“Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.”

~Anna Freud

Survive -  I’m a survivor and I’m surviving once again.

Confession – It’s been almost a year already since I crossed a line that shouldn’t have been crossed.
Rephrased -   It’s only been a year since a line was crossed that shouldn’t have been crossed.
To clarify  -   It’s only been a year since I had a sexual encounter with my therapist/spiritual teacher.

It still hurts in this really deep-deep-down-heart-aching way.

For the longest time I thought that the whole affair really only affected me.  Lately I can see how it’s had a profound effect on nearly everyone in my life, in one way or another; my husband and daughter being the most noteable.

I’ve withdrawn from my family and many of my friends.  I’ve been mindful of keeping and recruiting a  support network and  I know I am not alone, but somedays I’m much better at reaching out than others and lately I’ve been holing up again.

I still have a lot of anger and grief.  I don’t subscribe to “everything happens for a reason” so please don’t go quoting some idealistic “you’ll be stronger for it” peptalk.  I learned a valuable lesson for certain…but that doesn’t mean ‘I asked for it’.  I didn’t ask for this and had boundaries been created and proper therapy/teaching been in place I could have learned what I needed without so much pain.

It’s got me to thinking a lot about what can be done to help prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future.  The man I had been seeing isn’t actually a licensed therapist, though he led us to believe he was, telling us to have him added to our provider list but then never calling my husband back after repeated requests (the insurance company couldn’t find any record of ”Michael Dean Goodman” being licensed in the State of Florida).  Such was the state of our marriage (and hence my seeking out couples counseling) that I believed the therapist rather than my own husband.   I thought my husband was just being difficult and was not open to therapy.  When I asked the therapist about it I was told to “stay out of it”.

I had sought out this man because he was said to be alternative lifestyle/kink friendly.  I was (and still am in certain ways) attracted to a very strong polarity dynamic in a relationship (also known as Dominance/submission) and was also seeking out ways to have pain inflicted upon my body.  I wanted to better understand the reasons for these urges and I wanted help for my marriage which was nearly shattered at that time.  It wasn’t long before I was placing my therapist in that empty masculine position in my life.  It’s completely natural…they even have a name for it called “transference”.  And yes, I became quite infatuated with him.

I read back over our corresondence and I remember bits of conversations that we had.  I told him how I felt.  He lives several states away and the counseling sessions were done via phone.   Perhaps he felt safe because of the distance…

It escalated.  He would tell me what to do during therapy and I would turn into a gooey mess.  He knew.  I told him.  I wrote hundreds of emails.  He knew. Perhaps he thought he was doing some great thing by using his dominant nature to get me to open up…

I started to feel like I belonged to him.
I started to believe that he could show me the white light.
I started to believe that only he could show me the white light…
Forgetting…forgetting….

We started talking of spiritual things - experiences that I was having; levels of consciousness; meditation; ayurvedic living.  I started thinking of him as “Guru”.  I was so hungry for Guru that I didn’t listen to my Self.

It is no good to see the light if you can’t see the dark – no good to embrace the brilliance if you can’t dance with the shadow.

Now, there are medical boards and state licensure requirements for all who practice medicine; people you can call if there is a malpractice; consequences for crossing ethical boundaries.  There are no such measures in place for those who practice spiritual teaching as their trade.  Who do you call?  Outside of having the money to hire an attorney (because you’re unlikely to get one to take the case without a big retainer unless your teacher is effluent) you’re on your own.

Yet, so many teachings urge us to find a guru and follow them implicitly.  How is it that this tradition has been handed down for so many lifetimes?  It works of course, when all goes well but the risk is so high.

Well, one must have good powers of discernment (which is something I think is sorely lacking here in the western world and is something that I’m still working on myself) but also and perhaps more so I think it comes down to community.  We are so isolated, even in our big cities with millions of people.  We are so alone and transplanted and lacking the safety of community.  Community knows.  You can’t get away with much in Community without being found out.

They aren’t kidding with that whole Six Degrees of Separation thing.  It’s often even less than that.

And then of course, we need to speak up for ourselves.  The only thing worse than crossing those ethical boundaries is keeping quiet about it so that they can be crossed again.

I’m not quite sure what my voice is going to sound like or the ripple effect it may or may not have, but I know the answer for me and the future is community.  If we can make the time to build and maintain supportive spiritual communities then there won’t be so many that will suffer harm at the feet of an unethical guru and likewise, such a teacher would have the opportunity to correct his or her behavior (possibly even before great harm was done) and they could look into their dark side more completely to work on their own attachments.

After all, we’re all human…
And that’s not something I’m likely to go forgetting ever again…