Getting Your Attack On at the Academy for Psychic Studies

This is what Helen Mirren did when Angela told

her to tithe her film wages.

Admit it, Helen Mirren with a gun is HOT.

...and Angela, don't even try to touch

Betty White's Golden Girls wages.

We've all been through the Academy for Psychic Studies' warm and nourishing healing programs where we were all screamed at for hours and insulted with every kind of personal, cultural, ethnic, gender and fashion slurs, insults and abuse.

In fact, there is hardly a person who has survived the Academy's reign of abuse who managed to duck the swinging blade of healing dispensed by the spiritual leaders Angela Silva and Robin Dumolin.  One guy only found peace and quiet after he blew his brains out with a shotgun.  The rest of us had to get the fuck out of Dodge and had to put up with Angela's goon coming around to harass us for money even after we made it to the free world.

But the inspiration for all this spiritual harassment, the warm and nourishing attacks on your character, the corruption of your family ties, the ruin and destruction of your personal morals and values (the same morals and values that lay the foundation for a stable and civilized society) had to come from only the most  divine, holy and spiritual sources, wouldn't it?

Such loving and caring people like Angela Silva, Robin Dumolin and the founding psychotic Rev. Bill Duby would only use the kinds of spiritual techniques and teachings that are in the best interest and higher good of their followers, wouldn't they?

Yeah.  Just like Mayor Quan wants to keep the occupy-ers safe by covering them with tear gas and heaving grenades at them. (BTW: I just heard she's being called "Flipper" for her flip-flopping ways.)

I was surfing around the interweb and ran across something interesting.  It was something called "attack therapy".  Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia:

Attack therapy is a controversial type of psychotherapy... It involves highly confrontational interaction between the patient and a therapist, or between the patient and fellow patients during group therapy, in which the patient may be verbally abused, denounced, or humiliated by the therapist or other members of the group.

Maia Szalavitz writes that attack therapy can include the tactics of isolation, and rigid imposition of rules, which later leads to a restoration of limited permissive freedom, and an acknowledgement of those that did comply with the strict rules.

A study of group therapy in over 200 normal college students conducted by Yalom and Lieberman found that 9.1% of the students who completed over half of a series of "encounter groups" using attack therapy had psychological damage lasting at least six months. The most dangerous groups were the Synanon-style groups with a harsh, authoritarian leader.

Synanon was a drug rehabilitation center that later reorganized as a church.  It was led by a man named Chuck Dederich who harassed ex-members, current members and anyone else he disagreed with.  Mr. Dederich's associates placed a rattlesnake in the mailbox of an attorney who filed suit against Synanon.  The attorney was bitten and lost much of the use of one hand.

Judging from his print missive "Faith Under Fire" Rev. Bill Duby harbors the same kind of animosity for his ex-members as Mr. Dederich - but that's in the past as God dropped the hammer on Bill's ass in 2001 (making this December the tenth anniversary of Bill's timely departure - I say we throw a party).

Now, draw your own parallels between Synanon and the Academy.

I have.  Synanon has something called "the game" where recovering addicts gather to single out an individual to insult, demean and otherwise dehumanize him or her.  To what effect and for what reason is not really clear to me. At times, the leaders will jump in to intensify the game and throw a few kicks to the gonads themselves.  It's pretty close to the kind of things "Dr. Phil" does on his talk show but much more intense (which I know sounds impossible, but trust me - I've seen "the game" it is intense).

In a more naive time, I volunteered to teach drug addicts computer skills.  I usually arrived with an armload of software, computers, hardware and accessories every time I went there.  It was great to see guys come off the streets and get off drugs.

This rehab center used the same things Synanon and Delancy Street used.  I watched them engage in "the game".  I was glad I was only watching.  One woman got jumped by several of her peers and a leader or two for things I didn't really understand.  She responded as you might expect - like a cornered animal.

Fast forward to my even stupider time where the con man and his two witches kept me confined in their stable of warmth and nourishment.  It didn't take long for the stable to start looking more and more like San Quentin and the happy and helpful faces to greet you with a scowl.

The psychic readings were the main venue for people to vent their scorn on another.  I remember many where various members vented their frustration with me in a psychic reading for things so petty (like Joy and I staying in a hotel rather than in a stinking tent pitched in a stinking field or that we dared to take a little va-ca to Disneyland) I wondered what the hell was on these people's minds.

Well, I don't wonder what was in their minds - I wonder what's left of it.  Many still seem to operate as they have in the cult, blaming everyone else for all the things they need to overcome.  So many of the ugly and frightful things  they "saw" made no damn sense or more commonly, were concocted from tidbits of information they gleaned from their seemingly friendly conversations with you.  It's the same kind of trickery used by con artists and used car salesmen.

No matter what the reason, psychic readings gave the hapless followers a venue to make someone else feel even worse then themselves.  If you are familiar with the term "shit rolls downhill" you can figure out the sequence of events that led to the followers ripping at each other in a psychic attack set in the closed environment of the Academy for Psychic Studies compound.

When you want to receive a psychotic reading, don't let me stop you.  In fact, if you are of the bent to get one from the Academy, there's nothing I can say to stop you.  However if you have a curiosity about what those readings are all about when you are past the "just take their money" stage, you might just find that the readers are seeing in your own psychic space all the things they loathe about themselves and that they are seeing shortcomings in all the things you have they can never possess.

So if you have a happy family, a few psychic readings where the readers scowl and snarl at your "unhealthy" connection to you loved ones will cure you of your familial bonds.  I mean, just ask a particular Academy for Psychic Studies couple when they last saw their families.  Their peers went after them again an again until those bonds were corrupted.

If you have a great career, stick around so the psychotic readers can tell you how bad your employers are and how you are giving your soul away for the vain and selfish goals of security, fulfillment and a comfortable life for you and your family.

If your education is advanced or if you seek to pursue the higher learning appropriate to your skills and interest, have a psychotic reading from your peers (or better yet - a leader) so you can feel so discouraged and defeated from your fruitless effort, you'll quit school a couple of quarters away from your Master's degree to take up housecleaning to pay your student loans.

Just so you won't have nightmares or your PTSD won't be triggered, I'll quote one of the more mild "healing" attack sessions described in Steve Sanchez's book: Spiritual Perversion

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I was in a state of devastation. I was at once like a raw wound and numb from excess pain and stress. I was enraged and felt helpless. Everything he said felt like arrows of injustice, but at the same time, I was absorbing it and at least partially believed it.

We milled about the Academy for a bit. I was like a lame, numb duck walking around. Everyone looked at me like I had the plague. The guys had something to eat. **** and **** received some more instructions from Rev. Bill, and we went over to Russell Street. I desperately felt a need to eat some protein to help ground my hypersensitive nervous system. I dreaded every second of what was coming.

They all found seats in the narrow living room. I stood at one end near the next room, because it would be easier to walk out from there.

****** had a contemptuous, agitated look on his face. 

***** seemed to consider himself the director of the proceedings since Rev. Bill had given him instructions. He took a deep, loud breath and looked up as if it pained him and said, “Well, Rev. Bill says you need some brothers right now, Steve, so that’s why we’re here. You know we are all dogs here. I think everyone here has been through this before, except maybe ******. 

Rev. Bill says it’s our job as brothers to try and get through to you. The first thing I see is that you have a hard time bonding with other men. You were always in competition with your father and brothers and you can’t seem to let go of that, so you can’t bond with other men. You always have to be one up. So the real problem now is you are in competition with Rev. Bill, and that will ruin you. You have to get out of competition with him if you are going to make it. We’ve all been there. Linda loves him because he gave her the light. He got there first. It’s like Rev. Bill says, if Jesus Christ walked into a room with men and women in it, the women would instantly fall in love with Him and the men would all go into competition with Him. You just got to get over it man.”

I could barely tolerate standing there; I wanted to end it as quickly as possible. I said, “Okay, that makes sense. I see what you are saying.” I wanted to diffuse conflict. I was attempting to be a good soldier of the teaching by not resisting or competing with what they were saying. According to the teaching, “you become what you resist” and “competition shuts down your psychic abilities.”

****** said, “I have to let you know I have to report back to Rev. Bill whether or not you got the healing.”

***** jumped in. He had obviously wanted to say something for a while, “Yeah, and you clearly haven’t changed your attitude, motherfucker. The problem is, you are making it bad for all of us men, so don’t shuck us off. You’re making us all look bad, so the women won’t trust any of us. You know how Rev. Bill says the women go blind when they’re upset and shoot with a shot gun blast instead of a rifle shot? That’s what they are doing now. On a psychic plane they are whacking all of us, motherfucker, not just you. We all feel it.”
Wrong or right, what he said made me feel guilty.

***** went on saying stuff he’d heard from Rev. Bill. Then **** spoke up. He said, “I’ve seen you several times trying to go upstairs, Steve. On spirit patrol we see your energy on the second floor all the time. I live up there; it causes me problems as a male, kinda-kinda like ***** said. The women are always on edge, and they g-get on me f-for every little thing. Every time we do spirit patrol we see your energy… on the second floor. You are causing me a lot of problems, and I-I don’t like it.” He stared at me with his brows furrowed, at once expecting me to react and challenging me to fight back, in which case he clearly world have escalated the conflict. 

I was tempted to react in anger for a moment, but I knew his pattern too well. I sensed he was talking to the ghost of his brother, not me.

Periodically ***** posed the question as to whether I had changed my attitude. I tried to show I was cooperating and changing my attitude, but it didn’t come natural. They kept voting down that I had made any internal change.

***** said, “I guess you just don’t want to hear what we are saying, Steve. ********’s talking about the energy behind it. Rev. Bill has also told you many times, it’s about time to hang up the cleats. What do you think he means by that?”

This sort of thing went on for some time, and then the phone rang. ***** answered. We could all tell by his manner that it was Rev. Bill on the other end. “Okay… Yes, we are working on it. I think he’s trying, you now, it’s hard… Yeah, his attitude… No, it’s not really changing…” 

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Believe it or not, the men were somewhat more restrained in their attack sessions.  Bill Duby and the Witches of Ellsworth Street demanded the women be subjected to some of the most intense attacks seen since "Shock and Awe".  I described a few in earlier posts.  Instead of writing them again, I'll just say the term "bitch" could have been complimentary compared to the things said to the women of the Academy.

While this kind of attack therapy has its origins in a discredited drug rehab group and appears to be generally rejected by the mental health care profession, it seems to be common among places like the Academy for Psychic Studies, EST, Landmark Education (which I guess is the same as EST), Scientology and so many others where being called an "asshole" is commonplace.

It must say something, then, when those who want to manipulate people start using the things honest people find abhorrent.