From Matthew Remski'a website: What Happens in the Next Generation On From a High-Demand Group?
In another post, Remski writes about how The Goodness of a Yoga Group Comes From Those It Abuses.
Those who leave or escape from high-demand Yoga groups seem to reorganize through two successive demographic splits.
The first split separates out those who must ghost out of the industry altogether to heal themselves and start over. Their drive to escape might be driven by the fact that they were abused too severely by the group to recover. There can be other factors as well, such as whether they have a pathway towards a different social circle and life, or whether they retained interests and skills outside of the group.
The second split occurs between those who stay within the industry, often because they need to.
Category 1 is made up of those who figured out that [the leaders] created something toxic from top to bottom.
They emerged with the drive to completely reorient themselves in relationship to their practice and self-understanding. It was a lot of hard work, and very lonely, because the rule book had been torn up. They might go through associations with other groups, and successive disillusionments as they detect similar patterns emerging. It takes them a long time to realize that the wisdom of disappointment has made them into leaders. I’ve seen many Category 1 people also start and follow through with training in a licensed therapeutic skill.
Category 2 consists of those who believed that [the leader] created something really awesome and it was just a damn shame that he let it get to his head or his ego or something and made “mistakes”.
Category 2 goes on to basically replicate the dynamics they learned in the high-demand group, but with enough savvy to remain just above social reproof. They might apply these strategies to leading a new Yoga group, owning a studio, or they’ll skip sideways into an MLM (which gives you a sense of how they were thinking about Yoga training to begin with).
The mechanisms are the same: puff yourself up in the name of inspiring others, whether you can follow through or not. For Category 2 people, charisma is not something to interrogate but to domesticate. Weber called it “routinization”. If they remove the rough edges it’ll all work out.
In the worst cases, Category 2 people form their own high-demand groups ... [a] particular grandiosity can make Category 2 people impervious to critique.
This also means that many many maintain a long-term subtle contempt for Category 1 people who didn’t “get over it”, or who foster a “victim mentality”.
In another post, Remski writes about how The Goodness of a Yoga Group Comes From Those It Abuses.
... [followers] were stripped of time, attention, money, social capital, earning potential, bodily autonomy and dignity. Those spoils contribute to the total value of the organization.
... survivors actually continue their selfless service to the organization and its ideals. Their activism actually embodies the stated goals of the group, better than the group ever did. They become leaders. In addition to reparations, they deserve consulting fees.