Willem,
your story about the guy with the temper tantrums reminds me of something. You see I really like the work of herbalist Susun Weed. Her style is great because she uses common weeds and she encourages people to touch and taste the plants and disparages little pills and shipping little bottles around the world. In short she promotes the old style wise-woman ways. Well she lives in the catskills and so I went to a four day class at her house and I don’t know if I will ever go back because she is nuts. She insults her paying guests. She throws temper tantrums several times a day. She has these apprentices (a motley looking crew who are only allowed one shower a week, and are perpetually covered in poision ivy) and they pay thousands of dollars and travel thousands of miles to come study with her and many of them end up leaving during the first week, if not the first day and I’m not sure if they get a refund. She swears and screams at them. “You’re cutting the onions too big! Now you’re cutting them too small! What are you an idiot? Are you a baby? Do you need me to hold your hand?” She claims that she enjoys this scary reputation, that it means only the serious ones stay. She claims that she is always in control. That she knows exactly what she is doing and that this is part her shamanic training part of of breaking down the ego.
I can see how that could be true. A bit like an herbalist boot camp, but actually I think she is just delusional. For one she has work study days where people come to volunteer on her farm for one day a month and half of them end up leaving early too. They didn’t come for any shamanic training. They just wanted to learn how to milk goats and make a wild salad. In my short class one mother who was there left early because Susun screamed at her for using bug repellant containing essential oils around her baby. I just can’t see how treating people this way can be good. If someone is going to scream at me I’m going to make them pay for the opportunity, rather than the other way around.
I guess my question is, has anyone else ever encountered anything like this and what do you make of it? I think of it as the guru personality. Susun is a guru. She has the skills, she has the charisma, she has the charm and the fame to keep them coming. She has this way of saying things that make you believe nothing else could be true. In between tantrums it’s like nothing ever happened. She’s kind and loving, complimentary. Unfortunately that sounds exactly like the relationship between an abuser and an abusee.