This blog post was polished by ChatGPT.
To read my original version of this blog with my raw English, click HERE
Self-help guru Wayne W. Dyer dies at 75
Reflections on the Death of Wayne W. Dyer
“He was born Wayne Walter Dyer in Detroit and grew up in a series of foster care homes. His father was an alcoholic who left the family when Dyer was 3.”
— Excerpt from the article reporting his death
I didn’t know much about Wayne Dyer’s childhood, but I’m not surprised to learn he was abandoned as a young child. Like so many others, he escaped his pain through the only avenue that seemed socially acceptable: intellect. With it, he recycled and repackaged the same seductive lies and disconnected half-truths that have been passed down for generations. These “feel-good” messages helped him numb his own unresolved childhood trauma — and they helped millions of others stay numb in their emotional prisons, too.
His books offered survival, but not freedom.
I know this all too well, because for years I was also distracted from feeling my childhood pain through his books — and Deepak Chopra’s too. I remember going to hear them speak in the 1990s when they came to Phoenix, Arizona. I would leave those events feeling high, like I’d taken a spiritual drug. Their speeches were intoxicating — smooth, uplifting, and full of promises. But those promises were illusions. They were not paths to liberation, but polished bandaids for gaping emotional wounds.
And I fell for them.
I now see that I wasted so many years — with these self-help charlatans, and with the 12-step programs that only helped me survive a little longer in my emotional prison. I don’t say this lightly, and I know “charlatan” might sound harsh. But it fits. These men were cult leaders in disguise, cloaked in spiritual robes, keeping millions distracted and emotionally blind while calling it “healing.”
They sold illusion as love. And many of us bought it.
As I wrote in A Dance to Freedom, on pages 126–127:
“Ultimately, I realized that self-help books and 12-step programs offer a false hope at best. I’m convinced that people who put their faith in these types of things — or in psychologists, psychiatrists, or any cult leader for that matter — are avoiding the real causes of their problems and are just masking their symptoms instead. The seductiveness of the quick fixes offered by traditional treatments and therapies is very powerful, and even if they don’t work, they offer at least temporary relief from the fear and pain of our abused younger selves.”
“In the best of cases, groups like Al-Anon can momentarily help people cope with unhealthy situations and survive another day inside their emotional prisons, but they can’t resolve people’s problems. Everyone I encountered in Al-Anon was just reenacting his or her childhood drama like everyone else. The unhealthy, cult-like devotion they invested in the group was actually getting in the way of their true happiness because the group was just filling in for their parents and keeping them blind to the truth.”
Alice Miller expressed it so clearly:
“Even smart people become stuck in confusion for years if the ‘healers’ demand from them the same as the parents did from the child: to stay blind, to forgive, to make amends, not to make troubles. The fear of the parents, stored up in the body, can make a person obedient and sick forever.”
She continues:
“It is a great mistake to imagine that one can resolve traumas in a symbolic fashion. If that were possible, poets, painters, and other artists would be able to resolve their pain through creativity. This is not the case… Creativity helps us channel the pain of trauma into symbolic acts; it doesn’t help us resolve it.”
— The Drama of the Gifted Child
If symbolic revenge truly worked, dictators and war criminals would be healed by their “art.” But as long as they deceive themselves about who really deserves their hatred — and refuse to feel that pain in the context of their own childhood — their thirst for destruction will remain insatiable.
This exchange between Borut Petrovic Jesenovec and Alice Miller comes to mind:
Borut: Human blindness to abuse can be astonishing. Even when confronted with their own obvious abuse, people still believe in the myth of being loved, and keep abusing their children. How would you most effectively "open their eyes" to what they are doing? Is this possible at all?
Alice Miller: I can’t open the eyes of others; they will quickly close them again, and they don’t want to see – or they are afraid to see – the truth because they expect to be punished by their parents or by God who represents them. I can only open my own eyes and say what I am seeing. And sometimes people feel encouraged to open one eye or even both. They are then surprised that they were not punished, that they feel even relief since they have stopped betraying themselves.”
— From “How to Combat Denial” (2005 interview)
Social Media Reflections
After posting this blog in 2015, a few conversations on Facebook stood out:
Monica commented:
“I would like to think Wayne was different from the Deepak and Osho types… that he was genuine and believed what he ‘prescribed.’ Maybe it wasn’t true healing, but at least they were ‘aspirins’ — unlike money machines like Osho, Tony Robbins, and Deepak who exploit the desperate.”
My reply:
They used to be my favorite charlatans! I loved listening to them. Their words were my medication for many years. But in the end, they were all selling illusions — just packaged differently. Maybe you liked Wayne’s packaging more.
Monica:
“If he sold it knowing they were illusions, that’s charlatanism — and it’s unforgivable.”
Me:
Even if he believed his own seductive lies, they were still illusions. Believing in your own delusions doesn’t make them true. It just makes you a more convincing fraud.
Another friend, Donald Warner Parker, shared a quote from my book:
“Resolving childhood repression is the vaccine against the charlatans of the world who exploit those who are still emotionally blinded by the unresolved, repressed emotions of the children they once were.”
— A Dance to Freedom, page 172
To which I replied:
Yes, Donald. That’s exactly it. Resolving our childhood repression is the only vaccine against the seductive lies of the world’s spiritual salesmen. If I hadn’t done the deep emotional work of facing my pain, I would never have survived the orchestrated mob attack at my last job — a methodical smear campaign meant to destroy me. I was likely the first person they couldn’t crush, because I had already freed myself.
If you found this post insightful, I also recommend reading:
👉 Gurus and Cult Leaders: How They Function
No comments:
Post a Comment