Psychedelics Culture Needs Ethical Healers and Facilitators. Here’s How To Be One.

Many people in the psychedelics space work as healers and are motivated by a desire to help people. I think you read me because you are committed to critical thinking and believe in the principle of “do no harm.”

Healers can harm. The relationship between healer and client is one of great power and should come with great responsibility — this is why healers for millennia took the Hippocratic Oath, supposedly invented by Hippocrates in Athens in the fifth century BC. It goes:

“I swear by Apollo, Asclepius, Hygieia, Panacea, and all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will carry out, according to my ability and judgment, this oath…I will use those dietary regimens which will benefit my patients according to my greatest ability and judgment, and I will do no harm or injustice to them.”

Healers can harm others unintentionally, even when they have the best intentions in the world. All humans are prone to error, and mind healers are perhaps especially so. If we accept this and work from this starting point, we may limit the harm we unintentionally inflict on others.

The Story of Anne Craig

This is the story of someone who called themselves a healer, but who actually caused tremendous harm in the lives of her clients because she had misplaced faith in her convictions.

It’s the story of Anne Craig, which I learned about from a new podcast called Dangerous Memories.  Anne is an Irish lady who advertises herself as a therapist, although she isn’t a licensed psychotherapist, and what she practices is very different from traditional psychotherapy.

She’d previously been a human relations trainer for a couple of British companies (there are a lot of occult and New Age beliefs lurking in the HR department, as I wrote about here). She then left and started working as a freelance personal development coach, “therapist,” and spiritual healer.

She wasn’t a member of any professional association, nor did she have any professional therapist training, but she claimed to have learned her methods from another “healer” named Russell Jenkins, who practiced something called “esoteric healing” at the Quiet Mind Centre in Portsmouth.

“Esoteric healing” is a phrase first used by the Theosophist Alice Bailey and can refer to a host of different spiritual practices for healing “the whole person” via energy healing, spirit guidance, dream interpretation, auras, channeling, recovering repressed memories or past lives, and so on.

Anne started building a client list of young, wealthy, posh English women, several of whom studied at a painting school in Florence, Italy.

READ: This MDMA Zoom Therapist Is Not Who He Claims to Be 

Dangerous Memories focuses on the story of one client, Fipsy, who heard about Anne through another student in the painting course and decided to schedule a time to see her because she was struggling with her sexuality.

It was clear from the start that Anne was not a traditional psychotherapist. She claimed to be in touch with spirits, who would tell her what she and the client should focus on in each session. She also worked a lot with clients’ dreams, and her own dreams about the clients.

Anne and Fipsy would sit for hours in Anne’s office, drinking chamomile tea, as Fipsy poured out her soul to this older, maternal-like woman listening to her with limpid eyes and a deep sympathetic gaze.

Fipsy finally summoned the courage to talk about her attraction to other women. And she asked Anne directly, “Do you think I’m gay?”

Fipsy later realized that this was a fatal moment because it was the moment she gave Anne the power to tell her who she was.

That’s the hook that power-hungry mind-healers use to gain control over other people’s minds. They need you to believe this: The healer knows me better than I know myself. Only they hold the key to my true identity and my healing and future happiness. I need to suspend my doubts and trust in them completely.

Once you have accepted that, you have handed over the code of your identity to another person. And that person might very well be the sort that gets off on power. Because that is the ultimate power — the power to control another person’s identity and reality. Once they’ve handed over control of their inner code, you can enslave a person, turn them into a zombie, make them do whatever you want — even, in extremis, kill people.

A professional therapist would (hopefully) never answer a client’s direct questions about their identity or the meaning of their life with a direct yes or no answer. That would be an overstepping of professional boundaries, an instance of undue influence. In practice, of course, therapists and healers often do overstep these boundaries and tell clients what they should think or do.

That’s what Anne did as well. She told Fipsy (to paraphrase): You’re not gay, you’re the victim of family neglect and abuse.

Anne led Fipsy back through generations of her upper-class family, through all the (imagined) ancestral sins that were now supposedly weighing Fipsy down. And she focused on Fipsy’s mother, who she insisted was a cruel and neglectful parent (she wasn’t).

Anne insisted that to get to the root of Fipsy’s problems, they needed to go deeper and deeper. All the signs and the spirits suggested Fipsy had repressed memories from her childhood. Didn’t she remember them? Couldn’t she try to piece back together the shattered pieces of her past?

Fipsy tried and tried. She really wanted Anne’s approval. Eventually, Anne simply told her (again, to paraphrase): ‘You are the victim of terrible sexual abuse at the hands of your mother,’ and encouraged her to stop seeing her family.

She told similar stories to her other young, posh, female English clients, with names like Hue and Tori, who were seeing Anne without knowing each other and following her into a similar, dark labyrinth.  

Anne Craig, left, and two of her victims – Laura Hue-Williams inset, and Victoria Cayzer

Some of the girls realized it was bullshit and got out before it was too late. Fipsy got out because she realized she was gay and Anne wasn’t helping her accept that at all, she was just trying to turn Fipsy against her loving parents.

But others like Hue and Tori got stuck in the labyrinth for years. They became completely isolated in a dark, illegitimate reality of abuse, which they believed only Anne could lead them out of.  

To emerge into the light, they needed to “do the work,” including long sessions of therapy and dream analysis and healing, while also “putting the pieces together” to help Anne uncover what she said was a much bigger conspiracy of child abuse by the English upper classes.

You might think it’s bizarre that people could come to believe a false memory implanted by someone else, but there is now a lot of evidence that this can happen, especially when you’re isolated and confused, under the control and influence of someone else, and being pressured to come to a particular conclusion.

Anne’s web unraveled after several years when the parents of these girls tried to track them down and re-establish contact. They learned about Anne and tried to sue her. But the families discovered it is not easy to sue a personal development coach for negligence — their children were now adults, and they could “freely” decide whether they saw a healer and whether to see their families or not.

Nonetheless, there was a court case (Annie denied and continues to deny any wrong-doing), the police started investigating Anne, and journalists also started looking into the case, including Mick Brown from the Telegraph. Anne actually reached out to Mick to tell her side of the story and they sat down for hours together. She was genuinely convinced she was a wronged woman.

It’s really interesting because one is never quite sure what motivates these kinds of abusive healers, cult leaders, or conspiracy theorists who ruin other people’s lives with baseless lies. 

Is it money, sex, or the intoxicating sense of power that comes from having complete control over a person’s identity and reality? It can often be one or all of these things. But they can also really believe they are doing the right thing and healing their clients.

Dangerous Convictions

The presenter of Dangerous Memories, Grace Hughes-Hallet, says:

“You don’t have to have a malevolent intent to damage someone. You can have the best intentions in the world, but delving into people’s problems, fears and traumas without the proper qualifications can do serious harm. Just like it wouldn’t be safe for a well-intended but untrained doctor to perform heart surgery.”

Mick Brown, the Telegraph journalist who interviewed Anne at length, tells Grace:

“I would challenge her and say this doesn’t sound like therapy, you don’t have the qualifications. Her answer would be ‘I’ve been to counsellors myself. And they never get to the root of the problem.’ She really did believe she was the only person qualified who could get to the root of the problem. She told me: ‘I’m like a dog with a bone at times. If I sense with the person we haven’t got what we need, I’m not going to let them person walk out of the room, I’m going to stay with them until we know ‘yes we’ve got it’. I just instinctively know when the person’s got something.’

Mick says: “That’s terrifying, really. She was a woman on a mission. She had a conviction. And convictions are very dangerous things.”

Anne grew up in Ireland, and seemed to have a conviction that the English upper classes were corrupt and abusive. She was both drawn to that world – all of her clients were posh young English women – and deeply resentful of it. She seemed to be taking her revenge on the English upper classes, one by one, by turning its daughters against them and becoming a poisonous substitute-mother-witch.

She had what Grace Hughes-Hallet describes as a “belief in herself without any real credentials or training or qualifications and an entitlement to interpret or control other people based on delusion and an omnipotent kind of righteousness.”

READ: Psychedelic Group Therapy Is More Powerful Than One-on-One Sessions

Finally, after several years of isolation and pain, Tori and Hue found each other, connected the dots, and realized Anne had been poisoning their minds. They’re out of the web now, but their full recovery will take a long time. Are others still in the web? We don’t know. Anne has never faced any professional or legal consequences for her actions because she is not part of any professional association. She swims like a shark in the uncharted waters of Wellness.

Grace Hughes-Hallet concludes:

“For Anne and other untrained, unregulated individuals doing harm under the title of ‘healer, ‘coach,’ or ‘self-development teacher,’ there is very little to stop them. The therapy and wellness industry is booming and it can be a Wild West of people who are not qualified to be entrusted to our mental health.”

Hue’s mother, Sarah, is currently advocating for British politicians to amend the law on coercive control so that it applies to a wider range of relationships — including therapists, gurus, and healers — not just romantic partnerships.

In the meantime, Grace advises people:

“There is a wealth of trained and regulated practitioners out there who are qualified and trustworthy, so be careful who you choose to trust with your mind and your memories.”

What about if you’re a healer, a coach, an integrative therapist, a psychedelic facilitator, or any other thousand-and-one titles now popping up in the Wellness market. How can we reduce the harm we — all sometimes — unintentionally inflict?

The dangerous power of the healing relationship

During the pandemic, a reader asked me if she could pay me for philosophical conversations. This sounded dangerously like therapy to me, and I’m not a trained therapist. But we decided we could do sessions where we explore a particular philosopher or philosophical idea, and we started to do that online once a week.

Some of this person’s friends asked if they could do philosophy sessions as well. I said yes. Eventually, I started formalizing it, offering “philosophical safaris.” At one point, I had a dozen clients all over the world.  

I really enjoyed it – the clients were smart, the conversation was lively, and it earned me good money. A venture capitalist client even asked to invest and launch it as a business. That didn’t happen, thankfully, in retrospect.

Sometimes, clients would bring up personal issues in the conversation. Occasionally, they would ask me for my opinion on some ethical, psychological,, or spiritual matter in their life, or some personal situation they were facing. They would make that extremely dangerous request that people often make:

“You’re a life expert, tell me who I really am and what I should do with my life.“

I remember one particular client would talk about her fascinating, glamorous and wild life. She would sometimes join the Zoom from a yacht. I would be sitting there with a PowerPoint about Zeno, jaw agape as she spilled out these Gatsby-esque stories about her private life, then one day she fixed her gaze on me and asked in her laconic drawl: ‘What do you think I should do with my life?’

Um….

It’s a flattering question but also a dangerous one for all kinds of reasons. Firstly, there is a transference-countertransference loop that happens in teaching and healing relationships. They’re putting you on a pedestal as a “life expert,” projecting their feelings onto you, and saying  (in effect) “you’re a life expert, tell me who I really am and what I should do with my life.”

People can be eager to hand over control of major life decisions to others — sometimes temporarily, when they’re at a crossroads and aren’t sure what to do, other times more permanently.

Tens of thousands of people in the wellness industry are more than happy to leap over any professional boundaries and say, “I have the answer, I can save you, trust me.”

The less training, qualifications, and scruples people have, the more certainty they can heal and guide you to a better life.

READ: Roger “Mukanranko” Bardales Is Not the Shaman He Claims to Be

I stopped offering those philosophy sessions. Partly because clients kept asking me if we could do Hegel, and I really don’t want to read Hegel, and partly because it felt like slightly risky territory.

But if you’re in the wellness space, and selling yourself as a healer, what can you do to limit the harm you might unintentionally cause?

Don’t assume you’re right or your methods are perfect.

Humans are all prone to error, and healers especially so. The history of medicine — both traditional and alternative — is riddeled with horrendous cases of harm.

Intuition does not trump evidence.

Just because you feel you’re right and are aligned with Love and Light, doesn’t mean you necessarily are, or that you definitely know what’s best for another person. It is ethical to pay attention to any harm you may be unintentionally committing.

Seek the evidence for any healing method, including evidence of harm.

Have respect for scientific evidence. Look for the scientific evidence supporting any particular healing method, but also look for any evidence against that method. Actively seek out evidence of harm from that method. An ethical healing modality should actively seek evidence of unintended harms (and, notably, hardly any psychotherapies have done randomized trials or studies specifically of harm).

Be prepared to be proven wrong in your methods or assumptions.

Don’t “fuse” with them so that they become part of your identity that you need to defend no matter what. Hold your beliefs lightly. At the moment, I believe psychedelics can sometimes, or even often, cause harm. But if the evidence eventually shows the harm is much rarer than I thought, I will hopefully re-examine my priors.

Seek honest, anonymous feedback. 

You may practice in a field where there aren’t many scientific trials.  However, you can still look for any evidence that you might be unintentionally causing harm by offering clients the opportunity to give anonymous feedback. We run a peer support group for people dealing with post-psychedelic difficulties. That could help people, but it could also cause harm. If it does, I want to learn about that, so I send all attendees an anonymous feedback form so if I am causing harm, they can tell me about it anonymously.

When people complain, try to be grateful. 

Occasionally, people have complained to me about my actions and suggested something I did or wrote was unethical or potentially harmful. In such situations, one can easily be defensive and see the person complaining as difficult. But such complaints can also be gifts, alerting us to blind spots, helping us grow, and potentially helping us avoid a much worse situation in the future.

Get some supervision.

Find someone you can check in with occasionally who can give you honest feedback, to whom you can bring any recent disputes or contentious situations that came up in your work.

Join a professional association with an ethics code and a complaints procedure.

You may not be a licensed therapist, but you can still join a professional association and commit to its ethics code. Professional associations of life coaches, yogis, acupuncturists, Reiki healers, tantra massage providers, even esoteric healing has its professional association (Anne Craig was not a member).  Such associations are not foolproof by any means – none of these checks and balances are. But they might help and prevent you from unintentionally committing harm.

If someone lets you into their mind, tread lightly, and don’t leave any litter. 

Do not scrawl your name on the wall of their soul. Do not set up your tent in the cave of their consciousness. Tread softly, follow theirlead, and leave at the earliest convenience.

Finally, know your limits. Know when to say, “This is out of my field of expertise.” 

It is better not to be a healer than to be a bad healer who unintentionally causes harm. First, do no harm. And if you do cause harm, learn from it, and if necessary do something else. That could be an incredibly noble thing to do: Accepting “maybe I’m not actually a healer.”

The barriers to becoming a healer are incredibly low in the wellness industry. You can call yourself a healer right now on Instagram, make a few charismatic and overly certain videos, and people will start contacting you, paying you, and saying to you, ‘Tell me who I really am and what I should do with my life.’

Resist that dangerous invitation.   

*This story originally appeared on the Ecstatic Integration newsletter.

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