My writing as Amlearning January 8, 2004

Site Map		Hello again, Gee, it's hard to know where to start. So many deep and painful feelings are surfacing since talking about this here.  If I'm repeating myself by saying that, it's because each day there seem to be different painful feelings coming up. It is a tremendous relief to release them here. It's like going to the dentist with an abscess and bursting it so the infection can be exposed to fresh air, be cleaned out. I know this may be somewhat revolting or repellently ugly to anybody who is still in denial, or who has not fully come into their feelings about surviving such deep betrayal, but I would like to assure anybody else reading these posts that to talk about these issues OPENLY, to come clean with one's inner self about the abuses one experiences, is a tremendous relief. It certainly is for me, and for anybody else who openly talked about the abuses they witnessed or were subjected to. To all those who want to share their experiences, please come forward and make a difference.  Come and share THE TRUTH. It helps give the person who shares their truth a way to heal the damage done, and is also a comfort and inspiration to others, who may have been too ashamed to come forward. It HELPS to protect others who are now or will be victimized. I know a woman who killed herself because others didn't speak up soon enough. Being abused caused me many YEARS of pain, depression, grieving, loss, terrible deep pain. Please come forward and DO something about this! Please! How to begin talking about this all? I'd like to say that over the last 17 years, I have spent a lot of time in therapy, in meetings for survivors of abuse, and I am not ashamed to discuss what for most people may be a source of shame, deep feelings of anger, or outrage, of profound grief, bitterness, disgust. Those feelings are not much allowed to be discussed in society anywhere, particularly in the East, and most definitely not expressed without being shamed for it by Tibetans. Anger is not a comfortable feeling to observe in others or to feel in oneself. But it is there for a reason, and it can be the healthiest response to abuse of all kinds. When anger surfaces in the face of abuse, lies, hypocrisy, conniving, exploitation, sadism, violence, perversion, corruption, it is a setting of a boundary, saying finally, "NO!" NO MORE ABUSE!" Especially for those who have chosen spiritual paths, anger is not perceived as an acceptable emotion to express, particularly for WOMEN to express. I'd like to say to the men out there who have seen Sogyal's, or abuses by other lamas, that if a female priest had committed the same abuse I think it would be quite conceivable that the male victim would be calling this woman all the names that men say about women when they are angry, expressing in angry, clear, and possibly violent terms what they might like to do with her. I don't think for a moment that a male victim who had been spiritually betrayed by a female priest would necessarily ACT on that, possibly scary looking, outrage, but I can imagine he would release his anger verbally in ways that as a woman I would not be comfortable to hear. I have seen in meetings for abuse survivors that men who have been violated by women, who had power over them as children, say ugly, angry things in healing their pain. In either gender, the expression of deep anger may appear scary. Psychologically it is okay in the arena of recovering to verbally express feelings of deep anger, in visceral ways, because it is seen as an expression of anger that is not acted on. The anger comes up and out in a catharsis. Then adult action can be taken to put in place healthy boundaries of self protection, take legal or other sane adult action. The abusers get away with all kinds of violations, being violent or perverse, but whoa, if the victim gets angry, that's not nice? No, it may not appear nice, but it is most definitely a part of the healing process, like dealing with the contents of an abscess. An abscess needs to burst to heal. In abuse cases, the anger of the victim needs to surface to heal. In the recovery process, hidden anger just festers. Is feeling one's feelings or telling the truth a hunting license? No. There are legal ways to deal with criminal abusers like Sogyal and other Tibetan lamas, who think they are not legally responsible for their criminal actions, not least of which is avoiding paying taxes in the USA because they are under the umbrella of religion. But is it appropriate to feel the anger in an appropriate healing arena like this? In my opinion, definitely yes. One such case of a man being abused by a sadistic female, so-called Buddhist teacher, is the cult buster, Josh, who helped Jane Doe and me in filing the case against Sogyal. He had been a disciple of a malignant narcissist Zen priestess/master, whose name I can no longer remember, but it was, I think, in California. This Zen priestess connived Josh to be her lover and, like most pathological narcissists, after he gave in to her advances, was devalued in cruel ways. When Josh broke free of his enmeshment with this teacher, she gave him 3 dimes. She said the dimes could be used by Josh to call her from any of the three places he was destined to go after he left her: From an insane asylum From jail Or from a homeless shelter Amazing how 3 coins could contain such venom in such a compact and psychologically lethal form. It was a death script of sorts, a curse upon his head. I believe that Josh had been her disciple for a number of years, and that's what he got for his spiritual trust in his teacher. He has since become a very successful business man who is also renowned for being a cult buster, helping people to deal with malevolent gurus/lamas/so-called teachers of all kinds in legally assertive ways, and has ample, experienced legal connections to do so. He was finally, after years of deep anger, able to channel that anger into helping others. But expressing the anger came first. That was the beginning of his coming back into his sense of integrity. So I want to honor anger as an appropriate emotion in this process. It's not an emotion that comes out in particularly tasteful ways ... like "Ahem, excuse me, pass the Grey Poupon, and by the way I'm feeling rather angry right now". Authentic anger about real abuse usually comes out like: "FUCK THAT SHIT!!! I want to tear that motherfucker a new asshole, damnit!!!!! I'd like to take my psychic chainsaw and make puree of that shithead fucker!!! WHO do they THINK they are???!!!! GRRRRRR!!!!" Raw anger may not be expressed like that for a while. Often the anger is first just stuffed down, with depression, feeling frozen, physical illness, nervous breakdown, crying jags, or just bewilderment. But when the anger surfaces about real abuse, it's harsh at first for everybody, including the person feeling it, and everybody who loves that person doesn't want them to feel or be angry. People immediately want to put a damper on that anger, just sweep it out of the way, placate or call the angry person nuts or psycho, or say ridiculing things. But there is honesty in that anger, truth, and connecting with one’s integrity. I think that anger, when it surfaces about having been abused, is to be respected. It is hard to feel the anger and get it out when people around are saying, "Stay cool. Just let it go. Forgive." Wait a second -- something needs to be DONE first about the abuse! The abuser needs to be stopped! And why be cool in the face of abuse? It's WRONG! It's RIGHT to feel angry about abuse! It's HEALTHY to feel angry about abuse being perpetrated! Anger is not something one usually would be especially proud to have any of one's friends see. There is a lot of discomfort about feeling or SHOWING any anger. Tibetans really shame anybody expressing any anger, and it's said that even a nanosecond of anger results in eons of loss of merit, which presumably was accumulated saying Vajrakilaya practices while doing the dishes over tens of thousands of lifetimes, when one wasn't in the lower realms where they don't have dishes. But there is, in my opinion, a beauty in anger honestly expressed. When one has been thinking for a while, "This doesn't really feel that alright to me but maybe it will all change into something alright later," gradually losing one's integrity and watching other dharma friends lose their integrity, a good burst of anger can snap one out of the cultic mindset into awakening and realizing, "What AM I doing putting up with this insane shit! This is AWFUL! I'm getting OUT of this mess!" Breaking free of the malignant optimism of the abused into expressed anger can literally save one's life. The terrible and painful aftermath of popping out of the cultic mindset has been quite an ordeal for me as I slowly healed. After the initial anger, I sort of went numb. Who was there to express the anger to? I just went on with my life feeling a terrible sadness that my spiritual connection and feelings had been so violated by Tibetan lamas ... and for what? So they could get laid? It's such a grotesque thing to imagine that what was so deeply precious to me was so violated. But looking back on these betrayals, especially studying how narcissists work, the effect the enmeshment has on the victims who head into this hell unwittingly and get stuck there, I see now that I still have some deep anger to release, and I am happy to have a place to let go of this anger.  It wasn't just them getting laid; it was an abuse of power. It was and is very sick and very wrong and I AM REALLY ANGRY ABOUT IT.