Unlicensed Trauma Therapist Hurts Many
Allen Kanerva is an ego-maniac, a menace, a fraud, and an NLP grifter. He tries to sell himself as this renowned expert in the field of trauma and neuroscience, but the reality is he just took an NLP course and read some books by Joe Dispenza. There is not much else to his history beyond his overly inflated ego.
To sum up Allen's history, he took a NLP course and learned Timeline Therapy and the NLP Phobia Cure techniques, both techniques which he did not innovate or create himself. He made some some superficial changes to the NLP Phobia Cure and took it upon himself to start charging people thousands of dollars for him to use it on them as an alternative to Brainspotting and EMDR. Through social networking, he introduced it to certain individuals in the mental health field who did all the work in developing it into an alternative protocol called Reconsolidation of Traumatic Memories.
Allen has postured himself as the creator of this technique since then, but you will find no mention of him as a teacher or founder on any documentation for Reconsolidation of Traumatic Memories. Despite his over-hyping of it's success, the technique is actually overly complex and inferior in comparison to Brainspotting, which is one of the reasons it never received mainstream adoption in the mental health world.
Allen presents this technique as the ultimate cure-all for psychological trauma, but it's only a drop in the bucket in terms of the overall healing that is required, particularly when it comes to complex trauma. It's simply a gimmick for allowing somatic processing to occur.
Allen likes to posture himself as some big player in the trauma field and an expert at healing trauma, but it's nothing more than delusion created by his inflated ego. Allen's lack of therapeutic training comes out in his programs he charges thousands and thousands of dollars for in the form of boundary issues, dominating the session time by talking about his own accomplishments and life struggles while telling you that discussion about yours is not necessary for the healing process, violating basic ethical codes by taking gifts or services from clients and using his position of authority to upsell his courses, ghosting clients his trauma techniques failed to help, and blaming those clients for his own failures to help them.
I invested around $8k into Allen and it ended up being one of the most harmful experiences I've ever had with trauma practitioner. He violated so many boundaries and dominated the sessions with his non-stop talking about himself and how amazing he is. I left the entire thing feeling taken advantage of, hurt, and betrayed.
Despite Allen's trauma healing gimmick having no real long term effect on the state of my trauma and my recovery taking much work with other practitioners after seeing him, Allen kept all of my money and returned none of it.
When I went to see Allen, I did not understand concepts like transference between a patient and a therapist and I found myself doing free work for Allen's business, in addition to paying for his service, out of a desire to please him. As our relationship became more emotionally entangled and complex and I began to become distressed as everything felt "wrong", Allen ghosted me and kept all of the money.
My experience is not the only one. Allen has hurt many of his clients with his arrogance and lack of training, but many are afraid to come out and speak about it. I found myself deleting reviews out of shame and embarrassment and it took time for me to come out and speak about it like I am now.
Allen is so arrogant he has blatantly said multiple times in his trainings that he says he does self-improvement to satisfy the Canadian state, but is really doing the treatment of trauma. He has been reported multiple times to the College of Registered Psychotherapists for practicing without a license. He went low-key for years and I thought he was gone, but he has remerged in the last year with a new company name, prompting me to write this review to warn the public.
Allen Kanerva should be stocking shelves at a local grocery store, not pretending to be a trauma therapist. The man is a menace to the mental health community.