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lthomas
As I've stated on this post before I came from a very abusive background. My mother and father were very emotionally abusive even while I was in the organization. I remember standing up to my mother and even separating myself away from my mother. When things like this would happened I was often told that I chose my parents in a different lifetime and in this lifetime this was the life that I chose. Linda Johnson actually told one of my friends that the reason why a family member molested her as a five-year-old child was because she actually chose that life. I was angry!! How dare she say that to someone who was a victim of sexual abuse. My friend was so hurt when she heard that yet so far gone that she eventually gave in and agreed with Linda, yet I could still see the hurt in her eyes.
lthomas, your friend's situation sounds like something that I read on the Byron Katie thread:
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forum.culteducation.com]
------------------------------Beginning of Quote, Anticult, page 251 "Eckert Tolle and Byron Katie thread--------------
A new report here about Byron Katie.
[forum.culteducation.com]
"I watched this woman take an educated psychotherapist who had been severely abused, tied to a bed and beaten at age 5 do a turn around where she assumed responsibility for what had happened. At one point she said to Katie....."Lady you are fucked up in the head", that was the healthy part of her, it did not last long.
Katie knew just how to manipulate her. It was as scary as it was amazing to watch. It made me sick to see how manipulative this woman truly is. She knows just who to pick. If you are vulnerable she sucks you in and she gets you, if not she basically implies that there is something wrong with you and tells you to go do the worksheets. A win win for her..."
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Byron Katie is a former real estate agent -- she'd apparently had a lot of psychological problems years ago, and was in a halfway house. She says that this one morning, she woke up on the floor of her room, a cockroach ran across her feet -- and she'd supposedly attained some kind of enlightened state where her mental problems vanished and she was just happy and loving all the time. Since then, she goes around giving workshops on how you can be happy all the time by just accepting what is...even things like the Nazis ripping babies out of their mothers' arms and killing them...because God "is what is" and you have to "love what is!"
Insanity, but otherwise intelligent people believe her -- and pay a fortune to hear this kind of talk.
Anyway, how is this like SGI?
1. Both Byron Katie and SGI will tell you that they have the secret, the solution to all of your pain and suffering -- if you just do what they tell you to, you can be happy no matter what happens! In Katie's case, it is doing something that she calls "the work," asking and answering her questions -- that basically exist to convince you that what you really think and feel is not true. With SGI, it's chanting and SGI activities.
In either case, if you try their solution -- and you're still not happy -- then you are told to do MORE of either "the work," or chanting and SGI activities. Basically, if their solution does not work for you -- the problem is YOU, not that their solution was bad.
2. Both Katie and Ikeda say that their system can bring about world peace and they pressure their followers to convert others and spread their ideas worldwide.
3. Neither Katie nor Ikeda is willing to admit that the world is horribly unfair. To a person who was raped and abused at the age of five, SGI says that the person CHOSE to be born to such a family. Katie has said that the child CHOSE the abuse as a way of getting attention from the abuser! Both SGI and Katie are using a warped, distorted logic -- if you can even call it logic -- that holds the victimized child responsible for the abuse, rather than the abusive adult. This is just backwards!
4. Neither Katie nor most SGI leaders are qualified to counsel people who are suffering from serious issues such as depression, anxiety schizophrenia, domestic abuse, the aftermath of child abuse, substance abuse, or eating disorders. They have NO education or experience with such issues -- and yet they act as if they're experts, giving advice that they're not qualified to give, and hurting the people whom they think they're helping!
5. The skill that Katie and certain SGI leaders have -- is manipulation. Katie was a real estate agent, an excellent saleswoman. Linda Johnson is a prosecuting attorney. In both those professions, you need to be persuasive, good at using words to twist and spin -- and manipulative. A skilled lawyer or salesperson can sense their customer's, or a witness's vulnerabilities. They know what buttons to push, how to confuse the person, how to mess with his perceptions of reality. The poor customer's buying something he doesn't need or want, or a person's confessing to things she never even did -- and the poor person doesn't even know what hit her! Like lthomas's friend, they may know that they're being bamboozled -- but not how to stop it. The "persuasive" person is like a tsunami wave that just rolls over them.
Someone who is really qualified to counsel abuse victims does the opposite. A qualified counselor would help the abuse survivor explore his or her own truth. The survivor would be given the space to share what he or she really experienced, felt, wanted, didn't want -- rather than having the advisor's scenario rammed down the survivor's throat.
Please, avoid getting "guidance" from SGI leaders! They do NOT care what you want, or what is good for you! They have little or no training in advising anyone with serious concerns. They will not keep what you tell them confidential. And if you ever criticize SGI, they will use your problems to discredit you! All they want is an opening to push their agenda -- to get you more devoted to SGI, just like all Byron Katie really wants is your money and admiration.
It is evil, the way people like Byron Katie and some SGI leaders take people who are hurting, who have been abused -- make fake promises of "Sure, do what we say, and you can be happy!" -- and then re-abuse them.