The Journey

I half-stood, half-slumped in the middle of his office, sobbing in his arms.

He’d stood up in the midst of my confession, spreading his arms wide in an invitation to embrace. With great hesitance, weighed down by shame, I pulled myself up off the couch to meet his invitation with proper response. As soon as his arms engulfed me, I deteriorated into a sobbing heap. He had to hold me up from collapsing to the ground.

“You should slap me…” I heaved, hoarsely, through the waves of grief overwhelming me. “I want–you–to–slap meeee. Why…don’t…you…slap me?” I sobbed into his shirt sleeve. The raw, primal thoughts behind my emotion were finding their way out through my mouth, much to my horror and compiled shame. This is what I truly thought and felt I deserved, apparently.

He hugged all of his clients at the end of their sessions, on their way out. No matter how harsh the session might have been, you could count on that ending. That was normal to me by now. But he had never hugged me like this, not with the expression of sympathy and reassurance that he offered me this day, and not for this long.

I was so shocked by this rare display of tenderness from him that it served to artfully and methodically open up the floodgates of my deepest, darkest and most thoroughly groomed self-loathing. Thoroughly groomed by him, that is. He had taken the seeds and watered them very carefully over a decade of precise and meticulous “therapeutic” care. He had made sure to build himself up first and hold himself as the pillar of salvation all along the way: the one who knows me, the one who knows all things, the one who hears the Truth more clearly and in-advance of the rest of us, the chosen one, my God-appointed teacher in life.

After convincing me most thoroughly of my utter, depraved horridness, he now offered me undeserved and unbridled mercy. After stranding me in the desert without food or water for 10 long years, he now offered me the life-saving sustenance of gentle, kind redemption. He truly was my savior. He truly was the evolved, spiritual master who surpassed us all.

My transgression? The cause of all this grief?
…Who can remember, exactly?
A grave offense, for certain, had been plucked out of the ether on the preceding day. There was always something we’d done wrong.
If I had to guess, straining back in my memory, the true cause of his particularly vicious outburst the day before, I’d venture that I’d received too much praise from him or my peers for handling a tough situation well at work.
He perhaps decided I’d become too cocky or too secure? He just needed a target that night? Like the scorpion, it is simply in his nature to seek out strife, conflict, negativity and blame in order to be superior?
All of the above, I’d wager.

He’d studied the surveillance footage. We were always under scrutiny from the ever-present work cameras. That’s right, my “therapist” for over a decade had maneuvered himself into position to become my employer as well. He claimed the roles of life coach, “friend,” boss and guru, and to that effect he’d installed “security” cameras throughout every part of the stores where I worked so that he could have unlimited access to scrutinize his employees and customers at all times. To scrutinize and to determine our pitfalls–for our own good, of course! For our personal growth and spiritual betterment, no doubt. And a pitfall there always was.

A moment of praise and congratulation during our mandatory, nightly email exchange suddenly turned to doom and damnation: It was deemed, instead, that I had stolen from him and his business! How dare I award a customer their own loyalty program credits after they treated me and the store so poorly? Who the hell was I to make such an “executive decision”?? Didn’t I know better than to give away customer-earned loyalty credits per our store’s loyalty program policy…in this specific situation? How could I not?? Any fool could see it!!

…The rules were always changing. There was no solid ground to stand on. Ever. There was no way to know for sure which call would be the right call, the call he would want made on that day. The call he deemed appropriate given his mood, the weather, what he was having for dinner or any other number of mysterious factors that determined his judgment of right from wrong.

See, on another day, I could have just as easily fallen victim to the same outrage for NOT giving the customer their earned loyalty reward credit. I could have been called self-righteous, out of line, unempathetic, arrogant and too self-involved to offer true customer service, compassion and understanding to this customer. You see, I’d already been previously ridiculed for these character flaws, sought out through another round of surveillance footage, and the ridicule I received for being previously accused of such misdeeds still rung clearly in my mind during the moment of deep inner turmoil and confusion that I experienced at the checkout counter with the customer in question on this day. The result of such constant ridicule with such inconsistent basis served to degrade my self esteem and decision making skills until, when all was said and done, I was a walking, withering heap of self-doubt, confusion, inner turmoil and dread. Up and down, black and white were all utterly indiscernible.

On this night, in light of what was deemed as my horrific act of betrayal, I was now decided to be too disgusting to engage with. I’d chosen wrongly and it revealed the true evil at my core. I was a gross, defiant, egoic thing that was too rancid to even be dealt with. After ample time was given to telling me what a piece of shit I was, reinforced by the other 5 voices echoing everything he said (of which I was normally one), I was finally declared a “raging cunt” and kicked off of the nightly rapid-fire email exchange. Usually he seemed to enjoy dispensing his rage and condemnation on the offending party of the night (oftentimes, all six of us), but this was the first time I was actually kicked off the thread. It was “either you go or I do.” Of course, I went.

I came undone that night. I lay on my living room floor in a pool of despair. I warped back in time, in my mind, to 17 years old, splayed on the sanctuary floor of the church, halfway under a pew. Indeed, I was that 17 year old again. Here I was reliving the same thoughts and the same grief: “I’ll never be good enough. I just can’t do this. I’m never going to be able to get it right. It’s just too hard. No matter what I do, I just can’t make myself right. I have to give up. If this is what it takes to ‘get to God,’ then I will never be good enough to get to God. I am doomed…I give up…I can’t do this anymore.”

In reality, it was early Spring of 2019, and for a moment, lying on that floor, I decided to let go. I decided I couldn’t be a part of this group any longer. For the first time, I seriously contemplated walking away. The cost was so high and the pain was so great. I was dying inside and soon there would be nothing left of me. If only I’d left then….

Somehow, he knew. Some instinctual part of him, that predatory sixth sense, calculated the results of how far he had pushed me this time. I was at the brink of total annihilation from despair and ready to calmly lean forward into a free fall, consequences be damned. Consequences like being totally alone, spiritually bereft and stunted of all personal growth, doomed to a mediocre life of eating, breathing, sleeping and dying, devoid of all meaning or substance. These were the consequences that had been planted deeply into my subconscious, the consequences of leaving this group, the consequences I now almost felt ready to face for the sake of the relief of being free of the perpetual anxiety and doom that came part and parcel with being a part of this group.

When I walked into his office the next morning for my bi-monthly “life coaching” session, I was wracked with nerves. I did not know how that session was going to end. I was prepared to be ripped a new one (again). I was prepared to be kicked out. I was prepared to let go. I was prepared to admit that I could not hack it as a member of his inner circle. And somehow, he knew. And without missing a beat, he switched tactics and brought me back from the brink of the end with a bomb of love.

It was perfect. He’d torn me down, over months and years, to absolute desolation and then that morning he offered to personally carry me back up out of the depths of hell with his warm, forgiving, accepting embrace.

The one thing I had not anticipated that morning was the love bomb he dropped on me. It had the effect of revealing the depths of just how far I had fallen under his mental and emotional torture. It showed how thoroughly convinced I was of needing and deserving his correction through punishment and pain. “Why-won’t-you-slap-meeee?” I cried. He held me instead. He offered me tenderness and the forgiveness of my assigned sins. He offered me redemption. I was now good and truly his for the taking.

He switched tactics in my “therapy” that day and decided to delve into the trauma of my past. He assigned another red herring to my psyche to keep me distracted: It was my childhood that convinced me I deserved and needed punishment. It was my projection of God that I was placing on him that caused me to fear him so. We needed to dive deep and really deal with all this trauma from my childhood that I’d never really opened up about. I needed to do some serious healing work on my wounded inner child. That was the only way I was going to ever be able to “get it right” moving forward. Get what right, exactly? I don’t know…everything.

Only in hindsight, with the full awareness of each deliberate step he constructed over the months to come, can I recognize what a pivotal moment that night and the following morning actually were. It was a turning point. It was the moment when the next phase of his indoctrination and coercion were initiated. Unbeknownst to me, Operation Total Consumption had reached the beginning of its final phase.

I should have left that day. I should have had the courage to give up, the courage to let go. But I’d already dedicated more than a decade of my life to this path and to this “teacher,” and in truth, there was nothing left in my life outside of it anyway. Instead, it would take another 3+ years and far deeper depths of descent into hell before I would finally be free.