This Victim Refuses Silence

My rape, its aftermath, and my poor choices

Wednesday, August 12, 2020

Many readers have told me that this post was difficult to read. It was also difficult to write, but I will not be silent. I originally wrote about my abuse in Bob Hoffman—#GayMeToo. I have expanded on it in two other posts: Forgive and Forget? Impossible and A Very Personal Question: Can I Forgive Bob Hoffman?

I can find no silver lining in the story of my abusive relationship with Bob Hoffman, but even if there were one, the relationship was so muddy that I don’t know where to begin to look. It is a lot like trying to write about it. I feel that I cannot write because I would be obligated to disclose too much about what I consider personal failures. I cannot write from the position of a life that didn’t turn out even though opportunities and avenues were most probably closed off to me by the events I’m going to describe. The only thing I can say with any certainty is that my life is not what my parents nor I envisioned for myself, but it has been my own life, and I am responsible for my choices. 

Any light at the end of the tunnel would shine. It would mean that the residue of the abuse was over, and I would be able to forget Hoffman and our relationship. But that does not happen. It’s just not enough for me to declare “This happened,” and move past it as I’ve been counseled from many quarters, new age therapists, love and light gurus. I know that Hoffman’s selfish actions had an effect on me. Of course they added unnecessary suffering. As I recently told a friend, every gay person I know would love to be guided by the loving, wise and resourceful example of a older queer man or woman. But by the luck of the draw, I got a narcissistic predator. I’ve told the story of how Hoffman came into my life in some detail in my blog Bob Hoffman—#GayMeToo.

A friend recently told me that she had accomplished what the Hoffman Process promises, “putting the past in the past and obliterating the traces of your parents’ negative influence" in a 20 minute process of stamping out any memories of them in a ritual practice. Only time can judge its effectiveness. Only future actions which do not bear the imprint of past missteps can be trusted as indicators that the past is truly in the past. 

As I've watched the #MeToo movement unfold in the press, all the attention has been focused on the bad actors. Whether famous men Epstein or Weissman or Trump or Cardinal Pell or ordinary men like Hoffman, we cannot allow any one of them to escape the consequences of their actions. But it occurs to me that what’s still missing are stories of the victims. 

And so I have decided to write about my abuse. The only possible path I see to freeing myself is a thorough investigation of what occurred, including my own missteps. If my writing really leads to liberation, “the function of freedom," in the words of Toni Morrison, "is to free someone else;” so I will write as candidly as I can. I had hoped to avoid a painful and lewd description of the sexual encounter as I describe some of the repercussions, but find I have to talk about some of it. 

Bob Hoffman, my therapist and mentor, invited me to dinner less than 5 months after I completed the first 13 week Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy. After some very awkward conversation and a few glasses of wine, I found myself on the living room floor of my shared apartment naked, on my stomach, being brutally raped. After Hoffman had his orgasm, my anus was bleeding. Then the situation became surreal—I listened to apologies which were actually blame shifting—he told me that pain was normal when a man first had anal sex and that in time I’d learn to enjoy it—that anal sex was an important part of spiritual development because it mirrored the reality of the mother-father god, both active and passive. I remember this statement after all these years because of the horror and lunacy of justifying rape in the name of some intrasex godhead. I didn’t throw him out as I should have, had I been capable of it, but when he asked if we could have another date, I did say no. However, in true co-dependent fashion, I left the door open to further contact as friends. I realize now that I had to—I was still in transference with him. In fact we maintained a strained acquaintance until he died.

I came out as a gay man in the Hoffman Process, but the process wasn’t coming to terms with a part of myself that I’d left hidden, festering under parental and societal disapproval. It wasn’t part of a program of careful analysis and self discovery. I wasn’t led by a professional to see layers of self-deception. Rather I stood uncomfortably in the doorway to Hoffman’s office, while he, red in the face, screamed that I was gay, told me that I was playing games and couldn’t love myself. This only reinforced my own learned, negative views of being gay. I sensed the same angry, defensive stance in the way he dealt with his own homosexualty and he certainly displayed its brutality when he forced anal intercourse.

Hoffman was both a narcissist and a predator, but I was in such denial that I allowed myself to be manipulated. Over the course of intermittent conversations which spanned more than 25 years, I discovered that he lied about many things; he exaggerated; he made empty promises; and he entertained grandiose ideas about himself. Dr. Fisher, the being whom he called his spirit-guide, had not been, as he proclaimed publicly, a family friend but rather his therapist; he felt he was destined to have a young lover because the immense contribution he was making; he had singled me out when he first saw me in Naranjo’s SAT; he started frequenting the only gay bar in Berkeley to stalk me, and not because, as he told me then, he usually stopped in to relax on his way home. The truth is that initiating a sexual relationship with me was a criminal violation of his professional responsibility as a therapist, mentor and spiritual guide, but his psychosis did not allow him to understand this.

In true predator fashion he groomed me. He told me that, if I played my cards right and listened to him, I was destined to become a leader in the gay community; that I had extraordinary powers, like his spiritualist mentor—I think he named her, Florence Becker, though he was vague—had singled him out as a person of great psychic abilities. He also insisted that I was attracted to him, and he knew it because he was a powerful psychic as well as the fact that I had an erection during our encounter. Recalling this fills me with disgust. I recall that most of the people around Claudio viewed Hoffman as a buffoon, a conman, or at best a crazy wisdom seer. I thought he was unintelligent and crude plus being sexually repulsive, yet something compelled me to continue to place my trust in him.

Within a year of our encounter, I’d left the Jesuits, moved to San Francisco with my SAT friend Hal Slate and began experiencing the burgeoning Castro gay scene of the ‘70’s. I became promiscuous, but, at the same time, I was very unhappy and frustrated with sex itself. I could not achieve orgasm. I cannot claim that Hoffman’s brutal abuse was the direct cause of my sexual dysfunction but I am certain that it played some part. But my solution to the problem became more of a problem. As in my college days and my life as a Jesuit, alcohol became an antiseptic for the wounds. But now pot, and eventually cocaine and methamphetamines, became a way to lubricate sexual activity. 

There is a very high rate of alcoholism and substance abuse among victims of rape, and that is certainly part of my story. Drugs opened up a whole new world for me though they took an immense toll. Eventually the number of days of work I missed because I was still too high to work safely began to outnumber the days I was late because I was hung over and unable to get out of bed. This December I will be 10 years free of drugs and alcohol. The 12 Step Program does not encourage any playing victim and always redirects a person to recognize his or her own part in the matter. However facts and situations do matter. Hoffman’s sexual abuse, the threads of our relationship, and my part in the matter are all part of the equation.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind —

Emily Dickinson

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, 2020

The Many Voices, a Note from Jon Joseph Roshi

by Jon Joseph Roshi

Jon has allowed me to repost his commentary on the koan "Little Jade."
I will attest that the monsoon has finally let up. Thank you, Jon.\

Nora Reza

A treasury official retired and came home to Sichuan, where he sought out Wuzu to learn about Zen. Wuzu said, "When you were young, did you read a poem which went something like:

“She calls to her maid,
‘Little Jade!’

not because she wants something
but just so her lover will hear her voice."

The official said, "Yes, I read it."
Wuzu said, "That is very near to Zen."

~ PZI Miscellaneous Koans; Entangling Vines, Case 98, Notes


This is too rich a story-koan to leave its many parts unvisited, so I would like to sit with it again this week. The above exchange is deeply touching for me: a mistress of the house is calling to her lover through her maid, Little Jade. It is very near to Zen, says the teacher Wuzu. I have a warm memory of this koan, when a few years ago, at St Dorothy’s Rest, a moldering century-old building deep in a redwood forest, we were holding a week-long retreat. I walked into the kitchen to help with cooking, and found my retreat roommate, a former Jesuit novitiate, rooting and clanging through the industrial pots. He was calling out, “Little Jade! Little Jade! Where are you, Little Jade?” At that retreat, unbidden, he gave me a pair of new white socks, which I still have, though they now have holes in the toes.

It was all the more unsettling and heart-rending, then, to read my Little-Jade friend’s recent blog posts on revisiting his first major love encounter as a gay man. What he thought was a friendship of growing mutual love and respect turned out to be forced sex and rape, a pattern of emotional abuse that lasted for a quarter century. “I can find no silver lining in the story of my abusive relationship with B, but even if there were one, the relationship was so muddy that I don’t know where to begin to look,” begins his blog.

So, how to resolve, for him, the many decades-long pain that recently revisited him? “It is my ghost,” he wrote me from Dharamshala, in India, where he now lives. An acquaintance of his and follower of the same psychic-spiritual school from those days wrote that she herself was able to put her shadow behind her by “obliterating the traces of her parents’ negative influence" in a daily ritual of stamping out her family’s memories. She suggested my Little-Jade friend try the same. “Only time can judge its effectiveness,” my friend writes sardonically.

Last night I checked in with him via WhatsApp. McLeod Ganj, like all of India, is under stay-at-home orders; the dark downpour of the monsoon has not let up for weeks. “How are you doing?” I asked my Little-Jade friend, who is alone in his small apartment all day long. We talked about the dark nature of his posts and laughed about Little Jade in the kitchen years ago. Despite the need, he felt, to write of his experience, he does know that “the Little Jade poem has been written more than once,” and that “it comes in more than one voice.” The variations of the Little Jade poem have allowed him to fall into some deeply satisfying love relationships in his life, he says. “I now write my own Little-Jade poem.” I sent him Tony Hoagland’s piece, A Color of the Sky, one of my favorites (fragment below):


Last night I dreamed of X again.
like a stain on my subconscious sheets.

Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,
I never got her out,
but now I’m glad.

I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.


Perhaps the rain will let up soon. That would be very near to Zen.

___________________________




P. S. Here are two links to the writing Jon refers to:
This Victim Refuses Silence

A Very Personal Question: Can I Forgive Bob Hoffman?