“Any diagnosis, including cancer,” invites everyone to a seminar in the Sokol metro area “psychologist, oncopsychologist, crisis psychologist, member of the OPPL, supervisor, oncology curator, project teacher” from the team of businessman Mikhail Filyaev. The event is listed as a charity day, so the price is more than symbolic – 500 rubles.
Filyaev himself at the end of February launches his next personal growth course “Transformation”. 12 psychologists of his school will teach people “to adapt to any realities, to evolve personally and become a reliable support for themselves and their loved ones” within a month. Listeners are promised that they will “see the “matrix” from above and control reality, time and the laws of physics.” The cost of knowledge is 80 thousand rubles.
Thoughts heal the body
42-year-old Mikhail Filyaev and his 38-year-old wife Ekaterina own two firms that sell various trainings and courses in psychology. The basis of their method of healing is the so-called psychosomatics. This is when the cause of all diseases and troubles of a person is associated with his feelings, experiences and attitude to life.
The teachers of the Filyaev school believe that the real healing from diseases does not occur due to pills or surgical intervention in the body, but due to a change in the patient’s consciousness. Like, the head heals the body. Filyaev himself claims that his experiments showed “revolutionary” results regarding allergies. He also mentions vision, endometriosis, infertility, overweight and a dozen medical conditions.
And it seems that this method has found its grateful listener: in 2021, the spouses’ business only officially gained 230 million rubles.
Now the cost of training in their courses depends on the active participation of the center’s teachers: it starts from 15 thousand rubles for several training videos pre-recorded by employees and reaches 80 thousand rubles for the personal presence of the project founder at the trainings. At the same time, his psychological education and approaches to work raise questions for a number of specialists of the academic school.
Teachers, businessmen, writers
Judging by the words of Filyaev himself, he has a technical education – in 2003 he graduated from the Moscow State Technical University. Bauman, having received the specialty of an engineer of power engineering. What is psychology as a science, I learned at the MBA courses (“Master of Business Administration” – courses for managers who came to us from the USA and Europe) in 2009, and four years later I received a psychological education for some reason in a non-core for psychologists RANEPA. Judging by the time of study, Filyaev could only get a bachelor’s degree at the university.
By this time, the man was already engaged in business: he repaired household appliances, traded, installed and adjusted industrial equipment. One of these firms brought in up to 25 million rubles in revenue per year, but it seems that he wanted more.
In 2016, Mikhail Filyaev launched his own psychological counseling project, in 2018 the first firm appeared, and two years later, the second. At the same time, he allegedly unlearned in Germany, receiving a PhD degree there – a doctor of philosophy in the field of psychology – which, with a number of assumptions, can be equated with a Russian Ph.D. However, in order to be officially equal, a PhD holder in Russia needs to go through a special nostrification procedure. Why the businessman did not get a “candidate” in Russia is a mystery.
Ekaterina Filyayeva is an economist by education. In one of the videos on the Internet, a woman said that she had encountered psychology relatively recently, in the 2010s, when she came to training for her future husband. Now, in addition to running a common business, the newly minted coach as an individual entrepreneur helps those who wish to “unpack” events, live emotions and set priorities in life at a price of 9 thousand rubles for an online consultation and 15 thousand for one personal appointment.
A separate item of income for the spouses is the sale of books written by them, as well as by other specialists of the center. The most expensive of them – the authorship of Ekaterina Filyaeva – 3500 rubles per copy.
A similar “business” approach of the Filyaevs to the use of psychology led them to excellent financial performance and a noticeable increase in living standards. Life found in the ownership of Mikhail Filyaev several apartments located in Moscow and St. Petersburg, country houses and land plots in the prestigious Rublyovskaya direction of the Moscow region and in the Crimea.
In addition, the spouses own about 50 square meters. m of Sochi real estate in one of the business-class holiday homes, located in the elite cottage village of Ruchey Vidny. Until recently, they owned about 200 square meters here, but for some reason, by the summer of 2021, the Filyaevs got rid of most of the premises. On the Internet, Life found several ads for the sale of apartments at this address: for example, for 119 square meters, the seller asks for 35 million rubles.
With cars in the family, too, everything is fine. Mikhail now drives a new BMW X7 crossover, the market value of which reaches 19 million rubles. Recently, literally in one day, a man got rid of two cars at once: a BMW 6-series business sedan and a Mercedes-Benz V-Klasse 250D minivan, in which he rode for less than a year. The cost of such a “land yacht”, depending on the configuration, can now reach up to 32 million rubles.
Ekaterina, on the other hand, uses a silver Mercedes-Benz C-Klasse 200 coupe, in which she moved after the BMW X3 SUV. By the way, both spouses also have a modest French Renault Duster, apparently for trips to nature.
From the Snow Maiden to the coach
At the same time, it should be understood that not only business owners make good money, but coaches in general. Life looked through the social networks of one of the coaches of the Filyaev school – Ekaterina Pykhareva. A few years ago, the girl traveled around Europe on a budget, hitchhiked to St. Petersburg, loved hanging out in inexpensive drinking establishments, and at the same time worked as a bartender and the Snow Maiden on New Year’s holidays. In 2016, fate brought her to Filyaev.
On one of the recordings of master classes with the participation of Pykhareva, made in 2018, the coach admits that she does not have a special education and even hardly understands why she was invited to teach. However, this did not prevent her from becoming an individual entrepreneur soon, doing master classes and trainings and writing a book on trance techniques.
Now Ekaterina Pykharev is unrecognizable: the girl opened a new account on social networks, in which she appears exclusively as a business woman, a psychosomatics school coach. And last summer, a 33-year-old psychologist bought a Mercedes-Benz SUV.
Why the experts are sounding the alarm
For the third year now, academic science has been urging State Duma deputies to finally finalize a bill on psychological assistance to Russian citizens, which will allow separating real psychologists from people with professional retraining certificates received after several months of training in non-core institutions. The issue has become especially relevant in connection with the wave of information gypsy that has swept the country, selling all sorts of recipes for happiness: personal growth trainings, courses on “unity with the world”, “paths to wealth” and other things.
According to a number of professional experts, the industry needs strict regulation, since today’s various coaches and trainers with dubious education and methods sometimes, instead of healing, create a client’s dependence on their business and thus regularly empty their wallet.
“As long as the state does not have an understanding of what to do with “non-science”, there is no ban on selling non-scientific concepts, anyone can use it,” Arseniy Postnikov, head of the Center for Psychological Security, told Life. – With regard to Filyaev, we see that in his practice he mixes many different concepts and psychological schools. This raises questions, since either charlatans or outright ignoramuses often act in this way. But it can be unequivocally argued that he “makes money” on his clients.