We can't understand Teal Swan without understanding the Satanic Panic. And we can't really understand that historical disaster with out feeling our way into the mysteries of memory, fantasy, shame, and terror.Many of you will have heard about therapists interfering in a family constellation by insinuating the client has has memories of abuse to uncover, and that they can’t go forward in their lives without doing that work. This is the bread and butter of Swan's technique, with the result being that many of her close followers come to tell stories about their childhoods that echo hers. Swan's own story of childhood abuse crystallized after she goes through treatment with a leading Satanic Panic therapist, Barbara Snow. Those are stories on the page. But today, to kick off the Swan Song Series, Julian shares the moment-by-moment mechanics of how this disastrous parody of therapy turned his own life inside out, and alienated him from his family for a decade.Content warning for listeners: we’ll be talking about stories of child sexual abuse.Show NotesThe Gateway Michelle Remembers, covered by Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes Forrest Yoga students ask A. Forrest to stop using the Zia Nation symbol A. Forrest's ostensible mentor
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Welcome to an episode of a Conspiratuality Podcast bonus collection, the Swan Song series, a tour through the paradoxes of Teal Swan, an influencer who embodies the tangled history and whiplash contradictions of our beat.
This collection will be accessible first through our Patreon feed, but we will release each episode to the public over time in our regular feed in addition to our Thursday episodes.
Topics will revolve around the method, the myth, the impacts and implications of one of the most unsettling conspirituality figures alive.
Content warnings always apply for this material.
Themes include suicide and child sexual abuse.
To our Patreon subscribers, thank you for helping keep our platform ad-free and editorially independent.
And to everyone else, thanks for listening, including followers of Teal Swan.
We hope this is all useful to you as you consider your relationship to Teal's story and influence.
While I'm in that training, I...
I have a romance with a woman from out of town who's in the training.
And what I remember as the sort of pivotal moment for me that would probably send me off into an incredible tailspin for probably two or three years, is that I'm talking on the phone with Anna Forrest.
And I'm saying to her for the first time, hey, I'm spending time with this young woman who's in the training.
It's really nice.
And I still don't know how exactly to make sense of what she does, but she does a derisive kind of smirking laugh of the sort that I'm familiar with from her.
And she says, has she figured out who raped her yet?
Oh my god.
So that's a moment in which I as a young person am talking to my friend, my mentor, my teacher in the midst of this very intense nine week immersive training about a tender new kind of budding romance and that was the response.
The implication that this person is really fucked up and has some really horrible thing that happened to her that she hasn't figured out yet that I can see and that is to talk about intrusive right that is that is what I'm going to inject into your sharing that you're having a little romance.
I also just want to say it's intrusive on the woman.
But you're speaking to her on the phone and you're describing a new relationship and she laughs and she says, by implication, that she must be with you because she has some kind of trauma.
That that's the irony.
Yeah.
She's talking about you as well, right?
Yeah, that's there too.
That's there too.
Yeah, it's so uncomfortable I can feel my skin crawling now.
Yeah, I'm kind of sorry I brought it up.
No, no, it's also hard to avoid the underlying, like an interpretation that would say, she's jealous in some way of my closeness with this woman and she's going to sabotage it in some way or she's going to try and influence my perception of her.
Right.
Because the person that you're now forming a relationship with is not in tune with their trauma, whereas she is.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I took that to heart, and there were interactions that I had with that young woman in which I sort of also played that role of like, I could see something about her that she didn't know.
I could interpret like what she was somatizing because this was the thing like we're in this deep teacher training process and so we're going to the next level in terms of our healing and integration and really recognizing how whatever we're experiencing in our practices or in our bodies is a somatization of something from our deep psyches and from our past histories.
And so as part of I don't know if it's that conversation or if it's a later conversation in that same period.
There were some somatic, or there were some bodily issues that I was having that I mentioned to her, mentioned to Anna over the phone, and she said to me, If you let yourself go into that place, she knew that I had experiences with psychedelics.
She said, if you go to that place when you're on MDMA and you know what the truth is, and you just know it, if you go there right now, this is on the phone, what do you imagine may have happened to you that is now being expressed through your body in this way.
And one of the things I had been sharing with her was that I, you know, I had this weird rash and it was probably a weird rash that I had from like wearing the same yoga pants too many times in a row without washing them, right?
And that turned into a sort of free associative reverie around leading questions that Inevitably sort of came to something terrible that my father must have done to me as a, as a, uh, some kind of sexual abuse.
And that was, uh, that was a big explosion in my life, in the life of my family.
Uh, it was something that I,
I think at that point, with all of the setting up that we've established, and being in that teacher training, I felt like in order to graduate, in order to, not literally, but in order to go to the next level of my own growth and my own ability to be a good teacher and my own self-actualization,
There had to be this continuing escalation of abusive content, of getting to the motherload, or the fatherload, of the really bad, bad, bad thing.
If I could process that, then it would be this big breakthrough, and then I'd be able to walk in beauty, and be a spiritual warrior, and be of service to the world, and mend the hoop of the people, as she would talk about.
Now, did she say all of those things to me directly?
No, not at all.
But that was how all of these different elements of what that particular subculture was about, that was how it all came together for me.
So a couple of thoughts.
One is...
That given all of the context, all of the buildup around the intuition, the studio as the beacon of light and the kind of pole star for people who were going to come and heal their childhood abuse, and the oversharing of her own personal story repeatedly, that it actually didn't take much
in that phone call for you to be pushed into a reverie about what possibly could have happened.
And I want to just note that if we refer back to the Gateway Podcast and Jennings Brown's engagement of the completion process with one of Teal Swan's certified therapists, That conversation sounds almost exactly the same.
Absolutely.
So you had a rash.
He was feeling claustrophobic.
He was feeling claustrophobic, reasonably so, because he had just been on a crowded bus.
You have a rash, reasonably so, because of the fucking Lycra or whatever it is of the late 90s yoga pants.
And that gets turned into, where did you feel that before?
And let yourself go.
And then, of course, you get rewarded for Coming up with the most horrible truth, which, as you say, has to be escalated.
Yeah.
And I want to add two little things here.
One is something I haven't said yet today, which is that whenever Anna would talk about her horrific experiences, which, you know, included Included a lot of sexual abuse from a very young age, included being put on drugs and sold into prostitution as a child and being used in some kind of ritualized ceremonial way, like all of that kind of stuff.
She would talk about how she had participated in hypnotherapy.
