E73 | 50 Years Treating Trauma and Mind Control — A Therapist on Where Self-Help Crosses the Line

Susan Pease Banitt has spent nearly fifty years as a trauma therapist, including decades working with survivors of mind control and trafficking. In this conversation, she turns that clinical eye on the self-help world: where it helps, where it crosses the line, and how to tell the difference.

Susan is a licensed clinical social worker trained in psychodynamic psychotherapy in the Harvard teaching hospitals, specializing in PTSD, dissociation and complex trauma. She is also a yoga teacher, a Reiki practitioner and the author of The Trauma Tool Kit, Wisdom, Attachment, and Love in Trauma Therapy, and the new anthology Women Therapists on Healing. With Anne, who spent thirty years as a participant and leader in Landmark, she looks at the quiet moments where agency changes hands. One is the familiar invitation to "just try these ideas on for the weekend." Another is responsibility teaching that slides into "you caused everything that happened to you."

Susan's central tool is the difference between content and process. Content is what a teacher says. Process is what the dynamic is actually doing to you. When the content sounds wise and the process is controlling, the whole thing becomes harmful. From there, the conversation moves through love bombing and our deep need to belong, why people with early trauma reach for outside structure, why smart people are not immune to influence, and why good people inside harmful organizations keep repeating the same harm. Susan closes with a hopeful challenge. Organizations, practitioners and individuals can all take an honest moral inventory, keep what is good, and look directly at their areas of denial.

This episode is for anyone who has felt something was off in a personal development setting but couldn't name it, and for any coach, therapist or facilitator who wants to hold people without taking their agency away.

A note before you listen: this conversation touches briefly on mind control, trafficking, abuse and a training exercise involving mock strangulation. These come up as references rather than in detail, but if they're tender topics for you, take care as you listen. RAINN offers confidential support at rainn.org or 1-800-656-4673, and Rachel Bernstein's recovery group is linked below.

Resources mentioned:Women Therapists on Healing, ed. Susan Pease Banitt and Larissa Miranda https://www.suepb.com/books

Connect with Susan: ⁠www.suepeasebanitt.com

Book - The Fund by Rob Copeland

Jon Atack's Family & Friends podcast: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCI4tcSMV2kEh3BooY_XFSYQ

Rachel Bernstein's Healthy Healing group: https://ilumn8.life/op/lgat-recovery-group/

Chris Shelton's What Now: Reclaiming Your Life class: https://ilumn8.life/op/reclaiming-your-mind-and-life-chris-shelton/

Seek Safely: https://seeksafely.org/

Anne Peterson's book, Is This a Cult?: https://isthisacultbook.com/

Confronting the Line is dedicated to the safe and ethical practice of personal and professional development. We explore what separates genuinely transformative work from environments that exploit the very people seeking growth.

Go Beyond the Line: I just started a companion Patreon for those who'd like to explore deeper into what I've been learning about the Human Potential Movement, what works and what doesn't. https://www.patreon.com/cw/BeyondtheLinesStudio

Read about how Confronting the Line is funded and our commitment to transparency: https://isthisacultbook.com/confronting-the-line-pod/