is correct.
Oprah’s Blessing
Gabby goes on to publish three more books in the next three years, all slight variations on her “How to Be a Miracle Worker” TedxFiDiWomen talk.
And then IT happens. In 2016 Gabby secured her spot as a Spiritual ‘It Girl’ with a place on Oprah’s SuperSoul 100 list.
The full list of names is exactly what you would expect. Oprah’s net doesn’t cast all that wide. What’s somewhat fascinating is that almost all record of this event is scrubbed from Oprah’s accounts, despite it being a major publicity push leading up to the release of her book. You can still find references on Danielle LaPorte’s blog and a few other places around the internet. This video on Facebook is one of the few traces I could find coming from Oprah’s sources.
The SuperSoul 100 list was part of the PR for the 2017 launch of The Wisdom of Sundays: Life-Changing Insights from Super Soul Conversations, Oprah’s 2017 book highlighting her SuperSoul Sunday interviews. Marie Forleo and Kris Carr document a bit of the hoopla for the follow up publicity brunch hosted at Oprah’s estate in this Maria Unplugged video.
I don’t want to take up too much real estate focusing on Oprah’s endorsement of Gabby Bernstein, but we need to at least address that Oprah’s not exactly known for her stellar track record of character assessment. At what point do we stop heeding her recommendations?
I have to ask myself, if you have no warning signs going off with someone like John of God, how solid are your instincts? John of God and Weinstein are two major examples of men with whom Oprah had close friendships who have been convicted for horrific sexual abuse on a mass scale. John of God was accused of sexually abusing more than 300 women, many of whom were minors. Meanwhile, it’s hard to put a number to the women intertwined with Weinstein since the culture of silence and repression runs rampant in Hollywood.
Contrast Oprah’s glowing endorsements of John of God with accounts such as the “I Found Healing With A Famed Spiritualist. Then He Was Arrested As A Sexual Predator” HuffPost feature. The internet is rife with stories of people who, in their own words, have hit rock bottom seeking support and wisdom from ‘holy men’ like John of God or Bikram or Deepak Chopra only to discover their predatory tendencies.
It’s a harrowing trend.
But Oprah isn’t the only one with a penchant for endorsing shady spiritual leaders who are actually sexual predators. You’ll note (if you click the link) that the photos and videos have been pulled from this story of how the “miracle man” John of God changed Gabby’s life forever and propelled her on her spiritual journey.
Just like Oprah, it doesn’t stop with a single endorsement. Maybe you prefer Gabby’s statement about her trusted Kundalini teacher Yogi Bhajan.
Then there’s her longtime friendship with Deepak Chopra, another man who used his power to manipulate vulnerable women who came to him for spiritual solace. He and Gabby even did a Global Meditation for Peace together.
Then of course there’s this. We’re going to have to agree to disagree.
One of the things that really struck me while collecting that last round of links and photos is how apologetic many of Gabby’s followers were in the comments section on her post regarding Yogi Bhajan. There are plenty of folks who encourage people to separate the teacher from the teachings. But can we actually do that? Should we? And is that utter hypocrisy?
These predatory spiritual leaders are teaching in such a way that it fuels their pipeline of abuse. The teachings are explicitly meant to manipulate. Sure, there might be some gems of knowledge in there, but they’re mixed with a heavy dose of duplicitous beliefs and lessons. Would we make the same distinction of teacher from teachings about David Koresh and his interpretation of the Bible? Highly doubtful.
Why do we choose to do this in some places but not others?
Bill Cosby. Canceled
Woody Allen. Let him off the hook. We like his work.
Michael Jackson. Canceled.
Salman Rushdie. Let him slide.
The list of careers that lay struggling at the feet of the the #MeToo movement was staggering. What’s more, not all of them were guilty of the accusations launched their way. It gained the momentum and gusto of any modern witch hunt. Cancel, cancel, cancel.
Yet in spiritual realms we’re supposed to separate the work from the teacher? Really? When it has an even more profound impact than watching entertainment?
Weinstein’s films didn’t get canceled nor did the careers who benefited from his activities. Casey Affleck won an Oscar the same year he was sued by two different women for sexual harassment on the set of I’m Still Here. I have no idea what happened on that set and if Affleck is guilty or not. With the reliability of the news cycle, or lack thereof, I think that we could all take a beat before jumping to a whole host of conclusions.
But where this all falls apart for me is that men who were found guilty in a court of law are to be excused for their actions and separated from what they teach. Meanwhile Gina Carano gets booted off of The Mandalorian for nothing more than her set of beliefs. Be consistent.
What this demonstrates is that the influences on Gabby’s spiritual perspective, and the basis of her teachings, are not what you would call clean or loving. Her mentorships are riddled with people who wish to control and abuse — and have been found guilty of such actions.
On some level this isn’t surprising as childhood abuse survivors tend to replay that early dynamic.
At 36 Bernstein first recovered a repressed memory of being abused as a child, which she went on to write about in Happy Days (because of course). We’ll address this at greater length when reviewing her interview with Lewis Howes. My point here is that it’s not unusual for those who were abused to seek out relationships that mirror those early interactions or bring others into that cycle of abuse, which appears to be what is happening here. I want to be crystal clear. I am not saying that this is an inevitability. What I am saying in this specific circumstance, it’s what I observe.
Back to Oprah and her posse.
In May of 2017, Oprah hosted the third season of SuperSoul Sessions and headlined Gabby. Tony Robbins and Glennon Doyle also joined the lineup that year. Previous speakers included Eckhart Tolle, Caroline Myss, Kris Carr, Marie Forleo, Cheryl Strayed, Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson, Brené Brown, Janet Mock, and Elizabeth Gilbert.
You might think that I’m being overly nitpicky with my dissection of Gabby’s SuperSoul Sessions “The Universe Has Your Back” speech — then again you might not. I’ll remind you that Gabby and her teachings are indicative of a whole school of thought that has taken over Instagram, at the very least. It warrants some serious scrutiny. Here goes nothing.
Out of the gate this speech is nuts. I’m going to transcribe it for you in case you don’t care to watch —
New Year’s Day of 2015, I had a plan. My plan was to get pregnant. I had it down. It was perfect. I was going to get pregnant right away in February. I was going to take the entire nine months to write my book, The Universe Has Your Back. And I was going to give birth in the Fall and then have the baby, give birth, submit the book, then take three months off with my baby and go on a book tour. Perfect plan, right? Perfect plan.
The only problem was I wasn’t getting pregnant. Month after month I wouldn’t get pregnant, and I would start counting nine months ahead. I’d start looking at what I had ahead of me. I’d start thinking, okay, I’ve got this speaking engagement. I’ve got this contract I’ve got to deal with. I started canceling those contracts and canceling those speaking engagements.
– Gabby Bernstein, “The Universe Has Your Back” for SuperSoul Sessions
This is presented to us to supposedly be relatable, but I find it to be pure insanity. How crazy controlling does she strive to be? I immediately flashed back to Mel Robbins’ desire to orchestrate every detail and interaction her teenager would have at prom when Mel discusses her “Let Them Theory.”
Even though the rest of the SuperSoul Sessions speech goes on to claim that Gabby’s overcome this level of desire to orchestrate every detail of her life, she hasn’t. I’ve watched a bunch of interviews recorded years after this talk in which she is still locked into this endless loop.
For context, this was in the middle of her career. She had six books on the market, a number of which were New York Times bestsellers, touting the wisdom of divine timing and how everything that happens is divinely guided. Yet here we get to see a glimpse into her actual life. The person she is claiming to be and the real Gabby are not one and the same. Heck, she tried to orchestrate the timing of finishing her seventh book to coincide with her desired time frame of giving birth once she finally became pregnant.
I’m not buying this false play for sympathy. She’s on stage for an incredibly rehearsed event. This talk is clearly memorized (without a fake claim that she tossed her outline this time). It’s for freaking Oprah. I may not care for her, but others bend over backwards to please. This script has been run dozens of times. Those are not genuine tears. We’re meant to feel sorry for her.
Next Gabby explains the need to escape to her “Zen Den” in order to find her peace and quiet. I have no problem with the concept of such a space, but at some point, that shouldn’t be the only way for you to connect to your inner wisdom. Is she not able to tap into this sensation in the real moments of the everyday?
The intention is not to ‘be spiritual’ while in a serene room with perfect conditions. That’s not life.
How do you respond to the slings and arrows of navigating the world? What happens when you’re faced with setbacks and hardships? What’s your reaction when things eventually don’t go your way?
Of course, in the doctrine of Gabby, we’ve brought it upon ourselves. The energy we’re emitting has attracted those turbulent events to us. Life should be nothing but green lights and cartoon birds pulling back our curtains in the morning.
Resistance is not an inherently bad thing no matter how much the spiritual elite try to convince us it is. The reality is that we need a little resistance. It’s the difference between building muscles for bodybuilding competitions versus strength training. Aesthetics versus function. Sitting in your whites, head wrapped in a turban, camped out in your meditation room doesn’t put your practice to the test. Are you able to live it when faced with hardship?
I’m going to play two clips back to back for you again so that we can fully ponder the similarities in how Gabby constructs her language. (You need to do the heavy lifting and click play for yourself.) This goes beyond linguistic tendencies that we all carry. My consulting team used to have impersonation days when we adopted each other’s personal idioms. Gabby is recounting events that occurred years apart using the same order, descriptions, and intonation. That’s unsettling.
These are my raw notes that accompany that section —
My Raw Notes
// Involuntarily moved to her desk // so over exaggerated and stage // there’s a way to talk about all of this without being so melodramatic // they are not mine but I get the paycheck for all of it // she also can’t attribute where they’re coming from // big red flag for me // hey aliens! // language of this spiritual culture or as my dad says, “A cult.” Followed by, “Okay lady, what are you selling?”//
Hold please. I’ll translate them into full thoughts.
First of all, everything about this recounting is so over exaggerated and staged. Gabby’s voice generally grates on me, but this segment is a 16 out of 10 for annoying. Even the Russian judges say so. A story should hold up without all of the overexertion of emphasis. This tone says, “I am superior and guided in ways beyond your mere mortal knowing,” instead of, “This incredible thing happened! Let me share it with you!”
Then there’s the Elizabeth Holmes smile — as if to say, “See how clever I am? I’ll pause so that you can praise me properly. Wait. I’ll even do it again.”
In many ways, you can think of this as Gabby playing a version of Gabby Bernstein onstage. Joan Rivers explained this beautifully in the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work saying that when she’s on stage, she’s playing the comedian Joan Rivers. It’s a version of her crafted for that particular audience. Which is to say that Gabby’s persona is intentional.
Delivery aside, there’s a lot that’s problematic in Gabby’s story about channeling “The Five Steps for Spiritual Surrender” that are the basis for The Universe Has Your Back. The biggest hand clenching, grimace inducing one for me is that she speaks of her intuition as both something internal and external.
Originally Gabby claims that it’s her intuition speaking to her —
And in that alignment, I heard this voice come forward. This voice of my intuition. This voice of my inner wisdom.
– Gabby Bernstein, “The Universe Has Your Back” for SuperSoul Sessions
Then without clarifying that it’s a new voice external to her, she states —
Involuntarily I place my hands on the keyboard of my computer, and my fingers just start typing. And they’re moving and they’re moving. And all of a sudden at the top of the page, the words that were not mine came onto the page. These are the steps for spiritual surrender.
– Gabby Bernstein, “The Universe Has Your Back” for SuperSoul Sessions
She still hasn’t clarified that this is no longer her intuition when she boasts —
Words that were not mine. Ideas that were not mine. Belief systems, guidance, wisdom that was not mine came onto this page. And within that half hour period of time, I channeled “The Five Steps for Spiritual Surrender.”
– Gabby Bernstein, “The Universe Has Your Back” for SuperSoul Sessions
I find this troubling.
In this charged cosmic climate, we need to be able to differentiate our inner voice and inner wisdom from external voices speaking to and through us. If we are channeling something, that call is not coming from inside the house. I mean, if it is, it might well be the killer on the line. And yes, the teen horror movie reference is intentional.
The beings who want us confused on this front are not benevolent.
The malicious voices don’t want us to distinguish what is innately us and what is them. They benefit from muddled origins. Those who are here to support us will help us strengthen our discernment for which voices belong to which beings.
I often think of this like a conductor and an orchestra. To an untrained ear, there’s music. The orchestra is a collection of sound. To the person standing on the podium waving the baton, not only does each instrument ring distinctly, he or she can pick out that the third chair viola is late on the fourth beat of the second measure. Someone of the caliber that Gabby claims to be should be able to tell Marge that she’s late by half a beat and flat on the C-sharp. It’s the gripe I have with Tyler Henry and Theresa Caputo and Anthony William and pretty much every mainstream medium. They haven’t a clue when it comes to the origin or intention of the voices speaking to and through them. Dicey. Dicey. Dicey.
Oof. Boy do the aliens get upset when I lay forth this distinction. Go away. Go away.
I want to pause and make a clarification between not knowing the voices versus not pausing to pick them out one by one. Let me elaborate. If you’ve ever joined me for a live Q&A with the ghosts, you know that we have a whole crowd in attendance, not the living kind. We don’t pause to do roll call because they’ve already been vetted. In this instance, we’re listening to the orchestra as a whole, knowing that each seat is filled by the musician who is supposed to be there. Moving on.
I call foul as Gabby erroneously claims that —
Every single one of us in this room today is trying to control something. You know what I’m talking about? You all know what it is. Maybe you’re trying to control that ring that you’re trying to get on your finger. Or maybe you’re trying to control when you’re going to get that cash in the bank. Or maybe you’re trying to control the outcome of a physical diagnosis.
But all that control and all that manipulation, all that trying to make something happen, is creating resistance. Resistance from the alignment. Resistance from that intuitive voice that is beckoning you all the time. Resistance from your connection to a power far greater than yourself, a magnitude that is within you that you have forgot to listen to because you’ve been too busy focused on what you need to get.
– Gabby Bernstein, “The Universe Has Your Back” for SuperSoul Sessions
So much to say.
This could be straight out of an Abraham Hicks recording. The focus on materialism. The message to surrender. The gross overgeneralization. It’s all there.
Of course, there’s a nice tent revival flair to the delivery. Next thing you know, she’s going to invite people onto stage, slap them on the head, and shout, “You are saved!”
Heck, maybe the voice she’s hearing is the ghost of Billy Graham. Can I get an amen!?
Then there’s the same controlling mindset that we saw with Mel Robbins and her “Let Them Theory.” It’s a call to relinquish control over something you shouldn’t have been trying to orchestrate in the first place. All I hear is, “But Daddy, I want a golden goose!” It’s so juvenile.
I also object to the rhetoric that we’re all doing this. I understand that it’s a tried and true speaking tool to lump us all together and speak as a collective whole. Heck, I’ve done it in this piece. But you know what Gabby, I’m not doing any of what you’re claiming, and I don’t appreciate your projections.
Again, clarification.
Go back to the beginning of her speech and revisit the level of control that Gabby was/is attempting to exact on the universe. There’s next to no trust for what is unfolding. I don’t think that most of us are moving through life like that. So yes, we all have occasional moments of wanting to control outcomes or desiring to will something into existence, but not like this. For Gabby it’s habitual and constant.
I prefer the question, “Are you ready to rummmmmblllllllllle?” but if we must, I’ll entertain (and by entertain I mean throw rocks at) the notion of, “Are you ready to surrender?” as she asks it in the next phase of her presentation. The answer is a firm no.
To whom are you surrendering? We still don’t know who or what spoke to Gabby and provided her with these five rules that are now meant to dictate her life and ours. Again, hard pass. I argue that the universe doesn’t want you to surrender. It wants you to get in tune. It wants you to listen — to take a breath, to activate, to contribute — not surrender.
You know who tells you to surrender? People who wish to control you. To which I say… Cult! Cult! Cult! Cult!
I want to explicitly call out Gabby’s use of the term “reboot” in these ramblings as it’s a term that often goes hand in hand with alien influence. Where she could say something to the effect of sinking deeper into herself or rekindling parts that had laid dormant, she chooses the term reboot. Couple that with the tone of this message and the compassion and love that it’s supposed to have but totally lacks, and everything is at odds. What I hear is anger, anger, anger. Grrrrrrr.
Okay, so if you’ve been itching to know what the “Five Steps for Spiritual Surrender” are, now’s your moment. We’ll address each one individually, but let’s start with an overview.
THE FIVE STEPS TO SPIRITUAL SURRENDER
take your hand off the wheel through prayer
appreciate what’s thriving
recognize that obstacles are detours in the right direction
ask the universe for a sign
when you think you’ve surrendered, surrender more
Take Your Hands off the Wheel Through Prayer
I imagine Gabby driving through life in a student driver vehicle tapping the gas and the break even when she’s not the one driving. She needs to take her hands off the wheel because she’s lurched from the passenger seat to grab it and the car is swerving out of control.
Basically, we’ve already covered this with my earlier comments where it became clear that Gabby has no comprehension of what it’s like to NOT be controlling.
Focus on What’s Thriving
This is again straight out of the Abraham Hicks playbook. Ignore the darkness. Don’t try to stamp out evil. Just go with the flow. What an oversimplification and intentional omission that sometimes you have to face the crap that isn’t working head on.
In some instances, focusing on what isn’t working is a way in which you improve it. Don’t fester or wallow, but do give it focus. Part of having a solutions oriented approach is being able to identify the problem.
Let’s take a step back and get conspiratorial for a moment. Who’s the sponsor of this talk? Oprah. Who’s on board with the globalist agenda? Oprah. Who does it benefit to have malleable people who are super compliant? Oprah. Only kidding. In my best Alex Jones voice, The Globalists.
What you’re being told is that there are people out there who are smarter than you are who can make better decisions than you can moving forward. Don’t try to take control of your life. We’ll take care of it for you. In retrospect, messages like this were a total setup for COVID. We’ll get there. Hang tight.
Obstacles Are Detours in the Right Direction
Everything bad is happening FOR you!! Isn’t that a relief! Whatever you do, don’t resist. Don’t fight back. Passive. Passive. Passive. I go into much greater detail on this with Abraham Hicks. Since Gabby is regurgitating those messages, I’m going to redirect you to the original piece.
Gabby’s neck touch when she says, “We are always in communication with the universe,” is telling. Yikes. She does not believe what she is saying. For as ‘polished’ as this speech is (and by that I mean it’s performed like a Stepford Wife), that motion speaks volumes.
As for the concept of asking for a sign, Gabby’s next segue, I would again like to add some nuance and increase the complexity. We’ll delve into much greater detail on signs in a later section as well. For now let’s focus on this claim —
The universe is always giving us messages. It’s just that we’re not listening. But when we ask, we will always receive. It’s the law. We will receive.
– Gabby Bernstein, “The Universe Has Your Back” for SuperSoul Sessions
Wait. Wait. Wait. Pardon me. Isn’t that — pregnant pause — being controlling? Didn’t we start this lecture saying that’s a bad thing? You’re now trying to control outcomes by receiving a sign.
Let’s also remember that she was a theatre major at Syracuse. Gabby’s nervous tells are so obvious once she’s in an interview setting. Between the neck touches, her hand on her face, and the self-soothing arm rubbing, we know immediately when her words are empty. They’re less frequent on stage, but one certainly accompanies these assertions.
What Gabby is proposing is a transactional relationship with the universe and signs on demand. Talk about taking the majesty of the unknown out of the human experience. It’s waking up on Christmas morning and acting surprised as you open presents that you’ve wrapped for yourself.
These people treat this like they’ve discovered nuclear fusion when really they’ve just dropped Mentos in Coke to make it erupt. It’s not that I think that signs don’t matter. It’s the oversimplified emphasis that people put on them that drives me nuts. Let’s take Gabby’s example of the turkeys.
Gabby’s tearful claim is that turkeys symbolize fertility — spiritually — because Google told her this after she saw a few out of her office window in her rural setting. Awww. Look, I even found a link that confirms that. And maybe we can argue that she was led to that link because reading that turkeys represent fertility is exactly the message that she needed to hear that day. Fine.
That won’t stop me from relentlessly reiterating the point that symbols are not universal and do not mean the same thing to everyone everywhere. The best example of this is one that will get me strikes on most platforms. Read between the lines with me here. Long before it was worn on uniforms in Europe during WWII, it represented sun, fertility, and abundance for certain Native American tribes as well as cultures in India. It’s not uncommon to see it on woven blankets that predate the war.
Yet now when someone encounters it, the first thought is of a dictator sporting a mustache. Why? Because symbols evolve over time. Heck, some cultures intentionally capture them in order to usher in new ideas and have them adopted. Case in point, Christianity stole pretty much every icon and symbol from Greek and Roman life. Funny how God looks like Zeus.
So yes, maybe turkeys represent fertility or nourishment, as the link proposes. That doesn’t mean that turkeys symbolize that to you. When I think of turkeys, my mind goes to Northwoods traffic jams when they’re gathered in the middle of the road or springtime when I can’t figure out what that noise is outside my window. Some of my friends think of giant dents in the front of their cars and increased insurance prices because those things are a doozy when you hit them with your car, making turkeys a warning. Let the symbols take on personal meaning for you.
When You Think You’ve Surrendered, Surrender More
The last step for spiritual surrender is to surrender more. It’s based on a prayer from A Course in Miracles, “Where would you have me go? What would you have me do? What would you have me say? And to whom?”
The premise of this is fairly solid. The issue is that there’s no discernment for what voice is giving you these instructions. You have done ZERO vetting of what is leading you. This could be evil just as easily as it could be God. As my dad and I continue to discuss, the Devil doesn’t come as a scary person. He comes in a helpful form. God wants you to be self reliant and not to depend on Him. Connected, but self reliant.
Surrender doesn’t mean passivity.
The way Gabby or Mel Robbins or a number of these other big name spiritual leaders promote surrender is to let someone else take control. Stop it. Be a collaborator in your own life, not a puppet for unseen forces.
Let’s wrap this section up with a serious and still slightly angry Gabby with her ‘see how serious I am about this. I’m saying it in my forceful voice’ attitude —
As it turns out, the universe had a plan far greater than I did. The plan wasn’t that I was going to get pregnant in the exact moment in time that I expected. The plan was that I was going to learn to mother myself before I could be a mother.
We are living in times where it is required of us to have a spiritual foundation, an anchor, a sense of alignment. If we don’t have that foundation, we will be flailing. We need that connection now, and it is through the “Steps for Spiritual Surrender” that you realign with that connection to the universe, to a higher power of your own understanding. We need it to survive and to thrive.
– Gabby Bernstein, “The Universe Has Your Back” for SuperSoul Sessions
Yep. Yep. Yep. Agree. Agree. Agree. Ohp, there’s the gotcha. THE way to have a solid spiritual foundation is to follow MY five steps — and purchase my book for the low, low price of $19.99. Signed copies on sale today! Don’t forget to stop at the gift shop. Oh, Gabby.
Originally I started these breakdowns because people would ask my opinion of [insert name of big time spiritual leader or celebrity psychic]. What propels me forward with them is the lack of critique I see within circles that believe in the premise of their work.
Translation. What I often find is that the folks who take issue with the names on our list do so because they don’t believe in the overall belief set — ghosts, mediums, psychics, and so forth. When I come across reviews of someone like Gabby, the focus is how everything she talks about is ludicrous. A dismissiveness of the notion of energy and mediumship is at the forefront of the criticism. There’s little distinction between ‘this is all a load of bologna’ and ‘these are bad practices for these legitimate abilities.’
What I’m trying to do is say, if you’re going to chop an onion, here are some ways to do it so as not to lose a finger. What I find is that people say, “I don’t believe in onions.” I believe in onions. I believe in knives. I think that they’re delicious in things — the onions, not the knives. Let’s handle them properly.
I don’t see a whole lot of people saying, “Yes, I believe in the topics she addresses, but here’s why she (or insert other names here) is a charlatan.” If they’re out there and I’m simply not bumping into them, send them my way. I would love to read them.
A voice told me that you should subscribe.
But We Need Judgment
Before we dive head first into my heated opinions on the topic of judgment, I want to remind you that at this point, Gabby has spent close to a decade of her career touting the principles of A Course in Miracles and encouraging people to surrender, surrender, surrender.
Her followers have been urged to listen to whatever voices speak to them with zero discernment for what type of beings might be bending their ears. They’ve been fed the Law of Attraction and told that bad things happening in their lives are because they’re attracting it with their energy, and even when horrific things happen, those are detours on their paths to greatness.
That’s the framework when releasing her next book, Judgment Detox.
I will repeat myself on this in mere moments, but it bears repeating. And repeating. And repeating.
In December of 2018, having released her sixth book that January, Gabby finally got her wish when she and her husband Zach Rocklin welcomed their first child into the world. Proving yet again that if you tell the universe exactly what you want and on what time table, it eventually bends to your every whim. [this is sarcasm]
For as often as she repeated the phrase “mothering herself” during this era, including in her Oprah talk, I am amazed that she didn’t publish a book by this title. Maybe it didn’t receive the traction she desired. Which also makes me wonder, how much of her audience is comprised of moms versus single women? Huh. Things to ponder ever so briefly.
Speaking of things to briefly ponder, we haven’t even touched on Gabby’s husband Zach. The pair married in 2014. At the time, Zach was an investment banker in New York. Which begs the question, was the lifestyle that Gabby portrayed to her followers during her early career one that she enjoyed based on her own work or that of her banker husband?
Most of the time, I would say that this doesn’t matter. Marriage is a partnership and finances are for the couple to navigate privately. However, Gabby is selling an image. She’s telling her followers that if they emulate her, they too can have incredible lifestyles and wealth.
During that time frame, her social media was filled with her designer purchases and outfits of the day. She donned the moniker ‘fashion junkie,’ a less than clever play on the title of her second book, Spirit Junkie. Zach is now the COO for Gabby’s company, but it’s still worth asking who was funding her career in the early days.
Up until the publishing of Judgment Detox, the majority of Gabby’s work was focused on her reinterpretation of A Course in Miracles and regurgitation of the Law of Attraction. It’s incredibly important to remember these underpinnings with their message of surrender, surrender, surrender.
That lays the stage for her next message — eliminate judgment. We’ll delve into why this is so problematic in a moment.
Side Note: The inconsistencies in spelling of judgment are not mine. In some instances, you find the book title spelled Judgement Detox and then in later versions they correct it to the proper American English spelling of Judgment Detox. It’s weird and has been bothering me, so I figure someone else is bound to be annoyed or confused by it.
After showering Gabby with praise that this book is really special, even though all of the others have been too, Marie Forelo reads to us from the introduction of Gabby’s book at the start of the “How to Quit Your Addiction to Judgment” interview —
My fingers are trembling as I begin this introduction. I have a limiting belief on repeat: Who are you to write a book called Judgement Detox? You judge all the time!
I take a deep breath and pull myself together. I have a book deal, a deadline, and a commitment. I’ve got to write this book.
I sit in stillness with my hands on the keyboard. I take a deep breath and continue typing…
I struggle with judgement every day. I judge far and I judge wide. I judge strangers for divergent political views. I judge acquaintances on social media for the comments they make. I judge the way people discipline their children. I judge the girl moving too slowly in the line ahead of me. I judge my husband for not responding to me exactly how I want him to respond. And of course I judge myself for just about everything.
– Gabby Bernstein, Judgment Detox
What’s evident from this interview segment is that Gabby moves through the world condemning the actions of others. Mind you, this is nine years into her career as a self-proclaimed motivational speaker and spiritual advisor. She’s been talking about trusting the universe and surrender for almost a decade at this point. Yet her day to day activity is filled with hostility and a total lack of compassion for others — do as I say, not as I do. And don’t get me started on her false humility.
Again, as with the talk from SuperSoul Sessions, Gabby frames this as though everyone moves through life this way. Far from true. She addresses it as though having such a rampage (to borrow a word from Abraham Hicks) of frustration is typical for the average person. This says volumes about Gabby.
As the interview continues, Gabby states —
It’s not that we give up judgment altogether. It’s that we no longer believe in it. And that’s the miracle, that we don’t believe in it anymore.
I’m sorry, what!?! Way to have your cake and eat it too. Choosing not to believe in something does not remove it from existence, even if you’re Gabby Bernstein. What a ridiculous sentiment. What self aggrandizement. Gabby, you’re not that important that you can erase an entire concept from global consciousness.
Judgment is what keeps you from walking into traffic because you gauge that the oncoming car is approaching too quickly. Judgment is what tells you not to put your hand on the roaring fire because you will get burned. Judgment is what diverts you from taking the job because something felt off about that interview.
Judgment is not inherently bad.
What becomes tricky is when you judge and then believe that the rest of the world needs to draw the same conclusions that you do. Granted, Gabby’s only frame of reference or perspective that she is able to entertain is her own.
Here’s what that looks like in action — I love cabbage and therefore EVERYONE needs to love it. Quilting is the best hobby in the world, what a fool you must be to not want to learn. You get where I’m going with this. It pains me to even type examples such as these because I simply don’t believe them.
Diversity of beliefs and ideas is necessary to keep this world from falling off its axis.
Next in the world of crazy, Gabby asserts the definition of judgment is a separation from oneness.
This is such nonsense. Call me judgy. I’ll take it. Words mean things folks. This is not what they mean.
You’re not Joe Dispenza. You can’t simply make up your own definitions for words. Oh wait, yes she can. Gabby defines her version of judgment as, “A separation from oneness.” Pity that doesn’t at all sync with Miriam Webster or The Oxford English Dictionary (not that those are always reliable with the rewritings in recent years).
Gabby is mistaking judgment for being a judgy bitch — or maybe simply judgmental. Let’s look at some definitions.
Judgment | judg·ment /ˈjəjmənt/
noun: judgment; plural noun: judgmentsThe ability to make considered decisions or come to sensible conclusions. An opinion or conclusion.
Similar: discernment, acumen, astuteness, common sense, good sense, sense, perception, discrimination, wisdom, prudence, understanding, intelligence, awareness, sharpness, powers of reasoning, reason, logic, savvy, know-how, smarts, an opinion or conclusion.
Those synonyms speak volumes. By contrast, here’s the definition for judgmental.
Judgmental | judg·men·tal /ˌjəjˈmen(t)l/
adjective: judgementalof or concerning the use of judgment. having or displaying an excessively critical point of view.
Judgment is a gauge. Judgmental is a criticism. Yet they’re being used interchangeably and leveraged yet again to diminish people. Ironically, the concept of a “Judgment Detox” is in itself judgmental. That feels oddly meta and like we’ll disappear into a hall of mirrors if we examine it too closely.
Nowhere in there does “a separation from oneness” crop up as a valid definition.
The concept Gabby is putting forth is all part of the cult side of these teachings, telling people to surrender. Don’t judge. Don’t question. Don’t resist. If you do, you’re separating yourself from oneness and love.
Well guess what folks, sometimes you need to judge with a side helping of being full on judgmental. Sometimes people are taking advantage of you. Sometimes there is harm in not questioning or judging. Sometimes you need to be the lone voice saying, “This is not freaking loving!!”
Convincing people of these warped belief systems is a surefire way to make them malleable and compliant. It’s how you quash uprisings. It’s why so few in the spiritual communities objected to vaccine coercion during COVID. The cumulative impact of these teachings is crippling. You become a doormat for those who wish to take advantage of your willing nature. It becomes harder to spot evil and those with malicious intentions.
What I find fascinating is that we’re in a time where simultaneously people have little tolerance or understanding for views that don’t exactingly align with their own. There’s minimal room to acknowledge that we all have different upbringings and context and, as such, may approach the same issue with dissenting opinions. AND THAT’S OKAY.
Seeing the world differently does not make those who disagree bad people.
But here’s the rub, while all of that intolerance is happening, we’re being told that anything goes. Whatever you do, don’t criticize. Tell me those aren’t at odds.
I would love to see a social climate where we acknowledge that we all have varying approaches and lead with a curiosity of how or why someone might see the world so differently. Perhaps we could assess people on how they actively treat others instead of a checklist of approved worldviews.
There’s also a distinction between judgment and being a judgy bitch, the latter of which is what Gabby is describing. To sit around and gossip about someone is completely different than to say that you judge something as not the right fit for your life. We’re not all meant to like the same things. Plenty of people wouldn’t want to live in Northern Michigan in the middle of the woods because they judge it as too remote or as not having the amenities they desire.
If you love attending Major League Baseball games, guess what, you’re right. This isn’t the place for you. A four hour drive to Detroit during the season doesn’t sound particularly awesome if that’s one of your favorite pastimes.
I have no desire to live in Chicago or New York and never have. Each city is a wonderful fit for friends in my circle, and I could not be more thrilled for them. Thanks for letting me visit and showing me around town!
Those are all judgments but not condemnations.
On a personal note, one of the most curious things to happen in recent years is that long time friends who have repeatedly told me throughout decades of friendship that I am one of the least judgmental people that they have ever met now believe that I am intolerant. I haven’t changed. It’s their dislike and lack of acceptance of my beliefs that has caused a rift. Riddle me that.
I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time on the actual steps within the “Judgment Detox” because I find the whole thing ludicrous. But if you’re wondering what they are, here you go —
THE 6 STEPS FOR JUDGMENT DETOX
Witness Your Judgment Without Judgment
Honor the Wounds That Live Beneath the Judgment
Put Love on the Altar (Through Prayer)
See for the First Time
Cut the Cords
Bring Your Shadows to the Light (Or, A Willingness to Forgive)
I will take a moment to focus on forgiveness, the last step in the “Judgment Detox” process, as this is yet another concept being bandied about with an angle towards disempowerment.
Forgiveness is a two man operation.
In order to truly forgive, there needs to be an acknowledgment of actions of wrongdoing. If the egregious party sees no reason to apologize or own his or her actions, forgiveness may or may not be warranted. This doesn’t mean that you as the aggrieved party have to hold on to the anger, frustration, or resentment. You can let those things go and still choose not to forgive someone. But rarely does this get discussed.
We saw something really similar with Mel Robbins’ “Let Them Theory” where she conveniently evaded examples where forgiveness kept people in an abusive loop. Particularly because Gabby talks incessantly about trauma, it seems irresponsible of her to not address that there are times not to forgive because you need to get out of the relationship.
Again, in a vacuum maybe this isn’t quite as subversive or disempowering of a belief system. Pair it with surrender and removing the ego and eradicating judgment, and you’re next in line for a membership to NXIVM.
That’s me not so subtly saying that they’re priming you for a cult.
There’s also this thread of quiet and stillness laced through many of the current spiritual teachings. Granted, there are deep historical roots to this. However, what I keep hearing from the ghosts and galactics who chat with me is that we need more action. The reason people are having difficulties with silent meditation practices is that they’re meant to be moving. The frequency match is off.
We’re suppressing the exuberance of our vibrations. It’s the energetic equivalent of playing dumb.
Those who wish to guide us into the next wave of energetic expansion have a terribly difficult time reaching us when we’re thwarting our own brilliance. Tune your instrument, and get off the mat! Go be in the world.
So when Gabby explains that her three steps to forgiveness are a very passive practice, I again hear aliens and cults clamoring to prey on unsuspecting victims. She’s encouraging people to be bystanders in their own lives, just like she was with signs.
Later in her book tour during an interview with Lewis Howes on his The School of Greatness podcast, Gabby mentions in awe that Deepak Chopra meditates for two hours a day. I squinch my face at this. For a man of his ‘spiritual stature,’ does he really need that much time to come into alignment with himself? Daily? That’s troublesome. (Also, nice name drop.)
Get ready for more orchestra analogies.
Imagine if the Concertmaster of the New York Phil took two hours to tune his violin. We would think that’s ludicrous. Perhaps when he was first learning to play, it took ten or twenty or thirty minutes to adjust the pegs and perfect the tension on the strings. As the caliber of the musician improves, the time it takes to ready his instrument decreases — drastically.
Dramatic life events aside, the same should be true of those conscious of honing their own vibration. The muscle memory is there, so to speak. Finding your way back to your equilibrium becomes effortless, not a two hour daily ordeal. You know how to adjust your energetic pegs to make your instrument sing.
An Insidious Inversion
Here’s what I’ve realized about these teachings as Gabby Bernstein so helpfully aggregated them all in a single place. They’re a massive inversion meant to draw you further away from the true light of humanity and the threads that connect us all. They perpetuate isolation and distance you from your own innate knowings.
They open the door for aliens and demons to act in the place of God and the profound wisdom of all creation.
There’s just enough truth in them to sound plausible and keep people hooked. That’s the intention.
I’m going to continue to hammer this point home. It’s not that the entirety of the idea is terrible. If that were the case, people would dismiss them out of hand. There’s enough of a thread of truth that you nod along in agreement and by the time the twist comes, the hope is that you’ve already been hooked.
They prey on your openness and curiosity. Jerks! Those are amazing qualities. I get a little peeved when they’re exploited. Okay, maybe a lot peeved.
I’ve been under more vicious attacks compiling this series than I’ve experienced in ages. The aliens orchestrating this separation don’t want us to see it. If they can keep us in the haze of spiritual politics, our energy is primed for them to steal.
Instead of accessing the entirety of our own energy, bits of it (or huge chunks) are syphoned off to them. In this case, ‘them’ is an elaborate network of beings meant to keep us constricted. It’s tricky to get a specific read on which cohorts comprise this faction.
How do we escape this? Shatter the illusion.
See things for what they really are. Expose the man behind the curtain. Take the mask off to realize, by golly Scooby, it was the innkeeper all along. We see the monster for what it is instead of falling for the glamor.
This isn’t easy. It takes a fair bit of self assurance to question and go against the grain. (If however you are sanding, please always go with the grain or your wood will be ruined.) The cool part is that the more you do it, the easier it becomes. Trusting your internal compass reinforces those energetic pathways. It no longer matters if you’re that lone voice. You know when you’re certain.
These beings want us in doubt and constantly questioning. It breeds the chaos on which they thrive. Let’s pull the rug out from under them for a change.
It’s irrelevant that the most influential voices in the wellness and spiritual space are all regurgitating the same lies. Once you spot them, there’s no turning back. Break free from their coils and harness a brightness and energy that only gains momentum from here.
Can you feel the high fives that I’m giving you through this tiny screen?
A Shift in Beliefs
Gabby followed Judgment Detox by returning to her original themes from A Course in Miracles and the Law of Attraction. You’ll notice that the tagline to Super Attractor is the sentiment whispered to her years ago by either a fellow AA attendee or a higher power — methods for manifesting a life beyond your wildest dreams. You pick which story you believe.
Here’s my big question. When you keep reinventing yourself and your ideas every 1-2 years to sell more books and throw out what came before, where’s the truth? What do you really believe? These aren’t evolutions of ideas. They’re replacements.
What’s even more stunning is that these ideas aren’t even hers. They’re not original. She doesn’t have a single unique idea of her own. Even her posture is stolen from Oprah. Gabby’s not the only one who has adopted this annoying gesture.
Gabby’s latest reinvention, as she primes her audience for her next book, is her retelling (give or take a few key points) of research by Peter Levine, author of Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. Granted, she gives little to no credit to him from what I can tell. Plus she throws out one of his major premises when she begins dividing trauma into ‘“big trauma” and “little trauma.”
Levine, who has been working exclusively in the field of trauma for decades, makes it clear early in his book that the magnitude of an event is not indicative of how it is processed by the human brain to be translated into trauma. Yet here Gabby is categorizing them so that her traumas can be more important and horrific than anyone else’s.
We kick off this interview with Lewis Howes for The School of Greatness with another round of, “You’re great!”
“No!! You’re great!!” And so begins the closed podcast loop of self-congratulatory praise.
I mention this because it’s another aspect of how bad ideas become so prevalent and ingrained, even when we don’t really believe them. The same folks make the rounds and are promoted everywhere. If they receive that much press, they must have something important to say! Not always.
I’m mostly setting aside the inflated use of the term trauma as we move through the topics in this interview. It’s an incredibly important discussion that we’ll save for another day, otherwise we might never reach the conclusion.
Short version. Not everything is trauma. The end.
What I find far more concerning is Gabby’s posturing as a trained therapist. Let’s be clear. She is not. Her credentials are those of a self-help author who can’t seem to get her life on track, an all too familiar trend.
Here’s how Gabby described herself in a 2019 article in The New York Times —
This is a woman who has a bed with silk sheets for her iPhone. But yeah, she’s just like you.
The other overarching trend is that Gabby claims that you can do this all on your own — never mind her twice weekly therapy appointments, four therapists on speed dial, umpteen guru friends on whom she depends, and the whole host of other modalities on which she relies. You’ve got this with her three minute meditation for anxiety. Just scroll through her YouTube thumbnails.
I’m not discounting that people can move through some big stuff alone. Gabby didn’t. Now she wants to profit off of your pain.
For someone who claims to be so in tune with her audience, there’s just a total lack of empathy in her tone and delivery. She’s always selling. Her speech is highly calculated. Her words don’t match her facial expressions.
The body language of this whole interview with Lewis Howes is off. Big time.
I’m inclined to think that’s because it is riddled with lies that make her squirmy. Conjecture? Mostly. Granted, I trust my energetic read on these things.
As the discussion with Lewis continues, Gabby asserts —
You can practice these principles [laid out in Super Attractor], but not because you think you’re going to get something. You have to practice these principles so that you feel good. This isn’t actually a book on how to get things, even though it sounds like it. It’s a book on how to feel good.
This leads to Lewis asking the question, “How do we feel good?”
To which Gabby answers, “The first step to feeling good is to decide to stop feeling bad,” which kicks off an entire conversation about Gabby’s postpartum depression, her endorsement of antidepressants, and the role of choosing better feeling thoughts. We’ll delve into each of these themes more deeply. Trust me.
For now, it’s important to capture in Gabby’s own words where she is in her postpartum experience while already offering advice to her audience. After rattling off a list of ways that people might feel stuck in their own lives and resistant to choosing “to decide to stop feeling bad,” she shares her ‘success’ story —
I’m very proud to say I can speak to this very authentically. As you may have known I had postpartum depression, anxiety, and insomnia [nose touch], and I’m about five months into recovery from that. And at my darkest moment, Mother’s Day, I said I wanted to kill myself.
I’ve had a lot of dark moments in my life. This was the darkest, darkest moment of my life.
When asked why she thinks this happened, particularly because she was so eager to become a mother, Gabby cuts Lewis off mid sentence to explain that, “It’s a biochemical issue.”
I am not an expert in depression. That said, I have lived through multiple horrific bouts of it in my life and know others who have as well. One of my best friends is a licensed therapist and manned a suicide hotline for years. This means I have a lot more conversations about the topics of depression and suicide than most people.
Yes, all of this is anecdotal. However, in NONE of my conversations with people who are intimately familiar with depression do I hear them talk about it in the way that Gabby does in this interview.
My skepticism that Gabby experienced depression is high. I recognize that sounds like an incredibly callus thing to say and that on some level it isn’t my place to gauge. EXCEPT, she is profiting off of this claim. This isn’t her sharing her story to provide context or make people feel less alone in their darkest moments. She is selling her book and her however many steps to magically fix your situation.
That’s exploitation for profit which means that I get to have all of the opinions that I want on this matter. So there. (She really brings out the surly teenager in me.)
It’s also worth noting the timing of John of God’s indictment and Gabby giving birth, both December 2018. Might having your spiritual mentor facing accusations for sexually abusing nearly 600 women have an influence on your mental health in addition to the hormone shifts of birth? Perhaps.
As Gabby continues to explain postpartum depression, she mentions “the mom questions” referring to a series of inquiries made by her doctor to see if any depressive tendencies are present. Gabby mentions questions such as, “How are you feeling? Are you sleeping?” My ears perked up hearing her discuss the postpartum screening questions administered in the exams within the first six weeks after giving birth.
Why? That specific questionnaire has been on my radar as I’ve been connecting some dots about the history of Valium, Zoloft, and Prozac that laid the groundwork for the marketing manipulation that caused the Fentynal and Oxy epidemic. It’s frightening. They’re all connected. Again, we’ll save that discussion for another day.
Just like Purdue Pharma invented the pain rubric to sell more Oxy, Pfizer crafted a series of diagnostic questions that would lead doctors to prescribe more of their product, Zoloft.
Want to know who developed those screening questions? The marketing team for Zoloft.
What’s incredibly telling in Gabby’s story of her postpartum depression is that the defining moment when she decided to get help wasn’t because she was anxious to the point of not being able to sit in the front seat of a car with another person, dealing with constant panic attacks, crying at parties, or agoraphobia.
Nope. It was because of a missed work event, not part of her personal life. The tipping point was losing the revenue. It’s always about the money. That’s the unspoken part.
Here’s her recounting of that era of her life in The New York Times article —
Interestingly, the article claims that Zoloft is “safe for breastfeeding” even though many other mothers have reported otherwise to the point that a class action lawsuit was launched against Pfizer for injuries in utero due to Zoloft. While the lawsuit was dismissed, you have to wonder just how safe Zoloft actually is while breastfeeding.
Gabby recounts the same story to Lewis Howes —
I’ve never missed an event in fifteen years. I’ve got to do something about this. So then I got in touch with the psychiatrist. I went on antidepressants. Seven self-help books, right? And here I am. I had to. It saved my life. I would have died. I would have killed myself. 100%.
She then reels it in saying that someone would have intervened before it escalated to that and that her therapist stepping in was exactly that.
I hadn’t realized until reading the article in The New York Times that Gabby had no contact with the psychiatrist prior to their first encounter where, on the spot, she is given a diagnosis and prescribed Zoloft. This never comes up in her numerous podcast interviews. The vagueness around the topic leads you to believe that it was one of her long standing therapists who made an observable change in her demeanor and actions.
For me, that unfolding of events makes the suddenness in Gabby’s shift in belief system from homeopathic remedies to pharmaceuticals that much more suspect and bizarre.
What’s incredibly striking about this exchange, as Gabby relays it to Lewis, is Gabby’s recounting of her therapist telling her that, “Your tools aren’t working.” All the while Gabby was in two therapy sessions a week and talking to sleep doctors while practicing meditation and yoga. Perhaps it was more the person than the tools.
Fine. I get it. Sometimes we’re not equipped to handle the curveballs that life throws our way.
But here’s what’s missing from this discussion that I also haven’t seen elsewhere — an apology. At no point does Gabby acknowledge that if her tools failed her, perhaps they failed her audience and readers as well.
She again discusses the need to forgive, not in this context, but doesn’t own up to her role in the dynamic. Gabby made millions exploiting people’s struggles and insecurities promising them steps that would eradicate the difficulties of life. Yet she can’t even deliver that for herself.
You’ll also note that there’s no mention of the Law of Attraction and that by her own rules she’s attracting this into her life. Yes, later in the interview she reframes this and claims that she went through this dark experience so that she could better assist others (and make a few more bucks on another book).
Clearly this doesn’t sit well with me. It’s that same air of superiority that her struggles aren’t like everyone else’s. There’s a point later in the interview where she explicitly states that others couldn’t have weathered what she did. Bite me. Get off your high horse and scrounge up some humility.
Let’s resurface my video discussing the various dynamics in the self-help and spiritual spaces. The question I ask is, are you sharing your story or are you preaching your way to do it while claiming that’s the only way?
In her interview with Tom Bilyeu of Impact Theory, Gabby speaks about the timing of going on medication “right when I was about to launch my first self-help book” so flippantly. The giggle. Oh, how funny. It’s not.
At the point she was contemplating taking her own life, she was launching Super Attractor: Methods for Manifesting a Life Beyond Your Wildest Dreams. How at odds is that?
At the time of her Lewis Howes’ interview she was only five months down the road from what she described as her “darkest, darkest moment.” Gabby has no business offering advice to anyone on this subject matter.
While we’re on the topic of mediation (one of Gabby’s tools that wasn’t working), let’s address Transcendental Meditation (TM) since it’s an integral tool in Gabby’s practice that she describes as transformational.
Bill Clinton, Hugh Jackman, Jerry Seinfeld, Ellen DeGeneres, Martin Scorsese, and Arianna Huffington are all featured prominently on the David Lynch Foundation website, an organization dedicated to TM, and like Gabby, were trained there. Thrillist actually does a pretty solid job of describing the trend and the massive celebrity following in their article “Inside the Blissed-Out, Tight-Lipped, Spiritual Movement That Has Hollywood Obsessed.”
I’ll add my two cents by saying that I don’t trust what comes through when Lynch is at the helm. With warped movies like Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive that Lynch writes and directs, I would not be surprised in the least if all sorts of malevolent beings come through with the techniques that he sells.
All for the low, low price of $1,000 to receive your own secret mantra. I wonder if each mantra correlates to a different dark entity?
Back to our main conversation.
The interview between Gabby and Lewis Howes came out prior to COVID (October 2019), and I remember watching it at the time. During that era, it never occurred to me that people were covertly or overtly paid by pharmaceutical companies to push certain drugs, other than the reps themselves.
Looking at this having experienced the incredible lengths that Pfizer went to pay influencers and celebrities to endorse the vaccines, I now wonder if Gabby was getting a cut from one of the major players in the industry to push antidepressants. She’s doing exactly what we saw happen with influencers and celebrities with the vaccines. It would explain the total 180 of going from a homeopathic mindset to endorsing antidepressants full stop.
Zoloft is owned by Pfizer.
The Crime of the Century, an HBO documentary on the role of Purdue Pharma in the opioid crisis and its promotion of OxyContin for chronic pain, paints a very clear picture of the dynamic between Big Pharma, pharmaceutical reps, doctors, patients, and the general public as well as the marketing dollars behind all of that. Not for a minute should we believe that this is an isolated dynamic.
I’m still hung up on the body language and condescending tone of delivery from Gabby. It’s out of sync with the sentiments she shares. Plus, there’s a heck of a lot of anger coursing through her words, particularly when she defends her own position —
And of course these things are so overprescribed, and I want to really acknowledge that. I don’t think that people should just take meds because they’re sad… But if you’re depressed, if you are suicidal, if you are having insomnia and panic attacks, there’s a time and season for that kind of support.
Okay. Maybe. But this still begs a much more nuanced conversation.
Where in this discussion is the mention that SSRIs are acting as chemical castration and creating a rise in asexuality?
Where do they discuss that class action lawsuits are being lobbied against Zoloft because women who took it while pregnant were giving birth to children with clubfoot?
Where does it talk about the marketing dollars used to invent new diseases like PMDD to sell Prozac in a reworked package because the patent was about to expire?
Are these drugs life saving or are they kicking the can down the road to create different problems without ever resolving the underlying issues?
What about the people who were depressed but only began experiencing suicidal ideations or tendencies after taking such pills, particularly Zoloft?
There are important conversations to be had.
In the next segment, while Lewis shares about his own childhood trauma, Gabby sits there with an attitude of — mmm hmmm mmm hmmm. I’ve been in therapy two times a week. I’m now an expert on this. I can talk about your trauma for you. I find her insufferable in this exchange. Yes, more so than usual. Her body language is so smug.
She’s put herself on a pedestal for so long, ten years at this point — I have all the answers. Follow me. And she looked down on those who did struggle. Yet now she says in her own words that her techniques didn’t work.
Then in the next breath, she claims to have it all figured out again and sits there pretending to be an expert when she’s still in the thick of it herself — I’m not recovered, but I’m going to talk about all of this as though I am.
Oh, and buy my new book! One word. No.
For those who aren’t familiar with the backstory, in recent years Lewis Howes has started sharing his experience of childhood sexual abuse. Read about it in his own words here.
But wait! Gabby’s trauma and abuse are far worse than Lewis’ childhood experience. Just ask her!
Still not letting Lewis get a word in edgewise as he tries to include his path through trauma in the conversation, Gabby jumps in with even more unsolicited advice and how her situation is clearly different than his as she explains —
Even just saying out loud, “I’ve been sexually abused.” I said that in The New York Times, the most recently, and I had so much shame about that article coming out… but, if anyone’s listening, don’t say it until you’re ready to say it because if you’re still holding all that shame, people will feel that shame in your experience.
Right. Right. Again, we see Gabby do explicitly what she then tells the listener not to do. It’s brave and bold and beautiful for her to talk about her situation while still in shame, but she warns everyone else against voicing their story if any speck of shame still exists. Here’s the article she mentions. It’s the same one that talks about the bed for her iPhone that I referenced earlier.
In the article she states —
Some of my struggles fall into that vast category known as unspoken shame,” she said, referring to her realization, in 2016, that she had been sexually abused as a child. “Real shifts occur when we stop chasing wellness and become brave enough to look deeper.
– “Gabrielle Bernstein Loves a Routine,” TheNew York Times
Pardon my choppiness in weaving multiple concepts together here. I want to address the topic of Gabby’s lack of childhood memories, but in order to do so, we also have to address her terrible take on trauma. It gets messy.
That’s kind of the point though, isn’t it?
If we take any of these ideas as a stand alone, they’re not solid. Combine them into a single worldview from which someone operates, in this case Gabby Bernstein, and it’s no wonder that she’s struggling through life.
To say that her tools aren’t working ignores the human component. It’s not the nail’s fault if someone doesn’t know how to wield a hammer.
Some people move through life needing none of these tools to function and adapt. Others are ill equipped no matter how stuffed the toolbox, again Gabby. All that to say, maybe it’s not about mediation not being effective but is about the underlying worldview that resides within the meditator.
I love the body language when Gabby starts reframing —
I think that if we start to look at the difficult times in our lives and appreciate them, and also recognize them as a learning device. Thank you alcoholism or thank you fear or thank you drama in my life right now because you’re revealing to me what I need to heal.
Lewis’ crossed arms. His throat clearing. Gabby doubling down on her stance.
Gabby’s assertion that, “We’re all traumatized. Everybody. Everybody that’s walking through this world. Every human being.” His laugh. Her qualification. She’s pissed he didn’t agree.
“They may not have had to have trauma like we’ve had, but they’re walking through life feeling unsafe.”
Lewis clarifies and offers specific examples, “They may not have had sexual abuse or a father that abandoned them or were adopted.”
Gabby interrupts to insert —
No. But maybe their teacher told them they were stupid or maybe they got lost one day in the parking lot when they were a kid and didn’t find their mom.
Listen to her voice rise during this defense. She needs him to believe her. She needs him to acknowledge that we’re all traumatized and moving through this world in fear.
I don’t think we are. We’re not all walking through the world traumatized. Sure, we’ve all experienced traumatic events on some continuum, but it’s not all bonafide trauma.
To me, this is the middle class white woman race to victimhood.
What’s the point of all of the therapy and other various modalities if it’s not transmuting or metabolizing the trauma. We’re not meant to hold onto it forever. Process and release. That might take years for some and moments for others. Regardless of the time and the method, we’re not meant to walk around with it for a lifetime.
She continues —
These subtle moments, or as A Course in Miracles says, the moments that we detour into fear. They call it the descent from magnitude into littleness, and we then create this form of ego, which is a separate mind. Separate from God. Separate from love. Separate from that freedom. And it builds up a pretense around us.
You know the thing about a detour right? It still returns you to your original path. A Course in Miracles presumes that we’ve taken a left turn into oblivion. I much prefer the belief that we falter and get back up. Take a misstep and find our footing again. THAT is the incredible nature of the human experience.
Also, did Gabby really just compare childhood sexual abuse to being lost in a parking lot or being told you are stupid?
I recognize that these can all be internalized as trauma, go back to my citing of Peter Levine’s work, but wow. Again, how dismissive. In one breath she says it’s all trauma and then turns around and labels it as trauma with a big T and trauma with a little t. Hers, of course, is the significant kind of trauma.
Here’s the other thing, we need conflict and arduous experiences. They shape us and build resilience. I don’t think that we need to go so far as to say, wow, these were incredible blessings to happen in my life because look how much stronger I am for them. We can acknowledge that they were crap. Our fortitude and character guide us through.
We’ll come back to the bubble wrap generation and their crippling anxiety in a future section. Abigail Shrier and Jonathan Haidt are both doing some interesting work on this topic.
Plus! Plus! Plus! How often is this crap thrown in our path as an attack or a deterrent? Waaaaaay too often. In which case, the proper response is screw you! I’m not backing down. So no, it’s not all there because we need to heal. As I always say, evil’s gonna evil. Sometimes it’s as uncomplicated as that.
We see a similar dynamic play out in Gabby’s Impact Theory interview around the topic of trauma.
This interconnects because as Gabby excitedly readies herself to discuss the remembrance of her childhood sexual assault, watch her demeanor shift. She begins with the assertion we just heard —
I really want to go there because everyone is walking around traumatized. Right? Let’s be real. Every single one of us has trauma that’s dictated the path of our life.
Wow. No. We are not all walking around traumatized.
Sure there might be some traumas or traumatic moments that have shaped us, but there are just as many joyous ones for most people. Yes, there are outliers to both camps.
I also can’t get over her smile when sees the opportunity to delve into all of this. It’s eerie.
This again misses the point that all of these tools are meant to help us move through trauma so that we are no longer weighed down by it. Many of you share stories with me of incredible things that you have put to rest in your lives so that those very real traumas aren’t dictating how you move through the world.
I feel the energetic stillness in you as you relay horrific experiences that no longer hold an energetic or emotional charge for you. It’s absolutely brilliant. Those events are not currently dictating your life.
Her interview with Tom Bilyeua is a perfect example of Gabby and her pseudo-psychobabble. She’s sat through enough therapy to do a poor impersonation of a therapist. That theatre degree is failing her.
I also have to laugh listening to her talk about kids and how fragile they are. Have you ever had those moments where a group of adults is watching children play and one of the kiddos bites the dust? The crowd gasps. Silence falls over them. Unphased, the kid pops back up and carries on with her day.
There are also the moments where the child carries on only to burst into tears as a reaction to the concern of the adults. She realized that she’s supposed to be in pain based on their behavior.
After a brief mention of how kids tend to dissociate because life and trauma is more than they can handle, Gabby tells us, “I have no memories of my childhood. Zero.”
I love that Tom Bilyeu pushes back on this, asking, “Up to what age?”
Gabby responds, stammering —
Really, I mean, even, I really don’t even remember much from high school. But, but, but, but mainly the infant to fifteen or whatever it was. Right?
This does fly against other accounts of Gabby discussing her upbringing. It would have been great to see Bilyeu inquire further. This lack of memory seems significant to discussion. Just saying.
She moves on —
And I always had these sort of imprinted memories of like, visuals or like the closet, just sort of imprints that when I thought about them, I would be like, my body wouldn’t lie. My body would be like wooo, we’re not going there. You know? [hair flip] And then I had all of these different symptoms — drug addiction, I had work addiction, TMJ, gut issues, chronic pain in my neck.
Uh, these are all trauma symptoms. Okay? And worst of all, this desperate need to be in control. Okay? Because if I was in any way feeling out of control, I wouldn’t feel safe. I had a feeling that I couldn’t trust anyone. Okay? So there’s more. There’s more than that, but those are the big ones.
This is the most unpolished and choppy that I’ve heard Gabby in the countless hours of watching her speeches and interviews.
Does anyone with more knowledge on these matters have any insights here? She’s so fake in a multitude of other ways that I don’t trust it, but I also recognize it’s not entirely for me to question — except it is because she’s profiting off of her story. So when there’s a book and a speaking tour involved, we get to question.
Then there’s the recall of the forgotten memories —
That night I had a dream where I remembered being a child having sexual trauma, and then I remembered being an adult confronting it. And when I woke up, it was the most real experience I’ve ever had in a dream where I woke up and was like, that happened. And what did I do? I said, hell no. I am not looking at that. Goodbye. Hell no. And then ultimately what happened was days later I remembered it in a therapy session.
Which brings us to another tangent. Read between the lines as you see fit.
I want to go on a little tangent. This is not about Lewis Howes or Gabby Bernstein directly. It’s meant to address a greater cultural phenomenon and again ask some questions that I’m not hearing others voice.
Many people in my life have experienced sexual assaults, a number of them as children. These atrocities are far more prevalent than we may wish to acknowledge. With accounts being as common as they are these days, are all of them true?
Stick with me. I swear that I’m not being heartless.
During the eighties and early nineties, a rise in suppressed and then recovered childhood abuse memories swept the nation.
Ethan Watters, co-author of “Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria,” raises some excellent questions as he explains the repressed memory phenomenon in his opinion piece for The New York Times. A lot of what he discusses sounds awfully familiar.
Here’s the CliffsNotes version. (But seriously, this whole article is well worth a read.)
In the late eighties and early nineties, therapists claimed that they could help retrieve repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. Obviously accusations of this nature destroyed families and communities. The real kicker is that many of them were false. Memories were being implanted by the therapists.
Lists of the symptoms that supposedly indicated repressed abuse often went on for pages in these texts. E. Sue Blume’s book “Secret Survivors” listed over 70 symptoms indicative of repressed abuse. The psychologist Renee Fredrickson’s book “Repressed Memories” describes over 60.
Do you have trouble trusting your intuition? Do you neglect your teeth? Have joint pain? Do certain foods nauseate you? Do you sometimes space out or daydream?
If you have some of these warning signals, “you probably do have repressed memories,” wrote Dr. Fredrickson. In their books and papers, therapists described themselves as clever detectives searching patients’ lives for unexplained emotional responses or feelings, which might be the first sign of hidden pasts.
– Ethan Watters, “The Forgotten Lessons of the Recovered Memory Movement” published in The New York Times
Why do such a thing? Money. Notoriety. Power.
If you make it to the end of Watters’ piece, you’ll note that he ties the looping of symptom pools (as he calls them) of the eighties and nineties into what we’re seeing on social media today.
What was truly fascinating, in a very dark way, was that these claims would spread within friend groups — the desire for belonging runs deep — which made these webs of destruction all the greater.
Across history, patients have shown themselves willing to adopt their healers’ beliefs and manifest expected symptoms accordingly. Doctors and other health professionals can unwittingly engage in what’s been called symptom amplification by focusing on and legitimizing certain symptoms and ideas and ignoring others. Through this process, cultures develop what the historian Edward Shorter calls “symptom pools” — behaviors that healers at a given time and place understand to be a legitimate communication of suffering.
Healers have always been key players in identifying and broadcasting which symptoms or beliefs are valid, creating an interplay among themselves, their patients and the culture at large. The philosopher Ian Hacking calls this the “looping effect” — the process by which emotional distress or unusual sensations are shaped and channeled by social reactions and diagnostic labeling, which, in turn, dramatically affect the course and expression of the illness.
– Ethan Watters, “The Forgotten Lessons of the Recovered Memory Movement” published in The New York Times
Ultimately the trend faded out as therapists retired or had their credentials pulled. However, I posit that the popularity of ADHD and anxiety diagnoses as well as the transgender movement in adolescence is a new wave and iteration of similar themes. Add to that the popularity that everything is now trauma. Culturally, we may have made things even worse.
Recently, I spent an afternoon watching various TikTok channels under the hashtags #recoveredmemory and #dissociativeidentitydisorder. The ideas and themes I heard, mostly from young adults, were disturbingly familiar. Belief in memory repression and the idea that the mind can split into dozens of distinct personalities are alive and well.
Across social networking sites, I also found a maelstrom of information, opinion and conversation about mental health topics, including Tourette’s syndrome, gender dysphoria, attention deficit disorder, self-harm, eating disorders, anxiety, depression and suicide. The internet as we know it didn’t exist during the rise of recovered memory therapy, but it is a powerful cultural force now and may be ground zero for the creation of new symptom pools, new looping effects and new ways of being.
What takes place on social media will, no doubt, influence what develops during private therapy sessions. Effectively treating this new generation will require an understanding of how culture is once again shaping the symptoms of patients and the certainties of healers. Without that knowledge, mental health professionals will risk engendering new hysterias that they can neither control nor cure.
– Ethan Watters, “The Forgotten Lessons of the Recovered Memory Movement” published in The New York Times
Oh, by the way, a lot of the methodologies used in the eighties and nineties are the same ones we see in popular self-help and New Age therapies. As with all things, in the right hands, they can be powerful tools, but it all depends on the practitioner.
Therapists used relaxation exercises, age regression, dream interpretation, psychodrama, sodium amytal and hypnosis to help clients visualize abuse. All of these techniques, we know now, are much more likely to distort memory than to enhance recall.
– Ethan Watters, “The Forgotten Lessons of the Recovered Memory Movement” published in The New York Times
Two things can be mutually true. Exploitation and abuse of children exists on a far bigger scale than our hearts and minds can handle. Some of the people claiming recovered memories may not actually have them. It’s complicated.
There’s a ton of child abuse happening that’s being swept under the rug. But in this ‘victim as social currency’ landscape, I think we need to at least examine the possibility that not all accounts are true. With things being what they are, I can also see the implanted memories being a tool to muddy the waters and distract or detract from the legitimate cases.
And how does that play into the industry of therapy and pills on demand?
These topics are heavy and somewhat difficult to explore in this medium. In the same way that I’ve never been on the “Believe All Women” bandwagon because women can lie, I don’t think that we can take every assault story at face value.
The gravity and definition of assault, like so many other words, appears to be shifting. In the same way that false rape accusations disenfranchise those who have actually been raped, so do manufactured occurrences of assault. While potentially unpopular, I think we need to ask some questions.
Back to Gabby. Let’s pick up where we left off with her interview with Lewis Howes as she continues to discuss her postpartum depression and how none of her tools or past spiritual principles were working and that medication, Zoloft specifically, was the only solution. She brushes that all off with a swipe across her forehead and hair adjustment to refocus the interview on selling her book. Her press training really stuck —
The point is, I had to decide to feel better. And so every single day when I would wake up, once I knew I had a diagnosis and once I was on a healing path…
Then Gabby can tell you how to do it. It’s this language. I want to throw things at the screen. So pretentious. So above it all. I want to shake her.
She’s incredibly disconnected from herself and her body. And yet, she sits there purporting to have all of the answers — AGAIN. She isn’t even through this experience. She’s fresh in it. Yet she’s already written a book about it with a chapter titled “Choose Again,” which oh by the way is a direct steal from Abraham Hicks and choosing a next best feeling thought and a next best feeling thought and a next best feeling thought.
To be fair, she does eventually give credit saying, “This is very influenced by Abraham Hicks which is mentioned 23 times in that book.” So if you’re wondering if these people are all controlled by the same aliens, the answer is yes.
For more on that, I have an extensive highlight on the dangers of the teachings of Esther and Abraham Hicks.
I’m floored by how terrible Gabby is at providing examples of better feeling thoughts considering how thoroughly she prepped her talking points for her book tour.
While I’m very down on Abraham Hicks and the Law of Attraction in general, I know the power of finding gratitude for the small moments that are working when you’re in the thick of it.
During the months when I was experiencing 8-11 hours of full body paralysis daily and couldn’t adjust my limbs on my own or even control my eye blinking, I found things to appreciate — the birds landing on the feeder at my window, my folks loving me unconditionally and caring for me, Doozer lying with me on the bed, a homemade quilt covering me, a roof over my head, my ability to breathe independently.
This outlook kept me afloat.
When you’re in those moments of all caps STRUGGLE, you’re not thinking about a book or a podcast. Those are too removed from you. Who cares what Lewis Howes has to say when you’re focused on survival.
Gabby continues, “We attract what we are.” Pardon my language, but screw you. (I edited myself for less profanity.) So my mom’s death is my fault because I’m a terrible person and attracted that? You can take your Law of Attraction and shove it.
I go on about this extensively in the Abraham Hicks breakdown, but ugh. The whole notion in the Law of Attraction (or the Prosperity Gospel on which it’s based) that your value is in the quality of life experiences that you’re attracting gripes my cookies. Crap situations in life are not always your fault.
You can be bright and exuberant and joyful and still have terrible things happen. Bad things happen to amazing people.
Also, by that principle, what an awful person Gabby must be that she attracted suicidal ideations. That’s such a harsh and unyielding premise. And it simply isn’t true.
I talk about this concept at much greater length here.
Let’s add a little nuance yet again to explain why the Law of Attraction has a tendency to resonate with people and take hold in their belief system. At a surface level, it’s in essence the Golden Rule, do unto others what you would have them do unto you. I like when it’s defined as reciprocity.
Shower people with kindness, and you’ll find them reflecting that back to you.
But guess what? Some people will still be jerks. That’s not a reflection on you or an indication that you’re putting the wrong energy into the world.
At this point in the interview, we paused and my dad commented, “These people are children.” And yet they’re touted as spiritual and self-help experts. Leaders! Gabby was on Oprah’s whatever it’s called list.
The profundity of the obvious — we see this a lot in podcast circles. Did you know that water is wet? No! Tell me like that thought has never occurred to me before. I both attribute this and credit it with the dumbing down of our society. The adolescent nature of these conversations lauded as profound sets the bar lower than it should be. Our education system is also not off the hook.
I love watching these terrible videos with my dad, not because I enjoy some perverse torture, but because he has such a distinctly different angle on them. He’s not their target market. None of this information is tailored to him. He couldn’t fill out a Buzzword Bingo card with terms if he tried. Well, maybe now he can after I’ve made him watch hours of this drivel.
It speaks to the echo chamber that can develop around these concepts. We come to accept them because suddenly they’re everywhere. We’re inundated with them. That’s how propaganda works.
I thought about treading lightly here, but nah. We’re a nation of overmedicated individuals, and it’s only getting worse. As Gabby and Lewis discuss how there shouldn’t be a stigma around taking antidepressants and that, “God works through medication. God works through doctors,” I find myself thinking, yeah, but we need to start asking more questions.
I mentioned this before, but it bears repeating.
Are we going to talk about the side effects of any of these things? SSRIs and the impact they’re having on asexuality? Zoloft and the Class Action lawsuit against them for causing clubfoot? The continued rise in anxiety despite doling out antidepressants and ADHD meds like they’re Tic Tacs?
If we’re going to define drugs as lifesaving, I want someone to define the specifics around that term for me. And what are all of the other questions that we’re not allowed to ask?
What’s even more striking is that this embracing of medication is such a 180 from where Gabby had been, relying on mediation and homeopathic remedies up until this point — with no trail of breadcrumbs leading us to the change of heart. Yes, she explains hitting rock bottom with postpartum depression, but is there really an acknowledgement that her entire view on health and medicine changed in a moment?
She describes it as —
I was so grateful that there was just something that would give me relief. I ran [to the pharmacy].
Which also discounts ALLLLLLLLL of her previous work.
In essence she’s telling us that all of this stuff that she’s been selling and making money off of for over a decade didn’t even work for her. Explain to me why we should listen to another word she says?
Plus, her eyes say she’s lying. If she were so grateful and happy, she would be smiling or at least showing some genuine emotion. Her words and body cues don’t match. Talk to anyone who has lived through severe depression. The act of filling a prescription does not miraculously change everything. That’s not how that works.
But don’t worry, she experienced all of this so that she can “be a spiritual voice for this.” Translation, Gabby plans to make money off of writing a book about it.
If God works through medication (which He may, but so do aliens) that would explain Gabby’s stance on the COVID vaccines —
Sounds an awful lot like Abraham Hicks. This was the segment that made me wonder how much the pharmaceutical companies were paying Esther Hicks to endorse them.
Do you think that either Gabby or Esther Hicks would acknowledge the increase of more than four million people on Disability since the COVID vaccines hit the market? Or did those with vaccine injuries bring it upon themselves because the Law of Attraction says that’s what matched their energetic frequency? You see how that belief system can be cruel.
And oh by the way, the nature of most of those disabilities isn’t recognized by the government which means that the majority of Disability claims of that nature at best are taking 18-24 months to be approved and at worst are being denied. So what are the real numbers of vaccine related injuries?
But yeah, God works through medication.
Here’s my issue. No one flinches if you extol the virtues of pharmaceutical medicine. (Yes, we do in this little corner of the internet, but we’re unusual.) But the moment you question the validity and safety of that viewpoint based on personal experience, you’re silenced or told that you’re crazy. This isn’t speculation. [scrolls through DMs]
I’ve had an adverse reaction to every medication that I’ve ever taken. EVER. The antidepressants that were prescribed to me in high school wreaked havoc on my system for another twenty years. An allergic reaction to Valium ravaged my nervous system, and I’m still dealing with the fallout eight years later. As a child, instead of Benadryl making me sleepy, I reacted as though someone had given me a quadruple shot of espresso laced with speed.
But I was told again and again that my body was reacting incorrectly or that what I was experiencing was impossible.
I have strong issues with Big Pharma, to put it mildly, and only become more jaded as I dig deeper. Each layer of research uncovers that the destruction is intentional, not an unforeseen byproduct. I would again point you toward The Crime of the Century and Purdue Pharma’s knowledge and role in the opioid crisis.
I’m not saying that anyone has to agree with me, but my view is that pharmacological medicine does far more harm than good. That is my experience. That is my research. Yes, there are exceptions to that, but they’re the edge case not the norm, particularly when we focus on depression and anxiety.
I mentioned earlier the through line between Valium, Prozac, and Zoloft and how each one laid the groundwork for the next. The popularity of those drugs was driven by marketing, not efficacy.
Today we see the same thing with the opioid crisis. OxyContin was introduced to the market as “safe and effective.” Where have we heard that one before? Purdue knew full well that it wasn’t and didn’t care. Oh the damage it has done.
Concern for patients is not what’s driving medical care, and it isn’t relegated to only the drugs that I’ve listed.
Plenty of my friends still believe in the validity of the healthcare system. That’s their experience. We don’t have to see eye to eye on this one. This goes back to that whole judgment versus judgmental conversation.
Last month, I went to see a specialist for the first time in four years. He told me that most doctors will think that I’m crazy and psychosomatic and those who don’t won’t want to work with me because my condition and symptoms are so complicated, and I quote, “I’m more trouble than I’m worth.”
Kudos to him for his honesty, but you can see how I might be disillusioned with the whole system, particularly since this is one of many such stories. See the upcoming section on profit motives.
You know who I didn’t expect to be a voice of reason when it came to pharmaceutical drugs? Jillian Michaels. Here she is on Bill Maher passionately discussing the side effects of Ozempic that no one is supposed to acknowledge. How often do you hear someone mention the inevitable plateau of many of these drugs?
Meanwhile, Gabby cavalierly says that —
For anyone that’s on it for their entire life, God bless you. If you feel good, and you’re getting the support you need to be free and do deeper work.
This ignores the deeper implications that those companies want lifelong customers so that they can continue to make billions off of people’s misery — never mind the cycle of chasing new symptoms with more drugs for their additional profits.
Subscribing to the mentality that one should or could be on antidepressants for the rest of her life is giving power to the victim status and abdicating any responsibility of one’s own actions.
And we haven’t even dipped our toe into the research that has come out in recent years that the accepted knowledge about serotonin function was wrong.
In today’s culture, ADHD and anti-anxiety drugs have picked up where antidepressants left off. Or rather, they’ve been added to the mix to expand the reach of Big Pharma, with some clever repurposing of expiring patents.
No longer do these companies need to rely on print ads or television commercials. Individuals are pushing them on each other, some covertly paid while others do it voluntarily. You can’t open social media or read a blog without having someone extol the virtues of how one of these medications changed his or her life.
This is being pushed on us in all sorts of places. Here are a few that come to mind —
She even shares her dosage.
Mari Andrew’s piece even includes a handy link to “The 8 Best Medications for OCD.” How convenient.
I want to revisit a line from Ethan Watters’s piece, “The Forgotten Lessons of the Recovered Memory Movement” —
The internet as we know it didn’t exist during the rise of recovered memory therapy, but it is a powerful cultural force now and may be ground zero for the creation of new symptom pools, new looping effects and new ways of being.
– Ethan Watters, “The Forgotten Lessons of the Recovered Memory Movement” published in The New York Times
Sounds an awful lot like what we’re seeing with the rise in late in life diagnosis of ADHD, OCD, depression, and anxiety disorders.
Except this isn’t a question of the chicken or the egg. We can trace the roots back to the history of marketing campaigns and paid endorsements in the pharmaceutical industry. If they’re running promos that are this overt, I have no hesitation believing that other individuals are paid as well.
I was going to direct you to Elyse Myers’ page, but it turns out it’s been wiped. Both her TikTok (7.1M) and Instagram (3.8M) accounts now read “Taking a break from this app. See you when I see you 🤍” with zero content attached.
Her YouTube channel is still live so I was able to grab a few examples of her glorification of OCD and anxiety and the comedic stylings that have sparked a massive growth in her following in a very short time — When OCD Gets in the Way of Content Creating and When Anxiety Meets Insomnia. I’ve posed the possibility, and will again, that this growth was not organic.
There are certain folks on these platforms who are intentionally pushed by the algorithms because they are sharing the messages that the parent companies want to infiltrate the masses. Elyse Myers is on my radar as one of them.
Another influencer with notable reach who is pushing the ADHD narrative is Jenna Kutcher. Folks like Tony Robbins and Mel Robbins promote and collaborate with her. In November of 2022, she published a blog post titled “I Found Out I Have ADHD (Here’s What I’ve Learned So Far!)” sharing her experience and providing a rubric for other women to determine if they might have it too.
What’s most alarming about Kutcher’s blog post is that the idea that she might have ADHD came from a podcast interview she hosted. Again, this sounds like the symptom pools discussed in Ethan Watters’s “The Forgotten Lessons of the Recovered Memory Movement” piece.
We’ve seen a meteoric rise in the past decade of women in their 30s and 40s diagnosed with ADHD. It doesn’t sit well with me and has all of the same markings of the marketing campaigns of its predecessors — Valium, Prozac, and Zoloft.
Is this MLM style peer-to-peer marketing really serving us when someone says, “I have it! You might too!!” My vote is nay. Plus I suspect that there are deeper agendas at play to stifle creativity and innovative thinking through the promotion of these medications to further the complacency of the masses. Perhaps we give a hat tip to Huxley instead of Orwell on this one.
It’s time we question this pharmaceutical Ponzi Scheme. Abigail Shrier is doing exactly that with a sharp focus on adolescents. Shrier’s latest book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up, focuses on the overmedication of our kids in conjunction with the role of unnecessary therapy, and lots of it.
Turns out that this generation of kids is the most anxious and fragile of any generation we’ve previously seen. Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, comes to incredibly similar conclusions from his research and work.
I would argue that this doesn’t only apply to teens. Look around. Our peers are struggling.
One of the things that Shrier highlights in her second book is that the constant examination and rehashing of feelings is likely the very thing prompting the increased anxiety.
In a recent interview with Joe Rogan, she discusses a study run by the Wise Teens Program focused on coping techniques to help them with emotional regulation. “It turns out it made teens sadder and more anxious. They measured this. And the reason was, regularly ruminating on your bad feelings can make you feel worse,” she explains.
Go figure.
While Shrier’s focus is children and teens, this principle extends to everyone. If you keep picking at an emotional scab, you’re going to continue to expose the original wound. Let it heal.
Conversely, many adults don’t want to acknowledge the wounds at all and would rather slap an SSRI over it and call it a day. Except those same people are then in therapy rehashing over and over and over their perceived wounds. And why would the therapists stop the loop? They’re profiting off of this hamster wheel. The same goes for the pharmaceutical companies.
As Shrier puts it, “The incentive is for therapists to treat the least sick for the longest period of time.” Yep.
Rogan marvels that he had never considered that the impact of thinking about your problems all of the time makes your problems grow until reading her book. Shrier responds, “The number one symptom of depression is what they call rumination, this pathological obsessing over your pain.”
How much does this habit of depression sound like the echo chambers of social media where people post about their mental health and not only ruminate about their own issues but those of others?
Tie this back to the symptom pools that Ethan Watters discusses in his recovered memories article, and it’s no wonder that the trend is spreading.
We’ve seen a massive rise in discussions about nervous system regulation and somatic healing in recent years, tools that are intended to reduce anxiety. Yet people seem more anxious and highly medicated than ever.
Shrier echoes sentiments that I’ve shared before, “What we should be telling kids is that the amazing story of human history is resilience.” This is what we should be telling everyone!
Not everything is trauma. Some of these bumps and bruises of life are simply the human experience. It’s how we grow and expand and build that very resilience.
“Anxiety exists for a reason. It’s actually adaptive,” Shrier continues. Exactly!! Anxiety, judgment, pain — they’re all there for a reason. The brilliance of the human body is that it gives us clues about where to go and how to proceed. If we mute all of these indicators with medication, we’ve cut off crucial information.
Shrier agrees, “We’re going in with medication and deleting things like anxiety and depression. Anxiety is what helps you make beautiful memories.” That’s one example of many of what we’re sacrificing when we turn to medication as the primary solution.
I highly recommend this entire interview and really appreciate her optimism for the future. Her main premise is, let’s stop overdoing it on all of these things. How refreshing to hear a proposal that doesn’t include one more thing that we need to do or accomplish. Let’s leave it with this —
Depression is adaptive… and one of the good things about depression is it shuts us down so that we don’t do anything rash, and we think about what change we might want to make in our life, because sometimes we need to make a change. And if we just medicate away the bad feelings, the worst feelings might be dampened, but we might also be locked into that low state and never make the change we need to make.
Worth pondering.
I often wonder, are we just kicking the can down the road when we readily dole out medication? Is immediate relief truly life saving or is it creating other conditions that you will then spend years reversing? I know it did for me. And what are we defining as life saving? I want some specifics if that term is going to be tossed out as frequently as it is.
But mostly, how can Gabby (and others) be so glib in promoting antidepressants and other drugs? This is a HIGHLY nuanced conversation — and one that we’re told we’re not allowed to have.
THERE’S ALWAYS A TRADE OFF FOR THE DRUGS THAT YOU TAKE. ALWAYS.
Ugggghhh. Gabby follows up her glowing endorsement of taking medication when necessary with the sentiment, “We live in a culture where people just take a pill. And that’s the problem.”
So which is it? Where does this fit on her continuum? When is it okay per Gabby to take a pill and when is it to be scorned? There’s no cohesion to her belief system. This seems like another “have your cake and eat it too” kind of opinion.
At this point you may be wondering, Libby, why are we still on the topic of Gabby Bernstein!? I’m a glutton for punishment and want to suck all of you in with me. Only kidding.
It’s because her teachings really are a sampler platter of dangerous assertions and interpretations. In recent years, she has become more vocal about spirit guides and mediumship. You better believe I have thoughts I need to weigh in with here.
Which brings us to…
Gabby the Medium
Until this juncture in her career, the publishing of Judgment Detox (2018) and Super Attractor (2019), I would have lumped Gabby in with folks like Glennon Doyle and Rachel Hollis, insecure women pushing self-help to feel better about their own lives. You know, unremarkable white women looking for their own slice of the pie in this victimhood economy.
There had always been an undertone of spirit guides and signs in Gabby’s work, but nothing this overt. It went from your typical self-help handcuffs that keep you locked in a cycle of believing you’re imperfect to one that overtly opens the door for gnarly beings of the alien, ghost, and demon variety to step into your life and lead you.
Too harsh? Gabby says this of herself in Spirit Junkie (2011), her second book, and has been echoing those sentiments in every subsequent book she has written —
I now realize that behind all my striving was a search for meaning and purpose. I was searching for a sense of self-worth in relationships ranging from friends to family to romances. My outside persona was a loquacious, white, middle-class Jewish girl growing up in the 'burbs with her divorced hippie parents. But I had no clue who I was on the inside.
– Gabby Bernstein, Spirit Junkie
Don’t fret. Now she gets it, ten years and seven books into her career later.
Let’s move past Gabby’s flippant response of, “It’s easier than you think,” when Lewis remarks that what Gabby is proposing is simple but not easy. However, if that’s the case, why has Gabby struggled for years? Why is she only now delving into the trauma that was too big to tackle? Why is there continually one more trauma to address? Let’s also set aside the face touching and the hair tossing and all that jazz that indicate a lack of truth in her sentiments.
Our focus is on “Chapter Nine: Appreciate and Appreciate More” in Super Attractor.
Gabby rattles off a list of things for which she is deeply grateful — postpartum depression, suicidal thoughts, panic attacks, insomnia, addiction recovery, trauma healing.
Face touch. Face touch.
Lewis is spot on with his comment about people over appreciating even the bad stuff that happens in their lives. This is where things get extra slippery.
Gabby’s type of response is so dismissive, particularly with that intonation. As someone who does this for a living, she should be acutely aware of this. This isn’t a one off example. You find it riddled throughout her interviews. Her interview with Tom Bilyeu has some of the most acute examples.
And that body language. Admire me. Superiority. Dismissiveness. She’s not at all engaged in the conversation, and Lewis can’t extract himself fast enough.
Over focusing on appreciation ignores the signs that maybe this isn’t happening for you, maybe it’s happening to you. Is it an alien attack? Is it an assault from another human? Does feeling this way mean that I need to change my actions or get the heck out of here? This is precisely why we shouldn’t always numb the pain.
We’re looking at the surrender conversation with a different window dressing. Yes, learn from the hard crap that you’ve experienced. I know this crowd is FANTASTIC at that. But there’s again never any discussion on when you should push back against some of it from Gabby or those like her. You’re not always supposed to roll over and take it. Resistance can be important.
Because it’s not always something that you need to heal. It’s not always happening to you because you’re not evolved enough in your spiritual evolution. You’re not always in the wrong. This is what cults tell you to keep you trapped.
It finally dawned on me to look up the definition of surrender as I was searching for a new cover photo for my piece on this topic and the only image coming to mind was waving a white flag. Do you know the actual meaning of the word?
Surrender | sur·ren·der /səˈrendər/
verb: cease resistance to an enemy or opponent and submit to their authority.
Ummmmmmmmm.
When did the meaning transform? Or did it? Are we being told to submit to the authority of an enemy or opponent?
This is the first time that we’ve seen an unfeigned smile from Gabby. It’s because Lewis Howes gave her a segue to plug another aspect of her book. Not only that, this is THE hook for the aliens and demons to worm their way into yet another unsuspecting target. She’s locked in on her prey. And what’s with that jaw shift?
Then her demeanor and her body language completely shift back to her normal interview style. This woman is not genuine, though this is a small piece of her true self sneaking through.
Oof. So much to unpack here. This is when the aliens become particularly squirrely. They don’t want us examining any of Gabby’s babble. So of course we’re going to pick this ten minute segment of the interview apart in great detail. Ready? Ready? Time to unmask some aliens.
She sounded defensive. Gabby is trying to convince herself. Wow, what an undertone of anger. This information is not coming from benevolent beings. This is not how that support sounds from those who truly have your best interest at heart. These are controlling beings who want you to do their bidding.
As much as I was tempted to skip to the end of this entire discussion between Gabby and Lewis Howes and focus on this final section, it’s the stacking of bad ideas that really makes this unfolding of what she suggests insidious and quite dangerous. Gabby’s audience and readership has already been worn down. Surrender. Don’t judge. Everything is happening for you, even the really horrible stuff. If this faulty belief system isn’t working, dampen the screams for help your body is giving you by taking medication.
By the time she introduces how to connect with ghosts and spirit guides, she’s already made people ideal targets for the duplicitous tactics of the aliens and demons who want to syphon your energy or control you. This is what I want to prevent and why we’ve dedicated an inordinate amount of time on Gabby. Her teachings are emblematic of a lot of what I see out there.
Back to the start of this clip. Gabby tells us —
To make a commitment to feel better means that you’re committed to returning to God… or love… or spirit. Whatever you call it.
Holy equivocation, Batman!
I looked up the definition to make sure that it really was the word that I was seeking. Equivocation: the use of ambiguous language to conceal the truth or to avoid committing oneself. Yep. That fits to a T.
Here’s why it matters. You’ve created a wobble. The thing that wards off unwanted beings more than anything else is standing solidly in your own energy. Muggers are less likely to confront someone who walks with purpose, direction, and confidence — same with aliens and demons.
It could be this or this or this. Don’t hold me to any of them, says the expert. Gabby has just wedged an opening for herself and those listening. Through that crack can sneak all sorts of unwanted misery. She’s erected a flashing neon sign reading, “Targets here!!”
Now that the door is swinging wide open for unsavory characters to enter the scene, Gabby begins to unfold her noncommittal explanation on angels, guides, ancestors, and spiritual beings in response to Lewis’ inquiry of who are these guides and how we can know when our guides are here —
What I write about in my book is what I believe, and I always have a big disclaimer that says — this is an opportunity to crack you open to believing something new, and if it’s not for you, you choose how you choose to perceive this. [hair flip neck touch] So not only do I talk about spirit guides and angels and your deceased family members, but I also talk about your higher self.
Well phew, I’m glad she let herself off the hook there.
She goes on to give herself the widest of widest berths —
So if this is too woo woo for you, start to tap into what is the voice of my higher self, that voice of my inner guidance system, and that wisdom that I believe in is my true nature. Right?
Gabby still hasn’t offered parameters of how to distinguish beings who are genuinely there to support us in a purely benevolent way and those who claim to do that but wish us harm. For the past six years, there has been a marked increase in aliens impersonating ghosts. Have you ever seen the pinprick sized holes that mice can squeeze through? These jerks can do the same thing energetically speaking.
Gabby continues —
But I personally, Gabby Bernstein, I believe that I have… that we all have guides, ancestors, family members, teachers, beings of… light beings, energy beings that are all supporting us in a, in a form that is… is able to step in. Able to channel through us when we write books. Able to be there in those darkest moments and pick us up off the floor and hold us in discomfort and guide us to business opportunities or babies or whatever it is that we’re looking for.
That’s a heck of a lot of stammering for Gabby.
Yes, without question those things are accessible to us. However, and this is a big however, Home Alone style, there are also Joe Pesci-like beings dressed up as cops casing your house so that they can rob you while you’re on vacation. Okay, not literally.
I point you to this — just because something is a higher vibration does not mean that it’s benevolent.
Past Libby was spot on when she wrote the caption for that reel, so I’m simply going to cut and paste —
Understanding that not all higher vibrational beings or energies are benevolent is imperative right now.
Would you automatically trust someone because that person is older? Or taller? No, these are superficial qualities that while influencing someone’s personality and perspective on life do not define how they will treat you.
The same goes for beings of higher dimensions.
The fourth dimension in particular is awash with aliens who wish to manipulate us. They speak to people through telepathy. They plant ideas that on a surface level sound true. They slowly undermine our trust in ourselves.
Put some parameters in place! Gabby has a flashing carnival ride reading, “Come one! Come all!!”
Even still, you’re going to get it wrong. Unwanted beings will find a way. There are no surefire solutions to all of this. They’re wily and persistent and feel no inclination to play by the rules. Sorry. But!!!! You are powerful and have the ability to send them running on the occasion that one does sneak through.
I can’t promise that you won’t be mugged even if you carry yourself with loads of confidence, but I can teach you how to react in that unfortunate scenario.
Gabby segues into her A Course in Miracles talking points —
It’s always available to us, that guidance, but we just cut it off. We block it. Fear is the reason we block. It’s not even fear. It’s that false based perception that we’ve built up around ourselves from those traumatic events, right? So we had these traumatic events early in life and they continue to build and build and build. We build up a world of false perceptions — I am this body. I am Gabby Bernstein. I am Lewis Howes. I’ve got the School of Greatness. I am a New York Times bestseller.
It’s fear. It’s not fear. It’s Gabby’s false definition for fear. It’s fear again. She has all of her bases covered so that she can never ever be wrong. As I said, holy equivocation, Batman.
Again I inquire, what was all of that therapy doing along with the multitude of other modalities if it wasn’t moving her through the trauma or helping the reactions to past incidents subside? However, that’s not where I want to focus.
Saying I am this body or I am my name is not a false perception. We come into these physical forms in these human bodies with these human identities for a reason. Knowing where your energy begins and ends in conjunction with that is part of what creates sharp distinctions of this is mine and this isn’t.
Start blurring the you that is you, and you’ve created yet another opening for malevolent beings to find a way to access you and your energy.
Yes, we are all energetically connected, but we are also individuals. That is the experience of choosing a human incarnation on Earth.
Gabby disagrees —
And you believe you’re separate from others. You believe you’re better than or less than or not good enough. And all those stories, all those false pretenses or what many spiritual practices call the ego and that fear based perception of yourself is misaligned with God, with love, with spirit, with angels, with guides.
Guess what? You are separate. You are better or less than others. Roger Federer plays tennis at a far superior level than I do. Objectively he is better than I am — in that specific aspect. That doesn’t determine his moral character or what type of person he is or reflect on me. I am not good enough to play in Wimbledon. Factually.
Federer should be darn proud of twenty Grand Slam titles. Nadal and Djokovic should be too. That’s ego. Misplaced? Not even in the slightest.
To say that I’m not even a fraction of the tennis player that any of those guys are is not a fear based perception. It’s fact. They would wipe the court with me, particularly because I haven’t picked up a racquet in over a decade.
Somehow this continually remains omitted from spiritual conversation. I’ll say it again, ego is not inherently bad. It’s another aspect of ourselves that gives us cues and indicators when something is awry.
I also want to ask, how can you be misaligned with God? That hadn’t struck me until I listened to this clip way too many times in my aim to transcribe it correctly. God is with you always. How can you stray from that? Even if you forsake Him, He does not forsake you. That wisdom is with you even when you choose to ignore it.
So what is she connecting to and calling God?
Gabby asserts that she (and her book) hold the answers —
This book is all about how to get back into alignment so that you can hear that guidance and receive that guidance and be a channel for inspiration. And when you clear and undo those patterns of fear and start to claim the pattern of love, that’s when you are hooked up. Super attractor. Unstoppable. Invisible doors open for you.
It doesn’t matter how low you are when starting this, you will go way further than you could possibly have imagined. And I am standing behind that subtitle, methods for manifesting a life beyond your wildest dreams. Standing behind it!
Yes, it can be true that incredible, benevolent beings are the ones opening those doors for you. My life is full of that. However, the dark beings are equally as capable of paving your way. This is why our conversations center so much around discernment.
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Here’s where I really lose my cool. Lewis asks, “What’s the difference between spiritual guides or guides and intuition?”
Gabby responds, “You can call it the same thing.”
Oh hell no. I hit the pause button while literally yelling BULLSHIT at the TV.
Danger! Danger! Danger!
Nope! Nope! Nope!
If you’ve read anything else that I’ve ever written on this topic, you know how dangerous this line of crap truly is. Not having discernment for who is speaking and their intentions will land you in a heap of trouble faster than you can say shazam.
This topic is my entire body of work.
Spiritual guides and intuition are not in any way the same. Intuition is internal to you. It’s your inner compass, your innate knowing, your gut instinct. It is an inextricable part of you.
Guides are external. You may hear them speak to you telepathically or feel a sensation in your body when they communicate, but they are not part of you. It’s the I of intuition versus the you or they of guides.
Some of the particularly devious beings try to mimic your intuition, so Gabby telling folks that they’re one and the same plays right into their schemes.
While Joe Dispenza is feeding people to aliens for energy syphoning by holding workshops, Gabby is opening your heart and home to aliens through the perils of her teachings — which by the way is part of how she’s powering her success. That’s the Faustian deal of it all.
So please, please, please, if someone tells you that guides and your intuition are one and the same, run in the opposite direction.
Gabby then states, “Your guides are your bridge between your fear based thoughts back to your love.” What!? No.
That’s like saying your mechanic is your spiritual guru. Now, you might have an awesome mechanic who has a really incredible take on the universe, but that’s likely the exception. I often joke that you wouldn’t ask your mechanic for advice on gardening, except for mine because his in-laws owned an incredible farm for years.
We’re talking ghosts here. They’re complete with all of the baggage and perceptions that existed as humans. Some of those shift as they are exposed to a greater swath of information but not always. They too are fallible. They too have shortcomings and biases.
This is where that whole no judgment thing gets really dicey — again. You need to have discernment around their advice and their wisdom to determine if it’s solid.
Would you ask your aunt who never had a successful relationship advice on dating? Probably not. Then don’t ask her ghost!
Gabby then advises the following —
If you pray and say God, guide, higher self, I give this to you. Figure it out. Right? I don’t know how I’m going to get through this time, but I give it to you. That’s how we surrender. People are like, I don’t know how to surrender. I don’t want to let it go. I don’t know how to. Through prayer. Okay, prayer is the conduit.
Again, we’re seeing the suggestion of passivity in your own life. Say it with me — Cult! Cult! Cult! Cult! Why not work WITH them? Why not have them guide you with you as an active participant? Why do you have to give yourself over to them? Cult! Cult! Cult! Cult!
She continues —
And then when we say that prayer or that intention, whatever you want to call it, and we allow ourselves to give it over to a higher power of our own understanding, a guide, God, spirit, Grandma, whoever — then we’re taking that difficult experience, we’re handing it over, and then we relax because we think, okay. It’s not on my shoulders anymore.
How are all of these being rattled off interchangeably? God and your grandma are not one and the same.
Why is Gabby so dismissive? I don’t want to hand all of my choices over to my grandmas even though I love and trust them implicitly! They don’t always know the best choice for me.
Everything about this mindset that Gabby endorses lures her audience into the trap of succumbing to the every whim of aliens and demons along with any beings who might not want what’s best for you. Remember, the nasty ones are helpful and friendly. That’s how they seduce you into their grasp.
She’s purposely setting people up. She’s psychically grooming them.
When people die, they return to the Hoopla and have access to infinite wisdom. That doesn’t mean that they choose to embrace it. What we think of as ghosts are pockets of consciousness that maintain their identities from past incarnations on Earth.
By no means is that the same thing as God.
I address these intricacies and distinctions at length in my piece on reincarnation.
Toss your car keys to the valet or the local homeless man or the teenager who wants to take it for a joy ride. It’s all the same! Umm, no it isn’t.
While this is an intentionally ridiculous analogy, it’s not far off the mark from what Gabby is suggesting.
Identifying and screening the various voices speaking to you and influencing your life matters. Remember when we used to see this depicted as an angel and a devil sitting on each shoulder? Both were voices clamoring for your attention. It was up to you to decide which advice to heed.
Gabby provides us her next step —
And then their job is to pay attention. What’s going to show up for us. And so pay close attention. Just be aware. Stay calm and stay chill. Right? And be conscious of how things start to speed up or the synchronicities that start to happen around you.
Taken outside of the context of her last sentiment and her next, this is one of the least objectionable things that Gabby says.
I encourage people to voice their needs and communicate with those supporting them in other dimensions the same way you would another human. Not understanding what one of your ghosts is trying to say? Express that. Love a particular way one of them has communicated? Offer that feedback.
It’s a relationship even if one of you is alive and the other is dead.
Then Gabby begins her nonsense on signs —
If you are like, guides, I want to see a sign and you are like, I need butterflies. And butterflies are everywhere. I mean, I’m getting thousands and thousands of emails from readers that are reading this book in the last two weeks it’s been out, and they’re just like, Gabby, every single sign that I’ve asked for is coming to me. It just speeds up.
Ask for a sign today, if you’re having a difficult experience. Say, guides… what would your sign be? Don’t think. Just say it. Just say it, don't think.
Wow. Just wow. This is not GrubHub where you get deliveries on command. What was that earlier talk about not being controlling? Guides, I want butterflies. Here you go, Gabby. Then have you failed or are your guides not listening if you don’t receive your sign? What happens then? She’ll get to that — not receiving a sign is a sign too. But of course.
Yes, signs and signals happen. I don’t want to be totally dismissive of that. But they aren’t some sort of punch list or that paper menu at a sushi restaurant where you check off what you would like to eat. Plus, in my experience, the more you are trusting of the flow of life, the longer some of this stuff can take to appear. You don’t require constant reassurance.
I often think about this like human relationships. Do you need your boyfriend/husband/best friend (jeez, now I’m doing it) to tell you that he or she loves you in order to know it to be true or is it shown through other actions? Needing that constant reassurance demonstrates deep insecurity to me.
Read the energy of the situation.
And what if butterflies aren’t the sign that is most beneficial for you? What if getting stuck in three hours of traffic was really the thing you needed? What if you see a herd of cows instead? This is such a narrow and prescriptive way to look at this type of interaction.
Conversely, you could ask for a confirmation that everything’s going to be okay or that things will work out. What a broader opportunity to delight you with signs, signals, and experiences. Get out of your own way! Let the magic of the universe pull out all the stops for you.
When I travel, without even asking, I’m showered with complimentary dishes and drinks everywhere I eat. I never expect it and am always surprised and tickled when it happens. Often it springs from having had a wonderful exchange with a waitress who says that our table made her day and brings us a bonus side dish that she thinks we will love. I’ve received free cab rides in New York and cheery baristas who say, “This one is on me.”
It’s a wonderful outpouring of abundance and the kindness of this world. These are indeed signs, but they’re so much richer and less scripted than requesting butterflies would be to me.
I don’t want to sound like a wet blanket poo pooing signs in our lives. They’re everywhere! They’re joyful and full of magic!! But to me, there’s an over emphasis on them. This reads a bit like telling someone what gift to buy you and then being smugly pleased that you received it. It falls flat.
Again, there’s real Veruca Salt, “But daddy, I want a golden goose!” energy here.
Then there’s this whole exchange between Lewis and Gabby about Lewis choosing an eagle as his sign and Gabby telling him what a great and powerful choice that is. She follows it up with the instructions to —
Just say, thank you guides. Thank you universe, whatever you believe in, for showing me my eagle to remind me that I’m on the right path.
This may ruffle some feathers, but asking for signs with such specificity is an easy way for malicious beings to swoop in, fulfill them, and engender favor and trust with you.
All of this is so much more nuanced than how I see these big names present it to be.
With Gabby’s instructions, I see this flash of the sitcom trope where a girl, having just broken up with her boyfriend, sits at the bar telling her friend that she’ll go home with the next guy who asks her name or offers to buy her a drink. The guy down the bar overhears and trips over himself to get to the girl to be the one she chooses.
Now replace Gabby’s follower for the girl and aliens for the overeager chap. See where we’re going here?
When I hear someone say in this context, “Every single sign I’m asking for is coming to me,” I think well yeah. That’s because aliens and demons can fulfill these requests too.
Gabby has removed all of the barriers between those following her work and the aliens who wish to prey upon them. She’s served her audience up on a silver platter and is so darn proud of it.
Yes, be delighted by signs, but also know when you’re being played.
Never one to be tied down be an actual stance, Gabby equivocates —
Sometimes I’ll use a sign, like, if I’m supposed to take this deal and I don’t know what to do. And I’m feeling so uncomfortable about it. And I’ll say, show me a sign. And the thing is, if you don’t get your sign, that’s a sign too.
But you absolutely will get your sign. If you’re asking to be shown that you’re being guided, 100% you’re going to get your sign.
Oh okay. Glad we covered all of the bases here. Your sign is a sign but so is not receiving a sign.
There’s a time and place for asking for this type of feedback and confirmation from the universe, but please don’t go around asking for a sign for every incident in your life. You have way more personal agency than that.
Also, if we’re talking about big business deals or anything of that caliber, it’s never as simple as a yes or no answer. There are always, always, always intricacies and considerations to be weighed and quite likely tradeoffs. I’ve spoken extensively about contracts for this very reason. Understand what you’re signing.
In the next excruciatingly thorough breakdown of this section of the interview, I’m going to address how Gabby is using tried and true psychic cold read tactics to ensure that she’s never wrong while being totally noncommittal. This exchange is a prime example of that technique.
Lewis asks for a practical example. He suggests the instance of someone asking whether a second date would be advisable.
We’ve moved into full on Magic 8 Ball territory. Outlook not so good.
Her first advice is to say, “Show me my sign.” But not to worry, “If you don’t get the sign, and you decide to go on the date anyway, there’s still some learning in that.”
See how carefully Gabby positions herself so that she is never wrong? Sign or no sign, she has all of her bases covered.
Yeah, there’s always an opportunity to learn something from an experience. Thanks for that fortune cookie wisdom. This one would read, “You will learn something (in bed),” because I will never be too old or too mature to not find that addition funny.
I’m not going to subject you to a play by play of Gabby’s next story. Turn your sound on and skip to the 36:18 mark in the interview if you’re interested. The general gist is that because Gabby was 39 at the time of her pregnancy, her doctor considered hers to be a geriatric birth. As such, labor was going to be induced.
Everything in her told her that she did not want to be induced. She ignored this and let the desires of the doctor overpower her intuition. (My words not hers.) So what did she do? She asked for a sign.
Instead of listening to exactly what she knew she wanted to do, she outsourced her wisdom and abdicated decision making in her own life.
Turns out that she ultimately gave birth without induction. She then rationalizes the entire string of signs and feelings and muting of her intuition because it turned out as she had actually desired.
Gabby wraps up this topic restating —
So if you don’t see your sign, that’s still guidance. And then if you get your sign, even if it’s something you didn’t want… you know?
Yeah. Sure. Okay. It’s alway a sign unless it isn’t a sign but even then it’s a sign but not the same sign. Gotcha.
End phrase by phrase dissection.
In a similar vein to Gabby throwing open the door to all beings when she vacillates between terms, she then claims that, “We’re all mediums. We all have the ability to listen to spirit.”
Are we? Do we all speak to the dead?
Yes, I do think that we all have the ability to do so if we desire, but there is a massive range of skill and cultivation of those abilities. So that said, I don’t think that everyone is a medium or even wants to be.
To some people it comes naturally. Others actively cultivate it. Others suppress it. Others have no acumen for that ability.
I often equate this to music. We all land somewhere on the musical spectrum. I’ve known multiple people with perfect pitch. One of them was even tolerant of us knocking on her door in high school, singing a note, and asking her to name it. Art school is a weird place.
But not everyone is a musician. Some folks out there are bonafide tone deaf. Singing in your car or your shower is not the same as performing at Carnegie Hall.
By Gabby’s logic, in the past, I’ve painted my living room. Heck, I even painted a full apartment once. Does that make me a professional house painter? I can change the tires on my car. Look at me! I’m ready for the Formula 1 pit crew.
Why does this make me think of the old Holiday Inn Express commercials?
From the sounds of it, Gabby also has no boundaries on her mediumship. Shocker. She should not be reading people unsolicited. It’s rude. I wrote a whole piece about it. I feel very strongly about professional decorum. Yes, even in mediumship. The examples of where Gabby is inviting danger into people’s lives are ever mounting.
But wait! I promised you another painstaking dissection, and I will deliver. Tah dah!! So here we go. We’re returning to the Impact Theory interview with Tom Bilyeu for this one. It’s a long and tangled ten minutes of back and forth about patience, sort of.
How do I tee this up for you? Maybe we just jump in?
I’ll try to give context without making this required viewing, but this really is one of those clips that you have to hear to understand. Granted, I totally appreciate the desire to mute all of this.
What’s more or less happening here is Gabby trying to persuade Tom that he believes what she has written about in her book, namely her principle called “Spiritually Aligned Action.” Phew, I’m so glad that she didn’t plagiarize that. It sounds nothing like Abraham Hicks’ alignment or aligned action. Oh, wait…
In order to trap Tom in her way of thinking, Gabby asks a series of questions attempting to find the angle where she can go, “Ah ha! See, you agreed with me all along.”
What Gabby is doing here is straight out of the psychic cold read handbook. Tom says something. Gabby repeats it to gain buy-in. Tom disagrees with her rephrasing. Gabby says, that’s not what I meant anyway and claims she was saying exactly what he said and continues to pivot and change her statements. “Blah blah blah, right? Blah blah blah, right? Yeah, that’s what I meant.”
I’m glossing over the not so humble brag in this clip. We get it. She’s insufferable.
When her questions and assertions don’t land, she blows through them and asks another round. Notice how her speech quickens as well. The faster she speaks, the less room there is for Tom to contradict or question.
Now we reach the part of the conversation about patience. Sort of. What eventually comes out of this is that neither of them is actually discussing patience but both are using that term to describe their version of something different. Because who cares about definitions anymore!? Anyway, let’s continue as Gabby wants Tom to believe that the universe is always conspiring for him while he disagrees completely. He also shoots down the Law of Attraction outright. Gabby doesn’t let that stop her.
I’ll type some quotes out for this section.
Tom asserts —
When it comes to patience, I think that the reason people’s dreams don’t come true is they never acquire the skills to actually be able to execute against it.
Still not about patience folks.
You have to love the body language throughout all of this.
Tom believes that not only is the universe not conspiring for you because more people would be successful if that were true, he thinks that —
Something is working so actively against us that we have to find a way out of that. Now, I will say what is working against you is evolutionary pressures. You’ve been pressured evolutionarily to survive, not to thrive. So I think that the human brain is working against people in many, many ways. If they don’t understand that, they get trapped.
He goes on to explain that in his view, we’re biologically wired for laziness. Tom then references the second law of thermodynamics. How about I link you to NASA’s explanation of said law. In essence, the second law is entropy. It seems safe to say that Tom and NASA are not discussing the same thing.
Tom’s assertion that “all systems move toward chaos,” seems an oversimplification and errant application. In fact, according to NASA, the second law of thermodynamics is mainly focused on, “The application of the second law describes why heat is transferred from the hot object to the cool object.”
But sure, let’s all nod along knowingly.
Tom then goes on to say —
Patience to me is about waiting. It’s about relaxing. It’s about surrender.
Which means, it’s definition time! The crowd goes wild. Balloons fall from the ceiling. Streamers are waved with abandon.
Patience | pa·tience /ˈpeɪ.ʃəns/
noun: the ability to wait, or to continue doing something despite difficulties, or to suffer without complaining or becoming annoyed
More rambling. More rambling. Some unnecessary swearing.
Is this popping into anyone else’s head?
Gabby inserts herself, “We have a different definition of patience.”
Here’s an idea. Use the ACTUAL definition of patience. Novel.
The real reason that they can’t come to a consensus is that they’re discussing two completely different things, neither one of which is patience, while both peddling their agendas — and those five things are at odds. (Somehow it’s greater than the sum of its parts. Orwellian math.) This happens far too often in these podcasts full of false authority.
Then they both abandon the original topic by addressing Gabby’s concept of “speed up by slowing down.” Cool. Should we abandon this too? Or should we stick around for a little more false humility as Gabby leads by “being a powerful example of what it looks like to live a spiritually aligned life” but certainly isn’t “tooting her own horn.”
Gabby shifts gears again with her thinly veiled anger mode saying —
I have created far more in the last fifteen years than I think people could do in a lifetime, okay? And that’s not… I don’t want to sound like I’m being egotistical.
Well, she blew that one! The anger that seeps through when she discusses tuning her energy and making sure she clears whatever is in her way is striking. These are the moments when I see the aliens who pull her strings peek through.
And with that, I thank you for your patience and bid you adieu, an abrupt ending but we need to conclude this somewhere.
Oh wait, Gabby published three more books. Here you go.
I think our big takeaway here is that I’m never going to be invited onto Gabby Berstein’s podcast. [single tear] Wouldn’t that be a fascinating conversation if it were to happen!
I would also accept a poker invitation, because oh those tells!
Epilogue
We interrupt our regularly scheduled Gabby programming to address this ah ha moment.
Between posting the second section of this series on Instagram and formatting the third section while finishing writing the last two, I had a strong hankering for a hamburger. Through that cue, it became evident that the aliens were attacking in an attempt to prevent us from freeing a ton of ghosts. Something about posting the final section was going to get them unstuck.
Two main reasons that ghosts become stuck — confusion or interference. Neither of those scenarios is their natural or intended state upon death. The presence of stuck ghosts on our planet keeps the vibration of Earth suppressed.
What is happening in this instance is that the group of aliens that have been meddling with the writing of this series have been using those stuck ghosts as a sort of battery. They’ve harnessed the dead for energy. Fear and confusion is a powerful energy source for groups such as this.
What baffled me was that clearly these ghosts were stuck due to their connection to the arc of Gabby’s teachings and more specifically the Law of Attraction. But that’s where things didn’t entirely add up. Gabby’s audience is young and few of them would have died in the span of her fifteen plus year career. So how do they connect?
Well, Gabby wasn’t the first to teach the principles of the Law of Attraction. It predates Abraham Hicks too. Flip back far enough in time and you reach Napoleon Hill who truly popularized the teachings in his book Think and Grow Rich, released in 1937. That’s old enough to accrue some seriously stuck ghosts.
It’s quite possible that Hill took his inspiration from New Thought spiritual teacher and writer Florence Scovel Shinn who published The Game of Life and How to Play It in 1925, but the ghost connection to her feels thin. Think and Grow Rich with its 80 million copies sold is a far more likely captor.
Anecdote. A handful of years ago, I performed a reading for a then friend. Napoleon Hill, Louise Hay, and Wayne Dyer all showed up to offer their guidance. None of those folks would make it through my screening process today. Hill and Hay sat in my kitchen sharing their insights over tea. Dyer camped out in my downstairs bathtub shouting his commentary from the other room.
Even at the time, the whole incident felt bizarre.
Back to today. The unmasking and exposure of the alien techniques and control free the stuck ghosts. There’s no active step (other than publishing) that needs to be taken to propel the ghost crowd to their natural state.
This release of captives does explain the unrelenting alien attacks that I faced while composing this series. They did not want their energy source drained. Guess what, I did.
So there’s that.
If you made it to the end, congratulations and thank you! I would love to hear your thoughts, commentary, and questions. Drop them below! Think someone else would benefit from reading this? Send it along.
If you enjoyed this piece, more breakdowns await you. In addition to the links shared here, you can find the full collection of videos that I’ve watched in order to compile this assessment of Gabby Bernstein, including some that aren’t referenced.
Another worthwhile article on recovered memories if that topic piqued your interest: The Return of Recovered Memory by Julia Yost
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-return-of-recovered-memory/