LP-fortellinger - Norwegian website sharing information and experiences about Lightning Process - now available in English

Kalliope

Kalliope

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
A new website was launched today in Norway; LP-fortellinger (LP-stories).

For now it has 32 stories about ME patients' negative experiences with Lightning Process.
It also has some information about ME, LP, Recovery Norge and a collection of resources.

The people behind the website are anonymous, but quite a few of the stories told are with full name.

They have a section in English, but for now just to recommend automatic translation. They are however looking for people who can help translate the website.

I've just skimmed, and the site looks good and informative. The stories though are upsetting to read :cry:

Very useful to have patient's experiences collected in one place. Perhaps they'll publish stories from people from other countries as well in time?


https://lp-fortellinger.no
 
An important new site, given LP relies on their own anecdotes of success to sell their dangerous treatment, especially in Norway where LP seems to have made unfortunate inroads with some of the medical establishment.
 
https://melivet.com/2018/10/17/abou...k-norway-and-what-me-patients-are-up-against/
About Recovery Norway – and what ME-patients are up against
17. oktober 2018 · by melivet worth revisiting.......

Establishing a patient association, for the healthy, under the leadership of an MD is an excellent idea! The regulations for marketing of traditional and complementary medicine can then be bypassed and at the same time it’s a way to get access to, and influence the health authorities.

Copied to this thread:
Voices of Recovery website (Lightning Process promotion)
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I have been reading through the stories. Here are some of the key points that stood out for me.

Enrolment:
Some people were recruited by word of mouth following media stories about LP curing people with ME. Others were recommended to do it by doctors, and some were even expected to do it by the Norwegian employment department before they could get financial support.

Some were children and teenagers. These took a family member with them.

The course is very expensive for a 3 day 'training' of about 5 hours a day in small groups with a trainer.

Enrolment was not automatic on application. Participants had to fill in forms and have phone assessments which were geared around making sure the person was 'ready'. This meant basically being able to convince the trainer that they were suitable subjects for believing and doing everything they were told to do without asking questions, or expressing doubts or negative feelings. They had to say they weren't analytical.

Enrolment on a very expensive course with a process you had to pass to be accepted made the course very enticing. It helped create an aura of excitement that they were going to experience something special and complex and that they were excited and privileged to be accepted. Some were told they weren't ready when they first applied, so they tried harder to put aside any doubts and scientific thinking and to accept everything they were told.

On arrival, or beforehand, not sure which, they all had to sign a confidentiality agreement that they would not tell anyone what the course consisted of. Some were still years later quite frightened about revealing what happened on the course.

The course

Participants, some very sick, were expected to sit on hard upright chairs for hours at a time for 3 days. One asked if they would be allowed to lie down if they needed to and was told that never happened.

No one was allowed to question or criticise anything that was said or done during the course, being told if they did they would be asked to leave.

The course started with some scientific sounding information about the mind affecting physical health, also some pictures of optical iliusions to build the idea that the mind could be tricked into thinking they were physically sick.

They were told they did not 'have ME', they were 'doing ME', and the method would enable them to stop 'doing ME'.

Then they had to learn the method and practice one by one with the trainer in front of the group. This consisted of standing on pieces of paper on the floor and saying NO with an emphatic arm gesture to their symptoms every time they had a thought about experiencing symptoms, or about being sick, and stepping onto another piece of paper choosing between 'the life I love' and 'the pit', and saying aloud that they choose the life they love.

They were told to repeat the process all the time, whenever they started 'doing ME'. At the end of the first day they were told they had to do some sort of activity they hadn't believed they could do, like going to a shopping centre, and report back the next day what they had done.

They were told that part of the process was that they were to tell everyone in their lives that they had recovered, and to get rid of all associations in their home of their sick life, like the clothes the wore when they were 'doing ME', even sofas they rested on. They had to get on with their lives as recovered people and every time they felt symptoms, the had to stop themselves 'doing ME' by repeating the Stop action and chosing the 'life they love'.

Before they left at the end of the third day, they were told that they had to sign a document saying they had recovered. This was justified on the ground that stopping 'doing ME' meant the same as being recovered. Most signed it. Some are now worried that their signing is used for recovery data.

They were told they must not communicate with each other after the course, nor must they look online for anything about ME, or join any online groups or ME organisations, as that would be 'doing ME'. The must also cut ties with any friends with ME.

The immediate effect

A few decided straight away that it was a con and a cult and dismissed it, feeling they had wasted their effort and money. Some of these took a while to recover from the PEM of the 3 days and the trauma of it.

Most believed and tried really hard to do the process, some finding that at first they did have a surge of energy and believed they had recovered and were able to push on for some time. Some felt the effect wear off and were persuaded to pay more to do refresher courses, and to keep doing the method even up to hundreds of times a day. Some described it as a rush of excitement and adrenaline that kept them going through the course and for variable lengths of time afterwards. Some who admitted to their coaches that it wasn't working were told it was their fault, they were doing it wrong, or they didn't want to recover.

The long term effects

All those who stuck with the method and believed it would work ended up sicker than before. Some managed to keep doing it and live more active lives than before the course for some weeks, months or even years, though the longer they kept trying, the more they realised afterwards that actually they had been pushing and crashing and getting sicker overall, but managing to persuade themselves that the crashes had other causes. They had persuaded themselves they had recovered but were actually living far from healthy lives.

All felt they had been conned, most ended up sicker, and quite a few had ongoing psychological problems believing they were failures and it was their fault the process hadn't worked, and their fault they were sick.
Some lost friends and felt awful for having lied to their friends and family by telling them they had recovered.

Several only found they could finally let go of their feeling of failure and stop doing the method once the plucked up courage to look online and found support groups and information about ME, as they had been told not to do.
____________________

My thoughts

Reading some of these stories is very distressing. Lives and families and friendships have been destroyed, people have ended up much sicker, and some still live with ongoing psychological distress related to the process.

I suggest you take them a few at a time. They need to be read and shared widely.

My conclusion

LP is a cult and a dangerous scam. It uses brainwashing to harm its victims, and should be banned everywhere.
 
Last edited:
Trish said:
Enrolment was not automatic on application. Participants had to fill in forms and have phone assessments which were geared around making sure the person was 'ready'. This meant basically being able to convince the trainer that they were suitable subjects for believing and doing everything they were told to do without asking questions, or expressing doubts or negative feelings. They had to say they weren't analytical.
Click to expand...

I've seen an LP coach on Twitter talking about the importance of motivation in order to make changes, and compared LP with going on a diet. You need to be motivated and be willing to do the work in order to expect results. Of course what is implied here is also that those who don't achieve results, must have lacked sufficient motivation.

I also saw once the argument from same person that the high price of the course was to increase motivation :cautious:

Thanks for a good summary of the stories!
 
Thank you @Kalliope for sharing this information. It is so important that we understand worldwide what is happening with the LP.

It seems to go in bursts in different countries at different times. I don’t know if this relates to chance in that particularly charismatic practitioners enter a particular evangelical phase and gain momentum or if practitioners find at different times particularly receptive situations. For example in New Zealand there seemed one practitioner skilled at gaining official support and achieved a national boost through access to things like national medical conferences. She was then successful in drawing GPs in through seemingly pragmatic approaches to mental health and well being, and then started to market the LP and then her own rebranded version of the LP through doctors that seemed ‘receptive’. A New Zealand GP friend most enthusiastically emailed me her power point slides, and was then taken aback at the press of critical references I emailed back.

In contrast here in the UK there have been ups and downs, though most recently Prof Crawley’s fatally flawed research and its blind promotion through such as the SMC must have given it a boost. I estimate it must be on average once every three years that a different well meaning friend sends a press cutting or emails a new link thinking they have discovered for me a new miracle cure. With Prof Crawley I guess practitioners found a partly open door to push against.

I seems that currently in Norway (an) enthusiastic practitioner(s) has/have met with a situation where there are unfortunately some sympathetic people in the (for people with ME) wrong places.

So it is import we have a full picture of the LP tactics so that people have the history and information to counter wherever and whenever there is a new surge in whichever country is hit next.
 
Yeah this 100% describes a cult. Zero difference between this and gay conversion therapy. It's a sign of a failure that's been normalized for a long time that there are physicians supporting this nonsense, rot that's eaten away at the whole foundations. Compared to this, a judge straight up demanding a bribe is almost acceptable, in terms of being completely derelict in the aims of the profession.

Also: there absolutely need to be civil lawsuits for everyone scammed by this to be reimbursed in full. It doesn't amount to anything compared to the primary losses but this is necessary moving forward.
 
Snowdrop said:
This quote shows completely that LP practitioners have no idea what they are talking about.

You cannot compare having ME to going on a diet. They are not at all comparable.
Click to expand...
Also it's well-known that most diets fail and motivation has little to do with it. So this is similar to Fauci admonishing the ME community in the 80's for saying there's nothing wrong with a psychiatric disease, even people with peptic ulcers don't mind (they famously minded and his premise was completely wrong given ulcers' famed status as the quintessential psychosomatic disorder).
 
Given the coercive aspects involved children need urgent protecting.

Given that and the delusional aspects being told not to believe what is real I think one might justifiably consider mental health investigations of LP practitioners.

There are real public health issues in the mental health sector that are not being addressed let alone considered.

And I confess I don't think that mental health services anywhere are really up to the task.

It's a sad state of affairs that have real social consequences.
 
A further thought arising from reading these stories is that they highlight the vital importance in treatment trials of both objective outcome measures and long term follow up as the main end point - at least 2 years after initial treatment.

And collection of subjective outcome data needs to be done by people completely unconnected with whatever psychological treatment they have had, whether LP or the version of CBT used in PACE which had significant similarities. With patients being told this, to help to encourage them to feel they have permission to step outside the CBT/LP bubble and give an honest appraisal of their actual symptoms and illness severity.

For those still practising and believing in the LP methods, questions might need to be worded in a way that asks how often they are finding that they still need to do the 'Stop' method because of still 'doing ME', and what their symptoms are when they are 'doing ME'.

That poses an ethical question of whether the researchers should provide de-programming for those still sick, still brainwashed, and suffering psychological and self blame problems as a result of being brainwashed.

Many of these victims of brainwashing telling their stories here were still telling themselves and the people in their lives that they had recovered and that they were able to live normally sometimes for several years before they finally crashed so badly they had to admit they were still sick, and much sicker than before. The lengths some went to to cover up or re-interpret crashes while pretending to themselves and others to be recovered are extraordinary.
 
Good God, but wouldn't there be a group of lawyers who, by pro bono, would take charge a class action against these LP instructors and the Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration ? It seems to me that the seriousness of the damage suffered by these many people amply justifies it. The testimonies are numerous and overwhelming.
 
It would be great to have some excerpts to post on social media whenever the issue comes up. So whenever someone speaks in favor people could point out what it's actually about.

An effective way would be to use the vignette format tags, like Twitter uses, when the URL of a testimony is shared. All it takes is a few HTML tags.

This is stuff worth sharing. It's powerful, it leaves traces if people share them. This is truth that needs to be revealed.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom