It’s no secret that I think that Vatican 1 was a colossal mistake that’s sucked up more spiritual oxygen than it’s worth in its rather brief history. Ex Cathedra has about as much to do with the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus as the proclamation of Charles III as king certifies the divine right of the British monarchy to rule the fate of nations. Zero, except for his bank account. What we are witnessing now is the slow, painful demise of a spiritual monarchy and the upset of curial hangers-on and courtiers who have been sucking the papal tit for money and power for a century and a half. It’s not pretty, but it’s entirely predictable. The rub is that this proclamation can’t be wrong, no matter how wrong it is, or the whole house of cards comes crashing down.
It was a California Jesuit, perhaps John Loubonis or Gene Bianchi, who retorted to one of my historical analyses: “Remember the logical fallacy ‘post hoc, propter hoc.’” My worthy opponent was defending arguments in favor of the truth of the doctrine of papal infallibility. The fact that Pius IX surrendered the Palazzo del Quirinale to Victor Emmanuel when he lost the Papal States, his army of 15,000, his rights, privileges and income as one of the kings of what we now know as the the Republic of Italy of course has nothing to do with shoring up his spiritual authority at a time when he lost everything else on which he imagined that authority rested. Of course not. It was just a quirk of fate or a pure coincidence that allowed him to reassert a doctrine lurking in the shadows until a political upheaval allowed the truth to reveal itself.
In the cult of objective spiritual truth, it is vital to dissociate the muck of historical circumstance from the hard work of doing logical analysis. Post hoc ergo propter hoc* is what is known as “informal fallacy.” It refers to assumptions embedded in ordinary language. “I saw Johnny on the street just after the bus left the station” does not necessarily imply that Johnny took the bus from Bakersfield. If I needed to demonstrate that Johnny took that bus, of course, I could just ask Johnny to show me his bus ticket or search his pants pockets for the incriminating evidence, but then there is still the possibility that he might have picked up a ticket from a real passenger who’d dropped it on the sidewalk or had boarded the bus in Oakland and disembarked on 6th Street. Nothing is certain. But I am certain that the Roman church is pulling a fast one. They’re not showing the ticket from Bakersfield.
After all this, you might think that I am actually interested in the pope’s infallible words. I'm not. I was curious that Benedict, recently of happy memory, said he was no oracle, but he could be given the proper conditions. Even John 23 said something to the effect that “I am infallible, but you’re not going to hear it from me.” So these guys hold the authority of the oracle in their back pocket just in case. Meanwhile, it has caused immense disruption and controversy across doctrinal Christianity. This interests me. The church is standing in its own way.
Why and how? I think that the “why” is self-evident. The “how” might require some digging, but let’s dig.
Avery Dulles became very conservative in his later years. I asked him why he supported this kind of centralized authority, and he said that his argument rested on the Ignatian principle of “Thinking with the Church.” I should have countered, “Even if that thinking is wrong?” But I didn’t. I was intimidated by the obligations of friendship and his red hat, but after John Paul 2 strongly reiterated the centralized power of papal authority, any further discussion was over as far as Avery was concerned.
This was not always the case. During a symposium about the Jesuits’ connection and promise to hitch their horses to the papal cart, a strategy that proved immensely successful, I asked a simple question: why? Avery said that despite everything, any problems or contradictions, we obeyed because of “filial piety.” That was enough for him. I then asked how we could support something or someone on a premise that contradicted the person's own understanding, or how we could justify believing one thing when the person in question actually said something different about themselves? He reiterated his statement about filial piety, but later privately said, “I really didn’t answer your question, did I?” He did not, and I cannot accept a pious notion to guide us. Today I would phrase my question differently, “Why do people believe nonsense?” Usually because of laziness, or fear, or tradition, none of which are good reasons.
I am quite sure that we will never hear any infallible words from Francis. The question is whether or not the absurd travesty of papal monarchy will simply die off without being addressed directly. The opposition is gathering its forces to nullify any work by the upcoming synod.
*Post hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin: 'after this, therefore because of this') is an informal fallacy that states: "Since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X." It is often shortened simply to post hoc fallacy. A logical fallacy of the questionable cause variety, it is subtly different from the fallacy cum hoc ergo propter hoc ('with this, therefore because of this'), in which two events occur simultaneously or the chronological ordering is insignificant or unknown. Post hoc is a logical fallacy in which one event seems to be the cause of a later event because it occurred earlier. [1]
Post hoc is a particularly tempting error because correlation sometimes appears to suggest causality. The fallacy lies in a conclusion based solely on the order of events, rather than taking into account other factors potentially responsible for the result that might rule out the connection.[2]
A simple example is "the rooster crows immediately before sunrise; therefore, the rooster causes the sun to rise."[3]
Monday, February 6, 2023
Sunday, February 5, 2023
Christopher Hitchens vs. the Blessed Venerable Unassailable Saint Mātā-ji, aka Mother Teresa
15th December 2011
Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet's idea of what a public intellectual ought to be is someone who devotes himself to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them."
This morning, I got further confirmation that Mother Teresa is not what the world would like us to believe she was. As I was reading that the Missionaries of Charity worldwide are praying for the soul of Christopher Hitchens, the touching sentiment arrived within seconds of news from India that her followers rejected my then partner’s offer to teach English in one of their schools because--his words a loose translation from the Hindi--“we don’t want fags.” Ah! Homophobes. I was not surprised, but what a loss for the kids who might have really learned something from a very smart, educated guy, fluent in Hindi and English.
I’ve had history with the Missionaries here in San Francisco, though my personal contact has been no more than smiling at some of them on the bus.
Back in 1991, when I was running Maitri Hospice, I got a panicked call from the sister of a man who wound up in the Arc of Love, the Missionaries AIDS Hospice. The woman was completely outraged: her brother felt that he had been taken captive by religious fanatics who cut off his TV, made him say the rosary, and beat the devil out of him with bunches of peacock feathers attached to the beds of recalcitrant patients.
I was never able to verify these practices because the Missionaries did not accept public funding and escaped the normal oversight required for hospice. So it’s only hearsay. I did speak with the guy who felt trapped there, and moved him up to the top of our waiting list. He moved to Peter Claver House and died before we had a bed.
After leaving Maitri and dealing with my own PTSD, I went to work as the Assistant Director of The Spiritual Center for AIDS Services in Oakland, soon to become just “The Center” as the street folks, sex workers, called us. The Center had been started by a few of the men Missionaries, and particularly one American guy with a deep sense of compassion and commitment to the poor. But he was also gay, came out, and left.
When Mātā-ji learned that a good portion of the infected sex industry workers still worked and that the majority of the injection drug users did not embrace total abstinence, she pulled her support. The Center was taken over by a ragtag group of outsider nuns, priests, gays, blacks, catholic lay people and Jews--Jacinta from the Sisters of the Holy Family was the main stay of the program, really our priest, who did the memorial services, hospital visits, and many hours of counseling; Anne who was a Franciscan ran a day care for kids with HIV and the children of women with HIV; an older Dominican woman, perhaps in her late 80’s, who sat at the door and greeted everyone warmly; a gay priest who did the reports to the CDC; a full cadre of catholic lay people from the suburbs who prepared meals everyday for about a hundred or so. The staff was rounded out with a few other gay men, a Latino Jew who was the social worker and case manager, a black lesbian who did drug and alcohol counseling, a huge, handsome, grounded brother who drove the van, getting folks to medical appointments.
So what’s my point other than my walk into the past to feel deep gratitude and love for a whole bunch of people who really did step up and gave of themselves during a terrible epidemic? When I wrote to foundations for money, the board chair, a good friend, told me to milk the Mother Teresa thing as much as possible. Which I did--until we heard through the grapevine that Mātā-ji was not going to be happy if she discovered that her name was associated with the project--that we’d bowed to the idols of case-management, drug counseling, and infectious disease control.
After all, her nuns had ripped out the carpet of the abandoned convent that they’d occupied on Church St. So, of course, they had the blessing of the Most-High on her hijacking social services to covertly turn the world to Jesus.
I throw my total support to Hitchens in the controversy, and will add some Buddhist prayer that his soul winds up Nowhere, and not in a constricted heaven presided over by fanatics. It seems to me that there is more than enough evidence that “Mother Teresa makes no real effort at medical or social relief, and that her mission is religious and propagandistic and includes surreptitious baptism of unbelievers.”
And finally, from an interview with Christopher, who makes my point very concisely:
http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/hitchens_16_4.html
Free Inquiry: According to polls, Mother Teresa is the most respected woman in the world. Her name is a byword for selfless dedication in the service of humanity. So why are you picking on this sainted old woman?
Christopher Hitchens: Partly because that impression is so widespread. But also because the sheer fact that this is considered unquestionable is a sign of what we are up against, namely the problem of credulity. One of the most salient examples of people's willingness to believe anything if it is garbed in the appearance of holiness is the uncritical acceptance of the idea of Mother Teresa as a saint by people who would normally be thinking - however lazily - in a secular or rational manner. In other words, in every sense it is an unexamined claim.
Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet's idea of what a public intellectual ought to be is someone who devotes himself to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them."
This morning, I got further confirmation that Mother Teresa is not what the world would like us to believe she was. As I was reading that the Missionaries of Charity worldwide are praying for the soul of Christopher Hitchens, the touching sentiment arrived within seconds of news from India that her followers rejected my then partner’s offer to teach English in one of their schools because--his words a loose translation from the Hindi--“we don’t want fags.” Ah! Homophobes. I was not surprised, but what a loss for the kids who might have really learned something from a very smart, educated guy, fluent in Hindi and English.
I’ve had history with the Missionaries here in San Francisco, though my personal contact has been no more than smiling at some of them on the bus.
Back in 1991, when I was running Maitri Hospice, I got a panicked call from the sister of a man who wound up in the Arc of Love, the Missionaries AIDS Hospice. The woman was completely outraged: her brother felt that he had been taken captive by religious fanatics who cut off his TV, made him say the rosary, and beat the devil out of him with bunches of peacock feathers attached to the beds of recalcitrant patients.
I was never able to verify these practices because the Missionaries did not accept public funding and escaped the normal oversight required for hospice. So it’s only hearsay. I did speak with the guy who felt trapped there, and moved him up to the top of our waiting list. He moved to Peter Claver House and died before we had a bed.
After leaving Maitri and dealing with my own PTSD, I went to work as the Assistant Director of The Spiritual Center for AIDS Services in Oakland, soon to become just “The Center” as the street folks, sex workers, called us. The Center had been started by a few of the men Missionaries, and particularly one American guy with a deep sense of compassion and commitment to the poor. But he was also gay, came out, and left.
When Mātā-ji learned that a good portion of the infected sex industry workers still worked and that the majority of the injection drug users did not embrace total abstinence, she pulled her support. The Center was taken over by a ragtag group of outsider nuns, priests, gays, blacks, catholic lay people and Jews--Jacinta from the Sisters of the Holy Family was the main stay of the program, really our priest, who did the memorial services, hospital visits, and many hours of counseling; Anne who was a Franciscan ran a day care for kids with HIV and the children of women with HIV; an older Dominican woman, perhaps in her late 80’s, who sat at the door and greeted everyone warmly; a gay priest who did the reports to the CDC; a full cadre of catholic lay people from the suburbs who prepared meals everyday for about a hundred or so. The staff was rounded out with a few other gay men, a Latino Jew who was the social worker and case manager, a black lesbian who did drug and alcohol counseling, a huge, handsome, grounded brother who drove the van, getting folks to medical appointments.
So what’s my point other than my walk into the past to feel deep gratitude and love for a whole bunch of people who really did step up and gave of themselves during a terrible epidemic? When I wrote to foundations for money, the board chair, a good friend, told me to milk the Mother Teresa thing as much as possible. Which I did--until we heard through the grapevine that Mātā-ji was not going to be happy if she discovered that her name was associated with the project--that we’d bowed to the idols of case-management, drug counseling, and infectious disease control.
After all, her nuns had ripped out the carpet of the abandoned convent that they’d occupied on Church St. So, of course, they had the blessing of the Most-High on her hijacking social services to covertly turn the world to Jesus.
I throw my total support to Hitchens in the controversy, and will add some Buddhist prayer that his soul winds up Nowhere, and not in a constricted heaven presided over by fanatics. It seems to me that there is more than enough evidence that “Mother Teresa makes no real effort at medical or social relief, and that her mission is religious and propagandistic and includes surreptitious baptism of unbelievers.”
And finally, from an interview with Christopher, who makes my point very concisely:
http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/hitchens_16_4.html
Free Inquiry: According to polls, Mother Teresa is the most respected woman in the world. Her name is a byword for selfless dedication in the service of humanity. So why are you picking on this sainted old woman?
Christopher Hitchens: Partly because that impression is so widespread. But also because the sheer fact that this is considered unquestionable is a sign of what we are up against, namely the problem of credulity. One of the most salient examples of people's willingness to believe anything if it is garbed in the appearance of holiness is the uncritical acceptance of the idea of Mother Teresa as a saint by people who would normally be thinking - however lazily - in a secular or rational manner. In other words, in every sense it is an unexamined claim.
Friday, February 3, 2023
Meeting Issan
Originally posted February 03, 2023
Tobias Trapp asked me to write a few words about volunteering during the AIDS epidemic for the German magazine, Ursache & Wirkung. I jumped at the chance because it gave me an opportunity to acknowledge Frank Ostaseski and his pioneering work with the Zen Hospice Project, as well as Issan Dorsey Roshi, who founded Maitri Hospice. It also gave me an opportunity to encourage others to accept the invitation to be with another human being at the end of their lives, something that sadly, our fears stand in the way of.
In 1989, I lost a very dear friend, Nancy Storm, who’d been like a mother to me. Her daughter, Mary, asked me to donate the hospital bed that she had in her room at the Heritage Retirement Home in San Francisco, where she’d spent the last years of her life.
I still remember that the more established hospice care facilities refused donations unless it had a warranty. In the late 90’s, there were sometimes 100 men a week dying in San Francisco from HIV. Surely someone could use a hospital bed. I began to feel that I had to do something to help.
Then, through an odd series of phone calls, Curtis Mann, a gay friend who was doing design work for the Zen Hospice Project, gave me Frank’s number. Could the Hospice use the bed? Frank said he’d love to have the bed, though work on the building was not complete. How could we move it across town? I had a truck. Frank said, "Let’s meet and be delivery men." We set a time.
I liked Frank immediately, bright, upbeat, not my picture of a deathbed priest. He was also very persuasive--between the time we’d loaded the bed in my truck and unloaded it at the Zen Center, I was signed up for the Zen Hospice Volunteer Training Program.
That afternoon also set the tone for volunteering, listening and responding to simple requests, taking care of what was at hand, and working with others. No special knowledge was required.
Within 6 months, I’d also met Issan and became a volunteer at Maitri Hospice.
Guided by Issan’s compassion, I cooked spaghetti and painted walls, I helped men sort through a lifetime of personal letters and called their mothers. Taking care of almost 100 men changed me. Not every task was easy, but the rewards were immense.
I could not have known that this simple trip would lead to the first Buddhist Hospice for people with HIV/AIDS. I was just helping a man carry a bed across San Francisco. Thank you, Frank, Issan, J.D., Bernie, and the other men who came into my life. Your gifts were amazing.
Monday, January 30, 2023
The Case against Bob Hoffman
A respected Zen teacher told me that she had encouraged several students of abusive Buddhist teachers to pursue lawsuits. After she heard the account of Hoffman’s relationship with me, she said, “Hoffman was a criminal. Simple.” She was right. California law stipulates, “Therapy Never Includes Sexual Behavior. . . . Sexual contact of any kind between a therapist and a client is unethical and illegal in the State of California. Additionally, with regard to former clients, sexual contact within two years after termination of therapy is also illegal and unethical.”*
When Governor Jerry Brown vetoed a bill that would have extended the statute of limitations for clerical sexual abuse, he said, “There comes a time when an individual or organization should be secure in the reasonable expectation that past acts are indeed in the past and not subject to further lawsuits.”* (SacBee)
Bob Hoffman has been dead for more than 20 years, and he raped me 50 years ago, but I’m just uncovering the severe emotional consequences of his abuse. In the last part of my life, I know that the effects of abuse can extend beyond any "reasonable expectation" that they are past. I also acknowledge that most reasonable people would think that such old grievances might not be subject to any lawsuits, and I do try to function as a reasonable person. However, as the Hoffman Process teaches, the effects of our negative actions can persist over generations.
To paint over the dark side of Hoffman’s legacy with the portrait of a grandfatherly spiritual seer who wanted everyone to lead lives of freedom and happiness is total nonsense. Most people who were close associates of Hoffman will admit that he was an extremely difficult man, and that his interactions with clients were at best unconventional, at worst, unethical and abusive. Stan Stefancic labeled him a “malignant narcissist.” But these same people will also argue that Hoffman's basic insight allows them to overlook what they characterize as eccentricities. For years, I tried to excuse his behavior—perhaps he was the gay kid who was bullied and overcompensated when he was in a position of power.
Hoffman became the bully as well as a predator, and if I let bullies get away with it, I am complicit. This I cannot and will not allow. Whether or not his basic insight into human behavior as “negative love” can stand the test of time or whether or not the effects of his revolutionary “psychic therapy” are worth the expense, I cannot say. But I will say that Bob Hoffman was a criminal.
* It should be noted that Brown is a former Jesuit, and the Society of Jesus continues to be subject to numerous accusations of abuse by its members dating back many years.
*Hoffman operated as a clergy person. He was a recognized psychic in a spiritualist church. He called the people he trained as “psychic therapists.” Now the Hoffman Institute calls them “teachers.” But whether therapist, clergy person, or teacher, the title does not excuse him from the moral or ethical standards that apply to professionals interacting with the people who come to them for help and pay them money for that help.
___________
Where was that wise person you could seek out for guidance? Who was trustworthy? I had put my trust in Claudio Naranjo and on his recommendation, I entrusted my mental well-being to a man who abused me. I was in such enormous transference that I didn’t recognize it; it persisted for years and caused enormous damage. How did I allow this to happen, and why am I talking about it now, so long after it happened?
After I completed working with Hoffman nine months later, he began to show up at places where I hung out, stalking me. He’d been my therapist and knew an enormous amount of my psyche so he knew how to get to me. He was grooming me. Five months after the end of our work together, he invited me to dinner. After a last drink at The White Horse Tavern, he dropped me off at my apartment and invited himself in. Then he raped me.
___________
Shortly after 5 on a hot Wednesday afternoon, I hand-delivered my “Emotional Autobiography with Father'' to Hoffman’s office on the second floor of a building in downtown Oakland. His secretary had already left for the afternoon. Hoffman was recording his feedback for another patient on a cheap cassette player. He’d thrown his feet up onto the desk. I stood awkwardly in the half-open doorway. There was no chair and no invitation to engage in a conversation.
He told me to hand him my work. Right on the spot, he’d read a paragraph, comment on the emotional tone, and then make a simplistic, predictable connection between the specific circumstances I’d described and a negative pattern or character trait that he asserted I’d adopted from my father in an attempt to bargain for love.
Hoffman read through to an incident about my father resetting the stone wall at the back of our lot. As Dad was lifting stones into a wheelbarrow, he uncovered the nest of a woodchuck who’d built her nest in a cranny between the rocks. As she ferociously defended 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 complimented the emotional tone of my writing, but then he began to raise his voice. Obviously my Dad was a homosexual he said, and then, “You’re also gay, aren’t you?” I countered how he could deduce that my dad was gay based on bludgeoning a woodchuck? His voice became louder and louder. He just repeated “You’re gay.” Now he was almost screaming—obviously my father was a sadist. What? Then he yelled, “You’re gay? Don’t play games with me. I know these things.” I said, of course I had gay feelings, but I was unsure if I was gay. “Don’t play games with me,” his voice was angry; his face was red. I had watched Hoffman attack clients, but I could barely believe that I was now his victim.
My Dad was not gay. The idea of having a same sex relationship never crossed his mind in his entire life. Hoffman’s readings were projections and his own pathology. What he asserted was so off base that it isn’t worthy of even the weirdest pop psychology. But because there was one note of truth in analysis–that I was in denial about my own homosexuality–the whole thing became plausible, and I destroyed any possibility of a real relationship with my father for the next 30 years. In exchange I got the debilitating transference to Hoffman.
I remember that the price of that first group Process was no more than $300. The real cost was devastating. Instead of dealing with coming out in care of a professional, compassionate therapist, I had the bad luck to land a closeted gay predator as my guide. When I described this incident to my therapist, his immediate response was: when you stayed, he knew he had you. And he did.
I recall one conversation in particular that helps me accurately date Hoffman’s obsessive pursuit; it also should have alerted me that he knew exactly what he was doing. Almost in passing, and perhaps as a way of excusing or justifying his behavior, he mentioned 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, perhaps the usual 6 months could be compressed. Misinformation, or perhaps he considered himself above the law which in California outlaws sexual contact between client and therapist within two years after termination of their work together..”* Less than 4 months after working with him, he nervously gave me his “private” phone number and asked if he could call me.
Finally, I agreed to go out to dinner with him. He imagined 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, 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 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 possibilities were certainly 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 or 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 did 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. All that I can say for certain is that Hoffman’s selfish actions had an effect on me. Of course, they cut off some avenues and 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 an 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 #GayMeToo.
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 writing really leads to my liberation, my only real obligation, in the words of Toni Morrison, “the function of freedom is to free someone else,” so I will write as candidly as I can.
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, being 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. Every time I think about this, I ask myself why I didn’t 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. 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 in transference with him. In fact, we maintained a strained acquaintance until he died.
I had hoped to avoid a painful and lewd description of the sexual encounter, but I have decided to write about it openly, describing its repercussions. A thorough investigation, including my own missteps, is the only possible path I see to freeing myself. If my writing really leads to liberation, “the function of freedom," in the words of Toni Morrison, "is to free someone else.”
I did come 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 kept 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 homosexuality, 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 I was destined to become a leader in the gay community—if I played my cards right, and listened to him; that I had extraordinary powers, like his spiritualist mentor, Rose Strongin, 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. Most people around Naranjo viewed Hoffman as a buffoon, an eccentric, a con artist, or, at best, a crazy wisdom seer. I thought he was crude, unintelligent, 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 ’70s. 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 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.
When Governor Jerry Brown vetoed a bill that would have extended the statute of limitations for clerical sexual abuse, he said, “There comes a time when an individual or organization should be secure in the reasonable expectation that past acts are indeed in the past and not subject to further lawsuits.”* (SacBee)
Bob Hoffman has been dead for more than 20 years, and he raped me 50 years ago, but I’m just uncovering the severe emotional consequences of his abuse. In the last part of my life, I know that the effects of abuse can extend beyond any "reasonable expectation" that they are past. I also acknowledge that most reasonable people would think that such old grievances might not be subject to any lawsuits, and I do try to function as a reasonable person. However, as the Hoffman Process teaches, the effects of our negative actions can persist over generations.
To paint over the dark side of Hoffman’s legacy with the portrait of a grandfatherly spiritual seer who wanted everyone to lead lives of freedom and happiness is total nonsense. Most people who were close associates of Hoffman will admit that he was an extremely difficult man, and that his interactions with clients were at best unconventional, at worst, unethical and abusive. Stan Stefancic labeled him a “malignant narcissist.” But these same people will also argue that Hoffman's basic insight allows them to overlook what they characterize as eccentricities. For years, I tried to excuse his behavior—perhaps he was the gay kid who was bullied and overcompensated when he was in a position of power.
Hoffman became the bully as well as a predator, and if I let bullies get away with it, I am complicit. This I cannot and will not allow. Whether or not his basic insight into human behavior as “negative love” can stand the test of time or whether or not the effects of his revolutionary “psychic therapy” are worth the expense, I cannot say. But I will say that Bob Hoffman was a criminal.
* It should be noted that Brown is a former Jesuit, and the Society of Jesus continues to be subject to numerous accusations of abuse by its members dating back many years.
*Hoffman operated as a clergy person. He was a recognized psychic in a spiritualist church. He called the people he trained as “psychic therapists.” Now the Hoffman Institute calls them “teachers.” But whether therapist, clergy person, or teacher, the title does not excuse him from the moral or ethical standards that apply to professionals interacting with the people who come to them for help and pay them money for that help.
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Where was that wise person you could seek out for guidance? Who was trustworthy? I had put my trust in Claudio Naranjo and on his recommendation, I entrusted my mental well-being to a man who abused me. I was in such enormous transference that I didn’t recognize it; it persisted for years and caused enormous damage. How did I allow this to happen, and why am I talking about it now, so long after it happened?
After I completed working with Hoffman nine months later, he began to show up at places where I hung out, stalking me. He’d been my therapist and knew an enormous amount of my psyche so he knew how to get to me. He was grooming me. Five months after the end of our work together, he invited me to dinner. After a last drink at The White Horse Tavern, he dropped me off at my apartment and invited himself in. Then he raped me.
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Shortly after 5 on a hot Wednesday afternoon, I hand-delivered my “Emotional Autobiography with Father'' to Hoffman’s office on the second floor of a building in downtown Oakland. His secretary had already left for the afternoon. Hoffman was recording his feedback for another patient on a cheap cassette player. He’d thrown his feet up onto the desk. I stood awkwardly in the half-open doorway. There was no chair and no invitation to engage in a conversation.
He told me to hand him my work. Right on the spot, he’d read a paragraph, comment on the emotional tone, and then make a simplistic, predictable connection between the specific circumstances I’d described and a negative pattern or character trait that he asserted I’d adopted from my father in an attempt to bargain for love.
Hoffman read through to an incident about my father resetting the stone wall at the back of our lot. As Dad was lifting stones into a wheelbarrow, he uncovered the nest of a woodchuck who’d built her nest in a cranny between the rocks. As she ferociously defended 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 complimented the emotional tone of my writing, but then he began to raise his voice. Obviously my Dad was a homosexual he said, and then, “You’re also gay, aren’t you?” I countered how he could deduce that my dad was gay based on bludgeoning a woodchuck? His voice became louder and louder. He just repeated “You’re gay.” Now he was almost screaming—obviously my father was a sadist. What? Then he yelled, “You’re gay? Don’t play games with me. I know these things.” I said, of course I had gay feelings, but I was unsure if I was gay. “Don’t play games with me,” his voice was angry; his face was red. I had watched Hoffman attack clients, but I could barely believe that I was now his victim.
My Dad was not gay. The idea of having a same sex relationship never crossed his mind in his entire life. Hoffman’s readings were projections and his own pathology. What he asserted was so off base that it isn’t worthy of even the weirdest pop psychology. But because there was one note of truth in analysis–that I was in denial about my own homosexuality–the whole thing became plausible, and I destroyed any possibility of a real relationship with my father for the next 30 years. In exchange I got the debilitating transference to Hoffman.
I remember that the price of that first group Process was no more than $300. The real cost was devastating. Instead of dealing with coming out in care of a professional, compassionate therapist, I had the bad luck to land a closeted gay predator as my guide. When I described this incident to my therapist, his immediate response was: when you stayed, he knew he had you. And he did.
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When I returned to the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley that fall, I told my superiors honestly what I had experienced, and they supported my decision to reconsider ordination. I took a leave of absence from my religious order and began an extremely difficult period of my life. I loved being a Jesuit, and if it weren’t for the obligation of celibacy, perhaps I might have been able to carve out a very happy and successful life as a priest.
Another man in Naranjo’s SAT, Hal Slate, and I rented a small apartment on the Berkeley/Oakland border. It was just a short walk from the White Horse, a college-town gay bar.
Towards the end of September, Hoffman started to show up at the bar every night around 9 o’clock, leaning awkwardly against the elbow bar, pretending to look off into some distant corner of the universe. He claimed that he normally stopped by on his way home. Another lie! He later admitted that he never went to gay bars because being recognized might negatively affect his important work. In reality, he was tracking my movements and making himself known. This was exactly stalking–out of the predator’s playbook.
When I returned to the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley that fall, I told my superiors honestly what I had experienced, and they supported my decision to reconsider ordination. I took a leave of absence from my religious order and began an extremely difficult period of my life. I loved being a Jesuit, and if it weren’t for the obligation of celibacy, perhaps I might have been able to carve out a very happy and successful life as a priest.
Another man in Naranjo’s SAT, Hal Slate, and I rented a small apartment on the Berkeley/Oakland border. It was just a short walk from the White Horse, a college-town gay bar.
Towards the end of September, Hoffman started to show up at the bar every night around 9 o’clock, leaning awkwardly against the elbow bar, pretending to look off into some distant corner of the universe. He claimed that he normally stopped by on his way home. Another lie! He later admitted that he never went to gay bars because being recognized might negatively affect his important work. In reality, he was tracking my movements and making himself known. This was exactly stalking–out of the predator’s playbook.
I recall one conversation in particular that helps me accurately date Hoffman’s obsessive pursuit; it also should have alerted me that he knew exactly what he was doing. Almost in passing, and perhaps as a way of excusing or justifying his behavior, he mentioned 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, perhaps the usual 6 months could be compressed. Misinformation, or perhaps he considered himself above the law which in California outlaws sexual contact between client and therapist within two years after termination of their work together..”* Less than 4 months after working with him, he nervously gave me his “private” phone number and asked if he could call me.
Finally, I agreed to go out to dinner with him. He imagined 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, 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 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 possibilities were certainly 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 or 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 did 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. All that I can say for certain is that Hoffman’s selfish actions had an effect on me. Of course, they cut off some avenues and 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 an 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 #GayMeToo.
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 writing really leads to my liberation, my only real obligation, in the words of Toni Morrison, “the function of freedom is to free someone else,” so I will write as candidly as I can.
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, being 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. Every time I think about this, I ask myself why I didn’t 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. 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 in transference with him. In fact, we maintained a strained acquaintance until he died.
I had hoped to avoid a painful and lewd description of the sexual encounter, but I have decided to write about it openly, describing its repercussions. A thorough investigation, including my own missteps, is the only possible path I see to freeing myself. If my writing really leads to liberation, “the function of freedom," in the words of Toni Morrison, "is to free someone else.”
I did come 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 kept 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 homosexuality, 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 I was destined to become a leader in the gay community—if I played my cards right, and listened to him; that I had extraordinary powers, like his spiritualist mentor, Rose Strongin, 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. Most people around Naranjo viewed Hoffman as a buffoon, an eccentric, a con artist, or, at best, a crazy wisdom seer. I thought he was crude, unintelligent, 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 ’70s. 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 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.
Other Posts regarding Bob Hoffman and the Fisher-Hoffman Process of Psychic Therapy
The Ontological Odd Couple, and the Origins of the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy
Bob Hoffman was a Lunatic, a Liar, a Criminal, & a Fraud
Why Do Cults Need to Rewrite History?
The Truth about Bob Hoffman
The End of Patriarchy and the Beginnings of a Cult.
It’s a cult, damn it. Nothing more
Jonestown and Our Deliverance from Cults
Bob Hoffman was a criminal. Simple
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