A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Mainstream — UPDATED

The Gateway is a six-part series about Teal Swan, a new brand of spiritual guru, who draws in followers with her hypnotic self-help YouTube videos aimed at people who are struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts. Some followers move to Teal’s healing center—a spiritual startup in Atenas, Costa Rica—where they produce content and manage social media accounts. Teal insists her therapy saves lives, but her critics say Teal’s death-focused dogma is dangerous.

Last fall Gizmodo gained incredible access to teal's operation. Reporter Jennings Brown not only interviewed teal several times, he was allowed to take a crew into Philia, her retreat center in Costa Rica, to observe one of her high ticket Curveball retreats. The result of his year-long investigation is a six-part podcast series that is by far the most extensive profile of teal yet by a mainstream media outlet. Days before Gizmodo first interviewed teal, she was interviewed by reporter Addison Nugent for OZY, an international, online magazine. The interview was uncomfortable for teal, which she expressed immediately, and somewhat intemperately, on her blog. Neither the resulting OZY article nor "The Gateway" podcast series — which began airing at the end of May and has aired three episodes to date — have been mentioned by teal or her team.  (In the interest of full disclosure, I was interviewed by both reporters and my statements appear in both pieces.)

The day ends.  The house falls into the dark silence of sleep.  The next morning we board a plane to Paris.  I have one more interview to do; a segment for the provocateurs section of OZY.  This interview marks the end of this European tour.  I have five minutes to change my outfit before the camera is switched on in our hotel room.  The style of this interview is not what I expected.  There are two different styles of interview, one is supportive and the other is antagonistic.  In a supportive style interview, you are already going into the interview being loved.  The entire structure of the interview is set up to make you look good.  In an antagonistic style interview, the majority of the focus is placed on challenging you.  No one holds your hands in support in this type of interview.  Instead, the interviewer gives you the opportunity to fight though the power of narration to earn people’s good opinion by putting you on the spot.  The interview started off with this: “I have interviewed spiritual leaders from everywhere and many of them have been doing this for more than 30 years and to be honest, none of them have the amount of controversy, hatred and dedicated antagonists as you do.  There is so much written against you out there in the world, they call you things like ‘the suicide catalyst’, why do you think that is?”  In an antagonistic style interview, you spend your time trying to answer questions while simultaneously trying to caretake the vulnerable aspect of you that feels targeted and like hiding under a blanket while sucking its thumb.  Sometimes the interviewer is already biased against you and is simply setting up the interview as a trap to make you look bad so their pre-conceived, concrete concept of you can then be shared by the world in order to make them feel personally validated.  But if the interviewer is genuinely non-biased, the antagonistic style of interview often leads to the best content.  Nonetheless, it is always awkward when this style of interview ends because everyone acts as if nothing just happened and everyone is really friends when in reality both you know and they know that it was an antagonistic interaction that made all parties involved socially uncomfortable.  I decided to order minestrone soup after the interview was over to comfort myself and take a bath before I fell asleep. [all emphases added]

How teal came up with this binary construct of "supportive" vs. "antagonistic" interviews is anybody's guess. It bears no resemblance to how professional journalism actually works. In all my years as a publicist, I never once asked a potential interviewer if they were going to be supportive or antagonistic and not one of the supervisors, editors, or authors, I worked with ever expected me to. Most of them were just happy for the media exposure. But teal is different. She has a long history of doing softball interviews with other YouTubers, who are, indeed, very supportive of her. I think it would be fairer to say that there are fawning, sycophantic amateurs and serious journalists, and teal has almost entirely interacted with the former. It is not a reporter's job to "make you look good." It's a reporter's job to uncover facts and inform the public.

The OZY interview was published a month later, on November 19, and it did not go as teal had hoped, in no small part due to her own whinging about the "antagonistic" interview on her blog. She did not announce its publication or mention it ever again.

Days after OZY's Addison Nugent asked her about the controversy surrounding her and the moniker "suicide catalyst," teal whined to Gizmodo's Jennings Brown that she had no choice but to respond to  the "allegations." We know that it was within days of the OZY interview, because she announced that she had just taped the allegations video on October 23 to her Instagram followers. She announced that "Teal Swan Answers to the Allegations" was posted on October 25. (My response to that video may be found here.)




Seconds into her first conversation with Gizmodo, toward the end of Episode 1 of "The Gateway," teal launches into a jeremiad about how her "hate groups" have finally forced this public response. It seems painfully clear that the catalyst for the "spiritual catalyst" to make this video was direct questioning from OZY about her being the "suicide catalyst."

I'm a little frustrated today because today we're gonna be filming, uh, so, I'll just go here. My hate groups are so incredibly active lately that I've been put in a position where, um, our decision as a team to ignore it can't happen anymore... So I basically have to do a video today that's answering to a lot of their allegations, because I'm losing so many contracts [emphasis added] based off what they're saying...  Like for example one of the monikers that my haters have given me is the "suicide catalyst," as if I'm promoting suicide, so I'm gonna basically answer to all these things from my perspective.

Says Brown in his narration to podcast listeners:

I thought I'd have to work my way up to asking about things like her critics and the suicide allegations, but it's not even two minutes in and we're already there.

It is a strange interview, indeed, that mostly involves teal complaining to a reporter from a mainstream tech website— a survivor of the late, lamented Gawker Media — about her "haters."




Teal Bosworth Scott Swan has been talking for years about breaking into "the mainstream." To hear her tell it, it was a plan hatched by her Arcturian designers before she ever took human form here on earth. This is how she explained it to BATGAP's Rick Archer:

Do you want to know something funny? The way that I look was not designed for people like you who are already on the path. It was designed to break me into the mainstream. And the reality of today’s world is sex sells. The reality is the better you look the more people pay attention. This was a discussion which took place before I even came into this world. A lot of people in the mainstream would not listen to a person who was wrinkling and greyed. They would listen to someone who looks like me, and it has nothing to do with the validity of looking the way I look. It has to do with attention.

Buddha at the Gas Pump is a long-running and fairly well-respected platform, a cut above her usual YouTube interview. Archer got backlash when the teal interview ran, in part for his paternalist comments about her appearance, in part for interviewing her at all. (I included the BATGAP interview in the noncast"TEAL Works Blue.") At some point, Archer quietly removed the teal interview from his platform. When pressed, in the BATGAP Facebook group, about that and other removals, he explained.

Regarding Teal, I don't know anything that isn't public knowledge. I'll watch her answer to allegations. Even the guy she was married to when I did the interview says there's something rotten in Denmark. I see Batgap as a stew, Certain ingredients may spoil the taste of the whole thing.

Her explanation of Arcturian designed, universal appeal was also offered in an earlier interview. That interview was also removed. A number of interviews in which she has discussed her alien origins began to disappear just as she was doing what those Arcturians designed her for, getting mainstream attention and publication. Mainstream audiences, unlike the woo world, aren't so enamored of alien origin stories. But in this remaining snippet of that interview, teal explains the importance of being pretty and white, if one hopes to make a splash on the world stage.




It may well be that what attention teal has received, mainstream and otherwise, owes to her appearance. It is certainly not because of her ideas, which appear to be almost entirely plagiarized. (See also here and here.) Both the Gizmodo and OZY reporters admit to being struck by her physical attractiveness.

But pretty and white as teal is, her forays into mainstream media have not gone terribly well. That was true even before "haters" like myself started raising questions. She has never responded well to a more journalistic approach, wherein hard questions are asked, and healthy skepticism is employed. The press release for her first, and self-published, book was picked up by her local newspaper, The Herald Journal. The former book publicist in me can only see this as a win. The name of the book was mentioned. The op-ed was fair and even-handed. Really, from a publicity standpoint, this was a success. But teal and her team responded with outrage. Letters to the editor were penned by herself and by one Jason Freedman, a "freelance reporter" who appears to be none other than her associate Blake Dyer. In fact much of the firestorm that ensued in the comments section may have been so much sock puppet theater. But it was clear then, as it is now, that teal and her supporters will not tolerate anything but fawning, credulous coverage.

At some point, teal's rhetoric around mainstream success began to change. Instead of promoting herself as an Arcturian designed, caucasian beauty, capable of attracting the mainstream attention that "ugly" black girls and wrinkly, grey-haired people could not, she started to speak of herself as "controversial" and "up against the mainstream." And this has been her response to the Gizmodo series. While she has almost entirely given it the silent treatment, those in Teal Tribe who have stumbled on the series have expressed almost uniformly negative reactions, from sadness to outrage. Gizmodo has joined the legion of "haters."












In one of the longer threads, teal offered a brief response. She's very hurt, but she's challenged the mainstream and the mainstream is fighting back.




Outside of the teal bubble, "The Gateway" is getting positive reviews from mainstream outlets like The Guardian and The Wrap, which made a podcast about the podcast. The reviews teal gets from those outlets are less flattering, as they seem to find her own words about as jarring as I did when I first learned of her over four and a half years ago. To "the mainstream" her ideas about suicide are as troubling as you might expect them to be, as is the fact that she has no training or credentials that qualify her to treat serious mental health issues. She comes across as narcissistic, her claims grandiose. The influence she has over her followers' life (and possibly death) decisions inspires deep concern. In The Guardian, Miranda Sawyer writes:

All of this is undeniably icky. Having your life’s decisions directed by a compelling stranger is a very bad idea, but at least nobody’s getting hurt. Except… some are. Swan, who gives her closest followers very personal attention, insists that in some cases (when someone’s “vibrations” are of a certain type), then suicide prevention hotlines won’t work, psychotherapists and psychologists won’t either and that death feels fantastic and “is an immediate relief” or “a reset”. Meaning, it’s OK for people to kill themselves. And some do. Her fans call her the Spiritual Catalyst. Her detractors call her the Suicide Catalyst.

Confident and narcissistic, Teal is happy to talk to Brown (she boasts about having five security guards and refers to “haters”) and it looks as though in the next few weeks he’ll be going to her Costa Rica retreat. Let’s see if he returns in a state of spiritual refreshment.

One thing that teal can take some small comfort in is that, at least so far, "The Gateway" hasn't gotten a lot of press attention beyond what I've noted here. The reason for that, in my surmise, would be less comforting to the woman who talks endlessly about her own fame and hashtags her Instagram account with various iterations of #celebrity***. No one outside of her online following and the outer reaches of the new age and self help arenas have any idea who she is. In many ways this podcast is her "gateway" to notoriety, and it is a less than auspicious introduction.




Having spent over four and a half years cataloguing teal's body of work, I have amassed an encyclopedic knowledge of public material by and about teal. I have also gotten to know a number of people who have broken with teal, including some who have been seriously injured by her methods and her abuses of power. But I am not an investigative journalist or in the business of bringing forth information that I've received in confidence. I do not have the backing of a professional news organization that would enable me to do that kind of reportage. So what I'm enjoying most about "The Gateway" is that Jennings Brown's investigative journalism is bringing to light previously unreported information about teal's background and the lives she has affected. Episode 2 delves deeply into Leslie Wangsgaard's suicide, something I first learned about from her own video of the Santa Fe workshop, and wrote about in my second teal post. I vainly hoped, at the time, that it was pure invention on her part. What she said on that stage was so flippant, so bizarrely self-aggrandizing, that some sort of performance art seemed a plausible explanation. I learned in short order that teal was speaking about a very real person who was most definitely dead by her own hand.

When teal talked about Leslie Wangsgaard's suicide in that workshop, she described her as irredeemably miserable. "And this was a woman who was absolutely miserable. I'm talking, every moment of her life was a nightmare." But Gizmodo's reporting paints a different picture. She may have battled depression, but her friend Joyce remembers a vital and "upbeat" woman who enjoyed belly dancing and was always up for a bit of fun. She was also a compassionate hospice worker who extended herself to caretaking the vulnerable on her free time, rescuing homeless animals and humans alike. Joyce also saw a pronounced personality change when Leslie and her husband John Wangsgaard started working with teal. This may have had something to do with what John describes as teal's "ability to see things that you and I do not." And what did she see in Leslie but her soul's intense desire to leave her body.

According to John, she also "helped" Leslie recover "memories" of sexual abuse by her father. As Brown notes, repressed memory is a very controversial idea in psychology, but teal takes an unequivocal position on the topic. Despite her total lack of psychological training, she has guided many people through the experience of unearthing traumatic memories that may or may not be real. This was something Katherine Rose Breen asked her about directly. It got her banned from Teal Tribe. She recounted the experience in this blog post (also posted here).

There is a sense of tragedy to John Wangsgaard, not so much because his wife committed suicide. That he seems to be at peace with. What he seems to be grieving over is that he is no longer in touch with teal. He is still hopelessly devoted to her, longing for contact that he can no longer financially afford. There is a tone of desperation in his voice when he speaks of being with her again, if only for an hour. He keeps a stack of her "Frequency Paintings" in his bedroom. He claims that his "attraction" to her was spiritual, not sexual, but explains that teal told him early in their acquaintance that they had been married in a previous life. The interview leaves me more disturbed than ever over Leslie's tragic death and teal's role in it.




"I want you to imagine that you're dead. So we're all gonna get suicidal for a moment," is how teal introduces an exercise during the Curveball retreat that people have paid up to $5000 for. I can't help thinking about James Arthur Ray's version of the Samurai Game during Spiritual Warrior. Ray played God, with the power over life and death, making people lie perfectly still on the cold, hard floor for hours. At the end of that week, three people would die in his sweat lodge. So imagine the shiver that went up my spine when I learned at the end of Episode 3 that Philia is getting its own sweat lodge.

Brown is concerned about "suicide contagion," as the group embarks on this death exercise. This is something I've been concerned about for a long time with teal's followers, in part, because I have seen it play out in screenshots from Teal Tribe. Having people visualize their own suicide this way is something teal recommends for people who are contemplating suicide. This has always struck me as a truly terrible idea.

There is some new terminology in this, or should I say, old terminology with new tealified definitions. People can now "channel" anyone or anything and, when they do, they are "possessed" by them. This seems to be part of a new product/framework that teal is rolling out. I'm guessing it will be laid out in her upcoming book, something about putting people in jars.

As these exercises unfold, it seems like the lines between imagination/visualization and "actual" experience of participants' own deaths, and other dramatic experiences, is becoming blurred. Brown is also concerned that teal is "engineering a mystical experience," as people become convinced that they are "literally" becoming everything from dead relatives to rocks to shoe laces to bodily organs, in these "possession" experiences. It is all the more troubling to me because it does not seem like these are naturally unfolding experiences, but the result of very direct prompting by teal, who says "I want you to..." more times than I can count. She's not holding space for people to have their own realizations. She's not so much a guide as she is a dictator, telling them what will happen and what they should feel about it. It does indeed seem like their experiences, both mystical and emotional, are being engineered and directed by teal, who has established herself as a superior, spiritual authority in their lives.

You should write that down. "My whole life is about..."

Brown tracked down the author of a Philia review I had also seen on the Philia Facebook page. The charge is one of manipulation and outright fraud.




When Brown expresses concern that teal might be "playing with fire" putting a group of strangers together to have this intense, group "therapy" experience, teal replies, "I'm not afraid of that. That's where you get the best stuff. [snort, snort, giggle, giggle]" You can actually hear the duping delight (see noncast "Drunks, Cult Leaders, and Duping Delight" for background).
As disturbing as all of this is, it is not the most troubling part of this episode for me, perhaps because none of it comes as a surprise. I've seen these patterns play out in a variety of ways with teal over the years. What truly shook me was something a tech reporter like Brown is well equipped to explain, and that is how teal has cultivated a solid base of depressed and suicidal followers. The mystical experiences she's engineering aren't only in retreats and workshops. They begin when people stumble onto her videos on YouTube. What feels to them like some sort of divine intervention directing them to just the right video for their pressing need is actually a skillful use of search tags. In hushed tones, as if she's letting Brown in on her conspiracy against human decency, she explains how she targets people at their most vulnerable by matching the kind of desperate search criteria despairing people  will likely use.

Most people were going through a fucking huge crisis, like gun-to-your-head type of crisis. And then, you know, they typed in something like "how do I not kill myself" and my videos popped up and they just... I specifically try to go for tags and things like that that get that, capture that audience. When you're in a desperate state, it's not sophisticated. People, like, when they're in that state, they type in shit like "I just lost my mother, what the fuck do I do." Literally, that will be the google tag line so even when we're doing videos, we'll add things like that so if someone's suicidal or someone's had a breakup or whatever, that's the video that comes up. 

Says Brown:

Teal was explicit. She uses tags that target people when they're having suicidal thoughts. 

This explains, at least in part, something I've heard from one Teal Tribe refugee after another, that they were at the lowest of low points in their lives, when they first discovered teal. Some have described to me how when you're in that state, her videos are a kind of sweet relief. This caused some people to ignore any number of red flags, to put aside even a visceral dislike that was their first reaction. Could it also explain why so many of her followers credit her with saving them from suicide?

On a personal note, I'm a little startled to find that the seeming twist of fate that led Brown to his first teal video included a song I've long associated with her and used in my post about the suicidality so common among tealers, "Suicide Is Painless." I always thought this was an organic connection on my part, stemming from a childhood love for M*A*S*H. Suddenly I'm less sure that I made this connection on my own.

Meanwhile, in Teal Tribe, the plaintive cries of the suicidal continue. They bring a mix of reactions, some of which are more disturbing than the posts themselves. I wish I could say that this was more than a small, representative sample of the kinds of posts that come up over and over, in that group.
















Some posts are from members who are dismayed over the sheer volume of suicidal posts and the way they are handled — or not handled — by admin. And if that concern is great enough admin shuts those threads down. Move along, folks, nothin' to see here!

Update 6/24/18: Episode 4 of "The Gateway"

In Episode 4 of "The Gateway," Brown drills down on teal's use of online marketing tools to target suicidal and otherwise vulnerable people. He interviews Justin Olaguer, who was once part of teal's "intentional community." I had been wondering whatever happened to Justin. He's been conspicuous by his absence from her inner circle. It was nice to hear his voice and know that he's doing well. He seems to have come a long way from the days when he was ranting about me being the "psychic Nancy Grace" on his Facebook page. (I've never cared for Nancy Grace, but I thought that was amusing. Funnily enough, he's not the first to make that comparison, so maybe I should sit with that.)

Says Justin now about teal's targeted marketing to the suicidal:

Those are ripe for becoming dedicated, loyal consumers of her products... She just wants a share of that market. Sorry if that's overly cynical but that's a market... She's a self-interested economic force... That's a market. She wants it.

Justin worked on her PR strategy, so he would know. But he was also part of her "market." This is a segment of the last extant episode of "Shadow House" that I've been able to find. "Shadow House" was a kind of reality show that teal used to livestream. This was hardly the most action-packed of these broadcasts, like the infamous "racist rant," or her public humiliations of Cameron and Fallon. But it went to some very dark places.




Astronauts have cyanide capsules in case they need to kill themselves? And you can get these astronaut cyanide pills on the black market? Who knew?! I did not. (This is NASA we're talking about, not Trump's new space force, because that doesn't exist... yet.) So I googled it. It seems this incorrect factoid traces to Carl Sagan. You'd think she'd check the, um, Akashic Record on that.

That bit of absurdity aside, there's a lot that troubles me in those six minutes alone. I don't know what kind of pain Justin has had in his life or what state he came to her in, but she seems to be steering him straight into a very dark place and dangling suicide as relief for whatever hardships might await him. She assures him she can teach him to stop his own heart with his mind or, you know, take astronaut cyanide.

Even in 2014 teal was telling tales of deep paranoia. She was risking assassination by the government, cults, and the pharmaceutical industry. Nothing about "hate groups" conspiring against her, though. That came later.

I also learned from this podcast that another suicide was presaged in Teal Tribe, with posts that are hard to read after the fact. The first such suicide, that of the 22 year old Brown calls "Max," was something I wrote about in this post. When I wrote it, I was somewhat dubious about her claim of receiving ten suicidal emails a day. Why was she "law of attracting" so many suicidal people? Now that I know that she's actively, and mechanistically, targeting that "market," I find her unwillingness to devote the time to responding to those desperate emails all the more galling.

In this episode, she complains to Brown that she's just deluged with desperate and suicidal emails, too many crises for her to possibly deal with. Perhaps she should have considered that when she decided to target that "market" so directly. Perhaps she should have put some sort of framework in place before she started luring desperate people to her groups and workshops, presenting herself as the cosmic answer lady. Perhaps she should at least post some suicide hotline numbers in Teal Tribe, as many have suggested. Her contempt for those hotlines has never been more apparent than in this podcast. She openly mocks them, imitating the counselors with a silly, sing-song voice. She is actively dissuading her many, many suicidal followers from reaching out to helplines. Where does that leave all the desperate followers she can't find the time for? At least two are dead by their own hand.

I had not heard about the second triber taking her own life. Brown’s description of “Jane’s” gun-to-the-head post rang a bell, though. I went back over the many screenshots of suicidal posts I’ve received. Learning that she died of a self-inflected gun shot wound shortly thereafter, at age 18, I shudder. It’s a feeling I won’t be able to shake anytime soon.




We talk a lot about how tealers should be getting proper therapy, but I've read through hundreds of these screenshots, at this point. Many of these folks have been in and out of therapy and do not feel they've been helped. And a lot of them couldn't afford to go to a therapist if they wanted to. Brown interviewed suicidologist April Foreman who confirms that pessimistic outlook.

I'm not sure what of teal's body of work Brown shared with Foreman or what her feelings would be on things like suicide being a "reset button" or how it "feels so good to die." She did weigh in on teal's insistence that people, like the late Leslie Wangsgaard, need to "commit to life." The data do not support that idea, according to Foreman. What the research shows is that no one is ever a hundred percent committed, either way, even in the midst of a suicide attempt. She did not, however, call them "fence-sitters," as teal did.

Foreman's comments are echoed in a piece that recently appeared in the New York Times, a sampling of comments from clinicians who had responded to an AP article about Anthony Bourdain,  Kate Spade, and the escalating suicide epidemic.

As a mental health therapist who has been practicing for 26 years, I appreciate the attention that the recent celebrity suicides have been given by journalists. I believe it is important to shed a light on this issue and that talking about difficult subjects is crucial.

What I sincerely wish, however, is that journalists would stop referring to the “mental health system” in this country. This is the United States, not Canada or the U.K. There is no “system.”

There are only providers: some individual and some groups. But the idea that there is an established, organized “system” of care is simply incorrect.

Is help available? Yes. If you have health insurance and can locate a provider who will see you, then help is available. But please stop alluding to a “system” of mental health care in this country. It simply does not exist.

Sadly, Brown is right. There is a void and teal has strategically positioned herself to fill it.

Brown also interviewed psychologist and former Moonie Steven Hassan. Hassan seems to share a number of my concerns, after watching just a few of teal's videos. Her droning voice can be hypnotic, as can her soothing backgrounds. I can't personally relate as I find her voice to be like nails on a chalkboard, but many former tealers have told me that they found her voice and manner hypnotic.

She presents herself as an authority with special knowledge. As I've said many times, the way she defines "extrasensory" ability as something very rare, that she claims to speak for "source" where others do not, infuriates me. And I say this as a practicing psychic. Psychic ability is not "special." It's our birthright. Good practitioners in this field don't foster dependency. They teach people how to fish. But I digress.

Hassan was also very troubled by her suicide meditation, because, no, she does not know how everyone will process that, especially the suicidal people she is actively targeting with her tags on that video.

So Hassan addressed a handful of indicators of the mind-control cult that teal appears to be building. Justin now sees teal as a cult leader but also as the "pope" of her own religion, an "object of adoration." Todd Mooney, who abandoned his children and pregnant wife, under teal's guidance, calls her "divine mother." Rick Ross also told OZY that teal fits the definition of a charismatic cult leader. And the OZY reporter was troubled by teal's comments about people being exiled from her "community" when they disagree with her, just as Todd Mooney and countless others have experienced. You are either with her or you're with the "haters."

For somebody who’s never had a sense of belonging, [Teal Tribe] becomes … their new family. Which works until the minute that someone has a falling out with me. … If anyone has an issue with me, turning against me, they stand to lose all these people they’re really close to.

I'm still not sure if it's a cult or a quasi-cult, but there are a lot of cult indicators. I leave it to the experts to make that call.

Brown also did a Completion Process session with one of teal's certified practitioners. She seemed very sweet and supportive, but Brown left with more churned up than resolved. This is a process that teal herself says could make people suicidal, but is now proffering as the replacement to suicide helplines. Her practitioners are trained for a few days, for the princely sum of $2,600.00. But teal trains them herself and knows for sure whether or not they're ready to counsel people through crisis. She knows even before the training because she screens the applicants using her super-psychic abilities. And yet, she's refused to certify some people, because it turns out they just weren't ready. At one training, she tells Brown, she declined to certify five people. How did she not see that coming?!

I remembered hearing about this less than successful training in one of teal's Daily Updates and I had the same thought then. So not only did teal fail a bunch of psychically pre-screened people who shelled out thousands of dollars and traveled all the way to Costa Rica, she announced it to the world, before she even told them. And she hates to hurt anyone's feelings, even though, according to her, hurting people's feelings is what "shadow work" is all about. Funny because I thought she loved to "attack" people and put them in the "hot seat."

Her next CP training went better, according to a subsequent Daily Update. She goes on to explain that "real" healing "unseats your entire reality." Most people are so inauthentic, according to teal, that if they genuinely heal, their lives "implode," their "reality collapses." It's "not fun." It "sucks." So that's quite the advertisement. And I'm sure very helpful for people who are already suicidal.




"So. We gotta get you triggered," says teal, after tossing out a casual compliment about her client's attire. She's not even fifteen seconds in to this Completion Process demonstration video that got teal cited for practicing therapy without a license.  A minute in, teal directs the client to "think about the thing that's causing you the most pain in your life... I wanna see if by getting you to talk about it, we can get you in some strong emotions."

She talks a lot about "unconditional presence," but what teal is doing is the opposite of being present for this woman. Instead of meeting her where she is in the moment and supporting that, addressing the concerns that she's expressing, teal moves straight into her agenda, which is to make her as uncomfortable as she can as quickly as she can. She wants her to be emotionally raw. She seems determined to break her down, to unseat her entire reality, to have her life implode, no matter how much that might suck.

This is the kind of thing that has troubled me for a long time with teal's methods. I have described her version of "shadow work" as being more like a "witch hunt through the psyche to unearth trauma, real and imagined, for which people can find whole new reasons to blame their parents."

She's not helping people find any sense of equilibrium. She's deliberately throwing them off balance, destabilizing them, and pretty aggressively. That she's providing these methods to people she's deliberately targeted for their instability, makes this all the more disturbing.

At the end of this episode, Brown gently but directly confronts teal on her qualifications to treat suicidal people. She becomes defensive, her speech clipped. She "feels" like she has "the answer" to suicidality because she's been suicidal. He suggests that this is not really a qualification, that what has worked to keep her "off the fuckin' ledge" might not do the same for everybody. She replies:

It works for everybody I’ve stepped around... Unless, unless they really don’t want to be here.

How convenient. Her method is one hundred percent foolproof except when it isn't. But when it isn't, it's not that her method has failed. Her mind-reading tells her that that person was absolutely committed to dying, that thing that suicidologist April Foreman says is never the case.

And am I the only person who is struck by her wording? To "step around" something is to avoid it, as one might a dead body.

But teal is certain that she has cracked the code on suicidal ideation and she feels absolutely qualified to disavow hotlines and trained professionals, to set herself up as someone who has "the answer" for suicidal and psychologically fragile people.

And I have a lot of people who've written and said that I do. So.

This is a logical fallacy, argumentum ad populum, aka., the bandwagon fallacy. But just because something is popular doesn't mean it's worth anything.

"No one in this world, so far as I know... has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people." ~ H. L. Mencken