Christopher Hansard has his own reasons for lying…

Add Christopher Hansard to the list below.

Christopher Hansard had entirely different reasons for lying in his 3 publications however. He used his story to lure clients to him, advertising that he could help them, and cure them of a myriad of diseases spanning from depression to cancer and diabetes. Instead he sexually harassed, coerced and assaulted them in his treatment rooms. He had none of the training and certainly none of the “teachings” he said he received from a Tibetan Teacher in New Zealand, and is only now taking painstaking measures with the help of his psychologists to gain real credibility and education. It was in fact during one of these sessions that was intended to correct his compulsive lying, and sexual addictions that he first learned the terms “transeference”. A term he would use almost immediately in his own practice when telling a patient that her perception of his behaviour towards her, his breach of trust and boundaries, was due to her own transference.

At workshops, Christopher Hansard instructed students to have participants bow down to him in humble prostration before entering the room. A symbol of respect in some Buddhist teachings for genuine teachers such as the Dalai Lama. However it must be said, even the Dalai Lama does not make his students or seminar participants bow down in such a way or at any time suggest that he is better or greater then them.

Such an imbalance of power was what Christopher Hansard used and encouraged among his staff, students and clients alike in order to groom them, and eventually coerce them into granting sexual favours.

It is for this reason that abuse by therapists, or ‘healers’ is not unlike child abuse, and many of the examples and tactics used by the sexual predator are similar if not exactly replicated, such as grooming, intimidation, and love-bombing.

The imbalance of power between that of a child and an adult, is the same that is created between a vulnerable patient or client asking for and turning to their therapist for help. Out of desperation, hope, and a sincere wish to get better they will usually be compliant or open to whatever “treatment” plan their physician presents.

Sex was never the immediate ‘cure’ offered, but the suggestion was made over time.

A Brief History of Modern Lying Authors

Last week we reported that Angel at the Fence, the Holocaust “memoir” about a love blooming on opposite sides of a concentration camp barrier, may have been a fake. Now Angel’s publisher, Berkley Books, is pulling out of the deal after public criticism of the story’s veracity by several Holocaust scholars. Oprah had already announced Herman Rosenblat’s book as the love story of the century, a misstep that brings to mind the daytime queen’s support of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, which also turned out to be slightly more fiction than fact.

In the last 10 years, “fake” memoirs have appeared everywhere, ranging in mendacity from “unverifiable details” to “totally fabricated.” Below, the four biggest sham memoir writers and what brought their discrepancies to light.

Stephen Glass

Fabrications: Although not quite a memoir, The New Republic author and paralegal added cinematic flourishes to many of his articles, which didn’t necessarily sync up to the facts. Some of the infringements were small, including a detail about whether a mini-fridge existed in the hotel room of a young Republican at the NRC; some were larger and involved entire fabrications of events and, in one case, an entire person: Ian Restil.

Example of his imaginative writing:

Ian Restil, a 15 year old computer hacker who looks like an even more adolescent version of Bill Gates, is throwing a tantrum. “I want more money. I want a Miata. I want a trip to Disney World. I want X-Men comic [book] #1. I want a lifetime subscription to Playboy – and throw in Penthouse. Show me the money! Show me the money!” …

Across the table, executives from a California software firm called Jukt Micronics are listening and trying ever so delicately to oblige. “Excuse me, sir”, one of the suits says tentatively to the pimply teenager. “Excuse me. Pardon me for interrupting you, sir. We can arrange more money for you…”

How he was caught: Competing writers over at Forbes found that “Jukt Micronics” never existed. When Glass was backed against a wall, he had his brother pose as an employee from Jukt named George Sims —as in The Sims, the game that was created in Palo Alto, where Glass’ brother lived.

James Frey

Fabrications: Frey’s 2003 book, A Million Little Pieces, reimagined the definitive druggie memoir and redemption story that landed him on Oprah’s book club and her show. The book starts out with Frey’s teeth smashed out of his head and ends with him finding his rehab crush hanging herself. His 2005 follow-up My Fried Leonard, dictated his (supposed) time in jail. Gritty and raw, A Million Little Pieces was called “The War and Peace of addiction.”

Example of his imaginative writing:

I wake to the drone of an airplane engine and the feeling of something warm dripping down my chin. I lift my hand to feel my face. My front four teeth are gone, I have a hole in my cheek, my nose is broken and my eyes are swollen nearly shut. I open them and I look around and I’m in the back of a plane and there’s no one near me. I look at my clothes and my clothes are covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood.

How he was caught: The Smoking Gun searched a little bit into Frey’s numbers, and cast a lot of doubt onto the length of jail time (which was under three hours), the people he met in rehab, and the friend that apparently killed herself. Oprah had Frey on her show and chewed him out for being the worst person in the world. (Who lies to Oprah!??)

JT LeRoy/Laura Albert

Fabrications: JT LeRoy, the young boy who acted as the Bonnie to his teenage mother’s Clyde, raced around the country eating pills, sleeping with his mother’s boyfriends, and dressing in drag. “JT” had been writing for Nerve since 2001, but when The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things came out in 2001, Laura Albert, the real author behind the alter-ego, paid her sister-in-law Savannah Coop to make public appearances as cross-dressing Jeremiah “Terminator” LeRoy.

Example of her imaginative writing:

I run my palm along the smooth leather of the belt and reach my hand in my pocket past the five-dollar bill, like I do at night sleeping on the foam bed in the front of the cab when I snake my belt out from my jeans loops and guide it gently under the fuzzy polyester blanket. It’s Kenny, holding me from behind, breathing out in my ear, pressing into me, draping the belt over me, like I wish he would but never does, my grandfather preaching, his minty breath stinging and his face set like a stone carving so solid, so absolute, you know there’s something between you and the bottomless pit….’Please punish me, please,’ and I rub, so hard it’ll hurt when I piss the next day. I rub with the belt, wrapping it and squeezing. I dig my nails deep into the tender skin of my thing until I cry, until I feel that point of breaking, but there’s no one to fall into. I hold the belt close until I finally sleep.

How she was caught: Unlike the other people on this list, it wasn’t objective facts that brought JT down, it was her appearance. A 2005 article in New York magazine by Stephen Beachy hinted that LeRoy might be the pen name of Laura Albert, after interviewing several people who had spoken to LeRoy over the phone and had come away with the conclusion that she was a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman. In 2006, in an interview with The New York Times, Albert’s manager confirmed that she was the real writer. Albert was later sued in civil court by a film company that had bought the rights to her first novel under LeRoy’s name, Sarah.

Margaret B. Jones/ Margaret Seltzer

Fabrications: Truth and Consequences is the latest addition the faux-memoir genre. Ostensibly about “Margaret Jones’” thug life as a half white/half Indian foster child involved with the Bloods in South Central Los Angeles, Jones’ memoir included harrowing details of gang initiation and drug abuse.

Example of her imaginative writing:

My job was to approach anyone wanting to buy drugs, see what they wanted, and check them out to make sure they weren’t the police. Then, if I felt okay about it, I would take their money, tell them where to go, and gesture my approval to the homie who was holding the drugs. There were all kinds of people buying drugs in the area — white suburban teens, college kids in nice cars, and even the occasional businessman in a big luxury Mercedes or BMW. Usually, though, it was just the neighborhood crackheads, whom we called baseheads or smokers. It was sad seeing the strung-out and desperate begging in front of their kids, but some of the other baseheads were funny to watch. They would tell wild stories, trying to get you to front them some drugs or offer to do just about anything for the smallest amounts of cash. Once I saw a younger homie pay a basehead two dollars to eat dog shit. We all laughed over that for a week. But mostly it was a boring job with a lot of time sitting around, waiting and shit.

How she was caught: Seltzer’s own sister blew the whistle on her. Margaret Jones, aka Margaret Seltzer, turned out to be an all-white valley girl from Sherman Oaks, who grew up with her biological parents. The book’s publisher recalled every issue and offered refunds for anyone who felt like they didn’t get their money’s worth.

The New P.I’s: With newspapers losing steam, who better to use their free time and zero dollar budgets to scour Google and find discrepancies in author’s works?
Some may say the memoir genre might as well be dead and buried – if you so much as incorrectly recall the weather on a particular day, the Internet dicks will be on your case faster than you can say “subjective memory” – but looking through the list, the authors’ more often than not exposed themselves in the large lies, rather than the small ones. No one would have found out about James Frey lying about rehab if he hadn’t already fabricated an entire jail sentence for himself. Albert may never have been caught if she had just hired a believable drag queen to play JT. And Shattered Glass would never have made it to film if Stephen hadn’t been cute and made up an entire persona based on a Sims character.

Verdict? If you’re going to lie in a story that is ostensibly about your life, make it a million little ones, and leave the tall tales at home.

Do Lying Memoirists Believe Their Own Stories?

By Peter Suderman

Another year, another fake memoir picked up by a New York publishing house looking for a riveting, can-you-believe-it! story:

This time, it was the tale of Herman Rosenblat, who said he first met his wife while he was a child imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and she, disguised as a Christian farm girl, tossed apples over the camp’s fence to him. He said they met again on a blind date 12 years after the end of war in Coney Island and married. The couple celebrated their 50th anniversary this year.

Ms. Winfrey, who hosted Mr. Rosenblat and his wife, Roma Radzicki Rosenblat, on her show twice, called their romance “the single greatest love story” she had encountered in her 22 years on the show. On Saturday night, after learning from Mr. Rosenblat’s agent that the author had confessed that the story was fabricated, Berkley Books, a unit of Penguin Group that was planning to publish “Angel at the Fence,” Mr. Rosenblat’s memoir of surviving in a sub-camp of Buchenwald with the help of his future wife, canceled the book and demanded that Mr. Rosenblat return his advance.

A lot of the blame has to be put on the publisher. I have a lot more sympathy for the magazines, especially the smaller ones, that get caught by fabulists, since they tend to be working with a small staff on lots of tight deadlines and with fairly limited resources. To a certain extent, an editor has to make a judgment about whether or not a writer is trustworthy.

As for the writers, well, the obvious question, as with all of these fabulists, is why? Here’s Rosenblat’s vague response:

In a statement released through his agent, Mr. Rosenblat wrote that he had once been shot during a robbery and that while he was recovering in the hospital, “my mother came to me in a dream and said that I must tell my story so that my grandchildren would know of our survival from the Holocaust.”

He said that after the incident he began to write. “I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people,” he wrote in the statement. “I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make good in this world. In my dreams, Roma will always throw me an apple, but I now know it is only a dream.”

At first, this seems pretty thin, but I don’t think it’s entirely clear whether he was fully aware that his story was false.

Now, I’m no neuroscientist, but I wonder if Rosenblat’s dream functioned essentially like the doctored photos that have been shown in various studies to induce false memories. Imagery, especially imagery which purports to document reality, can cause people to remember things which simply aren’t true — to genuinely believe they’ve had experiences which they haven’t — and a particularly powerful dream following the trauma of being shot in a hold-up seems like the sort of memory-like imagery that could cloud one’s ability to discern the truth about one’s own past.

Indeed, I suspect it’s especially easy to believe falsehoods about your past after many decades; I’m obviously much younger than Rosenblat, but I sometimes have difficulty recalling details from even a decade ago. Talking to my parents, or friends from that time, it’s clear that we remember different events very differently. For many people, I suspect, it’s easy — perhaps even necessary, to an extent — to revise and edit one’s life story as time passes, to make it all fit into some overarching master narrative. And when sharing that story with others, the temptation is even stronger: Who hasn’t found themselves cleaning up a funny story — not lying, necessarily, but making the tale a bit more dramatic, a bit more straightforward — when telling it to a friend? Rosenblat clearly went much farther than most, and inexcusably so. But it’s not clear that he did so knowingly, or with any impulse substantially worse than the one that so many have felt: to tell a good story.

Tags: Herman Rosenblat, memoirists

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Sexual abuse by spiritual leaders

Who Abuses?

Although the work done by John C. Gonsiorek, Ph.D., and Glen O. Gabbard, M.D., in the area of typing exploitative professionals is based primarily on cases involving mental-health providers, their profiles are applicable to clergy with some caveats: For example, clergy roles are also inherently more complex, with boundaries that are less clear-cut than those of other professions.

While most people think that the sociopathic predator is the most prevalent perpetrator, Gonsiorek has found that “reasonably well-trained, responsible individuals” who are undergoing a stressful time are at greatest risk of violating boundaries. Almost without exception, these professionals have only one victim, are remorseful, and usually confess to authorities. Their prognosis is generally good.

There are also the perpetrators who are severely neurotic and whose problems are more long-standing and significant. Work tends to be the sole source for filling their personal needs, and transgressions by individuals in this group tend to recur every few years or so. They are self-punitive rather than motivated to change. Prognosis is mixed; rehabilitation may or may not be feasible.

Sexual abuse by spiritual leaders
violates trust, devastates lives, and tears communities apart.
No denomination or tradition is immune.

by Anne A. Simpkinson 

Anne A. Simpkinson is editor of Common Boundary magazine.  The Common Boundary Organization is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to exploring the sources of meaning in human experience.  They examine the relationship among matters of the heart, matters of the mind, and matters of the soul; psychology, spirituality, and creativity; and individual growth and social change.

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In the early 1980s, Jeanne Miller was a typical suburban mom. She did community work, served as PTA president, and helped produce plays in her school district just outside Chicago. She was also a devout Catholic. “My mother died when I was 14, and I went to boarding school,” she recalls. “For a critical time in my life, the Church — the nuns — raised me and was my family.”

This sense of family began to disintegrate in 1982 when another mother confided that one of the parish priests had, during a swim at a nearby lake, tried to strip off her son’s bathing trunks when he was in the water. Thinking the accusation unbelievable, Miller initially proceeded, she admits, “to disprove what this woman had said.” But instead of being reassured when she called the head of religious education at the parish, she was told that the church had a file of complaints against the priest. When she contacted the archdiocese, she was rebuffed by a chancery official, who told her that her motherly instincts were working overtime. She could not prove her allegations, he said; nothing was going to be done.

“I can’t even describe how devastated, angry, and hurt [I felt],” says Miller, who ultimately discovered that the priest had provided alcohol and marijuana to the 13- and 14-year-olds he took with him to a lake house each Tuesday on his day off, let them drive a boat and his car, lied to parents — and tried to fondle her own 14-year-old son. Miller contacted police and filed a lawsuit, mainly to force the church to deal with the priest’s behavior.

“We didn’t want him removed. We just said, `Do something, find out what is wrong here, provide some counseling. Care about us.’” Instead, the church’s law firm began fighting the lawsuit. Miller’s legal bills grew steadily until she could no longer afford to continue the battle. She agreed to a small financial settlement — $15,000 — which didn’t begin to cover the $35,000 legal bill.

“We were a Yankee Doodle Dandy family,” Miller says. “We believed if you were good and gave to others, others would give back to you. We never expected the Church to come down on us like that.”

Miller is not alone in the shock, betrayal, anger, and grief she experienced. One of the first to bring a lawsuit against the Catholic Church and a leading figure in the abuse-survivor self-help movement, Miller has helped bring awareness to the issue of abuse by spiritual authorities. The problem, however, is vast. For example:

• In July 1994, two lawsuits were filed against Swami Rama, the spiritual leader of the Himalayan International Institute of Yoga Science and Philosophy in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. The civil suits followed decades of reports of sexual improprieties, including a 1990 magazine article that detailed instances of sexual misconduct and several individuals’ efforts to alert Himalayan officials to the abuses.

• In October 1994, Yogi Amrit Desai, spiritual director and founder of the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, Massachusetts, resigned after admitting to inappropriate sexual contact with three women. At the time, he told senior Kripalu officials that there had been no other instances of sexual misdeeds. Eight months later, two more women came forward, and the then 62-year-old spiritual teacher admitted that he had had sexual contact with them and one other woman.

• In July 1995, Harry Budd Miles, a 65-year-old retired Methodist minister, was sentenced to five months in jail after pleading guilty to charges of child abuse and perverted practice involving a Boy Scout in the 1970s. According to court documents, the Maryland minister had engaged the boy in kissing, fellatio, and masturbation in his church office, the basement of his home, and his summer house over a five-year period.

• In December 1995, what is thought to be the first lawsuit against a Buddhist teacher was settled through a mediation process. The civil suit, filed initially in November 1994, against best-selling author and Tibetan lama Sogyal Rinpoche alleged that over a period of 19 years he had induced female students “to have sexual intercourse with him . . . by preying upon their vulnerability and belief that they could only achieve enlightenment by serving the sexual and other needs of Sogyal, their enlightened master.” In addition to intentional infliction of emotional distress and breach of fiduciary duty, the complaint included a count of assault and battery.

• In April 1996, 59-year-old Episcopal Bishop Edward C. Chalfant began a one-year disciplinary leave of absence after admitting to an extramarital affair with an unmarried woman. According to diocesan spokesperson Mary Lou Lavallee, following that announcement additional people came forward. Based on information provided by them and upon further consideration, the diocese’s standing committee and the national church’s Presiding Bishop Edmond L. Browning recommended that Chalfant resign, which he did in May, ending his 10-year tenure as Bishop of Maine.

Beginning in the mid-1980s, a rash of news articles detailing accusations and lawsuits against Catholic priests for molesting youngsters — generally teenage boys — unleashed a flood of revelations concerning sexual misconduct not only by Catholic priests but by spiritual authorities in virtually every religion. Regularly since then, reports of years-old as well as current sexual improprieties have surfaced, forcing religious organizations and churches to create codes of ethics, procedures for handling allegations, guidelines to deal with victims, and educational programs for clergy and spiritual teachers.

Hardly a month goes by without news of a priest, rabbi, minister, roshi, or swami being disciplined for, resigning because of, or charged with sexual misdeeds. Still, data that could precisely measure the prevalence of sexual abuse by spiritual authorities is difficult to come by. What research exists focuses solely on Christian denominations and is either years old or statistically “soft.” For example, a nine-year-old survey of evangelical ministers conducted by the research department of Christianity Today magazine and published in the 1988 Leadership Journal found that 12 percent of clergy surveyed admitted to having sexual intercourse with someone other than a spouse; 23 percent stated that they had been “sexually inappropriate” with someone other than their spouse. A 1991 national survey of mainly Protestant pastors by a group at the Center for Ethics and Social Policy, Graduate Theological Union, in Berkeley, California — described by its researchers as “small and not scientifically controlled” — uncovered similar findings: About 10 percent of those surveyed had been sexually involved with a parishioner. Another study published in the winter 1993 Journal of Pastoral Care found that only 6.1 percent of Southern Baptist pastor respondents admitted to having sexual contact with a person either currently or formerly affiliated with their church. In that same survey, however, 70 percent of respondents said they knew of pastors who had had sexual contact with a congregant.

A.W. Richard Sipe, a former Roman Catholic priest and current Baltimore, Maryland, psychotherapist, suggests that nearly 50 percent of Catholic priests break their vow of celibacy by engaging in some form of sexual activity. In his 1995 book, Sex, Priests, and Power, he estimates that 6 percent of priests have sexual contact with youngsters — 2 percent with children under 10 years and 4 percent with adolescents. But, he writes, “sexual abuse of minors is only part of the problem. Four times as many priests involve themselves sexually with adult women, and twice the number of priests involve themselves with adult men.”

Looking at the situation from another angle, the United Methodist Church sponsored a 1990 study that examined sexual harassment — unwanted behavior ranging from suggestive looks and unsolicited touching to attempted or actual assault and rape — within its ranks. Of the clergywomen surveyed, 41.8 percent reported unwanted sexual behavior by a colleague or pastor; 17 percent of laywomen said that their own pastors had harassed them.

Nevertheless, many researchers and professionals in the field are wary of citing statistics. According to Roman Paur, executive director of the Interfaith Sexual Trauma Institute in Collegeville, Minnesota, statistics regarding clergy sexual misconduct are “fundamentally guesses” because there is no hard research to back up the numbers. Father Stephen J. Rossetti, vice president and chief operating officer of St. Luke Institute in Silver Spring, Maryland, for example, says that while he respects his colleague’s work, he is not confident of the source of Sipe’s figures. Yet interviews with clergy, victims, and other professionals offer clinical and anecdotal evidence that challenge several popular perceptions related to clergy sexual misconduct:

• That most sex-abuse cases involving priests are pedophilic. In fact, only about one-third of priests who sexually abuse children are pedophiles (that is, they molest a prepubescent child). The rest sexually abuse adolescents, generally boys. The precise clinical term for their behavior is ephebophilia. Although few would dispute the fact that sexual violations against youngsters of any age are detestable, the distinction has important clinical implications related to prognosis and treatment. The term “pedophile priest” is an unfortunately memorable but often inaccurate appellation.

• That Catholic priests become sexually involved with adolescent boys, whereas all other religious authorities become involved with adult women. Stephen Rossetti says he’s seen enough cases of Protestant clergy abusing minors and Catholic clergy abusing women to believe that it happens both ways. He uses the generally accepted estimate of 2 to 7 percent when speaking of Catholic priests who molest minors, and he points out that this is the same percentage as in the general population.
  That fact carries no comfort for survivors such as David Clohessy, a St. Louis political and public-relations consultant and national director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP). “It doesn’t matter whether just as many priests [abuse] as plumbers do,” he says. “You can’t take solace in that.”

• That clergy misconduct involves only heterosexual men abusing women and children. According to social worker Melissa Steinmetz of the Holy Cross Counseling Group in South Bend, Indiana, sex abuse is not a males-only transgression. Because the feminist movement was largely responsible for awareness of sexual abuse, the original focus was solely on male perpetrators. But, says Steinmetz, experience has shown that some women, too, are guilty of abuse, especially of preadolescent and adolescent boys. “Probably there will always be more male sex offenders,” says Steinmetz, but she notes that keeping the focus exclusively on male perpetrators does a disservice to the adolescent male victims of female offenders.

Pat Liberty, an American Baptist minister, also reports that she is beginning to see some grassroots organizations springing up for survivors of abuse by women religious and to hear about complaints against lesbian clergy. But regarding the latter, she says, “Gay and lesbian folk are not going to come forward to tell their story. They know that they are not going to get a fair hearing, because the Church will get lost in the gay and lesbian stuff rather than dealing with the power abuses and the other things that are at stake.”

Despite the lack of reliable figures and the misconceptions, most professionals agree that the problem is far-reaching not only in Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish congregations but in Buddhist sanghas and Hindu ashrams as well. Abuse by spiritual leaders is nondenominational, and the dynamics between clergy and parishioners, between gurus and devotees, between spiritual teachers and students, bear striking resemblances to one another. From profiles of the perpetrators and victims to the impact on the spiritual communities and their ways of dealing with the situation, clergy sexual malfeasance is an ecumenical reality, one that has probably been with us as long as civilization and one that is not about to go away.

Through time immemorial, human beings have sought protection, salvation, and solace from deities — from Shiva and Shakti, from Jesus and Jehovah, from Aphrodite and Zeus. For nearly as long as we have been petitioning and praising the gods, we have identified in our tribal ranks those who seem particularly attuned to or knowledgeable about guiding us in our search.

Anson Shupe, a sociology professor at Indiana University/Purdue University, reasons in his book In the Name of All That’s Holy that if the priesthood emerged as a profession during the transition from a hunting-and-gathering to an agricultural society, then the ancestor of the priest is the shaman. Because Shupe believes that the shamanic craft is not without a certain amount of manipulation and sleight-of-hand, he theorizes that “clergy malfeasance, or something we moderns could recognize as such, is probably as old as practiced religion itself.”

What is new, however, is the media coverage of abuse by spiritual authorities. In the not-too-distant past, a kind of embargo existed against publicizing what might at the time have been considered the “sexual shenanigans” of those in positions of leadership. Some offices carried such respect and weight that the persons occupying them were granted immunity from the scrutiny of their private lives. Sex scandals were seen as reflecting poorly on hallowed institutions — the presidency in the case of John F. Kennedy’s affairs, or the Catholic Church in the case of priests who might have been caught in flagrante delicto. Incidents were winked away or dealt with quietly.

Recalls Philip Jenkins, professor of history and religious studies at Penn State University and author of Pedophiles and Priests: “I had a police friend in New York who would — pardon the expression — talk about all the times he had `cut loose a faggot brother,’ by which he meant he had arrested a priest or brother for a homosexual act and had let him go with a warning.” For decades, it was impossible to write about church scandals due to publishers’ fears of losing advertising dollars or of being boycotted. “Think what that must have done to people in the priesthood and in the seminaries,” says Jenkins. “For a tiny minority who did have tendencies to any kind of sexual misconduct, it must have given them a sense of invulnerability.”

That shield of immunity was shattered in the mid-1980s with the Gilbert Gauthe case. Gauthe was the pastor of St. John’s Parish in Henry, Louisiana. According to journalist Jason Berry, who broke the story in a local weekly newspaper and who detailed Catholic priests’ abuse of children in articles and a book, Lead Us Not into Temptation, church officials were aware of Gauthe’s sexual propensities as early as 1974. Almost 10 years passed, however, before he was finally relieved of his priestly duties. Soon thereafter, in October 1984, Gauthe was indicted on charges relating to sexual abuse of minors and child pornography; a year later, the judge in his case agreed to a plea bargain. Gauthe pleaded guilty to 33 charges and was sentenced to 20 years without parole. He also lost a subsequent civil suit, which awarded $1.25 million to a boy who claimed to have been molested and the boy’sparents.

Since that time, gallons of printer’s ink have splashed details of cases across the pages of newspapers and magazines. According to Marie Fortune, founder and executive director of the Center for the Prevention of Sexual and Domestic Violence in Seattle, Washington, the prevalence of sexual misdeeds by those in spiritual authority is due to the fact that most organized religious groups — both traditional and nontraditional — are “fundamentally patriarchal in their history and contemporary in expression and practice.” In her new book, Love Does No Harm, the United Church of Christ minister says that this paradigm, which is sometimes seen as “normative, even ordained by God,” supports and reinforces a dominance/submission model — with men dominant and women submissive. This power imbalance is then combined with a cultural assumption of male sexual access to women and children. The result: sexual abuse in epidemic proportions.

Shupe offers a different explanation of the problem: “The sociological reality is that all religions are hierarchies of social status and power.” This power, he says, is undergirded by the “loyalty and respect of rank-and-file believers who are taught or encouraged to expect that their leaders possess in large measure some special discernment or spiritual insight and have benevolent, ethical treatment of believers always uppermost in their mind.” It is this inherent structure of “trusted hierarchies,” Shupe explains, that offers ample opportunities for abuse.

Spiritual authorities — whether rabbis or roshis, priests or pastoral counselors, ministers or swamis — all hold a special position in their spiritual community. Zen Buddhists, for example, bow to their teacher as a sign of respect. Some Hindu devotees stand as their guru enters the room and wait until she takes her place at the front of the room, often on a flower-bedecked dais or elaborate throne-like chair, before settling in for satsang (a spiritual gathering). Catholics are taught that a priest is “called” by God to his vocation. One California woman who was abused by a priest owns a missal, a gift for her First Communion. In it, a section reads: “My child: Someone has said it is a sign of salvation to have a great love for Priests. Why is this so? Because the Priest takes the place of our Blessed Lord on earth. . . . Jesus loved you so much. He wanted to be always near you. He wants to do many things for you. He does them all through His Priest.”

While Catholics are taught that priests are representatives of Jesus on earth, devotees are often led to believe that their guru is a god, a perfected being, or Realized Self. In his 1971 book, Guru, Swami Muktananda declares: “The Guru is an actual embodiment of the Absolute. Truly speaking, he is himself the Supreme Being.” The word “guru,” derived from Sanskrit, means “one who brings light out of darkness.” Generally, the term is translated as “teacher.” Many religious traditions — including Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Islam — use the teacher-student relationship as a vehicle through which to impart spiritual knowledge and experience.

Speaking on an episode of the PBS series Searching for God in America, Islamic scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr of George Washington University argued strongly for having a spiritual teacher. Practices such as meditation, invocation, and concentration require the guidance of someone who has experience in them, he explained. But Nasr also cautioned against choosing a teacher too lightly; potential students need to exercise “a sense of discernment,” he said.

Many believe that Americans sorely lack this quality. Our cultural conditioning encourages a fiercely independent, anti-authority stance, but the shadow of that self-sufficient lone ranger is a gullible idealist wearing rose-colored blinders. Yvonne Rand, a Buddhist teacher in the San Francisco Bay area, says that this tendency to “give ourselves away” is the source of enormous difficulty in the American Buddhist community — so much so that the Dalai Lama, the Nobel Prize-winning leader of the Tibetan people, is said to be “particularly worried” and “deeply concerned” about the issue. He advises students to get close to the teacher, “spy” on him or her, watching carefully for at least three years to see if the person’s teachings are congruent with how he or she behaves.

This advice can also apply to seeking a church. While there are numerous variables that go into finding a good fit, it is often the personality of the pastor or spiritual teacher that attracts parishioners and disciples. One personality trait to be wary of, experts warn, is charisma. Writing in his latest book, Feet of Clay: Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus, British psychiatrist Anthony Storr compares the original Greek meaning of “charisma” — “gift of grace” — with sociologist Max Webber’s use of the term as “a special magical quality of personality by virtue of which the individual possessing it was set apart from ordinary men and women and treated as if endowed with supernatural or superhuman powers.” In the former, the pastor’s power is derived from a spiritual source; in the latter, his power comes solely from the force of his personality.

Charisma can be evident in the popular pastor whose dynamic sermons and impeccable people skills fill the pews and church coffers every week as well as in the guru whose mere presence induces altered states of consciousness. The problem comes, however, in mistaking a spiritual leader’s persona and talents for holiness. This dilemma has been particularly troublesome in some Buddhist groups and Hindu yoga communities where religious practices — meditation, yoga exercises, extended periods of prayer, chanting, and even silence — can induce trance-like states of consciousness in which participants are highly suggestible and thus vulnerable. Furthermore, because of Westerners’ inexperience with the mystical side of religion, they often become overly impressed by siddhis (psychic powers) and equate them with sainthood.

Biofeedback researcher and pioneer Elmer Green, formerly of the Menninger Foundation, part of the well-known midwestern psychiatric research and treatment center, has been involved for decades in investigating the mind’s ability to control bodily functions, emotions, and consciousness. He has conducted many experiments on psychically gifted individuals, Indian yogis, and a Native American medicine woman. In his estimation, paranormal abilities have nothing to do with spiritual development. For example, in the early 1970s Green conducted experiments on Swami Rama of the Himalayan Institute. Green found that the Indian swami was able to produce, among other things, an atrial flutter at will (a condition in which the heart rate flutters at four or five times its natural rate but doesn’t pump blood), create a difference in temperature between the left and right sides of the palm of his hand, go into a sleep brain pattern while staying conscious and able to report what was being said in the room, and give indications of psychokinetic abilities. The swami’s abilities, however, seem to have been matched by the size of his ego. In fact, Green recalls Swami Rama saying, “The greatest problem a person can have is ego. And nobody knows that better than I.” Says the professionally active, 78-year-old Green: “There’s a Hindu adage: `Go through the garden, but do not eat the fruit.’ Swami Rama enjoyed the fruit.”

Some of that forbidden fruit was sex with female devotees. According to a 1987 dissertation, a 1990 Yoga Journal article, and court documents related to two lawsuits filed against him, Swami Rama apparently chose to sexually exploit a continuous stream of female followers beginning almost as soon as he arrived in the United States.

Accusations of Swami Rama’s sexual liaisons with female followers swirled around his community for years. In 1974, four Minneapolis yoga students sent a letter to their teacher, a Swami Rama devotee, accusing the swami of sexual misconduct, falsification of his background, and financial improprieties. In the summer of 1975, a small group of disaffected students tried to alert disciples to these issues by setting up a “Truth Booth” at the entrance to Carleton College, where Swami Rama’s organization was running a summer yoga retreat. In the early 1980s allegations again surfaced, and in 1990 Yoga Journal published an article that detailed instances of sexual abuse by the swami. Finally, in July 1994 two civil lawsuits against Swami Rama, the Himalayan Institute, and one current and two former institute officials were filed. Testimony given in sworn depositions taken last year indicates that one of the defendants, Rudolph Ballentine, M.D. — a member of the institute’s board of directors in the 1970s and institute president from 1987 to 1993 — received verbal reports and letters referring to instances of sexual relations and sexual harassment between the swami and female disciples, including his personal assistants, for years. In case after case, Ballentine discounted the allegations on the basis of the swami’s denials and Ballentine’s own judgments about the character and motivations of those reporting the abuse.

Since the suit — which is still pending — was filed, Swami Rama has left the country and has not returned. Says one former devotee: “I think he intentionally misrepresented himself. He played the game very, very carefully.” Sadly she concludes, “Instead of being a real guru, which is the light that dispels darkness, he was a maya [illusion] maker.”

It may be tempting to point a finger at a particular group of perpetrators and say, “It’s all their fault. If we could only round them up, maybe even jail them, we could eradicate abuse.” In reality, this is neither a wise nor a feasible course of action. The reason abuse has persisted for so long and cuts across denominational lines is because the dynamics underlying it are universal — varying only in the degree to which we are aware of them and in our ability to deal with them.

One of these dynamics is transference. The concept, which originated with Freud, refers to the process by which we transfer past feelings onto individuals in the present for the purpose of reliving and resolving painful experiences. Transference does not allow you to see the person as he or she is; rather, you see that individual through a screen of projections.

Father Stephen Rossetti explains that authority figures such as clergy are often figures of transference, and as a Catholic priest he experiences it every day. Simply walking down the street, “half the people love and a few people hate me, and they don’t even know me,” he says. “They don’t know Steve Rossetti.”

Virginia Wink Hilton, a Costa Mesa, California, psychotherapist, agrees. In her opinion, a person who idealizes the minister, priest, or spiritual teacher or who has erotic feelings for him is not really seeing the clergyperson. The feelings are not for the minister but come out of unconscious material. If a clergyperson doesn’t understand this, Hilton says, “it puts him in enormous jeopardy.”

Hilton compares the transference that psychotherapists experience to that which a minister might encounter in his parish. Transference in a therapy setting is fairly clear and well-defined, she says: Psychotherapists meet with clients an hour a week, at the same time, in the same location. Ministers and priests, on the other hand, are “weaving in and out of the lives of parishioners all the time.” The situation becomes complicated because of the play of both parties’ unconscious dynamics and unmet needs roiling below the surface of their social personas.

For example, people may desperately crave a relationship with someone who is smarter, kinder, more spiritual, and more compassionate than they feel they are because they believe that association will quell their anxieties and afford them a measure of security in a seemingly unpredictable and dangerous world. They want heroes and saints to inspire, soothe, love them. Says one experienced spiritual seeker: “I’ve worked with enough New Age heroes in enough groups to know they aren’t heroes; they aren’t saints. But people don’t want to see that. People want a hero. They want somebody who is a thousand times better than they are. They want a Pope.”

In this way, disciples and parishioners can transform spiritual authorities into omniscient experts, the expectations of whom far exceed the leader’s knowledge or experience. The basic function of a religious authority is spiritual direction, assisting individuals in forging a relationship with the Divine. But often there are pressures for them to do and be more. Yvonne Rand explains that students of Buddhism might go to their Zen teacher and ask him about their marriage, how to raise their children, what to do about their jobs. “Pretty soon the teacher starts to think, `Oh, I really know a lot about everything.’ Pretty soon the student starts projecting all-knowingness on the teacher, and the relationship gets way out of balance.”

This human propensity to desire a savior, an unconditionally loving parent, a hero, or a saint can devolve into a dark pursuit with painful consequences. For example, if yoga devotees believe that the guru knows best, they may gradually allow the guru to guide not only their spiritual process but every aspect of their lives. This unbounded devotion can feed the guru’s sense of power and can fuel a sense of grandiosity or invincibility. The guru may begin to sound like the Pope delivering opinions ex cathedra. He may also begin to feel that rules that apply to others don’t apply to him. As Anthony Storr writes, “It is intoxicating to be adored, and it becomes increasingly difficult for the guru not to concur with the beliefs of his disciples.” Furthermore, Storr reasons, “if a man comes to believe that he has special insights, and that he has been selected by God to pass on these insights to others, he is likely to conclude that he has special privileges.” Often those privileges are sexual.

Some female parishioners and devotees all too willingly cooperate because they have turned the priest, minister, or guru into an object of adoration, flirtation, and sexual desire. One meditation teacher says that women approached him even in the middle of the night on retreat. Another male ashramite recalls one young woman who later accused her spiritual teacher of sexual misconduct: “She was a sexy young thing, for sure. I remember sitting in the room and thinking that. But she wasn’t giving me any attention.” Her attention was riveted on the guru.

Despite these sexual come-ons, Peter Rutter, a Jungian-oriented San Francisco psychiatrist, argues that it is up to the spiritual leader to maintain the proper sexual boundaries. The task is difficult, admits Rutter, who has written two books on the subject of boundary violations, but he suggests that the ultimate protection against abuse is the leader’s understanding of the harm he can inflict and his empathy with the woman.

Not all spiritual authorities have that capacity. Sometimes what psychologists call a personality disorder compels a person to exploit, manipulate, and hurt those in their spiritual care. While publicly charming, ebullient, devoted, hard-working, and inspiring, this leader proves himself cunning, slick, seductive, and cruel in private. Involved in multiple, simultaneous relationships, he can sweet-talk his victims into compliance — “Our love is special and holy” — or bully them into submission.

United Church of Christ minister Marie Fortune, in her book Is Nothing Sacred?, details the havoc and pain wreaked on individual women and the congregation by the sexual misconduct of one of the church’s pastors. Fortune notes that sexual predators go to great lengths to choose women whose current circumstances might make them vulnerable: for instance, the death of a parent, a divorce, problems with children, or an illness. The situation that sends Fortune “over the edge” is one in which a congregant approaches a minister for help in dealing with childhood sexual abuse. Often that confidence is seen by the minister as a “green light” to seduce the person. One clergyman whom Fortune heard about told his victim that the way to heal from childhood sexual abuse was to re-enact the experiences with him. “I am amazed at the creativity that perpetrators have,” Fortune says, “the manipulation of theology and scripture and ritual, the moral rationalization they bring to bear: `No, there is nothing wrong with this because God’s love for you is flowing through me, and this is a holy kiss.’”

Because of the innocence and vulnerability of the victims, perhaps the most heinous crime perpetrated by sexual predators is the abuse of children. Trust, innocence, and sense of self all shatter, leaving behind shards of fear, shame, distrust, and self-loathing.

David Clohessy of SNAP, himself a survivor of abuse by a priest, describes the abrupt shift in perception this way: “It’s like getting up one morning, walking outside, and all of a sudden the law of gravity isn’t in effect anymore. It is something that is so far beyond the pale of expectation for a kid. . . . It is just a horrible, horrible betrayal.”

Of course, the degree of damage to individual youngsters varies. For example, the closer the relationship of the offender to the child, the greater the trauma. The type of abuse (fondling versus intercourse, for example), its duration, the degree of violence, and the age of the child also figure prominently in the extent of the pain and damage inflicted. Young sexual-abuse victims inevitably suffer from what professionals call posttraumatic stress disorder, symptoms of which, says Judith Lewis Herman in her classic book Trauma and Recovery, are “both extensive and enduring.” These include an extreme startle response, elevated arousal, sleep disturbances, deep distrust, sexualized behaviors, depression, withdrawal, eating disorders, drug and alcohol abuse, and suicidal thoughts and actions. In fact, a survey described in the paper “In the Name of God: A Profile of Religion-Related Child Abuse” in the Journal of Social Issues (volume 51, number 2) reported that, of their sample, almost 20 percent of children abused by religious authorities subsequently considered suicide.

Not only is the pain inflicted on an individual child heartbreaking, but the scope of the problem is immense because each perpetrator generally has multiple victims. In Slayer of the Soul, an anthology whose articles focus on issues related to the Catholic Church and child sexual abuse, Father Stephen Rossetti cites a 1987 study that found that 377 child molesters whose relations with victims were not incestuous had victimized 4,435 girls and 22,981 boys. Pentecostal preacher Tony Leyva, for example, pleaded guilty to having abused upwards of 100 boys, although law-enforcement officials placed the number closer to 800.

Although youngsters who have been molested by clergy exhibit the same symptomatology as those violated by other trusted adults, there is an added dimension if the abuse is perpetrated by a spiritual authority. Developmentally, children often equate spiritual authorities with God. For this reason it’s easy to see how a child might think sexual fondling is somehow supernaturally sanctioned. One case cited in the Journal of Social Issues article involved a priest and his wife who told the boys they abused that the abuse was part of the youngsters’ religious obligation as “good Christians.” The same researchers also noted that the opposite attribution can be made: One young girl who was sexually abused by both parents was placed with a minister who molested her as well, saying that the abuse was “God’s punishment” for her “badness.”

Because church is often thought of as a refuge, and God as someone to turn to in troubled times, a child who is molested may turn away altogether from spiritual pursuits even into adulthood. He or she may not attend church, pray, or otherwise participate in religious rituals. David Clohessy, for instance, says he no longer considers himself a Catholic. “In fairness, I want to say that I could be in this same spiritual position even if I never had been abused.” Still, he says, “there are times when I am very envious of those people who have been able to separate out what one man with a Roman collar did to them as kids from the rest of the institution and the rest of religion. I am envious of people who still have their faith.”

Outrage and anger are understandable, natural, human responses to sexual abuse of minors by clergy; the force of those feelings is needed to protect children. However, what often gets lost in the hue and cry resulting from news of such abuse is an understanding of the central character in the drama: the perpetrator.

Father Rossetti of St. Luke Institute takes a compassionate yet clear-eyed view of clergy child abusers. The institute, a 32-bed psychiatric hospital in the Maryland suburbs outside Washington, D.C., provides care primarily for Catholic priests with addictive disorders and psychological problems such as chronic depression. St. Luke also deals with sex offenders on a regular basis. While Rossetti does not condone their offenses, he does see their behavior as reflective of larger societal problems. He uses family-therapy and systems theories to explain how these offenders might be the “identified patients” of a dysfunctional societal “family.”

“Child molesters don’t drop down from Mars,” he says. “They come from a society that produces that pathology. So if we want to get rid of this problem, we have to heal society.”

Specifically what need to be healed, he says, are our flawed attitudes toward human sexuality and aggression. On the one hand, he explains in Slayer of the Soul, we as a culture are obsessed by sex; on the other hand, religious traditions, in not-so-subtle ways, condemn sexuality as unspiritual and even sinful. Pointing to increasing violence, he states that we know neither how to encourage healthy human aggression nor how to manage violence. We need to learn to become strong, he says, without being overly controlling or power-hungry, assertive rather than aggressive. We need to become fully sexual people who are warm, compassionate, intimate, engaged, and empathic.

As for the molesters, Rossetti is surprised by the intensity of hatred toward them. He says he has heard people suggest castrating them, tattooing them on the forehead, even killing them. “You hear this said all the time by rather rational people. There is a well of hatred toward child molesters that goes beyond the heinousness of the crime.” Furthermore, he notes, attention seems fixated on child abuse in the Catholic Church.

Another skewed public perception is that sociopathic predators are the sole perpetrators of sexual abuse. As clinicians who deal with sexual boundary violations have discovered, the profiles of perpetrators fall along a continuum. Many different personality types can violate boundaries, and ignoring this fact can jeopardize parishioners and devotees alike.

Psychologist John C. Gonsiorek has described the characteristics of clergy perpetrators (see box, “Who Abuses?”), as have Richard Irons, M.D., and Episcopal priest Katherine Roberts, distinguishing among them differences in age, experience, career development, clinical diagnosis, and prognosis. Their work in this area is important in terms of humanizing the perpetrators as well as communicating the message that factors such as stress, training and education, self-awareness, and peer relationships are significant elements in both the cause and prevention of clergy sexual misconduct.

Says David Clohessy: “The most notorious priest molester [of children] in history is James Porter of Massachusetts. He was clearly a predator; he abused anything with a pulse. But even though his behavior is predatory, I think that if you got inside his head and heart, you would find the same loneliness and woundedness that is more obvious in other priests who molest.”

One of the most overlooked players in instances of abuse by spiritual authorities is the community. A good example of how a collective both contributes to and suffers from abuses by a spiritual authority is the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, Massachusetts, which is struggling to regain the vitality it lost two years ago when its founder, Yogi Amrit Desai, resigned his post as spiritual director after admitting to inappropriate sexual contact with several women.

Nestled in the Berkshires amid a host of cultural, arts, and outdoor attractions, Kripalu’s combination of holistic programs and spa-like offerings such as vegetarian fare, saunas, whirlpools, and a private lakefront beach make it a desirable R-and-R destination for holistically minded individuals. Its peaceful location belies the major upheaval it endured, losing two-thirds of its residents, running monthly deficits of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and reorganizing its management structure.

The turmoil the center encountered clearly did not begin with Amrit Desai’s resignation. With a core of 100 longtime residents — some having been there for 10 years or more — the community had been immersed in an individuation process in which midlife devotees were struggling to articulate and make conscious their growing discomfort with a system that on the one hand provided them with spiritual sustenance and a sense of belonging and purpose and on the other hand paid scant attention to the classic shadow bugbears of sex, power, and money.

The first Kripalu ashram, established by Amrit Desai in Sumneytown, Pennsylvania, in the early 1970s, was a small residential community that viewed itself as a religious order. With a skeletal core staff and affiliated members who worked in the town nearby, the ashram had an annual budget of less than $100,000. Spiritual practice was the community’s raison d’etre, and members participated in a stringent yoga regimen — wake-up at 4 a.m., with jogging, yoga, pranayama breathing exercises, and satsang (teaching session) all before breakfast. Brahmacharya — a yoga principle akin to chastity or sexual modesty — was strongly encouraged. In yoga the life force is seen as residing in sexual energy and sexual fluids. Yoga practice is aimed at raising that energy up the spine toward higher spiritual centers. Therefore, sexual activities — masturbating or intercourse — are seen as counterproductive to one’s spiritual progress.

By all accounts, Amrit Desai was a gentle yet powerfully inspirational teacher. The pivotal moment in his own life had come during a morning yoga practice session in 1970 when, as he has described it, he was “flooded with bliss” and began spontaneously performing — or being performed by — yoga exercises with a newfound flexibility and fluidity. Not only was he drawn into an ecstatic state but those in the room with him — his wife and two students — were also drawn into a deep state of meditation. Inspired by this experience, Desai began to formulate a new method of “meditation in motion,” which he called Kripalu Yoga in honor of his guru.

In the early years of the Kripalu ashram, it was not uncommon for residents to have strong shakti (energy) experiences, such as automatic movement and writing, speaking in tongues, and sharp increases in body temperature. These experiences in part solidified Desai’s guru status among many of his students; some disciples took them to mean that the guru must be bona fide and therefore infallible. For too many devotees this reasoning translated as giving over their sense of judgment in major life decisions. One area that was affected was sexual activity. In a milieu in which “single and celibate” was the norm, many disciples did not marry or have children.

What community residents did not know was that, as they earnestly practiced brahmacharya, their guru was violating this yogic principle through sexual contact with female disciples. In 1986 a devotee made it known that she had had a sexual relationship years before with him. But when confronted in a community-wide meeting, Desai flatly denied the accusation. The upshot was that the community — including her husband and son — believed the guru. The woman left the ashram, staying in the area to be near her child. Eight years later, she was vindicated when another woman came forward and described to community members how Desai had used her sexually when she was his personal assistant in the 1970s. What devastated many of Desai’s followers far more than the revelations of his inappropriate sexual relations was the fact that he had hidden them and lied about them for so long.

“I never would have said Kripalu was a cult,” says Jean Matlack, a Washington, D.C., psychotherapist and a Kripalu Yoga teacher, “but now I understand that for people who lived there and were young and vulnerable, they were in a kind of trance. They gave over their lives in a way that is the hallmark of cults.”

Another area where residents “woke up” was the financial one. Over the years the community grew both in numbers and in sophistication. In 1983, it invested $1.25 million to purchase a former Jesuit seminary in Lenox. Situated on several hundred acres, the ashram grew to 300 residents and became a thriving retreat and holistic health center. In the late 1980s Kripalu residents, especially the old-timers, began feeling their oats. Desai was traveling a great deal, and the staff found themselves teaching the courses, handling administrative duties, putting out advertising — in other words, running the center. With the flush of financial success and the sense of real-world achievement, many felt a need to “graduate” and to reap the monetary rewards of what was now a multimillion-dollar-a-year enterprise.

From the start, Kripalu was a religious order legally modeled on a Catholic monastery or convent. “Vowed” members initially received no salary. If someone needed a pair of jeans or shoes, he or she would have to request them. Later, members began to receive a stipend of $30 a month, out of which they had to pay for personal items such as shampoo. Than money was not technically a salary and did not qualify them for Social Security benefits. On the other hand, Amrit Desai, who at the founding of Kripalu had a wife and children, received financial compensation from the beginning. At the time of his resignation, he was being paid $155,000 annually, plus an additional $15,000 to $33,000 a year in royalties from the sale of his books and tapes. Although the words “financial exploitation” never crossed the lips of any Kripalu associates, the discrepancy between the remuneration of residents and the guru was obvious. When the community’s cup began to run over, residents stood in line to share the bounty. “Appropriate” remuneration based on length of service was instituted. But even top-level stipends were no more than $3,400 a year. A resident security fund — a kind of retirement plan that set aside monies to provide for lifetime residents in their old age. The vesting period was exceptionally long — 16 years. But in the meantime, certain amenities — such as a new building with living quarters for longtime members and easy access to automobiles — made life more comfortable.

One sticking point that remained unresolved, however, was the fact that some managers had been hired to work at Kripalu and drew salaries that seemed fairly competitive with professional positions in the outside world, while other vowed members, even though they may have been working for the community longer, received only the “appropriate” stipends. Many of the residents — whether they have left or are staying in some relationship with Kripalu — are now involved in a claims process that will work out a financial settlement between the center and longtime residents.

In an interview conducted in May 1994, Amrit Desai told Yoga Journal senior writer Ann Cushman that “we are in the process of dismantling the old form, which has served its purpose. We are now exploring new depths of the guru-disciple relationship.” It’s hard to believe that, as he spoke these words, he could have anticipated the chaos and disillusionment that would be precipitated five short months later when revelations of his sexual contact with female devotees would come to light.

Kripalu’s general counsel, Daniel Bowling, is convinced that Desai’s secret misdeeds did not explode into a conflict, but the conflict was there calling for integration; whatever was keeping the secret in place and unintegrated had to be exploded. Dinabandhu (Patton Sarley), past president of Kripalu and now executive director of the Omega Institute of Holistic Studies, states this same idea slightly differently: “Clearly, individuation needed to happen for all of us. You can’t fool Mother Nature. Either you do it gracefully, which we attempted to do, or you do it ungracefully — but you are going to do it.”

Kripalu did it. For months, even while guest programs continued, intense catharsis was carried on in private behind closed doors, in community meetings, and in special workshops conducted by outside leaders such as spiritual teacher and author Ram Dass; Arnie Mindell, known for process-oriented psychology and his conflict-resolution work; and Elizabeth Stellas-Tippins of the Center for the Prevention of Sexual and Domestic Violence. According to Daniel Bowling, it is difficult to “put words around the impact,” referring to the windstorm of emotions — anger, frustration, disbelief, disenchantment, grief — that were unleashed. There were a rash of marriages, births, and many, many leave-takings.

Still, the community seems to have weathered the storm. A new executive director, with both corporate management experience and a personal understanding of the spiritual journey, has been hired; the quality of programs remains high; the claims process is nearly complete; and a new organizational structure has been created: Whereas the Kripalu staff once consisted primarily of vowed members and 15 salaried employees, today 160 staff members are paid, and only 26 remain vowed. The managers are also working hard on a strategic direction for the center.

According to Daniel Bowling, what Kripalu has accomplished over the past two years “is not just Hatha Yoga on the yoga mat. We have done it under the most difficult of circumstances one can imagine, to bring about a healing in this three-way dynamic between individuals, teacher, and community.”

While the problem of abuse by spiritual authorities threatens to overwhelm with its universality, prevalence, and magnitude of spiritual and emotional devastation, there are indications that with vigilance, systems interventions, and support for victims, perpetrators, and their religious communities, the tiger can be tamed.

At the organizational level, codes of ethics are being written clearly stating that sexual contact by a priest, pastor, guru, or roshi with a member of his or her flock is a breach of professional boundaries, that responsibility for maintaining appropriate boundaries lies with the spiritual leader, and that violations of such boundaries are both unethical and unacceptable. Policies and procedures for handling situations — ranging from verbal accusations to formal, written complaints — are also being put into place. Experience has shown that without them, the process of investigating allegations gets muddled in ways that can retraumatize the victim and upset the community. At present, a variety of institutions, from the Buddhist Peace Fellowship to the General Conference of the Seventh Day Adventists, have implementedsuch codes, policies, and procedures on sexual abuse and/or harassment.

But according to American Baptist minister Pat Liberty, “policies and procedures don’t solve the problems”; what does is “shifting basic paradigms about ministry.” One way to accomplish this is through education and training. Courses on sexuality, ethics, professional boundaries, and transference can help young men and women get a more realistic view of interpersonal problems and dynamics that go along with the ministerial territory.

Buddhist teacher Yvonne Rand also thinks that spiritual seekers need to be educated in how to find a teacher and what to look for if they think they may be getting into trouble. Asian teachers coming to the United States to lead Buddhist and Hindu spiritual communities are to some extent culture-bound to patriarchal systems. Rand believes that the best hope for diminishing sexual abuse in the American Buddhist communities is to educate students by speaking out, writing articles, and holding workshops on the topic.

In addition to self-help and support groups for victims (see box, “Where to Find Help”), an often effective avenue for healing is litigation or mediation. Many people in both the therapy and ministry professions believe that if victims feel that their wounds are acknowledged and that some restitution — for example, payment for therapy sessions — is made, litigation may be unnecessary. Marie Fortune maintains that victims generally have reasonable requests: an apology, acknowledgment from the perpetrator, a letter to the congregation that indicates what final steps have been taken around the complaint. But when institutions stonewall victims, many feel that they have no other option than to bring a lawsuit.

Of course, litigation is what brought the issue of clergy sexual misconduct into public awareness. Lawsuits against the Catholic Church alerted the media to the problem and resulted in large settlements for victims. Through this economic leverage, victims forced changes in institutional responses. However, Kripalu’s Daniel Bowling doesn’t think healing and spiritual values are upheld by bringing in lawyers to rectify the power imbalance in this setting. In fact, he says, you can destroy everything in that process. Kripalu and its longtime residents are using mediation to resolve financial claims against the center.

Another area that can help guard against abuses is pastoral self-care. According to Liberty, the issue of workaholism is critical. “Basically, the lines between clergy personal life and clergy professional life are pretty thin. Historically, the Church is a place that has rewarded workaholism and called it devotion.” She adds that for clergy and their parishioners to think that the former are on call 24 hours, seven days a week, is “nonsense.”

Ministers need to have a life beyond their professional calling, experts say, a place to relax and renew themselves. One essential part of that life in order to stave off temptations to violate sexual boundaries is same-sex friendships. Jungian analyst and author Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig is convinced that they are the single best antidote to ego inflation and self-deception. Friends point out our virtues as well as our ridiculous sides. Setting oneself up as a guru can preclude simple peer relations, and without solid friendships one begins to minister in a vacuum. Colleagues and friends keep us connected, honest, and in touch with reality.

Last, Fortune cautions that people who have come out of destructive family relationships often seek a haven, a safe and intimate family unit, like a spiritual community. Unfortunately, these desires might create unrealistic expectations of intimacy and an enmeshed system that is inappropriate to a faith community. Although people often refer to their spiritual community as a family, Fortune thinks they should look for a different metaphor and model. “Which doesn’t mean that significant things won’t happen,” she says, but it all comes down to a sense of balance. “There are some things I do with my family and close friends. Other things I do with coworkers. There are still other things I do with my church. Occasionally there are situations where they blend, but I don’t expect any one of those pieces of my life to meet all my needs.”

Still, Liberty is convinced that “we have only seen the tip of the iceberg” with regard to abusive power by spiritual authorities; hundreds, maybe thousands, of men and women who have been wounded have not yet come forward to tell their stories. And, she adds, instances of abuse in which perpetrators are not being held appropriately accountable are still occurring. Far too many religious institutions are, she says, turning “a blind eye and a deaf ear to the reality of abuse.”

The breadth of the problem and the depth of the suffering seem to require a constant vigilance from communities, spiritual seekers, and spiritual leaders alike because the problem is part and parcel of the spiritual search. As Carl Jung cautioned, we need to be aware that as we grow toward enlightenment, so too does our shadow grow. Thus, simple remedies consistently applied — balance in one’s life, deep friendships, a dedication to self-knowledge, integrity, a willingness to stand up and tell the truth, empathy, and a healthy exercise of inner authority — all help counteract abusive behavior.

When the one you turn to for help, is the one who hurts you most.

Sexual Abuse of Adults

What is the sexual abuse of adults?

Sexual abuse of adults includes both sexual harassment and rape.

What behaviors occur with sexual abuse of adults?

Sexual harassment includes any unwelcomed sexual advances or unwanted sexual contact by another adult. People involved in sexual harassment may also tell sexual jokes, ask for sexual favors, and/or use crude or abusive language in the presence of someone else who is not inviting the behavior. Victims of harassment may wrongly blame themselves for having somehow contributed to the harassment.

Rape is the forceful act of sexual intercourse against a person’s will or consent. The focus of rape is power or anger and not sex. Rape is frequently carried out by someone known to the victim and can even occur within a marriage. Anal intercourse, which may accompany rape, is called sodomy. Fellatio, oral sex, may also be a forced act that accompanies a rape. Threats of serious bodily harm or death are often connected to a rape. Following an assault, victims of sexual abuse will often feel like they have been ruined by the horrible, painful event. Victims of rape may also wrongly blame themselves for somehow getting into a situation where the assault occurred.

What are some of the statistics of sexual abuse of adults?

1. Most rapes are committed by men between the ages of 20 and 50.
2. Victims of rape range from under 2 years of age to more than 80 years of age.
3. More than 50 percent of all rapes reported in the United States occur against females under 18 years of age.
4. Strangers commit only about one-half of all rapes; the other half are caused by men who are known to their victims.
5. Relatives of the victim commit about 5 percent of all rapes.
6. In more than one-third of all cases of rape, the male, the female, or both were using alcohol.

---

Do males or females commit sexual abuse?

Males are almost always the perpetrators of sexual abuse in the United States.

At what age does sexual abuse of adults occur?

Sexual abuse of adults occurs during any age of adulthood even into the geriatric population.

How often are adults sexually abused in our society?

Many, maybe most, rapes go unreported to authorities. However, more than 100,000 rapes (which is about 300 episodes every day) are reported in the United States every year.

How is sexual abuse of adults treated?

Treatment for the rape victim focuses on helping that person heal from the psychological and physical trauma caused by the event. It is important to give immediate support to the rape victim. Individual, group, family, and/or couples therapy are recommended. The victim should be encouraged to talk about her feelings about the trauma. It is often very helpful and healing for a victim to know that the rapist has been arrested and convicted of the rape.

What can people do if they need help?

If you, a friend, or a family member would like more information and you have a therapist or a physician, please discuss your concerns with that person.

But what happens when it is your therapist or counselor that has harassed or sexually assaulted you?

This is the case for many who turned to Christopher Hansard for help and for healing. They read his books, they poured over his loving, compassionate words, they heard how great he was from others, they read book reviews and interviews. They went to workshops, following him to Canada, California, Denmark and back again. They booked appointments and saw his loyal apprentices, they became apprentices themselves, and somewhere along the way, somehow they found themselves defending their space, their personal boundaries, fighting off fear, shame, confusion and depression.Fighting off the person they turned to for help with diabetes, chronic pain, and some went to him because they thought they just might be ready to confront their memories of childhood abuse only to be abused all over again in adulthood by someone who told them he would play out the role of their abusive father for them.

Christopher Hansard would have patients perform meditations and breathing exercises in which they were asked to “breathe (him) in”. He would suggest they perform the Guru Gita or other such meditations many of which revolved around or involved sexual focus or mindfulness, inevitably for many these thoughts would be directed back to him as their teacher or therapist.
Christopher Hansard played many roles for many people. He did so simultaneously, and still does. To assume that he is now faithful to the one patient he pulled most recently from his treatment room, is to assume wrongly.

At any given time he was prone to indulging in sexual activity with up to 6 or 7 women at a time. Including his wife or partner, whilst grooming any number of patients, sometimes bedded in rooms right next to each other. Then the apprentices or students were expected to carry out “massages” in which he would approach them naked or offer to teach them ‘tantric’ practices of which in reality this “Tibetan Master of Dur Bon” knows very  little. He would also invite other practitioners or even staff members in his clinic to do exchanges with him, in which they would perform massages, and he would ‘counsel’ them. Again, during the massages, he would initiate sexual intercourse with his victim, who would be performing the massage on him as an exchange for his counsel.

Patients were groomed over time. Many endured sexual remarks, undue exposure, humiliation if they rejected him, and completely unnecessary treatments or procedures which left them in compromising, vulnerable positions.

For Christopher Hansard, everything was largely about sexual gratification. His. Every treatment inevitably ended up focusing on the patients sexual health, history, or healing, and the solution or course of treatment always involved touching, performing fellatio, or taking part in any number of sexual acts with your therapist or ‘teacher’, Christopher Hansard.

Christopher Hansard told students and patients alike that it was for their own good. That it was intended to help them, and that it was part of their ‘treatment’. If doubts or challenges arose they would be admonished, or told that they would not get better if they were unwilling to follow the treatment as laid out by him. He was, after all, a “Master Physician of Tibetan Dur Bon Medicine”. These were practices and treatments that they could not possibly understand, but he was more than willing to teach them…

How does one heal from the “unskillful” (to coin a phrase that Christopher likes to use) touch of their ‘healer’?

When someone else’s search for “love” becomes your abuse

Love Addiction Part I: The Problem
By Robert Weiss, LCSW, CAS

Healthy romantic love is a unique experience which can encourage bonding, intimacy and the opportunity to play and explore with that special new person.

Romance, with or without sex, encourages personal growth as each new relationship forces new insights and self knowledge. The beginning stages of a potential love relationship can be intense and exciting. Most people easily relate to that “rush” of first love and romance; the stuff of songs, endless greeting cards and warm memories. Healthy intimacy, however, is characterized by more than romance, intensity and sex. Intimacy evolves over time. Loving relationships develop partially through utilizing those first exhilarating times to begin to build a bridge toward deeper, longer term closeness.

Healing the Shame-based Self in Sexual Recovery

Sexual Addiction Defined

Love Addiction Part I: The Problem

Love Addiction Part II: Recovery from Love and Sex Addiction

Understanding Addictive Cybersex

The Role of Grief and Loss in Addiction Recovery

Public Figures and Problem Sexual Behavior Position Paper

See All Articles »

It can be difficult for anyone who is not a love or sex addict to understand how love or sexuality can be exploited or evolve into destructive patterns of addiction and compulsion. Yet for the love and sex addict, romantic love, sexuality and the closeness they offer, are experiences most often filled with pitfalls, anxiety and pain. Living in a sometimes chaotic emotional world of desperation and despair, fearful of being alone or rejected, the love addict endlessly longs for that “special” relationship.

Caught up in the constant search for a partner, the addict’s endless intrigue, flirtations, sexual liaisons and affairs, leave a path of destruction and negative consequences in their wake of his or her behavior. Ironically, the love or relationship usually has few options to resolve these painful circumstances except by engaging in even more searching, creating an escalating cycle of desperation and loss. Just when seemingly “safe” in the rush of a new romantic affair or liaison the troubled Love or Sex Addict grows steadily more unhappy, fearful and bored and ends up pushing their partner away or looking outside the relationship for yet another new intensity or “love” experience.

Thus the cycle begins anew.

Unlike the healthy person seeking partnership and sex as a complement to their life, the love and sex addict searches for something outside of themselves (a person, relationship or experience) which will provide them with the emotional and life stability that they themselves lack. Similar to a drug addict or alcoholic, love and sex addicts use their arousing romantic/sexual experiences in an attempt to “fix” themselves and remain emotionally stable.

When love and sexuality are used as a way to cope, rather than a way to grow and share, partner choice becomes skewed. Compatibility becomes based on “whether or not you will leave me”, “how intense our sex life is” or “how I can hook you into staying”, rather than on whether you might truly become a peer, friend and companion.

Addictive relationships are characterized over time by unhealthy dependency, guilt and abuse. Convinced of their lack of worth and not feeling truly lovable, love and sex addicts will use seduction, control, guilt and manipulation to attract and hold onto romantic partners. At times, despairing of this cycle of unhappy affairs, broken relationships and sexual liaisons, some love or sex addicts may have “swearing off” periods (like the bulimic/anorexic cycles of overeaters). The addict believes that just “not being in the game” will solve the problem; only to later find the same issues reappearing when they re-engage in any type of potential intimacy.

Typical Signs of Love or Sex Addiction Include:

• Constantly seeking a sexual partner, new romance or significant other
• An inability or difficulty in being alone
• Consistently choosing partners who are abusive or emotionally unavailable
• Using sex, seduction and intrigue to “hook” or hold onto a partner
• Using sex or romantic intensity to tolerate difficult experiences or emotions
• Missing out on important family, career or social experiences in order to maintain a sexual high or romantic relationship
• When in a relationship, being detached or unhappy, when out of a relationship, feeling desperate and alone
• Avoiding sex or relationships for long periods of time to “solve the problem”
• An inability to leave unhealthy relationships despite repeated promises to self or others
• Returning to previously unmanageable or painful relationships despite promises to self or others
• Mistaking sexual experiences and romantic intensity for love

Delusions of Grandeur – Illusions of Love

Question:

If narcissists love themselves and are so self-centered, why do they have all these self-destructive and self-defeating behaviors?  Isn’t it a contradiction?

Answer:

There are two important differences between healthy self-love and malignant narcissism:

(a) in the ability to tell reality from fantasy, and (b) in the ability to empathise and, indeed, to fully and maturely love others. As we said, the narcissist possesses no self-love. It is because he has very little True Self to love. Instead, a monstrous, malignant construct – the False Self – encroaches upon his True Self and devours it.

The narcissist loves an image which he projects unto others and which is affirmed by them. The projected image is reflected by others to the narcissist and, thus, he is reassured both of its existence and of the boundaries of his Ego. This continuous process blurs all distinctions between reality and fantasy.

A False Self leads to false assumptions and to a contorted personal narrative, a false worldview, and to a grandiose, inflated sense of being. The latter is rarely grounded in real achievements or merit. The narcissist’s feeling of entitlement is all-pervasive, demanding and aggressive. It easily deteriorates into open verbal, psychological and physical abuse of others.

Maintaining the distinction between what we really are and what we dream of becoming, knowing our limits, our advantages and faults and having a sense of true, realistic accomplishments in our life are of paramount importance in the establishment and maintenance of our self-esteem, sense of self-worth and self-confidence.

Reliant as he is on outside judgment – the narcissist feels miserably inferior and dependent. He rebels against this degrading state of things by partly escaping into a world of make-belief, daydreaming, pretensions and delusions of grandeur. The narcissist knows little about himself – and finds what he knows to be unacceptable.

Moreover, our experience of what it is like to be human – our very humanness – depends largely on our self-knowledge and on our experience of our selves. In other words: only through being himself and through experiencing his self – can a human being fully appreciate the humanness of others.

The narcissist has precious little experience of his self. Instead, he lives in an invented world, of his own design, where he is a fictitious figure in a grandiose script. He, therefore, possesses no tools which enable him to cope with other human beings, share their emotions, put himself in their place (empathise) and, of course, engage in the most demanding task of inter-relating, love them.

The narcissist just does not know what it means to be human. He is a predator, rapaciously preying on others for the satisfaction of his narcissistic cravings and appetites for admiration, adoration, applause, affirmation and attention. Humans are Narcissistic Supply Sources and are (over- or de-) valued according to their contributions to this end.

Self-love is a precondition for the experience and expression of mature love. One cannot truly love someone else if one does not first love one’s True Self. If we never loved ourselves – we never experienced unconditional love and, therefore, do not know how to love.

If we keep living in a world of fantasy – how are we to notice the very real people around us who require our love and who deserve it? The narcissist wants to love. In the rare moments of self-awareness that he has he feels ego-dystonic (unhappy with his circumstances and with his relationships with others). This is his predicament: he is sentenced to eternal isolation precisely because he needs people so much.

These internal agonizing conflicts lead the narcissist to hate his tormenting self. As a form of self-punishment he then engages in self-destructive and self-defeating behaviors.

We can classify these behavior patterns according to their underlying motivation:

The Self-Punishing, Guilt-Purging Behaviours

These are intended to inflict punishment and to provide the punished party with a feeling of instant relief.

This is very reminiscent of a compulsive-ritualistic behavior. The narcissist harbors guilt. It could be an “ancient” guilt, a “sexual” guilt (Freud), or a “social” guilt. In his formative years, he internalized and introjected the voices of meaningful others that consistently and convincingly and from positions of authority informed him that he is no good, guilty, deserving of punishment or retaliation, and corrupt.

His life is thus transformed into an on-going trial. The constancy of this trial, this never adjourning tribunal IS the punishment. It is a Kafkaesque “trial”: meaningless, undecipherable, never-ending, leading to no verdict, subject to mysterious and fluid laws and presided over by capricious judges.

The Extracting Behaviors

People with Personality Disorders (PDs) are very afraid of real, mature, intimacy. Intimacy is formed not only within a couple, but also in the workplace, in a community, with friends, while collaborating on a project. Intimacy is another word for emotional involvement, which is the outcome of interacting with others in constant and predictable (safe) proximity.

PDs interpret intimacy as dependence, strangulation, the snuffing of freedom, death in installments. They are terrorized by it. The aforementioned self-destructive and self-defeating acts are intended to dismantle the very foundations of a successful relationship, a career, a project, or a friendship. NPDs (narcissists), for instance, feel elated and relieved after they unshackle these “chains”. They feel that they broke a siege, that they are liberated, free at last.

The Default Behaviors

We are all afraid of new situations, new possibilities, new challenges, new circumstances and new demands. Being successful, getting married, becoming a mother, or someone’s boss – are often abrupt breaks with the past. Some self-defeating behaviors are intended to preserve the past, to restore it, to protect it from the winds of change, to inertially avoid opportunities.

Primitive Envy

Narcissists seek to avoid the pain of abandonment, or the death of loved ones. Moreover, narcissists are terrified even of their positive emotions lest they open the cesspool of their negative feelings. Thus, the narcissist always strives to destroy, or devalue the objects of his love. Narcissists experience this inner conflict as pathological and primitive envy (the wish to eliminate the desired object because it is also, potentially, a source of frustration and pain).

But what happens when the object of the narcissist’s affection and tenderness – emotions much derided by him – is the narcissist himself?

The narcissist then “envies” his self. He seeks to destroy and devalue his own self. He seeks to punish himself and to motivate others to punish him (”projective identification”).

It is just one of the paradoxes of this disorder, a veritable mirror hall, where nothing is what it seems to be. Love is reason for envy and destruction. Self-love leads to self-annihilation and self-defeat. Welcome to the narcissist’s topsy-turvy universe.

Also Read

The Narcissist’s Reality Substitutes

The Narcissist’s Confabulated Life

Do Narcissists Have Emotions ?

Narcissists, Narcissistic Supply and Sources of Supply

We recommend:

Narcissists, Psychopaths, and Abusive Relationships

Dedicated to Urgyen Nam Chuk.

Bad therapy: the case is under investigation

Therapist ‘had sex with split personalities patient’s other self’

Last updated at 11:07am on 07.07.07

Add your view

A therapist has been accused of taking advantage of a patient with a split personality – using one of her alter egos for sex, another to be his cleaner and a third to lend him cash for holidays.

When confronted by his alleged victim he refused to comment, saying he had a duty of confidentiality to her other personalities.

The German woman, Monika Mirte, 44, had gone to qualified psychotherapist Peter Blaeker, 43, after she was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder. Much of

the time Miss Mirte was in control, but sometimes she became her other personalities, “Kathrin”, “Finja” and “Leonie”.

Bad therapy: the case is under investigation

She alleges that Blaeker used his knowledge of her condition to use her for sex, housework and loans. If convicted he faces up to five years in jail.

Miss Mirte said: “It is like there is more than one person in my head and when one of the others is in control, I always have no memory of what happened when I return.

“I found out there were certain personalities he favoured, and he used them to fulfil his wishes.

“He used Kathrin for sex and Finja to do the shopping and pay for it, while Leonie gave him money to travel on holidays to Mallorca and Sylt (a popular German tourist island).”

It is unclear how Miss Mirte became suspicious about her “treatment” but she eventually confronted Blaeker.

She claims the therapist told her he would not discuss the matter because he had a duty of confidentiality to his patients, including her other personalities.

Miss Mirte later gave details to police which are being studied by prosecutors in Cologne.

Spokesman Dr Gunther Feld said they were considering charges of sexual abuse under duress. They were also investigating possible fraud.

Miss Mirte’s lawyer, Christine Andrae, said: “So far there are numerous leads to show that the therapist made use of my client’s weakness.”

Blaeker has refused to comment while the case is being investigated.

Psychologist Dr Christian Luedke said: “It is a unique case but it is possible.

“If you know a person has multiple personalities, you can deal with the personality you want by calling that person by name until they take control.

“You can then replace them with another personality by calling the next personality by name.”

Once Vulnerable, Always Vulnerable

Way Too Personal

The temptation and consequences of patient-therapist sex.

WebMD Feature

Secrets, dreams, fears, fantasies — all are shared with the professionals we hire to guide us toward optimal mental health. It’s no surprise that patients often become attracted to their therapists.

But woe to the shrink who allows this attraction to develop into a sexual relationship. In its Code of Conduct, the American Psychological Association (APA) forbids sexual relationships during therapy and for two years after therapy ends. Violating this code can bring expulsion from the APA, a revoked license, and a nasty lawsuit.

Every year, about 17 therapists are expelled or asked to resign from the APA due to sexual misconduct, according to the organization, which began keeping track of the numbers in 1993.

Now, the APA is considering changing its Code of Conduct to forbid post-therapy sexual relationships forever. This means that if a woman runs into her former therapist 10 years later, for example, and the two begin a sexual relationship, the therapist could risk his entire career.

Once Vulnerable, Always Vulnerable

Why such a hard-line attitude? “Because of the possibility of the patient being harmed,” says Rhea Farberman, spokeswoman for the APA. People often arrive at therapy with many concerns, sometimes focusing on sexuality issues and distress about how they were parented, says Farberman. ”These vulnerabilities can remain for a lifetime, and a sexual relationship with a therapist could compound their problems,” she adds.

Furthermore, says San Francisco psychotherapist Dorothea Lack, Ph.D., the process called transference almost always occurs during intensive therapy. This happens when the patient transfers onto the therapist the feelings he or she had for an earlier authority figure, typically a parent. “Transference lingers for life,” she says, which is why a sexual relationship can never be equal, even years after therapy has ended.

Christopher’s Poetry vs. Threats – Justice continued…

February 04, 2009 08:27PM

Gita

Date Added: 08/17/2008

Posts: 44

Re: Christopher Hansard

While I cannot advise you what to do HDM and others. If you were to write about what you know then I would consider writing the people directly involved. It is my belief that although they are aiding Christopher, they themselves are innocent as were his many other eventual victims. I do not for one instant think that Mr. Fisher or Mr. Whitfield, or Mr. Wilkes are bad people or practitioners for that matter. I believe they have been duped as the rest of us were once duped. Again, it is not because they are bad, it is because he is that good.

Christopher Hansard is a fraud. I have confidence stating that here, because he is, because I know that he lied to his publishers, his agent, business partners, his public relations company and of course those who were abused while in his care.
Whether or not there is an absence of law or even regulation, those who have posted here, and many others know that it was Christopher’s gross abuse of power and authority that allowed him to bed a number of his patients over the years and physically abuse others. Some seem to question that, such as “jah”, “gondolf”, “dr. thomas”, however I’m wondering how the circumstances of those sexual relations with patients, whether or not they were ‘consensual’ (which they were not), negates the fact that he was in the sole position of power in the capacity of their ‘healer’. A title he more then insinuated every time he referred to himself as “Master Physician of Dur Bon Medicine”, or had others do so in his presence. How does the fact that he lied not only about that title but about his credentials and training seem to be diverted every time by the question of whether or not the women consented to their abuse!?

He lied! Not to one, but to thousands! and now some have the audacity to question whether or not his victims are lieing?

So, do what you need to do, write who you need to write. Use your real names when writing to people directly, do not hide anymore. For some reason we have been lead to believe, alongside victims that we have done something wrong here, so much so that we all hide behind pseudonyms, myself included. But when writing, use your name, and stand by it. That is the only way. As long as we are all hiding, we are not seen as real people in the eyes of the public, in the eyes of Wilkes, Fisher, and others. So make that human contact so that they know you are real, a real person, who knows of others abuse or you are someone who has suffered yourself. As long as you remain unreal to them, Christopher Hansard can create any story around and about you, as he has done for himself. He will dehumanise you, as he once did for himself when he created the story of the Lha Khu or Master Physician, but for you he will create a story of insanity, and scorn, and himself as a vulnerable victim.

That is how he now enjoys the collusion and support of those mentioned in earlier postings and how now it would seem he has them exactly where he wanted them all along, as part of his intimate defense team. He is confident now that they will join him and ‘protect’ him further as they now feel their own reputations have been threatened, and perhaps they have, though that was never the intent. But it is more difficult to defend someone once you have met the real person he has harmed or abused, and who is sincere. So when and if you write, write with that knowing.
Quietly,very quietly
by Christopher Hansard

quietly, very quietly
seeking
and planning
a wolverine
is caught
not by stealth
or guile
but by waiting
a while for the words
to come tumbling from its mouth
February 4, 2009 No Comments

Write to:
The RCMP – Canada
The Sapphire Unit – UK

Westminster Trading Standards Scambusters
Hodder & Stoughton
Simon and Schuster – Canada
Simon and Schuster – UK
Association for Contextual Behavioral Science

and of course all those individuals endorsing or supporting him who may not otherwise know. They have only ever heard his story, and we all know how convincing that is, or can be. Frauding a major publisher is no small feat indeed. Unfortunately it is what has largely given him credibility in the eyes of the public up until now.

If anyone has any contacts to add to this list, please forward them on, or publish them here.

Welcome to the Rick A. Ross Institute of New Jersey An Internet archive of information about cults, destructive cults, controversial groups and movements.

Justice?

February 03, 2009 06:17AM

Gita

Date Added: 08/17/2008

Posts: 43

Re: Christopher Hansard

Christopher Hansard is attempting to rear his ugly head once more… and he is not alone. See below.

Association for Contextual Behavioral Science

christopher

* View
* Track
* Contact

christopher hansard
therapist/coach
london england private practice
london, 0
United Kingdom

Site member for: 1 week 10 hours. a fairly recent site member
Contact Information

* Email christopher

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

* ACT Background and Training

i am currently about to enter a ACT training in London,UK with Martin Wilkes and Henry Whitfield

With the endorsement and encouragement of one of his former psychotherapists, Mr. Mike Fisher of the British Association of Anger Management introduced Christopher Hansard to Mr. Henry Whitfield, though Mr. Fisher is far from ignorant of Christopher Hansards unethical, sexual advances on his clients and students, and furthermore and perhaps more incriminating, Mr. Fisher is aware that the entire story of Christopher’s training by a Tibetan Master in New Zealand is a mere delusion. Indeed, Mr. Fisher is 1 of 3 people who Christopher Hansard admitted that the story of his training told in 3 publications is a lie. Yet, Mr. Fisher, alongside Christopher’s more current psychotherapist who was herself formerly a patient, continue to refer clients and encourage this man to gain credentials in order to continue practicing bringing their own ethics into question.

However there are many more who know differently who lack the training of these supposed well educated therapists. Many of Christopher Hansard’s alleged victims who know not by training but by the horror of their own experiences.

Christopher Hansard, is a man who by all definitions is more than likely psychopathic and has been for most of his life judging by his ability to fool even these otherwise intelligent people into believing he has been the victim of his own clients and students who seduced him over the span of 30 years, as opposed to the other way around, and his offering of having suffered “a nervous breakdown” just in the last 5 years. Yet both sexual abuse and physical violence have been a part of this fictional “Plastic Shaman’s” life since well before he ever feigned his own vulnerability and victimhood and reached out not for their help in getting better, but for their help in supporting his addictions and teaching him how to manipulate far better. Though this may be the first time he has so openly and publicly “reached for help”, it is not the first time, nor will it be the last he has re-invented himself. Christopher Hansard trained as an actor and continues to act by all definitions. He learned quickly how portraying himself as the victim, even of his own illness, placated his therapist, his detractors and even some of those he abused. Christopher Hansard is a quick study, and when once again his abuses and fraud were nearly exposed, he learned how drawing on the sympathy of those around him, served him, and could be used to his own advantage.

Christopher Hansard’s Threat

Quietly,very quietly
by Christopher Hansard

quietly, very quietly

seeking

and planning

a wolverine

is caught

not by stealth

or guile

but by waiting

a while for the words

to come tumbling from its mouth

February 4, 2009   No Comments

And so it goes that Christopher Hansard with the help of those who so easily colluded with him will seek “justice” from one of his many victims whose only crime perhaps was not being able to pull themselves together enough to get on with their lives after what they possibly witnessed or experienced themselves.

There have been many offerings through out this “crusade”, as Christopher Hansard refers to it, that the supposed and alleged victims were not victims at all, but seduced or even consented to taking part in sexual acts with Christopher in his treatment rooms. Let us assume for a moment that that offering were true. That the 11 or so women that we are aware of alone were indeed the seductresses, some in the positions of being his students, others as attending his workshops as participants, massage therapists employed by either him or his hosts, and many as patients in his care, turning to him for help.

Let us assume for a moment that it is them, and not him, that is in the wrong. That all of them, unknowing of each other perhaps until now, are lying about the arrangement or initiation of sexual incidences while going to Christopher Hansard for treatment.

It was offered that what he was doing was not against the law…

Is Christopher Hansard’s part in these sexual encounters in his clinic even considered unethical?  And what if these grown women consented? What were they told that would possibly ever allow them to submit themselves in such a way? Many of them of married, Christopher himself married, and why would they believe it?

Considering the absence of a law, or any sort of regulations in this particular case, it is up to you whether or not you decide that sex between a person who put themselves in such a position of authority, a position that suggested he was a “Master” no less, and those who believed and turned to him for help is unethical or not.

We can tell you that the women were told that to take part in such acts with Christopher Hansard would “help” them. That is why they went, some of them on referrels, others because they had read his books, and therefore felt they knew of his own morals and his enduring belief in honouring the matriarch. Through his books and his blogs he speaks eloquently of honouring women, of honouring marriage, and relationship. Though his lifestyle, and his practice, could not be any further unrecognisable from what he speaks of.

Why did they believe?

Because they believed his publishers and all those around him, supporting him, had already asked all of the questions, that themselves would have asked such as if the fantastical story of his own tutelage and training were true or not.

But here we are, the story a mere facade for the fraud behind it. For reasons that will remain bewildering to those of us who continue to contribute to The Courant, the many sexual incidences that we are aware of, have overshadowed the one thing that is beyond question. That Christopher Hansard cannot be trusted. He has LIED in 3 publications. He has lied to his publishers, to his patients, to participants, to the police, to the media, business partners, to the hosts of many of his workshops, to the public about his training, about his credentials, about having any for that matter.

Yet he is still practicing, even progressing, and it would appear there are those that still believe him when he tells yet another story.  There are those who still choose to believe him over many and who it would appear are choosing to cause further harm and grief for others who have quite possibly already suffered enough at the hands of this one man, all because they found out the truth, and stopped believing what they were told to believe, what they have been told was non-fiction. ..

And it has all been diverted by the question of whether or not the women were victims, whether or not they ‘consented’ to sexual acts since his career as a Tibetan Healer began in a official capacity in 1992.

His diversion has worked it would seem, and as the victim of harrassment he will be seen.

So we turn you yet again, to the blatant lie that cannot be erased, washed out, and so easily written off, because it has been written in Chinese Mandarin, English, French, Russian, Norweigen, Danish, Swedish, Spanish, Italian, and many other languages, *all except Tibetan of course.

Christopher Hansard’s books. His everlasting and irreverable lies.

The Tibetan Art of Living, The Tibetan Art of Positive Thinking, and The Tibetan Art of Serenity.

The Courant

Having to re-live through yet another re-invention! – Christopher Hansard

~~~

A Clear Admission of Fraud!

Just follow the story…

From his first publication by Hodder & Stoughton where he wove the yarn of how he had been found on a beach in New Zealand by a Tibetan Master who taught him medicine from the age of 4 to 27…

~~~

Author: Hansard, Christopher. Title:The Tibetan art of living : wise body, wise mind, wise life / Christopher Hansard. Publisher/Date London : Hodder & Stoughton. Subject:Medicine. Tibetan. Holistic medicine. Religious aspects. Buddhism. Mind and body.

The Tibetan Art of Living: Wise Body, Wise Mind, Wise Life by Christopher Hansard (Paperback – 5 Sep 2002)

~~~

Other publishers picked up the story…

~~~

Author Profile & Information at Simon & Schuster

The Tibetan Art of Positive Thinking Skillful Thought for Successful Living By: Christopher Hansard This edition: Trade Paperback, 336 pages Publication date: August 2, 2005

Christopher Hansard

Christopher Hansard is the author of The Tibetan Art of Living. Trained in the spiritual and healing traditions of Tibetan Bön medicine from the age of four, he is now the leading Western practitioner in the field and the director of clinical affairs at the Eden Medical Centre, Chelsea, London. He is married and has a young daughter.

~~~

and how that story grew…

~~~

Hodder & Stoughton > Christopher Hansard

Christopher Hansard

Christopher Hansard was trained in the spiritual and medical traditions of Tibetan medicine from the age of 4 and is now a leading practitioner in the field. He is Director of Clinical Affairs at the Eden Medical Centre, London. He writes a weekly column on herbal medicine in the Sunday Express magazine and a monthly column for the Life section of the Express. He regularly appears on TV and newspapers in Britain, Europe and the US. He is married with a young daughter.

The Tibetan Art of Serenity

• • 

  Christopher Hansard

  ISBN : 9780340835111   Publish Date : 11/01/2007
  £7.99 RRP Paperback

  In the ancient Tibetan Bön tradition, the secret of serene, successful living is to have no fear. But in our demanding society, where stress is the norm, fearfulness can become a way of life.

  In this inspiring book, leading Tibetan Bön practitioner Christopher Hansard explains the `twelve types of fear` believed by traditional teaching to affect our lives. He shares with us age-old techniques for facing and overcoming these fears, and shows how without them we can better connect with our deepest selves, transform relationships and find increased peace, humour and confidence.

  Drawing from his deep personal knowledge of Tibetan teachings, and with easy-to-follow exercises and inspiring case studies, Christopher shows us how we can stop living with our fears – and start living our life.

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The story continued until…

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November 28, 2006 03:28PM

pema

Date Added: 11/28/2006

Posts: 107

Christopher Hansard

Hello,
This is my first post in this forum. I am not yet familiar with the way it works, so forgive me if this enquiry is not in the correct category.
I would like to know if anyone has encountered a healer/therapist/guru based in London called Christopher Hansard? If so I would like to hear about their experiences with him.
regards
Pema

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someone finally questioned…

and a very different story began to submerge…

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April 27, 2007 02:06PM

wisedup

Date Added: 04/26/2007

Posts: 31

Christopher Hansard

Nice to see some chickens coming home to roost after a very long journey.
I was a patient at the Eden Medical Centre over 10 years ago.(Hello James)
When I first started seeing Chris, I was impressed by his warmth and what I now see as charisma, also he charged fees in line with what I could afford (but 3 times a week?) there were warning bells quite early on, one being the way he treated those who worked for him, he often seemed to enjoy a good belittling.
Sometimes I felt good results from seeing him, others it felt like a case of emporer’s new clothes.There were media people buzzing and he was king bee.I kept on because the good seemed to outweigh the useless but also he showed me his (probably fake) vulnerable side, which could be quite charming.In retrospect, it looks like grooming.Each time I went to him he would reveal more of himself until he more or less said he was falling in love with me and kept up that pretense for a long time. This was a difficult state of affairs for me for many reasons, I did not want that kind of attention.

As Chris wooed, I would take the piss out of him, now, I can see this may have been part of my appeal.He stepped up the charm offensive (no irony here) and I began to take him seriously.His behaviour was sexually and emotionally inappropriate, probably in a court of law I could site sexual abuse.This is quite hard to write about.When it got more serious, I wrote him a long letter to try and get him to justify his behaviour,(as he kept telling me I needed a man like him,and the rest),but when it came to him standing by his behaviour or word, he just avoided all responsibility and acted like I had made it all up.

Okay, I was an adult, but my issues were anxiety/depression and a lot of serious neurological problems, possible M.S..Did he medically help me?, not really, sometimes we had a laugh. Did he “mirror” me? Not really, I didn’t ask for a guru, I wasn’t seeking to have my ego dismantled but the effect of him not taking responsibility for his behaviour was devastating, I lost all sense of my SELF, like an energy vampire he took my power. When it all came to a head, I was so completely overpowered by him that I was in a very dangerous state, so much so that my ex-partner phoned him in desperation. The response was that I was completely nuts, not to be trusted and that I brought it all on myself and if he wanted to help me, give me 50,000grams of vitamin C. ????!!!!

April 27, 2007 04:23PM

pema

Date Added: 11/28/2006

Posts: 107

Christopher Hansard

Thank you Wisedup for your courage in re-living your experience

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“Health Warning: Christopher Hansard could seriously damage your health”

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and now…

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Association for Contextual Behavioral Science

christopher
* View
* Track
* Contact

christopher hansard
therapist/coach
london england private practice
london, 0
United Kingdom

Site member for: 1 week 10 hours. a fairly recent site member
Contact Information

* Email christopher

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

* ACT Background and Training

i am currently about to enter a ACT training in London,UK with Martin Wilkes and Henry Whitfield

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Another Re-Invention and no mention of a Tibetan Master nor of Tibetan Medicine practices, skills, acupuncture, herbs, teachings, lineages, honour or spirituality!

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Clearly Christopher Hansard, formally known as “Physician of Tibetan Dur Bon Medicine” has frauded many thousands of people, yet a number of publishers continue to sell his books, and he continues to enjoy the royalties from the one real skill Christopher Hansard has always possessed, the ability to tell a story and carry a lie so far that we have to question whether or not this man might truly possess the power to overtake our sensibilites.

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THEN…

Christopher Hansard – Master Physician of Tibetan Bön Medicine. Author, educator on ancient Tibetan lifestyle, health, and spirituality based in London, UK.

NOW…

I value being able to share my researches about Mr. Christopher Hansard, an individual who formerly achieved a moderate standing within the world of alternative therapy. Possessed it seems with some charm and persuasiveness, Chris claimed to be an adept, of what he asserted to be an ancient Tibetan healing system, which he called ‘Dur Bon’. According to his account, he was invested with special abilities, that were supposedly recognized (presumably through some sort of Lobsang Rampa-style telepathy) by Tibetans inside Tibet. Who we were asked to believe, during a period of bloody suppression and the wholesale destruction of their culture by communist China, were seemingly so moved by the discovery of Christopher, faced torture and prison by dispatching, (exactly how, and what, travel documents were secured from communist Chinese troops remains another curiosity) a teacher to New Zealand. Where the four-year old Chris was then supposedly steeped in the complicated, and extensive mysteries of Tibetan medicine.

It was an alluring and exotic tale, sufficiently mysterious to attract the interest of a number of clients, seeking ‘enlightenment’, healing, or self-development.

more…