UNLOCKED: Swan Song Series 3 | Listening to Teal Swan’s Mom and Dad
Some of the most valuable material that come to us from Paula Marino's Open Shadow film of 2017 is an extended interview with Swan's parent's, the Bosworths. They speak about Swan's sensory sensitivity as a young child, and how that morphed into a staunchly independent but sometimes isolated social life. They describe Swan's secret runic writing, their belief in her capacities as a medical intuitive, and discuss the gaps in psychiatric care that failed them all when her mental health needed help. This episode examines this interview, and then cross-checks some aspects against the account of Swan's childhood friend, Diana Hansen Ribera.Here we have the unique insight into parents speaking vulnerably and transparently about their baffling child—which means we can really lean into the primal material that pre-exists the charged questions about whether Teal Swan is running a cult or encouraging suicide. What we find, between the accounts of the Bosworths and Ribera, is a collection of commonplace phenomena: high sensitivity, parents learning as they go, the intrusion of internet pornography, and a likely abusive figure who was too close to the family.In this episode, Matthew and Julian discuss the mystery of familial memory, idealizing vs. pathologizing children, the appeals of fantasy as a mode of relief, whether the Satanic Panic was a collective cry for help to resolve commonplace domestic and community abuse, and the possibility that cult formation is a social form of post traumatic play. Show NotesOpen Shadow — Paula MarinoDo You Cry Easily? You May Be a 'Highly Sensitive Person'The science behind why some of us are shyStudy: Pornography does not cause violent sex crimesWhen Children Act Out Sexually: A Guide for Parents and Teachers1607: Growing up with Teal Swan - Diana Hansen Ribera“Forbidden Games”: Post-Traumatic Child's Play — Lenore TerrValerie L. Dripchak (2007). Posttraumatic Play: Towards Acceptance and Resolution. , 35(2), 125–134. doi:10.1007/s10615-006-0068-y
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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.
Hello listeners, welcome to installment three of the Swan Song series.
This one is called Listening to Teal's Mom and Dad.
Hey Julian, what's going on?
Oh, you know, Matthew, just another day of reading, writing, and talking about the cultural impact of these amazing fantasies about how the devil works in the real world.
I have to say, you know, most of what we're talking about in this series, it's not really news to me, but digging into the history, the details, and then sort of seeing the connective tissue between all of these stories, it's still just kind of wild in terms of this perennial preoccupation with With how Satan is behind everything bad.
Yeah, it's not news to me either, but I am having this feeling of coherence beginning to dawn, which there are positive aspects to.
Things seem to be moving inside me from, what the fuck was that?
To, oh, so that's what happened.
Anyway, last time on the Swan Song series, we discussed Open Shadow by Paula Marino, and we rolled an interview that I did with her.
And in that interview, I asked about the bonus footage from her sit-down with the Bosworths, Teal Swan's parents.
And I think that that is some of the most valuable material that has emerged from that project, given that they haven't spoken to anyone else, and given that I'm not sure that they will.
I just think it adds a lot of depth to the whole Swan landscape, particularly because it's parents speaking vulnerably and transparently about their baffling child, which means that we can really lean into this almost primal stuff that pre-exists the more clinical, political, and charged questions about whether she's running a cult, whether she's encouraging suicide, and so on.
But I have a question for you to start, which is, with the Bosworth interview, we have something really unique.
I can't think of another instance in which we have the parents of one of our subjects on record about their origins.
And I think it exists because, as Paula mentioned, she presented an open and neutral space for them to speak.
Now, before you even hear their voices and what they have to say, Julian, and speaking as a parent, I'm a parent too, can you imagine yourself in this very strange position?
Yeah, it's a weird position to be in, right?
Because you're sort of reflecting, I would imagine, as Teal's parents, I would be reflecting back A decade or two on sort of impressions of a complex and unusual child who had struggled a lot and who also was obviously gifted and sort of just trying to piece together
An understanding of who they were then and how that serves as sort of a prologue to who they are now.
It's not, it's an inexact science, shall we say.
Yeah, you know, as I'm listening to you, I'm realizing that we often focus upon childhood memories, or at least we have through this particular context, but I'm realizing now that Parental memory is very similar, actually, that there are all kinds of instances that I recognize and I remember from my own parenting life, but it's by no means complete.
It seems very watery, in fact.
And it just makes me reflect upon the fact that it seems that we are also, in a way, we are reconstructing our own histories of parenting as we go.
Of course, of course.
And it's also, I mean, I reflect on this a lot because, you know, my daughter's a lot younger than your boys are.
And so we're in that place that I know you will recognize where so much is happening every month, sometimes every week.
And very often we turn around, my wife and I look at each other and say, wow, you know, she was in this phase just a couple of months ago, but it seems so long ago now, or this thing that happened was so long ago, but it still feels really recent.
And also those moments when talking to other parents who have kids who are older, where they say, oh, you know, it goes so fast and, you know, hold on to the precious moments and enjoy every bit of it.
And you sort of realize, like, So many powerful, beautiful, touching, meaningful things have happened that I know I don't fully remember because it's just too much.
And between the stress and the emotional intensity and the demands and the lack of sleep and the lack of personal time that's all just part of these first few years, it is hard to remember.
And then that also puts me in mind of something that I've noticed a lot through the course of my life, which is that When parents talk about their grown children, there's a mythologizing that happens, right?
You could always tell that they were like this, and it's like, how much of that is a carefully selected joining of the dots around particular themes that You know, in hindsight, prove something beautiful or important or special about their kid.
Or what is beautiful or important or special about them as parents to be just a little bit more cynical about it.
Yeah, or even more cynical, avoid their own responsibility in some of the darker traits that that kid might be expressing as they've grown up.
It's such interesting stuff.
There's another thing that I want to mention which is that there's a principle that I've been guided by for years that's being challenged a bit by this series and that is that you've probably heard this you've over years you've heard me dismiss considerations of the charismatic or cult leaders internal life or intentions or even their personal history as being speculative beside the point and Ultimately distracting when it comes to evaluating the systemic harm of a cult.
And I have pretty good reasons for having held that view.
There's one example that I think shows how solid and necessary it can be.
And that's that when I was doing that book on Patabi Joyce, the founder of Ashtanga Yoga, I was able to show with reporting and testimony from almost 20 women that he sexually assaulted his students on a daily basis over decades.
He would basically hump them or grab their genitals under the guise of adjustments.
And a key complicating factor in that reporting was in how senior students who actually derived their authority and their social status from him would rationalize or even spiritualize the abuse saying that he didn't mean it or that he was too pure or that he did mean it but in some kind of pure way that no one who wasn't enlightened could possibly understand.
I know that you're familiar with this particular argument.
Yeah, I mean, it's sort of an old hobbyhorse of mine that you're familiar with, that once any individual gets put in a special category of being kind of beyond ordinary, everyday human judgments, then all bets are off, right?
And then you can make these kinds of rationalizations.
It's that whole idea of crazy wisdom, that somehow when the enlightened teacher is doing despicable things, You can't judge them by the same measurement that you would judge ordinary human beings because they know something that you don't know about the nature of reality and so therefore maybe what looks bad is really love and guidance and enlightenment sort of in disguise.
And in fact that disguise is part of their genius because in fact they are using this means to get at your hangups.
They're tricksters!
They're tricksters!
Yes, they're trolling you!
Absolutely.
They're trolling you.
My God.
Yeah, it's the Rajneesh answer, right?
When people would ask him about the fleet of Rolls Royces and all the diamond watches and he would say, ah, it would appear that you are very, you're very triggered by this because of your attachments.
To me, they mean nothing.
So I'm free to enjoy them.
Yeah.
And then he takes a big sort of drag on, what was he, what was he huffing at the time?
Laughing gas.
Right, laughing gas.
I forget the name of it.
Yeah, great.
Okay, so this is how this particular rationale accelerated or was further bolstered by senior students.
These students of Joyce would dismiss the notion that Joyce was assaulting women by noting that no one ever saw him have an erection.
So, he's groping, he's fondling.
I reported on instances of digital rape and we have people saying, oh it couldn't have been sexual, he wasn't aroused.
Now there are many huge problems with this, obviously.
First of all, sexual assault is not defined by arousal, but by non-consensual contact of a sexual nature.
And so, you know, the most recent understanding is that sexual assault isn't really about sex in any intimate sense.
It's about power perpetrated in an intimate context.
And, you know, secondly, by focusing on whether Joyce has a boner or not, otherwise, you know, what his intention is, because of course, you know, the body doesn't lie, or, you know, focusing on the state of his inner desires, the attention is just diverted away from the victim's body and experience.
And when that happens, the focus actually remains on the perpetrator as the subject of empathy.
So long story short, this whole sort of investigation, this part of the puzzle, came to exemplify the flaws for me in looking at intentionality when thinking about cult leaders, because usually that search is speculative, often it relies on a false premise, and Probably most importantly, it distracts us, at least in this instance and instances like it.
And so for years I've come to think of the question, well, do you think that Osho was a good guy at heart?
Do you think Jim Jones had good intentions?
Did Trungpa really want to wake people up?
How about Vishnu Devananda?
Was Yogi Bhajan really evil and an asshole or was he just sort of misguided?
All of those questions I just sort of classify as Patabi's dick, right?
Those questions are literally just It's his.
I don't care whether it's hard or soft.
It should stay his responsibility.
I don't want to think about it.
And also, this dismissive attitude was influenced by conversations I had with a number of cult researchers.
One of them was the late Kathleen Mann, who insisted that all writing on cult leaders was just bullshit.
Because it missed the point.
But also, she implied it broke the Goldwater Rule, which comes out of a lawsuit that Barry Goldwater launched against some newspaper because they made some claims about his internal mental states.
And in response, the American Psychiatric Association released a statement that says that,
yeah, psychiatrists should participate in public, in the public, you know, sphere,
but they should not give a professional opinion on people they haven't treated and they shouldn't discuss,
you know, speculations about their mental health and public health statements and public statements.
So this topic first came up with Man when I asked her about a book called Prophetic Charisma
by the Australian psychologist and cult survivor, Len Oaks, who happened to interview, I think about 10 cult leaders,
which is a very interesting story in itself.
And he came up with an archetypal template for how these figures develop.
I don't know if he interviewed them directly.
My memory seems to have that he also looked at their notebooks, diaries, things like that.
Anyway, Mann thought that Oakes was full of shit and unscientific.
And she thought the same thing about Daniel Shaw's work on Traumatic Narcissism, which attempts to illuminate the anxious horror of being a cult leader.
Now, to be fair and honest, Man seemed to think everyone but herself and a few exceptions were full of shit.
It didn't seem to matter to her that cult survivors found Oaks and Shaw really useful.
So yeah, that's how I'm sort of changing on this topic a little bit.
And so I wanted to ask you, how do you feel about all of this stuff?
I think that it's a fascinating question that comes up.
Sort of inevitably for anyone who thinks about this stuff and so I'm always a little bit frustrated when I come up against that thing in you and in others where they say well it doesn't matter and you can't speculate on their internal state right?
Of course we can't know for sure but to me it goes to this question of It's like the human condition.
What goes on with this type of person?
And do they start off that way and get corrupted?
Or do they know they're lying the whole time?
Are they delusional?
Are they sincere in the beginning and then over time it kind of wears thin and then they find themselves in this position where they have all this power and that's a terrible situation for them and their followers?
And it's interesting because, you know, we're in the latest round of edits on our book, and it's one of the things that the editor is asking us to think about, like how many of the conspiritualists that you cover are full-on charlatans, and how many of them really believe what they're saying.
I would argue that even though we can't make definitive statements, that it's still a worthwhile thing to think about and discuss, as long as we have the relevant caveats in place.
And, you know, I'm going to be talking to someone for NPR next week, and in the prep work for that, they asked something similar as well.
So it's clearly something that comes up for people, especially once you start identifying individuals as being sort of Malicious operators who are well-networked, who are profiteering off of their stuff, like we do.
That's a question that arises.
And with regard to psychiatric diagnoses, I think it's such a complex topic.
One of the things that I have a hunch might be useful, if we were ever to dig into that more deeply, would be to consider that what we think of as Psychiatric conditions probably exist along some kind of spectrum.
And that it need not be ableist, especially if one is careful about how the topic is discussed, to suggest that it may be a contributing factor towards all manner of criminal behavior or idiosyncratic beliefs.
You know, I also have to own something, given that you talked about how it made you frustrated when you came up against this rigid, no, we can't really talk about that or that's not irrelevant, that's not relevant.
My thinking in this has also been influenced by the echoes of the French literary theory
that I read in college, specifically the work of Roland Barthes on the death of the author
where his main point is that when you encounter a text, that's all you have.
You have the text.
You do not have access to the author's intentionality.
You may be able to historicize things in a somewhat interesting way, but even that is going to be infinitely interpretable.
You really have the text.
You have the text, and that's what he means by the author is dead.
And I would bet that You know, the point at which you feel frustrated is the point at which I feel like I've made a really cogent logical point that you can't argue your way out of and that's really good for me because you're such a logical person.
And so yeah, that's in there too as a kind of like triumphant philosophical rigidity.
you know, that I was able to beat you with at times.
But I think what you're doing is you're saying, I think we should be able to talk about these things
if we do it really nicely.
It's okay, we can really talk about them.
It doesn't have to be a bad thing.
And I mean, I think that that observation is obviously so powerful, right?
It's powerful because it says, on the one hand, I think that the analytic kind of muscle that Barthes' observation gives us is it enables us to say, look, The author is a product of multiple influences and they're kind of situated within this cultural context where whatever they intend, there may be meanings and there may be layers that we can tease apart within this text that even they didn't know that they were putting there, right?
Or that they intended the opposite.
Exactly.
And that's where the psychoanalysis piece of that literary theory comes in.
Yeah.
Because they might actually be concealing something that they're not aware of.
They may somehow be showing their ass.
And in fact, they might be waiting for, in some sense, the reader to find them out and they have no control over it.
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
I am not sure what has changed for me here with regard to Teal Swan.
I think that a few things have come together.
First of all, watching The Deep End and its over-determined story has had an impact on me.
I think also that when you recognize that if you exaggerate anything about Teal Swan, you kind of recycle satanic panic energy and you feed this diversion machine.
I also think I'm developing, maybe with your influence, a little bit of more vigilance with regard to polarization.
I'm realizing that journalistic integrity is fragile.
I've always known that, but I think I feel it even more.
And at the same time, it also provides this kind of crucial catch net for reality.
But maybe most simply, there's an availability heuristic going on, which is that there's just so much out there about Swan's childhood now and it seems like it would be a huge oversight not to look closely at it.
Not to rehabilitate her or ignore her damaging content, but to better understand how these dynamics emerge in resonance with the needs of her followers.
So, with all this in mind, what we're going to do is examine several clips from that Bosworth interview, which is available through the bonus footage presentation on the Open Shadow site.
And I just want to say a couple of things before we begin about, you know, context and boundaries.
Teal herself has said, and I find this quite disturbing, that she blames her parents for her childhood trauma more than she blames her abuser.
And so it's not surprising to me that they've kept to themselves.
Jennings Brown told us that they declined to speak with him, and I've elected not to reach out because it seems clear to me that they're seeking privacy.
Nonetheless, we do know through Moreno that they consented to this public record disclosure, so I feel fine about discussing what's actually on record.
Now, you're going to hear that Marino does not ask in these clips about their views on Teal's ritual abuse story.
And she doesn't ask in any of the other published footage either.
However, in our interview, if you listened to that, you would have heard her explain that she did in fact ask and the Bosworths answered, but they requested that their answers be kept off record.
So that's just all stitched up.
There's nothing to be done about that.
You're also going to hear that Marino believes that what she heard from the Bosworths off-record lends some credibility to Teal's origin story.
And I want to say too that you don't have as listeners visuals for these clips, but I think it's worth noting that the Bosworths exude a kind of relaxation and a spirit of being forthcoming as they speak.
Teal's dad looks warm and approachable and handsome as, like, he might be part of the Mitt Romney family or something like that, although part of their story is that they're not actually Mormon.
And Teal's mom looks like she could have been the lead singer in a 1960s folk band.
So, really good vibes from both of them, in my view.
So, we're gonna go clip by clip here, hearing how they describe Teal growing up.
And we'll also cross-reference at a few points with what Diana Hanson-Ribera has said about her childhood with Teal on the Mormon Stories podcast, but also via email through me.
And yeah, so that's how we're gonna do it.
This first clip is called Little Miss Sensitive.
We know now, but at the time, you know, we were not knowing that she has much more heightened
sensitivities than most people.
So she was extremely sensitive to sound.
If I would take cotton out of an aspirin bottle and just rub the cotton, she'd go like that.
I mean, it was like, and she would sleep.
Sometimes I'd find her under her bed or by her bed.
She didn't like sheets, no sheets.
She only liked satin.
And it had to be soft.
And clothes, certain clothes, no way would she wear them.
You know, she would pick the clothes she would wear and those clothes she would not wear.
And a lot of it was feel, so very sensitive to feel.
We called her Little Miss Sensitive for a long time because she just, you know, seemed to be so attuned to every little sound and You know, she was always sort of looking, and that's how the beginning was.
I love the music.
Yeah.
So I know you're going to unpack this idea in a moment.
I just want to say I think that things like sensitivity to sensory stimuli as well as to sort of emotional empathy, these are probably traits that exist on a spectrum.
Some people are obviously more sensitive than others, but I find that often in new age circles the idea of being a highly sensitive person can often be code for I'm really psychic or I'm really enlightened, I'm not of this world, I come from elsewhere, I'm an alien hybrid, I'm an indigo child.
You know, that's fine as far as it goes, but the shadow side of that can often be a sort of unbounded certainty about, I know what others are feeling because I'm an empath, or an overconfidence that my intuitively felt truths about all manner of things are inviolable and that others are just too dull to pick up on them.
I have a hunch that the greater sensitivity might be supported better by really grounded and contained therapy than by this ethereal validation of being some special person with incredible attributes.
And to hear that this was the case for her from such a young age.
Does, you know, does suggest that there's already something going on prior to any actual or, shall we say, fabricated traumatic history?
You mentioned the term highly sensitive person, which is something that I brought into our discussion before we started, because this description from the Bosworths just rang that bell for me.
I'd heard about it.
I'd done some reading in it before.
It's a term coined by A psychologist named Elaine Aron who says that, you know, there's a subset of the population who are high in sensory processing sensitivity and that they display increased emotional sensitivity, stronger reactivity to both external and internal stimuli like pain, hunger, light, and noise, but also a complex inner life.
She also writes that they are thought to be more disturbed by others by violence, tension, or feelings of being overwhelmed.
They may, as a result, make concerted efforts to avoid situations in which such things are likely to occur.
And on the more positive end of the trade, high sensitivity is thought to be linked to greater levels of creativity, richer personal relationships, and a greater appreciation for beauty.
So, I'll also include a link to an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal from 2015.
It's by Elizabeth Bernstein.
It's called, Do You Cry Easily?
You May Be a Highly Sensitive Person.
She covers Aaron's work by telling the story of a 44-year-old Houston guy who cries at the drop of a hat, and emotional overwhelm is one of the traits.
And I guess as part of this project of humanizing this landscape and all of these stories, I just wanted to point out that this is actually really familiar to me from earlier in my life.
Like, I too would cry at music, primarily while in the choir.
You know, 50 other boys in sutans and I have tears streaming down my face, wondering why everyone else can't feel what I obviously am feeling as being true and authentic.
Yeah, I'm right there with you.
I'm right there with you.
Yeah.
But there's, it's interesting how that, it's very easy, and I think I stepped onto this bridge a couple of times, or at least part way, that goes somewhere else, which is this feeling that I can perceive more than others.
That normies are asleep at the wheel, that they're fine with that, that they're self-satisfied.
You know, it's kind of, this is why when I first, you know, encountered through my stepdaughter the Harry Potter world, that's the whole feeling of the Muggles, right?
You know, and meanwhile, if you're awake, if you have some kind of magical perspective, you know that everything is changing.
You know that everything is fading away.
You know that people are getting sick and dying.
No one seems to be noticing.
And I think that always gave me a deep sense of urgency.
About life, and setting aside the satanic panic, setting aside, you know, megalomania, whatever narcissism Swan has got running, looking at her content through this particular lens I think seems very approachable, almost very organic.
Okay, so we've got a second clip here where they're talking about her social interactions as a child.
Social interactions were difficult.
She's I always called it shy because I was shy as a child So I know and we know that shyness is a gene.
So I just kept saying oh she's shy But I think actually as she got into kindergarten, it was more than that.
I think she would Be easily overwhelmed around other kids and tend to be very quiet and withdrawn and and then once school started I think for her it was she'd come home just exhausted and overwhelmed.
And I think what was happening that we didn't know was just this amazing sensitivity that she was picking up what the teacher's feeling, what the kids are feeling.
Yeah.
You know, for me, this is what I think of as the golden child explanation for why a kid is shy or awkward or sensitive.
They may indeed be special in certain ways, but who knows how much of this is just a difference in temperament or Something psychiatric or neurological, how much of it is the result of trauma.
I just think we're seeing a totally understandable tendency for some parents to play into myth making around their very special little girl.
And when she references that there's a shyness gene, she's not wrong.
There really are studies on the shyness genetics.
Some researchers suggest that genes may account for 30% of shyness.
I really wonder how this stuff is measured, by the way.
But the other factors beyond the 30% would be environmental, including difficulty fitting in.
We have to remember that The Bosworths are a very rare non-Mormon family in town, and that really sets them apart.
But I think this social piece follows on highly sensitive person responses to sensory stuff, and I think also it makes sense that it would heighten social urgencies, and also a sense of like, things are very exhausting.
Everything has to be, everything is going to be a really heavy slog.
And, you know, I found it curious that someone who begins here ends up with what seems to be Swan's type of extroversion, or her ability to be on stage or be a public figure.
But I also wonder whether the kind of online influencing or the gurudom that we so often study in the podcast and extraversion are actually even related.
And sometimes I'm not so sure because I think of people like Sam Harris or Jordan Peterson, the cult leaders that I have known, each has a paradoxical trait of both being and wanting to be highly visible but also unapproachable.
And I think in the online world, the technology can facilitate those boundaries because it drives parasocial attention one way only.
And I think I've referenced this before but, you know, I went to see Peterson at a quote-unquote lecture event here in Toronto and people cheered like they were at a rock concert and he responded by launching into this impermeable trance state.
It was like he entered into a literal Bubble, like an acrylic dome was around him with some sort of like resonator inside so you could hear his voice.
And he maintained that isolation for hours, eventually winding up on the steps of the theater outside, surrounded by like 200 young people who were basically silently genuflecting in front of him as he kept talking and talking.
So I've never seen someone both so public Yet so alone.
It's such an incredible description because what I got from that description is you're talking about someone who is who in that has has in in the in the privacy of their own solitude has been able to reach out through the power of the internet and affect all of these people and then when when they're in the real life situation with all of those people the magic is to be able to draw them into your own introverted space and then pretend that they're
not even there as you continue with that trans state kind of thing.
And so, what I get from that picture is that he's never really treating them as subjects.
They're just part of his fugue state.
Yeah, his fugue state, his diorama, it's like, yeah, he's on a movie set.
It kind of reminds me of, I don't know if you've seen any of the background documentary for the making of The Mandalorian.
Maybe your daughter isn't old enough, I know she isn't, but like the nine-year-old here is old enough to watch it, and so we watch how it's made, and they actually have a surround stage, green, I guess, green, what's it called?
Green screen?
Green screen, yeah.
Well, okay, this is 360 degrees around them, and the cameras are on tracks that roll around this circular space, and basically they can create, they can make Three people in a sound studio, wherever they are in LA, look like they are in Tunisia or in, you know, the mountains of Jamaica or wherever it is.
And it's absolutely seamless.
And that's the feeling that I get From my memory of Jordan Peterson is that he could be anywhere in the world because the backdrop is projected.
And he's, yeah, he's really sealed into it.
Okay, here's the next clip in which the parents talk about how Teal Swan is self-taught.
She's self-taught because we took her to New Zealand for almost a year when she was two.
We went to New Zealand to work on a sheep station and I had her in the pool and I remember she looked at me and she was two at the time and said, no mommy, I'll teach myself.
I will teach myself and that was kind of a theme even though she went to school she really I don't I think she absorbs learning in a different way and she doesn't particularly like to be taught and she kind of feels it herself and then as she got into school it was Kind of the same.
She would come home and just, not a lot of respect for the teachers, just more of a feeling of, do I really have to go there?
Then when she got a little older, and I can't remember exactly what age, she started writing in this different language.
And we didn't know what to make of it.
We thought at first it was like a game where she was making little symbols like a treasure map or something.
Because we used to do treasure maps for the kids' birthdays.
But this, she started writing in it a lot.
And it looked a little like hieroglyphics.
And that was the first real signal, to me anyway, that something unusual was going on.
I mean, I don't want to be mean to these people at all.
They're talking about their experiences with their young child, but I mean, my daughter has said things like that since she was about two years old as well.
She wants to teach herself.
She knows how to do it.
She will often turn the tables and say, here, I'll show you how to do it, you know, even if she doesn't really know what she's doing.
So I don't think it's that unusual.
I think kids at that age are trying to gain agency over the world in small ways because they're so incredibly dependent on you that they'll have these moments of like, no, I know how to do it and I can do it for myself and I don't need you to do it.
Right.
And obviously, look, Teal is a very, very smart, unusual human being.
There's no denying that.
But again, to me, these are the kinds of somewhat naive interpretations that then lean into the precociousness as having some kind of I mean, she actually literally was making little symbols like a treasure map or something, as they said.
It's not something more than that.
Right.
I'll get to this in a moment, but it's just wild to me that a podcaster comes along 20 years later or whatever it is and actually translates those symbols.
Which are unknown to the family, right?
Yeah.
Anyway, one of the first big moments in The Deep End related to this self-taught, self-teaching mode is that, and this really raised my culty eyebrows, was that first exchange with Simon in which he asked Swan who her own mentors And accountability partners were and she basically blows off the question and she compares herself to a world-class runner who needs no instruction because of course she's the fastest in the world.
Now that scene has since been complicated by Swan revealing raw audio from that exchange.
And the dialogue is actually way more stretched out and more nuanced than Casby presents.
This is a smaller misstep in the film, I think, but I think it's important because it's important that it's a misstep because she can now fold it into her victimized by the media narrative.
Anyway, still, her rejection of authority is quite visible and functional in that scene.
Yeah, absolutely.
No matter how that scene played out, she is still asserting that she is the world champion of everything and so why should she have anyone else telling her what to do?
Or advising her or giving her feedback?
You know, and I just want to flip back to the previous point about being in a trance state, is that I think the thing that is I mean, it's not just a power struggle in that moment.
It's not just Simon saying to Teal, hey, I'm going to challenge you on this particular point and Teal slapping it down.
There's also an aspect in which that kind of dynamic It's the site at which the subject or the follower is interrupting the trance state of the charismatic leader.
And that's not acceptable, right?
Like, that's the thing is that when anybody actually asks Jordan Peterson a question, He will sort of wade around and flail until he gets back into his groove, because his objective is not to answer the question.
It's to get back into his fucking acrylic bubble.
It has nothing to do with information.
It's about trying to restore a kind of incommunicado core, or a kind of confident state.
Yeah, yeah.
And with that example, when she presents the longer footage, you know, in the aftermath in terms of how she's showing what she thinks of as Caspi's distortions and betrayals.
What gets revealed is that Simon is someone who's been in an executive leadership function and he's been told that he needs mentoring.
And he has come to her seeking mentoring.
And in that very process, he's saying, you know, if I am realizing a blind spot where I didn't realize I needed mentoring and I'm coming to you, I just want to ask you this because I want to be sure that you don't have the same blind spot because then how are you going to mentor me?
And so it's actually a really legitimate line of inquiry and she can't actually handle it.
Even though she, like, says, hey, here, look at the whole conversation, it actually underlines that she doesn't really know how to handle that particular topic.
Amongst all of her objections, that one is kind of the silliest, actually, because the extended conversation doesn't really add any new information.
I think that she has an explanation to him that's something like, Well, you know, if you get to the point where everything is coming from source or something like that, then you don't need an outside authority or you don't need mentorship or something like that.
So she's describing her enlightened state.
And I think she's meaning to say to her followers, hey, look, the deep end didn't pick up my real explanation here.
So here it is.
And doesn't it make sense?
Well, no, it doesn't.
It doesn't really.
Yeah.
Now, about that coded writing, we know that Jennings has, you know, had it translated, so we've broken that story a little bit, and that it concealed some pretty normal things, like fantasies and self-doubt.
But, you know, I've also been in communication with Diana Hanson-Ribera, who's Teal's childhood friend.
Some of you may have seen her very informative appearance on the Mormon Stories podcast.
We'll link to that.
I reached out to discuss some of those details with her.
In a follow-up email, she described that she was familiar with that coded language.
So she writes, I didn't create the language with her, but we wrote together in it.
There was a key to the language, but I'm pretty sure she memorized it later on.
She has an amazing memory and is obviously very creative.
She wrote the stories that we created together along with her own stories.
She had started creating it before I met her.
She was very proud of it, having more letters than the more basic English alphabet.
She considered her made up alphabet more superior to the very small English alphabet that only had 26 letters.
We made up fairy and magic stories mostly.
The elves were one of our favorites from Lord of the Rings, so Gladriel, Arwen, Elrond.
I wasn't into Lord of the Rings as she was.
I liked it, but I didn't memorize the maps, alphabets, and so on.
I was more of a Harry Potter fan.
We watched The Dark Crystal, The Black Stallion, Pocahontas, The Matrix movies, Unicorns, Fairies, Elves, Witches, Magic, etc.
So yeah, just like very normal, very human stuff.
A lot of big interior fantasy life.
You know, and then we have this and some kind of bridge that leads towards becoming a satanic panic influencer, when she might have just wound up on, you know, Tumblr and gaming sites or something like that.
So okay next one is auras and healing when she would start to use these colors these crayons and color pictures She would just she described I remember at that point that oh that that's the color that's by you or that's the color that's behind her We didn't know what an aura was.
We were not in that world.
We had no clue what she was actually seeing when she was looking at either one of us.
Colors emanating around our body and different colors for different people.
Really slight differences she could tell that she later figured out had a lot to do with.
a person's temperament or a mood or their health or health particularly and we've watched her heal people and and I can say that as a She's worked on boss.
Yeah, she has on me, but I mean any dad would say anything Yeah, but to watch her work with people who come in with some pretty significant long-term chronic illnesses and come away either Saying I'm well or saying or her telling them, you know, you need to see somebody else because here's you're talking about this issue in your body, but here's where your problem is pointing to Pancreas or to a lung or and then have that and then have that yeah have those people go seek medical Western medical attention for Trauma or and sure enough.
She's right and I think going to see the psychic and I and that we went to she was Really good.
I recognized Teal right away.
I mean, it was one of those weird things.
We drive all the way up there.
A fox crosses the road as we're driving in.
That's Teal's spirit animal.
And she was like, oh my god, mom, it's a fox.
And we got in there and the woman, I was so skeptical, I've got to be honest about that.
And she said to me, you're going to get very cold because there'll be a lot of spirits in the room.
And I remember thinking, yeah, sure.
Yeah, I mean, we have science backgrounds.
Yeah.
And so I get in the room and she hands me like two blankets and I'm holding them in my lap and she and Teal start talking about what they see and what it's like and all of this and it's like they're kindred spirits and by the end of the time I had both blankets wrapped around my ass freezing and it was really for me again for both of us it was a world that we you know we heard about it but it wasn't one we ever really interacted with.
All right, so here's where the Bosworths are empathizing with their daughter to the extent of a kind of familial teal-pilling, really, it seems.
Julian, what comes up for you when you hear them moving into this zone?
I'm going to keep sounding like the grouchy skeptic here.
I mean, to me, this is precisely why being informed about universal human cognitive vulnerabilities to things like confirmation bias or cold reading, Barnum statements, and like the narcissistic specialness that all of this can kind of serve.
I think it's really valuable just to know about this stuff.
In my experience, these kinds of personal anecdotes are a dime a dozen in New Age circles.
They're usually taken as Undeniable evidence, because how else do you explain that there was a fox or that the room suddenly felt cold?
It must be the thing that it is claiming to be, rather than some sort of, you know, just process of how you interpret things.
I think, well I know that when you look at these kinds of claims carefully, they tend to evaporate, they're ethereal.
It's a trick of the mind, and all of us are susceptible to these kinds of tricks of the mind, and certain people are very good at exploiting those vulnerabilities, even when they're sincere, and they don't really realize that that's what they're doing.
They say, we'd heard about this world, but we don't really interact with it.
Well, now you've stepped over into that world, and it's largely a self-created world that relies on all of these sort of cognitive vulnerabilities and slippery interpretations.
Yeah, and once in that world, they start looking for help because things turn a little bit south.
We started thinking, you know, why is she so sensitive?
And I feel like we started trying lots of different things to figure out.
You know at first it was just shy and sensitive and then you know by the time she got to be a teenager it was starting to be she was very unhappy and that's when we start taking her to psychiatrists, psychologists say okay what's going on here and in my humble opinion our mental health system is so broken in this country that really all they've got is a very haphazard ridiculous A way of diagnosing people and then just throwing pills at them and we went through that phase and said no.
So then we talked a lot and I got permission from the place I was working at to take a leave of absence for a month and I took her to China.
Because I just thought this system in the United States is going to just ruin her.
And there was nobody that could tell us how to look at this in a way that rang true.
Every diagnosis that people had was different from every professional.
And the guy we liked the best, who was a psychiatrist, said, I cannot tell you what this is.
Well, it sounds like that was someone who had the courage to be honest in that way.
I really feel for them.
They must have been having a really tough time.
With this unusual and unhappy yet obviously gifted child and trying to figure out how to take care of her.
Perhaps by the time we get to this age maybe she was being traumatized as we've discussed.
Perhaps she has some very hard to diagnose combination of organic and developmental issues.
I've certainly known people like that.
Perhaps the psychiatric care they got was substandard.
We know that that's You know, that does happen.
But the idea then of saying we're going to go to China to get out of this Western medical model to find answers in a remote mountain community where the guru claims to heal cancer energetically.
I mean, it does paint a picture of being quite desperate, and I have a lot of empathy for that.
It's also quite naive.
It also brings us to a really crucial theme, which is that the normie world cannot help their daughter.
Shrinks are shrugging their shoulders, they're not really taking her seriously, haphazardly diagnosing and prescribing.
And this happens to be a real-world encapsulation of what's happening in many sort of pockets of Popular culture and news media as well.
In terms of popular culture, it's only, you know, 15 years before this sequence is taking place that, or maybe, I guess it's 20 by that point, that we have a film like The Exorcist in which whole teams of psychiatrists and urologists can't help It's just an incredible, incredible movie.
the 12-year-old at all, uh, in which Father Karras, who's trained as a psychiatrist,
um, has no option for treatment, but to appeal to the diocese to have them call up
Father Mirren, who's played by Max von Sydow, to perform an old-timey exorcism.
It's just an incredible, incredible movie.
I think for me, because...
all of these themes of demonic possession and Satan and ghosts, uh, they've always just seemed
to me more like fascinating psychological fantasy.
The diocese, knowing that they play very heavily on a kind of Catholic mythology,
um, they've seemed interesting to me in that way, more so than terrifying.
Although I know a lot of people are very terrified by these kinds of films, especially The Exorcist.
I've always wondered what percentage of people who have been subjected to exorcism were in the midst of psychotic episodes.
What percentage had been fragmented by the sort of more mundane brutality of real abuse within their own families?
Even less dramatic than that, how many of these people might just be tormented developmentally by parenting dynamics that rejected and shamed healthy attachment needs?
While also imposing sort of the unbearable demands of a parent who might have narcissistic or borderline personality and just put so much pressure on a kid to where they're kind of exploding and acting out and maybe just don't have a very steady sense of self or emotional regulation.
Right, and the theme of possession or inferred possession is somewhat laundered in Michelle Remembers, in which Lawrence Pazder's psychiatric malpractice really on his patient, Michelle Smith, provides the opening for her to convert to Catholicism Well, and not only is she rescued, she's also healed, so there's no medical evidence of any of the terrible things that were supposedly done to her.
It's amazing.
Right.
There are photographs of her having a skin rash on her neck, but yeah, otherwise.
But this is a storyline of the normies can't help that is here now further, I would say, laundered and secularized in the Bosworth's telling because when they give up on psychiatry, they find something more alt-health, more globalized, this Chinese Qigong master, and they make a pilgrimage Now, we don't know what Paula Marina was asked to leave out of this public footage, but we do know that there are plausible reasons and signs for why Swan was struggling during this period.
And these are reasons that go beyond the notion that she's highly sensitive, but they stop short of her being a survivor of satanic ritual abuse.
Now, as Jennings Brown pointed out in episode 111, There are reasonable questions to ask about Swan's relationship with Doc.
This is the family friend against whom satanic panic therapist Barbara Snow initiated an investigation into his alleged abuse of Swan.
Now, Swan eventually backed away from that police action, and so the case is closed, but the question kind of remains open.
Now, you're going to hear me ask Marina whether she heard anything in the off-record footage that gave her confidence in Swan's story of survivorship, and she said yes.
But then there's also something else.
So, here's Diana Hanson-Ribera talking about what Swan was getting into at around 12 or 13 years of age.
It just it gets so crazy and I didn't ever want to talk about this before because it was so shameful embarrassing to have been in the situation to have been scared to kind of talk about parts of it, but There was Like when she would have been 12 or 13 Started looking up pretty, pretty disturbing pornography.
So I'd never seen any form of pornography at that point.
And she goes straight to showing me, um, like, well, I mean, see, I still hate saying it even now.
Um, like S and M porn and So like BDSM, bondage, sadomasochism, bondage, kind of porn, the kind of more hardcore porn.
Oh yeah.
So, and I would have been about 10 years old at the time.
So it was just, again, didn't want to seem like I wasn't cool that I was judging her.
A lot of just a following wanting to be as cool as my, my friend was.
Um, and the reason I mentioned this pornography thing is cause I feel like it, Played Into some of the things she came up with later on and there was even the most disturbing one This is a funny and embarrassing story She came down to my house and on our computer We had a better computer than hers and she's like you have to see this crazy thing.
I found and starts pulling up Googling bestiality mortified That was the one where I was like, I don't think we should do this.
This is scary.
My mom's going to come home any minute.
And lo and behold, my mom starts driving down the driveway.
And back in the day, some people might know this, pop-ups were a big thing on a computer.
Once they started, they wouldn't stop.
I panicked, unplugged the computer.
And we ran up to her house later on.
My mom's like, hey, I plugged in her computer.
There's a lot of weird things on there.
I'm like, weird.
I don't know how that got there.
So and she didn't push it, which I think she was very uncomfortable by it, too.
So there's a kind of tender or contentious issue that we come to the edge of here, which is About the supposed links between pornography and abuse.
Now, this has been a line of research for many years, perhaps driven by moral concerns, that has attempted to correlate porn consumption with increased tendencies towards violence, sexual aggression, the self-reported willingness to commit rape, especially amongst young men.
So, to leave this data sort of hanging out there about Swan can give the impression that she is somehow predisposed to aggression because, hey, she was into porn at 12 or 13 years old, and this is in that, you know, sort of making of a monster category of thought.
But there are newer studies that dispute that correlation, that criticize the poor design of previous studies.
That fail to disambiguate other influences that might predict violence, such as witnessing real violence.
So, we'll post some of that in the show notes.
The other line to follow here is a reversal of that sort of correlation flow, which is to look at how acting out sexually as a young person, and I think Swan showing Hanson violent porn qualifies there, may indicate an abuse history.
You know, there's an old principle at play.
Freud called it repetition compulsion.
A more recent term is trauma reenactment.
And the general idea is that a traumatized person might seek out materials or situations in which the content of the experience is similar to the initiating event in order to understand it better or to adopt a more confident position in relation to it.
In other words, to master what had mastered them.
And I found a really good explainer on the Health Canada website, of all places actually, it's called When Children Act Out Sexually, a guide for parents and teachers.
And they say, although there is evidence that sexually abused children can act out against other children, the reason they do so isn't always clear.
People often assume that abused children would try to avoid repeating a frightening and distasteful activity.
However, in many cases, children who have been sexually abused repeat the experience with other children in an effort to make sense of what happened to them and to regain a sense of control.
For example, a boy may have been forced to perform oral sex on an older boy.
The activity may have made him feel frightened, confused, and sexually excited all at the same time.
repeating the activity with a younger child takes him out of the confused and helpless role
and into a new and more powerful role. He is now less frightened and less anxious and better
understands why the older boy wanted oral sex performed on him." So that line led me towards
something else that I had remembered from years before which is what I referenced earlier Julian,
the notion of post-traumatic play.
And this is a This is a term that was coined by a doctor named Lenore Turr, and I'll just read from the abstract of her 1981 paper, I believe it was published in.
It's called Forbidden Games, Post-Traumatic Child's Play.
She found 11 characteristics of play.
So, compulsive repetitiveness, unconscious link to the traumatic event, literalness, Failure to relieve anxiety, wide range of players, varying lag time prior to its development, carrying power to involve non-traumatized children, contagion to new generations, danger art and talk as alternative modes of playing, and usefulness of tracing post-traumatic play to an earlier trauma.
And so, as I'm thinking about that, it's kind of mind-blowing To begin to view, if Teal Swan is actually at the center of cultic dynamics, it's kind of mind-blowing to view cultic formation and the abuses therein as expressions of highly organized post-traumatic play.
Setting aside what's going on personally for Swan, You know, just think about how these markers are descriptive of the content that we see.
So, compulsive repetitiveness of themes and practices, literalness, like the need for, you know, the actual event, the traumatic event, to be literally true or to attain a degree of kind of Clarity or concreteness that, you know, memory probably can't provide.
The failure to relieve anxiety, which I think is pretty clear because, you know, there are many people who will fall away from Swan's content after having used it for a long time and they'll say, well, you know, there are people who say they'd improved their lives, but there are also many who will say, you know, actually it just, you know, made me, it didn't improve anything.
But then carrying power to involve non-traumatized children and contagion to new generations is kind of like, these sound like principles of recruitment and indoctrination, right?
Yeah, and you're also, you're just, you're, this is a, I think a really helpful way of reframing, perhaps in certain situations, how we think of the word ritual.
Absolutely.
Right?
That this is, this is a ritualized activity that is symbolic, that is a, an unconscious reenactment of something.
For a variety of different reasons that is taken as having some other function or as being a literal expression of something that's happening right now instead of what it really represents.
You know, what's interesting about Lenore Tour is that she was also an advocate of repressed memory theory.
Uh-oh.
Yeah, now I think you looked a little bit farther and it seems like she dropped that idea over time.
She seems to still be in good academic standing.
I think what I did find is that she continued to remain, yeah, academically legitimate and to speak at conferences and to have like a...
You know, some kind of special event where she was being honored in terms of her body of work over time.
So I would wonder, I don't know this for sure if it's true or not, but I would wonder if maybe she dipped into the repressed memory stuff because that's what everyone was talking about in the late 80s, early 90s, and then maybe transitioned out of it and continued to make good academic contributions and to do good work in the world that did not become sort of completely swept up in satanic panic.
So repressed memory theory has dropped by the wayside but post-traumatic play has not and in fact we'll post another article this comes from 2007 by Valerie Dripchuk And she goes on to describe two types of post-traumatic play and I think this is where things get really sort of interesting with regard to what Teal Swan actually provides.
There's the positive type and the negative type.
So in the positive type of post-traumatic play, the child reenacts the trauma but is able to modify the negative components of the trauma with the guidance of the therapist.
And in the process of positive post-traumatic play the child is able to gain mastery over the experience but in the negative type of post-traumatic play the repetitive play is unsuccessful in relieving anxiety and fails to help the child attain resolution or acceptance so in the positive version children feel happy and in control of their fantasy world
It helps children to learn and express feelings, but in the negative type, children usually look anxious and restricted.
They are not in control of their fantasies, and the repetitive play does not alleviate their internal conflicts.
This type of play depicts a perceived danger, and the child is stuck in these traumatic reactions.
And the risk of the negative type of post-traumatic play is that it may actually worsen the traumatic effects and cause developmental regression.
The child needs some kind of intervention.
Some kind of some kind of help to to move on and so Dripchak advocates for like an Ericksonian Intersubjective approach to interventions that on one hand help the child find a new ending to the story and secondly They involve caregivers in that process very importantly so in many instances I like that model.
It makes a lot of sense to me.
It's a great find.
when the primary caregivers are reintegrated into the process
and the therapist actually steps aside and allows the family to be repaired.
I like that model.
It makes a lot of sense to me. It's a great find.
I think it's a very important angle on all of this material.
And, you know, it goes again back to this complex and tricky nature of memory
as well as how unaddressed trauma can play out in different ways
ways as the psyche tries to find resolution.
I mean, I would speculate that the likelihood that Thiel would just happen to come across extreme hardcore pornography in the late 1990s and find it interesting enough to be preoccupied with showing it to other kids,
it's age inappropriate.
Yeah, that's an additional step, right?
Yeah.
That's like an additional step.
It's not just that you found it, but that it has to be shared.
Yeah.
It feels like an additional step.
Yes, and that act of sharing it with other kids seems like a reenactment, possibly,
of it being shared with her by an adult.
And then her going through all of the confusing, you know, feelings about that.
I just, from what I do know, I think that would be a red flag to most child psychologists, like, oh, something's going on here.
I have one more thought about the repressed memory specter.
You know, we know, we've established that in relation to the satanic panic and countless claims of recalled abuse, that many, many families have been ripped to shreds by terrible therapeutic missteps, including your own family, as you shared with us in the first part of this series.
But I think there's something at play in the general notion of repressed memory that I think we have to look at squarely in order to understand how appealing it is.
And we've spoken about the escalating charge involved, I think, in endlessly searching for the worst possible crime.
You spoke about that in the circle of Anna Forrest.
If you could get to the worst possible thing, then there would be some sort of success.
Now, when we look at Michelle Remembers starting next episode, we're going to see how this plays out in bitter detail through really abusive, intrusive therapeutic techniques, you know, perpetrated by Lawrence Pazder through his absolute abdication of his training, if he got any, around managing his own needs as counter-transference.
So, there's a trauma-bonding story there that plays out many, many times in, you know, therapy sessions.
All over North America and some in Europe through the 80s and early 90s, and then it explodes into waves of fruitless criminal prosecutions.
But I think that it also draws or it proposes or it points to something archetypal to get a little Jungian, maybe a little, you know, a little collective unconscious-y.
As in, just how powerful is it to have a cultural meme to begin to circulate in the 1980s?
Like this, as globalization kicks into high gear, as the History Channel explodes in popularity, as there are all of these Holocaust documentaries coming out and memorials, And then Holocaust denialism beginning to rise up at the same time.
And all of that is increasing in scope and volume.
People are starting to murmur about abuse in the Catholic Church.
First Nations people have been speaking about genocide since it started happening, but they're starting to get heard in the 80s a little bit.
And then we have popular books that are heralding, you know, on the environmental front, the global population crisis and the possibility of climate collapse.
Nightly News completely changes as it goes local and becomes this firehose of sensational sort of domestic disasters and anything involving child abuse is just bumped into the lead.
And so, it feels to me like the entire post-war era, or at least after the alcohol wears off of the Mad Men episodes, the whole time period is this explosion of revelations, scandals, betrayals, and disillusionments, and they're all playing out on accelerating and expanding platforms.
I mean, don't forget, this is all wonderfully described.
It's also all happening under the fear of nuclear holocaust.
Absolutely.
And beneath all of that, there seems to be, I feel like there's this constant question that is the drone of my own first 10 years on the planet, being born in 71, which is, what the fuck happened to all of us?
And so I think against this backdrop, I believe that for a while during that tortured 10, 15, 20 years, the alleged survivors of satanic ritual abuse are viewed like canaries in the coal mine, as well as they are being viewed and exploited as cash cow subjects for people like Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera.
And on one level, on the superficial level, and the very real legal level and personal level, they are accusing parents and caregivers.
But then on a symbolic level, on a cultural level, I think they're expressing a larger accusation, which is against a culture and a history that's seemingly out of control, seemingly beyond repair.
You know, but I think on the level of just the facts, ma'am, we just don't know what happened to Teal Swan.
