Tyranny Can Begin Because You Lost Your Humanity to the Self-Care Industry

When self-care becomes a lifestyle brand instead of a path to embodied truth, we begin to shrink. We forget to protest. We ignore each other’s pain. We starve while smiling. With piercing clarity and somatic wisdom, Ana Mael challenges the healing world’s obsession with self-love, self-mastery, and self-optimization — and asks what we’re losing in the process. This isn’t a rejection of healing — it’s a reclamation of what healing is meant to be: relational, justice-centered, and rooted in moral clarity. I

n this powerful episode, Ana Mael dismantles the modern self-care industry and its shadow side: spiritual bypassing, emotional gaslighting, and the slow erosion of solidarity. Takeaways: Self-care becomes harmful when it disconnects you from your community and numbs your moral instincts. Spiritual bypassing is not neutral — it upholds abusive systems. Real self-care includes justice, action, and relational responsibility.

Summary of Ana’s Position: Ana Mael is not against healing — she’s against healing that ignores injustice, isolates people in self-performance, and gaslights those who are suffering into silence. She calls for a return to somatic integrity, political agency, and human connection — especially for those who have been exiled, silenced, or marginalized.

1. The Weaponization of Self-Language Ana’s repetition of “self-love, self-care, self-mastery…” mirrors how the language of healing has become a mantra of avoidance. It’s a critique of: Performative wellness culture Healing as self-branding Bypassing suffering in the name of “positivity” or “manifestation” Key Line: “My friend, everything will be fine. You just need to know how to manifest.” Takeaway: This culture keeps people sedated while systems collapse. It privatizes emotional survival and ignores collective trauma.

2. Collapse of Solidarity and Kinship Ana points out that the pursuit of self-optimization has replaced acts of care toward others — even in life-and-death moments. Key Line: “You, my friend, can starve.” Key Line: “A stranger dies, but I need to protect my time for self-care.” Takeaway: The self-care industry’s ethos has eroded our relational ethics. We lose the instinct to help, protest, feed, and protect each other.

3. Tyranny + Bypassing = Perfect Storm She draws a direct link between apathetic spiritual culture and rising authoritarianism. Key Line: “Because tyranny can begin. I am in my own frequency.” Key Line: “Do not let spiritual bypassers… shame you, confuse you, or put fear in you.” Takeaway: Moral clarity has been replaced by personal branding. This makes it easier for regimes to rise unchecked because citizens are focused inward, not outward.

4. Moral Clarity as Embodied Resistance Ana reframes trauma healing as an act of social and political integrity, not just private relief. Key Line: “We became so obsessed with us that we lose a common sense of solidarity.” Takeaway: Real healing is not about feeling better in isolation — it’s about becoming more alive, awake, and relationally engaged.

Key Quote: “Self-care without justice is self-delusion. And it’s killing our solidarity.” “You, my friend, can starve. But at least I’ve mastered self-compassion.”

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