New PTSD studies: TM as a "black box" - what's inside?

Recent studies claiming that Transcendental Meditation is effective in treating PTSD, and that it provides other benefits, treat TM as a “black box.” As with many similar past studies, researchers fail to consider that this method of meditation instruction contains several hours of other information, which creates a context of expectation of life improvement, a structure or habit which will improve life, and an authority who provides the assurance that TM will unfailingly produce those changes. These inadequacies in the design of these studies would be obvious, if all aspects of instruction in the TM program that have never been opened for examination by the TM teaching organization were properly studied and controlled for by independent researchers.

Another research study, this time on using TM as a method of treating PTSD, has just been published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress. The study, “A Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial of Transcendental Meditation as Treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Veterans,” purports to show that “Veterans with PTSD who practiced the Transcendental Meditation technique showed significant reductions in PTSD symptom severity.” A widely circulated press release issued by Maharishi International University announced this study, headlined with the “Transcendental Meditation effective in reducing PTSD, sleep problems, depression symptoms” claim. It includes the same sort of ubiquitous bar chart that’s been seen in TM promotional efforts since at least the mid-1970’s.

It should be noted that while the data analysis performed in this study showed significant positive changes with respect to PTSD, insomnia, depression and anxiety, there were no significant changes on the measures of anger and quality of life, the last being one of TM’s traditional selling points. More notable is the way in which this study, as with many others performed with the participation of the Maharishi International University (MIU) research faculty, relies on a vague if not inappropriately inaccurate description of Transcendental Meditation, as if it were solely a method practiced inside the mind and contained no other significant aspects, doctrine or belief that might in some way affect behavior which would then produce these results, among some people, for some limited period of time. 

Boston-Area Cult Recovery Group Starts Jan. 26, 2013

I want to share with our readers this email that I recently received from the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA):

"ICSA will soon begin two-hour meetings in the Boston area.  The meetings will take place at MeadowHaven, a residential facility for former group members that is located about 25 miles south of Boston.  The meetings will be directed by MeadowHaven's founders, Robert Pardon and Judy Pardon.  The meetings will be educational yet supportive.  The plan is to explore a particular topic, e.g., resolving trauma, recovering from an aberrational Christian group, for 8 meetings, and then to explore another topic.  Former members of any high-control or cultic group are welcome.  Through these meetings, participants can acquire conceptual tools to help them understand troubling issues, get to know others wrestling with similar problems, improve communication skills, and facilitate healing.  An introductory meeting will take place at MeadowHaven on January 26, 2013 (Saturday) from 9:00 A.M. to 11:00 A.M.  (URL for directions:  http://www.meadowhaven.org/place.html).  At this meeting, participants can discuss possible topic areas that the first series of meetings can cover and decide on dates and times for subsequent meetings.

Although this first group is designed for former group members, ICSA also hopes to provide supportive groups for family members in the Boston area, if there is sufficient demand.  If you are interested in attending the former member group or in starting a family group, please e-mail ICSA at: mail@icsamail.com.

Please tell others who might be interested in these meetings, especially if you think they are not on our mailing list."

Selling Sizzle (not Steak) : Transcendental Meditation, David Lynch and Pandits

This “Africa for Norway” video exemplifies how TM’s fundraising sells feel-good sizzle, without evaluating the steak :

Yes, the video spoofs the successful business model of fundraising charities that do not provide substance. 

(To read more about this creative team highlighting racism and charity abuse, click here.)

The David Lynch Foundation is sponsoring (yet another) feel-good benefit gala to bring Transcendental Meditation to veterans with PTSD and at-risk youth.

The merit of the steak behind the DLF’s sizzle, Transcendental Meditation, has not been  properly evaluated, and in this case may even be dangerous for the trauma victims they claim to help. TM is a dissociative meditation.  TM's numbing dissociative meditation may cause further long-term harm to the  targeted PTSD survivors and at-risk youth that David Lynch's Foundation claims to help.

The International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation studies the very real phenomenon of dissociation related to trauma and PTSD. More can be found about dissociation and trauma in other psychology and public health journals. The Transcendental Meditation Organization breaches ethics by teaching trance-induction dissociative practices to this vulnerable population.

Oxford University research scientist Kathleen Taylor, author of 2004 Brainwashing; The Science of Thought Control, writes that soldiers with PTSD are especially vulnerable to suggestion. Experts on brainwashing, the late Margaret Singer and still-living Robert Jay Lifton conducted their first brainwashing research on military PTSD survivors, Korean War POWs. 

Maharishi's promised “transcendental bliss” actually triggers dissociation in many practitioners. Anyone who has been around the TM Movement knows the “bliss ninnies” or “space cadets”, as we once called the walking zombie-like members of our beloved "TM Family" cult. 

TMFree's Sudarsha wrote in a private email : “If politicians advocate something, no one believes them. If your parents advocated something, you couldn't get far enough away. If the minster/priest/rabbi/imam advocates something, everyone is suspicious ... but if a celebrity advocates something, everyone immediately believes it's real, good, desirable, necessary, right and certainly something one needs to get as quickly as possible.

Not sure why this is so, but, at least for those who might be seen as prone to addiction (very broadly, of course), this seems to be the case, so a fund-raiser by celebrities ... well, that's a no-brainer! Surely celebrities can and must be trusted!”  Thanks, Sud'!


Meanwhile, another insider sizzle email provides updates on Vedic City's growing pandit compound. From Maharishi's invented Global Country of World Peace, we offer excerpts :

To our dear Movement family,

The Vedic Pandits are finally coming—not just the original 556 but a total of 600!

We know you’ve been waiting for some time to receive this update. So we are delighted to finally have some concrete news to give you.

With the addition of this group of Pandits, we will achieve a stable Super Radiance group of 2,000 Yogic Flyers to create Invincibility for America, a goal we have all worked towards for 30 years.

Of course, they require more money to keep the sizzle popping :

What more is needed?

We still need $1,000 per Pandit or an additional $600,000 total for airfare and other associated costs to bring all of the Pandits here. More than ever, your contributions are crucial. Please donate now!

Donation details

Donations can be made online at www.GlobalCountryofWorldPeace.org or by check payable to Global Country of World Peace, 1900 Capital Blvd, Maharishi Vedic City, IA 52556.

We would be happy to speak with you about this in more detail. Please contact us directly or through Eloise Raymond at eraymond@globalpeaceinitiative.org or 641-470-7027.

The "Movement Family" fundraising letter closes with TM's Raja Royalty :

Warmest wishes,

Jai Guru Dev,

Raja John Hagelin

Raja Harris

Raja Wynne

Raja Bob LoPinto

Ramani Ayer

We at TMFree encourage everyone to learn about the steak behind any tantalizing sizzle. Don’t just donate or buy based upon feel-good advertising. Don’t fall for celebrity - studded good intentions.

Evaluate the merit of any campaign, the TM-DLF organization, politics, the sleek new car, or the fabulous online dating profile. Sizzle usually lacks ethics. Do your homework and don’t be duped!

Wishing everyone a Happy Thanksgiving. Thankful for independent thought, lifelong learning, the loss of naiveté and so much more.

Jai to Freedom, to free thought and honest discourse,

The TM-Free Blog Moderators

Recovering from Transcendental Meditation, part 2012

For many, recovering from TM takes a lifetime.  So if you're still recovering after many decades, don't lose hope, and don't berate yourself.  It's normal.

I hope that some day there will be better techniques available to help people recover more quickly.  Right now, the best advice is to learn about mind control.  Other things that help are:  conversations with other former members, physical exercise, practicing real-life skills that you lost (or never learned if you were raised in a cult), psychotherapy, residential recovery centers, continued reading about destructive cults.  One exit counsellor suggested writing down every single thing you remember from your time in the destructive cult.

Gina (a co-contributor to this blog - see panel on the right) published a post on this blog, ("Psychotherapy with Former Cult Members" posted September 2, 2011;  http://tmfree.blogspot.com/2011/09/psychotherapy-with-former-cult-members.html), in which she informed the readers of a new Continuing Education Units course for psychotherapists.  I was moved to send the following e-mail to the teacher of this course, as follows:

From:  Laurie ------    

Date:  June 14, 2012 

To:  Patrick O'Reilly  

Subject:  Recovery for former destructive cult members

Dear Dr. O'Reilly:  

I am a friend of Gina Catena's, and like her, I am in recovery from the Transcendental Meditation (TM) organization. 

She showed me your excellent internet article on how therapists can help former cult members by encouraging them to learn about mind control.  I am grateful that you are putting the information about mind control and post-cult syndrome (which can masquerade as other mental health conditions) out there, and are offering a CEU course.

Since the psychological community is still at the beginning stages of learning how to help former destructive cult members, and since you are a leader in educating therapists on how to help cult victims, I hope it will be helpful for you if I share three additional steps that I had to go through in order to help me recover from my cult.

1.  I needed to learn information about my particular group - the specific lies that my particular group taught which kept me a believer.  Even though I already understood mind control, I still was a believer because of the 600 research studies I had been taught about, which proported to prove how marvelous TM was for every aspect of every person's life.  I had to read anti-TM websites to discover that TM experiments were usually biasedly designed and/or biasedly conducted in order to produce only positive results.  Also, I learned that some research had shown that TM sometimes produces unimpressive or harmful results, but that the TM organization had kept that information from us.

2.  I needed to talk to other former TMers who had been at my level of involvement in TM.  Even though I had spent over 20 years telling my TM experiences to sympathetic friends, therapists, and former TMers who had been at lower levels of TM involvement than I, TM memories continued to flood my mind.  However, when I finally found peers, and told them my memories, the memories finally stopped.  

3.  I have been in psychotherapy for many years.  By working on family-of-origin issues, TM has less and less hold over me.  

If these additional steps were necessary for me, then I assume there must be others out there who also need more than just education about mind control in order to recover from their destructive cult.

I hope this information is helpful to you.  Please feel free to contact me if I can be of assistance to you.

Please keep up the good work!  Thank you for what you are doing! 

Sincerely,

Laurie --------" 

I have been out of TM for 31 years, and I am still recovering.  As Sudarsha, a co-moderator for this site, has said, "You have to claw yourself out of the TM mindset, ('Maheshism') inch by inch."  For instance, it was only last month that I realized that part of the reason I eat a lot of nuts on my morning cereal is because Mahesh said that nuts were very good for you.

A problem I still have 31 years after leaving TM is my difficulty in learning new skills from books.  Before I got into TM, I had taught myself guitar, typing, shorthand and crocheting from books. But since leaving TM, I find it excruciatingly hard to learn new things from books, , like how to use a  computer or follow a recipe.  I think this is because when I try to learn something new, it activates the feelings I had when I was learning to "fly:"  "If you're don't 'fly' twice a day, you're wasting your life."

What stratagems have been helpful in your recovery from TM-brain?  In what areas are you still recovering?

re: Laurie's Reflections on Recent TM Publicity

Morris said, in response to Laurie's recent post:

• on TM-Free Blog: Reflections on Recent Transcendental Meditation Publicity 19 hours ago
  I'm not as familiar with the internal dynamics of the TMO as some others, and I have no doubt that much of what is said is true. But most of the things being discussed happened many years ago, and Maharishi is no longer here. I don't see what the harm is in seeing if learning TM actually can help kids with ADHD learn better without drugs, or help veterans who have suffered traumatic experiences in a war get over their fears and lead productive lives again. I agree that the quote mentioned is pretty much over the top, but so what? Reading some (not all) of these posts, it seems that some of the people making them want TM to be of no use at all, even in these cases, because if it is, it would invalidate their opinion of the TMO and MMY (which it wouldn't, in my opinion).
  Morris

I think you have raised an interesting point of pertinence to which I wanted to respond. I have no doubt that there are highly divided ideas, opinions, feelings and emotional responses when it comes to TM, the TMO and the on-going battle between those who would continue to propagate the faith (so to speak) and those who would happily see its backside burn in the fires of gehenna. There are always extremes. Avoiding both, I think, is about the best we can hope for.