Felicia's Hour of "Support"
Important context:
- Psychedelics dissolve boundaries - in this case the wall of repressed emotion around child-hood abuse that was too overwhelming and life-threatening to deal with with my parents.
- When someone insists on a higher dose of psychedelics against a patient's wishes and repeatedly stated preference, they are taking the patient more rapidly into that dissolving wall of pain than their ego knows how to deal with - particularly when there is no trained trauma specialist there.
- When pain and trauma cannot be fully integrated, because it is too much for the ego to deal with, dissociation and age-regression occurs to compartmentalize parts of the self that cannot be felt and digested. This creates a period of dependency on any guide/parent that is in proximity as a representative of safety.
- To betray that role: Invite someone in over their heads, suppress information, control communication, avoid repeated requests for help and then rage at the patient for needing that help is evil: It rips the heart and psyche apart by demanding that the ego choose between protecting the shadow of the person in the role of safety and deny one self in the process, or go into areas of the psyche that no human being can go into alone without re-living the greatest human terror we can experience. For a paid professional to put anyone through that protocol of torture is unconscionable and the act of a coward. To understand that cowardice requires going into the history of betrayal in the life of the therapist, since no healthy human being who is not protecting deep pain will treat another like this.
Felicia Williams called with Peter Sandhill on the line to help resolve things. Felicia made it very clear that she was not calling on behalf of HAI, but because she felt personally moved to be helpful. I asked her "why?" and she said that she had enjoyed a hug I had given her recently. This felt very forced, particularly since Felicia has never been candid with me. I have never had a clear eye contact with her in fifteen years and I never felt liked by her. I had tried to sort this out by asking her directly in a workshop what her suspicion was of me. She said there was nothing there so I accepted that she did not know, was not aware of her fear, or did not like/trust me enough to tell me. Either way, I did not feel safe with this intro and was not asked. I was told by Felicia that she only had an hour, was very busy, and that she would give half of the hour to Peter and half of it to me, with the goal of ending up with a clear plan to have a closing ritual, based on my request in my first audio to all the facilitators that I thought that a closing ritual would be helpful, given Peter's choice to string me along for six months without any closure and then pretend that he had not strung me along.
Questions about protocol: Felicia did not ask what I needed? She did not ask how I wanted the hour to go. When I said "Felicia, I would like to direct the hour myself," she said "No. I will be facilitating it." I protested and felt immediate anxiety. What I felt was that Peter and Felicia's agenda was more important and would take precedent over mine. This was consistent with no one showing up to hold me, no one listening to me, no one responding to my communication of escalating pain, and now Felicia telling me how things would happen, regardless of my needs or preferences.
I was very aware that it was a take it or leave it situation that overall seemed better to take because at least I would get more data points about what was going on - something that had been hard to do in Peter's protocol of avoiding all direct conversations of the key issues for six months.
Here is what is off about Felicia's sense of appropriate support:
1) I felt that this was a HAI issue and that I was being very gracious in extending them the flexibility I was giving them by not taking this immediately to the community or the courts etc. But rather than honoring that this was getting twisted around to be a personal act of generosity and love on Felicia's part, which I did not trust, and which reduced my sense of safety by introducing HAI's agenda to spin this as "not a HAI issue" so it could be hushed up.
2) I did not believe Felicia did want to talk to me out of love. Her tone was syrupy and hostile - not sincere.
3) When fifteen years of psychological denial and abuse has occurred at $175. per hour with a therapeutic patient who has been reduced to life-threatening trauma by a professional Felicia personally recommended to me, is the most approriate thing to:
a) Apologize for the recommendation, ask what I need, ask what would restore trust and help me feel safe.
b) Insure that Peter supported me in every way possible under her scrutiny.
d) Treat Peter as an equally grieved party in a couples dispute and give Peter 30 minutes to angrily reject and betray his role as therapist, shaman, lover, teacher, student, facilitator and community leader who had also promised to play a father figure role more powerfully than my father ever had before promptly breaking that promise.
e) Seek to learn more about what was going on, as I had asked her and all the facilitators, before using her role to influence anyone from a place of ignorance and fear.
Felicia chose "d" as her model. I had prepared notes in a bit of a panic, anticipating the energy of suppression and not being sure I could speak clearly with two facilitators and Peter aligned against what I was saying due to their position that "this was not a HAI issue" and Peter's ongoing position that he was an aggrieved party and this had nothing to do with him - a point he re-iterated four times, concluding various communications by saying "I'm really clear that this has nothing to do with me." Since I was the only other person in the dialog the message of shame was equally clear: It is your responsibility, your fault and all about you that I was not trained, did not keep my agreements, did not follow basic therapeutic protocols, betrayed my wife, made you an enemy of your entire support team and community and forced your support team to choose between me and you after taking your money to protect and guide you."
In an experience that was both satisfying and terrifyingly lonely and painful, I listened to Peter Sandhill tell me: "I want my marriage back. I want nothing to do with you. You should be dealing with this on your own. I don't want to teach you, be taught by you, be your father, be your lover or be in your life. I want nothing to do with you and am only showing up to do a closing ritual because you need that." He had already told me he would never trust me again in this life for telling his wife and peers exactly what he said and did.
Questions: Felicia and Peter have never apologized for this abuse. No one on the board or within the organization has asked for feedback. Quite the opposite. The extrapolation must be that with HAI's level of facilitator training this is viewed as perfectly reasonable. Is it reasonable to allow HAI to continue to make up it's own rules even when they transgress on the core mission of the organization and the well-being of it's clients and facilitators? I don't know if it is lost on anyone, but the facilitators cannot treat me this way and treat their children or their own inner children any differently. We are witnessing the script of the facilitator body in crisis upon learning that they have endangered a person's life, broken their heart and risked their sanity - dissociation and multiple personality disorder being one of the coping mechanisms abuse survivors use when a power-structure they cannot escape cannot hear the truth of their sanity, and their ego cannot process the pain of knowing that everyone around them would rather that they died or went insane than talk about the pink elephant in the room.
Concern: No one can teach in these terrains without doing their own work. Yet the facilitators are doing that. The danger when someone confuses the words and the role with real competence is that they get pseudo-medicine that will not work but which they think is real medicine, which leads to patients blaming themselves when their relationships fall apart, rather than the healers who did not do the real healing. I'm very aware that the blind-spots on this website account for much of the trauma I gave and received with the thirty women I met at HAI and was lovers with, including interns.
Suing For Best Practices at HAI
