Women are usually the ones who become heavily involved in support of schools for their children and facilities for eldercare of their parents -- though today more and more men are in this situation as well.

If a cult operates or infiltrates a school or care facility you're dependent on, you might never get involved with the doctrines of the group, but over time your appreciation slowly might mutate into hostage syndrome, like wood that,
under unusual and specific conditions becomes petrified.

Recognizing that your own self respect is being conpromised exposes you to a predicament with high exit costs. You may know nothing of the doctrines of the sect that runs your child's school or your elderly parent's care facility, but your emotional life is tied up in knots.

Something is going on in your therapy, or at your child's school or your parent's care facility. You don't share the religious beliefs of your therapist, your children's teachers or those who sponsor your parent's care facility.

But something is going on that gives you the creeps, or offends your beliefs. Your self respect and your boundaries are under siege.

Yet you fear you cannot get the same kind of care anywhere else.

Your child or parents are involved. Perhaps you finally, finally have a routine going that supports your work and your marriage and perhaps (miracle!!!!!) your wallet too.

To exit all that because you are getting the creeps or your boundaries are offended seems crazy and unreasonable.

This is called cognitive dissonance.

If we fear that the cost of leaving is too high or too terrifying, most of us cannot consciously bear to entertain any doubts or disturbing emotions or subversive insights.

Most of us are gonna suppress our doubts and hope we are mistaken or tell ourselves that things will get better. Few people will validate our concerns; many will invalidate them.

You may feel scared to consult someone outside the situation, you feel as though this is ungrateful or disloyal behavior on your part -- which is another sign that you are in a situation that owns you.

All this indicates you're being held hostage to something. Talking to someone outside the situation will preserve your adult dignity and autonomy.

Rick Ross, CEO of Cult Education Institute got involved in this work when he discovered a cult had infiltrated his grandmother's nursing home.

[www.abc.net.au]

"Q How did you end up being a cult expert?

A My grandmother got me involved. She lived in a nursing home that was infiltrated – that is, the paid staff were – by a particular fringe religious group that targeted the elderly. "

Waldorf schools are notorious for concealing information about their doctrine when offering school services to parents.

You deserve to know the actual complete doctrine behind any school or facility where you pay for services and, often volunteer your time. If you do not know this, you are expected to follow a set of unwritten rules which is crazy making.

Our Brush With Rudolf Steiner
by Sharon Lombard

[www.waldorfcritics.org]

Women (and, increasingly, men) can get hostaged into bad situations because of their roles as parents and caregivers. If women rely on services or institutions (schools, eldercare facilities) and the agencies and personnel do a wonderful job, a tired mother or daughter has high exit costs if over time she gets powerful gut feelings
that something is seriously amiss.

Women are usually in primary caregiver roles along with work and usually feel tired and guilty juggling these three roles - though today, more and more fathers are in this situation as well.

If someone seems to be doing an affordable wonderful, wonderful job helping us care for our elderly parents, educating and caring for our children, we are very dependent on them. We make friends with other parents there. We will not want to examine any doubts or misgivings we have.

But if you become afraid to examine your own fears and doubts, you are emotionally enslaved, held hostage even if you are not a member of the church or sect which runs the facility.

You get into an inmate mentality, and lose full access to your mind and emotions both of which you need to be a fully functioning adult, partner, parent.

If you find yourself getting a painful sweaty feeling in your gut when something comes up that raises your own doubts or questions -- misgivings and emotions you do not want to have -- this signals you are in a situations wher you feel trapped. You feel trapped because the you fear the exit costs of leaving are more than you, your child or your parents -- and your WALLET - can bear.

People may laugh your doubts away, make you feel foolish. They may even joke sure they are in a cult.

Laughing things away is a highly effective way of invalidating your thoughts and emotions. Using humor strategically to deflect an adult's anxiety, anger, fear is disrespectful.

If you feel guilty about even thinking of going to someone outside of the situation and asking questions about the facility, whether others have had the same worries you now have -- feeling guilty and scared at the more thought of doing outside research is itself a RED FLAG that something in you fears
you are in a hostage situation -- a situation where you fear the exit costs
are more than you and your family can bear.

You forget you do have options.

Never forget that you have customer rights.

Talk to someone outside of the situation. Schools and care facilities
are accountable to state regulatory agencies.

Talk to people outside of the situation. Describe a few things, see how they respond.

If you feel afraid to do even this -- that is worth examining.

Many schools and eldercare facilities are tied to religious organizations.

Schools and facilities which are not affiliated with religious organizations may have employees or volunteers whose beliefs are sincere and heartfelt.

Most of the time things things go well. But there have been situations where there is trouble.

Trouble arises if:

* Some employees or volunteers exploit the job setting as a venue for proslytizing without prior knowledge or consent.

* You are not told clearly and at the very beginning what if any doctrines underlie the curriculum or philosophy of care at your loved one's school or care facility

* Disruptive clique dynamics between those clients and personnel who do not know of or share the religious beliefs of the school/care facility vs clients and personnel who do share the religious beliefs of the school/care facility

Here are examples.

Rick Ross, CEO of Cult Education Institute got involved in this work when he discovered a cult had infiltrated his grandmother's nursing home.

[www.abc.net.au]

"Q How did you end up being a cult expert?

A My grandmother got me involved. She lived in a nursing home that was infiltrated – that is, the paid staff were – by a particular fringe religious group that targeted the elderly. "

Waldorf schools are notorious for concealing information about their doctrine when offering school services to parents.

You deserve to know the actual complete doctrine behind any school or facility where you pay for services and, often volunteer your time. If you do not know this, you are expected to follow a set of unwritten rules which is crazy making.

Our Brush With Rudolf Steiner
by Sharon Lombard

[www.waldorfcritics.org]

Lombard was not told that a specific set of doctrines undergird Waldorf school education. As a result, she found herself up against a set of unwritten rules. She was reprimanded for violating rules she was unaware of - which is a fast track to crazy making.

Quote

Soon doubts about our decision arose but they seemed superficial. I ignored the ever mounting references to cosmological forces, the zodiac, and other peculiarities, indulging myself that certain individuals were overtly "New Age."

Our new Waldorf school required participation from parents, and I threw myself into service with much enthusiasm working for what I believed to be a good cause. I volunteered to be on the school store committee to help raise funds. As an artist appreciating aesthetics and color, my first attempt at improvement was to transform the existing store into something with more pizzazz. I had hoped to use children's illustrations as part of the new decor, but I found it not to be acceptable. Not understanding what was wrong with my lovely collection of drawings, I put them away assuming that people just could not imagine the final effect.

So, instead, using my assortment cans of paint, I went to work transforming the blank walls with color. Soon, I received notes, phone calls, and a visit from one of the faculty who asked if I had permission to paint the walls as I had done. I answered that the store committee had given me the go ahead. Despite the disapproval, I thought the store looked much better than it had and was happy that sales increased.

During this time, I came up with a fundraising idea.

To help the store reach its financial goal, I designed a T-shirt to be printed with a small self-portrait drawn by each student in the school. I couldn't imagine a parent being able to resist buying one! Bundles of small squares of paper and black markers were distributed to teachers with instructions that each child should quickly draw a picture of themselves. These would be collected for me to have silk-screened.

My idea met with great opposition! I found out that markers were not permitted in Waldorf schools, no exceptions. I passed this off thinking that crayons and pencils were probably more environmentally sound, and I suggested that dark pencils could be used instead. The teachers were aghast; pencils were not allowed in the kindergarten.

After negotiation and hours at the copy machine reducing the large block crayon self-portraits and redefining the lines lost in the process, the T-shirts were eventually printed. They raised a nice sum for the school, but what was wrong with pencil line drawings? Along with these indiscretions, I had apparently inadvertently broken other rules and an inquisition took place before the faculty, accusing me of being "irreverent" and "nonsupportive".

Lombard was not told that use of black markers and pencils is forbidden in the lower grades at Waldorf schools -- because of the religious philosophy held by Rudolf Steiner, a theosophist whose doctrine is called Anthroposophy.

Quote

As a member of a committee, I had been pressured to study the work of Rudolf Steiner but had rejected the imposition, intuitively equating Anthroposophy study with bible study. Apart from a photograph of Steiner that hung on the faculty lounge wall and the constant references to him, I hadn't a clue about the man. I assumed that he was indeed the scientist, educator and philosopher that the school purported him to be....

Tackling Steiner's Art in the Light of Mystery Wisdom, I waded through his endless injunctions to try and fathom the "wet-on-wet" technique and found many clues:

"In painting, the line is a lie; the line is always part of the memory of life before birth. If we are to paint with a consciousness that extends across into the world of spirit, we must paint what comes out of the colour." (p. 68)
The wet paper, liquid paint, and large brushes are used to frustrate the possibility of line. Along with logical thinking at a young age, line is believed to affect the health in later life. But what of the paper with its cut, rounded corners and the "blobs" of color? According to Steiner, the astral body is a perfect circle. Perhaps that is the connection! He instructed that only liquid paint in pots could be used - in order to make the color shine inwardly. He explains his reasons in Colour:

"You will see that a yellow surface with definite boundaries is a repulsive thing; it is quite unbearable to artistic feeling. The soul cannot bear a yellow surface which is limited. We must make yellow paler at the edges, then paler still : in short the yellow must be full in the center, shining out into a still paler yellow. If we are to experience its inner nature we cannot imagine yellow in any other way." (p. 33)

As perplexing, is the added mystical significance of liquid paint:

"The `I' itself is within the colour. The human `I' and astral body are not to be separated at all from the colour; they live in colour and inasmuch as they are united with the colour they have an existence outside the physical body. It is the `I' and the astral body which reproduce colour in the physical and etheric bodies. That is the point." (p. 54)
It is impossible to go into detail concerning Steiner's heirarchies and decrees on color due to their sheer complexity and quantity, but it is important to note that contemporary Anthroposophists like McAllen endorse his views: "The colour sequence works as a cleansing-reorientation of the soul, helping the individuality to accept the present incarnation in a physical body." (p. 40) So, these wet-on-wet pictures are actual moral exercises exposing pupils to the healing influence of color. For instance, the use of yellow and blue in the kindergarten is a mystic weaving of the soul with the hereditary body, until the growth of secondary teeth, when the etheric body enters. On and on it goes. A rather bizarre benefit concerning the years spent experiencing these color exercises was more recently expressed in Drawing: From First Grade to High School: "It should help protect them from being sucked out altogether into the physical world." (p. 165)

Another idiosyncrasy I found in Steiner's book Colour is that "The soul lives in the actual colour of the skin ...Of all the varied colours in the world around us peach-blossom is the colour we would select as being the nearest to that of the human skin..."(p. 24) From reading Art Inspired by Rudolph Steiner, I discovered that the classroom walls must be painted with a transparent wash so that pupils can see through them into the spirit world. ( Now I understand why my paint job was such a shock!)

Just as the liquid paint had a mystic mission in preparing the well-reincarnated for the new world order, so too do all the myths, legends, and fairy tales Steiner adopted in his Anthroposophical pantheon and Waldorf curriculum. This was born out in Colour where he expresses his doctrine:

"Until we have thoroughly overcome the habit of inquiring in terms of symbols and allegories and of interpreting myths and legends allegorically and symbolically, and start sensing the breath of the spirit that weaves throughout the cosmos and feel its life in the figures of myths and fairy tales - until we do this we shall not have attained real spiritual knowledge." (p. 68)

[www.waldorfcritics.org]

Women (and, increasingly, men) can get hostaged into bad situations because of their roles as parents and caregivers. If women rely on services or institutions (schools, eldercare facilities) and the agencies and personnel do a wonderful job, a tired mother or daughter has high exit costs if over time she gets powerful gut feelings
that something is seriously amiss.

You may find you are in an emotional hostage situation if find you have misgivings but
feel afraid to follow your gut and investigate further.

To be hostage is far more than being appreciative of a valued service such a therapist, a school for your children, your own training program, an agency that cares for your elderly parents, or a job that finally finally meets your needs.

To be hostage is different from gratitude or reliance.

If, this moment, your gut is feeling sweaty as you read this, you may be held hostage by a situation and dread having your fears confirmed.

To be hostage is to be in a state of fear so profound that you do not want to admit just how afraid you are - or how angry you feel.

Hostage situations are where you fear you or your child or parents cannot survive outside the situation itself. You fear this because of high exit costs.

Exit costs can be social, financial, emotional

Some examples of exit costs

* A child or parent who would be heartbroken losing friends or care providers -- do I want to compromise their welfare because something about the situation is giving me the creeps or seriously pushing my buttons.

*The angst of looking for another school or care facility all over again

*Financial costs including lost time from work due to searching for another school for your child or another care facility for your parent/s


* Loss of the routine and stability you've come to rely on

* Loss of friendships you've formed with other parents at the school (unless they turn out to be real friends who stand by you)

* Leaving a school or care facility that is affordable but gives you the creeps which means you will have to pay more (or fear you must pay more) by sending your child or elderly parent to a different institution.

*Discord with your spouse or partner if the latter just does not understand why you want to get out of the situation.

These are examples of exit costs that make parents utterly, anguishingly vulnerable if they
have doubts and misgivings about a school or care facility they have come to rely on.

In a hostage situation you feel as though you are in a situation that has no outside.

A room that had an entrance but, once you stepped in, all doorways and windows have vanished. You may be socially and intellectually brilliant but in the hostage situation, primal fear has snuck in and slowly colonized your mind and emotions.