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SOUL BETRAYAL (2)

David Clohessy of SNAP, himself a survivor of abuse by a priest, describes the abrupt shift in perception this way: "It's like getting up one morning, walking outside, and all of a sudden the law of gravity isn't in effect anymore. It is something that is so far beyond the pale of expectation for a kid. . . . It is just a horrible, horrible betrayal."

Of course, the degree of damage to individual youngsters varies. For example, the closer the relationship of the offender to the child, the greater the trauma. The type of abuse (fondling versus intercourse, for example), its duration, the degree of violence, and the age of the child also figure prominently in the extent of the pain and damage inflicted. Young sexual-abuse victims inevitably suffer from what professionals call posttraumatic stress disorder, symptoms of which, says Judith Lewis Herman in her classic book Trauma and Recovery, are "both extensive and enduring." These include an extreme startle response, elevated arousal, sleep disturbances, deep distrust, sexualized behaviors, depression, withdrawal, eating disorders, drug and alcohol abuse, and suicidal thoughts and actions. In fact, a survey described in the paper "In the Name of God: A Profile of Religion-Related Child Abuse" in the Journal of Social Issues (volume 51, number 2) reported that, of their sample, almost 20 percent of children abused by religious authorities subsequently considered suicide.

Not only is the pain inflicted on an individual child heartbreaking, but the scope of the problem is immense because each perpetrator generally has multiple victims. In Slayer of the Soul, an anthology whose articles focus on issues related to the Catholic Church and child sexual abuse, Father Stephen Rossetti cites a 1987 study that found that 377 child molesters whose relations with victims were not incestuous had victimized 4,435 girls and 22,981 boys. Pentecostal preacher Tony Leyva, for example, pleaded guilty to having abused upwards of 100 boys, although law-enforcement officials placed the number closer to 800.

Although youngsters who have been molested by clergy exhibit the same symptomatology as those violated by other trusted adults, there is an added dimension if the abuse is perpetrated by a spiritual authority. Developmentally, children often equate spiritual authorities with God. For this reason it's easy to see how a child might think sexual fondling is somehow supernaturally sanctioned. One case cited in the Journal of Social Issues article involved a priest and his wife who told the boys they abused that the abuse was part of the youngsters' religious obligation as "good Christians." The same researchers also noted that the opposite attribution can be made: One young girl who was sexually abused by both parents was placed with a minister who molested her as well, saying that the abuse was "God's punishment" for her "badness."

Because church is often thought of as a refuge, and God as someone to turn to in troubled times, a child who is molested may turn away altogether from spiritual pursuits even into adulthood. He or she may not attend church, pray, or otherwise participate in religious rituals. David Clohessy, for instance, says he no longer considers himself a Catholic. "In fairness, I want to say that I could be in this same spiritual position even if I never had been abused." Still, he says, "there are times when I am very envious of those people who have been able to separate out what one man with a Roman collar did to them as kids from the rest of the institution and the rest of religion. I am envious of people who still have their faith."

Outrage and anger are understandable, natural, human responses to sexual abuse of minors by clergy; the force of those feelings is needed to protect children. However, what often gets lost in the hue and cry resulting from news of such abuse is an understanding of the central character in the drama: the perpetrator.

Father Rossetti of St. Luke Institute takes a compassionate yet clear-eyed view of clergy child abusers. The institute, a 32-bed psychiatric hospital in the Maryland suburbs outside Washington, D.C., provides care primarily for Catholic priests with addictive disorders and psychological problems such as chronic depression. St. Luke also deals with sex offenders on a regular basis. While Rossetti does not condone their offenses, he does see their behavior as reflective of larger societal problems. He uses family-therapy and systems theories to explain how these offenders might be the "identified patients" of a dysfunctional societal "family."

"Child molesters don't drop down from Mars," he says. "They come from a society that produces that pathology. So if we want to get rid of this problem, we have to heal society."

Specifically what need to be healed, he says, are our flawed attitudes toward human sexuality and aggression. On the one hand, he explains in Slayer of the Soul, we as a culture are obsessed by sex; on the other hand, religious traditions, in not-so-subtle ways, condemn sexuality as unspiritual and even sinful. Pointing to increasing violence, he states that we know neither how to encourage healthy human aggression nor how to manage violence. We need to learn to become strong, he says, without being overly controlling or power-hungry, assertive rather than aggressive. We need to become fully sexual people who are warm, compassionate, intimate, engaged, and empathic.

As for the molesters, Rossetti is surprised by the intensity of hatred toward them. He says he has heard people suggest castrating them, tattooing them on the forehead, even killing them. "You hear this said all the time by rather rational people. There is a well of hatred toward child molesters that goes beyond the heinousness of the crime." Furthermore, he notes, attention seems fixated on child abuse in the Catholic Church.

Another skewed public perception is that sociopathic predators are the sole perpetrators of sexual abuse. As clinicians who deal with sexual boundary violations have discovered, the profiles of perpetrators fall along a continuum. Many different personality types can violate boundaries, and ignoring this fact can jeopardize parishioners and devotees alike.

Psychologist John C. Gonsiorek has described the characteristics of clergy perpetrators (see box, "Who Abuses?"), as have Richard Irons, M.D., and Episcopal priest Katherine Roberts, distinguishing among them differences in age, experience, career development, clinical diagnosis, and prognosis. Their work in this area is important in terms of humanizing the perpetrators as well as communicating the message that factors such as stress, training and education, self-awareness, and peer relationships are significant elements in both the cause and prevention of clergy sexual misconduct.

Says David Clohessy: "The most notorious priest molester [of children] in history is James Porter of Massachusetts. He was clearly a predator; he abused anything with a pulse. But even though his behavior is predatory, I think that if you got inside his head and heart, you would find the same loneliness and woundedness that is more obvious in other priests who molest."

One of the most overlooked players in instances of abuse by spiritual authorities is the community. A good example of how a collective both contributes to and suffers from abuses by a spiritual authority is the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, Massachusetts, which is struggling to regain the vitality it lost two years ago when its founder, Yogi Amrit Desai, resigned his post as spiritual director after admitting to inappropriate sexual contact with several women.

Nestled in the Berkshires amid a host of cultural, arts, and outdoor attractions, Kripalu's combination of holistic programs and spa-like offerings such as vegetarian fare, saunas, whirlpools, and a private lakefront beach make it a desirable R-and-R destination for holistically minded individuals. Its peaceful location belies the major upheaval it endured, losing two-thirds of its residents, running monthly deficits of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and reorganizing its management structure. The turmoil the center encountered clearly did not begin with Amrit Desai's resignation. With a core of 100 longtime residents -- some having been there for 10 years or more -- the community had been immersed in an individuation process in which midlife devotees were struggling to articulate and make conscious their growing discomfort with a system that on the one hand provided them with spiritual sustenance and a sense of belonging and purpose and on the other hand paid scant attention to the classic shadow bugbears of sex, power, and money.

The first Kripalu ashram, established by Amrit Desai in Sumneytown, Pennsylvania, in the early 1970s, was a small residential community that viewed itself as a religious order. With a skeletal core staff and affiliated members who worked in the town nearby, the ashram had an annual budget of less than $100,000. Spiritual practice was the community's raison d'etre, and members participated in a stringent yoga regimen -- wake-up at 4 a.m., with jogging, yoga, pranayama breathing exercises, and satsang (teaching session) all before breakfast. Brahmacharya -- a yoga principle akin to chastity or sexual modesty -- was strongly encouraged. In yoga the life force is seen as residing in sexual energy and sexual fluids. Yoga practice is aimed at raising that energy up the spine toward higher spiritual centers. Therefore, sexual activities -- masturbating or intercourse -- are seen as counterproductive to one's spiritual progress.

By all accounts, Amrit Desai was a gentle yet powerfully inspirational teacher. The pivotal moment in his own life had come during a morning yoga practice session in 1970 when, as he has described it, he was "flooded with bliss" and began spontaneously performing --- or being performed by -- yoga exercises with a newfound flexibility and fluidity. Not only was he drawn into an ecstatic state but those in the room with him -- his wife and two students -- were also drawn into a deep state of meditation. Inspired by this experience, Desai began to formulate a new method of "meditation in motion," which he called Kripalu Yoga in honor of his guru.

In the early years of the Kripalu ashram, it was not uncommon for residents to have strong shakti (energy) experiences, such as automatic movement and writing, speaking in tongues, and sharp increases in body temperature. These experiences in part solidified Desai's guru status among many of his students; some disciples took them to mean that the guru must be bona fide and therefore infallible. For too many devotees this reasoning translated as giving over their sense of judgment in major life decisions. One area that was affected was sexual activity. In a milieu in which "single and celibate" was the norm, many disciples did not marry or have children.

What community residents did not know was that, as they earnestly practiced brahmacharya, their guru was violating this yogic principle through sexual contact with female disciples. In 1986 a devotee made it known that she had had a sexual relationship years before with him. But when confronted in a community-wide meeting, Desai flatly denied the accusation. The upshot was that the community -- including her husband and son -- believed the guru. The woman left the ashram, staying in the area to be near her child. Eight years later, she was vindicated when another woman came forward and described to community members how Desai had used her sexually when she was his personal assistant in the 1970s. What devastated many of Desai's followers far more than the revelations of his inappropriate sexual relations was the fact that he had hidden them and lied about them for so long.

"I never would have said Kripalu was a cult," says Jean Matlack, a Washington, D.C., psychotherapist and a Kripalu Yoga teacher, "but now I understand that for people who lived there and were young and vulnerable, they were in a kind of trance. They gave over their lives in a way that is the hallmark of cults."

Another area where residents "woke up" was the financial one. Over the years the community grew both in numbers and in sophistication. In 1983, it invested $1.25 million to purchase a former Jesuit seminary in Lenox. Situated on several hundred acres, the ashram grew to 300 residents and became a thriving retreat and holistic health center. In the late 1980s Kripalu residents, especially the old-timers, began feeling their oats. Desai was traveling a great deal, and the staff found themselves teaching the courses, handling administrative duties, putting out advertising -- in other words, running the center. With the flush of financial success and the sense of real-world achievement, many felt a need to "graduate" and to reap the monetary rewards of what was now a multimillion-dollar-a-year enterprise. From the start, Kripalu was a religious order legally modeled on a Catholic monastery or convent. "Vowed" members initially received no salary. If someone needed a pair of jeans or shoes, he or she would have to request them. Later, members began to receive a stipend of $30 a month, out of which they had to pay for personal items such as shampoo. Than money was not technically a salary and did not qualify them for Social Security benefits. On the other hand, Amrit Desai, who at the founding of Kripalu had a wife and children, received financial compensation from the beginning. At the time of his resignation, he was being paid $155,000 annually, plus an additional $15,000 to $33,000 a year in royalties from the sale of his books and tapes. Although the words "financial exploitation" never crossed the lips of any Kripalu associates, the discrepancy between the remuneration of residents and the guru was obvious. When the community's cup began to run over, residents stood in line to share the bounty. "Appropriate" remuneration based on length of service was instituted. But even top-level stipends were no more than $3,400 a year. A resident security fund -- a kind of retirement plan that set aside monies to provide for lifetime residents in their old age. The vesting period was exceptionally long -- 16 years. But in the meantime, certain amenities -- such as a new building with living quarters for longtime members and easy access to automobiles -- made life more comfortable. One sticking point that remained unresolved, however, was the fact that some managers had been hired to work at Kripalu and drew salaries that seemed fairly competitive with professional positions in the outside world, while other vowed members, even though they may have been working for the community longer, received only the "appropriate" stipends. Many of the residents -- whether they have left or are staying in some relationship with Kripalu -- are now involved in a claims process that will work out a financial settlement between the center and longtime residents.

In an interview conducted in May 1994, Amrit Desai told Yoga Journal senior writer Ann Cushman that "we are in the process of dismantling the old form, which has served its purpose. We are now exploring new depths of the guru-disciple relationship." It's hard to believe that, as he spoke these words, he could have anticipated the chaos and disillusionment that would be precipitated five short months later when revelations of his sexual contact with female devotees would come to light.

Kripalu's general counsel, Daniel Bowling, is convinced that Desai's secret misdeeds did not explode into a conflict, but the conflict was there calling for integration; whatever was keeping the secret in place and unintegrated had to be exploded. Dinabandhu (Patton Sarley), past president of Kripalu and now executive director of the Omega Institute of Holistic Studies, states this same idea slightly differently: "Clearly, individuation needed to happen for all of us. You can't fool Mother Nature. Either you do it gracefully, which we attempted to do, or you do it ungracefully -- but you are going to do it."

Kripalu did it. For months, even while guest programs continued, intense catharsis was carried on in private behind closed doors, in community meetings, and in special workshops conducted by outside leaders such as spiritual teacher and author Ram Dass; Arnie Mindell, known for process-oriented psychology and his conflict-resolution work; and Elizabeth Stellas-Tippins of the Center for the Prevention of Sexual and Domestic Violence. According to Daniel Bowling, it is difficult to "put words around the impact," referring to the windstorm of emotions -- anger, frustration, disbelief, disenchantment, grief -- that were unleashed. There were a rash of marriages, births, and many, many leave-takings.

Still, the community seems to have weathered the storm. A new executive director, with both corporate management experience and a personal understanding of the spiritual journey, has been hired; the quality of programs remains high; the claims process is nearly complete; and a new organizational structure has been created: Whereas the Kripalu staff once consisted primarily of vowed members and 15 salaried employees, today 160 staff members are paid, and only 26 remain vowed. The managers are also working hard on a strategic direction for the center.

According to Daniel Bowling, what Kripalu has accomplished over the past two years "is not just Hatha Yoga on the yoga mat. We have done it under the most difficult of circumstances one can imagine, to bring about a healing in this three-way dynamic between individuals, teacher, and community." While the problem of abuse by spiritual authorities threatens to overwhelm with its universality, prevalence, and magnitude of spiritual and emotional devastation, there are indications that with vigilance, systems interventions, and support for victims, perpetrators, and their religious communities, the tiger can be tamed.

At the organizational level, codes of ethics are being written clearly stating that sexual contact by a priest, pastor, guru, or roshi with a member of his or her flock is a breach of professional boundaries, that responsibility for maintaining appropriate boundaries lies with the spiritual leader, and that violations of such boundaries are both unethical and unacceptable. Policies and procedures for handling situations -- ranging from verbal accusations to formal, written complaints -- are also being put into place. Experience has shown that without them, the process of investigating allegations gets muddled in ways that can retraumatize the victim and upset the community. At present, a variety of institutions, from the Buddhist Peace Fellowship to the General Conference of the Seventh Day Adventists, have implemented such codes, policies, and procedures on sexual abuse and/or harassment. But according to American Baptist minister Pat Liberty, "policies and procedures don't solve the problems"; what does is "shifting basic paradigms about ministry." One way to accomplish this is through education and training. Courses on sexuality, ethics, professional boundaries, and transference can help young men and women get a more realistic view of interpersonal problems and dynamics that go along with the ministerial territory.

Buddhist teacher Yvonne Rand also thinks that spiritual seekers need to be educated in how to find a teacher and what to look for if they think they may be getting into trouble. Asian teachers coming to the United States to lead Buddhist and Hindu spiritual communities are to some extent culture-bound to patriarchal systems. Rand believes that the best hope for diminishing sexual abuse in the American Buddhist communities is to educate students by speaking out, writing articles, and holding workshops on the topic.

In addition to self-help and support groups for victims, an often effective avenue for healing is litigation or mediation. Many people in both the therapy and ministry professions believe that if victims feel that their wounds are acknowledged and that some restitution -- for example, payment for therapy sessions -- is made, litigation may be unnecessary. Marie Fortune maintains that victims generally have reasonable requests: an apology, acknowledgment from the perpetrator, a letter to the congregation that indicates what final steps have been taken around the complaint. But when institutions stonewall victims, many feel that they have no other option than to bring a lawsuit. Of course, litigation is what brought the issue of clergy sexual misconduct into public awareness. Lawsuits against the Catholic Church alerted the media to the problem and resulted in large settlements for victims. Through this economic leverage, victims forced changes in institutional responses. However, Kripalu's Daniel Bowling doesn't think healing and spiritual values are upheld by bringing in lawyers to rectify the power imbalance in this setting. In fact, he says, you can destroy everything in that process. Kripalu and its longtime residents are using mediation to resolve financial claims against the center.

Another area that can help guard against abuses is pastoral self-care. According to Liberty, the issue of workaholism is critical. "Basically, the lines between clergy personal life and clergy professional life are pretty thin. Historically, the Church is a place that has rewarded workaholism and called it devotion." She adds that for clergy and their parishioners to think that the former are on call 24 hours, seven days a week, is "nonsense."

Ministers need to have a life beyond their professional calling, experts say, a place to relax and renew themselves. One essential part of that life in order to stave off temptations to violate sexual boundaries is same-sex friendships. Jungian analyst and author Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig is convinced that they are the single best antidote to ego inflation and self-deception. Friends point out our virtues as well as our ridiculous sides. Setting oneself up as a guru can preclude simple peer relations, and without solid friendships one begins to minister in a vacuum. Colleagues and friends keep us connected, honest, and in touch with reality.

Last, Fortune cautions that people who have come out of destructive family relationships often seek a haven, a safe and intimate family unit, like a spiritual community. Unfortunately, these desires might create unrealistic expectations of intimacy and an enmeshed system that is inappropriate to a faith community. Although people often refer to their spiritual community as a family, Fortune thinks they should look for a different metaphor and model. "Which doesn't mean that significant things won't happen," she says, but it all comes down to a sense of balance. "There are some things I do with my family and close friends. Other things I do with coworkers. There are still other things I do with my church. Occasionally there are situations where they blend, but I don't expect any one of those pieces of my life to meet all my needs."

Still, Liberty is convinced that "we have only seen the tip of the iceberg" with regard to abusive power by spiritual authorities; hundreds, maybe thousands, of men and women who have been wounded have not yet come forward to tell their stories. And, she adds, instances of abuse in which perpetrators are not being held appropriately accountable are still occurring. Far too many religious institutions are, she says, turning "a blind eye and a deaf ear to the reality of abuse."

The breadth of the problem and the depth of the suffering seem to require a constant vigilance from communities, spiritual seekers, and spiritual leaders alike because the problem is part and parcel of the spiritual search. As Carl Jung cautioned, we need to be aware that as we grow toward enlightenment, so too does our shadow grow. Thus, simple remedies consistently applied -- balance in one's life, deep friendships, a dedication to self-knowledge, integrity, a willingness to stand up and tell the truth, empathy, and a healthy exercise of inner authority -- all help counteract abusive behavior. For in the end we are all guardians of the gate. As Yvonne Rand reminds us, the dynamics of abuse are "in everybody's back yard. In fact, the critical thing to understand is that not only is it in our back yards, but it is in each one of us."

Anne A. Simpkinson is editor of Common Boundary magazine. The Common Boundary Organization is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to exploring the sources of meaning in human experience. They examine the relationship among matters of the heart, matters of the mind, and matters of the soul; psychology, spirituality, and creativity; and individual growth and social change.

http://www.american-buddha.com/soul.betrayal.htm

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