Why Are Vulnerable People Getting So Traumatized By Both Doctors & Healers? How Can We Keep People Already In Pain Safer?

As part of my research for Sacred Medicine, I was attending a conference about healing and spirituality and giving a keynote to people who had spent years meditating with gurus or working with shamans. When I started talking about the shadow of Sacred Medicine, I noticed that many people began to cry, and by the time we got to the Q&A, people were having full meltdowns as they told their own traumatic stories about guru, shaman, healer, and cult leader abuse. Many of them had never sought out a therapist to help them heal their abuse, and some had never told a single person what they revealed in a large group of people, because they felt so much shame for having a traumatic experience when others were reporting transformational, healing, and awakening experiences.

If you start asking around, you’ll hear countless horror stories. In fact, a group of Native Americans have created an online forum, New Age Frauds & Plastic Shamans, where people who have felt violated by people who claim to be shamans can post their beefs. I started telling people who told me horror stories that if they weren’t going to press criminal charges, they could at least share their stories anonymously on this forum.

I didn’t know what to do with this devastating awareness. Here I had set out to study something sacred, hoping to help people who had lost hope with conventional medicine. But I was bumping into people who induce trauma in vulnerable, gullible people who were desperate for healing. It brought into clear focus why conventional medicine is so skeptical about Sacred Medicine practitioners. Not only is the science proving efficacy of these techniques hard to come by, but many doctors like myself have also heard such horror stories. Given that we as a profession make a promise to “First, do no harm,” it’s scary to risk referring patients to healers who might turn out to hurt them.

The opposite is true also. Healers are hearing horror stories from vulnerable patients about how doctors are traumatizing people right and left without intending to. So where is it safe to find healing? While the shadow of Sacred Medicine seemed darker even than the shadow of conventional medicine I've been calling out for over a decade, it's also true that I've heard awful, traumatizing stories from patients wounded by their doctors when they needed tenderness, mastery, presence, compassion, time, healing, and good ethics the most. Why was this happening? And how could we keep vulnerable and suffering patients safer than we're currently doing? I felt overwhelmed and under pressure to protect myself and anyone who reads this book.

I wrestled with how to handle the conundrum I faced. What was my responsibility in this situation? Short of either canceling my plan to write this book or becoming a professional whistle-blower, risking legal charges of slander if I name the name of the most out of integrity healers I came across, short of trying to ruin these people’s very successful careers by sharing their names publicly so vulnerable people would stop giving away their power, money, and bodies to people hell bent of conning, manipulating, boundary violating and sometimes even raping them, what could I do?

Fortunately, AIT founder Asha Clinton and IFS founder Dick Schwartz came into my life right around this time, and the deepest part of my own trauma healing and shadow work began. Asha told me later, when we were working with one of my Jungian archetypes in AIT therapy, that she believed I embarked upon my Sacred Medicine journey, not just to satisfy my intellectual curiosity and learn tools that might help other people, but also to save myself.

While I didn’t know I needed saving, the wise part of me, the part AIT calls your “center,” must have had a grand plan all along. And while I hope what I’ve learned has helped those who are reading Sacred Medicine, I also see that I needed this not just to help my own body heal from the dog bite injury I told you all about in the beginning of Sacred Medicine. I also needed to come face to face with my own abuses of power, boundary violations, narcissistic tendencies, pathologic need to feel special, and other developmentally traumatized parts that kept me from maturing fully in the woman I’m meant to become, parts that kept me developmentally arrested but blind to my own wounding.

Finally finding the right way to heal my own traumas came as a huge relief. I felt devastated because it took me fifty years, and I had to grieve how many years I hurt myself and others without understanding why my life had been so privileged but also so hard, why my Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) score was zero, and yet my relationships struggled so much. I comforted my parts with the reassurance that it takes however long it takes. They say when the student is ready, the teacher appears. I had found my teachers, and if I never even published my findings, it would have been worth the quest just for that.

The breakthrough I had after realizing that what I was calling Sacred Medicine might have far more to do with healing traumas and moving emotions led me to seek out the people who restored my faith in healers and gave me what I needed to continue my journey. I learned how to be more discerning, and part of what I committed to do is to help you become more discerning too, so that if you feel called to seek out healers for yourself, you’ll know what to look for and how to spot red flags.

*They say lunar eclipses are about endings, and I watched the full blood moon eclipse the other night and took this photo. If anyone listens to our deepest prayers, may we PLEASE treat patients better and stop harming them when they're already so vulnerable? Can we stop these abuses of power and care more?