A Final Letter to Peter
Hello Peter,
I am suing HAI with two goals: seeing the adoption of all recommended practices as institutionalized and publicly stated protocols that will protect all currently on team and participants, but also protect the facilitators and future people who will interact with the organization. Failing a leadership body able and interested in that objective, I will be seeking to remove HAI's non-profit status, insure that all unlicensed facilitators stop all forms of therapy, and see the end of HAI. Strangely, from an observer's point of view, you and every facilitator and board-member have acted so incompetently that it is not clear that there will be a power-structure trustworthy enough to lead a school and teaching of this sensitive nature, since I don't think that anyone who expected you to treat them as you have all treated me would want their daughter, son, mother or best friend to be exposed to the same. Would you wish this for your son? While I know it is HAI and your practice to blame the team and patient for your failings, the court-system and licensed leaders in the field of trauma and therapy do not share your view.
Questions asked in both the legal court and court of public opinion include:
a) Whether any facilitator will be allowed to do any form of one-on-one work without a license, given the fact that all facilitators do work deeper than many therapists and have shown that they lack the discipline, willingness and training necessary to put a client's safety above personal facilitator agendas, even when those agendas are in conflict with a client's well-being?
b) Whether HAI can keep it's non-profit status, given that every board-member acted so as to escalate the situation with both silence, lack of outreach and do anything that would be considered ethical or in the public interest?
c) Given a pattern of your dragging your feet to admit any incompetence for twelve years and your sustained negligence, combined by the defense pattern of the entire facilitator body and HAI to do anything in my interest to repair that abuse that cost even a fraction of what that abuse cost me, will there be anyone in HAI willing to pay the $200,000 to 3 million in awarded damages for inducing PTSD through gross criminal and therapeutic negligence leading in a clear direction towards suicide?
d) Is HAI's protocol for handling facilitator abuse and training legal or healthy, given the more than 100 deviation points from best practices by you, each facilitator and the board of directors? As each board member and each facilitator is questioned on the witness stand, with a licensed, trained trauma therapist going over each of these points, their probable impact on a patient/client and the science, training and basis upon which you deviated from known established therapeutic practices the court and those watching the documentary I make of the entire proceeding will decide for themselves whether you are a bunch of morons harming people for profit, or whether there is any scientific basis to support your claims that this is "love," a claim you have repeatedly made to cover up your incompetence (more on that below).
It is likely, given the fact that you, every HAI facilitator and every board member has shown strong resistance to every one of my requests that would have increased my own safety and the safety of all HAI participants, that you will have a hard time claiming that you did not know things that every licensed trauma therapist does know and many practice. When you are on written record as a group, failing to reach out and talk to the primary abuse survivor, denying repeatedly that it was a HAI issue, despite the obvious evidence that it is and should be HAI's highest priority to address facilitator abuse and that HAI has turned down even a request for an apology, I'm not sure how anyone in a witness stand will see you as anything but untrained cowards abusing your authority, roles and taking advantage of the person you harmed by creating a version of reality that only the HAI facilitator body could possibly see as real.
I consider each facilitator and board-member's behavior a profound violation of HAI's mission to such an extent that I do not know at present who I could hand HAI off to within the community in the probable event that HAI will plead insufficient funds to pay it's court damages. I have no certainty of getting any money, but more than 90% certainty that HAI will be unable to continue on it's present track after the court case, one way or another. I have not even begun to deal with press-releases and contacting various therapeutic and state license boards to have you arrested if need be. We will see how far down the path of organizational suicide you want to take your attachment to your current positions before you actually think it might be a good idea to get on board with everyone else's version of reality.
I never thought I would hear Anne Watts telling me that she did not see why I should tell anyone about these experiences and she thought it was for my own good to keep your and HAI's secrets. But that's what she said when I told her I felt it was important to tell the community. Apparently John Bradshaw's work on healing shame by breaking the contracts of secrecy did not penetrate your self-referential group? Into-me-you-see does not apply to the HAI power-structure? Brene Brown's work with shame does not influence your protocols? Who is doing research that says that sexual abuse survivors need to keep silent about the abuse to protect their abuser, particularly when that is someone charging money to teach about healthy relationships without a license? To my knowledge this is the specialized domain reserved for Peter Sandhill and Anne Watts, his teacher, with Jason Weston's clear training shining through with his contract asking me to sign that I would never tell anyone (abuse) and never sue HAI (abuse), having just communicated that HAI would offer zero acknowledgment of the issue and zero support.
You all showed great consternation any time "HAI" might suffer a scratch, while showing disdain for your participant's healthy requests - the very people HAI was presumably founded to serve (or did I read I not hear the final words of the mission statement which state "as long as it's convenient and none of the facilitators have to take responsibility for their mistakes."). Your first comments to me were about how "Stan would be turning over in his grave," rather than "I feel so bad for betraying your trust." I never saw Anne worked up about your many abuses or their impact but when I shared a document to her in confidence she broke it immediately, excusing her behavior by explaining "HAI is my baby, and I betrayed your confidence because it seemed like you writing about what happened to you would hurt my baby." The pattern of coming in as a third priority behind protecting your jobs and HAI's reputation and your personal comfort zones and shadow is exactly what no future participant or team-member should be exposed to.
A healthier statement, given Anne's appointed role as a buffer between me and the board and facilitators who all refused to invite me to their meetings from the get-go would have been to say "I'm so very sorry you trusted me to use Peter, who I failed to train, and I feel that HAI has a responsibility to make this right." Every facilitator's avoidance of my request for an apology until I threatened to sue and then insulting me with apologizing for my parents impact is so absurd and irresponsible that again a court may be compelled by this behavior to remove all of you permanently from any role where you might have the ability to hurt someone like this again.
As an aside, isn't that why all relationships break down? Are all the divorces, traumas and lies within the HAI community because no one knows how to say the words "I'm sorry?" They just cannot form the words in their mouth or have not learned English? Or because they cannot listen actively? Or because they think cheating and breaking rules is good? Isn't the real problem with relationships in the community that people know exactly what to do in the abstract but cannot bring themselves to do it when they need to? So what can you teach that is useful if you cannot create a win/win relationship yourself in a pinch? If your best shot at win/win is to deny that a relationship therapist who is unlicensed, but trained and recommended by HAI who endangers a patient's life through a sustained pattern of negligence and abuse is "not a HAI issue." Can you think of anything more likely to insult the public, and those you abuse? Just burn all your money in the street next time and take out an ad saying "We are fucked up and will mess you up too," and it will save time for everyone.
If you cannot pro actively apologize and give a refund for shitty work or hire comeone competent to clean up your mess even a decade later, what can you model that Americans don't already know only too well. Isn't that the issue? That neither you nor any of the facilitators can do the right thing when it really matters, and that this means you don't know anything that is useful when trauma is in play? Jason Weston rejected my idea that HAI start teaching the basics of trauma to the team, saying that "Trauma is not our focus." Trauma is what is threatening to bring the end of HAI and all your careers.
If a single facilitator or board-member or team-member knew what they were doing and cared about HAI more than facilitator egos, we would not be here. If you had taught me effectively after 100 HAI events and four facilitators, we would not be here. If Sarah knew what to do to honor her responsibility as participant protector, we would not be here. If the facilitators were smart enough to pick a board of directors that could truly guide HAI rather than act as puppets, we would not be here. And if a single board-member decided to pro actively hire the consultants I requested that HAI hire and abide by, we would not be here. We are here because not a single member of HAI's power structure knows what to do, and can admit it enough to ask for help from someone capable of leading you out of the mess Stan led you into by telling you that you had what it took to navigate the highly complex world of psychology and personal relationships, something no objective observer can see in your behavior pattern based on more than 100 specific events that made things much worse for your client and were sanctioned by every one of HAI's leadership group.
It has apparently not occurred to you that endangering someone's life, breaking their heart, destroying innocence and trust and abusing a client for $175. an hour is worth a refund? How do you think that is going to go down in court, in the documentary or for your current or future clients? Do you think that speaks well of what you learned from Stan or your facilitator team? I know it is consistent with their teachings, since far from asking you for a refund, Anne had the ignorance to insult every sexual abuse-survivor in this country by asking me to pay her to sort you out, when if she had done her job I wouldn't have to. Had Anne done her due-diligence prior to whole-heartedly recommending you to work you could not do, you would have actually known what you were doing or she would have known you were unfit to be recommended, without caveat and without disclosing your lack of formal training.
You add salt in many wounds in various ways throughout this process, with comments such as you "could not spend much more," in your words, than the $2,000. due at the time after I refused to pay her. If she had had any character she might have owned that she had the responsibility for training and recommending you and asked you to donate this to my therapy and well-being, but we are not talking about people capable of putting the client first. You are digging yourself into a pit of unethical stupidity with every one of your very honest comments. I'm glad you were honest enough to voice your actual thoughts, but appalled at the idea that abuse-survivors by the facilitator body are going to have to listen to you whining about $2,000. when you destroy vast sections of their innocence and trust which is priceless. You are telling everyone: "I don't know what I'm doing," and I'm too cheap to take responsibility for my mistakes.
Screw the fact that your office cost $16,000 to paint, that you bragged about making $900. an hour with one client, or your many resources of support you gave yourself to recover from being found out in your betrayals, and told me about before offering to give me a dime or spending an hour to find me support. Or me paying you to listen to you talk about the three family vacations you gave as excuses to leave me hanging. $2,000. was too much to pay to clean up your mess? My heart worth less than your fucking office paint job. You are a chauvinist and are too dumb to know it. Try two or three million, you fucked up son of a bitch! Get the fuck out of this business or grow up! You insult your role and your feminine self with every moment you drag your feet to behave like the teacher you claim to be.
A healer that is in service feels honored to participate, honored to show up, and money is not the goal, but a means to offer more effective healing. Your insults and HAI's insults form a pattern of dishonor for the mission you preach. What exactly is HAI's protocol for creating a world where "everyone wins?"
Does this sound familiar:
a) Avoid answering direct questions.
b) Say no to things that would honor me and keep me safe.
c) Ignore communication that might shed light on your stupidity so I could withdraw faster.
d) Avoid asking for help from people who knew what they were doing to save your reputation.
e) Never once ask: "What is your win. How can I help?" (try looking through all your recordings and e-mails for this question)
f) Never once tell: "This would be our greatest win."
g) Reject all requests I made to bring in expert help or a mediator.
h) Ignore my request to have an expert review the communication and make recommendations for the safety of HAI's participants and team.
i) Pretend that HAI's soul being gutted by a rogue facilitator is "not a HAI issue."
j) Cut off the participant from e-mailing the community by disabling their e-mail accounts without warning and violating the e-mail agreements.
k) Refusing to apologize for creating PTSD in a client.
l) Suing a client to shift attention away from a website I chose to build when you refused to come clean in front of your clients and community.
How does this lead to a world where anyone wins? When a jury is forced to listen to the long list of bizarre and unethical things you have all done, how will HAI survive?
You have all led yourselves into such a dark pit of incompetence and violated ethics that I have taken the unprecedented step of not only initiating a lawsuit but of buying domains for every one of you so that anyone who wants to check on who you are before dating, hiring, working with you or doing a workshop can find out exactly how HAI creates a world where everyone wins behind closed doors, when you think no one is watching.
As we speak domains for all board-members and facilitators will be linked permanently to the nuanced details that have occurred and that will continue to occur. You can explain to future lovers, children and people why your version of "love" really is better than that suggested by the entire therapeutic community, or why what applies to everyone else does not apply to the facilitator body in terms of healthy practices. The transcript from the court case will be linked, word for word, so that people have a chance to bypass one of your defenses, claiming that memories change with time. I will be relying on detailed notes, quotes and e-mail records from each of you and you can tell the public and the courts exactly what you meant, why and why you acted the way you did.
You have sent a clear message of shame to the most sensitive and feminine parts in me throughout our professional relationship. These parts, as you know, are the most wounded parts in every American man, courtesy of the institutionalized Chauvinism from birth:
"You are not important enough for me to bother being trained in psychology before taking money and influencing your psyche.
"You are not important enough to bother getting licensed and being bound by therapeutic guidelines.
"Your freedom to choose does not matter enough to me to disclose that I'm not trained and licensed and you may receive better help from people who are.
"It's not worth my time asking you the basic questions about your life that would help me see that what I'm doing is re-enacting childhood blind spots, abuse and shame before I guide you to repeat the pattern.
"I won't bother to apply the many healthy protocols around psychedelics that the Shulgins outline beautifully in their books among others before taking on your role as guide or recommending someone more suitable.
"I won't bother to ask you any questions about your body and substances before arguing with you for five minutes to triple the dose you are comfortable with even though I've heard you give burning shares about your body and Asperger's syndrome for years.
"I won't bother to explain why Lynda Cessara's protocol for making decisions, stating "if it's easy it's meant to be" applies to doing the psychedelic session but is contradicted by the separate Peter protocol for determining the dose where apparently "if it is hard and my client fights me, I need to make sure my will prevails," is the new pattern for making decisions.
"I won't bother to ask you about your many mixed feelings about homosexuality in a culture that shames homosexuality and feminine energy before escalating your first homosexual relationship with a paid therapist in 1993 and again under the influence twelve years later.
"I won't bother to ask you how I hurt you in 1993 when that's the first thing out of your mouth when the drug comes on. Why waste time learning about my mistakes when "I'm ready to be done with that now" is as uncomplicated for Peter as not telling your wife?
"I won't listen to you when you say "take money out of this relationship" because "I told Sarah I would be charging you and would not want to let her down," even though I will let her down myself by lying in a way that has made her life a living hell.
"I won't listen to you when you ask me to come into one of the darkest places my inner child has been wounded. I will just steam-roller past one of the great doorways to healing at a unique and time-sensitive moment in your life when you actually trust a man to go there.
"I won't bother reading your suicide note written to the whole community on Norcal Annce.. Such trifles as a community member dying primarily do to failing to create love under my teaching does not concern me.
"The fact that you spent $60,000 being re-traumatized as you follow my absurd repeated recommendations that you marry Wipa after only knowing her a weak and telling me about more than twenty red flags is of no matter. The fact that Wipa lost her job, went into deep depression, hurt her family and that this led to one of the most dangerous and abusive relationships in my life right after your abuse is not worth your time to apologize for to her or to me. Lynda can join you on the witness stand to explain exactly what good psychic ethics are when a therapeutic client is in love with his therapist after taking psychedelics and trying to please him, and his therapist does not know what he is doing. Lynda can explain this in court since she lacks the sense of responsibility to reply to my detailed outline sent to her about what happened. It's apparently not a "Lynda Cessara" issue when a co-teacher and student abuses his "gifts."
"You did not matter enough to hold a clear container in a vulnerable place.
"You did not matter enough to respond to your e-mails or explain the lack or response. "I have no boundaries. I just will ignore anything that could help you see what was going on for me that might allow you to protect yourself from my ignorance and fear."
"You did not matter enough to be on time for your first session after the most intense experience of your therapeutic life.
"You did not matter enough to communicate that you would be late or pick up when I called after the most confusing experience of your life, led by me. And it's fine by me to charge you $175. for an hour of you venting about how much that upset you that I did not communicate.
"You did not matter enough to make time to clarify the personal relationship when you asked directly at the time in which it would have been most beneficial to know.
"You did not matter enough to follow up as soon as possible to clarify things, so I kept dodging your questions and stringing you along.
"You did not matter enough to explain that I was not worthy of your innocence and love, given my current choices, and to make sure that you knew that my failure to hold, respond to, or honor you love was about me, and not about the value of your love.
"When you behaved passive/aggressively towards me in workshops after the 1993 abuse it was not worth figuring out how I had scared and hurt you. It was easier to say to the client you hurt "I love you and am here for you," and leave you to figure out what was wrong with you that you behaved this way.
"When you chose to stop taking my workshops because you could not figure what was going on and it did not feel right it's fine that you missed out on workshops as a consequence of my abuse.
"Your heart did not matter enough to take money out of a romantic relationship I escalated on your first drug experience.
"You did not matter enough to check on and ask if there was any way I could help more at any point in the process. Let's leave you to beg and have to manipulate in desperation for my unwilling support after I created an emotional dependency and regressed you to a young age of former abuse.
"You did not matter enough to have a closure off the clock. You pay me to try and end the relationship I structured to hurt you.
"You did not matter enough to own that most of this was my responsibility as the professional. It felt good to tell you: "You need to do your own work," rather than do mine, and we both know that me feeling good is more important than your safety.
"You did not matter enough to offer a refund even after finally admitting to more than ten areas of negligence and harm. That would have suggested that you actually were worth more than a few thousand, and I just don't think so.
"Your kindness in asking the facilitators to help me was not worth thanking you for.
"Your generosity in asking the facilitators to let me keep my job, when I was callous enough to ask for that before doing the things you needed to feel safe is not worth any support as soon as I got my job back and we could all gang up on you and pretend this was "not a HAI issue."
"Your generosity to give me gifts were not worth honoring with thanks or even opening.
"Your many efforts to connect with me in a win/win way were not worth my time or initiative to respond to.
"It did not seem important, even after you gave me a book you wrote on partnering, to apply a single suggestion in that book that would have helped me partner with you for your dignity and safety. It was easier to say "I read it," then do what I've always done.
"The money you gave me as a gift was not worth honoring your needs around. You were doing your best to restore safety in a dependent relationship but that did not matter because my psychic told me that you should not have any needs and should move on.
"Your needs to see me clearly were not as important as my needs to hide where I was and what I felt.
"Your needs to protect your wounded inner child were not worth me taking the time to map out your wounds with you with you and check in to see if I had hurt you.
"My reality is so much more valid then yours that I will consult with other people who don't even bother to meet you but tell you what you should do and feel, rather than listen.
"You did not matter enough for me to get you objective and real help from someone trained in trauma. The fact that you told all of us in a week that things were 500% worse was not worth an e-mail response or a call. We believe in "tough love" when no one is looking, but if you need a tissue, all you have to do is raise a finger. We are so here to help when we are on stage.
"When I Peter told you how I was being loved at team workshop and getting somatic treatment for my stress it was hardly worth insuring that you got the help you needed. Why would you, as the victim of our incompetence need as much support at the perpetrator who got paid?
"You did not matter enough to pay attention to specific requests or even honor agreements once made.
"You did not matter enough to ask: "What do you need. How is this for you? Is there anything else I can do?" That would be way to practical, leading perhaps to more things I did not want to do.
"I could never use the 30 minutes given by buddy Felicia to see how I could ease your pain. Telling you, after breaking your trust and heart, that I wanted nothing to do with you on any level and explaining how you were ruining my life, job and marriage and needed to disappear quickly was the important thing - my life being more important than yours as your therapist and teacher about love.
"I could never take the time to explain why I was doing the things that hurt you when it was easier to call my self-centeredness "love" than to actually find out what I could do to make you feel safe, cared for, secure, in integrity with yourself and have high self-esteem in a context that I controlled to preclude all of those feelings, as any licensed trauma specialist will gladly explain if asked.
"The fact that you told me in our session that you needed to integrate the session with my help over a nine month period is not as important as my need to avoid you and all of my own fears by telling you repeatedly "I'm really busy- try me in another few months." Most surgeons like to finish the operation before taking a few month holiday but we all know that I'm special.
"You are not worth offering any compensation for my abuse, even when I reluctantly admit it.
"You do not matter enough to make a public apology and own the impact publicly. Keeping my job is all that matters.
"Your feelings are not as important as my feelings: I don't want to get the other facilitators to apologize because I don't feel like it, even though you tell me it is the most important thing I could do right now to help and I say I want to help. I just don't want to help you in the ways that actually help.
"The fact that you nearly died due to my blind spots is not important enough to start educating the team. I know I said I would send an e-mail to the team asking for volunteers to study trauma at your request and you even scripted it for me when I said I did not know what to write, but then I realized it might not be good for me so I backed out and did not apologize for dropping the ball their either.
"I realize you might need support from the community, but I won't ask for it on your behalf. It might make me look bad. Sure it would take me five minutes and mean the world to you, but you are just not that important when the reputation of the Human Awareness Institute with its lofty mission statement we don't follow is at stake.
"I could have fought publicly with the other facilitators when they treated you like shit on top of the shit I treated you like, but I wanted to re-establish good feelings with them and keep my job so sorry, I cannot stick my neck out for you, even if it is the right thing to do and I see them making the same abusive mistakes I made of denial and refusing to apologize. No, we facilitators must look out for one another and our jobs and screw the client we abused one more time."
"I could have reciprocated when you got me my job back by insisting that you come to the meeting you were not, in another exclusionary measure to control communication, invited to. But getting back into the good graces of my friends was more important to me.
"I could have put your request to finish the twelve hour exploration of these topics as quickly as possible but the HAI facilitators wanted to meet with me without you and exclude you, so of course HAI came first.
"I could have heard you when you told me: "Peter you are not showing up to learn - you are arguing with me," but instead I brought in Sarah so two of your therapists could gang up on you and make you wrong - it being more important to be right than to actually validate that you felt argued with and learn how I was doing that in your eyes, and how I could open. It would be a completely different universe for me to graciously thank you for being open to teaching me how I fucked you over for money, but it's hardly worth traveling to a universe where therapists care about their patients enough to see their point of view, my own being so filled with love and gently spoken words I get a thrill just hearing myself speak.
"I could have insisted in the HAI meeting that any decision affecting you included you, as this is the basis of any win/win relationship compared to domination of a relationship based on exclusion, numbers, silence and power. But that would have risked further annoying the facilitators who wanted to exclude you and control what happened, whether you liked it or not. So I abandoned you again - more proof of my "Gandalf-like stand" for your safety in this work.
"I could have said: "You communicate to me in any way that feels safe and good to you. It's up to me to make this as easy for you as possible and I want to know everything I can do to own this as my issue." Instead, I thought it important to complain that you preferred audio messages (I could not type due to the stress) over typed messages and aggravate your adrenals one more time in their exhausted state."
"You are a piece of shit, and I am a loving, caring and amazing human being."
I try and imagine your reaction to this, based on your past denials of all things shadowy associated with Peter. I do of course have it all wrong. Other people's experience of your impact does not matter as much as how much you love them. I don't see you clearly at all. You meant to offer a refund but in fifteen years you were so busy with all those vacations. You meant to find me a therapist, but... And besides we all know that you were lured into a trap by a scheming, unreasonable client who you thought was benefiting from your abuses, based on the fact that abuse-survivors never ever re-enact their abuses with the new person in power. It does not matter what your story is, Peter. You failed. You failed to care, or your failed to see, and it's a fair amount of both. And that makes you a poor fit for your chosen role. A banker, maybe. Wall Street loves hyper-confident greedy assholes who screw everyone so you could fit in fine. But a teacher of love? Of all the jobs you could have picked. Your standing by that with this pattern of behavior with a paying client under the influence? I'm sure you see it. The problem is that I don't think there is going to be a therapist even in California who will do themselves any professional service by backing you up in expert witness testimony. Because even as an emotionally illiterate American man with Asperger's syndrome I would not let my son get near you with a ten foot pole. You are dangerous precisely because you think that your not. Your stupidity in therapeutic terrains is actually quite ordinary. It's thinking that you are beyond reproach and behaving like a jerk when you get caught that makes you important to stop NOW!
Research on the Incompetent Blind Spot:
"Incompetent People Really Have No Clue, Studies Find. They're blind to their own failings, and to others' skills. There are many incompetent people in the world. Dr. David A. Dunning is haunted by the fear that he might be one of them. Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent."
This article dovetails with research shared in the book "The Black Swan," which is one reason I recommend it to HAI leadership, or anyone in HAI leadership who might be interested increasing HAI's competency. It's also why I do not want to be left alone in my analysis of your and HAI's behavior but asked HAI to hire three well-reputed leaders in the field of non-profit ethics, trauma therapy and biology, and good business practices. Stephen Covey (dead), Brian Tracy (living) and Bessel Van Der Kolk (living) come to mind. If you even bother to read their books you will have a sense of the character and discipline that help them to lead many, including myself to respect their competency and ethical excellence.
The core finding that relates to your behavior is this: "The same part of the brain necessary to be excellent in a given area of work is the same area of the brain and the same talent needed to assess if one is excellent. Thus it is not uncommon for the top 10% of leading therapists to consider 90% of all therapists to be ineffective or dangerous, while the other 90% of therapists will all assure you that they are just as good as the next person, lacking the experience to measure their own lack of greatness. You have told me that you are a great trauma therapist, while inducing PTSD. You tell everyone at HAI that you are all great at helping people with their relationships, but never bother to measure your successes objectively and report the statistics: All five of the relationships I brought to Anne Watts failed, not because there was something insurmountable that could not be sorted out, but because she did not teach them (including HAI interns) or me the language of, the biology of or the tools of diagnosing and responding to trauma, early childhood attachment disorder or gaps in sensitivity. She listened well, but did not respond with the pertinent information. If you take a time-bomb to a bomb specialist you don't want them to just listen, but tell you how to diffuse the explosion 100% of the time. She encouraged, but could not direct me towards what she herself was unable to articulate. Anne was 500% more competent than you until it came to her own conflict of interest. You learned from Anne. Anne recommended you to me and everyone else. That's all you've got other than the validation of largely ignorant clients in a largely ignorant culture when it comes to knowing what good therapy that works actually looks like. So how are you going to know, without any formal training, how terrible you are? You cannot. It's not your fault. But it is your choice not to seek expert review by a licensed well-reputed psychologist who can pick your recordings and e-mails apart far more expertly than I can and give you a clue. And I think you at HAI do know enough to choose to stay in the dark rather than learn exactly what you don't know you don't know and exactly how that has been harming and perpetuating the blind spots in the 40,000 people who take your workshops. The last woman I talked to about HAI who was a former team-member said she still has PTSD from boundary violation after 10 years and wants nothing to do with HAI. This is only shameful when you willfully avoid seeing your own ignorance at the expense of others.
I am confident that at the end of a lengthy court case in plain view with no secret agreements of any kind that anyone who wants to can assess your competency. When you can assess your own competency by relying on those with more training and skill, you will have a choice to improve your service, should you wish.
The way abuse-contracts work, the child (and later the inner child accessed through abusive regression) agrees to do what the parent/authority figure they need wants, however crazy, in the hope of survival by securing Maslow's third need for love and belonging. You asked my child to see and believe what would surely kill me if I had not gotten help elsewhere.
This is venturing into theory, but it is worth considering: Since you have asked me to die, rather than face your inadequacy, without conscious awareness of being willing to kill me, it seems reasonable to me that you have tried to kill, abandon, shame and betray your own scared areas of uncertainty with greater cruelty. This will be your greatest work, in my eyes, and I am aware that, like myself, you may choose to die in one form or another rather than face the cruelty you have unleashed on this part of yourself and how ugly she has become as the banished carrier of shame you and everyone in this culture bestows on her. She is ugly, terrified, small and helpless not through any form of defect on her own. Rather, she is the most precious medicine our culture needs but is too stupid to love and give honor to. She is the sacred spring of innocence that we ritually murder in our culture to sustain the toxic norms that kill us.
She is bigger than you are, and so will forgive you faster than you can forgive your self.
She is bigger than you are.
That's why she has been strong enough to carry your darkest shames in complete isolation, while you run cowering at the slightest hint of a whisper that your shadow is around. She is your queen, who you have bound, gagged, and dragged behind pickups screaming everything you hate about your self. You cannot kill her because she is Soul. When you murder her in one body she comes back again in the innocence of each newborn child.
We ritually brainwash her again, but always with a certain sadness. For she cannot die, but rather be endlessly tormented by our fear of the unknown that leaves us clinging so desperately to the status quo that includes her banishment from view. You may kill your self, unable to face the horror you have done to her, but she does not condemn you. That is for me - the cultured self - who hates you for what you have done to her, and does not know how else to respond, untrained as I am in the rituals of Soul wisdom, the honor of grief, and the burial of lost beauty. That is for me - the modern ego trying to find my way out of the maze I have been trapped into by blind minds, and back to the rich and verdant waters, the black lines of rock, and the crystalline pinnacles that are my Soul's call. I do not know how to honor her in myself, so I can hardly claim to honor her in you. Yet I hope that when I feel less small, less dirty and humiliated by your sustained pattern of shame, I will regain the mercy and kindness that you stole from me by treating me like shit and walking away after urinating all over my sense of divinity as if nothing had happened. Your eyes flutter with the half guilty, half fearful air that many Westerners exhibit when dishonoring another culture and wanting to pretend it does not matter, we being so much more superior. But it does. It matters to us when we cannot grieve because we murdered the Indians who knew how; when we cannot be still in our bodies because of the restless shames that call out for more sedation. They are free of our stupidity. We remain in ignorance of our own ignorance. I have never wept the way a true soul weeps, or a free man expresses himself. I have been cowering in fear my entire life. And we are so much more sophisticated than those we treated like animals? Your needs are so much more important than mine?
I will publish a book about this using your names. There will be a documentary. I will meet you in court where you can try and pass your shit on someone trained who really takes their role seriously. But I will not be responsible for how your actions appear to the knowledgeable members of our country trained in abuse and therapy. You are the one who, in my hot tub picking up a crystal I gave to you with love, pretended that your awkwardness and fear as you avoided all direct questioning was not awkwardness and fear but "A new paradigm update of reality," according to Lynda Cessara. You used bullshit like this to hide the scared kid and angry teenager who were in over their heads and absolutely refused me the dignity of your asking for my help, forgiveness and understanding, (I have known every step of the way what you needed to do to increase my safety and well-being and you never asked once, fighting me more often then not when I made requests which are much more healthy than your many requests that I disappear behind a wall that never existed in your world). And it is the entire behavior pattern of the facilitators and board who helps me and every objective witness see that my safety and dignity and heart were never the highest priority for any of you.
You have an enormous amount of explaining to do as a power-structure before any informed, healthy and honoring person would trust you in a situation like this again. But of course it is you who told me in one of our first calls after I asked the facilitators to help us both: "I will never trust you again for the rest of this lifetime."
To Shadow Peter: "You can never trust me again to keep your lies, incompetence, stupidity and dishonor hidden for the rest of this lifetime." That's a good call 14 year old Peter who feels ratted on. But to your adult: "You can count on me, from this point forward, to keep HAI participants safe even when it means having to fight and be shamed by my therapists and even when it means being the uncomfortable focus of conflict in my most sensitive areas. Because you could not do your job as a professional to keep your client's safe, I will do your job and mine until you are relieved of duty." You can't keep your ages and persona's distinct so you cannot track me when you induce age regression with your unsafe behavior, and then hurt the child who has never been safe and will never be safe until you can put your own little boy first and show up for him without addiction to sex, power and looking good.
You cannot hurt another without being willing and hurting that same region in your own psyche. I have never been more hurt in my entire adult life than by you, Peter Sandhill, and it is the innocence that you so crave, as you pursue it in others after losing it in yourself, that you hurt the most. Until you can face the demon face in you that would wipe out that innocence and leave it in darkness forever to avoid your fears, shames and griefs, you will never be safe for anyone as a healer. Your light will draw you in close and earn trust and your fears will lead you to betray one person after another, leaving them to carry the shadow you do not own.
You have asked me to carry your hate, rage and shame. You have asked me to pay you. You have asked me to love and validate you. You have asked me to die so that you could avoid seeing. It is the pain in you that must die as well as the fear that is willing to murder. Find out what that rage is about and what pain it is protecting. That part of you will not need to look good any longer, and will not give the burden of your adequacy to your clients. This letter will be public because you do best in the light when you cannot hide behind your charm. The actions you take in response to this letter, will speak volumes about your safety and capacity to determine need from love. I offer this as the teaching you threw back in my face with fear and hate. You may have the right to throw away your own life, but not to hurt others in your professional role. You will see that people see your light. I will shine light on your wound. You are a whole person and it's time to own your healthy aggression towards those who are hurting you, and stop fighting with your clients through a form of denial and passivity that makes your client do your job or leaves others unsafe..
You waited, as you wait now, to do the absolute minimum that you can do, resenting and feeling blackmailed every step of the way, expressing your many dissatisfactions about how much time it was taking without realizing that it was precisely this pattern of dishonoring the feminine in me that rubbed salt in the wound and took what could have been a five minute conversation into a one hour conversation; a one hour conversation to a 12 hour conversation and now brings you to a point where you could not logically restore the trust you have broken if you tried because it is beyond the event horizon - requiring something that is bigger than your ego has the skill to conceive of. I have fought every step of the way for some small semblance of dignity with a broken heart turning into PTSD without you showing the character that is necessary for any ethical healer.
I am disgusted with your behavior! You dishonor your family, your community, your role and every abuse survivor including myself. At your age it seems unlikely that you can change, given the fact that there is never going to be another individual that bothers to take the time to outline your many insults to the feminine in every human being or track you through your slippery path of avoiding impact and shirking responsibility. You have run as an addict runs from pain, by asking your client to see your unhealthy version of reality over honoring and serving them in their version of reality. It has hurt and frightened everyone who tried to form a secure, healthy attachment with you. It has hurt me.
I will be doing everything I can to insure that people have a chance to see your shadow before having anything vulnerable to do with you. I would add that I chose you on a shadow level because you were suitable for the narcissistic contract of abuse in which you get to look great to yourself and I get the illusion of being loved. The contract with the abuser is the first thing any trained therapist must unearth to avoid transference to the therapist. You never asked me a single question about my childhood. It apparently was not important enough for you to understand me once your dick got hard in our first session. That's sad, Peter, because none of this is personal. You treat me the way you do because that's what you know how to do from a culture that teaches men to behave as you do. I would respond this way to anyone who treated me or others this way. It's the biggest wound of our culture: the chauvinism of the masculine that is bred to dishonor the feminine. This is what a good relationship councilor and healer seeks to heal. It's your blind spot that would happily pay to fix my car if you ran into it and were caught, but whine at paying your buddy $2,000. to repair a broken heart and a dissociated mind. It does not get much more chauvinistic than that.
You dishonored your wife by keeping a secret she had a right to know. She would have helped you pull out of this if you had given her a chance by including her, but you are too arrogant to recognize her superior sense of danger to your own. She does not have any more character than you in her fears of abandonment that you have induced; she did not in 1993 own up to her responsibility as your trainer, and as a woman who recommended you to me without caveat when you abused me and told her about it. But she does have a superior sense of danger to yours and out of a self-centered fear of losing you she would have steered you away from this, which is probably one reason you did not tell her.
There are no innocent parties in an unhealthy dynamic. It is the admission that a client has something to learn that takes them to a paid professional. It is the job of the professional to assess the self-harming pattern of the client and serve in such a way as to facilitate both awareness and healing, without re-enacting the abuse. You failed on all counts in all areas for fifteen years. You did not see how I was harming myself, harmed me yourself, did not bother to see the pattern, asked zero useful questions and escalated my deepest wound in the sacred space of innocence a first psychedelic offers a client as a second birth.
You then fought every healthy request I made, from integration, to clarity, to looking at your blind spots, delving into the pain you caused before and lowering the dose. I would have been much safer alone and would have been spared your absurd recommendation that I marry a woman who was completely inappropriate and I told you I had only known a week. That cost me $60,000. and an adrenal collapse. I realize that you have zero interest in taking responsibility. The question is why are you in this business at all if you don't care about helping people enough to use the protocols that actually work? When I had to literally throw Wipa out of my hotel room and told you about it, that was not enough to clue you into your mistakes. No. "Talk to two of her relatives that don't speak English when you don't have a translator." I've no idea how long your wild goose chase of an "optimal future" would have continued. I'm happily married now to another woman my other Shaman assured me "would never work out." It was the worse relationship I have ever had precisely because I kept hanging in there. Emotionally I needed you and you decided to block everything healthy that I asked for and only give me time to psychicly advise me on the relationship that was harming me almost as much as you.
Some psychologists spend $200k on their formal education. This was probably "wasted money" in your eyes and would not have been worth your time - the human psyche being only the most complex and misunderstood instrument of perception in human history and 25% of Americans estimated to have a mental disease. I hope you consider this degree in life experience worth the money you may play a part in repaying - unless of course you slither away and leave Sarah to pay for your arrogance and shadow wound. I was surprised to listen to your brainstorming so casually about leaving HAI and going to Australia if I did not get you your job back.
You generally close your cycle of abuse by telling me that you love me and will be waiting with your love. Perhaps you don't know what love is or it just looks good to say that? So this is for you:
Self-love and self-abuse:
When you treat someone carelessly, unprofessionally and insensitively it is an insult to the client, the role, but also to yourself. It really puzzles me from both a selfless and selfish perspective why you cannot lead yourself, your organization or your client out of murky waters. You have pro-actively and at times aggressively pushed for unhealthy practices, whether it is secrecy or insisting on charging for a love-affair or insisting on more chemicals than I felt safe with in your presence. So why not insist with equal fervor on the things which help your client, and by helping your client, your reputation, your organization, your future and your Self? Why not insist on an apology before being asked? Why not apologize for more than was asked with the same passion and clarity as you pushed for a higher dose? Why not insist that you find a great therapist who knows the terrain, and leave no stone unturned to see that I do not suffer communally or in any other way as a result of your mistakes, lack of training and negative impact. Because they are connected. When you fail in these areas, timidly offering a few reluctant morsels of support or validation months late and never follow up with professional care, you tell me how you will treat the next patient, just as your refusal to apologize for your 1993 abuses for a decade leave me clear that unless a client figures out your abuses and threatens you legally you will never apologize and take your abuses to the grave. This compels me to sue you, and those who stand by in your organization as your teachers and say, with their silence, that this is "Ok with us." But why do you hate your self so much that you would set your self up to fail so thoroughly. Why leave your fate in the hands of a client who you have hurt more than anyone else in their adult life. It makes no sense logically.
Loving Me:
While it is clear to me that if anyone at HAI actually wanted to take responsibility, wanted to love me or to learn how to love me they would have asked, and I would have told them. While I did ask anyway for what would increase my safety, only to have much of it fall on silent ears that would not talk back. While it is the easiest thing in the world for any human being to ask another: "How can I help you feel loved?" I will tell the others reading this exactly what you can do to love me, your Self and honor every sexual survivor on the planet, so that your refusal to ask and to respond is not interpreted as innocence. It's not. You could have asked in 1993 rather than tell me what was good for you:
1) Make the apology you made to me a public apology and put it on HAI's website. See that the people who know me are aware of what has happened and your role as my therapist, in inducing PTSD. Spend time with a trained therapist and add the many things that I did not ask for, but which you have clearly done to hurt me.
2) Restore my e-mail access to the community and apologize for cutting that off, apologizing to everyone else that you would do this to any of them if they were abused by a facilitator. As you say, it is not personal.
3) Make a clear statement that the blind spots and abuses as a result of those blind spots are HAI's highest priority and list a detailed action plan with timelines that HAI will follow to address the issues.
4) Publicly take a stand for therapeutic and sexual abuses and the best practices for response and prevention and be willing to stand alone if HAI will not stand with you. HAI's future is shaky precisely because if no one will stand alone and fight evil when it stares them in the place, then no one is ready to lead HAI, and without a spiritual leader HAI is a danger and should cease to teach.
5) Return the crystals and money owed by shipping them (I don't want to deal with how long it took you to pick them up or how I might be feeling about seeing you at all on the day you might choose).
6) Hire leading experts with one goal: The safety and success of the HAI community. If they advise you to step down, do so as soon a replacement is available (this to any HAI facilitator or board member in place since I have not kept up with the power structure details).
7) Once an assessment is made by trained experts, with or without the approval of the board, publish that, so that anyone in HAI who wants a clear path towards excellence knows where to do and who is blocking that path within the organization.
8) Once you understand the full impact you have had on me, the community and HAI, apologize for your ignorance, fear, shame and inability to transcend. This is not an apology based on the fact that you should have been better than you were, but rather that you have presented your many failings as "love" without the caveat needed for others to discern between love and shame, inadequacy and competency. You have set many up to fail and they have carried your shame for you to protect you, needing some semblance of love from a dysfunctional parent that was in Anne's words, "hopefully a little better than your parents."
9) Make this count. Start the process of training new people on the science-model of relationships: Every workshop in which people do what you recommend should lead to more and healthier sustainable relationships based on statistical feedback. You need the measuring system and app technology to do this easily with $10,000. for the entire community. You cannot claim to be helping people unless you are steadily learning and growing to a point where every team-member who wants one is in a healthy, loving win/win relationship. You mock them with the mission statement when you are not working this as seriously as a paper-boy works his paper-route. It's a discipline and a science that is meaningless if you don't define your goal and measure your results, and pick leadership based primarily on the growth trend: If the rate of growth, healing and sustainable healthy relationships does not continue to grow based on the proximity of someone in the community, then leadership is not doing it's job! Period. If you want to lead, you have to show yourselves competent to own the mission and measure results.
10) Participate in the documentary willingly about therapeutic negligence and sexual abuse in America. Be the face of ignorance and of the abuser for the 25% of Americans who will never get an apology from their abuser and will have their lives threatened, their jobs threatened if they tell. Be the face of the shadow that no one wants to look at. So that we can wake up in this country and see that the enemy is not out there. It's not Trump. It's the parents and teachers who traumatized Trump and the country that taught him that looking good was the only way he would belong, so he had to be rich. Show people that it is not the arch-conservatives that are the enemy of healthy relationships and higher consciousness; it is ignorant, well-meaning Americans, many of them liberals and feminists, who cannot face their own shadow. When we realize that the enemy is us - has a very nice face - teaches workshops on love, intimacy and sexuality the message might just get through: We need to look inside and find the internalized abuser within each one of us. You may be strong enough to do that without buying into the lie that because you have sold out your Soul to look good and feel secure like the rest of America, that you are not all bad. That though you have murdered innocence, you can grieve for her as real adults and lay flowers on her grave. That people are not all good or all bad in this country where no one chooses to own their shadow. This is something that is far more potent medicine than anything I have seen at HAI, and if you participate in true service, by recording your processes with your i phones or any good camera, you might yet contribute to sexual and spiritual healing in this country precisely because you are flawed and are willing to own it. That would be a gift of rare beauty. And it takes a soul in service to offer that gift, not an ego in shame. That's what healing is: rising above the ego to serve the soul. If you think it's easy for me being naked in my shame, rage, hurt and pain as an American man you haven't a clue. It won't be easy for anyone. But you can do it, if you want to, and you don't die first. Not one of you could have hurt me the way you did without first being hurt, then hurting yourself, then being numb. That is the law of the abuse cycle. I am no more a victim than any of you. I am no stronger and no weaker. I'm very lucky this weight has not killed me and your essence - the true selves that got into HAI for great ideals - were often by my side, telling me the things that would give me courage to fight the dragon in myself and in you. You are my friend, when you step into service and bare your soul in pain, and share the stories that can heal the isolation of others. You are my enemy, and I your nemesis, when you lie behind flowery deflections or abandon yourself to the darkness.
Now if you want my blessing, this is what it takes. The court will decide based on your response to this e-mail if you are interested in helping your community or just pocketing money to fix the relationships you sabotage in the community by not giving students a curriculum that works. I married the second woman I met after understanding trauma by doing the opposite of what you did to me around trauma. I am clear that I might have married other HAI women just as successfully if I had been shown what I learned outside of HAI by coming to you. Jason ought to apologize for his incompetence as "chief vision officer" and starts visioning a HAI that knows how to deal with trauma, rather than pretending that the very thing that is destroying your credibility, effectiveness and finances is "not a HAI focus," and then implements a protocol, designed by those more experienced than yourselves. Without that your community is going to stay saddled with the probability of failure that I have lived through in 30 relationships and that violates the commitment to win/win for every HAI participant, let alone "a world where everyone wins." Show some of that commitment here and now. Speak up like a human if you can, and find help if you cannot.
In addition to feeling profoundly unloved and lonely, I've had to deal with the formation of new protective personas and watch gentler facets of my personality retreat into frozen places:
Personas: patterned forms of consistent thought, feelings and behavior that show up in a given context have shattered in the process of this abuse, as the emotion and energy they were asked to carry without relief broke down the structures that had been consciously cultivated to trust, grow, learn and be polite in even tense situations. As the intensity of new energy rolled in without the protection of past personas, new walls were protected crudely and harshly to protect my consciousness from the pain I did not know how to digest, abandoned and alone outside the wall of half-truths and lies erected to keep your impact from penetrating your dusty organizational walls. Parts of me died, and I watched them die. Some surprised me when I reached for them and they were no longer there. All that was waiting for me in their former location was raw rage, hurt, terror and loneliness that was itself startling and terrifying to experience.
This created a frustrating lack of integrity on several occasions, which I found enraging and humiliating, and alarming. It helped me see that I was not safe around you or HAI and had to get to know the personas who were crystallizing around these new experiences of betrayal, isolation and abandonment. I integrate by talking and you prevented that by steering the communication away from your shadow and avoiding dialog for more than half a year, leaving me suspended. The gentle pushes of energy that began with the session became more and more violent and un integrated in their neglected state, leaving me in unfamiliar terrain when they began touching down into the runways of blockades you and HAI prepared to derail the emergence of my true self to protect your fears.
No one with any sense would do this. Your fate is linked to your client in a situation like this, so it is foolish to hurt them. There have been several points where I've asked for something and it was finally given, weeks or months later than I needed it to be offered, only to find that there was no persona left in that location to engage safely. After Jason pretended that this was "not a HAI issue" and avoided all responses, he finally wanted to talk. I found this so insulting at this point I could not speak. Sarah finally gave me a what for her was a sincere apology. But despite you telling me how proud you were of her, I heard her pride in a professional betrayal and felt rage. If she cannot put a HAI participant ahead of your feelings when you have fucked with their life she has no business being a HAI facilitator. That is a conflict of interest that only emerges if she has failed to train you to keep your client's safe before recommending you to them, and if she thinks that your feelings are more important than taking responsibility for that blunder she has no business being a therapist, something that the court and a trained therapist will no doubt want to understand: "Will you, Sarah, kill a client to protect your marriage? Will you protect Peter in his negligence in a professional capacity with a client your leadership induced into suicide? How many clients would have to be murdered before you would put the safety of a client first? Five? Ten? At what point would you rather divorce your husband if it meant that the only way to stay married was to sanction his blind spots which he does not know he has because you refused to do your job training him before you recommended him to an innocent client?" What will Sarah say to the jury? How is that behavior protecting you, when one of the reasons I'm suing HAI and you if necessary is precisely because neither of you as a couple would put a client's safety above your own ego over a span of more than a decade, and you are both old enough to have your values clearly illustrated by your behavior in a way that is unlikely to change before death. Did Anne stop recommending you after she told me "that man is not safe. I want to protect you from him!" Or did she still give you glowing recommendations to innocents in the workshops? You can explain all of this in the courts to people who are aware of the tendency for cults to start abusing power when they believe they answer to no one, and certainly not their therapeutic client's health. I will save the more complex narrative for the jury, since I'm sure you don't want to know - never having asked once about your impact and Sarah choosing never to reply to my anger at her "apology," or justification of her negligence.
With anger, compassion, sadness, hurt and rage,
Dane
PS: Some trauma survivors are fortunate and experience post-traumatic growth. I have created that fortune for myself, with help, luck and sheer determination to explore many options:
1) I am now married to the second woman I met after the disaster of your psychic predictions about Wipa. The marriage directly ties into what I learned from this experience. Taking note of exactly how you had induced PTSD in me, I was able to to the opposite with my wife, which is why she is my wife. Apologizing more than 1,000 times, taking full responsibility for my impact, asking her to write out her life-history prior to me making any moves or being sexual, being helpful with her trauma and not asking for anything in return (being the king that was too much bother for you to be), showing sensitivity where you did not, patience where you were impatient, never lying once and responding to all her communication immediately and in detail, she was able to experience a 400% increase in happiness and a 4,000% increase in life-skills, making me the very lucky husband of an amazing woman. It's a bit like the way I learned from my parents. I've never lied to anyone because my mother lied and blamed those she lied to (a bit like you) and my father never admitted doing anything wrong and blamed his children for the worst traits in them that he would systematically induce (a bit like you) it allowed me to at least avoid their mistakes.
This also brings a key point into focus: I did not take this level of responsibility for creating the love I wanted in my 30 HAI lover-relationships, influenced by your definition of "loving me" at the end of work in 1993. Using HAI's protocol I focused on asking for my 100% (something that was not very useful with HAI since each of you ignored altogether any request you did not want to respond to, not even bothering to say "no" to such things as my request that you bring in an outside therapist so that I did not have to exhaust myself repeating my words).
I could of course jump on the bandwagon of the HAI narrative: "We love you and did everything in our power to love you and you are just not getting it." But that reality would leave me asking my wife to see that all my abuses and shame were "loving her and she was not getting it," which would leave me failing as I have failed with every HAI relationship under your tutelage. You cannot have a mission of a world where everyone wins using a protocol where everything and everyone but the agenda of avoiding your shadow loses.
You have sold out your soul, your mission, your money, your marriage and your trust to protect your shadow. This is what addicts do. But you have nothing to teach of value from that position, and cannot practice the truths you teach. The many loyal HAI team-members who have caught your and our culture's viruses are failing in ways they do not understand. I have met ragged team-members with over 100 workshops under their belt who are no closer to love, and a lot more worn down. You dishonor them by pretending that they are not doing it right, rather than owning responsibility for the many gaps in your curriculum that you neither address or refer people to elsewhere. Instead you leave people going round and round, not even bothering to define what "love," is, while professing to teach it.
It's not black our white - and that's also the danger. I had some of my best moments in life inside HAI. But they were destroyed by the virus carried by every facilitator in this area, first given to me by my own parents, who asked me to re-wire my brain to call their ignorance, fear, shame and needs to avoid their shadow "love." This prepared me for you, who in turn made life so bad I had to die or break the contract. The terrified child would rather die than offend mommy and daddy in many cases. My child has tried to kill me when I moved towards confronting HAI's abuse cycle. This is the responsibility of therapists: to own the sacred trust that every patient must give in order to do the work, and to know that their patient will seek to give them the other side of the contract bond which could endanger that client's life. You nearly killed me with your fear, rage and hatred in the "session" in which Felicia was too untrained to treat me as a survivor of therapeutic abuse and chose to treat us as a couple, blocking my efforts to direct the session and then insisting that you had half of the time to make me feel worthless and unwanted, the very thing you had done to bring us to that point. This is why I know HAI has a problem, rather than Peter has a problem. Every facilitator has violated basic ethics and made things worse, in one way or another, and apparently either does not get it or does not care enough to apologize. Who needs teachers of healthy relationships like that?
I got the message that you would rather I died than bring your shadow to light. And it is the awareness of how close I came to dying on more than three ocasions, during whih you showed more concern for your tattered version of the truth than your patient's needs or experience that leaves me believing that you must cooperate with a complete transformation of this abuse cycle or be tried for probable murder. You are capable of that and I heard you loud and clear. You would never have the balls to actually be seen killing someone. But your shadow would murder me in a heartbeat if you could pretend to yourself that you were innocent. And that is the nature of the wound you have given me, compounding the hatred that both my parents had for the same part of me: the feminine that sees them and you, in dark and light.
A bit more about murder... Despite telling me that in your process with Peter Rengel you went through terrain in which you wanted to kill me and in which you wanted to die, you are likely blocking out the many ways you have acted and refused to act that directly lead to a probability of murder, along with every other facilitator and board-member. So I will break it down for you.
I told you in one of my calls to you that I found myself in a probability field where there was 10% chance I would die (I nearly did and it's quite remarkable that I have not). I said there was a 10% chance I would go insane. I have gone 30% into a psychotic break and have not yet fully recovered. I told you that there was a good chance, based on my body's responses that I would lose years of my life, a chance that I would go bankrupt. I believe that if you take 100 American men in my generation who are heterosexual and put them through the protocol outlined in the "symptoms" page in which I detail 80% of my HAI traumas, that 10 of them will end up dead, 30% will go crazy and 70% will become addicted to something unhealthy and less than 5% will come out healthier then they began. Those are terrible odds. And what they mean is that if you had 100 Dane's to influence ten of them would be dead right now. That's probable murder. I have addressed Collen Kasbab's probability field, and did not have enough information to deal with the suicides of two other HAI participants, but am clear that HAI has failed it's community by insisting on protocols that hurt the community rather than attuning itself to a commitment that "No one dies of suicide at HAI! Period." Tony Robbins makes that commitment and claims to have succeeded 100% over the same period. But apparently a world where everyone wins is not a world where every HAI participant lives. If there was a HAI with such a commitment there would be a protocol for when a HAI participant states they will kill themselves on Norcal Announce. There is: Silence. "We could give a damn. We are only your facilitators committed to everyone winning."
The threats to my life which I have communicated on more than one occasion include:
a) Failure to drive safely and getting into many near-accidents because I could not be present in my body with the level of pain you left me in.
b) Chronic fatigue reaching adrenal callapse level in which I could not move much for months.
c) Inability to work, raising anxiety about money, which I burned through.
d) Stating to every facilitator: "You are hurting me more than 1000 times more than I think you realize."
You and every facilitator chose to say nothing and do nothing to respond to these urgent messages of abuse. You chose to actively disobey key therapeutic directives concurrent with your roles.
Just ask yourself: If I, Peter Sandhill, wrote an e-mail to the community saying: "I have been involved with an abuse cycle with one of our community, who trusted me enough to hire me to learn about healthy relationships, only to be hurt on two occasions. In both cases I escalated a romantic relationship, did not show sensitivity, violated my marital and HAI agreements, and in this case endangered his life. I am an addict with blind spots and it's been hard to see my own shadow. The facilitators are enabling this abuse cycle right now by pretending that this is not a HAI issue. It is of course the most important HAI issue around. My first and primary responsibility as a paid healer is to insure Dane's safety, something I am not personally fit to do as I deal with addiction withdrawal symptoms. I need help finding a competent therapist for my client who understands trauma and sexual abuse. In the mean time I am very sorry to this community for letting it down by not walking my talk and by not securing adequate training to protect my client from my own abuse-survivor wounds. Please give Dane all the love and support that he has every right to respect from us at the facilitator body, but which we find ourselves too bound to our own fears to give. I will not be teaching or doing therapy until I can make sure that I can put my client's first. I am very very sorry. This was not Dane's fault and I take full responsibility for my ignorance, blind spots and self-centeredness, and the ways this has hurt someone who trusted me to be vulnerable."
What do you think would have happened in my world if you had had the courage to write this e-mail? You would have been the first man in my life who put my life above protecting his addictions and agendas. And it would have been life-changing to feel safe and cared for, rather than blamed and hidden from view like a dirty rag.
Though you are too selfish to ask "what would you like here" and perhaps lack the training to realize, it would have given me the very community support I needed to avoid PTSD. It would tell me that I was finally safe with you. It would possibly have given the other facilitators the courage to stop burying my truth and me in the delusion that this would protect themselves and you. I say "delusion" because I have never sued anyone in my life or been sued, despite doing millions of dollars of business as a contractor for 25 years, and had zero interest in suing HAI when this came up. Even now it is a 60% pro sue inner vote and 40% "I don't want to deal with the hassle of our legal system and all the trauma that will bring up" vote. The deciding 30% is that you have shown me, impersonally, exactly how you treat the people you abuse, and I've seen it twice with you Peter and online by another HAI participant. The stories of abuse and trauma within the community are rampant. For Jason Weston to say that "Trauma is not a focus of HAI" is like Greenpeace saying "Global warming, garbage, pollution and deforestation are not a focus of Greenpeace." It's willfull ignorance at it's worse and so I'm doing this for the next innocent you lure in and trash.
It would have led HAI to a much needed process of house-cleaning it's protocols. It also would have, assuming you actually believed any of this, set me on a path of getting paid help to repair the damage that would have avoided the need for me to sue HAI to regain visibility, honor and dignity in my own eyes. As it is, you continued to endanger my life, along with every other facilitator which told me in no uncertain terms: "You are going to either have to accept a cruel and painful lie on top of this abuse or your are going to have to break your contract with the abuser and sue your therapists, mentors, teachers and become the enemy of the community who, much like my siblings when I tried to confront my parents, are too scared of losing physical support from their abuser to face the truth. You would have set me, yourself and HAI free from the burden of your narcissism and left your community stronger. But you refuse to do this. You ask, instead, for your traumatized client to develop PTSD so that you can avoid losing face publicly and do many other basic simple things that any trained therapist could guide you towards if you had the humility to ask for help, rather than hire cronies to tell me this was all my fault and "had nothing to do with me."
You created a probability field through your actions and inactions that endangered other people's lives and has made it necessary to sue the organization that chose, trained and recommended you without caveat, and then failed to take any responsibility for your mess. You are a liar, a murderer and a coward, when it suits you, and it is not through you, but despite you that I have recovered to the degree that I have. I may never trust another therapist in my life - a handicap courtesy of your stupidity and the fact that I must own that I choose you to trust and therefore cannot trust myself to pick from among the handful of competent therapists out there.
You could have worked hard to find such a therapist for me and offered to pay for it - communicating again that you valued me and wanted me to live. But you chose not to. Nor did you offer any money or check on my finances. In a thousand different ways over more than a decade your message has been: "You can suffer and fail in relationship for all I care because I value my false sense of competency more than I value your success in the areas I presume to teach."
I have failed. Over and over again because of that attitude. A true teacher sacrifices their defenses to protect their student's odds of success. You sacrifice your students to protect your ego. Don't worry about what I say. give this letter to trained reputable trauma therapist who does not need your validation or money and ask them to show you how you set people up to fail. They can do so. Even I can do so. But do you want to see it? Even a little? Is it worth a few dollars to you to understand how you destroy soul, innocence and beauty to protect your shame from coming to light? If it was you would have spent that money by now and it would not be your abused client having to waste their time protecting others from you - you would be doing your job.
Continuing with my post-traumatic growth...
2) I now have my own 501c3 Non-Profit to fund the various work I have begun documenting my own recovery and making that freely available on youtube and other places. It's a 20 year project and is a big area of learning. I learned from HAI how to run a non-profit into the ground with willful ignorance and lies and I believe that will help me avoid many of HAI's mistakes and empathize when people I serve are upset because I fail to achieve my mission many times.
3) My acute awareness that 20% of Americans are in as much or more pain than I am has led me to want to do much more to help. The books I am writing are now able to incorporate PTSD, trauma, sexual abuse and regressed childhood memories, as well as the positive and destructive use of psychedelics. All of my media is free, except for paper copies of books, and I'm aware that if I keep this focus up I'll be an effective presenter in the next 5-10 years of constant practice.
4) I have grown more in a way that is necessary just to survive this ordeal. Pain and terror are great teachers. When no other human teachers who are safe and healthy have shown up and I have been flooded with pain and terror since bringing this to the HAI facilitators, my need to integrate all I'm learning has led me to make 800 hours of video on 10 different channels and counting. In the process I am learning skills needed to be effective at a positive advocate for abuse in our culture.
5) The documentary I am working on about this whole psychic terrain and the many unconscious ways children and adults are abused will be freely available and may lead to new avenues of communication I cannot currently imagine.
6) Disappointed not only with your therapy, but with Anne's and many of the other therapists I have tried, I am including therapists around the world in what I am learning. I was recommended to HAI by one of my therapist, who also did not diagnose childhood trauma or teach me to deal with it in all of his work (like many therapists, he just listened, showing no masculine wisdom to direct me towards a championing of my feminine). If you read the experiences I have had at HAI in the www.AbuseAtHumanAwarenessInstitute.org section on medicine you will see that I have been dealing with trauma in the community ever since I trusted all of you to give it a try.
My goal is to help at least 1,000 people avoid and/or healthily respond to trauma. Since there is no monetary amount that can possibly compensate for the hell I have endured in your care, I hope you transcend your own ego at some point enough to where you study, learn discipline and start using your full influence to heal others. That's where you will find the love you cannot find because you destroy it before it can reach you.
The way that I see it you are 1/3rd healthy, loving core, 1/3rd confused and terrified and trying to look good by not being seen in your terror, and 1/3rd chauvinistic and a bearer of our culture's wounds and blind spots. Your core has suffered enormously in response to every one of your blind spots and has felt the pain you cause others and avoid feeling. Your confused terror seeks belonging from those without the skill and character to put doing the right thing first, colluding with the reenactment of your own largely invisible wounds. HAI did not support you in healing because you are surrounded by those with the same wound. You pivot on trying to look good until you feel safe, so you have to find people who know your shadow so you can look good by finding real support.
You are a carrier of many of our cultures diseases. They are not yours. But right now you honor your diseases and blind spots more than you honor your self and the facilitators at HAI carry the same virus. (As an aside, I'm in no way distinguishing myself from you in any way other than that I'm glad I did not think I was ready to take money for things I have not learned yet.) You betrayed what is good in me to protect your shadow. You betrayed your self at the same time. Now that I see your shadow, I see more of my own. You cannot help anyone see their shadow until you are ready to be seen. Everything you have told me about all your relationships leads me to believe that you are destroying them by dishonoring the sacred feminine in every one, including your son, who is healthier than you are to my eyes, but very possibly burdening himself with your blinders to make you feel better, since that is what you ask everyone to do for you and punish them by withdrawing passive-aggressively when they do not.
The way you travel around, have many lovers and communicate in no uncertain terms that you have other options, while actively denying the many harms you cause when someone brings them up, is a form of hostility. I have witnessed you bribing them and steering them away from seeing you as you put you first. This is a nut-job you will do on your son the same way my parents did to me (I chose you because you were like them including the fact that they convinced everyone around us that they were perfect and their children were the real problem).
Your wife and your son deserve to know that they are the most important people in your life. I would not have known that at all if I was your son. You did in fact promise to take an absolute stand for me "like Gandalf in the mines of Moria," and lied and betrayed that stand even before you promised it by making me an enemy of your wife and HAI by keeping secrets - a complete betrayal of the therapeutic ethic.
You think your father was so great and told me so. So where exactly is the evidence? He was your core template for honoring the feminine in himself, in you and in your mother. You treated my feminine like shit and were completely blind to the fact. That tells me more about your father than your delusions, just as your actions every day you don't graciously offer a full refund and start behaving like a man tell the story of the chauvinism that is dripping from every relationship you touch. Go ahead and tell the court about how wrong I am and how much you love me. Explain to people who are licensed and trained how your version of reality is so much better than the rest of the therapeutic community!
My gift to you, though you will through it back as you have thrown back all my gifts, is to shine a spotlight on your behavior long enough for someone you trust to get a clear view of you. Then maybe you will have a chance to see the internalized wounds that are killing what you say you love. I must go through the same crucible in order to facilitate this and will likely be hated much more than you, given that my defense is control and pattern recognition in a culture obsessed about the freedom to get fat and watch 500 channels of shit. Your defense, according to you, is charm, which is gold in our culture and looks ever so much nicer until you examine the impact. So I will be hated, by you and by others, as I bring light to a pattern that is hurting you more than it hurts anyone else, but is hurting everyone. And I will be the misfit again in a culture that is not ready to hear about these wounds, because it's not ready to examine itself. But if I succeed your son may just get a dad worth having - or at least see you visibly abandon him to help him understand something he has known but not been safe to tell you: "Dad always comes first. His feelings are more important than my needs for more closeness than he wants to give me. He is the big one who does not make mistakes. I am the one who is inadequate." Study Bradshaw if you want to understand shame.
I wrote to every member of the facilitators in 1993 telling you about the super-human shame dynamic I saw throughout the HAI power-structure and not one of you could or would honor that letter in any way and chose to deny it. Why would you, learning from these people, be any different? I may read that letter in court because it is quite a challenge to help a jury to see what every American is forbidden to see: the shame and abuse in our midst in almost every family.
Moving into a metaphysical dimension: It's time, Peter, to face the pain and face the light. In death or in life, nothing is more painful than this wound of the loneliness that comes from denying and thus standing invisibly in this wound. I wish the part of you who can and will face this well. And I feel sorry for the addict who will pull out all the stops to blame everyone for the impact of your actions.
I will be learning from you constructively if you succeed. I will be learning what does not work if you duck and run again. Either way, I will be more aware as a result of meeting you in court. You mentioned in our first call that you might leave your family and go back to Australia if you were fired, almost as if they, as well as me, did not matter. It's always been about you whenever you take the lead in directing our time, from exploring how you could have sex with me at team workshop in an open relationship that would have been a disaster for my insecure attachment template, to explaining that you are ready to be done with hearing about your abuse in 1993 before unpacking it or apologizing.
When you love someone you honor your Self by putting the relationship ahead of your ego, understanding that the third energy is much bigger than the energy of you or them separately. You have never put your self in true service of the third energy because you are so enamored with your ego: that "great feeling of love inside that I have to give." I've never seen this great love you talk about. If you cannot give your life with joy to protect the innocence of another person you do not know the power of the third energy you destroy every time you betray a friend, wife or organization because "Peter knows best."
It was "less complicated" to tell Sarah the truth about our session, and presumably "less complicated" to inform the facilitator body. Yet both have a right to know when you are doing something that endangers all of their careers. You did not think so. This betrayal speaks about your level of maturity vs. performance. When you honor a value and sacrifice an addiction you honor your Self. When you honor a relationship and sacrifice an ego agenda you honor your Self. It is you betraying your Self that leads you to be so dangerous. It is your ability to mask that betrayal that makes you unfit for your role as therapist, relationship teacher, healer and community leader. When you are a man in these roles you will not nit-pick, proacrastinate, insult, dishonor and avoid these words of mine. The healer in you will discern between the delusions I carry and the beauty, goodness and truth that cares enough about you, HAI and the community to tell you these truths in a way you have to listen, when you refuse to own them proactively and take responsibility for your impact.
You have fought with my teacher every time it has offered you insight into your own shadow, while your shadow risked the lives of everyone you claim to love. That is the part of you that must die: not by hurting the adolescent that has no other option but to deny everything blindly in pain and rage, but to understand that it's your job to protect him from the harm of that level of blind rage, pain and denial by giving him as an adult another way to see that he is OK even though he carries diseases that all men who are born in our culture receive, that are hurting all involved. I have met your hot-blooded, raging adolescent, blind as a bat with a knife in his hand in many walks through imagination as I let images hold the presences sent to me by all the facilitators. He is in the forefront, while the king that you are is detached and less grounded. I have met your love, but never with the intensity of your rage and fear. As long as he runs the show you will do nothing but destroy everything you claim to honor and you will bring a community down with you.
You are a formidable opponent. You can kill anything you touch and would rather die than be wrong. It is just that the unique pattern of behavior has evoked the same part of me. So we will meet, either as light teachers who help others see what we carry as gifts, or as dark teachers who can serve as reminders of the capacity of a wound to destroy when it is not tended. It is not our nature to hide, so we will teach in our darkness and in our light, by reflecting back to a culture the wounds we have been given by that culture, and spelling them out in words that make them more visible to the primary sense this culture leaves un-maimed: the lineal left-brain. I will see you in light. You have about a year to either allow healing to enter you or to sculpt a weapon that can charm an entire courthouse into understanding how you were always acting for the best, and show them all the tears of remorse that you never once chose to share with me. When everyone else is more important than your feminine self, your little boy, then anyone in the position of the innocent feminine child will be treated with dishonor, as you have treated me and these parts of your self. I am committed to bringing your pattern to the therapeutic community, because too many therapists get into this work from a masked arrogance of superiority thinking they can "fix people" who are less then them. That simply drives the knife in. You are a danger to everyone of your clients, most of whom will not be able to see it because the message that "your feminine does not matter" is so ubiquitous in our culture.
The lightning bolt of the third energy between us, charged with mushrooms and MDMA was intense, beautiful and has transcendent potential. Your lies, guilts, anger, selfishness and lack of humility, combined with your chauvinistic stupidity dragged it down into pain, hatred, shame, rage that I was not equipped to deal with. Your self-loathing and hatred of the feminine led you to completely dishonor and disrespect it, going out of your way to treat me worse than any therapist has ever treated me and calling it all "love."
The third energy is more powerful than either person combined and you left me a choice of either abandoning that energy as you abandoned it before we began, or going into that hell. Yet that hell has also been a kingdom. Through reverse-engineering every one of your wounds I have learned how to love a more feminine woman than I have ever known, and see her grow into my queen. I am a budding king: willing to transcend a few bites of my own shadow to protect others and looking forward to more. And you, with your sneering blindness stand by helpless, while fighting my vision.
Electricity is energy: whether it destroys a city or powers a city has to do with the intelligence and space-holding of the electrician. In a culture such as ours we have powered cities, and doomed relationships - the inner energy cycles being ignored by those too uninformed to honor them, including every one of the HAI facilitators. Well, you have saddled a wounded therapeutic patient with an enormous charge you lack the character, training and courage to face and deal with responsibly. You lack the humility and grace to honor the part of you that was born in the innocence of the moment. And you lack the responsibility to channel that energy towards positive change.
Suing For Best Practices at HAI
