Anatomy of Spiritual Abuse in Shamanism

Spiritual abuse rarely arrives as an attack. It arrives as a diagnosis.

Spiritual abuse in a shamanic training happens when a teacher uses unverifiable claims about your inner life to control your behaviour. It is recognisable by three markers. The accusation cannot be disproven. No concrete facts are named. And denying it counts as further evidence of guilt. The language sounds like guidance, and the structure is a trap.

If you have left a shamanic training and months later you still cannot decide whether he was right about you, please read this. That uncertainty is not a character flaw and it is not unfinished spiritual work. It is the intended result of a specific way of using language, and once you can see the mechanism, it stops working on you.

A word on where this comes from. I am a shamanic practitioner, and I also train NLP practitioners, which means I spend much of my working life taking sentences apart to see what they are built to do. I received a letter of this kind myself, after completing a shamanic training. I will not be saying more about that here, because the man who wrote it is not the point. The pattern is, and it belongs to more people than me.

What follows takes that language apart, pattern by pattern, using the Meta Model from NLP, which is simply a way of noticing what a sentence has deleted, distorted or generalised. None of it requires you to believe or disbelieve anything about spirits. It only requires you to look at the grammar.

An example

The example below is a real letter, summarised here rather than reproduced. Every pattern examined in the rest of this article is drawn from it.

In it, the teacher wrote that the student was working with a spirit that was not what she believed it to be, that it was feeding on her rather than helping her, and that she had been calling on it covertly to serve her own interests. He wrote that she was deceiving herself about where her strength came from. He wrote that she had drawn energy from the other students and created drama in the group, and that this was a clear breach of the ethical code she had agreed to when she enrolled. He wrote that she was not a victim, and that she knew exactly what she was doing. He wrote that he was not angry with her, only gravely disappointed. He closed by telling her the choice was hers: give up the parasite, or carry on chasing an illusion of power and filling her life with drama of her own making.

If you have received something in this shape, you already know how it lands. You read it four times. You start drafting a reply and delete it. And somewhere in the second hour you notice you have begun searching your own memory for evidence against yourself.

Start here: there will not be one verifiable fact in it

Before any analysis of technique, do this one thing. Print the letter and underline every statement in it that a third person could check.

The page usually stays blank. No date. No sentence you actually said. No action you took. No name of anyone harmed. Pages of grave accusation, and every claim in them is about your intentions, your allegiances and your inner motives, which only he can see and only he can assess.

Hold that next to any legitimate professional complaint you have ever seen. A real one says: on this date, in this session, you said this, and here is the clause it breached. It can be answered, corrected or disproven. A letter with no facts in it cannot be answered, and that is not an accident of style. It is the point.

The language patterns, one by one

Each pattern below is described with the kind of phrasing these letters use. The exact words differ. The structure repeats, and the structure is what does the damage.

1. Mind reading, presented as spiritual sight

You know exactly what you are doing. You are deceiving yourself. You are afraid of your own powerlessness.

Each of these is a claim about the contents of another person’s mind, stated as fact, with no hedge and no evidence. In ordinary life you would notice it immediately. Inside a shamanic training it slips past, because the teacher has already been granted the role of someone who sees what others cannot.

The challenge is one question: how do you know? Not rhetorically. Literally. A teacher operating in good faith can answer it, and the answer will point to something observable.

2. The accusation is built into the grammar, so you cannot answer without confessing

This is the load bearing pattern of the whole genre, and it is called a presupposition. A presupposition is something a sentence assumes to be true in order to mean anything at all.

• When you stop calling on her assumes that you call on her.
• The choices you keep making assumes ongoing wrongdoing.
• You had clarity briefly assumes that agreeing with him was clarity, and that disagreeing was its loss.
• Put things back into right alignment assumes you moved them out of it.

You cannot respond to a presupposition from inside its own frame. Argue about which spirit, and you have already conceded that you work with one. This is the same structure as the courtroom question about when you stopped beating your wife, and it is why women read these letters for hours and end up more confused than when they started. You are trying to answer a question that convicted you before you opened it.

The only exit is to refuse the frame rather than the content. Not “it is not a parasite” but “I do not accept the premise, and I am asking you for the evidence.”

3. The unfalsifiable loop, where denial proves the charge

Notice what these letters do with the possibility that you disagree. It has already been handled: the spirit is deceiving you, and you are deceiving yourself.

So if you agree, you are guilty. If you disagree, that is the deception operating, which is also guilt. There is no answer available to you that leads out. In psychology this closed shape is what makes an accusation of being in denial so destructive, and it is structurally identical here. The only difference is the vocabulary.

A claim that cannot possibly be wrong is not a spiritual insight. It is a cage with better lighting.

4. Nominalisations, or words you are not allowed to examine

Alignment. Power. Clarity. Drama. The web of life. The illusion of personal power.

These are nominalisations: processes frozen into nouns. The old NLP test is whether you could put it in a wheelbarrow. You cannot put alignment in a wheelbarrow, which means it has no fixed referent, which means the person using the word gets to decide what it contains.

Because they arrive as nouns, they feel like things that exist in the world and can be measured. A sentence such as power comes from alignment has the cadence of a law of physics. Unfreeze it and ask what is actually being claimed: aligned with what, according to whom, measured how. The sentence dissolves. Nothing was ever said.

5. Lost performatives, or judgements with the judge deleted

This is a mistake. We all have a choice to make in life. Working with parasitic spirits is destructive.

These are personal opinions with the speaker surgically removed, so they read as universal law rather than as one man’s cosmology. The restored version is: I believe this is a mistake, according to the system I teach and sell.

Notice how much smaller it becomes when you put the author back in. That is the whole trick. Cosmologies differ enormously between traditions, and a teacher who presents his own as the structure of reality itself has left the territory of teaching.

6. The negation that installs exactly what it denies

I am not angry with you. I am disappointed.

Two things happen in that half sentence. First, to process a negation your mind has to represent the thing being negated, which is why nobody can not think of a blue tree. The anger arrives anyway, with the added instruction that you are not permitted to name it.

Second, disappointment is a parental position, not a collegial one. Anger between adults can be answered. Disappointment cannot, because it places him above you and casts you as the child who has let him down. In a relationship you paid for, with an adult, that positioning should stop you cold.

7. Your ability to object is removed before you have objected

You are not a victim here.

If there is one line to remember from this article, it is that one. It arrives before any protest has been made, and its only function is to disqualify the protest in advance. From that point on, any distress you express becomes further proof of manipulation rather than a reasonable response to being accused of spiritual sabotage by email.

People with nothing to manage do not pre-emptively strip you of the language you would use to describe being harmed. When someone tells you what you are not allowed to feel about what they are currently doing to you, note the timing.

8. A choice between two doors, both of which he built

Work for the web of life, or work for the illusion of personal power.

These letters offer a choice roughly every second paragraph, and each one is the same false dilemma in different clothes. Two options exist, he defined both, and you have already been assigned to the bad one.

The missing third option is simple and it is never on the menu: he is mistaken. A teacher who cannot be wrong is not teaching, because teaching requires a position that could be corrected by evidence.

9. Ethics language used without a single element of an ethics process

A clear violation of the ethical code of conduct you agreed to.

This is where a metaphysical opinion is upgraded into an institutional charge, and it deserves more attention than anything else in the letter, because it is the part that frightens people into silence.

Count what is missing. No clause is quoted. No incident is described. No date is given. No witness is named. No opportunity to respond is offered. No independent person reviews it. The accuser, the judge and the person who benefits from the outcome are one man writing alone.

Ethics without process is not ethics. It is the vocabulary of ethics borrowed to make a private threat sound official.

10. The only exit offered is obedience, relabelled as healing

You must decide whether you value yourself enough to heal.

Read what has been tied together there. Doing what he says equals valuing yourself, equals healing. Not doing what he says equals fear, equals self abandonment, equals ongoing damage. Compliance and self worth have been welded into one thing.

There is no version of the story in which you disagree with him and are well. That closure is the signature of coercive language, and it is the reason women stay in these trainings long after their body has told them to leave.

11. Whatever happens next has already been assigned to you

Drama of your own creation.

The final move is insurance. Any distress that follows the letter, including distress caused by the letter itself, has been pre-labelled as something you generate. If you cry, that is drama. If you tell another student, that is drama. If you write about it years later, that too can be filed under the same heading.

He has written himself out of any consequence in advance. Which brings us to the question that actually matters, and it is not whether any of it was true.

Why this works so well on serious students

The women this happens to are not gullible. They are usually the most committed people in the room, and there are reasons this language finds them.

Shamanic training legitimately asks you to loosen your grip on ordinary reasoning. You are told to trust the journey over the analysis, to sit with what you cannot explain, to accept that your teacher perceives things you do not yet perceive. All of that is reasonable inside a tradition, and all of it can be turned into a weapon by someone willing to do so, because the same openness that lets you journey also lets a diagnosis in without a check.

Add the money. When you have paid for years of training and reorganised your life around a path, the sunk cost makes the mind reach for any explanation other than the one where the teacher is the problem. Add the group, where a version of the accusation reaches other students and they quietly withdraw. The isolation is not a side effect, it is the mechanism.

And add the deepest injury of these letters, which is not the accusation of wrongdoing. It is that your own sense of your own strength is redefined as a parasite feeding on you. If your power is a lie, then the only safe source of power is the person who told you so. That is the sentence that keeps women paying.

What to do if a letter like this is sitting in your inbox

None of this is legal advice and none of it is therapy. It is what is worth knowing in the first week.

• Do not delete it, and do not answer it the same day. Save it, back it up, note the date. Documents matter later, and your nervous system is not in a state to compose anything useful in the first twenty four hours.
• Underline every checkable fact. Do this on paper. When the page stays blank, you have your answer, and you have it in your own handwriting rather than from someone reassuring you.
• Ask one question and only one. Which specific words or actions, on which date, in front of whom. Ask for the clause of the code that was breached. Then stop typing. The response, including no response at all, will tell you everything.
• Show it to someone outside the community. A friend, a therapist, a colleague, anyone who has never used the phrase middle world. Language like this only holds its power inside the room where the vocabulary is shared.
• Test the claim against your actual life. If you were genuinely draining people, there would be evidence of it outside his classroom. Look at your friendships, your clients, your family. Reality is a better witness than a letter.
• Separate the practice from the man. You do not have to give up drumming, journeying or your helpers because someone misused them. What you learned is yours. He does not get to keep it in the divorce.

What a real correction from a teacher sounds like

Teachers do sometimes need to correct students, including on matters of ethics, and it is worth knowing the difference so that you do not swing into distrusting everyone.

A real correction names the behaviour, not your soul. It gives the date and the incident. It states the standard it is measured against and quotes it. It asks you what happened from where you stood, and it waits for the answer. It leaves your relationship to your own guides alone, because that is not the teacher’s property. It describes a repair that is finite and specific, and afterwards the matter is finished. Above all, it is possible for the teacher to be wrong about it, and he says so.

Hold a letter of the kind described above against that list. Usually not one item is present.

The public page and the private letter

There is one test worth running on any teacher you are considering, and it costs nothing. Read what he promises in public. Then hold it against what he does in private on the day you disagree with him.

Shamanic schools often publish an ethical statement setting out what the teacher will and will not do. A common promise is that he will never impose his own interpretation on a student’s vision, that he will not tell you what Spirit is communicating to you or steer your journeys, and that his role is to teach you to find your own answers undistorted.

Now set a promise like that beside a letter that tells a student which spirit she works with, that it is a parasite, which lineage it comes from, that it is deceiving her, and precisely what she must do about it.

That is not a small inconsistency between a sales page and a bad week. The public promise is the reason a student hands over her inner life in the first place. When the private conduct reverses it precisely, the published version is marketing and the private one is the practice.

Run this test on anyone, including the author of this article. It is the cheapest protection available and almost nobody uses it, because we read an About page as a description of a person rather than as a promise that can be broken.

Where does the authority actually come from?

It is worth reading a teacher’s pages differently. Not for credentials, and not for how impressive the biography is. For one question only: if this person were wrong about you, who on earth could tell him so?

There are three places a teacher’s authority can come from. A lineage, meaning a tradition that trained him and could in principle disown him. An institution, meaning a body that certifies him and could revoke it. Or evidence, meaning claims he has agreed to have checked.

A missing lineage is not by itself a warning sign, and this deserves care. Core Shamanism works without traditional lineage on purpose, and many respected practitioners teach that way. A teacher who declines to claim a tradition he was never initiated into is behaving responsibly, not evasively.

The problem is not an absent lineage. It is an absent lineage combined with unlimited authority over a student’s inner life. If he names nobody who taught him, no body reviews him, and his claims are of a kind that cannot be checked by anyone, then the authority is self-issued. Self-issued authority has no appeal court. A letter of this kind is a verdict handed down by a court that the judge built, staffed and paid for himself.

What to look at before you enrol anywhere

None of the following is proof of anything on its own, and one or two of them appear on the websites of teachers worth studying with. What matters is whether they cluster, and whether the private conduct matches the public promise.

• Nobody is named as his teacher. Look for a person, a school, a tradition. A phrase such as years of healing across multiple traditions names none of them. Ask directly who taught him and whether you may contact them. The answer, and the reaction to being asked, is the information.
• The certificate comes from the man who wrote the standard. He designs the code, teaches it in the first course, interprets it, enforces it, issues the certificate and earns from your next level. Ask who else could revoke it. If the answer is nobody, then an ethics charge from him is not an ethics charge. It is a private opinion with an official sounding name.
• The method is proprietary and described as the only one of its kind. Original protocols with branded names, and a claim to be the only training that does what it does. When the system is self-contained there is no outside standard to measure a disagreement against, so your objection stops being a difference of school and becomes disloyalty.
• The accusation is written entirely in the school’s own vocabulary. Middle world spirits, the web of life, right alignment, energetic boundaries. These are course modules. A charge written in the school’s private language can only be assessed from inside the school, which in practice means by the man who wrote the language.
• The marketing recruits trauma survivors while positioning itself against therapy. Look at who the homepage says the training is for. If it names people recovering from trauma and narcissistic abuse, and features a testimonial saying years of therapy achieved nothing, ask what clinical training, supervision or referral practice sits behind that. Then notice who that marketing selects for. A woman recruited on the basis that she has been manipulated before, and that her own perception once failed her, is the least equipped of anyone to withstand a letter telling her she is deceiving herself.

That last one matters most. A homepage like that reads as an invitation. It is also a filter.

The part nobody tells you about afterwards

Long after the training ends, you may find you cannot journey without a small voice asking whether the helper who came was benevolent or the parasite he described. That is what this kind of language does. It does not only end a relationship with a teacher. It installs a supervisor inside your own practice, wearing his voice, checking your work.

Getting that voice out usually takes longer than leaving did, and argument is not what does it. What does it is returning to direct experience over and over and letting it accumulate, until your own perception carries more evidence than his letter does. Snake work helps here, because the snake does not negotiate with the skin it is leaving. So does the long slow work of learning where you end and other people begin, which the wolf teaches better than any book. And when you can finally look at the whole thing without flinching, the raven’s refusal to look away from what is actually there turns out to be the medicine.

There are wonderful teachers in this work. There are also people who have discovered that spiritual authority is the easiest authority to claim and the hardest to audit. You are allowed to have learned real things from someone who also harmed you. Both can be true, and holding both is usually the beginning of getting your own voice back. If that is where you are, the rest of the writing in this section was largely written for you.

Common questions

Now it is your turn

Two questions, and you are welcome to answer either one in the comments, anonymously if you prefer.

First: is there a sentence from a teacher that you are still carrying, years later? Write it down. Sometimes seeing it outside your own head is enough.

Second, and this one is harder: what did you stop doing in your own practice because of it, and what would it take to start again?

Every comment gets read. And if you want to learn this work in a place where your relationship with your own helpers belongs to you and nobody else, that is what Elements of Shamanism was built to be.