The Performance of Healing
False Prophets, the Uninitiated and the New Age Healing Paradigm Parading Around as Authentic
I want to say something that will probably make some people uncomfortable.
There are individuals operating in healing spaces right now, holding circles, running coaching programs, building spiritual brands, whose primary relationship to “healing work” is not about you. It’s about them. When people who need genuine help and support find these Cluster B’s parading around as healers and coaches and psychedelic integration coaches, you are enabling them by constantly complimenting and boosting their ego. That is why they do this work, they need to fuel their grandeur perception of self in order to not have the illusion be broken that they are in fact, uninitated.
And the ecosystem we’ve built around healing doesn’t just allow this, it incentivizes it.
There Are Almost No Healers
Before we talk about who performs healing, we have to reckon with something most of the wellness industry has completely bypassed:
Genuine medicine people are extraordinarily rare. And the ones who exist don’t call themselves healers.
This isn’t romanticism. This is something even contemporary sacred pipe carriers will tell you plainly. The kind of medicine people who walked this planet in earlier times, the ones with genuine ancestral lineage, rigorous initiation, years of apprenticeship under other carriers, and the lived relationship to land, ceremony, and community accountability that makes medicine medicine, those people are largely gone. What remains is fragmented, guarded, and held by a very small number of people who, notably, are not promoting traditional healing as paid opportunities on social media.
Authentic medicine people don’t advertise. They don’t build brands. They don’t call themselves healers, because they understand at a cosmological level that healing doesn’t originate in them. They are conduits, at best. And even that, they hold with tremendous humility and accountability to forces much larger than their ego.
So when someone walks into a healing space, digital or physical, and claims the mantle of healer, medicine person, wounded healer, shaman, or any variation of chosen and gifted, the first question isn’t about their training or their trauma resolution.
The first question is: who initiated you, and who holds you accountable?
Because in every genuine lineage tradition on this planet, medicine is conferred, not claimed. It is recognized by elders, tested by community, and bound by obligation. It is not a brand. It is not a niche. It is not a content strategy.
What Initiation Actually Is
And initiation, real initiation, is not what the wellness world has made it look like.
It is not a plant medicine retreat with integration coaching. It is not a vision quest weekend with a certificate. It is not the darkness you reference in your origin story to build relatability with your audience.
Real medicine initiation is rupture. It is the kind of suffering that remakes the nervous system at a cellular level. Near-death. Prolonged isolation. The dissolution of everything you thought you were. In many traditions, initiates don’t survive. And the ones who do don’t come back the same. They come back quieter, more careful, more aware of how much they don’t know.
There is no glow-up. There is no rebirth narrative ready for public consumption. There is grief that doesn’t resolve into content.
This is precisely why authentic medicine people carry their initiation with such gravity and such reticence. You don’t broadcast what broke you that completely. You don’t monetize the threshold you nearly didn’t cross.
The healer-brand aesthetic, the ethereal photography, the testimonials, the language of “holding space” and “deep transformation,” is the opposite signal. It is the performance of an initiation that was never actually survived. Because if it had been, the last thing you’d want is an audience.
The Role as Architecture
I’ve been watching this pattern for years, in communities I’ve loved and in dynamics I’ve had to untangle myself from. What I’ve come to understand is this: for certain individuals, particularly those carrying unintegrated Cluster B patterns, the identity of healer functions less as a practice and more as a psychological architecture.
It offers what internal instability cannot:
A coherent sense of self, organized around being needed. Continuous validation flowing from clients, followers, communities. Moral positioning that deflects accountability. Access to intimacy without the requirement of mutual vulnerability.
Cluster B traits, particularly grandiosity, the need for admiration, and a fluid audience-responsive identity, are almost perfectly designed to fill a vacuum. And the healing economy has created a vacuum of historic proportions: enormous demand for medicine, almost no actual medicine, and zero structural gatekeeping.
Into that vacuum walks the performer. And the performer, unlike the actual medicine person, is very willing to be called a healer.
In trauma-informed and spiritually oriented spaces, where emotional expression is currency and personal narrative is authority, this architecture becomes almost impenetrable. The healer persona grants someone the right to be revered, to be depended upon, to hold the room, all while controlling exactly how they are perceived.
That’s not healing. That’s a very sophisticated coping structure wearing healing’s clothes.
What the Ecosystem Is Actually Selecting For
Here’s the structural problem: the contemporary healing economy, especially online, especially on social media, has almost no accountability infrastructure.
There are no enforceable ethical standards. No governing bodies. Credentials are self-issued or loosely conferred. The gap between personal experience and professional authority is routinely collapsed. What gets rewarded is emotional intensity, compelling narrative, aesthetic fluency, and the ability to perform transformation convincingly.
In this environment, individuals who are highly attuned to social feedback, identity construction, and relational influence will rise quickly, regardless of whether their internal capacity to hold others is actually developed.
The ecosystem is selecting for performance. And some people are exceptional performers.
This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a structural outcome. Low barriers to authority combined with high rewards for visibility will consistently surface people whose gifts lie in being seen, not in the slow, unglamorous, relationally accountable work of actually sitting with someone’s pain.
Where the Seams Show
The performance holds as long as the relationship stays asymmetrical.
As long as the dynamic is structured around the healer’s identity, as long as you are the one seeking and they are the one knowing, the whole thing can look remarkably functional. The language is right. The presence can feel magnetic. The frameworks land.
But then something shifts. You ask for mutuality. You name a harm. You expect repair.
And suddenly the person who seemed so grounded becomes elusive, or defensive, or reframes the situation in a way that somehow centers their experience of being misunderstood.
What I’ve seen, in others’ accounts, in research, in my own experience navigating these spaces, is a consistent pattern: difficulty sustaining non-hierarchical relationships, resistance to accountability, narrative reconstruction to protect the self-image, rupture or withdrawal when the identity is genuinely challenged.
This is what happens when a performed identity meets the actual demands of relational presence. The seams show.
The Consent Problem
This is where I want to be precise, because precision matters here.
When you enter a healing relationship, you are operating under an implicit agreement: that the person holding space has the capacity to maintain emotional consistency, navigate power differentials responsibly, engage in repair when harm occurs, and hold boundaries that protect both of you.
If someone cannot do those things, but presents themselves as grounded, integrated, and ready, you have been deprived of informed consent. You are making a relational decision based on a misrepresentation of what’s actually being offered.
That’s not a misunderstanding. That’s harm. Not always intentional harm. But harm that is predictable, patterned, and largely invisible in ecosystems that have no mechanism for tracking it.
Why I’m Writing This
I’m not writing this to pathologize individuals or to offer a diagnostic checklist for vetting your next practitioner. Cluster B is a clinical category with real complexity, and most people carrying these patterns are also carrying enormous amounts of unprocessed pain.
I’m writing this because the healing economy has produced conditions in which that pain gets exported, handed off to clients and communities who don’t know what they’re receiving.
I’m writing this because I believe in healing spaces that are actually accountable. That have real standards, real repair processes, real humility.
And I’m writing this because if you’ve had an experience in a healing space that left you more disoriented than when you arrived, more confused about your own perception, more bound to someone who claimed to be helping you, I want you to know: that disorientation has a name. And it wasn’t your fault.
The performance was just that good.