The Business of Pain: How Pop Spirituality Sells Healing It Doesn’t Have
Scroll through YouTube or Instagram today and you’ll find an entire industry of self-styled healers. Manifestation coaches. Trauma guides. Multidimensional aunties talking about soul contracts and extraterrestrial energy as if they were NASA scientists. Their language is grand, mystical, and scientific-sounding. Their authority? Often nothing more than personal pain reframed as wisdom.
And that’s the paradox at the heart of this movement: the loudest voices preaching healing are often the most unhealed themselves.
Who Made You a Healer?
It’s the question that punctures the whole balloon. Who taught you trauma science? Who gave you authority to speak on mental health? If you’re still bleeding from your own wounds, how are you qualified to heal anyone else?
Scratch the surface and the pattern repeats itself everywhere:
Hurt by family → become an “ancestral healer.”
Go through a breakup → suddenly a “divine feminine coach.”
Watch three reels → “trauma-informed.”
What’s being sold is not wisdom but unprocessed pain, repackaged as a product.
The Illusion of “Work”
So what does this healing “work” look like? Painting, journaling, dancing, slow living aesthetics, singing bowls. Lovely practices, yes—but let’s be clear: those are hobbies. They can calm you. They can help you feel grounded. But they don’t make you a healer.
Real healing is messy. It doesn’t look like pastel Canva affirmations. It looks like therapy sessions that leave you raw. Relapses that force humility. Patterns confronted again and again. Grounding routines built and maintained over years. Healing takes evidence, discipline, time, and humility—not hashtags.
The Self-Diagnosis Epidemic
Another problem is how self-diagnosis has become fashionable. Online, everyone is suddenly “traumatized,” “depressed,” “anxious,” “triggered.”
These are serious medical conditions. PTSD does not come from one breakup. Clinical depression isn’t the same as feeling low for a week. Anxiety disorders are not equivalent to pre-exam nerves. Yet social media has turned these diagnoses into accessories—labels that trivialize real suffering.
And here’s where the cycle feeds itself: the more people casually claim trauma, the more fertile the ground for untrained coaches to sell them healing packages. The loop is simple: self-diagnosed pain → pop healer with no training → expensive workshop → no real healing.
What Healing Actually Takes
Healing—real healing—cannot be aestheticized or sold as a weekend course. It requires:
Evidence-based therapy: CBT, EMDR, somatic experiencing, medication where necessary.
Consistency and time: often years, not weeks.
Safe guidance: a trained psychologist or a teacher from a genuine lineage, not a YouTube guru.
Integration: movement, food, sleep, community, daily grounding.
Confrontation: the courage to name pain instead of bypassing it.
Spiritual discipline (if chosen): traditions like Buddhism, Advaita, or Tantra, which demand humility and years of practice—not hashtags and ring lights.
This is the work. It’s slow, unglamorous, and often invisible.
The Business of Pain
What we see online today is not healing—it’s commerce. The pop spirituality industry thrives on one thing: your suffering becoming their product. It sells the fantasy of quick recovery while avoiding the real demands of healing. It preys on your vulnerability, slaps cosmic language on it, and calls it enlightenment.
And the tragedy? The people running this industry are often the most unhealed of all.
So the next time you encounter a YouTube or Instagram coach selling “multidimensional trauma healing,” don’t be mesmerized. Ask three questions:
Who taught you?
What qualifies you?
And are you really healed yourself?
If the answer is silence, you’re not witnessing wisdom. You’re watching unprocessed wounds dressed up as enlightenment—and sold back to you at a premium.
