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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Hello Conspiratuality listeners, it's Matthew here.
This is a special, unlocked episode from our Patreon Early Access Swan Song series.
We'll be dropping these periodically into our main feed.
Thanks so much for your support.
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.
Welcome Conspiratuality Podcast listeners to the first installment of the Patreon Early Access Swan Song series.
This episode is called Close to Home.
Hey, Julian.
Hi there.
Let me take a deep breath.
Right.
Yeah.
A big day today.
I have a little bit of intro material so you can keep breathing.
First off, we want to let listeners know that we're just assuming you know the basics of Teal Swan's story from the top-shelf journalism of Jennings Brown, and if not, we're going to link to his podcast, The Gateway, in the show notes once again.
We're also going to link to our interview with him following the release of The Deep End, in which he discusses the importance of fully contextualizing Swan's personal history and the probable origins of the themes that she deploys.
And we're also going to link to our own coverage of Swan, which positions her content at the center of a growing landscape of trauma expertise marketed online for good or ill.
But we're going to kick off this series with a personal story of how that content was in the water of your particular high-demand yoga group, Julian, right on the tail end of the satanic panic.
So this is the late 90s.
Now I imagine that a lot of our listeners have heard about and can imagine what it would be like for a therapist or a charismatic spiritual teacher to interfere in a family constellation by insinuating that they have memories of abuse to uncover and that they can't go forward in their lives without doing that work.
Now in relation to Teal Swan, many of you will be aware that her close followers tend to echo very similar stories to hers about their childhoods.
For instance, we heard from Jennings Brown about one woman in SWAN's social media circles who, before dying by suicide, seemed to be remembering her childhood according to a precise SWAN-like template of ritual abuse and abandonment.
Now with Teal herself, we know that her story of childhood abuse crystallizes after she goes through treatment with Barbara Snow.
And more than that, Teal becomes a kind of recruiter for Snow, telling her friends Tori and Diana Hanson-Ribera that they, too, were embroiled in the cults she claims to remember.
That they, too, could benefit from talking with Snow.
So, we know all of these things in somewhat superficial ways, and I would just say that the real gift of being able to discuss with you how this played out in your life, Julian, is that we can get into the moment-by-moment mechanics of how this kind of disastrous parody of therapy works and how it feels.
So, I really want to thank you for taking this on.
And I want to issue a content warning for listeners because we're going to be talking about stories of child sexual abuse.
So do take care of yourself.
So, Julian, I thought it might be best to start with the scene that I believe we'll circle back to in the end, which is for you to describe just the general joys and troubles of your birth family.
Well, it seems important just to mention that my parents had kids very young.
By the time my dad was 25 and my mom was 20, they had a two-year-old and a newborn.
Yeah, my younger brother and I were both born in the country called Rhodesia, which was a British colony that would later, in 1980, become Zimbabwe.
And at that time, they were in the midst of what would end up being a 15-year civil war.
We moved, when I was about four years old, to my father's home country, which is South Africa.
He was working in Rhodesia when he met my mom.
South Africa, of course, embroiled in its own intense political turmoil.
My dad struggled with alcoholism.
And was prone to emotional outbursts.
Also, when drinking, he would get in the occasional bar fight.
He would do drunken philandering, which would create great conflicts between him and my mother.
He would sometimes drive very dangerously when he was drunk and angry, often with my mom and my brother and I in the car, or not often is probably incorrect, but that did happen.
And my dad got sober when I was about 10.
So even after that, but certainly before that, my parents had had a fair amount of fighting and yelling.
And my brother and I sort of followed suit and had a very oppositional sort of role.
Like the way we bonded with each other was through a lot of fighting and a lot of a lot of physical fighting, which in later years I would look back on and just be like, wow, that There was something so violent about that and so normalized within the culture that we were in that boys just, you know, beat the crap out of each other with regularity.
And something that meeting you now is, I would say, completely invisible.
I guess.
I guess.
Yeah.
I grew up very skinny with early onset acne, early glasses.
I got bullied a fair bit.
Went to very rough schools initially, eventually ended up in a nicer private school.
But at that point I was probably about 10 or 11 and I had learned that the quickest way to not be bullied was to punch anyone in the face who insulted me.
So, you know, you and I have talked about this before.
Uh, I kind of had that MO, that way of showing up in the world, especially around other boys for a few years.
But then by the time I was 14, uh, some sort of self-awareness started kicking in where I went, you know, I don't want to be a young adult who punches people in the face.
I don't, that's not, that's not who I want to be.
And so I stopped, I stopped fighting and I stopped, uh, maybe I stopped feeling the need to, to protect myself in that way.
As I got a little bigger and more confident and kind of realized I was not in as much of a war zone as I had been in when I was younger.
But I wanted to say too that even though my parents had the struggles they had, they were both also very sensitive and intelligent young adults.
They tried to verbally and emotionally give thoughtful messages of acceptance and love.
They both got into psychotherapy.
I grew up thinking that therapy was something everyone should do, that there was no shame in working on your emotional life.
And my mom and I had a beautiful connection around music and writing.
She taught me to meditate as a teenager.
My dad bought me my Fender Stratocaster when I was 17 years old and paid for me to go to music school when I eventually came to the US.
So they really supported my dreams.
There was always a message that whoever you become, We will love and support you in whatever you want to do in the world.
We don't need you to be a doctor or a lawyer and we don't care if you never get married or if you're gay or if you marry a black person.
All of that is, we embrace who you are.
So there was that piece of the puzzle as well.
And in their way as well, according to the limitations of the time and place, it sounds like they were also anti-racist.
Yeah, I mean, this is the thing that I've spent a lot of time untangling for myself, which is that we had an identity within our household of Being profoundly counter that culture at the time, so my parents were actively working and trying to dismantle apartheid, so much so that they belong to organizations that would end up getting banned by their government for which you could be sent to jail for 20 years or you know, have such a huge fine, you'd have to sell your house and your car to pay it.
Very disturbed by apartheid, very actively wanting to change it, always feeling the tension of not wanting to put their kids at risk through their actions, intellectual, psychologically minded.
And so there was often a sense of like, well, in this house, we have something unique or special or more enlightened than the society around us.
And for the most part, that was really true.
And so that also had an interesting sort of tension against the dysfunction of like, you know what, but there are some families around us that are happier.
And you said that, like, psychotherapy was not a shameful thing, that everybody should do it, but did you feel like you needed psychotherapy before you got into The yoga and wellness worlds to help you understand your family and your relational history?
I at that time in my life definitely saw things like meditation and psychedelics, which I was kind of obsessed with books about how psychedelics could bring about a sort of personal creative and spiritual transformation.
And psychotherapy.
We're just all part of the path of becoming a more self-actualized, happy, functional human being.
So yeah, I was fascinated with all of that.
I had been reading the Beat Poets and the pop psychology books that were on my parents' bookshelf since I was a young teenager.
I always had a reading age very far ahead of my peers, so I was hungry for adult material.
Yeah, so for me, the idea of personal growth and self-discovery and the recognition that One does not fully know oneself and that there is an unknown territory of the unconscious to be explored.
That was all very normal for me and something I would talk to other people about as well.
Like, this is the thing to know about being human that the mainstream doesn't understand, right?
It was my version of being separated out from mainstream sleeping people.
Now that intensifies a little bit, I think, when, or I imagine, when in the late 90s you meet Anna Forrest, who is a very charismatic yoga teacher of, I would say, kind of like the second generation of the modern global yoga movement.
And she has a big impact on your life.
So I just wanted to start by asking what drew you to her in the first place?
You know, these were the early days of Anna's profile.
I was sort of totally in my own world.
I was at that time 23, I was living in Venice Beach.
I would go out and do my sort of hybrid meditation, yoga, martial arts practice on the beach.
I was completely naive to the fact that there was such a thing as a yoga studio in the modern world.
That's how in my own little bubble I was.
This is 1993.
So I'm actually more mid-90s.
You said late 90s earlier.
It ends up going past the late 90s.
A woman came and hung out with me while I was doing my practice on the beach and said, Hi, can I join you?
And very sweet.
And we had a nice time together.
And she said, Wow, you might like my yoga teacher and invited me to a solstice community circle potluck sort of thing that happened at Forest Yoga Circle, which was where I met Anna and sort of
Simultaneously became friends with her as well as seeing her on display in that kind of community leader role before I had ever taken her class or gotten a taste of what that aspect of her work was all about.
And I think I just found her to be this Breath of fresh air in that she was, you know, it's interesting because we're talking about this in relationship to Teal Swan and Barbara Snow.
She was a truth speaker.
You know, we heard John Caspi say that about Teal.
Her reputation was as someone who was willing to do the difficult thing, speak the truth, and call people into a real confrontation with their shadow material and their unconscious stuff.
Let me just pause and sort of reframe, not reframe, but actually just underline that when a term like truth speaker is attached to a person like this, it's about a particular type of thing.
It's about the willingness to be socially intrusive, It's about the willingness to be dominant in terms of one's intuitive interpretation of what somebody else might be going through in their life.
I mean, it's interesting how we wind up using this very generalized term of, you know, she's a truth teller when really what we're talking about is this is a person who really doesn't have any shame about being an asshole.
And wrapping that up in a kind of, you know, compassionate, I'm-helping-you-learn-about-yourself kind of guise.
Yeah, yeah.
I would summarize it as saying this is someone whose charismatic interpersonal style includes a willingness to make other people really uncomfortable so as to assert dominance over them and sell that to them as I'm telling you something you really need to hear that you don't know about yourself because I care.
If you were to slow down the economy of that, what is the difference between running into an asshole who is simply going to, who's the drunk uncle at Thanksgiving or whatever, who's going to tell you about the world or tell you what you should do with your life, where you immediately say, this guy is just intrusive.
What is it about Anna Forrest, Teal Swan, and a hundred other people that we can Point two, what do they do in the moment that allows that sort of three-part mechanism to actually lock into place?
Where the intrusion is made, the person feels disarmed but not necessarily insulted or demoralized, and then that response is sold back to them as a kind of advancement.
How does that happen in some instances and not others, do you think?
You know, I hesitate to say it, but I still think it's true, after all these years, that a big piece of it is that the person is expressing a sincere Desire to do something positive in the world, right?
It's not, they're not just railing against the world.
They're not just expressing angry political opinions or philosophical or religious fundamentalism.
I feel like with Anna, she led by example.
So she shared her own harrowing tale of horrific abuse and would speak of these kinds of things very frankly.
So that was part of truth-telling as well, was the willingness to disclose things about yourself that no one else would talk about if they could maintain their sense of decorum or shame.
And it makes me think of Ernest Becker's book, The Denial of Death, and he talks about charismatic leaders as people who are willing to break taboos in public.
Because the breaking of taboo then conveys the implicit message that this person has some kind of power that I don't have because I'm afraid to do what they're doing right now.
And so therefore they must be special and it is right that they are in front of the room right now.
She would talk about how her approach to yoga had healed her from this horrific abuse.
She was messy and vulnerable.
She had this really piercing gaze, as you've flagged already, intrusive, disarming questions.
We've talked about this on the podcast before, the impatience with small talk.
Right?
The sense that every conversation we're having is about the real shit that matters.
And we've identified that now and that's what our interactions are going to be about.
Yeah, there's no such thing as having coffee.
Yeah.
There's no such thing as discussing the garden.
Yeah, there's no such thing as discussing the garden.
Yeah.
There has to be some sort of ultimacy to every human contact.
It has to be productive, right?
Like, it has to do something.
You feel like you're wasting your time in the presence of another person, and you're wasting your wild and precious life if you're not getting to the heart of something, like, immediately.
Yeah, so we're on a mission together.
We are the ones who have gotten in touch with something really important that most of the rest of the society ignores or denies.
And yeah, everything is important.
And I'm further along this path than you are.
And I've been through more terrible things than you have.
And I can talk about them with a frankness and a kind of wry, you know, shake of the head and smile.
And so all of this conveys some sense of wisdom and empowerment and truth-telling.
And you can be along for this ride too.
And then, of course, there's the, I don't think that in her case, and you and I have talked about this in terms of like the accidental process by which cults often arise, right?
And I wouldn't even call her a cult leader for reasons we can discuss in a little bit.
But I...
I don't think it was deliberate, but there is a pattern that ends up sort of emerging in terms of how the interpersonal interactions go on.
And one really important piece of that is I see you, I see things about you that you don't see yet.
I see your potential and I see where you're going to have to do some really deep work in order to reach that potential.
And this is about you, it's not about me actually getting more acolytes and power and resources, right?
Yeah, although the acolytes and power and resources accumulate through a kind of economy of pleasure sometimes, because I'm remembering that the first thing that Michael Roach said that I heard that seemed to shake me to my core in the first public talk that I went to by him, and it felt like he was looking at me because that's how always how it is,
It's kind of like, you know, all of these people figure out the Mona Lisa eyeballs somehow.
The optical illusion of intense engagement, yeah.
Yeah, but he said, it felt like he looked directly at me, and he said, you are going to die.
What are you doing about it?
Which is, which is, you know, forget about the small talk.
But the thing is, is that if you say that to enough people in a public space, and a certain percentage of them burst into tears.
The reward, the arousal, even I would say from his perspective, the eroticism of making people yield emotionally like that through just such a simple and direct intrusion.
I think is a huge payoff and I can imagine how just delectable it would be for that person to experience that, to take the tears and the emotional openness as a kind of food, you know?
I often think that the phrase narcissistic supply sounds very dry and kind of nasty.
But what we're really talking about, I think, is a form of social pleasure at the expense of the person who is surrendering.
And it's very, very messy, and I can see very easily how it begins to create its own kind of momentum, for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was an immersive and impactful, kind of vivid, Hyper real scene to be in once I started really being part of that community and going to those early morning two hour classes that were only sort of for the elite, right?
The intensive, Oh, everyone talks about it.
It's so intense.
It's so deep.
You're going to, it's really good.
You have to need to be ready for it.
Right.
And you almost need to be invited to come in.
And then in that space, you know, in addition to, In addition to things like the solstice ceremonies or the interpersonal interactions sort of outside of the yoga room, within the yoga room there was also all of this intense focus on she can see energy, she knows what's going on inside of you that you don't.
And she at different points is going to quote-unquote run energy on people by laying on of hands.
There's definitely the sense of being in a very Profound, shared, ceremonial, altered state that even today I have ambivalence about because I think that those kinds of spaces can be really nourishing and powerful and interesting and meaningful.
But it's, you know, you're stealing fire from the gods.
They're incendiary as well.
So she can see she has incredible intuition.
She's going to run energy.
These are all sort of premonitions of Teal Swan.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And I should say that we even discussed doing what we're doing right now because while I was watching The Deep End, I started to really dig back into Uh, this time in my life, uh, just through free association of, of what I was seeing on, on the television and think about the similarities and, and, and how that really impacted my life in, in very, very difficult ways.
All right.
Well, let's go there then.
Um, at what point does Forrest's story of childhood survivorship start to become transitive for the group, and at what point do you wind up starting to take on a sliver of it yourself?
You know, before we go there, I wanted to describe a couple things.
I made a couple notes here, and I just wanted to say that, as a setup for what we're about to get into, that From the very beginning, I could see that there was relational chaos around the studio.
I'm about 23 turning 24.
I didn't really have a language for it yet, but there's a pecking order.
There's a fair bit of conflict going on.
She would proudly sort of openly talk about that conflict as really having to do with her being the alpha dog who wouldn't tolerate people questioning her authority.
There's a rotating cast of managers and teachers who would end up being banished and the locks would get changed.
She tells me once how she'd like to have kicked one of those teachers down the stairs into the parking lot.
So there's a lot of aggressive posturing.
And I was very quickly in her inner circle of friends.
She'd openly talk about her insecurities, her relationship dramas, which were many.
It was all really boundaryless, as you've noted so far.
And I felt that we were friends.
I felt that she was pretty fucked up around her romantic relationships, and that's something she would have said herself and not been offended by.
But then when we're at the studio, she's my boss.
She's my personal mentor who's saying, I see great things in you.
You could be a really extraordinary teacher.
Which, that has stayed in my mind, the exact phrase.
There's also the awe-inspiring, super charismatic, domineering teacher, who I described, and not only was the like, I'm psychic, I see energy, maybe not I'm psychic, but I see energy, so whatever, however we label that, I run energy, I know what you don't know about yourself, but then there's the extraordinary, people who don't know her, the extraordinary physical mastery.
Of her, of what she could do in the yoga room.
I mean, just, and this was a little room, it maxed out at 25 people, mat to mat.
So when she's in the middle of the room, floating up into a straddle handstand, while talking and giving instruction about, you know, the specific ways that you use your core in order to be able to do that, that was all very, very, Impressive.
And perpetuated the dynamic of a kind of intense dominance.
Now is there a bit of a sleight of hand there in the sense that it came to be said that her physical prowess was a kind of sign of her spiritual advancement or did she have like athletic or gymnastic or dance training prior to all of this stuff because that's often something that's very confusing for people which is
That we associate the incredible physical feats of flexibility and grace and so on in the yoga room with a kind of enlightenment or, you know, intuitive grandiosity.
It's all very, very tangled and contradictory.
So she was very, you know, it's interesting because you've flagged recently in talking about Teal as well, this kind of The feminist piece in a way, right?
Of a certain generation of spiritual teachers.
For Anna, there was... Ambivalent, ambivalent feminists.
Yes, yes.
You know, patriarchally informed.
Exactly.
You know, third wave maybe.
Yeah, but also like really impactful, really impactful, especially with regard to, you know, Maybe not body positivity in a non-ableist sense, but certainly bodily pride.
Yeah, I think we're still talking about second wave, actually.
But we can get into the details of that another time.
We can get into the details when we get degrees in that stuff.
Let's let that go.
There was always a frankness about how she thought Iyengar and Posabi Joyce were horrible people.
That she had studied with them in depth, and that they were misogynists, and that they were perverts, and that they were physically abusive.
Good on her.
Say again?
Good honor.
Yeah, yeah.
So there's a she's already debunking the idea that being able to do certain things or being in being in a certain authoritative be able to do certain things with your body or being in a certain authoritative position automatically confers enlightenment, right?
She's never saying it's because I've done all of this deep work on my history.
And it's because I'm more enlightened than you are that I can do these poses but there is the sense of like the display and the demonstration and the advanced notion of the practice that always I think in the yoga world has communicated the sense that there is a path there are accomplishments
these accomplishments can be demonstrated and and borne witness to through these kinds of feats so that's in the mix and then there's also the other piece which is how she's giving instruction in the yoga room is suggesting that this thing that i see not happening energetically in your warrior
one is because of this blockage that you have because of this thing that That you're not conscious of, that I can see, which has to do with your emotions, your history, your traumatic experiences, even though trauma was not the buzzword that it is now, that wasn't really a word that was used, but that's all kind of clustered in there together in implicit ways that end up, I think, meaning what you're asking about, even though it's not overtly being named.
Right.
Yeah.
Now, part of that intuition and the stacking on of qualities about that intuition, you know, your posture is X and that might mean an injury, but it also might mean something psychic and there might be something in the history.
Does that sort of provide the groundwork for how you come to, you know, take on some kind of, you know, information from her about your own history?
Yeah, I think it's the water we're swimming in.
So let's, let me start to dive into the sort of heart of the matter here, because I want to be careful about how I unpack the topic.
I think that was what, what was so confusing to me as my involvement in that scene deepened.
And I would say I was, I was very heavily under Anna's influence for about five years, but I continued teaching at that studio for a total of 11.
And after those first five years, she started traveling a lot to teach workshops and trainings and just wasn't physically present that much, which I think was actually helpful in terms of me starting to disentangle myself.
And with hindsight, I could say that I think she may have leaned into that travel schedule because the little incestuous community around her was starting to push back against her authoritarianism and her harshness.
And in those sharing circles, we were starting to turn to her and say, hey, there's something we really want to talk to you about.
And she would say things like, well, you know, spirit has told me that the only way I can speak truth is the way that I do it.
And so, you know, I appreciate you sharing this with me, but this is how my gift is.
So I think at that time it became sort of more convenient to be the visiting expert from afar who could swoop into town and then swoop back out again after impressing everyone.
Yeah.
It's not as if Anna was some sort of like deus ex machina just like swooping down and implying or directly saying you have these abuse memories or these specific memories, right?
It's much more like the problematic interview style that we've talked about and that we will talk about more around what happened with the satanic panic.
We were swimming in the waters of this idea that there was deep work that needed to be done around repressed memories.
I already valued... Yeah, go ahead.
And that would be for everybody.
So it's in the water in the sense that everybody who's in the inner core starts to sort of virally inhabit this idea that this is what we're doing, we're all excavating together.
Yeah.
And for me, I already valued a psychoanalytic framework around the unconscious.
Most of us initially deny our deep emotions about our families and our most vulnerable and painful experiences and needs so that, you know, this is just part of the initiation into a psychologically aware adulthood is to face this stuff.
So I was all in on doing that inner work.
But another thing that's important to mention is that Anna's ethos was that the yoga studio was a healing center, that she was a healer, and that some combination of her approach to yoga, her Native American ceremonial work, how spirit was guiding her, her own therapy, all of this meant how spirit was guiding her, her own therapy, all of this meant that energetically Forest Yoga Circle was a kind
And this is sort of directly quoting her, that it called in people who needed to heal their childhood abuse, even if they didn't know it yet.
Wow.
Okay.
So she's describing like self-selection according to what her own charisma actually is appealing to.
Yeah.
Yeah, and that that is all driven by some kind of greater universal intelligence, right?
Was the word healer something that you were familiar with?
Because as you say it, first of all, it's a word that creeps me out.
It's kind of like the response that people have to the word moist.
I don't know what healer means, like what does it mean?
Does it mean that, is it meant to imply some kind of holistic skill or discipline?
It always bothered me when people would refer to her that way.
That also implies, sorry, that there's something complete about what this person is going to do.
Yeah, it always bothered me when people would refer to her that way.
I don't think, to be fair, I don't know that she necessarily used that word frequently, but other people would refer to her that way with a kind of, you know, hushed reverence.
And I always was like, wait, what are you talking about?
What do you mean?
Like, do you mean that she's like a faith healer?
Like, because I had my own allergy to that kind of stuff as well.
I think the implication was that she could intuitively zoom in on what needed to change and through being in her presence, through her attentions, that would start to change in you because she had a gift.
It's also not proprietary, I guess, right?
Like, you can't call her a doctor.
That's right.
And you're not going to call her a PhD.
No.
And you're not, you know, you might call her a shaman if you don't know anything about shamanism, but even that implies a kind of Specificity of qualifications and accreditations.
But Healer doesn't have any of that.
It's kind of generalized.
And it's something we talked about when we first looked at Teal and then we looked at someone named Kaya Ra as well, who listeners might remember.
It's sort of this interesting thing that at some point I think we need to explore more deeply around the perhaps gendered nature of how women without Other sort of necessary qualifications to be in the role that they're in can
at times, there is a repeated pattern of leaning back on this idea of having been through horrific experiences growing up and that initiation has turned them into the wounded healer, into the shaman.
They have a PhD in horrific childhood abuse, and then in saving themselves when they had actually wanted to maybe, you know, die by suicide or what have you.
Right.
I'm also understanding just now that healer is...
It might have a double meaning in the sense that it might be descriptive of something that you do for yourself.
The path they have walked.
Well, it's like saying, it would be like saying, I don't know what the grammar is for this, but I'm a runner.
I'm somebody who runs.
Yeah, I'm an improviser.
So, I'm a healer.
I'm somebody who heals, but that can apply to, I'm healing myself and this is my process projected outwards.
Right, okay.
Absolutely, yeah.
So, more about that, I mean, she was very open, as I've said, in those community circles, in her conversations with people.
At the starts of her workshops, in her teacher trainings, which I eventually took, that she would say she'd been through the most awful things imaginable, and so therefore whatever we needed to work through to become empowered and healed so as to quote-unquote walk in beauty, which this is part of the Native American terminology she would use, whatever we needed to go through, it was welcome in the space she was creating.
She would eventually refer to this as spirit hunting.
Which I've always felt is kind of a weird metaphor but it was like reclaiming like your spirit had gotten like locked up in your body in certain ways or you'd gotten disconnected from it and so we were going to hunt it down and re-embody with a sense of pleasure and empowerment and aliveness.
She would talk about, this is from an interview that I remember her doing, she talked about yoga as evoking cathartic experiences which she described as puking up the energetic puss balls of our past.
Right.
So it was to be able to then move forward.
But back to, just for a moment, back to spirit hunting and She comes to perhaps plagiarize a First Nations tribal symbol as part of her logo.
There's a lot of First Nations material that starts coming into her work.
And just so that we're clear, she doesn't claim First Nations heritage, does she?
Not that I remember.
I think I would remember if she said that, yeah.
So this is leaning into Pretendian territory?
Yeah.
She had someone who she was studying with in what she referred to as the Medicine Way.
Right.
And it was part of, you know, part of the mystique of the special wisdom that she had to share.
And I feel like she was very sincere about it.
I don't know necessarily what it amounted to or how authentic it really was, but I know you've done some looking into who that teacher really was.
Right.
Yeah, we'll put some stuff in the show notes.
It's kind of an interesting sidebar.
But yeah, what happens, Julian?
What happens at this point where this story begins to emerge?
Well, let me say it's gradually unfolding over the course of five years for me.
I'm in that world.
I'm becoming a better teacher.
I'm having meaningful healing experiences that I would still look back at as being sort of legitimate in terms of my own contemplative journey.
I'm taking psychedelics.
I'm growing up more.
I'm having my own messy romantic relationships.
And the pattern I start to recognize in my relationships is that I'm drawn to women who have a history of abuse.
And in, in classic sort of new age style of that period, I start to wonder if maybe deep down it's because I have my own abuse that I'm projecting onto them in order to stay safe.
And so if I want to start having happier relationships, I need to, I need to get to the bottom of this.
So I show up at the, at the intensive early morning yoga class, having shorn off my long rock star hippie hair, dressed all in black, like ready, ready to do the real work.
You know, and around that time, she offers her first teacher training.
And even though I've been already teaching for five or six years, of course, I'm front and center for that teacher training.
And, you know, I'm showing up, I'm ready to dig deep, I'm ready to overcome my delusions and find out how I'm sort of out of alignment and why that's manifesting in these really unsatisfying, painful relational experiences.
You have this way, Julian, of describing, of using the language that sounds like it's marketing copy for the training itself, but you have this like, just this soupçon of irony sort of floating on top of it.
Yeah.
It really floats back and forth between, you know, mild contempt but empathy for this person that you used to be who bought into it.
I hope it has just the right combination of those two things.
Yeah, right?
Yeah.
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've, 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, uh,
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 like getting to the mother load of the really or the father load, right?
Of the really bad, bad, bad, bad thing.
Because then if you can, 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.
That's 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.
Which is, 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 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.
So those connections were already there.
And then that for myself, in terms of how I was set up and where I was vulnerable to all of this and how I was integrating these threads into my story about myself, I did then go to confidants that I had within that community who I looked up to.
And say, it's happening.
I'm realizing what happened.
I'm starting to uncover the really, really deep abuse in my family.
I was proud of myself.
I was proud that I had crossed over into this new territory that was terrifying and disorienting and made me feel sick.
And therefore it must be true.
So, in one of our next episodes, we're going to look at this incredibly claustrophobic dynamic that unfolds in Michelle Remembers, which is the 1980 quote-unquote non-fiction book that kicks off the satanic panic in which the psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder is quote-unquote helping
Michelle Smith, who later goes on to become his wife, you uncover her history of surviving ritual child sexual abuse in the 1950s in Victoria.
And what becomes clear, and I have to shout out, which I'll do many more times to Sarah Marshall here, if you're wrong about, it becomes clear about two-thirds of the way through the book, if not sooner, that whatever Michelle confesses to, it's not going to be enough for him.
Whatever she is telling in terms of The depravity of the abuse that she suffered, he's not satisfied.
And she actually has to escalate and escalate and escalate.
She actually says at several points, I want to stop this.
In fact, I would rather cut my tongue out than continue coming to Wait, wait, wait.
Hold on, hold on.
He says, no, you must.
Satan actually wants you to believe that you haven't dug in deeply enough.
That's part of the ruse here, and you have to push through.
And if you don't push through, he will- Wait, wait, wait, hold on, hold on.
Satan wants you to believe what?
Satan wants you to believe that you've gone far enough.
That you've gone far enough, okay.
That's right.
Satan wants you to believe that you're done with this therapy, that this is it, that you don't want it anymore, and that means that you're still in his grip.
It's this whole upside-down Very abusive anti-therapy in which the client's actual denial of pushback is regarded as a form of resistance that must be overcome.
And I think what is so, we'll cover that in an upcoming episode, but I think what is so disturbing about that dynamic is that
It's so clear that it's the quote-unquote therapist who needs to extract some kind of heightened emotion from the client and who needs to get to the bottom of something and that the client really doesn't have any way of escaping
That cycle of needing to produce more and more depraved memories in order to show or to perform that they're doing the real work of healing.
And so you say, you know, I start this process and then I go to other people in the group and I say it's happening, I'm proud.
I imagine there's a part of that that's also recognizing that you're doing what she has asked you to do.
Yeah.
Is that fair?
Is that fair?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I don't know what else to say about that.
I'm thinking as you were talking about the Michelle remembers stuff.
She's wanting to stop.
And I know that it's quite different, but it makes me think about when we talked to John Casby about The Deep End, him saying that there were multiple times when he would say in the midst of intense processes that they were filming, do you want this to stop?
So there's that whole sort of dynamic around what stopping means, right?
Once you're in, it reminds me also of Chögyam Trungpa, right?
That he would sit in front of a group of hippies who'd come seeking enlightenment and say, you should all leave because this is like, you're going to turn into a snake going down a long tube.
And once you're in, you can't get out.
And so you don't want this.
Get out of here.
Because once you get in there, you know, it's like a self-selecting kind of weird reverse psychology.
Right.
Now, speaking of Michelle Remembers and some of the background for what's happening at the studio, what other materials was Anna drawing on as she evangelized this stuff?
You know, what I remember from that time and from taking that teacher training, which I did with her, I believe in 1997, there was a lot of recommended reading, a lot of required reading.
There were books that floated around the studio that people were saying, hey, you got to read this, one of which was A Courage to Heal.
Oh wow, by Ellen Bass, right?
Yeah, and there were other books that I sought out.
Let's just say, too, that that was a handbook for satanic panic therapists.
Yeah, so what's unique about A Courage to Heal is that it's, at least the edition that I looked at, it was a workbook.
So this was sort of, it was kind of like Very watered-down, self-help psychological text in terms of describing what the journey of healing entailed, but then there were lots of questions and there were lots of areas for you to meditate and reflect and then write down.
It's a very systematic process of like, think about your childhood, write down these things, now are there any other things that come to mind as sort of afterthoughts that as you're inviting yourself to go on this journey of healing start to come up to the surface as a way of starting to excavate and piece together a narrative that would ultimately culminate in this kind of patchwork of abusive memories that must be there.
And really train the participant, actually, in the validation of continuing to dig, continuing to dig, continuing to look.
And so there were other, I don't remember the names of them.
There were less of bestsellers than Courage to Heal was, but there were other books that were more specifically for boys, for men.
Yeah, it was an interesting mixture of things.
It was things like, you know, the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and Hands of Light.
Hands of Light, I think, is by Brew Joy, you know, stuff about healing.
And then, I don't even remember the name of it.
It's something like Buffalo Woman Comes Singing or, you know, some kind of gesture towards Native American wisdom and spirituality alongside courage to heal.
That's what I remember.
So, you have this phone call, and I think your words a few minutes ago were, this sent my life into chaos for the next couple of years.
What happened, Julian?
Well, as I continued digging, like you were just saying, into what could have happened, if this suggestion that there is this horrible legacy of essentially if this suggestion that there is this horrible legacy of essentially sexual abuse from my father, and then maybe from
And then maybe from some other figures within our neighborhood and within my growing up that I'm now starting to uncover, what does that explain about my life?
How do I make sense of it?
How do I walk that path?
And I would say that during the course of those two or three years, I would go back and forth between feeling I would feel that I only had two options.
That one option was that I was losing my mind, and none of this was true.
And the other option was that all of it was true, and that was too devastating to face.
I confronted my family, I wrote long letters, I had phone calls in which I absolutely freaked my mother out by saying to her things like, I'm starting to remember, and you don't have to pretend anymore, like really, you know, just those where basically my mom is You know, feeling like she's going to be sick and faint because I'm just being so, there's such an ominous tone in terms of me saying, I know the truth.
You can start.
And then, and then of course my mother going, well, shit, maybe, maybe my, my husband did do something terrible and I never knew.
And now, so then her having to go through a whole process with my dad as well.
So it was, it was awful.
And uh, My father tried in many ways to reach out to me and wrote long letters and excavated everything that really did happen when I was growing up that was painful and difficult and owned all sorts of things and apologized for all sorts of things and tried to do his best to make sense of where What this might symbolize, me coming to this place, what it might symbolize about what actually went on.
And ultimately in the final analysis, I think all of that was kind of good.
Like we did work through some real stuff, but it really shook my family to the core.
It created, I had those same sorts of conversations with my brother.
It created an incredible rift between he and I that has never healed, my younger brother, and I would say it probably took about 10 years before I was really able to fully Apologize to my immediate family and just say, you know, I was misled.
I was confused.
I was sincere, but wrong.
And I know now.
And that was made possible by doing long-term, deep, grounded psychotherapy with someone qualified who was able to help me untangle all of these different pieces and understand grounded psychotherapy with someone qualified who was able to help me untangle all of these And so...
So the wreckage and the chaos is just so painful to hear about.
Absolutely.
Very impressed that your father found it within him to disclose what he could or what he understood about perhaps his own failings or perhaps things that he had been unconscious about.
Was he at any point aware of the kind of influence that you were under?
Did he know anything about The satanic panic.
Did he know anything about false memory syndrome?
Yeah, both of my parents said to me and sent me articles about false memory syndrome and said, this is a thing.
This happens.
It's happened before.
They didn't know the extent of Anna's influence in my life or what was going on in that community.
I don't think I shared a lot of that with them, but they knew enough to have a sense of like, oh, we, we, It could be something like that.
I, of course, took all of that as just denial and, you know, unwillingness to face the truth at the time.
But yeah.
Was it actually worse?
Like, they're sending me false memory syndrome materials and that actually proves that they have something to hide?
I think that that was something I would have said.
The worldview that I had at that time coming out of the materials I was reading and the things that were discussed in our little yoga community was that This kind of abuse was much, much, much more common than anyone wanted to acknowledge.
And that it was rampant.
And that it was able to be so rampant because so many people were in massive denial about it and unwilling to face it.
And that forcing the issue and confronting it and trying to get people to face it was the right thing to do.
And that this was one of the things that they would say, they would say, oh, it's false memory syndrome.
You know, there's an analogy here for the general elitism of spiritual seeking, isn't there?
Because there's a way in which if everybody is suppressing or repressing memories of child sexual abuse, that rhymes with the fact that every human being is walking around deluded with some kind of blinded human point of view on the world and they're unaware of their divine nature and stuff like that.
And so I wonder, it's almost as if this material would be really attractive and impactful within yoga and wellness worlds because it takes something that is literal or literalizable and it sort of slides on top of a kind of dynamic that's already present in terms of worldview.
You already believe that you're part of an elite that is waking up.
And then this becomes part of that process that also, you know, excavates incredible truths about the nature of the world and also has the validation of quote-unquote therapy.
Yeah, it's so interesting, right, that there's this template that has to do with waking up from being asleep, and we see how many different things can have the right shape to fit on top of that template, right?
To nestle into that template, whether it's satanic panic, or QAnon, or COVID denialism, it all fits with this notion that we're part of a group who are waking up, the rest of the world is sleepwalking, we have
We have the taboo, unique insight that allows us to have clarity about the true nature of reality, whether that is divine, or synchronous, or quantum physics, or that big pharma wants to kill us all, or that the Democrats are drinking the blood of babies.
It fits into that template.
And that template is about urgency.
Yes.
And impatience.
Yes.
And going back to the top about what we said about, you know, these are spaces in which you can't do small talk.
You can't have a boring time.
You can't just hang out with each other because you have to break through to the other side.
What I find in the sort of waking up you know, template is that it expresses a profound terror of my life is slipping away, time is passing, and I don't know what will be real.
You know, it seems like the kind of pseudo-therapy or the parody of therapy that you're describing really answers that question.
Like, this will finally be real.
Yeah, yeah.
And there's that other piece that we often bring in as well, which is that it's having a mission to save the world, but it's in this insular kind of capsule that is not politically informed, that it's not environmentally driven, that isn't about the real world.
It's about saving the world from its, like, you know, grubby, boring destiny through some kind of grand narrative of heroic metaphysical realization.
As applied to the individual, which makes things completable too, right?
Because if you figure out, if you get to the end of your most morbid memory and you figure out the worst possible thing that happened, and that's actually the gateway to your salvation.
Then the fact that the environment and climate disaster is really complex can kind of fade into the background.
Or the fact that political inequality or, you know, the rise of authoritarianism or neo-fascism, which is very complex.
is kind of transitively solved by your individual effort.
It's a simplification process, isn't it?
It's like a toolkit for making something, turning huge problems into one problem.
Yeah.
So you repaired.
It took a long time.
You say 10 years.
Was Anna aware of this story or how it unfolded?
Did she get feedback on this stuff?
I don't remember.
I think that around the time that it had turned into something where I was confronting my family, it was probably around the time that she was starting to travel a lot more.
So I may have been on my own with how I was making sense of all of that.
I don't have strong recollections of her giving feedback on sort of how that process was going and of sharing it with her.
It's so interesting that you do kind of almost because I think you implied earlier that she started traveling at the point at which she wasn't going to be able to answer questions.
Yeah, I mean that teacher training that I was in with her, we would do long sharing circles at the end of every Sunday.
It was every weekend for about nine weeks.
And it was during the week as well.
It was super intense.
I think it was probably about three or four hundred hours that we all did together.
Much longer than the teacher training model that would later show up.
And during those trainings, I would say about three quarters of the way in, at one point
The group of us, or actually I wasn't involved, a different group of students hijacked the sharing circle and said, we want to ask that we get to share the ways in which we feel that your harshness and the way that you say things to us, a lot of it was just about the harshness and the feeling of being put down and not listened to.
We need to bring this up to you.
And so we're going to use the circle to do it.
And I remember In a fascinating moment of turnaround, I remember in that circle looking directly at Anna and saying, you know, I just want to acknowledge the incredible courage and vulnerability with which you're handling yourself in the circle while you receive this kind of feedback.
You're such an inspiration to me!
You pulled a Casby!
Totally!
That's amazing!
Did you do a bit solo rap?
I didn't do that.
I didn't do that, but I was impressed.
And after listening carefully to everything that everyone had to say about it, she did say, people have given me this feedback before and I've asked Spirit and Spirit has told me that this is the only way the gift can come through.
You know, so yeah, I think at that point how convenient.
Yeah, there was there was just enough the messiness.
It was complicated enough that, and who knows what the other reasons would have been, but to me there's a sense that it's messy enough that not being around as much is probably good and going elsewhere where she could stay for short periods of time and sort of have the influence she had and then extricate herself is probably a less stressful model for her.
So, I have one last question for you, but maybe to preface it, I just want to clarify that in all of the
Tensions and frictions and troubles that you described coming out of your early family life and that your father was able to dialogue about eventually and ironically because of this perverse process, it sounds like the fixation upon
Sexual abuse came to symbolize or came to sort of concentrate a whole bunch of non-abusive or simply uncomfortable things.
Is that a good way of kind of describing the function of that image?
Yeah, I would say that there was more of, this is all very grossly oversimplified, lurid psychology, right?
So as I matured and as I studied more and as I engaged in my own therapy more, I came to see it as there's a set of psychodynamic things that were going on that had to do with my father's emotional explosiveness and had to do with his own insecurities and his need to assert dominance that
If not sort of teased apart carefully and examined on their own terms and processed through in terms of all of the difficult emotions I did have about my father and about myself as a result of my relationship with him.
That failing that kind of more careful examination, it could get bundled together into something symbolic, like a violent sexual dynamic that, at the end of the day, just wasn't there.
The last question is kind of related to that process of symbolization and almost, what did you say you said, lurid and crude psychological reduction?
Oversimplified, yeah.
Oversimplification, right.
Yeah, so going forward, like me, you are now a father.
And you've had to deal with a lot more stress than I have in one particular way, even though you only have one child.
Your daughter has had some frightening health challenges that have required some strong medical interventions at times.
Now, we're going to cover in our study of Michelle Remembers, and we might also make reference to aspects of the UFO disclosure movement, that there are often archaic memories of medical stress in the background of the fantastical stories of abuse that emerge.
For instance, the abuse described by Michelle Smith while in treatment with Lawrence Pasdar all originates from and then seems to return to her experiences with multiple miscarriages and DNCs, probably while under general anesthetic.
That was very disorienting.
Also, when people describe being abducted from their sleep into spaceships, they will often report on experiences of being medically probed and examined while in a twilight state.
Now, I know that you spent many sleepless nights in the hospital with your daughter, and I guess first of all, I wanted to ask, does it make sense to you that these very early experiences of clinical intrusion and pain could morph into stories that are more lurid and therefore more easy to understand?
I have never experienced trauma more vivid
In myself or in someone else than in having multiple times to hold my three-year-old daughter down while she screamed, while she sweated, while she tried to look at me out of the corner of her eye whilst having blood taken, whilst having an IV inserted, whilst having to go through being x-rayed or being in an MRI machine.
I have no doubt it was deeply, deeply traumatizing to her and then having to sort of force feed her liquid antibiotics in the aftermath for many weeks at a time, multiple times a day that she did not want to take, but that there's this horrible feeling of, if I don't do this, you might die.
But in doing this, I am breaking trust and you're having a horrible experience and there isn't really any other way for us to save your life.
I just want to note for the listeners, we're looking at each other on video and when you said that your daughter's looking at you, trying to from the corner of her eye, I'm imagining that Just the expression on your face is, why are you doing this, or why are you participating in this?
Totally, can't make sense of any of it.
She's three years old, it doesn't, there's no conversation you can have that makes it okay.
So, you know, what we've done is tried to talk to her about it, especially in the days following.
She has a little medical kit that she gets to play with, so she gets to She gets to be the doctor with her stuffies and her babies.
There have been several times over the last year or so where she has remembered something from her time in the hospital and she's spontaneously started talking about it and in all those moments I've made sure I stopped what I was doing.
Really listened to her and really had that dialogue with her about how proud we were of her and how scary it was and how it was scary for us too and we love her so much and encourage her to just sort of unpack emotionally what she does remember from that.
But yeah, I can easily see how experiences like that could morph later in life under the influence of someone, you know, giving a leading interview technique.
Or not even under the influence of the technique so much as perhaps a natural need to make sense of something, especially if they didn't get the opportunity to talk it through or to have somebody bear witness to it, that especially that if it unfolded in isolation,
I can imagine that you stopping your work and being the sort of attuned person that you were trying to be while you're in the hospital.
That's right.
might break the particular kind of neurology that made that made its connection back at the moment where it looks like you're, you're, you're, you are causing some harm or something.
That's right.
I mean, I will say that I am proud of the fact that it's been about a year since she went through all of that.
And these days when she starts to feel sick, she will say to us before we suggested, I want to go to the doctor.
Can we go see my doctor, please?
She has an association with medical care that is positive and that she sort of reaches out for.
And there have been a couple of times she said that when we didn't even quite realize yet that she really needed to go to the doctor.
She's had a couple of ear infections where she's requested that.
So I take that as a sign that we've made some good progress in terms of helping her process that.
Julian, thank you so much for sharing all of this.
I really hope that it's helpful for us to have gone through this in a slow and detailed way.
And yeah, it's a real gift, I think, that you've given.
