Post-cult recovery
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ICSA Today, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2022, 2-9
The Heart of Cult Recovery: Compassion for the Self
Daniel Shaw
I left Siddha Yoga, the religious community I had lived and worked in for more than a decade, in 1994. Almost simultaneously, I began my training for a master’s degree in social work with the aim of becoming a psychotherapist. I asked my psychoanalytic supervisor at my clinical internship for some psychoanalytic reading, and she recommended two books: Alice Miller’s Drama of the Gifted Child,1 and Heinz Kohut’s How Does Analysis Cure?2 In the first book, I began learning about narcissism; in the second, I began learning about empathy. I perceived that the guru I had just left fit the profile of a narcissist, but I wanted to understand more clearly what that meant.
As I studied more, particularly the work of Erich Fromm in The Heart of Man3 and Escape From Freedom,4 I was led to formulate the concept of the traumatizing narcissist, based largely on my observations of my former guru, Gurumayi. Once I had left the cult and begun to reclaim my critical-thinking abilities, Gurumayi became a human being to me, not a deity. What I couldn’t find in her was real compassionate empathy, real unselfish giving.
I believe that the development of compassionate empathy had been aborted in Gurumayi by her guru, the late Swami Muktananda, who has been credibly accused of many abuses of power, including predatory pedophilia and multiple sexual assaults. In the time I spent working for Gurumayi, what I observed in the place where empathy could have been was contempt for whomever she could not control, and contempt disguised as “the grace of the guru”5 for the many people she did control. My first effort to theorize about the traumatizing narcissism of cult leaders-the shame they conceal from themselves and others behind their contempt, and their traumatizing impact on followers-became my final paper for graduate school, titled Traumatic Abuse in Cults: A Psychoanalytic Perspective, which can be accessed on the ICSA website.6
ICSA Today, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2022, 2-9
The Heart of Cult Recovery: Compassion for the Self
Daniel Shaw
I left Siddha Yoga, the religious community I had lived and worked in for more than a decade, in 1994. Almost simultaneously, I began my training for a master’s degree in social work with the aim of becoming a psychotherapist. I asked my psychoanalytic supervisor at my clinical internship for some psychoanalytic reading, and she recommended two books: Alice Miller’s Drama of the Gifted Child,1 and Heinz Kohut’s How Does Analysis Cure?2 In the first book, I began learning about narcissism; in the second, I began learning about empathy. I perceived that the guru I had just left fit the profile of a narcissist, but I wanted to understand more clearly what that meant.
As I studied more, particularly the work of Erich Fromm in The Heart of Man3 and Escape From Freedom,4 I was led to formulate the concept of the traumatizing narcissist, based largely on my observations of my former guru, Gurumayi. Once I had left the cult and begun to reclaim my critical-thinking abilities, Gurumayi became a human being to me, not a deity. What I couldn’t find in her was real compassionate empathy, real unselfish giving.
I believe that the development of compassionate empathy had been aborted in Gurumayi by her guru, the late Swami Muktananda, who has been credibly accused of many abuses of power, including predatory pedophilia and multiple sexual assaults. In the time I spent working for Gurumayi, what I observed in the place where empathy could have been was contempt for whomever she could not control, and contempt disguised as “the grace of the guru”5 for the many people she did control. My first effort to theorize about the traumatizing narcissism of cult leaders-the shame they conceal from themselves and others behind their contempt, and their traumatizing impact on followers-became my final paper for graduate school, titled Traumatic Abuse in Cults: A Psychoanalytic Perspective, which can be accessed on the ICSA website.6