The Journey

When I met the life coach, who would ultimately claim to be my “teacher,” in 2008, he offered me spiritual and metaphysical answers for every confusion, every fear, every doubt and every hurt I had ever experienced. He told me grand stories of his life and all the trials he had traversed. I learned that in his role as a “teacher of God,” he had been shown great favor and assistance from both God and His heavenly angels. Over the years, I heard all manner of stories, both major and minor, that constantly served to reinforce this belief in him as a great man because they seemed to provide evidence for the humble and passive claims he made.

I guess I didn’t look too far into it. I didn’t know I needed to. I came into his sphere seeking answers, seeking help, totally open and completely vulnerable. I was 27 years old. I had already all but given up on any of my previous life’s aspirations. I was directionless and desperate for purpose and meaning in my life. I was fresh, malleable, unmolded clay with a propensity for a belief in the magical and divine intervention (see my story in The Thing About Love for examples). He was all too happy to provide the answers that would give me that purpose and meaning. He leaned heavily on the great spiritual masters: Jesus Christ, Lao Tzu, Buddha – and even on the more current day teachers: Wayne Dyer, Louise Hay, Greg Braden, Gary Zukav, among many others. But most of all, he leaned on the book that would change my life: A Course In Miracles.

He claimed to have been a rock star who’d gone through a violent undoing when his whole world fell apart with the dissolution of both his band and his relationship in one fell swoop in the midst of a grand European tour. During my first few years in his office, I heard more stories about his band and his previous life than I can recount. But they all served to show me what a terrible personal tribulation he had endured and how much deep spiritual awakening he had undergone as a result. He no longer needed to pursue fame and fortune for he had let go of his egoic need for specialness.

He told me how angels had intervened on his behalf in the midst of court cases, how large sums of money and even gold had fallen into his care, about grand vision quests he had undergone in his spiritual development and so many other spectacular stories, including:

• Impossibly strenuous hikes in the desert where men showed up out of thin air and redirected his path
• Panhandling on the streets of Chicago to challenge his pride and to experience the position of poverty
• Meeting his own spiritual teacher, “Masa Yogi,” who claimed he had been waiting for him to arrive as his student. He supposedly lived with and learned from this master for some time. He told me a detailed and inspiring story about how Masa Yogi took him to Grand Central Station to show him the mathematical symmetry and precision in the universe through the movements of the people and trains.
• One time, early on, he told me a story about meditating all day in a Tibetan temple with the monks and how physically challenging it was.
• Another time, he shared a truly inspired story about his recent vision quest to the desert where he sat in a full lotus position for a straight 14 hours, from dawn to dusk, and when he opened his eyes, he was shocked to discover how much time had passed.
• Many years after that story, I was regaled with another spectacular tale upon his return from his annual vacation out West. This time he had gone on a hike with scientist and author Greg Braden and eventually ended up in the desert. There, they met with some Essenes who appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the desert. The Essenes took him to a small dwelling which also rose out of the desert from thin air. Here, they told him about his life, spoke in detail to him about some of his clients and the importance of his work, and then sent him on his way. Of course, my teacher was not at liberty to tell me all that they conveyed, but it was a spectacular story, all the same.
• He claimed to have been awarded an honorary degree from a prestigious university after his band fell apart. He also claimed to have gone on to get a PhD. (To other clients who started seeing him even earlier, he had claimed to have multiple PhD’s.) He once told me how he volunteered some time each month counseling hospice patients at the local hospital as part of keeping his therapy license up to date.

These stories were told in meticulous detail the likes of which I am omitting here, both for the sake of brevity as well as the sake of stopping the madness. And this is just a very small sample of them. But you have to understand that the overwhelming detail provided in his stories, combined with the fact that they were strategically delivered over a period of time spanning more than a decade, served to carefully, unwittingly indoctrinate many of his clients into seeing and believing the incredible persona he created for himself. With that persona as shield, he could then convince us to very gradually, systematically accept increasingly unconventional ideas and behaviors.

As ridiculous as these stories may sound in black and white and entirely out of context, his initial stories did contain some verifiable truth. He had been in a band, for example, and their albums were accessible on the internet. But even these stories grew gradually bigger over time and any factual details were dramatically inflated.

I was too desperate to doubt or question it, really. Not since the tools and information he had conveyed to me (via the other aforementioned teachers and masters) had been so effective in helping me find long-sought answers and a sense of peace that I had never known. After all, he commonly claimed to now be nothing more than an everyday dude living and working in an everyday life. He liked to say that he was “flying under the radar” and that he really preferred life that way. So humble.

It’s the classic case of the frog and the boiling pot of water: Put the frog in the water while it’s comfortably warm and then slowly, gradually increase the temperature, so he doesn’t notice it, until the pot is boiling. That’s how narcissistic sociopaths, cult leaders and many other manipulators work and that’s what happened to me. There was enough truth mixed into his stories at first, and there was enough Ultimate Truth conveyed to me in the beginning, that it was easy to confuse the messenger with the message.

In hindsight, there were so many little, tiny things that were off, but I was in no state to recognize them at the time. I was still reeling from the mental and emotional fallout of my chaotic, cultic childhood because I still had no language, tools or skills to understand and cope with any of that shit. My life was suffering from it and I felt that I was watching it all go circling around the drain. I feared my whole life was going to be over before it even began.

This man, on the other hand, spoke with such audacious hope, authority and certainty, that I felt immediate deference to him and trust in his ability to lead me through the darkscape of my current life. He offered me only kindness, hope and compassion in the beginning. He assured me there was no struggle too great to overcome and no problem that could not be fixed. He was there to listen and to “go deep” with me into my darkest internal fears. He was ready to take my hand and walk beside me, and together, there was nothing we could not face. This hope and reassurance felt like a bastion of safety, at first.

He also wanted me to stay in constant touch with him. I could email him any time. In fact, I should email him – a lot. He wanted to hear from me and know what was going on with me. It was important that I “stay in touch.” My willingness to be open and honest with him, and to stay connected with him, was equated with the level of my willingness to be open and connected with God. And so it was that the earliest seeds were planted, without my making the direct connection, that my teacher was equal to God.

The control started almost immediately, but it was so subtle, I didn’t recognize it. A few months into seeing my new coach, I mentioned a man I had recently started dating. He was instantly disapproving and behaved as if I had somehow reneged on an agreement. I had no prior knowledge of the agreement but he insisted that we had discussed the issue of dating and that it would be best for me not to get involved in any new relationships for at least the first year of the work we were doing together. He said that, at the minimum, I should have talked to him about it first. I felt horrible, believing that, as he said, I must have blocked that information out somehow. I promptly broke off the casual relationship because I felt the work of personal growth and learning that I was doing in his office was so much more important and I didn’t want anything to slow me down or distract me from it as my teacher had insisted it would.

[Over the following years, he would assist me in systematically cutting off every relationship in my life prior to meeting him. He did the same with several others clients. Eventually, we became each other’s friends and family for there was no one else left in our lives.]

It also seemed odd that I had been seeing this teacher for 2-hour therapy sessions once a week for well over a year before I learned that he was married. He would often mention activities that he had done, or conversations he had recently had, with his “friend.” Turned out that “friend” was his wife.

Another year or two later, I learned from one of my personal friends who had also started seeing this same “counselor” that he had previously had a child, a daughter, who had died at 5 years old in a drunk driving accident. This was such a major personal detail to have not heard about from a man who seemed to tell me every little bit of his personal life history prior to becoming a counselor. (Notice that his status has now been upgraded from life coach to counselor, and sometimes, therapist. Presumably, that made sense for a man with a PhD.)

It would be another year or two before I would hear the story of his dead daughter first hand in his office. I was confused about where this fit into the timeline. In fact, I was confused about where A LOT of things fit into the timeline of his life. There were so many stories from all over the place and it was difficult to piece it all together into a consistent narrative. But something in me unmistakably knew better than to question it. I knew it wasn’t safe to do so.

At one point, a solid 6 years into seeing this therapist, I learned that some other clients (also casual friends of mine by now) had, in fact, questioned him on the timeline of all his stories. They told me how our teacher had suggested they no longer work together since they seemed to be “seeking conflict and clearly didn’t trust him.” (And so it was that he manipulated any situation to be a victim while the other party was always the attacker.) They ended up backing down in order to preserve their relationship with him. Since I valued my relationship with my teacher more than anything else in my life, I was certainly not going to make the same mistake.

But was it a red flag? Yes. Yes, it was one of those red flags that I sailed right past. As they say, red flags don’t stand out when you’re wearing rose-colored glasses.

Throughout this time, I learned not to make any major decision without discussing it with my teacher first. And as time went on, it became just any decision, major or not. He became the final say on what was good and what was right. This was attributed to the fact that, as we clients believed, “He can see things that we can’t see yet.” And it was true that he often questioned us on things that would ultimately lead us to see the issue in question in a completely different way. This is an amazing ability to have when used only for good. But it can also be used for manipulation, coercion and control.

My teacher, in addition to his many other supposed credentials, was a Hypnotherapist and Master Practitioner of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming). These tools, as well, can be vastly helpful in manipulating, coercing and controlling others without their even recognizing it. I believe that these are the two credentials that may have actually, possibly been partially legitimate and which he used to assist in controlling those closest to him.

Every other thing I have told you here about my teacher, as it was relayed to me, is entirely false save for the little bit about once being in a band which one time took a trip to Germany to play in some clubs and consequently fell apart. That little bit was true, in its most infinitesimal description, without all the hype of stadiums, tour buses, bands of groupies, etc that was added later. Oh, and he was, indeed, married. He’d never had a kid, he had no degrees or licensure of any kind, and he was no grand spiritual teacher of God. He was a charlatan, a sociopath and a malignant narcissist. He defrauded me (and many others) for the almost 12 years I spent in “therapy” with him.

By the end of my twelfth year of “therapy,” I had come to live in close quarters with my teacher and it was at that point that I began to learn almost every single thing that man had told me about himself – the entire persona he had created himself to be in my mind – was entirely and utterly false. Brazen lies were told without hesitation or inhibition, lies used to manipulate me into assenting to total exploitation and repeated abuse. It would take me another three years to unravel all of the bullshit and to come to grips with the truth; and the truth did set me free, just as they say.

But how could this happen? How could it be that, something which was supposed to provide such safety instead landed me in more pain, despair and danger than I had ever known before? How could I fall for such lies, such insanity and such blatant abuse, believing it was actually all for my own good? Am I just stupid, naive, impossibly ignorant? Trust me, I have felt that way since I woke up and finally got the hell out of that horrible place. I have felt shame, embarrassment, rage. I am not a stupid person, but how else do you explain falling for such obvious insanity and allowing yourself to be so completely used and abused as I was? Well, that is the question I am hoping to answer here, as we go along. And the search for safety, along with the illusion that I had found it, is a large part of the answer to that particular question.

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As I have learned since #igotout, I am not the first to fall into this trap, but God willing, with greater exposure and education, I can be among the last. I have since discovered that my story is shared by SO many others, from one-on-one abusive relationships with malignant narcissists to multi-million dollar grand scale cult organizations with thousands of followers and everything in between. The prevalence of this issue is overwhelming and my experience is far more commonplace than I ever could have imagined. I am raising my voice as just one more among the din of voices now speaking up against these predators that we may expose their tactics and educate their prey before they fall victim to a similar fate.

Thanks for joining in on this journey, and stay tuned — there is so much more to come.