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# You Didn't Have Enough Faith
- URL: https://www.rebindclassics.com/you-didnt-have-enough-faith/
- Published: 2026-09-11T16:49:21.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T18:28:10.000Z
- Description: I've seen how the tricks are done, and I performed them myself, and I've taught others to do them.
- Author: Andrew Wessels
- Tags: Derren Brown on Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, #listen-in

In Book Four, Marcus Aurelius says our judgments hurt us, not events. Derren Brown watched that idea run as a stage act in evangelical faith healing, and explains who pays when it wears off.

You Didn't Have Enough Faith

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From Episode 9 of twenty-three, Derren Brown on *Meditations*. [**Listen to the whole episode: The Judgment Machine →**](https://www.rebindclassics.com/the-judgment-machine/)

> I've worked in the past in the world of faith healing, of Christian evangelical faith healing, when people are brought up on stage and they can stand up out their wheelchairs and walk around, and I've attended those rallies. I've seen how the tricks are done, and I performed them myself, and I've taught others to do them. And a recurring feeling I've had with it, and a recurring thought, is that it isn't terribly difficult to get somebody up on stage to say they're not feeling any pain, if for no other reason than adrenaline is a very powerful painkiller. So if you have an audience of a lot of people and you get them all geed up and tell them their pains have gone, you are going to have some people come forward and say they're not feeling any pain, and you can tell them they've been cured, if you're that way inclined. Now, the problem is, of course, is that afterwards, because nothing actually has happened apart from temporary pain relief, plenty of people are going to resume their symptoms and pains afterwards. So what these faith healers tend to do is to say, throw your pills away, and if the disease returns, or the condition or the pain returns, it is your fault. You didn't have enough faith. Some secret sin or something has meant that your healing has been stopped. And of course, what this does is, it's a horrible thing, and it places the blame securely on the shoulders of the poor person that's going through it, and absolves the healer of any responsibility at all. And this is a very standard way that this thing tends to play out.

Derren Brown is a mentalist, which makes him the one Rebind guide who has performed the faith healer's tricks himself and can tell you exactly how they work. In the episode this comes from, The Judgment Machine, one of his twenty-three on Marcus Aurelius's *Meditations*, he's testing the claim at the center of Book Four: remove the judgment and you remove the hurt. He reaches for the coldest example he has.

The clip ends on the mechanism. What he says next is where you've met it since: the law of attraction, the goal-setting culture that makes every setback your own fault. Then he turns the same question on Marcus, whose version of the move is that nothing gets into your soul unless you let it, and asks whether it's any kinder, with his own worst breakup as the test case.

[**Listen to the whole episode: The Judgment Machine →**](https://www.rebindclassics.com/the-judgment-machine/)

Twenty-three episodes. Derren Brown on Marcus Aurelius's *Meditations*, for members.