[tw: about NXIVM, a coaching company taken down by the US Gov’t, called a cult, deeply problematic gender and power dynamics]
Hi hi!
I don’t know what the balance is of sharing about the unbelievable and specific unreality of the heartbreak of losing my dad to COVID is, and the me that is emerging / re-emerging in the wake of it. This is some reflecting on the re-emergence.
To my surprise, I started doing some coaching work again. Where, really, coaching is a handle for “how I want to be present and of service to others.” I can not help but be fascinated by the human mechanism. I want to take it apart the way kids want to take apart their toys. I want to know what’s inside and how it works and put it back together again and hope I didn’t leave a screw out.
Something I think about a lot is the frame of deconstruction and reconstruction of the self - the two core movements of anything that might be called transformative. Deep down I think: deconstruction is good, important, sure, but reconstruction is the real gold in any kind of transformative work. Deconstructing a personality doesn’t take more than a sufficiently strong psychedelic for most people - it’s wrapping that person in a container of love and insight, strong enough to be meaningful but not so strong as to be unraveling, that seems to me like an incredible and holy, noble, deeply meaningful pursuit.
I found this frame really helpful when watching the NXIVM documentaries — “Seduced” and “The Vow.” At first I wondered how 9 hour long episodes could be made about NXIVM in “The Vow,” and then when I saw it I realized just how much ground there was to be covered there, and that 9 episodes could barely scratch the surface.
There are many, many takeaways from the NXIVM story. Is the NXIVM story common knowledge? I don’t know! They were famously outed by the New York Times for having a secretive inner circle of women engaged in very coercive dom/sub relationships, graphically marked by the women receiving a brand of the NXIVM founder’s initials. While this has become the central image of the NXIVM story, what hit me in watching the documentaries is, at its core, NXIVM was a coaching company.
As someone who is a student and collector of transformative technologies and has done multiple coaching trainings, this caught my attention. What is it that went so dark, so sideways, in a company that starts out running seminars and doing deconstructive work that looks awfully similar to many other coaching systems out there? There are scenes in the first episodes of breakthrough after breakthrough - a man getting freed of his anxiety and panic sitting in LA traffic, a famous actress having a breakthrough through a memory rooted in childhood. Where does all this fit in the coercive & secretive sorority that was an insidious mind-virus for the women who got deep into the organization?
I have two takeaways.
One: there’s a simple technical mistake in how NXIVM approaches coaching, which while sounding minor, is actually a huge red flag. I think any good coaching work paces the understanding of how beliefs and narratives are wrapped around feelings and memories - and that often the freeing thing is to let a feeling or memory flow through that hasn’t been safe to feel before, and providing the conditions for that safety. NXIVM presents a subtle distortion of this. In their world, a feeling or sensation coming up merits more deconstruction work (an “exploration of meaning” in their vernacular) - what arises is seen as a symptom of conditioning to be explored, not the thing to be loved itself.
For me one of the constant checks in doing this work is being with children. The better my sense of how to love and help someone unconditionally, the more fluid I feel with children. You can imagine loving a kid and every big feeling they have, being the kind of person that delights and shows up for them, no matter how messy it gets. Or you can imagine seeing the feelings as a symptom of something to be fixed in a child. It’s clear the former is the way.
The other take away: NXIVM gains a lot of social capital and momentum from their deconstruction work. Deconstruction, done well, is a flashy, dazzling skill. I have no doubts the moments they show - life-changing moments where someone is freed of a long-standing fear or anxiety - were both a dime a dozen in the NXIVM environment and real. When this kind of work works, it looks like psychological magic. (It’s not.)
Operating at the blueprint level with people - where the stories, beliefs, motivations are written - is a deeply vulnerable and sacred layer inside of us, to be treated with utmost care and respect. Freedom at this layer can be undeniably compelling - a sudden return of energy, motivation, or finding deep insight. In the wake of that, someone’s sense of what is real, what is possible, can get very malleable, shapable, very influenced.
The obvious, not subtle red flag with NXIVM is that the reconstruction looks like not like the huge, wild variety of self-actualization, but a repetitive and damaging frame focused on women, and focused on reducing them to a specific sexual type (i.e. the focus on calorie counting & being extremely underweight) and also creating a dependency financially and socially with the organization. This isn’t the subtle take - it’s pretty clear from any NXIVM news article. What struck me was how successful deconstruction can pave the way and earn the buy-in for a profoundly corrupted reconstruction.
Anyhow … those are my thoughts from watching the NXIVM documentaries. It feels like an important case study for any one interested in psychology and the practice of it.