(RNS) — In 2009, 18 people were hospitalized with kidney failure and dehydration and three died after participating in a Spiritual Warrior “sweat lodge” retreat led by self-help guru and multimillionaire entrepreneur James Arthur Ray. 

Participants had paid nearly $10,000 to attend. Ray had lied about his credentials. Two years later, he was found guilty of causing three deaths by negligent homicide. He served just 20 months in prison.  

One of the victims was 38-year-old Kirby Brown. Her family describe her as an intelligent and safety-conscious woman who ignored her body’s warning symptoms because Ray convinced her they were signs of a spiritual breakthrough rather than extreme dehydration. She would also have been determined not to leave, they explained, because of her “indomitable spirit” and the fact that she had invested her life savings in the retreat.  

Ginny and Jean Brown, the mother and sister of Kirby, want to honor her memory by exposing the dangers of the self-help industry and trying to make it safer for others. But how are safety, ethics and accountability fostered in a culture that places responsibility solely on individuals and has become a billion-dollar unregulated industry? 

In 2014, the Browns founded Seek Safely, a nonprofit organization that aims to add guardrails to the self-help industry by focusing on three main areas: education, advocacy and legislation. 

The Seek Safely movement is part of a wider ethical reckoning happening in contemporary wellness and spirituality — the emergence of critical and constructive approaches that are placing safe and ethical communities rather than the individual at their center. 

Seek Safely logo. (Courtesy image)

At Seek Safely, education includes providing resources such as a Red/Green Flag list to help individual consumers assess and develop informed consent about what self-development services they choose to engage with. Seek Safely has also developed the “Seek Safely Promise” — a pledge consisting of a set of ethical and pragmatic principles designed to protect the well-being of consumers. 

Working with a consumer protection model — laws that are designed to safeguard buyers of goods and services from fraudulent operations — Seek Safely has also been pursuing legislative advocacy. For the last 10 years, the organization has been working on New York State Senate Bill S1155A, which would require nonlicensed self-help providers to disclose information to their clients about risks of their practices as well as a risk-management plan.   

The Browns’ mission was reenergized after they met Anne Peterson, who also reports firsthand experience of the harms of the self-development industry. Peterson sacrificed 20 years of commitment, community and a leadership position at Landmark to become a whistleblower and public critic of what she argues are exploitative practices in the organization. Realizing that her experience was not unique to Landmark, Peterson created Confronting the Line, a public platform “dedicated to exploring the boundary between genuine transformation and exploitation in the self-help industry.” 

Seek Safely Summit  

The Browns and Peterson joined together to host the recent Seek Safely Summit, held on May 30. It featured a loose coalition of advocates, educators, therapists, cult experts and lawyers and was structured around four questions: 

• Why do we need a movement for Safe Seeking? 

• How can we equip people of all ages to recognize and resist manipulation? 

• What laws and policies are needed to hold self-help providers accountable? 

• How do we ensure healing and visibility for those who have been harmed? 

In their joint presentation “Bringing Common Sense to the Self-Help Industry,” Peterson and Jean Brown began by highlighting the size, influence and dangers of the self-help market. They reported that the global self-improvement market was worth $41.23 billion in 2023 and is predicted to grow to $81.77 billion by 2032, with a compound annual growth rate of 8.1%. The U.S. market specifically was estimated at $15.99 billion in 2023, projected to reach $27 billion by 2032 with a 6% growth rate.  

Yet, despite the size of the self-help industry, it largely operates without any regulatory bodies or oversight. Among a number of problems identified, they pointed to unrealistic promises of specific outcomes. As Jean Brown noted, licensed professionals like lawyers and therapists can lose their licenses for making such false promises. Yet most practitioners within the self-help industry are offering services without professional credentials and so do not face the same consequences licensed professionals would face.  

While education is a key part of Seek Safely’s mission, the organization rejects the idea that consumer ignorance or naivete is the sole problem. As Jean Brown points out, many people who join harmful groups are sincere and intelligent.

“It wasn’t just [that Kirby] made a bad decision, or it was a stupid move, or she was being naive,” she said. “She was doing something that she thought was going to improve her life and better herself. And I think that’s a really noble effort that so many people obviously undertake.” 

As they explain, the problem is that many of these people become victims of groups that intentionally employ manipulative tactics to exploit their good intentions. Some of these tactics were identified by speakers Chris Shelton and Jon Atack, hosts of popular podcasts in the Cultic Studies network.  

In a session focusing on legislation, Ginny Brown reflected on how Ray’s defense lawyers kept asking why Kirby had not just left the retreat. Such a question fails to acknowledge the role of indoctrination and undue influence. Ginny Brown emphasized the importance of the American legal system recognizing coercive control — an intentional pattern of behavior designed to assert domination over an individual. Coercive control in the context of intimate and family relationships is recognized as a crime in the United Kingdom. A number of researchers and survivors are advocating for it to be extended to other contexts, including spiritual and religious communities.   

Self-help and religion  

Jean Brown and Peterson see the decline of institutional religion as a key factor in the rise of the self-help industry. They acknowledge that religious communities have traditionally met many of the legitimate individual growth and social needs that lead people to turn to self-help culture. Seek Safely is not calling for a societal return to the ethical foundations or organizational structures of Christianity, but it is interrogating the harm engendered by the individualism, narcissism and commodification of modern wellness culture. 

As Peterson reflected, wellness culture’s emphasis on extreme individual responsibility within the wider context of American individualism and consumerism has led to much exploitation and abuse. For her, “collaboration is how we actually change things. … Coming together we can create the kind of evolution that we were all looking for in this space in the first place.” 

The movement to check the self-help industry is a shift perhaps from a “me” to a “we” culture.  

(Ann Gleig, a professor of religion and cultural studies at the University of Central Florida, is author of the forthcoming “Talking About Cults: Abuse and the Study of New Religious Movements.” Her work is supported ​by the John Templeton Foundation. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service).