The Open Chronicle of “Mentorship”

Some performances deserve applause. Others deserve tomatoes. And then there are those that deserve nothing but the long, withering silence reserved for amateur magicians who have just swallowed their own rabbit.

If you have ever watched a circus act where the ringmaster insists that the tiger is really a cat with theatrical ambitions, you will have some idea of what it feels like to sit through a certain kind of online “mentor” video. There is the same hasty flourish, the same charming claim that life’s perilous tangle can be unwound with a single, patented phrase, and the same faintly desperate wish of the performer that applause will substitute for competence.

Picture, if you will, a self-styled “mentor” sweeping onstage, inviting you into their “school of liberation”. They promise you a “new self”, insist you walk boldly away from “old pain”, and assure you that psychologists are the real villains, cruelly shackling you in misery. Luckily, salvation awaits — for the modest price of a monthly subscription and your undivided devotion.

Peel back the curtain and the glamour collapses like papier-mâché in a rainstorm. No science. No method. No credentials. Only a voice — inflated by ego, lacking by training — determined to persuade you that slogans heal better than therapy, and that charisma is a substitute for competence.

Let us be blunt, but not unkind. What is presented as liberation — “I stood up, I left, the psychologist kept me locked in my pain” — is not an alternative to professional help so much as an apothegm dressed in business casual. It looks like emancipation because it is wrapped in narrative; it feels like healing because it delivers catharsis at twenty per cent of the price of real work. But narrative and therapy are cousins, not twins. One tells you a story that fits; the other helps you change the conditions that make the old story inevitable.

Cheap Tricks of the Trade

The show is run on tricks so obvious they ought to be banned from birthday parties:

• Testimonials from fellow impostors, traded like Pokémon cards in a school playground.
• Bots inflating likes and followers, because nothing says “authenticity” quite like an audience of digital phantoms.
• Comment sections sterilised with North Korean efficiency, where criticism is deleted —or often brutally silenced— faster than a magician’s handkerchief trick.

Imagine, for a moment, the sheer folly of a self-appointed cartographer declaring the map unnecessary and then selling you a compass that only points to the nearest checkout. The language used here — “create a new self” — is intoxicating. Who would not want a newer model of themselves, slightly more jaunty, less encumbered by yesterday’s grief?

The problem is not the urge to become better; the problem is the promise that becoming better is mostly a matter of willpower, branding, and a weekend seminar.

And yet, behind the slapstick, the damage is real. Vulnerable people — the ones who actually need care — are lured away from evidence-based help and into the quicksand of performance. Instead of slow, difficult healing, they’re fed instant hope in sachets. Instead of being taught to think, practise, and recover, they are taught to obey and pay.

This is not help. It is dependency with a direct debit.

Not therapy but theatre — the commerce of despair performed in motivational lighting. Not the birth of a “new self” but the slow erosion of the ability to tell the difference between truth and fraud. The money is not the real theft. The theft is your judgement, your autonomy, your mind.

On Claims and Consequences

Let us apply the scalpel of clarity. The claim that conventional psychological methods chiefly rehearse pain — that they keep the client stuck in an “old self” — is not an observation so much as a theatrical interpretation. Psychotherapy, as practised by trained clinicians, is a methodical, evidence-informed collaboration. It can involve revisiting past pain; it is not an exercise in re-enactment for its own sake. It is, in many models, precisely the careful, painful work of seeing patterns, testing new behaviours, tolerating discomfort while practising different emotional responses — the very mechanics by which a “new self” is constructed, brick by humble brick.

When someone who lacks clinical training proclaims that therapy is the problem and offers a product as the antidote, several harms become likely:

• People with serious psychiatric conditions may be diverted from care that reduces risk and stabilises life.
• Parents may be encouraged to make choices that affect children’s schooling, health, or socialisation without evidence-based guidance.
• Vulnerable people may trade long-term recovery for short-term feeling better, prolonging harm rather than alleviating it.
• The economic outcome is predictable: money flows upward, agency is hollowed out, and blame is softly offloaded onto the client when promised transformations do not materialise.

These are not rhetorical possibilities; they are the predictable consequences of mixing theatrical certainty with profound human need.

How to Tell a Mentor from a Mapmaker

If you are reading these words because a polished video has persuaded you to consider an alternative to therapy, here are practical, gentle tests to apply — as if you were checking a recipe before cooking:

• Credentials versus narratives. Does the person explain how their methods work, with references to evidence or recognised frameworks? Or do they rely chiefly on personal stories, appeal to charisma, and the worn advice to “just decide”? Credible practitioners will happily talk about methods and limits.
• Outcomes, not anecdotes. Do they show controlled outcomes, peer-reviewed support, or at least transparent follow-up data? Or do they offer cherry-picked testimonials and dramatic before/after snapshots? Personal testimony is moving; it is not proof.
• Scope and boundaries. Are they clear about what they do not treat? A responsible professional says, plainly: “This is not suitable for X, Y, Z.” A showman often promises everything for everyone.
• Payment and pressure. Is the programme sold as a time-limited “last chance” with upsells and communities you must buy into? High-pressure funnels are not a therapy model; they are an industry model.
• Invitation to independence. Does their work teach you to evaluate evidence, to judge their claims, to seek second opinions? Or does it encourage you to join a tribe whose leader’s word becomes the final authority? Beware the mentor who confuses discipleship with empowerment.

A good real therapist holds a lantern in unlit corridors. A prescriptive, entrepreneurial mentor sells a plastic flashlights that run on hope, on empty promises and subscription fees. One helps you stumble forward with dignity; the other blinds you with slogans until you can’t tell the fire exit from the merchandise stall.

A Short, Frank Conversation With the Mentor - the Self-Styled ‘Awake Soul’ and Virtually Enlightened Online Guru (Who Mistakes Hype for Wisdom)

If, by any chance, the self-styled mentor were to read this, imagine me — in the most Dumas-inflected tone I can muster — drawing a sword of plain truth and saying: Sir (or Madam), you have an excellent eye for the theatrical and a regrettably weak seatbelt for responsibility. You are not a sage. You are a salesman of fear. You are not a guide; you are a hawker of platitudes. You do not liberate; you bind your followers to your own dependence on applause. And when the bots go quiet and your fellow charlatans stop clapping, you will find yourself alone, facing the bleak truth: your empire was built on the wounded backs of those you claimed to heal.

Your audience brings real wounds. Your rhetoric transforms uncertainty into commodity. If you truly wish to help people, the first revolution is humility. Study, refer, collaborate. Learn the limits of rhetoric. Do not trade the miraculous for the marketable.You will find that competence is not a constraint; it is the only thing that lasts. And if you still yearn for pageantry, let it be pageantry that wears the badge of evidence and the seams of ethical practice.

The shame will not arrive with critics, but with conscience — that small, unwelcome voice reminding you that you have become the parasite you once pretended to cure. If any shred of decency remains, you will stop. Not because you are forced to, but because to continue is to hollow yourself out until nothing but echoes remain.

As for everyone else:

Do not confuse volume with value. True strength lies not in surrendering to the loudest voice, but in stubbornly asking questions. True freedom is scepticism — that quiet inner murmur which says: if it sounds too easy, too perfect, too miraculous, it isn’t true.

For Parents, Helpers and the Curious — A Gentle Protocol

To those reading who worry for themselves or someone they love, you do not have to choose between being forever-analysed and being sold a quick fix. Consider this modest protocol — equal parts common sense and a psychologist’s caution:

• Before changing care for a child or withdrawing from treatment, consult at least two independent professionals.
• Ask any proposed mentor for references and clear limits. If none are forthcoming, decline.
• Keep an outcomes log: small measures of sleep, appetite, relationships, and mood. If a programme promises sweeping change without measurable markers, distrust the sweep.
• Teach scepticism to children by modelling it: say aloud why you are checking credentials, why evidence matters, and why no one person is infallible.

The Therapeutic Claim that Actually Matters

There is a therapeutic humility worth stealing from the best clinicians: the conviction that human change is gradual, that relapse is part of growth, and that agency is built by practice, not by slogans. If the “new self” is to be real it must be practiced in ordinary life: in the way you answer the phone, in the way you comfort a frightened child, in the harsh honesty of a difficult conversation. No amount of glittering proclamation can substitute for these quotidian experiments.

So here is a small, fierce invitation: when tempted by fast, charismatic certainties, ask them to show you the slow work. Insist on methods. Demand evidence. Celebrate modest, sustained change. That is where freedom lives — in steadiness, not spectacle.

So here is your weapon, sharp and pocket-sized:😉

If this entry has any final duty, let it be this: to give readers a mental instrument sharp enough to cut through charisma. It requires no degree, no certificate, only attention. Ask: Who profits? What is being promised? What is not being said? If the answers are upsells, miracles, and hostility to scrutiny, you are not buying help. You are buying theatre. Save your money; leave the tent.

And if the guru offers you evidence — marvellous. If they offer you a discount code — marvellous too, but only for them. For you? Not so much.

Readers, especially the young and the hopeful: feel the pull of a simpler promise. It is human and understandable. But do not allow the perfume of self-improvement to mask the scent of extraction. If something is sold as an escape from discomfort for a recurring monthly fee, treat it with suspicion. If it asks you to give up other forms of help, even more so.

Be generous, be kind — but be wary. The desire to help, when mixed with the desire to be paid and adored, becomes a chemistry that can produce either medicine or venom. Insist on the label. Ask for the ingredients. And if the self-appointed guru ever tells you to abandon competent care in favour of their patented programme, hand them the nearest mirror and say, very politely: “Prove to me you’re not another deceitful and damaging product. Show me you’re not just another nasty fake.”