"Stan Would be Turning in His Grave"
Context: Alice Miller in her book "For Your Own Good," a book that I learned about and purchased when both Robert Bly and John Bradshaw (two of the most significant figures in the our time that deal with shame and shadow work), discusses the tendency in shame-based parents to need to be "perfect parents," and the damage this can cause to a child in part because it deflects attention from the parent away from the feedback of the child and towards the need to live up to what is considered "perfect" by the parent figure.
One of the things that struck me in the protocol of all of the facilitators was that my safety, well-being, stated needs and feelings never came first. This began in 1993 but also was present in the first hour of my psychedelic session with Peter, in which he asked me to gloss over, again, the grief and pain I felt about the way he had used me, with my own money, for his own lust, rather than serve in honest inquiry about what was healthy for me, his marriage, the community, team or his colleagues.
In our first in-depth conversation in which we began exploring how to proceed, he did not apologize to me or show any empathy for breaking my heart, or guiding me into traumatic states that threatened my life. He was deep in reflection about how this would impact his own life. And Stan Dale was foremost in his mind. That's when he made the statement, in deep anxst, "Stand would be turning in his grave." It was clear to me that he was more concerned with how a dead man, his teacher and father-figure, would view his disappointing behavior, than he was with his therapeutic patient who he had harmed more than any person in his adult life.
This same pattern shows up with Anne Watts, when she mentioned needing to break confidentiality to send something I shared with her to Jason Weston, without asking me. "I was angry and upset. HAI is my baby and what you wrote seems threatening to HAI."
Yet she never broke confidentiality with her facilitator body to keep a secret at my expense and the community's expense.
Questions: What is it about the idea of an institution or a dead man that is more sacred to the facilitators than the sanity, safety, heart or dignity of a therapeutic patient? Why is a therapeutic client holding space for his therapist's feelings again and again? Are the facilitators competent to discern between terrain in which they cannot hold space for another and they can? If not, what are the legal and moral implications of the choice not to bring in outside help from someone capable of putting the safety and well-being of the patient first?
Concern: I believe that to the present day every facilitator would kill a HAI participant to protect their idea of being great facilitators to themselves, each other, the memory of Stan Dale and perhaps their own parents, providing that it could be done in such a way as to not appear to be murder. I believe many parents can and do murder their parents projected in their children in the same way, as in the case of a teenage girl molested by the lover of an insecure mother who tells the mother and is punished for "telling lies" about the mother's lover, rather than protected. This teenage daughter soon kills herself with addictions and self-destructive behavior to spare the mother from confronting her wish that the daughter die, rather than threaten the financial security of the lover. I have encountered many people who, when hearing a statistic that relates to death: "If you do it like this 5% of people die, get cancer etc." and the person is never grateful for the information, but rather avoids me so they can do something they feel compelled to do that is risking life, sometimes their own. The concern is not that at moments of deep and severe emotional pain when every single person around is in denial and blaming the patient, some will take on this message that "your feelings, needs and safety are not as important as all these other things" and in combination with the parent's similar message, kill themselves. One of the reasons for this website, which HAI has gone so far to shut down as to hire an attorney, is to raise concern for the safety of HAI's many other participants. We live in a world where men constantly receive the message: "Your feelings and who you are does not matter and is not wanted here, and you should be ashamed of your feelings." The therapist is supposedly the sole refuse from a message that can come from American women, home, work, shame-based peers and parents who don't want to see the way they hurt their children. When an entire therapeutic and teaching body re-enforce that message to protect their own agendas it is very accurate for a person, pre-disposed to suicide to protect the parents from their feelings of hate, to realize that literally everyone would be happier if they disappeared. And since there is no where to go, for many young men in a culture this shaming of helplessness and grief, suicide is often the easiest and most effective method of accommodating the people on all sides who cannot, or do not want to deal with their truths. It remains my concern that HAI is spending more energy sustaining secrecy than bringing it's shadow to light and entering the stage of grief. I have never heard a facilitator cry, let alone cry for the pain and betrayals in this entire issue, that they have caused me. Guilt leads to denial and repression, not grief and transformation.
Suing For Best Practices at HAI
