NHFNP,
I will be most interested to hear about how you manage to get your son back into the real world.
Some more points to note. The title, Dr Greg Baer refers to his being an eye surgeon. That's all. He is not qualified in psychology - he just read a lot about it and formed his own conclusions.
Further, Greg, and RealLove do not believe in psychotherapy, psychiatry, psychological counselling or hypnotherapy. These are all, apparently, useless and a waste of time and are all poo-pood. Only, and ONLY, RealLove will work to heal people of all the wounds of their life. These wounds are all to do with out not being loved properly in childhood and therefore all our relating in our adult lives is as a consequence of our poor childhoods. This lack of love and being able to give and receive unconditional love properly is the problem. Which only RealLove can solve - thereby any emotional problems or wounds in our lives are all to do with love. However, while they state in their terms of agreement that RealLove should not be used as a substitute for genuine mental health problems, they do actually love to work with people who are genuinely needing professional help. I assume that they are unable (which they are) to work with severe clinical conditions.
However, if you ARE or believe you are in a loving relationship and family, and are feeling happy, content, at peace etc. apparently you are being FAKE. Because, guess what? We are ALL suffering from PCSD therefore we are all just hiding this this fact and leading a life of pretending to love and be loved. I almost got sucked in. Almost. I have a very strong loving relationship with my father and it just troubled me how much they kept telling me that my relationship with and love for my father was false. That he didn't really love me. That I didn't really love him. That what was going on was that we were trying to be responsible for each other's happiness. Which is wrong. The arguments I have had trying to explain that they were wrong just wore me down over time. I do not, and will not, replace my father with a fake daddy. I have no issues and are indeed happy and content. I don't need RealLove to fix me and are insulted that they keep telling me that I am unloving and need to learn to be unconditionally loving. I can see how your son would have been worn down over time - even though he is from a loving family. They would have told him, like they told me (and still do) to 'stop believing the lies'. The lies are that your family loves you, that you love your family etc. We have to be reborn all over again, learn to do things properly (ie the RealLove way) and then we'll be allowed to go out into the big wide world and love properly. However, I suspect that there will be no end to learning how to love properly.
From what I have seen the concept of emotional wounds in need of healing and our endless journey of learning through life, are morphed into one. Therefore, in the RealLove world nothing actually heals. The learning how to be loving takes your whole lifetime because you are constantly learning. There is no end. The arguments I have had to try to explain that we do heal our emotional hurts, but our life is full of obstacles and lessons just gets dismissed as stupid.
When going to groups and hanging out with and listening to other people in RealLove your son would not only have been convinced his whole life is a lie and that he does not know what love is or looks like, but he will also have been 'LOVE BOMBED'. This is common for cults. Everyone will be so sickly over the top sweet and loving that he would have been overwhelmed by this. Lots of new friends all clamboring to make friends with him. Seeing all this seemingly outward sense of everyone in RealLove looking like they are loved up and loving and wonderful would make him doubt his own loving environment. He would look at these people who 'seem' so loving, lovable and adorable that he might think that this is 'real' 'love' when in fact it is a ploy to make RealLove look extraordinarily loving. I laugh as I see RL people finding it hard to be as loving as they once were to me, seeing as I have openly rejected it.
The 'double-bind' is used a lot, which confuses people. This is where they will have distorted what he has already experienced in his life and gradually led him to believe his whole life until finding RealLove was a complete lie. They also distort analogies and metaphors a lot too - taking one's we all know and understand, and distorting them to be something else that is more in line with RealLove than what they have believed those statements to mean. The long staring into the eyes will put anyone off of any form of critical and collective thought. Greg says that people don't take the time to really look into each others eyes and 'see' the person, the soul. And yes, that is true to a point. However, what RealLove do with the staring is what all cults do, and that is to close down our ability to think and respond to false data.
Your son will have been told over and over that he needs to surrender his fake self (the whole of his life so far) and find out who he really is, his authentic and true self. In fact, this system does nothing whatsoever to accomplish this. As you have read, the contradictions are rife in all the materials, and while they say they are helping you to find your true self, in fact they are helping you to lose who you really are. Then they, RealLove, will rebuild you into a new person. This is psychologically irresponsible and enormously damaging to people. RealLove wants to make it 'look' like they are helping you, saving you, and making you better. When in fact they are not doing this at all. A true life counsellor or mental health therapist will take things from where you are, conserve the real you and build on it, while losing the false and healing the wounds. By pulling you apart and stripping you away to nothing they keep telling you that this is for your benefit, it is loving you although you can't see it. That if you stop then you will not heal and will just go back to your miserable life and never find unconditional love. So people keep going along with it not realising they are being stripped apart, and will then be rebuilt. Every so often there will be a little bit of improvement thrown in, just to make people believe that this RealLove stuff is really working! To keep the faith (and to keep a customer). This is deep psychology work and in the professional sector none of what happens in RealLove would ever be allowed to happen.
Your son will have been told over and over that you don't really love him. That you are only loving him out of duty - because you are a parent. You are only loving him by trying to be responsible for his happiness etc... This is something else so incredibly distorted and to watch out for. We all know that no one is responsible for our own inner happiness - only we alone can do that. However, that does not mean we cannot care for people, show kindness, compassion, love, support, encouragement, praise etc.. The difficult thing is that this is taken to the extreme so that any act of kindness is taken wrongly as people trying to interfere with trying to make them happy. Everything. They will keep saying 'You are not responsible for my happiness'. So if you are just being you, doing something naturally it will be taken out of context and perceived as you trying to make them happy against their will and because you feel it is your duty or obligation or responsibility. RealLove has distorted this so much that if you are not in RealLove then every action or word spoken is taken incorrectly - we are therefore not being genuine at all and are only doing what we do or say out of obligation to try to get them to love us more. In fact, it is quite unloving in many respects when they fail to do kind or caring acts in ways that they used to, stating that 'this is not my responsibility' 'it is not my responsibility to make you/them happy'. This is saying that being kind, caring, compassionate etc. is wrong!! Everything has been so distorted and yet no one can see it. The one's with the problem are the one's not doing RealLove.
Lastly, when they have a daddy/mummy that they phone when they are thinking bad stuff or just had an argument or a disagreement with an outsider etc. they will sound off to their daddy about it. The daddy will love them and not tell them off about it, not correct them or help them to see both sides of the story. Instead the daddy will listen (without judging them, which is good) and will then tell them that they are still lovable, that they are so loved, that they are adorable, that they are enough, they are still wonderful etc.. They might then go to the secret page on facebook and share their issue on this public forum and in so doing will get dozens of people love-bombing them back with 'still lovable' 'You're adorable' 'still wonderful' 'Truth > Seen > Accepted > Loved'. Not messages to help them truly work through what happened at all (that is moderated and removed). Only these expressions. This will, apparently, make the person 'feel loved and accepted'. This is helping to feel loved properly, to accept love in. Empty words and expressions from a whole load of people you've never met. So between the call and being told you are loved, and social media messages telling you you are still loved the person learns nothing. This is sort of like a 'confession booth'. Just tell your bad stuff, it gets accepted and that's it - it goes away. And this is called being loved. The non-RealLove way would be to talk it through and come to some clarity - learn where you went wrong, learn about the other persons reactions etc etc etc. and take it from there. A life lesson from an interaction or situation. Instead it just creates a bigger them-and-us divide (common to cults) and promotes bad relating with outsiders (where they are just seen and accepted and loved by RL people, but don't learn anything) as opposed to working though things with people in the room with you, who know you very well and want to help you work through stuff, learn and be empowered to be a better soul. All this RealLove philosophy is total madness.
I am in the UK, I am not sure where you are, but I would love to know how you get your son out of this crazy organisation. I hope RealLove comes to an end soon, and all those people sucked into it are released to live their lives properly and find true and genuine love in their life. My goal now is to start a support group/s to help people who have left a cult organisation understand the experience, heal, and learn to become whole again. This is both organisations like this one as well as well know religious cults like the JW's and LDS etc..
Good luck - let us know how you go.
I will be most interested to hear about how you manage to get your son back into the real world.
Some more points to note. The title, Dr Greg Baer refers to his being an eye surgeon. That's all. He is not qualified in psychology - he just read a lot about it and formed his own conclusions.
Further, Greg, and RealLove do not believe in psychotherapy, psychiatry, psychological counselling or hypnotherapy. These are all, apparently, useless and a waste of time and are all poo-pood. Only, and ONLY, RealLove will work to heal people of all the wounds of their life. These wounds are all to do with out not being loved properly in childhood and therefore all our relating in our adult lives is as a consequence of our poor childhoods. This lack of love and being able to give and receive unconditional love properly is the problem. Which only RealLove can solve - thereby any emotional problems or wounds in our lives are all to do with love. However, while they state in their terms of agreement that RealLove should not be used as a substitute for genuine mental health problems, they do actually love to work with people who are genuinely needing professional help. I assume that they are unable (which they are) to work with severe clinical conditions.
However, if you ARE or believe you are in a loving relationship and family, and are feeling happy, content, at peace etc. apparently you are being FAKE. Because, guess what? We are ALL suffering from PCSD therefore we are all just hiding this this fact and leading a life of pretending to love and be loved. I almost got sucked in. Almost. I have a very strong loving relationship with my father and it just troubled me how much they kept telling me that my relationship with and love for my father was false. That he didn't really love me. That I didn't really love him. That what was going on was that we were trying to be responsible for each other's happiness. Which is wrong. The arguments I have had trying to explain that they were wrong just wore me down over time. I do not, and will not, replace my father with a fake daddy. I have no issues and are indeed happy and content. I don't need RealLove to fix me and are insulted that they keep telling me that I am unloving and need to learn to be unconditionally loving. I can see how your son would have been worn down over time - even though he is from a loving family. They would have told him, like they told me (and still do) to 'stop believing the lies'. The lies are that your family loves you, that you love your family etc. We have to be reborn all over again, learn to do things properly (ie the RealLove way) and then we'll be allowed to go out into the big wide world and love properly. However, I suspect that there will be no end to learning how to love properly.
From what I have seen the concept of emotional wounds in need of healing and our endless journey of learning through life, are morphed into one. Therefore, in the RealLove world nothing actually heals. The learning how to be loving takes your whole lifetime because you are constantly learning. There is no end. The arguments I have had to try to explain that we do heal our emotional hurts, but our life is full of obstacles and lessons just gets dismissed as stupid.
When going to groups and hanging out with and listening to other people in RealLove your son would not only have been convinced his whole life is a lie and that he does not know what love is or looks like, but he will also have been 'LOVE BOMBED'. This is common for cults. Everyone will be so sickly over the top sweet and loving that he would have been overwhelmed by this. Lots of new friends all clamboring to make friends with him. Seeing all this seemingly outward sense of everyone in RealLove looking like they are loved up and loving and wonderful would make him doubt his own loving environment. He would look at these people who 'seem' so loving, lovable and adorable that he might think that this is 'real' 'love' when in fact it is a ploy to make RealLove look extraordinarily loving. I laugh as I see RL people finding it hard to be as loving as they once were to me, seeing as I have openly rejected it.
The 'double-bind' is used a lot, which confuses people. This is where they will have distorted what he has already experienced in his life and gradually led him to believe his whole life until finding RealLove was a complete lie. They also distort analogies and metaphors a lot too - taking one's we all know and understand, and distorting them to be something else that is more in line with RealLove than what they have believed those statements to mean. The long staring into the eyes will put anyone off of any form of critical and collective thought. Greg says that people don't take the time to really look into each others eyes and 'see' the person, the soul. And yes, that is true to a point. However, what RealLove do with the staring is what all cults do, and that is to close down our ability to think and respond to false data.
Your son will have been told over and over that he needs to surrender his fake self (the whole of his life so far) and find out who he really is, his authentic and true self. In fact, this system does nothing whatsoever to accomplish this. As you have read, the contradictions are rife in all the materials, and while they say they are helping you to find your true self, in fact they are helping you to lose who you really are. Then they, RealLove, will rebuild you into a new person. This is psychologically irresponsible and enormously damaging to people. RealLove wants to make it 'look' like they are helping you, saving you, and making you better. When in fact they are not doing this at all. A true life counsellor or mental health therapist will take things from where you are, conserve the real you and build on it, while losing the false and healing the wounds. By pulling you apart and stripping you away to nothing they keep telling you that this is for your benefit, it is loving you although you can't see it. That if you stop then you will not heal and will just go back to your miserable life and never find unconditional love. So people keep going along with it not realising they are being stripped apart, and will then be rebuilt. Every so often there will be a little bit of improvement thrown in, just to make people believe that this RealLove stuff is really working! To keep the faith (and to keep a customer). This is deep psychology work and in the professional sector none of what happens in RealLove would ever be allowed to happen.
Your son will have been told over and over that you don't really love him. That you are only loving him out of duty - because you are a parent. You are only loving him by trying to be responsible for his happiness etc... This is something else so incredibly distorted and to watch out for. We all know that no one is responsible for our own inner happiness - only we alone can do that. However, that does not mean we cannot care for people, show kindness, compassion, love, support, encouragement, praise etc.. The difficult thing is that this is taken to the extreme so that any act of kindness is taken wrongly as people trying to interfere with trying to make them happy. Everything. They will keep saying 'You are not responsible for my happiness'. So if you are just being you, doing something naturally it will be taken out of context and perceived as you trying to make them happy against their will and because you feel it is your duty or obligation or responsibility. RealLove has distorted this so much that if you are not in RealLove then every action or word spoken is taken incorrectly - we are therefore not being genuine at all and are only doing what we do or say out of obligation to try to get them to love us more. In fact, it is quite unloving in many respects when they fail to do kind or caring acts in ways that they used to, stating that 'this is not my responsibility' 'it is not my responsibility to make you/them happy'. This is saying that being kind, caring, compassionate etc. is wrong!! Everything has been so distorted and yet no one can see it. The one's with the problem are the one's not doing RealLove.
Lastly, when they have a daddy/mummy that they phone when they are thinking bad stuff or just had an argument or a disagreement with an outsider etc. they will sound off to their daddy about it. The daddy will love them and not tell them off about it, not correct them or help them to see both sides of the story. Instead the daddy will listen (without judging them, which is good) and will then tell them that they are still lovable, that they are so loved, that they are adorable, that they are enough, they are still wonderful etc.. They might then go to the secret page on facebook and share their issue on this public forum and in so doing will get dozens of people love-bombing them back with 'still lovable' 'You're adorable' 'still wonderful' 'Truth > Seen > Accepted > Loved'. Not messages to help them truly work through what happened at all (that is moderated and removed). Only these expressions. This will, apparently, make the person 'feel loved and accepted'. This is helping to feel loved properly, to accept love in. Empty words and expressions from a whole load of people you've never met. So between the call and being told you are loved, and social media messages telling you you are still loved the person learns nothing. This is sort of like a 'confession booth'. Just tell your bad stuff, it gets accepted and that's it - it goes away. And this is called being loved. The non-RealLove way would be to talk it through and come to some clarity - learn where you went wrong, learn about the other persons reactions etc etc etc. and take it from there. A life lesson from an interaction or situation. Instead it just creates a bigger them-and-us divide (common to cults) and promotes bad relating with outsiders (where they are just seen and accepted and loved by RL people, but don't learn anything) as opposed to working though things with people in the room with you, who know you very well and want to help you work through stuff, learn and be empowered to be a better soul. All this RealLove philosophy is total madness.
I am in the UK, I am not sure where you are, but I would love to know how you get your son out of this crazy organisation. I hope RealLove comes to an end soon, and all those people sucked into it are released to live their lives properly and find true and genuine love in their life. My goal now is to start a support group/s to help people who have left a cult organisation understand the experience, heal, and learn to become whole again. This is both organisations like this one as well as well know religious cults like the JW's and LDS etc..
Good luck - let us know how you go.