Breakthroughs, Smear Campaigns and Death Threats
By 2002 my team and I had hundreds of case histories of people getting great results using the Lightning Process. Many of these people had recovered from CFS/ME, and this was really quite a breakthrough. I thought that, as the word spread, people with CFS/ME, their support groups and the charities involved, would be really interested in our findings. Surely anyone struggling with an illness for which there was no effective solution would happily greet the news that there was hope for the future? You might be surprised to find that I was very wrong.
Although some individuals were excited by the news that some people had finally recovered, other factions reacted in a rather unexpected way. Some argued strongly for the results to be seen as fiction; others resorted to hate and smear campaigns, spreading lies about my practitioners and me, and some even sent death threats against the doctors and scientists researching the Lightning Process.
It would have been easier to move on from working in the CFS/ME field, and many times I considered it for the good of my stress levels and my family. But I also felt that these people couldn’t be allowed to silence and disregard the real experience of so many people whose lives had changed so dramatically. Leaving the CFS/ME field, and allowing these bullies to win, would mean removing one possible route to health and so consign more people to a life of illness, completely unnecessarily. And that, I felt, was just not okay.
So, we just kept focusing on helping thousands of people worldwide and ignored these attackers, hoping they’d lose interest and go away. Unfortunately, the internet has given these people an easy way to spread their bizarre opinions, and anything that’s published, even if it’s on the internet, still strikes us as being ‘good’ information, and can have a long shelf life.
When you see the positive impact of the Lightning Process, and get a chance to experience its simple logic, it seems ridiculous that I have to write this chapter. But I thought it was time to set the record straight and provide the facts; to point out why these people’s warped opinions are things to be very wary of, and to explain what I think motivates them. Much of the following relates to the Lightning Process and its effect on CFS/ME, as this is the field where these opinions almost exclusively come from.
I thought I’d start by taking some of the common slurs from the smear campaign, and show the evidence as to why they’re clearly made up.
Actually, it couldn’t be less mind controlling, as one of the core elements of the training course is to teach people the skills to make their own choices about things. I hope this should be fairly clear from this book, which asks you to consider what you think about things and if those ways of thinking make your life and health better or not. Ultimately, it will always be up to you to decide what you use the Lightning Process to change, as I fundamentally believe that you, and no one else, should be the one in charge of where your future is headed.
Equally, to be a cult, you need some kind of a membership, a congregation or devotees. The Lightning Process has none of those; it’s a training programme and nothing more.
A scam is an intentional deception – something that promises one thing but fails to deliver it. The Lightning Process only promises one thing: ‘to train people in tools others have found useful to improve their lives and health’, and this promise is clearly stated in all our training and information material. As has been extensively discussed in this book, it’s not a ‘fix’ or a ‘treatment’, so it would be unreasonable and inappropriate to promise any ‘guaranteed cures’. This is why the Lightning Process doesn’t promise such things. People who want you to think it’s a scam are either ill informed or malicious, or have chosen to forget that the Lightning Process is simply ‘a training’ rather than a cure.
They’ve also ignored the evidence from the various independent surveys mentioned in chapter 5 and referenced in the Appendix tables. These show that it is an effective approach, that people get good results and, as shown in the reported statistics, get even better degrees of change compared to the approaches currently provided by the NHS.
Unfortunately, the Lightning Process can’t be provided for free, as it is not currently available on the NHS. We hope with time, and our commitment to research, that this will change. However, although individuals have to pay for it themselves, often clients say, ‘If I had known that the result would be getting my life back, I would have paid hundreds of times more’, and when they compare it to learning most other new skills, for example, taking driving lessons, they realize the Lightning Process costs far less. They also recognize that they have already paid much more, in total, for things that haven’t worked, especially if you include the funding of their NHS healthcare through taxes.
If we look at what you get out of a training programme, we find there are only three possible outcomes:
If we take the well-researched example27 of teaching people to lower their blood pressure using tools to calm their mind, we find that many people can manage to use these tools effectively, and some manage better than others. Occasionally, you might find someone who is using the tools and somehow increasing their blood pressure. This would suggest they are doing something different from how they were taught, and a simple evaluation of how they are applying the tools is usually enough to then be able to coach them on how to do it in a more effective way. You might describe whatever they were doing before the additional coaching as ‘not very healthy’, but it would be difficult to describe the actual training programme as ‘dangerous’.
In the Lightning Process the same applies: the tools need to be applied as directed to get change, and the vast majority of people manage this. Ongoing support is there for those who need some extra help in applying the tools more effectively.
With the case of CFS/ME there are some additional issues. If you effectively apply the Lightning Process, using the body–brain–mind connection to improve the way your body deals with exertion, then you can start to increase your activity levels quite rapidly. If you don’t manage to apply those tools correctly, then your body won’t be any better able to deal with exertion than before the Lightning Process. If you then attempt to do more, it is likely that you’ll feel worse, because you’ll still have the compromised physiology associated with CFS/ME. The Lightning Process training works very carefully with students to ensure that they can use the tools effectively before attempting to do more.
If someone with CFS/ME doesn’t master the tools then they simply leave the Lightning Process training unchanged. Unfortunately, the course of CFS/ME is one of occasional upturns and recurrent and persistent downturns. This means if they’ve not used the Lightning Process tools, they will continue to see this natural variation in their health state. So, at some point after the seminar, there is likely to be a downturn as part of the normal variation you would expect. The downturn might be worsened by using energy to attend the training – in the same way as a doctor’s appointment requires some exertion to get there – but it would be strange to suggest that ‘the training’ at the seminar caused it to happen.
This is borne out by the statistics, which show the Lightning Process makes greater change than CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) and GET (Graded Exercise Therapy) approaches, while having very similar levels of ‘worsening’ as a result of attending sessions as shown in tables 1 and 2 (Appendix).
There’s a common smear spread about the Lightning Process which is that you aren’t allowed to discuss any of its contents, and you need to sign a document to ensure you adhere to this ‘rule’. This is complete nonsense; it’s not ‘secret’, as people are free to discuss any of the training tools with anyone they choose. There is an application form on the website, which you can see at www.lightningprocess.com. All the form asks is for you to agree not to use the materials to run your own version of the Lightning Process seminars, recognizing you are not professionally trained to do that, and that the seminar’s materials are subject to copyright laws because they are the product of years of development and research, and therefore my intellectual property.
And the bizarre smear that we forbid people from saying it doesn’t work for them makes no sense; throughout the book you’ll constantly find references to how the Lightning Process isn’t 100 per cent guaranteed to be successful, or that success rates are 81.3 per cent and so on. We consistently point out that not everyone gets the results they wish for, so why should we be attempting to silence people from saying just that?
One very high-profile example of this was a piece in the famous satirical magazine Private Eye a few years ago. It claimed that Lightning Process Practitioners were threatening to sue people to stop them saying that ‘it didn’t work’. I knew we had never been involved in any such legal action and so politely asked the magazine to pass on any information so we could investigate this further. They were unable to give us any evidence at all on the supposed cases they had reported on. This hasn’t stopped the smear campaigners from continuing to quote that article though.
The other points about me not being an osteopath, not lecturing in the philosophy of science and health on a BSc course, having failed businesses and being a criminal are all completely untrue, and well documented as such, but that doesn’t seem to stop these lies being repeated. So, who are this merry band, and why do they do it?
It seems to involve less than about 50 people, all of whom have an interest in CFS/ME. Many of them are sufferers and appear to spend many hours a week blogging, commenting and stalking me and others in the field. Most odd of all is that, as far as I’m aware, almost none of them have ever taken the Lightning Process course, although that doesn’t apparently stop them being experts on it!
It’s difficult to fathom quite what motivates people to spend so much energy on spreading misinformation about the Lightning Process. I would imagine that the one or two who have actually done the Lightning Process didn’t get lasting results and wanted to warn others that it doesn’t always work for CFS/ME sufferers (although I think it’s clear that we already do that).
Unfortunately, they don’t seem to be even-handed and recognize the many people who do get well using the Lightning Process, and suggest they were pretending to be ill…
What’s so ironic is that this is exactly the same horrific accusation – ‘you are malingering’, ‘not properly ill’, ‘have a mental illness not a real one’, etc. – that has been raised against people with CFS/ME over the years by those who doubt it is a real illness.
So, not to believe the people who have got better suggests to me that they think the illness is incurable and that you can only have the real disease if you don’t get better. If you are now healthy, you’ve never had it! This perspective seems to be one of the things that all the members of this group share.
Others feel wronged by a misunderstanding of the terms body–brain–mind connection, or the field of psychoneuroimmunology. As soon as they hear the words ‘mind’ or ‘psych’, they perhaps think that this implies the illness is all in the mind and naturally get upset by thinking we support that position – which, as you’ve read most of the book now, you will know we don’t.
Many of them seem to have already made up their minds that the only solution for this illness is a biochemical one, and anything else is impossible, wrong and belittles the significance of their illness. I think this comes from the belief that only a physical (or in this case, biochemical) treatment could work on a physical illness, and this would help to vindicate those who have suffered from the ‘it’s in your mind’ taunting. Again, this isn’t a logical argument, as I discussed earlier in chapter 3, but I can understand the illogical reasons for it.
Linked to this is the idea that a serious illness takes a long time and is difficult to recover from, so the speed and success rates we’ve found don’t fit well with that perspective. It is, of course, a flawed perspective; many serious illness (such as many types of pneumonia) do go away quickly (often in two weeks) once effective approaches (antibiotics) are used.
Again, one of the horrible ironies that this group’s most extreme outpourings – such as death threats and talking about conspiracy theories – to my mind, is that they reignite the argument that maybe CFS/ME is in the mind… although, as you should now know, it isn’t.
It does raise the question of why this group feel they have an expertise on the subject of the Lightning Process, and how useful their extreme views have really been in helping people find options for recovery. Sadly, the main effect of all their effort has been to temporarily put some people off learning the Lightning Process, and possibly condemning them to extra unnecessary years of illness. As Sue wrote:
I am so glad I finally took the LP and got well. I was going to take it two years ago but was unsure after reading the negative stuff on the internet. I wish I hadn’t – that’s cost me two years of my life that I’ll never get back.
All this very negative attention has meant that one of the commonest adjectives used when describing the Lightning Process is ‘controversial’. I object strongly to this, as it’s actually not a controversial process at all; it’s just that a few people seem to be determined to make a controversy over it where there really should be none. My hope is that this book, and especially this chapter, will go some way to redressing this slighting and unnecessary tag.
And finally, we aren’t alone in being the subject of their attacks. Prominent researchers into a viral cause of CFS/ME have been similarly targeted when they couldn’t replicate the findings of a series of experiments that suggested a new virus might be the cause of CFS/ME. One professor left the field and ‘now specializes’ in helping ‘war veterans’, according to a British Medical Journal article: ‘I now go to Iraq and Afghanistan, where I feel a lot safer,’ he says28.