Reflection

Facing the horror.

Picture from HBO documentary The Vow Part Two

If you have ever had a life crash of some kind (which I have), and sought to recover (which I did), you will know it takes what they call “reflection”. We hear rather more about reflection than we aught these days, but it is a real thing. 

When you decide to try to climb out of the rubble of emotional, physical or financial destruction you have to take an honest look at yourself and think about some of the issues that put you in the situation where your life crashed. Some of those things cannot be fixed, some require work and others disappear completely with sunlight.

My emotional system failed because of a variety of issues, one of them was overwhelming grief at the loss of close family.  I also faced a range of life stresses, historical trauma and some beliefs I had about myself and the human condition that were untrue.  So, I had to really think about what I had to work with, what was true about myself, and what I had to leave behind.

Reflection is about looking at yourself and honestly describing what you see.  So, when we get asked by the new middle-class progressives to reflect, it does feel like they are speaking from a house of blackened mirrors. 

Ellie Dudley reported in The Australian Business Review yesterday about a Family Court matter where parents are in disagreement about the medical intervention for their child who has been diagnosed with gender dysphoria.

The barrister representing the parent opposing the medical “transition” of the child is Bell Lane, who last year wrote a landmark paper for the family law profession on the issue of the medical intervention into children diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Ms Lane urged legal professionals to become more aware of the emerging international legal changes and research on the issues.

Bernard Lane (no relation) reported on the paper and said Ms Lane urged judges to understand that “far from being settled science, the medicalised gender-affirming approach is under increasing scrutiny, with systematic reviews of the weak evidence base leading to more cautious treatment approaches in Finland, Sweden and the United Kingdom.”

Ellie Dudley’s reported last year that the family at the centre of the Family Court case were openly discussing what they will do when they remove the child’s developing reproductive capacity, by trying to turn her into a boy. The ten-year-old sibling of the girl in questions, has offered to have her eggs harvested when she is older, to donate them to her sister when she is a “man”.  From an outside perspective this all sounds insane.

Under gender identity ideology, the problem of a girl who has not been able to come to terms with growing up into a woman, is spun with a theoretical lens that reframes the problem as one where the child has an angry, unchangeable wrong sex soul, that can only be appeased by the sacrifice of her reproductive system.

I applaud Bell Lane for her push to call judges to reflect, because reflection is badly needed by the courts and in our politics as well.  There is a critical and damaging error being placed in law and policy and it is causing harm.

There is much argument on the gender critical side of politics about how we will ever recover from this. We won’t recover if we deny all the realities of the human condition, which not only include the realities of sex, but the vulnerabilities women have to oppression.

The reason for my own reflection on reflection today, is that I just watched The Vow Part Two, the second series in the important HBO documentary about the Nxnxivm cult.  The cult was headed by Keth Raniere and started as a multi-level executive self-help company. Raniere’s right-hand woman was Nancy Salzman, who was recruited by Keith Raniere because of her grasp on cognitive neuro-linguistic programming, her excellent training and teaching skills and her background in nursing. 

Right through the documentary, we see Salzman giving perky and well presented talks about personal issues like boundaries, goal setting, and justice.  In the last episode we see her reading out something from Raniere where he is reframing “abuse” and other footage where Raniere openly questions the legitimacy of the age of consent. When she is presented this this latter footage, Salzman reflects with regret at her own naivety on this one point.

In the testimony of former Nxnxivm members, we see a mix of where the neuro-linguistic programming was used to really help people, and even cure Tourette’s Syndrome, and a strange stretch and reshaping of principles where personal boundaries were deconstructed and openly shamed in people, especially women.

By far the most powerful part of the documentary, for me, was the real time breakdown or perfect acting performance of Nancy Salzman.

In the final episode we see a focus on Nancy telling the story from her perspective. At the beginning of the filming, Nancy still fully believes she was running a company that was helping people, but admits that Raniere was also using it to run a sex cult.

Originally, cult leader Kieth Raniere made Salzman believe that the company and community existed as an experiment in making the world a better place, by teaching people how to gain success and happiness by learning to reprogram their mind.

By the time the company was being used as a sex trafficking operation and weird sex cult by Raniere, Salzman had been completely broken by the very techniques she was teaching. Her own daughter had been groomed into being one of Raniere’s sex slaves and recruiter.

By the end of the documentary, we find a very tired and weary Salzman facing prison, caring for elderly parents and slowly coming to realise that her life’s work has destroyed very young and promising human beings. 

As part of her attempt to demonstrate her commitment to recovery, Salzman met with Diane Benscoter, an expert in psychological manipulation, on camera.

As Salzman protested that the curriculum she built was sound and not part of the sex cult, Benscoter said “the curriculum and the way the organisation was built was clearly to take control over people’s lives. It was designed to control people.  Now that is not what you believed I’m sure, that is not what you believe today probably”.

Salzman maintains near perfect composure as she says “I don’t know that the curriculum did it as much as Kieth did it, because there were 17,000 people unaffected and had good experiences with the curriculum… there was none of that in there”

Diane Benscoter, having dealt with many a brainwashed individual before, then says; “one of the main tactics, that is a hallmark of psychological manipulation, is to tear someone down, but then have the answer for how they can fix themselves”. Nancy, still perky, smugly retorts “that was him”.

Then Diane delivers a sentence she very clearly doesn’t want to say, telling Nancy that the psychological manipulation is “cooked into the trainings that you designed.. and he, I think, understood that”, she follows with a deep regretful sigh, that made me unenvious of her work.

You could see in the beautifully made and tragic documentary, the mirror emerge before Nancy’s face, as she began to see something that nobody would want to see. After the meeting with Diane, Nancy admits to feeling a great resistance in herself to accept what has been said.

“I hope it’s not true, it would really break my heart if it was true, because if the thing that I loved the most and I thought did the most good was really damaging people, that would be very hard to, I don’t know how I could come back from that”

With more reflection Nancy says “I was constantly doing damage control on Kieth’s sex life”. And it is at this point that we can almost see the disconnected neural pathways reconnecting, we know it wasn’t a “sex life” she was protecting but a sex cult trafficking operation, and then the uncontrollable wailing comes that is difficult to watch. Through the tears we hear Nancy admit that she “didn’t understand what was right and wrong anymore”

We can hear in the sentencing of the judge that he has quite a bit of sympathy for Nancy, but even if she is completely broken by psychological manipulation, which I believe she was, there is no way this kind of criminal negligence can go without a prison sentence.

You can look away once or twice, we have all done it with friends, family and children, but you can’t possibly make this a legal defence when you provide cover for such terrible crimes. Nancy Salzman received 42 months in prison.

As much as you can feel sorry for someone who has been obviously criminally negligent, I did feel sorry for Nancy as I watched her face herself and her choices. 

As I see brave people come forward to speak the truth about human bodies, reproductive roles and human sexuality, they come up against their own set of Nancys.  Nancy who is just doing her job, Nancy who is helping people reach their full potential, Nancy who is following the science.

Having had to have to face hard truths, I know it is not easy, but building on lies is foolish and negligent for the human endeavour, and ultimately it will end in destruction or more industrial strength lies and state coercion. You should watch the HBO documentary, The Vow Part Two and don’t be Nancy.