Welcome, 'jchpiper'

You shared something of yourself here by mentioning your ability to recognize when youve been the binder.

1) It is rare to see respectful non-coercive use of power being modelled in this society. We tend to learn from witnessing and experiencing what our parents and adult care providers did for us or to us. Recognizing one doesnt want to behave this way is the first step out.

2) Be cautious about PMs. If the PM is from a new arrival to the board, feel free not to read it. See how the person behaves.

3) If you feel confused or unsure about a particular person who is posting or who is PMing you, learn to audit their posts. You do an author audit by going to the search function, writing the author's name and run the search. That will bring up all that persons posts. You can see how their behavior changes over time.

To get acquainted with this huge thread, you can use a search function for this message board. It is in the upper right corner of the message board window.

You can search by author and also be words.

What I advise doing is select 'all dates' any time you want to run a search.

For items on covert influence, you can run a search using words such as 'Ericksonian' and 'all dates'

[forum.culteducation.com]

You search using Washing Machine-look for the articles on this thread written by Anticult

[forum.culteducation.com]

aikido handshake

[forum.culteducation.com]

continuing education module

Fiduciaries

[forum.culteducation.com]

Hazards of Fringe Psychotherapies

[forum.culteducation.com]

anonymity (therapists dont get you involved with their private lives or personalities)

[forum.culteducation.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/29/2009 10:10PM by corboy.

Thanks again H. "Mind rape and soul rape" do not sound extreme to me; I understand those terms but from another group. After reading various experiences I can see how it can happen with The Work. After reading the exercise itself, I can see it's not something I would find beneficial. Is your experience in this thread somewhere? I understand if you're not comfortable sharing that; I really do.

Thanks Corboy for your suggestions and information. It has been a thought-through (mostly, anyway) decision on my part to come out in the open...and has been a gradual process over the past 3-1/2 years, which is when I left my group.
Some of what I have shared during that time has been 'used against' me and I've come to see when that is done it is a distraction tactic, and really shows the immaturity of the accuser. It is similar behaviour to what I experienced in the group I was with. I don't share certain things that I'm not 'comfortable; with sharing, endeavoring to recognize my own vulnerability limits as well as to protect certain other parties who were caught in certain scenarios. I don't want to distract from this thread, so later I'll share a bit in a separate thread.

Thanks too for the helpful links!!

cheers,
~carol :-)

I tend to oppose protecting the guilty. ~Fred Poole

Additional Platinum Posts

BK work is NOT the same as cognitive therapy--an excerpt from a lengthy and detailed
analysis
[forum.culteducation.com]

Quote

others who promote The Work often say...its like Cognitive Therapy?
That is a salespitch one can see in many blogs promoting The Work, its a marketing strategy, trying to associate itself with CT.

First off, The Work has nothing to do with CT. Nothing.
The first part of the 4 Questions are if anything, just basic Epistemology.
"epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief".
[plato.stanford.edu]
That is, how do you know if something is true? That is the first step of philosophy and science.

Its what happen's next with The Work that goes off the rails.
The Work goes completely haywire from that point in...on purpose, that's how its designed.

Then the Turnaround, is not Cognitive Therapy either. A "Turnaround" in CT would be called Polarized Thinking, or Black/White Thinking, which is the #1 Cognitive Distortion.

Definitions of Cognitive Distortions
1. ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING: You see things in black and white categories.

Come into My Parlor--an Analysis

[forum.culteducation.com]


The New Age Cutsy Head Tilt-
[forum.culteducation.com]

Quote

As mentioned before, the Byron Katie "head-cock" or her tilting of her head at times, is not just a random thing, believe it or not. Sure, it may have evolved organically, but its a technique too.
In hypnosis, they establish "signals" and triggers and anchors.
It may be a hand gesture, or a look, or a head-tilt, Voice-Cue, anything.

You see, over time, they are able to set up a signal system with the subjects..(you), and your unconscious knows that right after the head-tilt, some powerful Suggestions are coming.
You will see Byron Katie talk...then pause, think...tilt her head in a head-cock, and then deliver some powerful suggestions.
Milton Erickson did Voice-Cues, and there are many methods like this. NLP has Anchoring, similar thing.

Yes, these are very skilled and talented people, its how they use those skills is what counts. Ethics.
Hiding their technique to such an extreme like Byron Katie, is deception, and is profoundly unethical.

Also, the NLP books, The Structure of Magic I-II, are interesting books, have them right here, and there are up on the torrent networks too.

yet more on BK not being the same as cognitive behavioral therapy

[forum.culteducation.com]



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 04/29/2009 10:58PM by corboy.

Quote
jchpiper
Thanks again H. "Mind rape and soul rape" do not sound extreme to me; I understand those terms but from another group. After reading various experiences I can see how it can happen with The Work. After reading the exercise itself, I can see it's not something I would find beneficial. Is your experience in this thread somewhere? I understand if you're not comfortable sharing that; I really do.

Hi again Carol,

For the most part I've chosen to be vague about my experiences with "The Work". I instinctively made that choice early on and am now glad for it, because some weird/icky things ended up happening with some BK-connected people behind the scenes.

Apparently that's not uncommon with culty groups.

Regarding mind rape, soul rape... yes indeed, that's what I feel happened to me and I thank you for "hearing" me there.

Thanks,
H

Quote
helpme2times
Anyone who has had an unhappy experience with Byron Katie's organization may wish to file a complaint with one or more agencies. Consumers have a right to do such a thing.

This is a link to a post made last year regarding the filing of complaints:

[[url=http://forum.culteducation.com/read.php?12,12906,54051#msg-54051]Filing Complaints re Byron Katie[/url]]

I didn't see a link in the above post for the Better Business Bureau... that is another agency people can work with.

[[url=http://www.bbb.org/us/]Better Business Bureau[/url]]

This is a link to Byron Katie International, Inc. contact information:

[[url=http://thework.com/contactus.asp]Byron Katie International, Inc. Contact Info[/url]]

This is a follow-up post regarding filing complaints about "The Work".

I made the above-referenced post very recently in another thread on Byron Katie, thought it would be a good idea to post it here in this well-read thread too.

I want to add to the above... in addition to filing a complaint about Byron Katie's organization, people can file complaints about paid "facilitation" of The Work. See the links in the above post for further information.

Power to the people!

Thanks for the links on CBT corboy.

At first I too put The Work in a category of CT. But the more I thought about it, the more especially those 2nd and 4th questions just threw me; it was like calling black white and white black....a mind eff. Yet, there are folks who state the BK exercise has helped them. I don't want to discount that it has helped them. Others (I'd suspect) are simply duped. And to claim a certain approach helps everyone and no one has unpleasant experiences with it, is always suspect.

I've used CBT and thought records quite a bit over the years and have found them very helpful in recognizing distortions and in coming up with a balanced thought. In fact, CBT helped me to see distortions in the group I was with and I believe helped me in the leaving process.

I definitely see a difference in BK's approach and CBT. The Anticult did a great job comparing the two.

Thanks!
~carol

I tend to oppose protecting the guilty. ~Fred Poole

its very interesting how the real hard-core Byron Katie followers and PR people, literally cannot have a discussion based on factual analysis.
They seem to fall into several patterns:

- BK programming-speak, where they mimick the words and phrases of Byron Katie, and live inside the BK Question system.
- aggressive-attack mode, when detailed facts about Byron Katie are presented, which they want to deflect from, by attacking others and change the focus.
- brazen dishonesty, as seen in various posts that were somewhat calm, but literally full of easily provable lies, top to bottom.
- complete silence. Some just won't say anything.

This is due to the comprehensivity of the Byron Katie thought-reform system.
If a person is deeply inside the BK system, they will mimick her patterns, and love-bomb language, as they have be conditioned over a period of years.
But when those beliefs they have built up about Byron Katie get challenged with objective facts, their "core beliefs" get challenged, and that's when some lash out.

Some of the more experienced and senior BK salespeople, are able to APPEAR to step out of the BK system and write in a conversational language, but those are the ones who will brazenly lie, they will say anything to get the sale. Its not connected with the facts and evidence.

And it seems the customers who are the deepest into the BK system, are the ones who just won't say anything. They probably go and do some BK worksheets, and turn everything around on themselves.

The Byron Katie system, is not just those few BK questions and turnaround, those are maybe 10% of what is going on. Its a complete system, that can take over every aspect of a person's life, for those who get really caught up in it.
the ability to have a normal conversation, appears to have been almost completely eliminated.

It does not appear to be able to get out the Byron Katie thought-reform system, while using her techniques. Its a closed-loop.
The only way out is to use thinking tools, from outside her system.
The Baloney Detection Kit below, literally turns the rigged questions of the Byron Katie system into vaporware.
These are REAL questions, that have real power, as they are about defining accurate knowledge.

Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit
[forum.culteducation.com]

"I Did Not Want To Be One of Those Suffering Clowns

This article is full of great material. And it shows how genuine therapy is transacted. Dont be content with these small snippits. The article is six pages long. Dont deprive yourselves.

[www.nytimes.com]

(quote)III. What Does It Mean to Have a Life of One's Own? With a wraithlike air, the Zen master accepted a seat on a black leather couch below the colored tumult of a de Kooning print and a photograph of a stone path vanishing around a bend in Kyoto. Lou Nordstrom later said he felt better almost the moment he met Jeffrey Rubin’s gaze. He had come as someone would to an emergency room for a therapeutic intervention.

“I left that first session with tears of joy on my face,” he told me one day last October as we sat with cups of coffee in the mica light of Bryant Park in Manhattan. “What Jeffrey did that first session saved my life. He listened empathetically and nonjudgmentally. He encouraged me to see my fears of acting out as symptoms of an unconscious desire to be seen.”

(unquote)

(quote)As the months went by, measured out in 50-minute sessions twice a week, the motifs of his history emerged. There was the surreal and horrific childhood of parental neglect, abuse and abandonment. There were those aspects of old trauma he was unwittingly reinflicting on himself, contriving to be abandoned by wives, disillusioned by mentors, seemingly incapable of taking basic care of himself.

From his grandparents Nordstrom learned his mother had stubbed out cigarettes on his skin and had beaten him with a brine-dipped switch; he was told that she was dead and advised to ignore the occasional phone call from a mysterious woman. It was not until he was 16 that he met his mother for the first time, at a hotel lounge in New York, where she downed a row of sloe-gin fizzes. She offered little explanation beyond that he was better off without her.

And there was the paradoxical role of Zen, which had enabled him to cope with the pain and alienation of his purgatorial youth but which he was now beginning to understand was implicated in his difficulties and may even have been making some of them worse.

(unquote)

(quote)The (zazen) habit took. He was impressed by the calmness he felt, not the “valium calm” of killing the turbulence inside him but the equanimity that came from becoming the turbulence.

“I felt saved by Zen,” he told me. “The Humpty Dumpty image is corny, but it’s right. Meditation put me back together. It helped me overcome the split between the body and the mind. The question that remained was what to do with emotions and the self.”

A year later in Litchfield, Conn., he attended his first multiday sesshin with a group of Zen meditators. The Rinzai teacher instructed him to “kill the watcher” within. By the third session he experienced kensho, which some meditators spend their lives hoping to attain: “I felt as if something like an earthquake or implosion was about to happen,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Everything around me looked exceedingly odd, as if the glue separating things had started to melt. . . . By the time I got to my room I was weightless; there was no gravity. . . . Then the earthquake or implosion — ‘body and mind dropping off’ — occurred. There was an incredible explosion of light coming from inside and outside simultaneously, and everything disappeared into that light . . . there was no longer a here versus there, a this versus that. . . . I understood nothing except that nothing would ever seem the same to me. . . . And despite the fact that I had no understanding whatever of what had happened (nor do I now), this experience changed my life completely.”

By the spring of 2007, nearly a year into the therapy, Nordstrom had a breakthrough — what he called “a tearful reunion with my narrative.” The gist of it had to do with the way he devised what Rubin termed “a self-cure.” He sought to protect himself against the trauma of further abandonment by pre-emptively abandoning himself. If he wasn’t there in the first place, he wasn’t in a position to be cast away. The Zen concept of no-self was like a powerful form of immunity.

“The Zen experience of forgetting the self was very natural to me,” he told me last fall. “I had already been engaged in forgetting and abandoning the self in my childhood, which was filled with the fear of how unreal things seemed. But that forgetting was pathological. I always had some deeper sense that I wasn’t really there, that my life and my marriages didn’t seem real. In therapy with Jeffrey I began to realize this feeling of invisibility wasn’t just a peculiar experience but was maybe the central theme of my life. It was connected to my having ‘ability’ as a Zen student and to my being able to have a precocious enlightenment experience

But what was absent in the rush of revelations during his tearful reunion with his narrative was any heartfelt sense of mourning. His new insights were mostly a matter of intellectually understanding the way he used Zen to assuage the pain of the past, hiding the pathological aspects of self-abandonment and neglect in the rapture of Zen vacancy; how he hid from his own neediness, anger and grief in the ecstatic abnegation of enlightenment..


(unquote)

(quote)I’m not converted to psychoanalysis in toto,” he said, “I’m converted to a very specific point, the relevance of abandonment in my life and the cost of Zen to myself — the damage I did to myself via self-neglect. I didn’t realize what I had renounced. It was a little like duh-uh! One of the most important insights I got from therapy with Jeffrey is that subconsciously I want the depth of my suffering to be witnessed by someone. I want to be seen for what a strange fellow I am. As a young guy I got off on the sense of being different. There was some arrogance and elitism in it. The positive spin of the surreal nature of my childhood was that there must have been some special destiny for me. To give up tenure, to become a monk, I embraced an aggrandized narrative. What Jeffrey has done is indicate that forgetting the self is not a constructive approach. What one needs to do from a psychoanalytic perspective is remember the self.”

It was a far cry from the advice he’d gotten in 1987 from a Zen teacher who said, “What you need to do, Lou, is put aside all human feelings.”

In a dialog with the therapist:

“Re-entry is difficult,” Nordstrom admitted. “I feel I’m going to be blindsided — that I’m being set up. The record suggests that’s what tends to happen to me.”

“Do you hear your language?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s what tends to happen to me.”

“What do you hear — that I sound like a victim?”

“There’s no agency in there — to see that is to open to the possibility of feeling less the victim in your life.”

“I know this intellectually. I’ve had this sense of being a victim, a marked man for a long time — marked for bad things and marked for great things.”

“I wonder if that isn’t a compensatory fantasy which hides a deeper pain. It’s not that ‘I was horrifically abandoned, unconscionably neglected,’ it’s ‘I have a special destiny.’ ”

“Yes,” Nordstrom said. “As a boy I consciously constructed this idea that I’m in a situation that makes no sense whatsoever. The only meaning I can glean from it is that there may be some kind of completely different life in store for me. There will be a compensation. I am owed.”
(unquote)

Then this:

(quote)“No, because it’s led to a passive detached relation to your own life. It’s robbed you of your human birthright. It’s like you are waiting for Godot. It keeps you in a virtual life. Do you get that? Do you feel that emotion?”

“This isn’t the first time you’ve said that this is the source of my suffering.”

“The vessel you took to escape your childhood became your prison cell. If we could move through that, I think it would open things even more.”

“What I got from my life in Zen is not what most people get or want from Zen. Most Zen students are samadhi junkies. They like the buzz. There’s a suppression of anger in Zen which is another kind of alienation. Sometimes it makes me sad. Teachers should point this out — how risky samadhi is from a psychological point of view. I was once asked what did I want from Zen practice. What I wanted was I didn’t want to be like everyone else, running around like chickens with their heads cut off.”

“There’s a little bit of that elitism — I don’t want to be one of those suffering clowns.”

(Unquote)

'I dont want to be one of those suffering clowns."

Could this be what leads so many to become gurus....and promise an end of suffering, so as to distance themselves
from that which they cannot bear to face in thier own lives?

And generates their desperate, proslytizing energy?

And perhaps for some, an eagerness to surround themselves with ailing people to reassure themselves they are the strong, superior leader?

Somone who goes into the self help business with these unexamined motives will punish you for growing beyond them.

That is why real therapists like Dr. Rubin go through training analyses and take mandatory CE classes on counter transferance issues.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/01/2009 12:41AM by corboy.

Corboy, thank you so much for sharing that article. I thought it was wonderful.

And very germane to this discussion.

Quote from the article (bold emphasis is mine):

But that afternoon in July 2006, driving from his home in Brewster, N.Y., to the shrink’s office in Bedford Hills, he was frantic with anxiety. He found a seat facing the door, consumed with the feeling that no one could see him, that he’d become, in his phrase, “the invisible man.” He feared what the desire to be seen might drive him to do. How could he have spent his life cultivating unity of body and mind, oneness with all beings and the ability to apprehend reality directly, unmediated by thoughts or concepts or what Zen considered the arch delusion of “the self” — only to be haunted by the feeling that he lacked the most basic unity of all?

The article illustrates well the problem of attempting a "spiritual bypass" -- i.e., trying to use spirituality, perhaps unconsciously, to avoid dealing with one's very human feelings and issues.

For myself, I've had multiple traumas to contend with in this life and have spent much of my adulthood attempting a spiritual bypass.

Sad to say, that doesn't work very well. If at all.

Whew, that was a really splendid article.

People who gotten sucked into something like The Work just may have done so via unconscious "spiritual bypass" and so imo would do well to read the article (linked above) and consider what it says for themselves....



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/01/2009 02:44AM by helpme2times.

To everyone participating in this thread...

Particularly those who have worked so diligently and so persistently
in getting information out about TW... and you know who you are...

THANK YOU