Bob Hoffman—#GayMeToo

October 1st, 2019

I have been struggling with my relationship with Bob Hoffman for more than 40 years. Ever since I finished the original Hoffman Process, then called “Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy,” the incidents I’m going to reveal have been painful and problematic. Still now, more than 20 years after his death, they continue to trouble me.

Last April when Ashish and I returned from India, we realized that after nearly 10 years of being inseparable, something had changed in our relationship. I had become restless and irritable, and couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I tried to pretend that everything would eventually return to normal, but some line had been crossed. After several blowups, he told me it was over, and he left me. I was crushed. 

Ash and I had come to the end of a deep, loving relationship, but certainly the breakup had nothing to do with his actions. So why did I feel betrayed? Not 10 minutes into the first session with a therapist, I found myself talking about Hoffman, our therapist/client relationship, being stalked by Hoffman not 4 months after I finished the Process, and before the therapist could even ask the question, I blurted out that he raped me. It was not a consensual sexual encounter between adults, but an uninvited, unwelcome, and painful sexual violation by a man in whom I’d placed my trust. Of course I felt betrayed.

I had met Hoffman at a point when I was in the midst of an enormous disruption in my life’s trajectory. I left the Jesuit order; I abandoned my professional aspirations to be an architect, and struggled to create a fulfilling livelihood; I came out as a gay man; I embraced a very active role in the world of gay liberation; I began my quest to find a nurturing relationship with another man. I would love to acknowledge Hoffman as the impetus for this change of direction, and celebrate him, or at least be grateful towards him. Instead the only feelings that I have towards him vary between indifference and outright hostility depending on the circumstances where I find myself thinking about him.

And now the project of writing #gaymetoo. 

A victim should not have to apologize. And yet part of the reason I’ve been silent all these years is that I’ve somehow felt that anything I might say that would damage Hoffman’s reputation is somehow inappropriate. Why? Because he is an admired figure, even if some of his past is murky, hidden or idealized. 

But many other abuse victims have felt the same misplaced feelings of complicity, so it’s probably most liberating to start with all the reasons why I shouldn’t even start. In 1973 I was 29. I was not an adolescent choir boy and certainly capable of consent. I am also gay. In the gay community attitudes and norms for sexual encounters have always been relatively permissive, and I am certainly not a prude. 

At the time Hoffman was 48 or 49, and, although that’s a significant age gap, I just ended a 10 year relationship with a man 25 years younger than myself. It’s also true that the 70’s were a time of sexual revolution. The norms of our conservative parents’ generation were being toppled. The War in Vietnam had forced my generation to question the moral authority of all our institutions. Although the authority of the Church had not yet been pummelled by the pedophile scandal, in the wake of Vatican II, we certainly questioned the role of celibacy for priests and religious. Everything was in flux. 

It’s also true that I had just come out. That journey for many gay men, and I assume lesbians too, of my generation during that period of revolution was tumultous. It certainly was for me. Everything that happened in my personal life then had the feeling of upheaval. That will become clear if you read through to the end of this piece.

And among the most persuasive reasons why I’ve hesitated to write is that the Process that Hoffman developed, despite all its problems, seems to have helped an enormous number of people. Of course the enterprise has changed and evolved since Hoffman first started his psychic readings with people in the “reading room” of his tailor shop on 15th Street in Oakland in the late 60’s. The current practitioners have shed the barbaric practices that violated professional standards of client-therapist relationship, and it took more than just calling people who stood in the powerful role of therapist “teachers.” Teachers can still be the objects of serious and debilitating transference. 

And if this appears to be just another “hit piece” against a man whom many take to be somewhat of a luminary in the transpersonal psychological world, or it devolves into “I said, he said,” I’ll miss the mark.

And so why write at all?

Because something deep inside me tells me that I have to. After years of personal work, thousands of dollars in therapy, countless hours in the rooms of 12 step recovery, experimenting with every personal growth program that I could find, talking to spiritual counselors all over the world, I cannot forget that Bob Hoffman took advantage of me in an entirely unethical and selfish way. In a way, writing about it may perhaps allow me to forgive Hoffman, or at least understand why it remains so painful and debilitating.

The current #metoo movement has focused on high, powerful men taking advantage of young girls. Of course the on-going scandal of priests abusing their position to satisfy their sexual drives with adolescent boys is a kind #Catholicmetoo story. But not as sensational as Roman Catholic Cardinals being held to account for their past sins, there is more than enough evidence of older gay men taking advantage of younger men in the process of coming out that I have to tell my story. 

And most importantly I have to heal myself. I cannot harbor any illusions of rehabilitating my relationship with Ashish, but I want to hold it as a cherished part of my life. And perhaps we both can share this and be friends.

So let me begin at the beginning, or at least as close as memory allows me to approach a relationship that began in 1972-3 and lasted until Hoffman died in 1997. Although time has thankfully erased many of the details, I am confident my reporting is factual in terms of the actions, times and places. And of course the emotional interpretation is mine alone. 

In 1972 I was a Jesuit scholastic, bright, enthusiastic, inquisitive and, to most observers, engaged in my life. I loved the Jesuits and had done well in the rigorous course of study. I was certainly accepted and encouraged by fellow Jesuits and superiors. I didn’t hide what I characterized as struggles with my homoerotic feelings from my superiors, and they tried to help in whatever way they could. Still the prospect of a lifetime of celibacy seemed more and more like a chain rather than a path to fulfillment.

I was unhappy and frustrated and, although I tried to hide from it, I knew that I was a turning point in my life. 

Then early that summer, over the course of a long conversation with another young Jesuit in New York where I was a student at Woodstock College, the famous Jesuit Theologiate that had relocated close to Columbia University, I heard about a Jesuit priest, Bob Ochs, who was working with Claudio Naranjo in Berkeley California. Bob P. told me about his experiences with the Enneagram, the liberation of psychological work that was also at its base, spiritual. Something inside me felt a connection, or perhaps I was just grabbing at straws in my pain, but I decided right then that I was going to California.

The very next morning I called my religious superiors in Boston, and asked for permission to transfer to the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley to work with Ochs. After a few questions, they agreed—actually they were enthusiastic—and asked me to call Berkeley and see if I could be admitted. Things fell into place so quickly and smoothly that I felt the Universe, or the Holy Spirit, was guiding me. 

Within 10 days I was sharing a ride cross country with a young kid from Brooklyn who was headed towards the Northwest for forestry school. Once in Berkeley I called Ochs to introduce myself, and then in a completely flat tone (I have no idea why I remember that) he asked, “Why don’t you join the group?” It had never occurred to me, but I’d just driven across the country in a headlong, desperate search to discover something about myself, and I called the number he gave me. Rosalyn Shaffer answered the phone and told me—again her tone was rather flat—to be at an old fraternity house at 7 PM sharp on Tuesday night. 

When I got there, I joined the odd collection of young therapists, grad students, carpenters, journalists, film makers, bearded bare-foot hippies, waiting at the door. Some were even smoking marijuana before the session. The doors opened and we entered a large thread bare living room, and Claudio just said, “Let’s begin with zazen.” And we sat for close to an hour. 

I am including as many details as I can remember because I want to flesh out how different this world was for me. Even though Woodstock College was as experimental as the Jesuits could muster post-Vatican II, and even though I had been a student at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard which was not immune to the counter-cultural forces of the anti-Vietnam, San Francisco Summer of Love ethos, this was remarkably different. I sensed that if I stuck with whatever program was going to be proposed, my life would change in ways that I could not predict. And that certainly I would be confronted and uncomfortable. I chose to stay.

My experience that evening was not just that California presented a cafeteria of spiritual disciplines, but a veritable smorgasbord! By 10:15 we’d sat zazen, been introduced to dantian breathing by Mr. Chu, a Taoist master from Taiwan, and engaged in Gestalt therapy, first Claudio working with one student and then in “dyads.” We were instructed to meditate for at least 30 minutes in the morning, keep a dream journal, meet with a support cohort of three other group members, and return on Thursday night. Tuesdays and Thursdays were shock points in the Sufi tradition and provided the most opportunity for deep change.

The professional, if unconventional rhythm of the evening sessions, was set. It became comfortable and something that I rather looked forward to. Long periods of meditation became easier and I actually did them. I made friends in my small group. The group began to seem less unconventional and more a group of dedicated young people who were intent on discovering something about themselves. And Rosalyn promised that within a week we’d be introduced to Bob Hoffman, who would lead us in a first ever group process of the “Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy.”

The first encounter with Hoffman was certainly very strange. I remember very clearly that he wore what I knew was an expensive sport coat and tie while we were in jeans and tee shirts. Standing behind Rosalyn he appeared extremely uncomfortable. When he began to speak, it was soon obvious that he was not educated in any psychological discipline, but he dominated the room, alternatively talking then yelling in a kind of dumbed-down jargon filled with what became known as ”Hoffmanisms.” The paradoxical definition of “negative love was illogical logical and nonsensical sense,” and if we didn’t understand that, we were just playing dumb out of negative love; if we thought he was too well dressed, it was negative transference and an indication that we didn’t love ourselves. My feelings about his inappropriate dress—worthy only of a racetrack—betrayed more far more than “negative love’—the transference had already begun. 

I felt trapped, but I had just moved all the way from New York and had nowhere else to turn so I sat and took notes. 

How and why did I get hooked? During the group work with Claudio’s group, during the “prosecution of mother,” I had what was my first major breakthrough. Claudio had us working in the manner of Perls’s Gestalt Therapy particularly when we were doing the “mother bitch session.” 

We were instructed to touch the core of any latent anger we harbored towards our mothers. Claudio said that even just a second of authentic experience would change our world. So I was in the hot seat, and I tried to express my anger. No one in the group believed me. So I tried again. Again just surface complaints about a trivial matter. But then something inside me opened. I could use the word snapped. And my anguish and anger exploded. The pitch of my voice broke a glass that was sitting beside Cheryl, a cherished friend in my support cohort. 

I could no longer pretend that I was somehow spared the anguish of a domineering parent. And with that realization, the intricate spiritual world of young Jesuit seeker that I’d constructed as defense began to look like a sham, and 10 years of rigorous disciplined religious life began to crumble. 

At about the same time, it became clear that Hoffman was frustrated with the pace of the process and the depth of Claudio’s exploration. He felt that a person just had to “open” to the emotions that he or she had either denied or repressed. Claudio’s work with Perls and his own psychological training, I think, opened the emotional world for exploration, but Hoffman was not interested in anything more than the psychic and emotional motivation for adopting the negative behaviors of parent or parent surrogate. He’d worked with people in his one-on-one process in a matter of 4 or 5 weeks. The SAT Process was going on 3 months and we hadn’t even finished the prosecution of mother. He announced that he was going to end the SAT Process after the defense of mother. He would do his own group process, and set a rapid, regimented pace for the work.

Hoffman approached me when he was finishing up the FHPT with the SAT Group and told me that he felt that I should join his pilot Process at Tolman Hall. He said that he sensed that I would go on to lead groups and that I should definitely train under Dr. Ernie Pecci whose PSI Institute would be taking over the Process. 

50 or so people gathered in late January of ‘73 for Hoffman’s first Process. We met I think on Monday nights, and had until Wednesday to complete the work assignment. We got our written work to Hoffman and he gave us taped feedback the following Monday. 

Late one Wednesday afternoon I hand delivered my emotional autobiography with father to Hoffman on 15th Street. It was past 5, and the receptionist had left. Hoffman was sitting at his desk in a cramped office, with his feet on the desk. I stood at the open door. 

He told me to hand him my work, and he began to read it right on the spot. He would read a paragraph, comment on the emotional tone, and then try to make some connection between the specific circumstances I’d described and what he called the negative emotional patterns and character traits that I’d adopted from my father in an attempt to bargain for his love.

He read through to an incident I wrote about my father resetting the stone wall on the back of our lot. As he was moving the stones into a wheelbarrow, he uncovered the nest of a woodchuck who’d built her nest in a cranny between the rocks. As she was ferociously defending her cubs, my father killed her and her cubs with his shovel. As I remembered it, he began to beat her viciously. Her screams were chilling. 

Hoffman began by complimenting the emotional tone of my writing. But then he began to raise his voice. First he said that obviously my Dad was a homosexual, and then, “You’re also gay too, aren’t you?” I countered with a question about how he could deduce that my dad was gay based on his bludgeoning a woodchuck? His voice became louder and louder. He was now almost screaming—obviously my father was a sadist. What? Then he repeated his question: “You’re gay? Don’t play games with me. I know these things.” I admitted that of course I had gay feelings, but I was unsure if I was gay. By now he was shouting loudly: “Don’t play games with me.” I had heard that Hoffman often often attacked clients—he claimed that he was breaking us down in order to build us up—but I could barely believe it. 

Of course he was right that I was in nearly complete denial about my homosexuality, but I am certain that he didn’t deduce this from any incident I related in the negative father autobiography. Many of the other things that he said or implied about my father were entirely off base and not even worthy of the weirdest pop psychology. 

When I described this incident to my therapist, his response was: when you stayed, he knew he had you.

By the first or second week of May we’d finished the Process. My parents had planned to come to California in late May and we would drive back east together. There was a kind of ritual for completing your emotional divorce from your parents—after you’d gotten your parents full attention, you just said “I love you,” and kissed them. My parents thought it very strange, but I always followed instructions as closely as possible.

However, the trip soon turned into a total nightmare. When I was staying at the Jesuit residence at Brophy Prep in Phoenix, my mother found the diary that I’d kept during the past year in Berkeley, and read it beginning to end. She always felt that she had complete authority in my life, so of course she was entitled to access my private life. And this was just confirmation that no matter how complete or thorough my personal work, I could not change my parents. 

When I got in the car with them the next morning, my mother was cold and angry. She announced that we would be driving non-stop back to Connecticut where I would be put under the care of a competent therapist who’d straighten me out. My dad was completely silent. I was in shock. 

The drive across country was almost unbearable, the interaction with my parents varying from loud anger with my mother, to complete disgust with my father’s silence. We arrived at their home, and I left to see my superiors in Boston. They supported me—after all, I was a 30 year old man, and had not hidden anything from them. But the situation was very uncomfortable. My already strained relationship with my parents entered what would become the new normal for the next 20 years—alternating icy communication interspersed with attempts to restore some civility. It would not change much until each of them approached death.

I have to be careful about the timeline here. I returned to California and the JSTB in early August, and with my superiors permission, I took a leave of absence to pray about leaving the Society. I moved to a cottage on Alcatraz Avenue with fellow SAT member Hal Slate who was also gay. It was just two blocks away from the White Horse, the only gay bar in Berkeley, and I began the process of coming out.

We had completed the 13 week Process in mid May. In early September Hoffman began showing up at the White Horse. He’d show up around 9 o’clock, leaning awkwardly against the elbow bar and trying to look off into some distant corner of the universe. 

He said that he just normally stopped by on his way home. But in reality he was just there to track my movements, and to make himself known—he later told me that he never went to gay bars because being recognized there might negatively affect his work. His behavior can only be described as stalking. It had been less than 4 months after I’d finished the FHPT when he nervously gave me his “private” phone number and asked if he could call me.

All this occurred at the beginning of the Fall semester at JSTB. I recall one conversation with Hoffman at the White Horse in particular which helps me date his pursuit of me. He mentioned almost in passing, and as I look back, perhaps as a way of excusing or justifying his behavior, that although the usual period for a therapist seeing a patient was 6 months after the professional relationship had ended, he thought that I had so completely and lovingly divorced myself from my parents, and that perhaps the usual 6 months could be compressed. 

I also told him about my mother’s reading my diary and learning about the raw emotional side of the Process. He assured me half-heartedly that if I just kept loving them unconditionally, all would work out eventually. I believed him. I didn’t realize the depth of my transference—I had to believe him. 

Finally, I agreed to go out to dinner with him. He thought it was a date. I thought it was dinner with a friend. I can’t in any way recreate the events or the conversation that ended with him returning to my apartment, and me finding myself naked in bed with a man I did not find at all attractive. But as with many sexual predators, Hoffman’s ability to read his victim, what he would describe as his “psychic powers,” lent themselves to skillful manipulation. And of course after working with me on an intimate level for almost a year, he had a real window into my psychology that was far more accurate than his psychic reading.

I will not go into any detail about the extremely awkward interaction, except to say that after a lot of “why don’t we try this?” and “do you like that?” he rolled me over and satisfied himself. Everytime I think about this, I ask myself why didn’t I say, “This isn’t working. Why don’t you put on your clothes and leave?” But I just kept my mouth shut and endured him trying to apologize for physically hurting me. 

I made it very clear that there was never going to be another date, but of course we would remain friends. And so I was introduced to his circle of gay friends and his rather secretive network of successful gay men who worked in the predominately straight world, lived a middle-class life style, and tried to pass as straight. There were dinner parties and seats at the opera, and lots of campy talk. Looking back I was pretty uncomfortable with the whole scene, though I did like some of his friends, and some not at all. Still, as a member of a minority, the unstated rule is that you accept everyone. 

I did not like some of the sexual banter, or, as happened several times, being passed around as the new kid in town, and expected to sleep with his friends. Of course you did it if you were not some kind of prude, and as Hoffman loved to point out, my mother was a puritanical prude, so just stop imitating her. 

Hofffman and I continued to see one another very occasionally for the rest of his life. I’d have to call it a strained “on again off again” friendship. When he came back from Brazil just after he completed the sale of his “intellectual property” to the new US owners, and was diagnosed with liver cancer, I stepped up and offered to be his live-in caregiver. So I both saw him in his last few months of life and did some small service in helping him repair several friendships that were important to him. But I didn’t stay until the end. 

Finally last May I was just tired of telling myself that it was all OK, just a sexual relationship in early gay life that didn’t work, and I should just get over it. Hoffman was a man with whom I’d entrusted my emotional well-being during an extremely difficult period, and he betrayed that trust. The scars of that betrayal have been deep and long lasting. I can only imagine what it might have been like to deal with coming out in the hands of an ethical therapist, but I can count the real cost of dealing with an unethical and selfish one: thousands of dollars in therapy, numberless hours in 12 recovery meetings, the inability to feel any real emotional connection without drugs or alcohol, the pain of feeling that I could never measure up to a satisfying real relationship with another man. 

And I’m calling this #gaymetoo because there are still numerous incidents of older gay men taking advantage of younger, vulnerable men. Is this a result of the repression and unhappiness that many gay men, and I presume lesbians and bisexuals too, of my generation experienced, or will this exploitation always be with us? Looking at the #metoo movement, there seems to be evidence that power, money, position, and religion are fertile breeding grounds for sexual exploitation and manipulation. 

____________________

Here are the pieces that I've written about Hoffman. Although I have tried to be objective, it is impossible to take a disinterested position with regard to the Process. Hoffman sexually abused me about 6 months after I finished my first process.

The Ontological Odd Couple, and the Origins of the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy

#GayMeToo

The Sad Demise of Bob Hoffman

This Victim Refuses Silence 

A Very Personal Question: Can I Forgive Bob Hoffman?

Forgive and Forget? Impossible. An inquiry into Victimization.

"Bob Hoffman was a criminal. Simple." 

New Age Miracle or Fraud

Why Do Cults Need to Rewrite History?

Science vs. Spooks

Jonestown and our Deliverance from Cults

© Kenneth Ireland, 2019