Iyanla Vanzant is opening up about her decision to leave her hit show, Iyanla: Fix My Life after 9 years on-air.
For almost a decade the life coach and personal relationship guru counseled women and families about their life choices and provided them with tools and advice to move on to better. As she revealed during a recent appearance on Tamron Hall, the criticism, negativity, and even threats of death and harm that came her way from some viewers when all she was attempting to do was help people in need contributed to her decision to leave the show behind.
“I wanted freedom: freedom to do to be to go,” she told Hall. “So I took a stand for what I value, which was freedom. Hall observed that one such freedom she sought was freedom from scrutiny.
“I’m very sensitive to energy,” Vanzant said of the onslaught of vicious critique she received. She noted that because people allow her into their homes via their televisions, they often get a false sense of familiarity.
“Because you go into people’s homes, you’re in their bathroom, you’re in their kitchen and then they think they know you and they think they have a right to say certain things because we’re not clear and conscious of the energy we send out,” she explained. “So through the emails, through the social media, people would come into my home. I was getting death threats because they didn’t like something I said about it. And I’m like, ‘I want to be free of this. I don’t want this.'”
Even when the reaction she got from fans was not insulting nor vitriolic, it was still invasive. Many looked up her information to ask her for help fixing their lives directly.
“People would come to my home, you know, because with the internet, they can find you anywhere. They would call me, ‘I know you don’t know me, but I need help.’ Wait a minute, hold up!” she said. “I have so many vehicles and avenues where I serve people. I’m on social media, I have classes, I teach. You don’t get to call me on my private phone at two o’clock in the morning. So I just wanted to be free of that. That was more important to me.”
Vanzant continues teaching and healing through her new podcast, The R Spot.
