By Germen Terpstra
(Originally posted in two parts)
Part 1
I feel that I came through the experience with Training in Power relatively unscathed – still scarred and battle-weary but also “older and wiser”. When I joined in 1996 I was ripe for seduction into TIP (I see the organization now as a Seduction in Power – SIP for short) for as a recovering Roman Catholic revelling in materialistic and hedonistic exile, a belatedly divorced gay father frustrated in the desire to establish a long-term intimate gay partnership, and a somewhat burnt-out teacher ready for retirement,Training in Power was the perfect novelty and then a real challenge – a second chance, so it seemed at honouring the psychic gifts I had rejected in my late 20’s. I readily convinced myself to like this radical, unorthodox, rather bizarre and definitely weird organization and it sucked me in completely.
I take full responsibility for becoming involved in TIP and I have succeeded in forgiving myself for that and for my well-intentioned involvement. I agree with David Hawkins assertion that “To the seeker of enlightenment there is no such thing as justified resentment”. I accept that as a goal – albeit perhaps as a long-term goal – since I do have my bitchy moments.
My Level I teacher was Perry Zavitz. What kinder, gentler, more intriguing teacher can one get? His appeal to the literary intellect with “There is more in heaven and hell, Horatio / than thou canst find in thine philosophy” struck a deep chord. I wonder how he got approval for such a personalized adaptation of the Founder’s notes?
Then Jan Walker taught us Level II at Faye’s sister’s farm in the countryside near Stratford. That was truly so much fun and it was an interesting group – my sons Jay and Julian were there, their mother Barbara Flagler and her partnerRichard Lander, as well as Anna Melnikoff, and Vals (——–) among others. I had no idea or familiarity with this kind of spiritual work and even though I didn’t smoke up like everyone else, I grooved on it. I was spiritually naive.
I didn’t meet Faye Fitzgerald till we persuaded her – over Karen Popoff’s decree – to come to Toronto and teach Level III. She was not at all the personI had expected but I could see how she had charisma and appeal. I had already heard her claims of her intellectual, professional and artistic achievements, yet even now they are all still unsubstantiated and examples of gross self-importance. The claim in the introduction to Level I that she was a”psychic to psychics” continues to this day to be only an illusionary sham.
What I perversely did like was the cleverness with which the various courses had been put together, how she had so audaciously and eclectically taken (plagiarized or stolen) material from so many disparate disciplines and put it together in a package that was so unusual (and mesmerizing). She reminded me (and still does) of one of those students in school that defies all the rules and niceties of deportment and brazenly cheats and lies to the teachers and gets away with it. And I remember only too well, as the teachers ranted in their search for the real culprits, how I blushed in misplaced empathetic guilt.
I was very angry with Faye when I left the Training. But I do no longer hold her in contempt. The more I understand her (and the more I internalize the work of David Hawkins and others who help me on my independent spiritual journey) the more I see her limitations and the dangers of her manipulations. (David Hawkins has much to say about false teachers and the gullibility of the naive spiritual seekers). Forgiving her and loving her is not easy, but possible.
I’m sure it has helped me that I never liked the Founder. I didn’t appear to irritate her, though, so I was somewhat tolerated and never directly targeted or preyed upon. I was never a star student nor a difficult one, so I was basically ignored and left to the ministrations of the minions. In retrospect, I realize that I never had a serious or meaningful personal conversation with her, was never part of her social or inner circle, and except for a formal teacher-student relationship based on healthy skepticism (I thought), we never achieved any intimacy. Her personal woundings and her issues with men, as well as her highly qualified condescending acceptance of them in TIP, also helped to keep us warily distanced.
Level III was taught in my apartment in Toronto in the summer of 1998. Even though it was totally incomprehensible to me and I thoughtFaye was an unbelievably autocratic and awful teacher, her voice grating on my nerves, I was determined to understand and master its mysteries and in the process was totally caught up by the appeal of power and the appeal of a potentially deep and satisfying spiritual journey. I was challenged to heal myself, and even if the first telephone meeting sessions were horrific – the addressments so assaultive – I wanted more. I had been given a sip of power and, like Oliver, I wanted more (I still do). And so I came to Vancouver to take Levels IV, V and VI. 1999 was for me a mind-blowing, life-altering blast and I sucked it up.
I awakened to a spiritual journey to which I gave my heart. I gained dominionover the self. I learned about impeccability. I was healing. And I convincedmyself that I was happy.
But I also awoke to the sobering reality that Training in Power has nothing to offer after Level VI except servitude to a manipulative leader and a hierarchical structure that is without love or compassion but fear-driven, trapped by delusions of superiority. However, it still took me four years to realize that I was committed to an illusion, sucked and trapped into an insatiable gyrating unstable cult.
As a student desirous of more than a sip of power, I was prepared to overlook Faye’s frequently bizarre and strident rants, her autocratic cruelties with certain students, the arrogance of her ministers, the inconsistencies and incongruities in the courses, and the sometimes unfathomable activities and demands. This was all new territory for me and until I was more familiar and acquainted with the metaphysics I rationalized a self-first self-absorption. Asa colleague, however, that kind of denial was no longer possible. There were no longer any clothes.
As a colleague I was encouraged to become actively involved in the work of the organization and I did fully immerse myself. For four years, I went to practically every class, every meeting, every new course, every Master Warrior class, was a Mentor twice, trained and failed how to successfully address at meetings, was trained and failed how to successfully teach Level I, produced the Newsletter for two years, and yet, never, was I ever treated as a colleague. And then I was berated for not volunteering enough.
(At this point in the first draft of this my latest “coming out”letter, I ranted and raved on for many pages about what made me leave the training. I realized as my letter took on a life of its own that my ego and mind were re-engaging in issues that the Training uses to maze and keep one mesmerized, trapping you in the fear that leaving will result in the loss of everything – especially your vibration – and that any independent thought and action is like Cipher betraying the crew of the Nebuchadnezzer and returning to the illusion of the Matrix. What follows instead is a summary of some of the reasons I finally left TIP).
In those four years as a colleague, I had surprisingly little to do with Faye. My nemesis was Karen Popoff, who for me, was far more insidiously dangerous than Faye. As the chief of TIP doctrine, the self-proclaimed Canadian Executive-Director and administrative controller of everything, including enforcer of the organization’s ever-changing procedures, rules and regulations, she was for me the archetypal ice queen and controlling manipulative boss. She and her consort, Bren Murray, checked me at every turn. I felt belittled in every step of the way. Her exasperation with me/men/members (“I could slap you”) – whether her projection or not – led me on an inevitable path of awakening from frustration to questioning, to righteous rage, to resignation from addressments, from the Editorship of the Newsletter, from teaching, and eventually from TIP altogether. I was not prepared like Richard Gregor to be ridiculed and mocked and take it meekly like a fool, nor as Chris Fleck be crassly crowned as the TIP cash-steer and a loyal minion, tattle-tale and probe, or like Bennett Williams and Reece Brill etc. be at their beck and call like good little gnomes etc, etc.
Faye Fitzgerald I could dismiss. I could never “pedastalize” her, anyway (and don’t get me started on her horrendous use and rationalizations of her gross manipulation of the English language), but Karen for the longest timeI could not transcend. I found myself pretty well alone in my frustration and my struggles with her and Bren. I was confronted and criticized by my healing partners, even my best friend Joanne. So I struggled and worked things through.I have to confess that the process triggered much healing – I was truly able to address how much I had been shamed, mocked, influenced, manipulated, used and abused by self-serving, powerless (pretending to be powerful) females all my life (specifically my Mother and my Godmother – God bless them) and then forgive them, and Karen et al. Nevertheless, for a long time she was for me the nightmare dominatrix (or the TIP’s Cardinal Ratzinger – take your pick of metaphor – or not)
What finally made me think of leaving started with my taking level VII – the first, I gather, of the many carroted (?) colleague (?) courses to trap the trainers into full subservience. We were taught to do so many unexplained, unfathomable, weird things at that Level that we were simply too busy to think or question. We were also made to feel anointed in our special position – a very clever ploy to widen the gap between the “”upper levels”and the “students”. The projection of Faye’s terror of the”It” of evil and her arrogant claim that only she and twenty trained psychics like herself can turn the tide, so mazes one, that one is trapped in paranoia, competitiveness and distrust. One needs, then, to be in denial and a position of superiority and exclusivity if only to survive. That like the horse Boxer in the George Orwell novel, Animal Farm , I kept saying “I will work harder” illustrates the completeness of her manipulation.
What I had overlooked in the courses as a student became too much to bear. Also, there was less and less warmth or camaraderie in the organization or in the community, let alone collegiality, to nurture an ongoing sense of belonging. And thus the incongruities, the gaps and the holes – all the assaultiveness, the brainwashing, the cynical manipulation of naive yearnings and well-intentioned participation – became more visible and more disturbing.Twisting the sacred call of “A Spiritual Journey of Service” to the golden calf of “Volunteerism” should have been a sufficient wake-up call in itself.
The Founder’s strident ranting and totally unprovoked attack on the men in the training at the Level VII retreat in 2003 ought to have been the final straw. I could have acted on my conviction that I would not be shamed or cajoled like that but I pussy-footed in waiting. I had already moved to the Sunshine Coast by then and it was becoming easier and easier not to participate as much. And yet I struggled that winter – even after my friends, colleagues, and line-members resigned – to find the motivation and commitment to work with Georganne Oldham and Jean S. to bring the Training to the Sunshine Coast.Also, leaving Master Warrior and working with Anne Binning was not that easy to abandon. I still miss some of that work – always best when Faye Fitzgerald was not there. So it was that, thanks to Diane’s documents – which helped me honour and pull all my thoughts and feeling together – I was finally able to make a clean break in June 2004.
I have stopped justifying Germen’s resentments. Thanks to teachers like Drunvalo Melchisedek and David Hawkins and others, I have continued seeking. I have forgiven myself for having been the naive spiritual seeker and I have forgiven those who have chosen to know not what they do. I have continued on the path of self-dominion, found the power of self-love and compassion for all that lives in limitation. In my resignation letter I said I found myself clear and strong in the conviction that it is time to part from the training and continue my spiritual journey on my own. I know that the right teacher will come for I am now truly ready.
I hope that my turn at sharing my story has been worth the effort of the reading of it.
Namaste……..Germen
Part 2
In the first four years of my involvement in TIP the various attempts to get me to see how I had been abused as a child never fully took hold – I was in resistance, right? The attempts to set up a “cause and effect”duality (this is more David R Hawkins stuff I am working with) only muddied my perceptions rather than giving me clarity – more dualities of blame and resent versus self-responsibility for the choices I made. The assault I experienced in the addressments and in the training to address and teach did much to re-open old wounds but very little to heal them. Power transference and love does result in miracles but does not give one the instantaneous expertise to be such therapists or leaders.
I was definitely hurt as a child – just being born into Nazi-occupied Europe was likely enough – and the conditions of my life were not exactly peachy. The insistence by one of the upper levels that I had been the victim of cult abuse so threw me into an energetic maelstrom that I worked very hard to get to the truth – how I wish I had known more about projection at that point, and been able to tell truth from falsehood.
Anyway, I was very much numbed out as a child and still have very few memories. Post-war Europe and immigration to Canada – no matter how much one romanticizes it – was not pretty. Survival in those circumstances may be its own reward.
As an adult, I know that I played out old personal and social patterns and in turn was as careless and as unawake as my parents in how I lived and how I raised my children. As I was traumatized by certain baby-sitters, so were my sons. The work I have done to expose the truth of my conditions has been very healing. The constant battering in the healing groups, however, I only found invasive. There are other ways to awaken and learn.
Faye never specifically accused me of abusing my children or of being a pedophile – but then, remember, we never really talked on a one-to-one basis. My good fortune – by the grace of God. In the men’s groups we did obsessively get forced to face the subject of abuse and victimization – and particularly to”deal” with the universal guilt of all men – but, according to Faye, we consistently failed to heal ourselves. I’ll save you her rants about that. Idid, however, as the editor of the newsletter, write an article about gay priests and pedophiles in the ranks of the Roman Catholic Church. There had been considerable pressure on me in my adolescence to enter the priesthood – in retrospect that makes sense for that’s where many young men suspected of being homosexual were often shepherded. I wrote about that and the abuse in theCatholic Church and then concluded my article with the phrase, “And there but for the grace of God go I”. What that means is that fortunately I was spared such a life of self-hating repression and incorrect and abusive acting out of sexual demons and possession. Faye ostensibly read the article but made no comments. She merely gave me that look. What happened later encouraged me to come to the conclusion that she hadn’t read it carefully or understood my perspective – I do indeed query her claim of professional and academic accomplishments.
So I never printed that article but filed it. In the year that followed, I began to “feel” that I was being talked about and I started to”see and hear” these conversations about me as a pedophile (this invariably took place in a kitchen setting where Faye and her cadre of supporters regularly gathered). “Me or my imagination?” Delusion? Surely I was being paranoiac? This wasn’t telepathy, was it? But every time I let down the “moat shield ” – which works very well for me – I was witness to more and more of these assaultive conversations.
When a younger level who called me regularly for support informed me that Faye had ordered her to keep me away from her son, and that in her understanding from her work with Faye and the ministers, all gay men were pedophiles, I was appalled at the ignorance and the mind-fucking manipulation. At a consequent Level VII meeting (at which Faye was not present) I raised the issue and in righteous rage demanded that if such judgments were in fact being circulated about me that they had to stop, that there was no basis in fact to such slanderings, and that such talk behind people’s backs was not impeccable (how naive and trusting that sounds now). The reaction I got was as if I had caught everyone in a lie – the embarrassment was palpable – and the advice they offered was not only assaultive but ludicrous. I was wrong! Obviously I must be guilty! I was paranoiac, caught in a wrap of my own suspicion, and – imagine this – to put a positive spin on it, I was likely just being chosen as the Guardian to hold that position of the pedophile on the wedge for universal exposure!
If I still harboured doubts about being psychic, they were laid to rest at that meeting, for I knew then that I had hit the nail on the head.
By the grace of God we become conscious of who we really are. Faye and TIP have definitely helped in that process but the manipulation, the slandering, the insidious soldier-gathering, and the mind-games has undone the purity of the initial intent of the training. Faye and the organization have fallen from the positives of courage, integrity, love and healing down into the negative morass of ignorance, manipulation and power over. May Faye Fitzgerald and her trainers see that before it is too late.
How willingly I have sought to accept a clear, cauterized closure from my experience with TIP. Therein, but for the grace of God, I would still been trained and trapped.
-Germen Terpstra