Personal Reflections on the Harm Caused by Byron Katie, David Hawkins, and Others to Vulnerable People - Part I

 

Discernment: Who Do We Trust With Our Heart?

   

New Renaissance Bookshop in Portland has provided me with many inspiring and enriching books and other beautiful items over the years. In Portland it is known for its ambiance and to be a wonderful resource for a diversity of spiritual gifts. At the recommendation of friends, I have also plucked off the shelves books by those such as Byron Katie and David Hawkins that I later returned or actually put in my garbage can. I also saw a therapist in Portland, Stephen R. Beck, for over seven years who I later filed a complaint against with the Board of Clinical Social Workers. In 2008, which was five years since I last saw this therapist and nearly a year into the investigation of my complaint, a Stipulated Final Order of Probation and Assessing Civil Penalties was issued which placed Mr. Beck on three years of probation, required him to work with a supervisor, required him to complete continued education, and assessed total civil penalties at over $4,000. That said, there was a time when I thought this therapist to be the best, to be beyond amazing. I trusted him with my heart, with my former marriage, with my children, with others I deeply cared about who I referred to him. I've also trusted others with my heart where that trust was not deserved and not in my higher good. Only some time later did I gain access to a larger picture in which I recognized that not only was this person who I had elevated to some high spiritual plain not grounded in compassion, wisdom, and love, they actually caused harm to vulnerable people. Such as myself. I also recognize today that I am far from unique.

Among the most challenging and empowering life lessons for me has been to recognize and embrace, learn and integrate, heal and transform how it is that I have given my power away. At 63 I am today able to more clearly see my triggers, my injured instincts, and how it is that I have replayed my painful history with others in my life as an adult. I recognize how this repetition of my childhood trauma has included those I have turned to for help, healing, and insight into how to live my life in a more integrated and whole, conscious and compassionate, and kind and loving way. It is amazing how easily so many of us can go looking for love in all the wrong places, or seemingly so. Because that is only part of a greater picture.

What I have also recognized is the power of my heart, spirit, and soul to seek healing for that which remains unattended in the shadows of my deeper self. There was a quote I heard years ago that I will never forget: "We will go as deep as the support we perceive is available to us." Gratefully, it has now been many years since I first connected with the courage, insight, and intention within myself to seek support. What I did not know over 30 years ago, and on into many years down my healing journey, was how I would replay my family of origin relationships and wounds with several of the exact people I turned to for help healing those wounds. It is uncanny, this honing device within us that can zero in on exactly the "right" spouse, friend, therapist, teacher/healer to hook all those old places and put everything on replay. Often, at least for me, how this occurs can be so subtle that I had no idea what was happening. The good news is that, paradoxically, transference and projection also have the potential to be powerful tools that can point to just where we are wounded and the truth of how we may heal. (A very helpful resource is David Richo's book, When the Past Is Present: Healing the Emotional Wounds That Sabotage Our Relationships - http://www.amazon.com/When-Past-Present-Emotional-Relationships/dp/159030571X.)

At some point after I had stopped seeing Mr. Beck, I began to read a book suggested to me by a friend, this one truly illuminating and helpful. My friend knew that I was trying to cope with an aging narcissistic mother. To my complete shock, when I first began reading The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists: Coping With the One-Way Relationship In Work, Love, and Family, the person who kept flashing for me was not initially my mother, it was this therapist I had seen for over seven years in individual, couple, and family therapy. Then, something descended over me that I could not shake, no matter my resistance. I became literally sick for three days when I realized that the therapist I had entrusted my heart with, and that of my family, had also demonstrated similar narcissistic qualities to those I had grown up with. It was like a lightbulb went on and suddenly I was seeing what I had not clearly seen before - his lack of empathy and compassion, his unhealthy boundaries, his crazymaking feedback, and his disempowering and retraumatizing messages. It took me another year before I was finally strong enough to do the right thing and file the complaint with the Board of Clinical Social Workers. I not only needed to finally find my voice as part of my healing of the trauma I had experienced with this therapist. I also needed to take this step out of my concern that harm was occurring to other vulnerable clients like myself.

Gratefully, with time I have found the support I have needed to heal, learn from, and transform these painful experiences. I have learned to hold myself and others with deep compassion, humility, and wise awareness of how in our deepest heart of hearts, we are all doing the best we can to heal what has been so wounded within us. This wounding can occur both in our families of origin and also in our culture, which can often look for quick fixes that ignore, deny, distort, and suppress the deeper needs and experiences of our hearts, minds, and souls. I was very impacted by the wounds I sustained in both my childhood family and in this society we live in. So many of us do not receive messages that encourage and nourish vulnerability, empathy, compassion, connection, and love. 

As local to global crises now impact us all, we can see the manifestations everywhere that spring from ignorance of how to truly hold ourselves with compassion. Without self-compassion, we are limited in the experience of connection and compassionate wisdom that we can bring to ourselves and to others, including even those we most deeply love. Yet, I believe that so many of us know that something is missing, we know that there is more, and so we set about on this journey of seeking. I believe that the core of this quest - whether we are aware of it or not - is often one of seeking to deepen our capacity to love, our capacity to relate as hearts with ears, and our capacity to live our lives as prayers and in remembrance of our connectedness with all beings and all of life.

Today I recognize my vulnerability in 1995 to being drawn to a therapist - and to authors and other "healers" over the years - who would trigger so much that remained unresolved in my heart in a way which exasperated those deeper wounds rather than helped them heal. And to the degree that I was unknowingly walking yet one more time down a heart-deadening path rather than a life-nourishing one, my unattended suffering continued to show up in many different forms again and again, each time presenting itself for healing. There had been addiction, depression, fibromyalgia, symptoms in my children, and on and on. That said, in the midst of hell, and if we are blessed enough with the courage to not give up, so much can finally become clear. And ultimately, as my disassociative thawing out progressed and my awakening continued, little by little I was finally able to hear, to discover, and to open to the true healing my deepest being longed for.

I am writing this today to acknowledge how it is that many of us can be vulnerable to aligning with others who in some way do not support us in growing more deeply loving and compassionate with ourselves and others. The question for me, always, is does this person and belief system mirror vulnerability, tenderness, empathy and compassion? Does this person we turn to for insight and support help us open, heal, and expand our hearts? Or in some subtle, or not so subtle,  way are we being directed to bypass our heart's deeper pain and our soul's deeper wisdom? Without the power of discernment, we may be drawn to those exact people who in some way replicate how we were not seen, not validated, not met with the compassionate mirroring eyes and tenderness of heart that we all needed in our childhoods as much as we needed air to breathe and food to eat.

Where, when, how is it that any of us turn away from the experience of being human? How did we get lost? How do we remember what we have lost and forgotten?

Life is such an amazing journey. I love this quote by the Dalai Lama: "Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck." There have been many times in my life in which I was so attached to a particular "healer" that I ignored and threw out the wisdom my own inner knowing and deepest Self. When the cost of the resulting distorted beliefs and blind spots, disconnects and dependencies, continued illusions and wounded actions ultimately presented their bill, I was devastated and thrown into confusion, despair, grief, and not knowing. Not knowing can be such a good thing. For years, I had a bumper sticker up in my kitchen as a reminder: Don't Believe Everything You Think. Amen! Gratefully, I also sought the lesson buried in all this suffering.

Today I deeply know how important it is to discern who to trust and who not to trust. I increasingly recognize how to listen and open to my experiences with empathy and wisdom, how to recognize and let go of judgments, how to treat myself and others with respect and compassion, and how to not lose myself searching for healing and love in all the wrong places. I also have learned to recognize my vulnerability to replay old traumatic patterns in my relationships today, and with that recognition I am empowered to make different choices. 

I hold myself and others with deep compassion. Learning these lessons can be especially difficult when our instincts have been injured, when we have histories of trauma and disassociation, when we have learned as children to disconnect from our higher wisdom and instead develop a high tolerance for inappropriate, dismissive, abusive, and unkind behavior.  For myself, and for any one of us, it is not uncommon to become blinded to how our unhealed wounds make us especially vulnerable to repeating patterns experienced as children and carry that which is unresolved, and also familiar, on into adulthood. This can certainly be seen in those we are drawn to as partners, friends, therapists, teachers, and more.

Gratefully, this is only part of the story. For right along side those who I learned so much through a great deal of suffering are also those who have truly empowered me to open and heal my heart. The list of those who reflected the part of my shadow that holds all my strengths, potentials, and true nature is too great to list here. That said, I am moved to give a deep bow to all my teachers, both those who mirrored my disassociation from my loving nature and those who provided true healing. All pointed to what was lacking and what was needed. 

The first question by Byron Katie in "The Work" is indeed a powerful one: "Is it true?" In returning to deepening our skillfulness of discernment, and in all areas, I would ask - is it true that this which I am considering embracing offers me a path to healing and humility, to vulnerability and authenticity, to empathy and compassion, to tenderness and love? Is it true that in following this path I am empowered to more fully embrace life in all its 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows? Is it true that this journey I am rooting into offers a pathway to the authentic empowerment and wisdom that comes with opening our hearts ever more deeply? Will it lead me into a greater experience of peace, connection, and consciousness of the beauty of my true nature and that of all beings? Are our choices, beliefs, actions rooted in a Path of Heart? Is this true?

 

 Namaste ~ Molly

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What will follow is a second post on this topic.