When Anela Pasalic moved from her rural hometown in Småland, Sweden, to study in the capital of Stockholm, she remembers feeling isolated and severely depressed. It was then that she happened across a glamorous spiritual guru.

Pasalic watched on her phone screen as Kathrin Zenkina shared, from roughly 5,500 miles away in Los Angeles, how she turned her life around through manifestation, which is the philosophy that we can will things into existence by believing they’ll happen. “It just felt like she was an ordinary girl who went for it and had amazing shifts in her life. She also seemed very kind, caring and understanding,” Pasalic says.

For Pasalic, Zenkina felt like an online best friend — one who boasts almost 450,000 followers on Instagram, identifies herself as a “seven-figure entrepreneur” and sells manifestation courses through her business, the Manifestation Babe Academy. Pasalic, who first encountered Zenkina in 2018 when she was 23, took out a payment plan to cover a $1,300 program that Zenkina advertised as the only course one would need to manifest their dreams. Now 30, she estimates she has spent more than $6,000 on Manifestation Babe Academy courses. To pay for them, she borrowed money from family and skipped payments on other bills, like student loans. This was partially due to Zenkina’s suggestion that behaving as though you have money is a technique for attracting it. “I wanted to manifest better circumstances, like me being happy, me having better friendships, me feeling aligned with life,” she explains. Zenkina declined to comment.

Although manifestation has been around since the 1800s, it has moved from the margins to the spotlight amid the recent wellness boom fueled by social media. By summer 2020, Google searches for the term “manifestation” increased, and ample books and podcasts on the practice were released. Since then, the term has been used colloquially (if often semi-ironically) in both pop culture and in everyday life: Sabrina Carpenter employed it in her song “Bed Chem,” and in 2024, “manifest” was Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year.

At the same time, some life coaches began incorporating manifestation into their services. Their guidance, from relationship to financial to career, can cost $50 per month to thousands of dollars per course. And some followers, like Pasalic, may end up feeling cheated and confused.

The life coaching arena is largely unregulated. Although coaches can receive certifications from various bodies, not all of them do, and these certifications vary in legitimacy as there is no overarching board. “Coaching is not a regulated field, it’s not a regulated practice. … When you see a licensed professional, such as myself or other psychologists, we have accountability to our licensing body,” explains Lynn F. Bufka, head of practice at the American Psychological Association. What’s more, anyone can call themselves a coach.

Zenkina, who doesn’t advertise that she has certifications, teaches manifesting, journaling, tapping specific points on the body while focusing on particular thoughts and taking actions that feel “aligned” with one’s desires. She has clients record themselves vocalizing their wants, turning down the volume on the recording until it’s inaudible, overlaying it with calming music and listening to it on repeat — a technique known as “subliminal hypnosis.” Pasalic attended online programs that involved prerecorded webinars alongside worksheets and live Q&As.

Pasalic followed Zenkina with religious fervor, but her life didn’t change. She began to feel helpless and out of control, especially as most of Zenkina’s teachings focused on inner work over practical change. (As manifestation is intangible, it can be difficult for clients to ascertain whether or not their coaching is “working.”)

“In many ways, manifesting takes the problems with life coaching to a new level, further moving the process away from the concrete, practical advice that coaching should be about and into the abstract, occult, less researched and even riskier realm,” says Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, a psychiatry professor at Stanford University, a research scientist at Cedars-Sinai and the author of “A Leader’s Destiny: Why Psychology, Personality and Character Make All the Difference.”

Zenkina warned her followers that their lives would fall apart before they improved, and that the universe would help them in the “11th hour.” So Pasalic trudged on. Then, in January 2020, her parents convinced her to visit a doctor who prescribed her an antidepressant. The medication helped, but then Zenkina said something that made Pasalic doubt its effectiveness.

On a live Q&A, according to Pasalic, Zenkina said antidepressants can help people get to a higher vibration (spiritual parlance for happiness and positivity), but then, perhaps, they should let them go. “I had been on antidepressants for maybe 10 months. And I was just like, ‘Oh, maybe she’s right. Maybe I should quit antidepressants; maybe I’m better now,” recalls Pasalic.

“If you don’t have any expertise in mental health, you might dangerously cross a line into a territory where you really need to have some expertise in order to be effective,” says Bufka, regarding coaches giving medical advice.

Pasalic says she had a wake-up call when midway through a roughly $2,400 Sovereign Money course — which promised to help disciples “hack the money game using the spiritual laws of money manifestation,” create “generational wealth for lifetimes” and “become recession proof” — didn’t work. She asked for a refund, but was denied.

“I was just so delusional,” Pasalic says. “I was stuck in my life for seven years because I believed what she was teaching.”

To vent, she took to the Life Coach Snark subreddit — one of several forums where people share their experiences with life coaches they suspect are taking advantage of people — and a deluge of similar tales came in. Pasalic says members of the various subreddits fear retribution for speaking out.

Nevertheless, the camaraderie was cathartic. “It felt comforting knowing other people were validating my feelings and what I went through,” she says.

Dane Schwaebe, too, was depressed and unhappy with his life when he stumbled into the coaching universe. A friend had recommended he look into Nick Unsworth, the charismatic founder of Life on Fire, a spiritual life and business coaching program which promises to help people unleash their “god-given potential.” On LinkedIn, he boasts certifications in hypnosis; neuro-linguistic programming, an unproven form of therapy that involves reprogramming how people process information; and time line therapy, which aims to teach people to respond to current circumstances without being informed by the past.

Schwaebe says he was seduced by how Unsworth presents on social media: He lives in a large house in Texas, drives a Dodge Viper sports car and, to Schwaebe, kind of resembles Channing Tatum. He’s also a family man, featuring his wife and three kids heavily in his Instagram content.

In 2018, Schwaebe signed up for a free introductory event in San Diego, about an hour’s drive from his Temecula home. Per Schwaebe’s account, it lasted from early in the morning until late at night, with a 20-minute lunch break, and attendees were asked to turn their phones off and put them away. As well as a group visit to church, Schwaebe says, the event featured new-age spirituality techniques like group meditation, Reiki and manifestation.

Unsworth also allegedly regaled attendees with the story of the time he was deep in debt and turned his life around through coaching (a recurring theme in his content.) “They offer a light, you know? They’re kind of like angler fish … You’re down and you’re in this darkness, and you see a light,” reflects Schwaebe. Unsworth did not respond to multiple requests for comment through his website’s contact form, email and Instagram.

After the free event, Schwaebe says he paid $6,000 for Life on Fire offerings. Per Schwaebe, one course called “Abundance” involved participants shouting a description of the person they wanted to become while a member of Unsworth’s team evaluated how much their eyes widened as they yelled — the wider, the better. Attendees also gathered in a circle to make a confession and confront a group member who resembled someone who had hurt them. Schwaebe chose a woman who reminded him of his birth mom and, per instruction, let it all out, which involved screaming and crying. One of the testimonies on the course’s website reads, “my favorite part of the event was breaking through generational sins, shame and regret.”

“I’m a perfect candidate for this sh—. I had a credit card to cover the coaching balance and was in a depressed, wounded state. I was willing to throw money at whatever would theoretically make me better,” says Schwaebe.

The title of “life coach” could potentially cause confusion, says Aboujaoude. “When life becomes your topic, you are a de facto therapist,” he says. “While any new helping profession is a welcome addition to our well-being landscape, this totally unregulated Wild West risks doing serious harm.”

Another Life on Fire event, Schwaebe says, guided attendees on how to manifest money, freedom and their own business. Schwaebe grew uneasy when Unsworth used it to pitch another course, suggesting those who couldn’t afford it ask someone they know to help pay for it. He also offered a commission for enticing friends and family to join, framing it as a business opportunity, says Schwaebe, who had signed up for the program via his friend’s affiliate link.

Unsworth also offers a course teaching people how to become a life and business coach in 90 days. Indeed, over the past few years, coaches coaching coaches have become a key component of the industry’s business model.

Today, Schwaebe says he is doing better. He’s been diagnosed with depression and ADHD; he takes medication and sees a therapist. He’s also set up an online marketing business, the success of which he attributes to no one but himself.

His advice for anyone considering following a life coach with a manifestation focus? “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.”

So how can people seeking life and emotional support — whatever the form — navigate that search safely, particularly given the onslaught of coaches with polished social media presences? Bufka recommends asking the practitioner all of the questions you can. “It’s very appropriate to ask questions. How do you know this is effective? When should I expect to see some changes? What will we do to adjust if I’m not seeing the kinds of changes [I need]? You know, asking questions like that can help somebody make a more informed decision,” she says.

She also recommends enlisting the help of a friend, who can weigh in if things start feeling off. And if someone suspects they need mental health support, a qualified professional would best serve their needs, Bufka says. “Seeing the professional with the education and experience in the domain in which you’re struggling is going to be really important,” she says.

Today, Pasalic says she still struggles sometimes because of how much she invested into (and relied on) Zenkina’s teachings, but she feels more independent. “I’m so, so much better and feeling much happier,” she says. “I feel so much more like myself than I did before.”