The Journey

[This is the second in a three-part series. I recommend that you read Part 1 first.]

Work Days in the Life:

I first came to work at the pet store in June of 2017. It was Keefy himself who suggested the idea. The store was owned by three of my friends (a husband, wife and mother trio) who were also clients of Keefy’s. One month into my employment there, Keefy formed his inner circle which consisted of his wife plus five of his clients. The five of us clients whom he pulled into a social circle with him were already well acquainted with one another through our connection with him. Four of us worked at the pet store, including the husband and wife owner duo.

By the end of 2017, a series of dramatic events transpired which culminated in pushing the mother of the store-ownership trio out of the business. Due to having a conflict with Keefer over making personal decisions with which he did not agree, she decided to stop seeing Keefer as a counselor and then the writing was on the wall: She was not only forced out of the business she started, but stone-walled from her family within a matter of only weeks. Over the following 10 months, legal battles would ensue and by the end of that period, she had been bought out of the pet store business by her son and daughter-in-law. Keefer then presented himself as a new owner to buy in. Before the year was out, my counselor had moved from being just my counselor to the head of my social circle, and now, my boss as well.

It was at this point that the already highly cultic walls were closing in. Once Keefer became an owner, the peaceful, contented job I had once enjoyed became a source of extreme overwhelm, fatigue, and demoralization. One of Keefy’s first orders of business as an owner was to install “security” (read: surveillance) cameras throughout each of the two stores. He intended to “help” us even further with our spiritual growth by being able to peer into our day to day lives, he said.

“What about the other two owners?” you might reasonably ask. Since the other two owners were also clients of Keefy and well established members of his highly exclusive inner social circle, the precedent was already set for Keefy to be in charge, regardless of what legal documents may say. All the same, there was some drama and misunderstanding as these new roles were established, and within 3 months of buying in, Keefy had to make sure the hierarchy was clearly established. Otherwise, he said he could not continue to be a part of the business but would recede into the background as a “silent partner.” (If only! We all knew that would never happen.)

He determined that he could not be an active part of the business unless he were given the authority to be the sole “captain of the ship.” He contended that in order for our business to succeed–which was now presented as much more than just a mere pet store, but rather, our personal spiritual laboratory in which to do our spiritual work and, one customer at a time, impact the whole world–we must learn to truly join and become unified under a single vision. And in order for us to do that, he contended, there must be someone to steadfastly hold that vision aloft, a leader for us to all join and unify under. Keefy fancied himself to be that humble but brilliant visionary who could hold that vision pure and unadulterated. We, his friends/clients/followers, gave him every reason to believe it was true.

An email was sent out to the entire staff forcing our hands to “vote” on the issue. Keefy loved to present things as if there were equality and democracy at play, but our actual options were limited since we were well aware of the consequences of making a “choice” that Keefy did not like. As a master of emotional manipulation, and a ceaseless talker, he could weave all manner of arguments and accusations to convince any one of us why our perspective or belief or feeling or choice on any given matter was wrong and how it revealed our “issues,” along with exactly what those issues were (usually “defiance,” “unawareness” and “mediocrity”). By the end, you were so twisted around and guilty, all that was left was to agree with him and say he was right, so we eventually learned to skip that whole middle part as often as we could and went straight to agreeing. After all, Keefy was always “right.”

[As an example of this principle:
There was one time during one of our hours-long post-work meetings where a discussion was presented about what we should do with the stores’ floors during our massive renovation stage. Keefy wanted to paint all our concrete floors a shiny gray. The topic was initially presented as an open, democratic discussion, but soon it became clear that none of us agreed with Keefy’s idea about the floors. Even though questions were posed about his idea and alternative ideas were gently offered, Keefy became angry when he realized his idea was being resisted and soon shut the conversation down. It turned into an enormous incident in which we were all accused of “attacking” him (by not agreeing) and viciously defying him due to our “authority issues.” As a result (to redeem ourselves), we had to orchestrate our own self-flagellation gathering in which all those present at the meeting (save Keefy and his wife) had to “voluntarily” attend another after-work meeting to openly discuss our grotesque and abusive behavior. It was during this gathering that we had to watch the video footage of our “attack” on Keefy and discuss where we had gone wrong. Upon watching the footage, however, it was abundantly clear that no one had attacked him or defied him at all. Only the mere act of having a differing opinion from him was enough for him to condemn and shun us. The resulting discussion (which we all knew was being watched from the cameras) was a perfect reenactment of the concept “the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.” We all had to craft reasons for how and why our behavior was so bad and wrong and how we would never do that again. Lesson reiterated: never disagree with Keefy.]

So in his “call to vote” email, Keefy explained that he was a leader by nature and that he had a clear and consistent vision from God on exactly what this store was meant to be used for and how it should be run. He said that he could bow out and just be a silent partner (a choice we all knew was not an actual choice), or else we could entrust him with the sacred duty of upholding our company’s vision for us and all fall into line, more or less, behind his leadership. In other words, we could make the choice for God, and our own spiritual growth, or the choice for mediocrity and stagnation.

I imagine you can guess the outcome of this “vote.” And so it was that even the other two owners of this little pet shop business came to be mere employees of Keefer as well, if not on paper, certainly in practice. [And so it was that we ended up with very ugly, very flawed, shiny gray floors. :-)]

Now that Keefy was the Ultimate Authority in our little pet stores, and now that he had cameras covering every corner of the store, his reign became supreme. The work load immediately increased with his new ideas and the changes he wanted us to implement, virtually overnight. Some of these changes were massive, including a complete rebranding of the store along with store name change. All work to make these changes had to be done “in house.” We did not outsource for any part of it, regardless of how unqualified, untrained or uneducated we were for the tasks at hand. Graphics, marketing, trademark legalities had to be mastered overnight, for example. Massive new lines of product had to be researched and brought in against all odds and obstacles. Many of the tasks were less glorious, extremely tedious and overly time consuming. All of these tasks had to somehow be completed while simultaneously maintaining the day to day store operations and hourly demands of customer service. Commonly the changes we finished implementing were then immediately changed again to something else. Everything was constantly changing at all times. There was a point where I no longer knew what half of the products were in our store or where they came from (information we touted as being fundamental to our business) because it had become impossible to keep up with the constant change that would only turn around and change again. Long, weary days dragged on of endless tedium and mountains of new work assignments. You could never begin to imagine the enormous amount of “work” that could be created and assigned in just a couple of little, local, independently owned natural pet food stores.

Due to being under constant surveillance, and the way that surveillance was used to harass, criticize, scrutinize and berate us at any given moment, work quickly became an oppressive and terrifying environment. We never knew when the judgment or accusation might arrive for something we’d done “wrong,” and with the advantage of having everything recorded, Keefy could randomly sort through footage from previous days and weeks to find a problem. And that’s exactly what he would do. He would claim that the “Holy Spirit” was guiding him to the footage of mistakes and issues that needed addressing. But in reality, the principle “seek and you will find” is more apropo here. Keefy went looking for problems and he found them–even if they didn’t genuinely exist. He was a master of creating them. (See A Glimpse Into the Mind of a Therapy Cult Member for a cursory example.) Therefore, an atmosphere of paranoia abounded.

Let me give you one example. In the midst of our constant, ongoing changes, Keefy would devise “checkout scripts” of information he wanted us to convey to every single customer as we rang them out. These could be quite long and contain superfluous information that wasn’t really essential to them, but no exceptions were permitted. This meant that even if a customer was purchasing only one thing, we had to hurriedly get all the info in before we could let them leave the counter and it completely annihilated any possibility of having a genuine or personal interaction with them. If Keefy happened to be watching over the cameras, or went back at a later time to observe the day’s events, and discovered that we had failed to give the checkout script to a customer, OR omitted some part of it by accident or purpose, there was hell to pay. When I forgot one part of a new checkout script while ringing out a customer once, I received an email moments later interrogating me as to why I had not included that sentence. He wanted to know just what my problem was. Why was I defying him? I had a real “authority issue,” he said, and that was my main obstacle to getting Home to God. As long as I kept defying Keefy (Aka God), I was doomed. And so it was that there was no room for human error without becoming eternally damned.

In addition to that stress, we were also expected to be constantly on our email. If Keefy emailed us and we didn’t respond within a relatively brief period of time, there would, again, be hell to pay. Even in the midst of helping a customer, I learned to find moments to step over to the computer and glance at my emails. The importance of seeing and responding to emails rapidly was reinforced through little drills. On random occasions, Keefy would send an email to the entire staff demanding that we reply with a specific response as soon as we received the email. He would have us send back a word, such as “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” and thereby clock our response time. More than 20 minutes was considered unacceptable, and despite how much work you may have been occupied with doing during that time period, it was assumed that you were absent and remiss in your duties because you weren’t staring at your emails. I’ve heard of other cult leaders implementing similar practices and they are referred to as “readiness drills.” It was another way of keeping us constantly on guard and constantly in a state of submission.

At the same time that everything at the stores was going haywire, all of our time outside of the stores was equally dominated by Keefy and “the group.” He called us The Bungleheads and that was the term to which we were “affectionately” referred for the next five years. As Keefer became increasingly obsessed with his stores, they quickly overtook all of our lives. There was no time outside of them anymore because even when we weren’t physically present in the stores, we were talking about them or listening to him talk about them. There was no break, mentally or physically. Due to the overwhelming workload and constant demands, coupled with the intense urgency of Keefer (he wanted to see his ideas implemented and changed immediately), I would spend my days off from work doing administrative tasks from home that I hadn’t had time to complete while actually at work. I researched and wrote educational papers for our stores during nights after work and days off (in addition to our nightly email exchanges – I promise we will get to this). I crafted pages long newsletters, writing endless content and killing myself to accomplish marketing, videography, digital editing and technical tasks for which I had no knowledge, training or understanding all under extreme time constraints. But there were no excuses. Anything less than perfection and excellence rendered us “mediocre,” “unaware,” and overall damned us to countless more lifetimes estranged from God himself. Everything had the highest imaginable stakes attached.

We all worked around the clock for no additional pay. It was simply expected that you would do whatever was necessary to complete a task within the fastest possible time frame which resulted in working 70+ hour weeks on top of the demands of the group itself. We learned very quickly and very well to swallow our exhaustion, our overwhelm and our despair. It got to the point that if Keefer even smelled the faintest hint of fatigue or overwhelm on us, we would be duly berated and made to feel ridiculous, overly dramatic, whiny and worst of all victimy (synonymous with egoic). As a result, we all learned that it was essential to put on a brave and happy face while at work (because of the cameras) and certainly in front of Keefy himself.

While we toiled away, Keefy’s role was to lay on his couch with his tablet in hand, furiously shopping on Amazon for store decorations, googling his latest random idea for a store project, monitoring the cameras and answering emails doling out duties, orders and answers to our endless questions that we were not allowed to answer or resolve ourselves. While his “work” contribution to the business consisted of endlessly creating and assigning duties to others, his belief was that he worked harder than all of us, as our fearless leader, toiling away in a role that none of us could begin to fathom the weight of. It was our responsibility to pay homage to this image while we did all the actual, endless and heavy lifting work. This is a classic cult dynamic.

Even after a couple of years, once he had learned that human beings are only capable of so much and we could not literally materialize the changes he wanted out of thin air and came to accept that it might take the smallest amount of time, and even after he became less obsessive about the checkout scripts and making sure we got every word right to every customer, we were already filled with such a deep fear and dread of making any kind of mistake that the atmosphere of paranoia and doom would never go away.

In such an atmosphere of overwhelm and exhaustion, we barely took time to eat or go to the bathroom in our 10+ hour shifts at work. I think it’s also worth noting that within a few months of Keefer taking over the stores, the only male in our little group was removed from working in the stores and given tasks and duties that had him primarily working from home. This gave Keefy sole control over an all-female workforce, which again, fell nicely into the misogynistic undertones that would eventually become outright overtones of our group. The lack of sleep, rest, proper nutrition or any care for the body whatsoever had detrimental effects on our cognitive and reasoning abilities. These are all extremely common tactics used by cultic groups and narcissistic abusers to gain dominance and ongoing control over their constituents because it becomes incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to see or think clearly at that point. Days in the store would fly by in a fog of running from one high-priority task to another. At times we would literally run to the bathroom when we could no longer hold it any longer, running back out just as fast as we could to continue working. Day after day melded into one long, endless road of work. There was no such thing as a day off anymore.

Keefer also kept us on our toes through spontaneous use of the cameras. He could speak to us through them remotely and he used this device to bolster the effect of being an omniscient presence in our midst. At times, he might come through the camera speakers to interrogate us about something he’d just witnessed. Other times, he might pop on to make a joke or comment benignly on something that had just happened. When the first crackle of the camera speaker hit the air, my body reflexively stiffened. We never knew what the tone or objective would be coming through those speakers, and even if it was lighthearted, it always served the effect of letting us know that Keefy was watching.

Within a few months of Keefer’s buy-in, after he began his epic reinvention of the stores by using them as his personal playground and all of us employees as his personal GI Joe/Barbie Dolls, Keefy realized he wasn’t receiving the level of praise that he craved for all of his hard, visionary work. He wanted to know what the customers were saying about the changes they saw and about the greatness of his little, tiny pet store empire. In addition, since every single little minute detail or decision had to be run past him before anything could be done in a given day, Keefy found that he became inundated with issues and problems (since we no longer held the authority or autonomy, as his employees, to resolve anything on our own). This led to him feeling disheartened and frustrated, which always led to conflict and punishment for the rest of us. As a solution to this disappointment for Keefy, it was declared that we would each send an email out to the entire staff at the end of the day with a “Good News” report. It didn’t matter how busy the day had been or how slow. It didn’t matter whether there was actually anything to report or not. This mandatory essay MUST be delivered at the end of every workday. The premise of this new duty was to cultivate positivity in the store and watch that increase as we put our focus on it while also bolstering the morale of Keefer who was too removed from the day to day operations to experience all of the positive customer interactions firsthand. However, the real reason for it was less spiritual and far more egoic.

I excelled at the Good News reports for two reasons: 1) writing has always been one of my natural strengths and 2) I inherently understood the purpose of the report was to praise and pander to Keefy’s ego as much as possible. Not all of our employees were so lucky. Some of them struggled with the expression of writing in general and some of them did not inherently understand the unspoken purpose of these daily essays. And essays they were: Paragraph upon paragraph had to be written on comments customers had made or feedback we had otherwise received that somehow reflected positively on Keefy’s genius and creativity. Keefy LIVED for these reports and they became a source of extreme duress for the employees. Finding time to write these daily essays, in the midst of every other damn thing we were supposed to do, and to come up with the material for these essays and to proof them repeatedly throughout the day for grammatical, spelling and other errors was just another 10 pounds of pressure in the pressure cooker of our work life. Rest assured, if you had more than two typos in your GN report, failed to adequately explain a scenario or in any other way delivered a daily essay that was considered sub-par, you would not only hear about it, but you would have to find and correct all your errors. At home, that very night, you would be editing and resubmitting your “Good News” until you got it just right…Or worse, you would be publicly interrogated and berated for your shortcomings on the nightly email exchange.

I hated the “Good News” with a fiery passion, not only for the burden and insanity and egoicness of it, but because it became one of the most consistent sources of conflict and rage from Keefer. Once I had been made Manager of the stores, every single little failing or issue that was inadvertently disclosed through the Good News reports (or that he could devise out of them) was used to reign down wrath upon me. I dreaded these reports, but I faced them every single day and I endured enormous abuse from them behind closed doors. Little did the other employees know how their reports were used to incite and justify routine interrogations and berating which I fielded to the very best of my ability in such a way as to prevent, as much as I could, that wrath being redirected toward the others.

And it was in this manner in which days within the therapy cult droned on and on. Yes, even as his “friends” and “employees,” we were all also still paying him for his “counseling” (life coaching) services, no less than two sessions a month on top of our daily (almost hourly) contact with him. Keefy claimed that he had an incredible ability to compartmentalize these different aspects of our relationship with him. He claimed that, when he stepped foot into his office, he entered a different space in which it was no longer him speaking to us, but rather, The Voice of God speaking through him. With wisdom and insight from the Holy Spirit Himself being channeled through him, he adamantly maintained that there was no conflict of interest in our continuing to see him as a supposed therapist. But for many of us, our sessions with him quickly became dominated by conversations about work and work tasks so that they were just another way for him to exploit us (mentally, emotionally and financially).

Even when we were all off from work and hanging out together (before he changed the stores’ hours so that we were open 7 days a week), he would be talking about the stores and the various projects and tasks to which we were assigned. You had to be on guard at all times as the seemingly most mundane of conversations could rapidly and unpredictably turn angry and dangerous. In the best case scenario, you might find that a project you’ve worked tirelessly on and almost completed is suddenly scrapped and changed to something else, or you’ve simply been given a new mountainous project to complete on top of your already insane workload due to Keefy’s latest “brilliant” idea for the stores that he came up with during our “down time” together. In the worst case scenario, he might start to interrogate your progress or approach to a certain task and end up in a fiery rage with you for any myriad of reasons. In the latter case, there was nothing to be done but to accept your utter failure and vileness as a person and do your best to grovel for forgiveness without appearing to be “groveling.” In truth, there was nothing that could be said or done to mitigate the situation once Keefy reached this point (which he did quite routinely). You simply had to grin and bear it until his anger and judgement passed–maybe hours, maybe days.

One of the other worst possible offenses you could commit was defending yourself. Blaming was just a form of defense. And defenses of all kind were harshly condemned. Any attempt to explain a wrongdoing of which you were accused was labeled defense. Any resistance to our teacher’s teachings, to his “corrections” of us, or to his demands were all defense. ANY attitude that was deemed less than total compliance, surrender, agreement and genial acquiescence was defense. To be called defensive was a routine, but harsh, accusation. Dissent in any form was defense and defense was the number one deterrent to our reconnection with God. Being called defensive was essentially a slur that damned your spiritual character and it was commonly used to keep us in line. Since you cannot offer any feedback or explanation when you are accused of a misdeed, a poor attitude, a personal flaw needing correction or an outright wrongdoing, the only acceptable alternative was to embrace whatever was being said to/about you and echo it back in full acceptance of it’s truth.

To say nothing at all and offer no defense was also considered defensive because then we were accused of shutting down. It was a closed loop of misery and there was literally NO WAY OUT. I learned this game so well over my time spent with this supposed teacher of God. The only way to survive in relationship to him was to go along with whatever he said and agree with him, whether it was about you or someone else. It was “go along to get along” to the extreme. And that is how he created a dynamic within the group in which we all ganged up on each other in accordance with his current target. When one of us came under fire from him, we all had to agree and echo his sentiments – both the person under fire and the other five people in the group. And here’s the real kicker: he would usually ask and prod us to offer some reason, some explanation for whatever offense we had committed which, as you may have guessed, would then only be labeled DEFENSIVE! We were doomed no matter what. Explain and you are defensive. Say nothing in an attempt not to defend and you are shutting down which is also defensive. Exhausting and hopeless it went, round and round, forever.

At the end of the work day, when the Good News reports were finally sent and every item on the closing checklist had been checked off and triple-checked for completion and perfection, we were far yet from winding down. The standard evening’s activities were just beginning. If you were lucky, it had not yet begun before you made it home, but often the emails would begin to trickle in before I’d even left the store. It would be many more hours before the day was done.

More to come in “A Night In the Life”….