Quote
Mariah
If I told those who trust me that they had to forgive those who raped or molested them, they would have this unconscionable, damaging invasion reinforced. You can't tell such people "not to be a victim"! I'm not saying 'stay in this mind-set for life' - but there is a time-line here that must be honoured, in order for healing to take place. People need to tell their stories and to come to forgiveness in their own time - and that may take a lifetime or more.

Agreed, you can't do this in the "therapist's time. "

Gurdgieff had a word for characters such as C.H. he called them Hasnamous (a made-up word from Persian or Turkish) - he is clever enough to see that he can gain power by tricks over ordinary people. Mr Ouspensky said "hasnamous men are people whose well-being depends on the ill-being of other people"

"Cyber-stalking" poor poor sod...

www.contextualpsychology.org

Congratulations Henry, Martin, and team!

christopher hansard
CCC Registered Counsellor, 'Schema' Coach, Trauma Facilitator
Private Practice, London, England
London
United Kingdom
ACT Therapist

Site member for: 28 weeks 4 days.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
ACT Background and Training

Introductory training with Martin Wilks, Henry Whitfield. Intermediate training with Henry Whitfield and Lesley Fletcher and will be starting online classes with Dr Russ Harris and will be seeking further advanced training via Henry Whitfield and guest teachers. I have used ACT successfully with addictions, phobias and anxiety. I am also in long term training studying Traumatic Incident Reduction Technique and use Mindfulness based Cognitive Therapy approaches in my work.I also use a lot of mindfulness methods to increase and assist client skills in becoming more conscious and I also facilitate sessions with clients who have been cyber-stalked or harassed where the use of ACT has been of great value . I am also an author of three best selling books. Registered CCC Counsellor


Specialties

anxiety,psychosomatic aspects of chronic illness,addictions,cyberstalking and harassment, trauma, chronic pain, anxiety


Types of Clients

a wide range


Additional Information

IF YOU HAVE BEEN ABUSED IN ANY WAY AS OTHERS HAVE IN THE "CARE" OF CHRISTOPHER HANSARD PLEASE WRITE THE FOLLOWING ORGANISATIONS:

I am a professional member of the following organisations: the UK Psychological Trauma Society, the Association of Traumatic Stress Specialists, Traumatic Incident Reduction Association, the European Society of Traumatic Stress Studies, the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies and the counselling organisation: Counselling.

This is terrible and totally outrageous that Hansard should be allowed to keep re-training and re-inventing himself in this way so that he can then go out and practice and cause even more damage to more people.

What the hell is wrong with these people who keep training him in these new therapies?

This June, I met up with a group of other therapists and met one who had worked with Hansard at Eden. Now, she is still traumatised by this experience and is still on sabbatical until further notice. She used to love the work that she did, but does not have the heart for it now. I also know of someone else who has managed to put the experience behind her and move forward.

How many more people is he going to be allowed to hurt due to this re-training that he is doing?

Cranial -- I fully understand your frustration and anger, but I have given up on trying to take Christopher Hansard out of circulation. Why? Because despite years of pleas to women who have suffered as a result of his unethical behaviour and sexual predations, none of them apart from his former fiancee, have had the courage to stand up and be counted -- either in court or in the media. They have all wimped out -- for a variety of reasons -- many of which arouse sympathy. I stayed on this case for many years. I assembled a comprehensive dossier which I passed to The Observer and to Panorama. I never heard back from either of these media outlets. I suspect that many media people have egg on their faces because they swallowed CH's PR lines and wrote about him in glowing terms. The media never likes to be shown up in this regard. Words can damage a reputation but they cannot prevent a charlatan of CH's magnitude from re-inventing himself. Only direct action by injured parties can do this.
Sigh
Blue Dakini/Pema

That's the first time I have ever heard of cyber-stalking being common enough that people are pursueing therapy for it. Can anyone confirm that such therapeutic endeavours do exist, or is this Hansard putting on the spin?

After all, nowadays, people can block e-mails, and most discussion groups are moderated.

This is my first time on this forum so apologies if I cover old and familiar ground or don’t have much of substance to add. It’s a long and quite seasoned thread, so I am sure readers and contributors have already picked over the story and are very familiar with the terrain. I am coming in at a slight angle to the main narrative here and time-wise my account precedes the main issue, but I do want to address Pema’s very first post which is several years old now.

I can’t unfortunately claim to know Christopher Hansard well. Firstly I am perhaps not a very insightful or observant person; secondly the last time I saw CH was over 19 years ago and my memory of him and that time is dimmed by the passage of time.

What I can say is that I knew him for around two months in early 1990 and trained in his particular brand of Bagua Zhang in Holland Park. I was new to martial arts and a few months previously I had started practising Taichi; because he knew I was looking to train in Bagua Zhang, my Taichi teacher told me a guy taught the art in Holland Park at weekends. So I went up to Holland Park and approached CH, who was teaching a group of students; he told me to come along the following weekend (I think the training was on Sundays) and that’s how I started practising with him.

Although I was ultimately unsatisfied with the training and left after two months or so, my experience of CH was not negative. I was more uncertain and suspicious about the whole nature of the Bagua Zhang he was teaching, which was so ostensibly esoteric and mind-bendingly weird. I had fallen for Taichi for its movements and was pulled to Bagua Zhang by its circular patterns; the appeal of the art was primarily aesthetic rather than combat or health-related. I had never seen Chinese Bagua Zhang performed (except in books) but knew that CH’s brand of the art was not just visually different but miles away in nature from the Taoist art I was hoping to train in.

As a novice, I knew little about martial arts except for a few months practice in Taichi, but I was happy to have a teacher of Bagua Zhang who expected no money from me for what he taught. There were around six of us training in total, excluding CH. One of this group was a well-known martial artist, or at least is well-known today and has been for several years (perhaps the same person mentioned in earlier messages). Most of us had some background in martial arts however minimal but there was one guy who started about a month after I started who I seem to remember had no martial arts training.

A couple of weeks into my training, CH exhorted us to train harder and expected us to put in four hours a day, instead of the sixty minutes we were putting in. The training became more demanding but I also became more aware of its bizarre esoteric content, a side to the art that had no appeal for me. The group became pretty spooked to be honest, and students started seeing visions and what not. It was all quite unearthly and heavily impregnated with superstition and magical goings-on. This really wasn’t my cup of tea; I also felt there was something wrong and overly incestuous with the whole group dynamic and the purpose of the art, so I quit. I was in two minds when I made my decision, but quickly realised it was the right thing to do. I have had no contact with any of the members of that small group since then, or with Christopher Hansard.

I can’t vouch for CH’s fighting credentials as I was a complete greenhorn at the time. But I do know that among the large number of Taichi types who would turn up on Sundays to practise in the vicinity there was this one fellow who had been a student of Master Chu, a well-known Taichi teacher of the time. I can’t remember the student’s name: he was tall and very slim (he also taught beneath Master Chu at his school). He professed to me that he didn’t think CH could fight as he had got CH on the ground and CH had rolled around in a useless, flailing fashion. As I was interested in the moves and patterns more than the art’s fighting side, this didn’t really dent my interest. But it was the prevailing sense of freakiness - I seem to remember there was much talk of Mahakala at the time - that sent me packing. It was the simple economy of Taoist Bagua Zhang that I was after and this stuff was simply way too Byzantine.

On a personal level, I found CH to be ok. He fitted the martial arts teacher stereotype for sure - eccentric, intense, dedicated and odd - but I didn’t feel anything unpleasant about him. Not that I can recall anyway. Certainly not abusive; but there were no women in our group, so perhaps I never got to glimpse that side which has constituted much of the content of this thread. I certainly had no suspicions other than this was a pretty freaky Bagua Zhang experience and I wanted out. CH certainly had a mental control over the people in the group, now that was obvious: everyone appeared to be enthralled by him. But many martial artists - especially in the soft schools - put reason aside and succumb to credulity, so they become quite malleable: it’s a two-way street.

I put all of this behind me and forgot about it until I read this thread. It’s been such a long time now that, as I say, I will have forgotten things that may have been relevant, but above all my only feelings are that this training just wasn’t me, it wasn’t my thing and I went off in another direction.

Hi Autumn,

This is very interesting, thank you. I know the martial artist who is now quite well known. (who trained with CH at that time) and he still occasionally mentions the "Tibetan Style" he trained in with CH. I believe he gave up the training because he started to become a bit freaked out by the weird psychic experiences that started occuring as a result of this practice. (reality breaking down and warping etc)

I believe CH called this style Lung Ta (which I think actually means Prayer Flag!)

In all fairness genuine Ba Gua is exceptionally difficult to use as a effective fighting style and has no ground fighting techniques at all, you occasionally see Ba Gua guys turn up to UFC type events and get creamed by Gracie Ju Jutsu type ground fighting etc. Ba Gua as a martial art is very young (1800's) but the Taoist circle walking it's based on goes back many thousands of years. I would love to find out more about where CH got that stuff from as Im sure what he told people was the usual BS however it did seem to have a genuine effect.

Some might say that doing 4hours of any form of circle walking would have that effect, however you don't get that level of weirdness from standard Ba Gua.

I'm curious, did you suffer from any of these hallucinations and Psychic disturbances?

Sparrow

Having talked to some much respected martial artists in the UK who do know their stuff in my research into CH. The general comment on CH was that he was a very good at copying things but had very little understanding or application. This is highlighted by the fact that he was 'mugged' for his watch and pen several times (buy that mugger a beer).

The people who I talked to said that... 'People assumed he had martial abilities because he constantly violated personal space, many find this intimidating. Violating personal space is the one thing you would not do as you do not seek to provoke conflict. Rather the opposite you seek to control conflict, CH methods were those of a bully, not a martial fighter’.

Says it all I think.

Sparrow and Autumn, thank you. It is always useful to read contributions from Hansard’s pre-bon era.

I think you will find that the weird mental states that people experienced were more to do with being spiked with herbs than walking in circles. CH had no qualms about dosing unsuspecting patients with marijuana. I know he spiked me with far more powerful drugs – probably magic mushrooms.

At that time there were already some fantastic martial arts teachers in London and it was possible to study ba gua. Robert Smith’s book on the technique was published in 1967. It would not have been too hard to build a circling practice on the basis of that book alone – better for a narcissist like Hansard who could not tolerate someone knowing more than he.

Hansard probably latched on to ba gua as it was more unusual at the time. The more serious martial arts students who practiced in Holland Park soon saw through his lark and, as you know, the less seasoned students did not last much longer.

In Hansard’s cosmology rlung ta means wind horse. The period you refer to is that of Hansard’s transition from ‘business strategist’ into the Tibetan healer fraud.

Hansard is and remains a fraud, an abuser and a betrayer.

Just to reiterate what Dorje and others are saying, Christopher Hansard is a fraud.
Several have written to Hodder Stoughton, his main publisher, Kay MacCauley, who is his personal agent, and many others in an attempt to prevent further harm.

I've heard so many question and even shame the women who were brave enough to come forward and tell their stories here and elsewhere simply because of their anonymity, not understanding that it is their anonymity that offers them safety from Hansard himself, and even more so his 'fans'.

One must truly understand, and indeed want to understand the shame that has been inflicted on these men and women time and time again. Many did approach the police, but when asked if they wanted to go through with charges quickly declined, not because they were lying, but because they were tired, weak, and scared. Many of them, like an earlier poster named Maria, had fought off his advances for nearly a year, trying to focus on herself, her own healing, and the 'teachings'. Many finally seemed to submit out of pure exhaustion and because they were told their submission to him would bring them the relief and healing they wanted more than anything.

Recently I have heard others condoning this man's behaviour, saying that despite his actions, the taboos he has carried out as a trusted "practitioner" or "healer", undoubtedly he holds a great power and therefore by that fact alone he has much to be admired or at the very least respected.
I and others of course strongly disagree - spiritual manipulation of this sort in any form is not debatable. It is wrong. What happened to the people who were unlucky enough to meet his acquaintance in the last 18 + years is more than sad. Many of them left as empty shells, suicidal still, devastated, delusional themselves. Others somehow picked themselves up and coped by calling it all a "lesson".

Now he has set himself up yet again with the support of his former psychotherapist and friends and is 'treating' people using cognitive therapy and has been well endowed with further psychological techniques, all the better to convince his victims it is they, not him who have the problem. It is they who are the "sick and demented" ones, not him.

Thanks to those who questioned initially and question still. That is perhaps all it takes even to save just one.

Strength to those who are still dealing with this on all levels. Know that you are not alone, and are still offered support if you need it. Hopefully from each other if nowhere else.