We’ve all heard the mantra:
“Families must go through conflict to grow.”
It sounds wise. Sometimes it is. But repeated too often, without depth or discernment, it becomes not a truth — but a cover. A justification. A way to neutralise critique and romanticise harm as part of a sacred journey.
This isn’t insight. It’s insulation.
And it’s most often deployed by those who:
When contradiction arises — when harm is named or trust is broken — the fallback line becomes:
“This is what deep work looks like. This is our sacred mess.”
But is it, really?
Or is it chaos dressed as wisdom?
Within certain mentorship and wellness spaces, personal rupture is no longer endured — it is performed. The more dramatic the breakdown, the more marketable the breakthrough.
The audience, disarmed by intimacy, suspends critical thinking. Contradiction is rebranded as complexity. Disorder becomes the aesthetic.
Emotional theatre, subsidised by privilege.
To speak of breakdown while protected by legacy, resources, and status is not the same as surviving rupture alone. Yet the difference is rarely named.
In one particular case I’ve encountered, the leader of a self-anointed mentorship circle is buffered — not by personal resilience, but by the inherited privilege of her parents and the institutional scaffolding of her former spouses. Her emotional experiments, framed as leadership, are made possible by structures that absorb the fallout on her behalf.
But that’s not the norm. And it should never be treated as a blueprint.
Because when someone repeatedly insists that “family conflict is essential for growth,” we must ask: Have they truly considered what they’re saying? Are they, consciously or not, validating patterns of harm that countless people experience not as growth, but as trauma?
To claim that rupture is inherently generative — without acknowledging the lived reality of domestic violence, coercive control, or psychological abuse — is to erase the experience of those whose “sacred family journey” included fear, erasure, and survival.
It is not healing to spiritualise harm.
It is not growth to bypass consent.
And it is not leadership to imply that all wounds lead to wisdom.
Instead, all family trauma is spiritualised. Silence becomes “holding space”. Inconsistency becomes “integration”. Withdrawal is rebranded as “energetic boundaries”.
The language of growth becomes a shield. The family becomes a stage.
Such mentors operate in a closed loop, where critique is labelled “unenlightened”, and boundaries are framed as resistance to growth.
But their influence is far-reaching — particularly among people seeking safety, healing, or reconnection. When they present personal dysfunction as sacred work, they risk encouraging others to:
This isn’t just misleading. It’s dangerous.
Real healing is not content. It’s not spectacle. It’s not a brand strategy.
It requires:
And crucially — it demands support structures that extend beyond those who profit from the telling of the story.
If a mentor uses their unresolved family dynamic as metaphor, they must ask:
Are you inviting people into healing — or into identification with your unprocessed pain?
If the latter, it’s not guidance. It’s projection.
And when projection is monetised, the result is not intimacy — it’s entanglement.
This sacred blind spot survives because it mimics love, kinship, and care. But we must ask:
If your “mess” is always public — but the consequences always private — are you really leading, or simply performing?
The personal is political. But it is also structural.
We cannot allow emotional resonance to replace ethical clarity.
Not in families.
Not in mentorship.
Not anymore.