Deprogramming
They lied to me
I recently watched a video by Dr. Ramani on deprogramming as healing from narcissist abuse. Then I watched the final episodes of Breaking Bad, which like all American pop culture, it seems to me to be an overdone description but an accurate one in this case. I find it hard to watch. Similar to watching Donald Trump abuse Americans at his fraud trial which just started today. DARVO prevails.
My first realization was that the really bad anxiety and depression I’ve suffered all my life was not because I’m broken or subhuman, but because it’s a consequence of the lies I’ve been told convincingly and mostly subtly. Since 2003, I’ve been well trained to seek evidence when I tell myself these lies, and there never is any. Ever. The anxiety and depression no longer stays as a result.
Recently, random formerly blocked experiences started to come back to me. For instance, I was at my kundalini yoga class, where Susan Oughtred was explaining that sexual energy was to be used for Enlightenment and Karma Yoga, aka volunteering, working for the Ashram without pay to burn the sin consequences of our past lives. Free (slave) very hard labour is so important that an entire chapter of the Bhagavad-Gita is devoted to it. The cult has been running for centuries. Essentially, yoga and Hinduism is a sexual abuse.
So. What’s sexual energy? A nonsense pseudoscientific term. It means you aren’t allowed to orgasm according to the ‘teachings’, a yoga owners manual of abuse. All narcissists in relationships control sex which is the definition of sexual abuse. In this case the yoga students are shamed for experiencing healthy sexual arousal.
According to the “The Anxiety & Phobia Workbook” people who don’t get their needs met for communication, companionship and sex become anxious. People who are anxious long enough become depressed, and if not treated, they suicide.
All of which is fine by the Ashram, A state of meditation for the enlightened is suicide called Phowa. In the meantime the anxiety created by abusing you through undervaluing, is medicated by distraction such as meditation and chanting, prayer etc. Good for symptoms but in no way is it a cure as the cure requires stopping the abuse and then deprogramming by seeking evidence for it. The evidence is that you were conditioned to be a willing ‘karma yoga’ slave through F.O.G. fear obligation and guilt.
The consequences of their lies are terrifying anxiety, which always goes hand in hand with hostility and depression that kills all joy in life. They finally booted me when I declared I had always wanted to go to art school. I was dumped summarily, shunned and smeared. Overvalue, undervalue, dump, smear, experiencing this is the evidence that you were in a relationship with a narcissist so it couldn’t possibly have been your fault. This hate was in their eyes because I wished to use my sexual energy for non-slave purposes, a betrayal.
I just wanted to paint and create beauty. A relaxing quiet career I longed for, as I was extremely anxious and depressed after hanging around these creatures not getting my needs met. They told me I was using my sexual energy for self indulgence. Whatever that is. Mastubating I suppose, as if there is something wrong with that. It was like listening to Donald Trump, the king of the meaningless word salad.
I was vulnerable and their target market, I had a history of past psychological, emotional and physical including sexual abuse by my family. I never knew safety. I was in transition coming out of a relationship, and I’m smart. They would have preferred me rich as well, but I was used for very heavy slave construction labour instead so that was ok. The rich never were.
During the overvalue stage at the beginning, I was told I was a being of light. And I now had the power to spread this divine helping light to others, who were losers and couldn’t manage their own affairs. This was to cut me out from the herd as any predator does, cutting me off from my family and friends by looking down on them, isolating me. Controlling my sexual satisfactions, my communication and my companionship so that I became anxious and dependent on the cult.
In kundalini class we wrote papers, talking about our intimate life details, reading them out loud to the group. These are kept by the Ashram and never destroyed, they’ve got the goods on you. It wasn’t until I watched Dr. Ramani’s video, that I learned that this is a common cult recruitment technique. We were told it was a form of psychology called transpersonal. Identifying our ‘bad’ parts and killing them. Undervaluing ourselves. According to evidence based psychotherapy, if I have a ‘bad’ character defect like nose picking or farting in public, folks have 3 choices: reject me, put up with me, or be assertive with frank conversation and willingness to compromise. Couples that don’t have frank conversation and willingness to compromise get addicted to golf/yoga and have affairs. I don’t have secret mind powers that control others choices, but I do have unconditional acceptance of self, others and the universe if I am sane.
Kundalini yoga promises secret mind powers. There is a list at the back of the Kundalini, Yoga for the West, an owners manual for sexual abusers. Joseph Campbell (Power of Myth) used this list when he was hired to consult on the set of the first Star Wars movie. Essentially normalizing cult celibacy, you know, the ones that lead to the abuse of kids. These became the Jedi powers. I never developed these powers according to the ashram teachers like David Forcee and his narcissist soft deep voice and street persons stare.
Apparently I had character defects, like I wasn’t working hard enough. So I had to pay more money and take more classes.
Anything that puts you down is abuse. All anxiety and depression is caused by abuse. Deprogramming is disputing these abusive statements we learned, were programmed to tell ourselves. There never is any evidence for them. Examples of rational responses used in deprogramming are:
Unconditional self-acceptance:
I am a fallible human being; I have my good points and my bad points.
There is no reason why I must not have flaws.
Despite my good points and my bad points, I am no more worthy and no less worthy than any other human being.
Unconditional other-acceptance:
Other people will treat me unfairly from time to time.
There is no reason why they must treat me fairly.
The people who treat me unfairly are no more worthy and no less worthy than any other human being.
Unconditional life-acceptance:
Life doesn’t always work out the way that I’d like it to.
There is no reason why life must go the way I want it to
Life is not necessarily pleasant but it is never awful and it is nearly always bearable.
Anyway, there is no evidence for the promise of secret Jedi yogic mind powers. It’s like saying Spiderman exists because there is a book about him, a comic book.
I was once a dispatcher, for 20 years I was a person whose job was to receive messages and organize the movement of vehicles: ”a cab driver responded to a call from his dispatcher”. I was a person to deal with (a task) quickly and efficiently.
So I drank at least 8 cups of coffee a day. It was 1988 and the Olympics were in town. I was responsible for 400 cars. I had the help of a computer system, one of the first which I consulted on, but it broke down a lot. I was the backup system. This shitshow was designed by incompetent managers and was always in a state of crisis. Exactly like Donald Trump today. Chaos. So I was quite at home, since I grew up in similar situations, rescuing a narcissist from themselves.
Every day I went into work expecting to be fired. Narcissists fire everyone. Which explains the revolving door of the ashram. Overvalue and take their money, undervalue as they run out of money or their body breaks down, dump then smear to justify dumping them. David Forcee left with some young woman half his age after his wife was diagnosed with Parkinsons, that sort of thing.
So, full of caffeine overdose, habituated since I was 6 years old, and cigarettes since I was 12, and worried about my being able to afford my shitbox of an apartment, I couldn’t sleep unless I self-medicated with expensive pot. I called myself a drug addict. I wasn’t.
I had dabbled in yoga taking the occasional class seeking to learn relaxation techniques and exercise. In 1988 I quit pot, attended the obligatory 12 step call yourself a loser cults to be duly programmed and combined with the yoga meditation techniques tried to sleep. I learned from yoga that the reason I reincarnated was that I was a loser, like everyone else, which is why the 12 steps program and the yoga meditation had limited success, or so I was programmed in yoga class to tell myself.
In reality, it was impossible to sleep since 8 cups of coffee and a pack of cigarettes a day to aid dispatching 400 taxis for a living, in a Donald Trump chaotic workplace, was the medical reason I couldn’t sleep. Years later I was reading a neurologist. I was advised to not take caffeine 12 hours before bedtime. I had spent thousands of dollars on yoga classes and pot, spent endless nights in self blame and worry, when all I had to do was go see a doctor (scientist) for 5 minutes and get a diagnosis. For Free For Fucksakes (Canada). But, since I was a dope smoking new age hippie, science was bad and the expensive alternatives which had limited success were good. I was probably anti vaccine as well.
At one of the new yoga classes I tried, at a house in Calgary called Shambhala House, I fell in love. My current yoga teacher at the time, David McAmmond, called the new class I tried, ‘sanctimonious claptrap’. Like every spiritual/religious organization on the planet, they hated everybody. I didn’t know of course that I was in love with a predator who hunted disturbed folks in trouble like me. Other students included cancer patients, recent divorcees and various psychological issues all referred by professionals much like the mindfulness bullshit referred today. The therapist is essentially saying,``I am incompetent so go do meditation du jour that doesn’t work because you are a loser. If you were more mindful, whatever that is, you wouldn’t be bothering me, making me look bad.”
So this is how I met Susan Oughtred, a failed artist who had a cat. Perfect as my conditional love interest. She also had a husband, Russell, a CTV local reporter, a BMW and a Mercedes in the driveway, but my emotions and longing ignored these red flag details. Russell, like many people at the Ashram, was a life-long smoker.
Susan, now Swami Jyotihananda, was emotionally enmeshed with everyone who walked in the door, and often I could hear her and a jealous husband in conflict when I entered unannounced. She looked at me with the narcissist stare, as was her job. Eyes wide open unblinking, sending out the unconditional acceptance of a parents’ love, for the price of a yoga class. I could have gotten the same from any street hooker, but I wouldn’t as I grew up with these girls as they were getting raped by their families. I refused to rape them again, besides I dislike rape and rapists. I didn’t realize that my bank account was being intentionally raped by a look of yogic motherly love. I wouldn’t have cared as I never had motherly love and I was hungry for it. Their target market. Car and house sales people do the same thing to fake empathy and build instant trust relationships, all the while talking softly like any street predator to capture your attention and draw you in. If they can get close to you, they can hurt you — street survival skills 101.
Eventually, since this turned out to be a recruitment centre for the Ashram a few hours drive away, I got involved with it as a place to do my holidays, volunteering doing heavy construction labour and chanting in groups, like the church choir participation of my poverty ridden orphan youth, a source of comfort and satisfaction.
Since an Ashram is a narcissistic guru run organization, I slowly cycled through the overvalue, undervalue, dump, smear routine with the usual Fear Obligation and Guilt, F.O.G.
I was in a coffee shop one day near my home in 1990 and was hooked by Edi Whittaker a slightly better ( 20% satisfaction on the Burns scale) relationships than the ashram offered, due to intense sex and love bombing, recently fired from my taxi family, predictably, and at age 40, based on portfolio, I was accepted into an art school where I attended for 6 years and taught for 10 more.
During this time I finally went to the hospital for help with the emotional abuse I’d experienced. The triggers were my brother had died, my flaky relationship with Edi the victim narcissist du jour predictably ended, and a friend I knew for many years died of a horrible skin cancer. So I spoke to the grief counsellors at the hospital, who were ministers and useless but I was referred to the emergency CBT family therapist in the psychiatric ward by the receptionist.
I had learned to ask for the evidence of my beliefs in art school, the therapy of art therapy, and slowly had started to deprogram myself from religion/spiritual self abuse, I began to smell a rat. What the family therapist offered was REBT, the crack cocaine of CBT, intensive, elegant, simply self-applied and powerful. I quit smoking and the worry, depression and anxiety reasonably abated all within 6 months. It was developed by Albert Ellis, the foremost psychologist of the last century.
Fifteen years later, in 2017, I had a stroke, a common coincidence, a result of narcissist programming I was told at the hospital, since I wasn’t a smoker or diabetic and didn’t procrastinate on exercise. During a year in hospital I learned to walk, talk and swallow again. I am still working on it, fortunately healing rapidly for this type of serious life altering injury.
I know if I was living at the Ashram as I had planned and had a serious physical injury, they would have booted me, as they did when I had a serious emotional wound as it turns out, caused by them.
These people are ruthless.They boot everyone.They are experts in DARVO, the technique that sexual abusers use. Just ask for your money back as you didn’t get what was promised, you have a right to get what you pay for, and see what happens.
During the long slow recovery from the abuse I suffered at the hands of these creatures I wrote a book or two about my experiences.
