Blurred Lines Between Mentor and Academic Cult Leader
I sat in the graduate assistant office I shared with 2 other master’s students, the myriad of lamps casting a dim, soft, glow over my desk, adorned with the maximalist style. Every inch was covered in my favorite dark academia art and décor. With the space heater blaring, my office was “the vibe,” as my students had often told me. I spent hours upon hours in this room reading hundreds of pages a week and writing hundreds of pages a semester, I wanted to love my time there. And I did.
On this day, I was in the midst of researching PhD programs all across the country. So many amazing Communication Departments to choose from, I was outright giddy with excitement. There were only two things I wanted out of life: to publish a memoir and to earn a PhD. I have wanted both of those things since childhood, and up until that point, I was well on my way. In my late 20s, I worried I was running out of time, but after entering grad school, I was beginning to learn that age was only a notion. Nothing to hold me back.
I heard a rapping at the door casing, as I always left the door open because I loved the hustle and bustle in the hallway, my ADHD brain needed it or I couldn’t focus. I turned in my office chair to see the face of someone I truly adored, my graduate advisor. I had a relationship with this man that I had only desired my entire childhood and young adult life. He was like a father figure to me, and I would have done anything to make him proud.
“Hey Amber! Do you have a minute?”
Always having time for him, I invited him inside, turning off my Billie Holiday with Robert Johnson variety Pandora station, and he took a seat across from me in the neighboring desk chair. I could tell by his wide eyes and head cocked to the side that he had something pressing to discuss with me. That was always how he looked when he had troubling news for me, and this always gave me anxiety because I was often afraid of disappointing him. There was never a day that went by that I didn’t agonize about losing him as a mentor.
“I have been ruminating about this for a little bit now, and I believe I would not be a good mentor to you if I did not share this with you.”
My heart had already begun to sink into my stomach, and I could feel at least one lung collapse. The lump in my throat made it hard to swallow. I could already feel tears welling into my eye sockets.
“I think you should reconsider applying to PhD programs.”
The rest of that conversation is a blur, and what I have come to learn through therapy, a traumatic event I am still working on getting over with EMDR treatment.
He began expressing his concern that my “mental health” would take a huge hit, and in order to “keep my sanity” it would be best for me to make a career change, suggesting I “start a blog” and “work for a non-profit,” leaving academia altogether. I had recently been diagnosed with Schizo-Affective Bipolar 1 Disorder and had divulged that to him in confidence. I never considered he would assume I was incapable of accomplishing my life’s most enduring dreams.
That moment in my life led me down a path of mental turmoil that was no less destructive than the 15 years of psychopathic abuse my step-father had put me through. The difference was, that this man did it in the guise of care, using language like, “You are one of the smartest people I know, but…” twisting my brain into mush, not knowing what to believe about myself and my abilities as an academic. Can I or can I not succeed in a PhD program? Will I even graduate with my master’s? I was so entrenched in this man’s influence that I left it up to him to decide.
It is important to note that this man had controlled my every move for several years by this point in my life. He had been my mentor since my undergraduate years, and I put him very high on a pedestal. I saw him as more of a father figure and I think he secretly thrived on that attention. We had very few boundaries and the lines between mentor and academic cult leader were very much blurred. I would have done anything he told me to do, and I did. I immediately stopped applying for PhD programs.
I drove in a surreal trance to the Communication building at the University of South Florida after a few weeks of planning my suicide. It was midnight on a Saturday just before school released for winter break and I chose this time with the assumption there would be no one there to stop me. I began systematically going through the steps of my well-thought-out plan, all the while sobbing so loudly, that I could hear my tears and bellowing echo throughout the carpeted halls.
· Step one: allocate your books. The books about narrative and storytelling go to one of your officemates while those about performance go to the other, and so on. Lastly, The Forgiveness Project, goes to your mentor who understands more than anyone your passion for forgiveness research. Check.
· Step two: make your way down the hall, your sandals flip and flopping onto your heel as you walk unevenly, periodically bumping into the wall, still weeping, and breathing heavily. You are simultaneously, present and ephemeral, focused, yet also in a daze. You are walking so briskly you can feel your hair bounce onto your neck and shoulders. Check.
· Step three: remove your driver’s license from your pink rubber wallet, placing it into your right hand. You want to make sure the police are able to contact the right people. People you believe will not care you are gone. Check.
· Step four: ID in hand, throw your bag to the side, kick off your shoes and approach the green railings of the third-floor atrium. Check.
· Step five:
I attempted to throw myself over a third-story high railing into an atrium below to end my life. Extreme letdowns and grief are hard to handle when wrought with mental illness. I spent the majority of November and December of that semester in a depression so deep every day felt like a fight for survival, and I was done. I barely survived. The depths of darkness I was buried in led me to the third-floor atrium of the very building housing my mentor’s office, the man who at the beginning of my Master’s journey complimented my writing and nurtured my academic life, but now decided I wasn’t good enough to continue and told me I would not succeed in a PhD program. His abrupt and unexpected withdrawal of faith and confidence in me caused me to make the unwavering decision to end my life. He no longer believed in me, and without a PhD, I had nothing to live for.
As I climbed the railing to jump from that atrium, hands grabbed and pulled me from the top. I was stopped by two good Samaritans I had not seen around the corner earlier. They must have run to me at what I can only describe as Olympic speed and as they wrenched me off the rail, they snapped me out of the haze. My body was so heavy with depression and grief that I collapsed to the floor in a puddle of sobs and convulsions. I could barely stand without aid. Someone must have called 911 because before I knew it, I was being walked down the front of the building, folded into the back of a campus police cruiser, and taken to a mental health facility.
I spent the first couple of days in the mental health facility simply lying in bed, trying to find anything I could to self-harm. All I could find were my reading glasses and I did everything in my power to break the lenses. I stomped on them, and tried to use my brute strength, but nothing would break them. I even considered the tried-and-true method of using a sheet. They ended up remembering that I was on suicide watch (yes, they forgot), and began locking the door to my room, taking away the things I had been trying to use to self-harm and forcing me to participate in group therapy. The very first group therapy session I sat in began like this:
Social Worker: “Okay everyone, we are going to paint today! Now everyone, close your eyes and imagine a beautiful sunrise on the horizon, now look toward the horizon and imagine that is your future. What do you want your future to look like? Now paint it.”
The tears came streaming down my face because the very reason I was there was because my future had been ripped out from under me by someone I truly trusted!
Against their wishes, I got the hell out of that torture chamber that was group therapy. Darting out of the room in uncontrollable tears.
Once I was finally properly medicated for my newly diagnosed mental illness and able to leave the facility, I met a series of milestones and achievements. Showering. Doing the dishes. Dusting. Leaving my apartment. Not isolating myself. Going to the grocery store to fill my fridge for the first time in months and returning to the very building where I tried to end my life. I had to in order to get books I needed to finally finish my fall semester coursework I received incompletes in. The semester after that unspeakable night at the atrium was intensely difficult. Instead of being a semester, I had anticipated as celebratory or affirming because it was my last semester in the master’s program, it was treacherous in ways I could not have imagined when I applied to the graduate program.
Graduate students are at high risk for mental health problems, including depression and suicidal thoughts and behavior. As a grad student with hidden disabilities, I experienced what is referred to as “interpenetration” or mixtures of more than one identity. Someone with a stigmatized identity like me (i.e. Bipolar Disorder, ADHD, etc.) is forced into a process “of combining or uniting elements of identity” that do not always mesh well. Fear of failure, paranoia, depression, trouble concentrating, cognition slowing down unexpectedly, all of these symptoms, and more, can drop a graduate student with a stigmatized label into an “identity gap” where they have to make an effort to enact the behaviors of the kind of grad student they don’t yet have much practice being. The kind of graduate student those in power say they should be: quick-witted, quiet, agreeable, cower to authority, never show weakness or emotion. Compete. Compete. Compete. The kind of grad student I had never wanted to be. I have discovered that there is nothing stable about my label as academic or the identity I am expected to enact in relation to it. But what remains static is the push and pull, the messiness of understanding what being a scholar means to me. A chaos I have chosen to navigate.
8 years later, I am sitting in one of my absolute favorite bright and cheery indie coffee shops where I often come to write, remembering and storying my deepest traumas from my time in graduate school. Coffee pours into a white porcelain cup lined with chipped gold mimicking the undertones of the chestnut brown allusion of what safety and warmth feels like. Cream plops into the pool of darkness developing a cloud, resembling a well-planned nuclear explosion of white, visually diminishing the bitterness of long sleepless nights spent wallowing in self-pity, and the overall feeling of emotional and mental exhaustion I experienced while under the care of a narcissistic and controlling graduate advisor.
I decided to write and explore my time in graduate school because I had been experiencing deep-seated feelings of imposter syndrome working in my adjunct position at St. Leo University. I’m fearful of getting fired at every turn and am left wondering if I’m good enough for such a fulfilling job. They will find out eventually, that I am not intelligent or experienced enough, right?
I then recalled something my therapist posited after I told her the story of my much-beloved mentor, and how just a week before that horrific event at the atrium he had a “heart to heart” with me where he explained that I should not pursue my life’s biggest dream, to earn a PhD, because my mental health just simply couldn’t handle it. My therapist explained to me that that conversation, as well as my relationship with him as a whole, was what could be considered “a traumatic experience.” One that I am just now beginning to grapple with in healthy and generative ways, through talk therapy, guided meditation, writing, and trauma informed care. Several other professors and colleagues have since told me he was using his power in uncouth ways, and that many people with mental health differences accomplish higher level degrees. Other professors I admired believed in me, but my mentor was the only person I listened to. I allowed him and the way he felt about me to control my life even 8 years later. 8 years of believing I was not good enough, not smart enough, with crippling imposter syndrome, anxiety, and depression I could not shake, even miles away from that atrium. I concluded that my therapist was right. That moment in that starkly lit office, along with years of control by this narcissistic man, caused complex trauma that I needed to process.
Once climbing out from beneath the shadows after my suicide attempt, I was able to understand just how many people cared for me, worried for me, remembered me, and wanted me around. Upon my resurrection from the hospital, I received countless texts, phone calls, Facebook messages, and comments all out of what I believe to be genuine love and concern. This initial outpouring of kindness helped immensely with my recovery, so much so that it felt as though I may have mended a bit too quickly. The swiftness of the calm that came over me died just as quickly as it came, leaving me back in a place where I yearned for human affection and intimacy, in the same way I received it at the end of that semester and reverted back to old behaviors to find it, ways that were co-dependent, and ultimately pushed away people who just a few months ago, were enamored by my mere presence in the world. I was expecting those around me to continue showering me with copious amounts of love, the kind typically saved for those who are sick, and understandably, they could not, and ultimately chose not to accommodate my unrealistic and unreasonable needs. I know now that that behavior, too, stemmed from my unhealthy relationship with my mentor. My attachment style as anxious/preoccupied due to my unhinged and abusive parent led me to constantly seek out approval and reassurance while having the intensity of limerence with many of my close relationships, and I now know that this mentor fed off of that energy, and then one day ripped the rug out from under me. After my suicide attempt, he distanced himself from me, stopped answering my emails, and even ignored me in the halls, and within just a couple of months, we no longer spoke. I never told him that his words were the reason for my decision to end my life, but I believe he knew.
In the beginning of this piece, I mention that through my haze that evening I allocated a book on forgiveness to my mentor. My main site of research for this master’s degree was forgiveness. And contrary to what you may think is coming next, I am not going to give you a spiel on how I have forgiven the man who derailed my entire career almost a decade and caused me to have self-doubt so incredibly stifling that even when I am being asked to create courses for universities around my expertise, or receiving exemplary marks on my teaching observations I still have a strong fear of being “found out” as not smart enough or qualified for my job.
Oh no.
If I learned anything through my research, it is that forgiveness takes time and should not be rushed or forced. True, honest, and real forgiveness is something that is a day to day struggle. It is a journey that may never reach a destination, and that is okay. I may never forgive this man. But I do know that I will process this trauma in productive and healthy ways, and in many ways I already have. I have used Socratic questioning to determine that he had absolutely no evidence to prove his reasoning for why I could not pursue my lifelong dream. None. Mental illness is absolutely not evidence that someone cannot accomplish a task. But he made me believe for almost a decade that it was. So no, I have not forgiven him, and may never will, but I will ponder about why, in the moment I wanted to die, my absolute lowest and most vulnerable moment, I bestowed one of the most powerful pieces of storytelling about forgiveness I had ever read, to the man who brought me to that atrium.
There is a buzz throughout the atmosphere of the coffee house, droning and weaving throughout and in between every word, every smile, and every giggle of the myriad of college students scattered about. I begin to daydream, breathing only shallowly, even at times forgetting to breathe altogether, and I have to mindfully pull myself to one of my favorite author’s, Albert Camus’ words.
“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”
The cup is slowly emptying as I ever so often glance up at the selection of caffeinated and herbal teas next to homemade vegan cupcakes. I especially enjoy smelling the teas, even when I have no intention of drinking any. Time and time again I refill my cup displaying for a moment the always uniquely artistic brown ring on the napkin representing to me the unyielding, everlasting power and resilience within me.
So here is my new checklist, not of despair, hopelessness, and doubt, but of healing, self-compassion, and faith in myself.
· Step one: Begin finding pleasure in the passions that bring you to life. Engage in these passions daily, with excitement and joy.
· Step two: Make meaningful connections with friends, family, students, and colleagues who care for and support me in whatever I choose to do.
· Step three: Embrace this healing journey I am on, understanding that healing complex trauma is not linear, and can be quite messy, showing myself compassion along the way.
· Step four: Practice mindfulness with yourself and others. Be kind and always remember to live in the moment.
· Step five: Look toward the future with excitement and optimism. With the hope that was once stripped from you. Take it back. Carpe diem.