When the Darkness Wears a Teacher's Face
I've spent years following stories about cult leaders. Documentaries, podcasts, books, and deep rabbit holes that my closest friends know well by now. It's not morbid curiosity that pulls me there; it's recognition. I've been in those rooms, or adjacent realms that were close enough to them that the grey area is difficult to identify. I, too, have sat across from individuals who held self-proclaimed spiritual authority and slowly, without fully understanding what was happening, began to question whether my own perception could be trusted.
That's where the real damage lives, not in the dramatic moments, public revelations or exposés. It’s in the quiet, insidious and incremental erosion of your inner guidance.
There's a pattern that appears in almost every account of one of these so-called gurus I've encountered or learned about: at some point, the person who questions the leader is told that the questioning itself is a problem. It’s not received as a reasonable exploration or evidence of a healthy mind doing its job. It’s a problem; the sign that something dark has “taken hold of you”. This is the moment the “teacher” tells you that this is proof that you need to surrender more deeply, lean into your devotion, spend more time inside “the container” (anyone else finding the term container overused?). The manipulative genius of that move is that it takes your own discernment, the very faculty that would lead you out, and reframes it as the contamination.
In my work as a Professional Master Clearer™, I identify and remove negative entities and dark elements; I name that plainly because the territory of this conversation requires it, so in my framework, I DO believe in darkness and dark entities and have seen them at work - I don’t take this stuff lightly. And so, when I say that I believe certain people who position themselves as spiritual leaders are themselves the dark element in the room, I'm not speaking metaphorically. The pattern of behavior, the feeding on the energy of those around them, the deliberate erosion of followers’ internal guidance, the manufactured dependency, this is what I recognize as darkness operating in human form. The guru who tells you that your doubt is demonic is doing the very thing they claim to be protecting you from.
My own wake-up moment came near the end of a long relationship with a mentor. I'd given that relationship years and lots of money. I'd trusted the guidance from it, built on it, organized parts of my business and spiritual life around it. And then, after a steady increase in abusive behaviour from her, in one of our final sessions, as I began to pull back, as some part of me finally found solid ground beneath its feet, she told me that darkness was taking me over. She actually said she could feel Lucifer around me.
That was the end. Not only did I know she was wrong, not because I don't believe in darkness, but because I knew myself, and in that moment, I finally remembered that. It certainly wasn’t a perfect end and wasn’t without doubt, but I remembered myself enough to feel the lie of what she was naming. When I told her I was leaving the group, she reached for every tool she had gathered from all the pieces of me she'd gathered over five years of intense work, every wound she'd witnessed, every longing I’d trusted her with, and she used it to try to pull me back in.
That's the moment I want you to feel into, if you've experienced something like this, because that level of manipulation doesn't come from a person who's actually spiritually awake. It comes from a person who needs your light, who's been feeding on it, and who panics when the source moves to leave.
When I fully removed myself, I felt the attack, and I do mean attack. There was a period after, as I disentangled what was left, where I understood viscerally what it meant to have been someone's source of light. She couldn't feed from my energy any longer, and I felt the force of that in my body and my field. This was when I first experienced a Professional Master Clearing™, and once that was complete, my energetic field clarified, and I understood the severity of the abuse in a way no intellectual understanding could have.
What I want to offer from all of this isn't a list of warning signs because I’ve shared those before here, but I will name a few. Your resistance isn't the problem. Your questioning isn't contamination. If someone who holds spiritual authority over you is turning your doubt back onto you as evidence of your dysfunction or brokenness, that inversion is the signal. Healthy growth creates more of you, not less. A teacher worth trusting builds your relationship with your own inner guidance. They don't position themselves as the gatekeeper of it.
Ask yourself who profits from your confusion. Ask yourself whether you feel more yourself, or less, in the presence of this person or this group. Ask yourself whether your boundaries have been met as wisdom or reframed as resistance that needs to be surrendered. And if you're sitting with those questions right now, uncertain whether what you're sensing is real, I want you to know that the uncertainty itself isn't a sign that your perception is broken. Sometimes it simply means the pressure has been so consistent and so skilled that trusting your inner guidance needs a little room to breathe and heal.
Your growth shouldn't cost you yourself. That's not a standard I invented; it's the most basic measure of whether something is serving your light or feeding on it.
If you're somewhere in this experience and need a space to hear what your own guidance has been trying to tell you, a SoulPoint Journey is where I’d invite you to begin. If you already know that what those years left in your field need to be specifically addressed and removed, a Professional Master Clearing™ does that work. Neither requires you to have it all figured out before you reach out.
