Beware The-rapist

Psychologists can be some of the most psychologically manipulative people on earth.

I started following a psychologist on YouTube talking about recovery from narcissism. What he had to say seemed helpful for me at the time to clarify some of the thoughts I had on my own recovery from narcissism. He shares some good stuff on his channel.

Today, I was catching up on his last couple of posts where he talked about emotional mastery. He’s selling a course on it. I am totally behind selling stuff. I get that he’d argue in defense of his course or methods in his “pitch.” I think that’s excellent to do. However, I picked up on something that I did not think was appropriate. He was using a little gaslighting (narcissistic manipulation) based in Kafkatrapping to market his method.

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Kafkatrapping is a logical fallacy which assumes that your defense of yourself is a definitive sign of your fault or guilt. Kafkatrapping is often used in modern feminism, identity politics and other victim based ideologies, typically.

Ironic that a therapist recovering from the trauma of narcissism and teaching these skills to others would choose this “strategy” to sell his own work.

In essence, he assumed people who disagree with his approach are skeptical and defensive, and that their defensiveness and skepticism of his method comes from something emotional in their childhood (and not that he is wrong- couldn’t be that). He reasons their earliest recollection of skepticism was likely highly emotional and confusing for them as children. This creates a negative emotional loop for their lives about hearing something they are skeptical of. Thus, their defensiveness creates a filter of obscurity through which these listeners defensively interpret his words. He reasons that therefore they must be unreasonable in their skepticism. He proves it to them by showing them that whatever their first emotional experience of skepticism from their past at its height was so emotional at the time that they couldn’t possibly now demonstrate a healthy or reasonable level of skepticism. He indicates that all their present skepticism must be based on this first experience and must be challenged or debunked as irrational. Then, he ends with this solution to their current “unhealthy skepticism” and their obvious need to work on themselves through his emotional mastery course. Nice sales technique you got there.

I am currently working on a marketing strategy for my course on creating healthy relationships through my innovative approach to boundaries. I am very aware of some of the ways I don’t want to sell my course. I just don’t love the whole slick salesy thing. But, this therapist using gaslighting and kafkatrapping, creating the problem that wasn’t there to begin with to sell his course is disgusting. He’s getting people that come to his channel because they have spent their lives second guessing themselves and being emotionally manipulated to doubt their own thoughts and feelings. He is getting them to believe that their own doubts in his methods must be the result of their own faults and traumas. That’s just horrible. I mean, that’s really, really horrible.

I know he can help people. It’s possible. Listening to him has helped me. The only reason I can imagine he went to this extreme with his marketing must have been that he still has a profound level of his own emotions to heal or that he harbors such a profound lack of self-awareness that he has lost touch with reality. In either case, whether ignorant or just a hot mess, he proved himself unscrupulous in business. I couldn’t promote him or subscribe to his channel anymore after witnessing this.

He went to such an extreme to manipulate people. It demonstrated egregious misconduct to use hurts from emotional abuse victim’s traumas which are LIKELY irrelevant to their doubt in his methods to make his case for why they should buy his course. You can’t see my face right now, but it is in a kind of grimace I haven’t made since watching Mel Gibson’s several hour horror film on the crucifixion of Jesus. I was profoundly disturbed by both experiences.

I am familiar with psychological manipulation. My mom was in a master’s program for psychology. She was kicked out by several of the university department heads after having near perfect marks in all her courses. This almost never happens. They claimed that she was a potential danger to her future clients in the field, and they were not about to allow her to become a therapist under their watch.

There’s an old quote: “physician heal thyself.” Most people teach what they most need to learn. I personally have found many amazing teachers in the field of psychology who really healed themselves before “practicing” on others. Many in the field of psychology, though, are people still carrying heavy, heavy traumas. They study the field looking for answers. Many become qualified on paper without ever finding the answers they sought, and as such, can be very dangerous to a client or patient.

My mom getting forced out of that program with her high grades was unprecedented. Had she not been a very Orthodox Christian with politically conservative values, chances are she would have been allowed to carry on in her delusions and eventually work in a field where she caused damage to people who came to her seeking help. That being said, many who are atheists or who are more on board with leftist ideologies get shuffled through those programs daily, when like my mom, these anomalies about them and their unhealed past should have prevented them from getting licensed or accredited. The bias in academia is creating a very damning loophole.

My mom is a classic, text book narcissist. Although she isn’t wrong in suggesting that her political views and faith kept her from getting her degree in that field, there were more obvious reasons for her rejection which she has never faced. Now, on top of everything, she’s a martyr for having sacrificed her degree in her unbending defense of her faith. You can’t see my eyes rolling.

My mom studied a lot about narcissism and could quickly identify it in others. She could teach volumes about narcissism to others. She could never identify those traits in herself. Getting kicked out of the program knowing her faith and values had anything to do with it kept her from ever using that experience to look within at the most obvious reason she should have been removed from that program.

I’m not diagnosing this YouTube therapist. I’m just saying that he could have acquired the traits he claims he saw in his parents and can identify in others without ever seeing them in himself. If he hasn’t self-identified those traits or healed from his own narcissistic abuse, he may use these traits in order to profit from undermining people who come to him for help. As long as he went along with the post modernist, neo Marxist ideologies, most academic programs would push him through with honors. That’s unfortunately what they do.

One last thing, if you want to know what happened to my mother’s hard earned college credits, she discovered she could transfer most of them to a major in a different field. She soon got her Master’s degree with honors in American Studies. She uses her degree today to teach in public high schools in America.

One more reason to homeschool your kids.