Thanks, I2009. Your autocorrect rendered Mickel Therapy as 'mocked therapy' at the start, which sounds about right!
Have you done the Lightning Process, too?
Generally speaking, with all these guys, I sometimes have moments where I see their testimonials and videos with 'recovered' patients etc., and a part of me thinks "They can't all be lying, so maybe there's something in it." But then I get rational and realise what's going on:
The only thing that allows these people to exist it the prevalence in some regions of the 'Oxford' Criteria, notoriously vague and almost certainly leading to people with ME and people with other conditions, one of which would perhaps more accurately be called Burn-out, all getting the same diagnostic label.
All these 'therapies' run through franchised practitioners, all of whom get training from the same commercial organisation. Their practice is to pre-screen patients and turn away those who don't fit, although they're vague about what that means. In the case of the Lightning Process, one of the reasons for turning patients away is that "they haven't done enough work and need to go away and study some more" (that's a Phil Parker quote, slightly paraphrased).
LP requires patients to buy a book and/or audio downloads and study them before they will be considered for a course. There's an old marketing adage that people will value more what you make them pay for. Phil knows his marketing.
And of course, if you've had to work at something before you even start with it, you're far less likely to look at it and think "this is stoopid".
And you can't buy the book, which 'explains the science behind the LP', until you've signed up with them, which noticeably requires you to give them your address and telephone number.
So .... IF they're happy that you've read their book and half-memorised it (some patients may laugh here), and IF you fit their secret criteria for acceptance, THEN they might let you on a course.
They're gathering up the people most likely to respond to life coaching / CBT / Emotional Freedom Technique etc. They really they only need a small number of these people to recover and they've got their 'patient testimonials' right there. And if that person happens to be a celebrity (and those guys are more susceptible than most to cleverly targeted marketing), so much the better. Because then they get more newsprint and airtime, and so the marketing cycle goes ....
I think the bottom line is that the people behind these 'therapies' know damn well what well-informed patients know — that the current diagnostic criteria are a joke and that the prevalent biopsychosocial model has created an unholy mess which cleverly targeted psych therapies can exploit, picking off the low-hanging fruit and using it to create an illusion of efficacy.