How unqualified voices with massive platforms are reshaping relationships, one algorithm at a time, and why nobody is asking who gets hurt.
I came to Jay Shetty the way most people do. Not by seeking him out, but by encountering what he had already done. By the time I understood the ideology that had been moving through my household for years, shaped by figures before them like Tony Robbins, Think and Grow Rich, Esther Hicks, Brian Tracey, Jack Caulfield, Gabby Bernstein and many more, and the coaching culture they represent, the conclusions had already been reached. The framework had already done its work. I was not a person to be understood. I was, in the language the industry provides, a limiting belief made flesh. Jay Shetty and Mel Robbins now use their platforms to “coach” millions at once.
That is not a metaphor. That is the operating logic of an industry that has never been asked to account for the people it leaves behind.
I am not alone in noticing. In recent months, a small but significant body of critical work has emerged around Jay Shetty specifically, and the spiritual influencer model more broadly. Liz Bucar, a scholar of religion at Northeastern University, has written with precision about what gets lost when spiritual practices are decoupled from their roots and repackaged as consumer content. Margarit Davtian, writing on Substack, has documented the cult dynamics embedded in Shetty’s rhetorical moves and the institutional history he works hard to conceal. Chona, a psychotherapist, trauma specialist, and head of a university mental health service, has a youtube video from 2024, a clinical takedown of Shetty’s coaching school that is as precise as it is damning. Each of them has named something important. None of them, quite, have named the person who was never in the room.
That is what I want to do here.
The Unregulated Space Is Not an Accident
There is a reason that Jay Shetty, Tony Robbins, Mel Robbins, Gabby Bernstein and the thousands of coaches they have directly or indirectly trained have chosen to operate in the coaching space rather than any regulated equivalent. It is not modesty. It is not a humble acknowledgement of their limitations. It is a structural choice with structural consequences.
Medicine is regulated because unqualified practice causes harm. Law is regulated for the same reason. Therapy and clinical psychology are regulated because the act of intervening in a person’s psychological life, their understanding of themselves, their relationships, their patterns of thought and behaviour, carries real risk. The regulations exist because the harm, when it occurs, is real and measurable.
Coaching is unregulated. Not because what coaches do is harmless, but because the industry has successfully maintained the fiction that what it does is not clinical, not advisory in any binding sense, merely facilitative. The coach does not tell you what to do. The coach simply asks questions. Creates space. Plants seeds. What grows from those seeds is entirely the client’s responsibility.
Chona, writing from over a decade of clinical practice and a PhD in psychology, has identified precisely how dangerous this fiction becomes when it is applied at scale. She documents that Shetty’s coaching school website contains a definition of therapy that is clinically false: it conflates therapists with psychiatrists, claims therapists diagnose and cure, and uses schizophrenia and personality disorders as the benchmark for when therapeutic support is appropriate. The effect of this framing is not accidental. It steers people with genuine psychological needs away from qualified clinical support and toward coaches, including Shetty’s own certified graduates, who have been trained on a foundation of misinformation.
Chona’s piece is available here and is worth watching in full.
As she puts it: it is unethical and dangerous to practise as a medical professional without the correct training and credentials. Why is the same standard not applied to mental health, wellbeing, and life coaching? The answer, which the industry will never provide voluntarily, is that applying that standard would end the business model.
A Degree Is Not a Monk, and a Monk Is Not a Therapist
Jay Shetty built his brand on a specific origin story. The monk. The young man who walked away from a promising career to live in an ashram, to study ancient wisdom, to undergo genuine transformation, and who returned to share what he had learned. That story is the credential. It is what licenses everything else: the relationship advice, the grief guidance, the couples communication frameworks, the coaching school that has certified thousands of practitioners to go out into the world carrying his methods.
The problem, documented thoroughly by Margarit Davtian and by the Guardian’s investigation, is that the story is substantially fabricated. The monk identity does not hold up to scrutiny. His claimed degree in Behavioural Science, which he used throughout the development of his coaching certification program, has since been quietly amended to Management Science on his materials. Chona, who knew Shetty personally during his university years, confirms he studied business and management science.
Davtian’s piece is available here. Her analysis of Shetty’s rhetorical behaviour in his New York Times interview is particularly sharp. She identifies what she calls the cult of personality reflex: the pattern of responses a person develops after years of immersion in a high-control environment, where criticism becomes evidence of the critic’s limited understanding, where accountability is dissolved into universal human imperfection, where a lie is repackaged as a paradox requiring only deep reflection rather than genuine reckoning.
Shetty was Youth Chairman of ISKCON, the Hare Krishna movement, from the age of eighteen. ISKCON settled a $9.5 million lawsuit with 500 child abuse survivors in 2005. Shetty does not mention ISKCON. His brand stays deliberately foggy. As Davtian notes, you would have to dig to find the connection, and the fact that you would have to dig at all is already saying something.
The question Liz Bucar raises, in her careful and important piece available here, is what gets lost when a spiritual practice is stripped from its roots and repackaged for mass consumption. Her answer is: usually the very thing that made the practice powerful in the first place. The traditions ask things of you. They have communities, demands, friction, accountability structures. What Shetty offers is the aesthetic of spiritual depth without any of its weight. The monk framing, the measured cadence, the borrowed Eastern vocabulary, all of it creates the feeling of encountering wisdom without the discomfort of actually being challenged by it.
Bucar names this dynamic with precision. Scholar Prea Persaud calls Shetty’s archetype the ‘oriental monk.’ The term Vedic monk, which Shetty uses to describe himself, is described by Cambridge divinity scholar Tilak Parekh as essentially meaningless. Ronald Purser, author of McMindfulness, is more direct: Shetty offers exactly what the masses want, a spiritual-but-not-religious, DIY, quick-fix type of McSpirituality.
That vagueness is not incidental to the brand. It is the product. Vague enough that anyone can project onto it what they need. Specific enough to feel authoritative. Accountable to no tradition, no community, no body of practice that could be examined or challenged.
Sixty Seconds of Advice for a Situation You Know Nothing About
Open TikTok on any given day and Jay Shetty will find you. Or Mel Robbins. Or Tony Robbins, repackaged from an arena event into a thirty-second clip. The format varies. The architecture does not.
Shetty’s delivery is intimate. To camera, quiet, measured. It replicates the conditions of a one-on-one conversation. The parasocial bond it cultivates is personal, almost confessional. You are alone with your phone, in a private moment, and he is speaking directly to you. There is no crowd to make you self-conscious. Just you, absorbing it.
Robbins is the exposed wiring version of the same model. His NLP training is right there on the surface: the anchoring, the pattern interrupts, the deliberate manipulation of physiological state, the volume and pace shifts, the manufactured emotional crescendos. He is not hiding the machinery because the machinery is the brand. His events are Large Group Awareness Trainings in the classic mould, sleep deprivation, social pressure, physical arousal, and an authoritative figure who has framed resistance as dysfunction, all engineered to produce a state that feels like breakthrough but functions closer to a controlled dissociative experience.
The content delivered through both mechanisms carries claims that belong in a clinical register. Shetty tells couples how to communicate. He instructs people on grief processing. He explains when to leave a relationship. He reframes how people understand their own memories of former partners. He tells an audience of millions, simultaneously and without any knowledge of their specific circumstances, that love is not enough, that if it doesn’t feel right they should walk away, that protecting their energy is the most important investment they will ever make.
Robbins tells a live audience that fear is False Evidence Appearing Real. That changing your physiological state overrides belief systems and trauma. That a momentary laugh at a funeral proves emotional states are entirely volitional and permanently alterable. He tells an audience member, publicly, to stop the bullshit, stop the ego, and show us the real you, using crowd dynamics to apply pressure until compliance is performed and labelled transformation.
Neither of them holds a psychology degree. Neither holds a clinical qualification of any kind. Shetty, as Chona has documented, does not appear to hold even a coaching qualification, despite running a coaching school that is accredited by the Association for Coaching and whose code of conduct he violates on multiple counts simultaneously.
A psychologist who told a client love is not enough, you can love someone and still need to leave, without prior assessment of that client’s relationship, history, or circumstances, would be acting outside their professional obligations. Shetty says it to several million people at once and is celebrated for his wisdom.
A therapist who publicly shamed a patient into compliance in front of a crowd would face a serious professional complaint. Robbins charges thousands of dollars for the privilege.
The Person Who Was Never in the Room
Here is the thing the wellness industry never discusses. When a person sits with a coach, absorbs a Shetty reel, works through a Robbins framework, or moves through a transformational leadership program, they bring their relationships into that space. Their marriage. Their partnership. Their family. These things become material: examined, reframed, diagnosed. The other people in those relationships are not present. They have not consented to being analysed. They have no right of reply.
They are characters in a story being constructed without them.
The partner at home has no mechanism for offering context, pushing back on a characterisation, or saying: that is not the full picture. By the time anything surfaces, the conclusion has already been reached. The framework has already done its work. What was a person is now a limiting belief. What was a marriage is now an obstacle to growth. What was a family is now, in the language the industry cheerfully provides, a situation that no longer serves her.
None of this appears in the testimonials. None of it makes the highlight reel. The transformation narrative requires a protagonist who awakens, and the awakening must be unambiguously good. The people left behind are not part of the story. They are the price of someone else’s breakthrough, and the industry that enabled it will never be asked to account for them.
The children of that marriage are not in the audience demographic. The partner who finds himself starting from scratch, trying to understand how his ordinary life became evidence of his inadequacy, is not the subject the content was made for. He is the externality the model never prices in.
Wisdom that offers destruction as its final result is not wisdom at all. The self does not exist in isolation, yet every piece of this messaging presupposes that it does.
The Architecture of Unaccountability
The wellness and coaching industry has constructed something elegantly self-protecting. The mechanism works like this. The influencer, the coach, the program facilitator: none of them tell anyone what to do. They simply ask questions. Offer perspectives. Create space. Plant seeds, in the language of the trade. What the client does with those seeds is entirely their own choice, their own growth, their own responsibility. The practitioner is merely the gardener.
This framing is doing enormous ethical work. It creates the appearance of client autonomy while obscuring the directional pressure being applied. The questioning is not neutral. The reframing is not innocent. The consistent privileging of individual fulfilment over relational obligation is not a value-free observation. It is an ideology, applied to a person, with predictable consequences for the people around them.
A therapist has a duty of care. They are regulated, ethically bound, required to consider the broader context of a client’s life. A wellness influencer has a brand. And the brand requires the listener to feel activated, not complicated.
The seed metaphor is the industry’s alibi. It places all moral weight on the person who grows the plant, and none on the person who chose what to grow, where to plant it, and what conditions to cultivate. But gardeners know what they are growing. They chose the seeds. They tend the conditions. They know what the harvest looks like.
The wellness industry knows what its harvest looks like too. It simply prefers not to photograph that part.
The Same Model, Different Packaging
What connects Jay Shetty to Tony Robbins to Mel Robbins to the thousands of coaches operating in their wake is not stylistic similarity. It is a shared and deliberate evasion of accountability at every level.
No qualifications that could be scrutinised. No methodology that could be falsified. No duty of care that could be enforced. No mechanism for the people harmed by their interventions to seek redress. And a business model that depends on the individual remaining the unit of analysis, because the moment you introduce the relational system, the people who didn’t consent, the partners, the children, the families, the entire permission structure collapses.
People return to Robbins returns again and again because the state change he produces does not transfer. The euphoria of the event, the crowd energy, the physical arousal, the feeling of breakthrough: none of it is portable back into ordinary life because ordinary life does not have the infrastructure that produced it. So the feeling fades, the old patterns reassert, and the only place the person has learned to access that state is at another Robbins event. That is not personal development. That is a subscription model with a spiritual aesthetic.
Shetty repackages 1990s and early 2000’s New Age spirituality for a new audience, sanding off the explicitly religious language and replacing it with something that sounds more like emotional intelligence. The energy protection content, the vibration and frequency language, the sacred self framing: all of it is straight from the self-help shelf of a generation ago, updated for algorithmic delivery. As Bucar notes, the vagueness is the whole point. It sounds ancient and authoritative without tethering Shetty to any specific tradition, community, or set of demands.
Real spiritual traditions make demands. They ask things of you. They situate the self within a community, a lineage, a set of obligations that extend outward. What this entire industry offers is the aesthetic of that depth without any of its weight, and without any of its accountability. Very much of the self, in a selfish way.
The Conversation That Needs to Happen
Bucar ends her piece by saying the traditions are still there, complicated and contested, but there. Not as museums to be raided for content, but as living resources. She is right about that. What she does not say, and what I want to name directly, is that accountability structures are also still there, in medicine, in law, in clinical psychology, in every regulated profession that works with vulnerable people. They exist because harm is real and measurable.
The coaching and wellness industry has spent decades arguing that what it does does not rise to the level of harm that would require those structures. The transcripts, the clinical documentation, the institutional histories, and the lives of the people left behind by someone else’s breakthrough suggest otherwise.
It is time to ask the industry to answer for what its harvest actually looks like. Not the testimonials. Not the highlight reel. The whole picture.
Including the people who were never in the room.
Sources
Liz Bucar: Jay Shetty Knows Exactly What You Want. That’s the Problem.
Margarit Davtian: Jay Shetty Can Walk You Out of Your Good Conscience
Chona: Jay Shetty Exposed | Analysis by Ex & Mental Health Professional
John McDermott / The Guardian: Uncovering the higher truth of Jay Shetty
The Interview | A Podcast From the New York Times: A Skeptical Conversation With Wellness Guru Jay Shetty | The Interview