My Healing

Suing For Best Practices at HAI

My Journey and Openings
Massage Suitable for Trauma
Denying Our Soul's Gifts
The Story of Betrayal
Standing Up to an Endless Loop
My journey of healing consists of repairing the damage caused by facilitator influence:

1) Broken trust: When my entire therapeutic and facilitator body betrayed me, by putting their own interests ahead of my life, safety and well-being, it not only breaks trust in the people who betrayed me, but in myself, since I am the one who chose them. This shatters hope of being able to find effective healing support. So there has been a lot of experimenting to see what I can and cannot trust myself to receive in the way of support. It is the most difficult wound to heal because my country, therapists, parents and teachers have also betrayed me in many of the same areas. It is hard to find a human, myself included, who can and will take a stand for the innocent boy who has never had a single solid adult in his life, until now, who he can depend on.

2) Loneliness caused by the many messages of exclusion: From the moment I exhibited symptoms of Peter Sandhill's mistakes, negligence and abuse there has been one message: "You are not welcome here. We don't want you. We don't want to hear about our impact. You are not worth the bother. Your feelings have little value compared to our own needs." This, following on the heals of falling deeply in love with Peter Sandhill on my first psychedelic dose, which he escalated in multiple ways during the session, followed by multiple betrayals and abandonments, is the deepest wound. It has been almost impossible to pull out of the nose dive, created by one betrayal after another, one denial and lie after another. Without trust it is very hard to form relationships strong enough to respond to this depths of loneliness. And yet that has been my primary focus, spending 60% of my time in Philippines and Thailand over the past three years and prioritizing this deepest of wounds, I have been slowly successful in building one very strong relationship that is one of the best in my life, and several warm acquaintances that make the loneliness tolerable most of the time.

3) Dissociation: The combination of lies, decoys, delay and agendas that were not my well-being meant that after a profoundly dissociating experience on psychedelics, I was not able to integrate. When integration meant feeling the depth of my anger, hurt, pain and loneliness about Peter and HAI facilitator behavior, it was an integration that was actively discouraged by Peter, the facilitators and HAI, leaving me with the clear message: If you are going to integrate your truth, you will have to be alone in that pain. No one wants to stand by you in this area. This was the most terrifying of rides and continues to be. It is hard enough to integrate the wave of childhood abuse that psychedelics often make conscious. When that abuse is mirrored in present time by a complete abandonment of all my support networks, it is almost impossible. Without trust, it's very hard to find someone able and capable of integrating such intensity. I have turned to women who can empathize and to my camera, as a silent, non-judgmental witness to record more than 500 hours of video around the emotions, and different facets of the experience. 

4) Disrupted gifts: The greatest wound of trauma is that it blocks my humanity. For many years I have not been able to love or be loved, because the reptilian brain that produces the fight/flight/freeze physiology is louder than the emphatic human areas of the brain, and often leads to emotional dissociation in an effort to survive. Feeling the grief as I come to grips with being robbed of my humanity for much of my life, and having that come online in deep crisis and pain, rather than the nurturing womb of healing container, has been so painful I've often addicted myself to avoid the pain. It is also the richest positive area to explore. Many of my videos touch on gifts, pains, griefs, perceptions, patterns from both a micro and macro lens, as I make sense of the terrain.

5) Blocked contribution: One of the biggest abuses of a power-structure that has a secret as an agenda is that I found that my many insights and impulses to help the community around this issue were resisted, unwanted, dis-honored and actively discouraged, rather than invited. Without inviting my love, care, empathy, learning, perceptions and feelings the community could not benefit from the learning, the insights or the parts of my Self that came online slowly, in an effort to keep Peter feeling great about himself - something he actively seeks in my relationship with him.
His need to feel competent in areas he is profoundly ignorant and dishonoring, expressed in multiple ways including him blaming me for telling his wife and peers what happened, when he refused to listen or respond, left me deeply divided and shamed. Every single facilitator participated in this, alone with every single board-member, and most members of the community. It has therefore been a very dark process of choosing between suppressing my gifts and going away in shame or rebelling against the lie that my gifts are not needed, when the evidence supports the supposition that the very things all of the facilitators do not want to do are the very things they need to do to save their organization, their mission, their own souls and the vitality of the entire community. It is always a shame when someone's contribution, truth, spirit and love is suppressed to protect an abuser's secret just because they appear to have the power. This site and the documentary, which bypass the facilitator's communication controls (they shut me out of all e-mail accounts for fear I would tell the community what happened and did so without warning) has been a way to honor those gifts. I am not sure this community can honor them, but I have learned so much from the faciliator's mistakes that I believe that other therapeutic bodies, other communities, other HAI participants and team members, and other leaders in trauma can learn from their mistakes as well. I will therefore make the information freely available for all of these bodies pro-actively for decades to come.

6) Overwhelm: Having my parent's shame and secrets, the facilitator shame and secrets and my own shame to carry in a communication lock-down of minimizing, control, denial, avoidance and outright lies has been too big. I've dealt with the overwhelm by breaking it down into small bits and making videos that each have a theme. Practicing in front of a camera. Noticing when what I'm saying rings true, or when it feels that it's 20% to the left or right of my truth has helped me zero in, without pressure, on what is in my body, what is in my heart, and what makes sense on my mind to integrate all that I've learned from so many sources. Listening deeply to such people as Robert Bly, Bessel Van Der Kolk, John Bradshaw, Brene Brown, Alice Miller, Terrence Mckenna, Tim Ferriss and many more for hundreds of hours has helped me ground to the truths in me that resonate with best practices in the field of leadership, human relationships, psychology and business. This is the crowd I want to emulate and it flies in the face of almost every aspect of HAI facilitator protocol around this issue. Letting in how off base the facilitators have been has been terrifying in it's way, but also healing as it correlates to the deepest pain, trauma, terror, shame and loneliness of my adult life.

7) Exhaustion and loneliness: Writing three books about this terrain, making 1-4 hours of video every day on topics relating to this, thinking in endless spirals about this material and all the while knowing that 80% of the HAI community and facilitators do not welcome these truths in their format, depth, intensity and what they reveal, has been very lonely and difficult. I've responded to that by turning my gaze beyond the community to a number of things: The fact that these learnings can help me in any situation. The fact that the documentary can help anyone in any cult and in any unhealthy power dynamic be more conscious of abuse and how to take care of themselves. And the fact that by doing the opposite that the facilitators did, my personal relationship is growing by leaps and bounds, allows me to plug away at the nuances around these issues without worrying about the fact that they are not welcome at the Human Awareness Institute, who has in fact hired a lawyer to prevent me from putting these things on this website, but has never once offered to hire a professional to repair any of the criminal and therapeutic negligence they have admitted to, or the negligence they have not admitted to - furthering the message that my needs, emotions and well-being is of little value to them compared to their own financial and other agendas.

This page explores a few samples of videos I have used to integrate.
What I Do and Do Not Know
Heading Towards A Court Case with HAI - Part 1
Heading Towards A Court Case with HAI - Part 2
Why I want to Die
Breaking the Contract of Survival and Shame
Understanding and Being Seen on Our Invisible Journey
The Chemistry of Insanity
Understanding Addiction Late at Night
Sub-Optimal and Abusive Choices of the Facilitator Body and Board
Listing the many ways I've been hurt, set up to fail and shamed for that failure has helped me lift some of the shame that I feel and the worthlessness that I feel as my efforts to educate the facilitators has been met with willful ignorance and silence, helps me understand where my feelings originate, validate those feelings as healthy and accurate reflections of the facilitator's impact, and also understand how NOT doing something, as in the case of telling someone how to press the accelerator but not how to stop the car, can be more impactful than what was done. 
Not training for the shadow aspects of the role and the shadow of sexual relationships in Western Culture.
Not having a questionnaire prior to the workshops and reviewing the answers and referring people to trauma material prior to attending with people who have been abused.
Not teaching or tracking the fact that I regressed emotionally due to this abuse and was therefor experiencing the abuse as a 1-7 year old much of the time.
Not teaching team-members about trauma, system theory and the shadow of relationships.
Not recommending team-members read the body of books that HAI does not cover.
Not mentioning trauma in the workshops.
Not disclosing the unlicensed status of the facilitators prior to recommending the facilitators.
Peter S. not asking about any history of family, trauma or context prior to doing work.
Peter S. not terminating a therapeutic relationship after expressing sexual interest in me.
Charging me to explore a sexual interest in me in the context of an open marriage.
Not catching the physical and physiological symptoms of trauma this violation of therapeutic and HAI agreements triggered.
Failing to apologize.
Treating shame-based regressed participants as if they were adults when they were in regressed states during workshops, which shames them.
Failing to offer a refund.
Failure to diagnose and point me towards a therapist who could help.
Failure to refer me to books that could help.
Failure to own the inadequacy of Peter S. training and implying that the failure of therapy was a result of my inadequacies, not Peter S. inadequate training and ethics.
Recommending that I take MDMA with Peter S. at his house.
Recommending that I pay a man who is exploring a sexual interest in me $600. to take an illegal drug.
Failure to go into any drug history in my family or life or my feelings about drugs prior to the recommendation.
Failure to ask about my feelings about breaking the law, taking drugs, having sex with a therapist or being homosexual for the first time in my life.
Failure to recognize passive/aggressive energy from me as a sign of anger mixed with fear.
Pampering the passive/aggressive energy in me without welcoming the healthy aggression/fear that would involve Peter S. owning up to his inadequacies.
Peter injecting me between his wife (my facilitator and therapist) and himself, by violating agreements, the law and good therapy to talk about his desire for a male lover and by telling me intimate details about his marriage, his needs, Sarah's feelings and fears in their relationship.
Sarah denying that she had any fear around me associated with Peter's behavior.
Sarah refusing to directly intervene to protect my well-being: I was scared and traumatized, did not understand my feelings and Sarah S. was in a position to understand those feelings.
Sarah choosing not to bring this to the other facilitators so they could intervene on my behalf.
Not asking participants during the workshops: "Are any of you leaving your body during these workshops?"
The facilitator body not honoring or responding in any way to my concerns expressed to them in an 8 page letter, a pattern which insures willful ignorance in these areas even when a participant takes the time to teach them what they need to be teaching participants.
Not educating participants in any of the workshops about trauma symptoms, while trauma symptoms were expressing themselves in 90% of my 30 workshops.
Not educating the participants that 60% or more of Americans are dealing with unresolved trauma to one degree or another.
Not educating the participants about what childhood and relationship abuse consists of in detail.
Not asking about the large percentage of team-members and participants abuse in the space.
Not referring team-members or participants to the material I've mentioned in "Medicine" that can respond to this.
Not teaching participants how to protect themselves from abuse dynamics by the team, by other participants and the facilitators.
Not identifying key abuse patterns of our culture, including the details of chauvinism, or referring participants to sources to find out this information.
Not teaching participants how to protect others from abuse patterns in themselves with a safe-emotional-conversation consisting of:
Not teaching trauma survivors that they are NOT at choice around trauma/abuse patterns. They are only at choice to seek help or not, and to seek help they must know what trauma is, that it is viral in nature, and that we are all innocent at birth until we are shamed by authority figures.
Not asking for information about the abuse in the community.
Not teaching the variables, such as power-differential, which relate to abuse intensity. 
Not asking for shame/pain/trauma tracking within the relationships HAI workshops facilitate.
Not responding to the very high levels of betrayal, shame, self-negation and self-abandonment of abused women in the community who say "yes" when they mean "no."
Not publishing the meta-data about abuse statistics in the larger culture and comparing that to the meta-data in the community and the abuse trends within the community. It is important to know if more shame/trauma occurs in the community or outside or if it's the same because HAI facilitates a 400-1000% increase in physical sex, which correlates to abuse in an abuse-illiterate population. 
Peter S. refusing to apologize for any of his abuse until it was all repeated 12 years later and then refusing again until I had to ask for an apology.
Failing to differentiate individuals into their essence, their wound and their coping strategy of managing the pain of the wound, thus leaving people loved and hurt by the same person and not knowing why. The essence never hurts. The coping strategy of managing pain always hurts the self and others in some way.
Failing to differentiate between healthy sensuality and sex/power addiction. 
Failure to teach men that they will ultimately treat any feminine woman the way the man treats his own feminine side, which defaults to the way the culture abuses men's feminine side with shame, betrayal, humiliation, abandonment, violence and shame for talking about the abuse.
Failing to ask for help: Enormous help is needed by the entire community to heal shame, trauma and ignorance in the culture at large and the HAI community. Yet the facilitators have NEVER once asked for the help they need to do this.
Using words such as "committed to win/win, love, the room of love, human dignity" while maintaining an environment of secrecy and shame that insured failure in a large percentage of participants in the blind spots the correspond to the cultural and family blind-spots. By using optimal words but not doing best-practices it not only muddies the meaning of words, but masks the many mistakes made by the facilitators. It has been demonstrated conclusively that an individual is incapable of doing "shadow work" until they know what it means and how to do it, that someone cannot stop addiction unless they understand the concept and how to do it with twelve step programs.
Failure to follow up when I have left workshops to learn any of the deeper reasons for my well-being increasing when I left a workshop I'd paid for.
Failure to ask me if my success rate was going up or down after 30 workshops of practicing HAI exercises.
  • A history of key abuse patterns in childhood.
  • A history of the most painful feelings the abuse engendered.
  • A list of trigger points that tend to bring this up.
  • A list of what books we have and have not explored.
  • A sharing of behaviors that keep us safe and bring the best out in us.
  • A list of ways we have hurt other people and why we think that happens.
  • A list of warning signs that we may abuse mentally, emotionally or physically.
  • An invitation to communicate to us in a kind way that we are becoming abusive.
  • An action plan to disengage with kindness if an abuse pattern is emerging in the relationship.
  • A safety/trauma protocol to immediately implement if/when abuse starts.
  • A periodic check-in about how close we feel to abusing and why, and how safe the other feels from our abuser.
  • I would add that I think ALL of this is more important, relevant and ethically necessary than understanding body parts and dynamics around physical sex.
Failure to teach me how to temper "asking for your 100%" with healthy empathy and trauma awareness.
Failure to set up the Normal e-mail lists to help me feel safe, seen and welcome in the work I was doing in this area.
Failure to provide a map of what HAI does and does NOT cover in the relationship terrain.
Failure to teach the community about the 10% of participants who are biologically Highly Sensitive and need respect and support to cope in high intensity workshops.
Failure to list the details of "best" practices on the website or hand-out to show what good protocols are and what the goal is in every interaction and how to get back on track.
Failure to adequately prepare sexual abuse survivors with a coping mechanism of "pleasing the abuser" before violating personal genital boundaries in many of the exercises.
Failure to teach a participant what to do when a sexual partner is abusing themselves and punishing themselves because they are traumatized.
Peter S. walked away in a workshop crying after I told him I needed him to stay and hear me and he never came back to apologize or clear things up. I had to leave his workshops to manage the betrayal this brought up.
Not one facilitator, board member or team-member contacted me when I wrote on Norcal Annce. that I planned to take my own life primarily around the exhaustion, pain, shame and failure of my relationships within the community and my inability to do anything about that.
Part Two Relating to Peter Sandhill facilitating my first Psychedelic Experience:
Peter failed to include his wife or any facilitator about his choice to facilitate my first psychedelic experience, thus insuring his isolation from support if anything went wrong and breaking trust with both his colleagues and his wife. This made me his enemy if something went wrong.
Peter failed to look into and talk about the 10-15% of people who have profoundly disturbing psychedelic journeys or prepare me for that, before agreeing to take money to be my guide.
Peter failed to ask any questions at all prior to the experience, stating only that because it fit into his schedule he knew it was a "good sign" and quoting Lynda Cessara, his energy teacher on this.
Peter failed to respect the massive amounts of panic that I felt leading up to the session.
Peter failed to educate me about trauma or ask about trauma prior to the session.
Peter insisted for five minutes that I triple the psychedelic dose I felt comfortable with, despite anything I said.
To assuage my fears Peter promised to take a total and complete commitment for my safety.
Peter glossed over my mention of my motivation to take psychedelics as a possible break-through to avoid suicide.
Peter agreed with my request that he ignore all his professional roles and do what I asked him to do. This was a mistake of mine to ask since it was my first psychedelic experience and it was a mistake of Peter to agree to violate his roles, which he was being paid to hold.
Peter discouraged me from drinking lime juice so that I would have an even more intense psychedelic experience.
Peter directed my attention away from the first words out of my mouth in the psychedelic session, "You really hurt me in 1993." He should have directed my attention into that wound so he and I would avoid repeating it.
Peter announced an hour into the session that "I did not tell Sarah this was a psychedelic session," making me a secret-keeper in his marriage again. Nor did he ask me if I would hold his secret or wanted to hear one.
Peter left me thinking that maybe this kind of lying by omission was OK because a facilitator was doing it. I've never lied like this to a partner.
Peter resisted three attempts to tell him he had blind spots.
Peter suggested that I add MDMA on top of the high dose of mushrooms when I said I was very dizzy, saw lots of shapes but was not getting anything out of the session.
Peter suggested I take MDMA again 30 minutes later when I did not follow his first suggestion.
When I fell madly in love with Peter on the two drugs combined, he did not honor the love or the vulnerability of this open place or coach me on how to honor it.
Peter asked me to lay on top of him while French kissing.
Peter talked about lifetimes together.
Peter asked me while I was channeling (his words) to tell him what he should eat for his diet.
Peter validated comments about his marriage and Sarah but denied repeatedly that he had any blind spots.
Peter refused to stop charging me when I asked him to stop asking me to pay for what was a mutually escalated first homosexual relationship. He refused five times.
Peter refused to bring closure or clarity to our romantic relationship at the end of the session when I asked him directly.
Peter ignored my request to help me integrate the session over the next nine months.
Peter refused to go into the depths of my pain with me, when I asked him to during the session.
Peter was 20 minutes late for our first integration session, without calling, responding to frantic calls, emailing or communicating in any way.
Peter charged me $175. to deal with the abandonment I felt about him being late for the biggest therapy session of my life without calling.
Peter recommended that I marry a completely inappropriate woman I had just met in Thailand.
Peter charged me $175./hr to facilitate the endless problems that occurred as I tried to marry this woman.
Peter recommended that I marry her multiple times stating "this is the brightest future I see for you," every time I presented new problems with the relationship.
Peter refused to apologize when I spent $60,000. for one of the most traumatic relationships of my life that left me laying in bed for a month. 
Peter deflected and refused to talk about our romantic relationship during this whole period, saying always "let's talk about this later."
Peter unilaterally ignored numerous e-mails from me without saying why or setting a boundary.
When I asked him: "Do you have any boundaries. Why are you not replying?" He said: "I have no boundaries," then ignored my next two e-mails and refused to clarify our relationship.
When I told him I needed support and asked him to take a stand for me, he said nothing.
When I told him I felt off and was trying to find a way to take care of myself, he said that everything was good on his end.
He charged me $175. to have some semblance of a closing hour so that I could attempt a withdrawal from this cycle of abuse. When I asked him if he could apologize for anything, he said "No."
He ignored and got angry when I found I could not emotionally separate from the relationship. He said: "You need to do your own work."
When I told him that images were forming in my mind of something very ugly around us, he denied it had anything to do with him.
Grappling with Grief
Healing Self by Giving to Another
One of the Most Important things I'm learning
Responding to Deep Pain with Medicine
Give it Back or Pass it On
A Lifetime of Personal Exploration
The Deterioration of Presenting Personas in the Face of Abuse
Meta Conversation
Understanding Paradox
The Older Brothers A Small Anecdote
Suicide
Chauvinism and Capitolism does not lead to a Diverse Culture
Meta Conversations
Shame Part 1
Art and Transcendence
Poetry and Magic
Healing Insanity
The HAI Defense Pattern
Psyche and Ego
Soul Wounds and their Healing
The Denied Feminine
Mythology of the Psyche
Exploring the Evolution of Personas to Survive Trauma
In Search of the Psyche Part One
In Search of the Psyche Part Two
My personal healing journey has been in-depth and challenging. The gist of it is to express unexpressed and repressed parts of myself, learn about them, and then respond to their many feelings and perspectives with a goal that every part of me feels welcome to talk to my conscious self. This has included forays into poetry, painting, music, physical paralysis and exploration, regression to early childhood ages and at times transcendent states in which I venture out beyond cultural norms and invite parts of me to speak that are not honored in my daily life. Everything I have learned of use has been at the fringe of our culture and the energies necessary to respond to the wound have been transcendent presences, including crystal consciousness. Learning that not a single human being was able and willing to understand the psychic states in play or provide the energy to heal has deepened my spirituality: my respect of those parts of the psyche that are bigger than the conscious mind and not physically embodied. This has been a gift, given the lack of available time and skill on a human level.

The full scope of my healing is outside of this page and includes:

  • Forming a 501c3 Non Profit to gather, organize and disseminate data relevant to global well-being.
  • Forming a relationship with my now Fiance.
  • Writing three books, including one published as The Art of Partnering.
  • Establishing a base in Thailand including a film studio for the large volume of video I have begun producing.
  • Doing a documentary on the challenges of a romantic couple with traumatic history and PTSD symptoms living together.
  • Making 700 hours of film exploring feelings and perspectives triggered by my interaction with the HAI facilitator body.
  • Designing several apps to address possibilities for well-being.
  • Digesting 300 hours of media on psychedelics, shame, therapeutic guidelines, trauma and post-traumatic growth.
  • Starting eight different youtube channels to make public different aspects of what I was learning and integrating.
  • Confronting my father before his recent death about his abuse.
  • Confronting my mother about her abuse.
  • Sharing much of this media with my siblings so that they are more aware of the abuse patterns we have each experienced.
  • Giving money to Wikileaks, supporting Snowden and several other non-profits that are taking stands for truth.
  • Helping a trauma-survivor escape an abuse-situation and explore her freedom independently.
  • Training five physical therapists and masseuses to engage with the trauma in my body in a healing way and doing several hundred hours of work.
  • Doing family constellation therapy.
  • Confronting several of my former therapists for their lack of knowledge about trauma and asking them to grow.
  • Giving away "The Body Keeps the Score" to several clients and friends to heal our cultural blind spot.
  • Doing a thirty day project to give value to people around me every day.
  • Designing a vision for community and a country that could generate ten times more well-being than any country on earth and devoting a youtube channel to explore it.
  • Learning to understand each of my feelings and their sources.

Below are videos and notes relating to a portion of this healing. I hope that by sharing this personal information individuals in trauma will feel less alone and people with constrictive emotions bottled up will understand that there is nothing good or bad about any emotion. Every emotion is a reflection in one way or another of our environment, past or present, and can lead us towards the knowledge needed to change our environment until we live in an environment that naturally generates healthy states.​
An Overview of my Healing
Rediscovering the Murdered Soul through Poetry
Where are the Adults
Faces of the Wound
Painting for Emotional Well Being Part 1
Painting for Emotional Well Being Part 2
Shame Part 2
Exploring Failure in a Paradigm of Self, Wound and Adaption
Healing Chronic Fatigue
Celebration
When Abuse Survivors Question Them-selves Rather Than The Power Structure
Sorting Through Confusion about How to Respond
Pros and Cons of Suing HAI
My Decision Making Process healing PTSD and Creating Success
Are the Facilitators Safe Yet
Using Art Therapy
Things can Integrate and Heal when the Pain Becomes Bearable
Regressed to a Traumatic Age
Age Regression and a Model for Healing
What it's like being an American Man
Exploring Age Regression
The HAI Video Project
Integrating Grief around HAI
Gandalf Defending HAI in Court
Humor
The Most Important Thing Part 2
The 30000 Feet View of this Dynamic
Resistance to Writing to the Facilitators
The Most Important Thing Part 1
Understanding Motivation around HAI