How a Gestalt school became an abusive high-control group
The story of Transformacion Humana in Colombia
This is a story about Transformacion Humana (TH), a shamanic / Gestalt school in Colombia founded and led by a man called Jorge Llano. It closed in 2023 after 21 former teachers and students accused it of being an abusive high-control group, including 12 women who said Llano manipulated them into sex acts, often claiming it was part of their healing process.
I’ve done extensive interviews with seven former students and staff of TH, some of whom had senior positions in the school. They were all at TH for many years. Most of the interviewees came away feeling traumatized (they nick-named the school Traumatizacion Humana), but I also interviewed one student who loved her time there and is sad it closed, and others have contacted me online to defend the school. The school was also the subject of a recent feature in El Pais, which highlighted the allegations of abuse.
There are always two sides to every story, but this story will mainly focus on those who felt damaged by their time at TH. I have repeatedly tried to seek comments from Jorge Llano and sent emails to the TH website. He hasn’t replied. In previous comments, Jorge has denied that he ever coerced women into sexual relationships.
In part two of this story, we will examine the lineage of psychotherapy called ‘Dionysian Gestalt’, which runs from Fritz Perls through Claudio Naranjo to countless Gestalt schools in Spain and Latin America, many of which offer Gestalt training courses which include psychedelics, erotic exercises and various occult or spiritual practices, like TH.
One of those schools is AWE, a psychedelic training school that I wrote about last year, which is run by Jorge’s son Igor (also known as Lila Vega), and which has also faced allegations by students of unsafe and unethical behaviour - as have other Gestalt teachers in Spain and Latin America.
As Nese Devenot has written, cases of unsafe practices and abuse aren’t always isolated incidents. Sometimes they emerge from a lineage’s approach to therapy, and the culture fostered by that lineage’s leadership.
What bought people to TH?
Transformacion Humana lasted for over 20 years until it closed in 2023. It was founded by Jorge Llano, a Colombian disciple of Claudio Naranjo. Jorge was a teacher on Naranjo’s Seekers After Truth program, which I will discuss more in part two. He set up Transformacion Humana in Bogota, and it later became known as Transformacion Humana School of Claudio Naranjo. Jorge was also president of the Colombian Gestalt Association, he appeared as a psychologist on TV City TV's "Women Online" program, and was once an consultant for the Miss Colombia competition. Jorge is also a farmer and horse trainer, and has a farm in Guasca, an hour from Bogota called Agua Blanca. That’s where many of TH’s retreats took place (it’s also where his son Igor holds some of AWE’s retreats).
The heart of TH’s offering was a four-year course in Gestalt therapy, at the end of which you were qualified to work as a Gestalt trainer in the school. TH also offered a long training course in constellations therapy, and shorter workshops and retreats on shamanism, psico-tarot, psychodrama, and an annual psychedelic retreat, El Llamado de Alma, or ‘call of the soul’. In any year there might be around 100 people enrolled in the long-term training programmes, and hundreds more attending the workshops on a more casual basis.
Many people came to the workshops because they wanted healing. Jorge had a reputation as a great therapist (although he is not licensed) and also a curandero or shaman. He had a stellar reputation in the insular world of Gestalt. Several of the students I interviewed said they signed up to TH after university because they were interested in becoming psychologists and were drawn to the more spiritual and shamanic side of psychology explored by Claudio Naranjo and his disciples.
Jose (name changed) signed up for TH when he was 20. He had got involved with Gestalt schools in Spain, where Gestalt is extremely popular. He took a course offered by Jorge Llano and was impressed:
I’ve never met anyone like Jorge. On the one hand, he is a simple farmer. On the other hand, he behaved in this mysterious way, like he knew something you didn’t, like he was superior to you. It made me want to follow him and become a superior person like him. The first time I met him, he said something to me, some comment about my personality, and it was enough to hook me.
Jose ended up winning a scholarship to study psychology at a university in Bogota - he accepted it in order to take classes at TH with Jorge. He ended up staying in TH for four years.
Francesca (name also changed), was a 23-year-old psychology graduate, interested in becoming a Gestalt therapist. A friend told her about TH and said ‘it’s crazy but it’s your type of crazy’. Francesca tells me:
You signed up for TH because you were searching. We had this big thirst for life and love. I think that this was one of the hooks. It was intense. And we started finding answers, or at least more questions, or at least people that had the same questions as I did, so I didn't feel as crazy and lost and weird.
At the beginning, it seemed like a magical place, a community of spiritual seekers deeply committed to a more authentic way of living, run by a respected shaman-therapist. Jorge claimed to have been struck by lightning, along with his son Igor (now called Lila Vega), and thereby both received shamanic initiation. He said he then trained with Don Lucio, a respected Mexican shaman. He claimed to have supernatural powers to heal - or to harm. Mariam, who signed up as a student in her early 30s, became a teacher, and stayed over a decade, says:
Jorge would say these megalomaniac things about his shamanic powers. For example, if someone was sick, he would say ‘I will go visit you in your dreams tonight and help you heal’. You felt like you were his apprentices, his chosen ones.
Some students nicknamed TH Hogwarts, or the Magic Kingdom. The school blended psychology with shamanism, the Enneagram, Tarot, psychedelics, and conscious sexuality - a far cry from the boring theory of an academic psychology course.
Mariam says:
These sorts of groups don’t show you everything at the beginning. At the start, everything is incredible - the exercises and group work are really powerful, you start to experience healing and feel ‘wow this is amazing’. And then the longer you stay and the closer you get to the inner circles, the more you start seeing what's really going on and all the power plays that go on backstage. But by then, you're already in too deep.
Francesca says:
It was a joke - Jorge would always say ‘this is a cult’, we would joke about it too. Years later, I thought, fuck, the warning was always there.
Dionysian Gestalt
The school offered a particularly intense form of Gestalt, which Jorge Llano nicknamed ‘Dionysian Gestalt’. Gestalt therapy is a school of psychology developed in the 1950s by Fritz and Laura Perls. Fritz later moved to Esalen, the human potential centre in California, where he and disciples like Will Schutz took Gestalt in a particular direction, towards dramatic group therapy sessions where the teacher is the circus ring-master and engages participants in intense live group therapy sessions that resemble experimental theatre. People in Esalen Gestalt sessions would weep, scream, strip naked, make out, hit pillows. It was all part of the process, helping people overcome their inauthentic identities and express their inner truth.
In the 1970s, Claudio Naranjo, a Chilean psychiatrist who lived at Esalen and studied under Fritz Perls, set up his own Gestalt training programme, called Seekers After Truth (SAT), which mixed Perls’ Gestalt techniques with the Enneagram, psychedelics, shamanism, meditation and conscious sexuality. Jorge Llano was a senior teacher on the SAT programme.
Mariam says:
Gestalt was born in the 60s. Back then it was very transgressional, without many boundaries. Times have changed, but TH hadn’t changed. They were still using a lot of the things that we now know are not really healthy and can even be harmful.
Central to Naranjo’s methodology was the Enneagram, an occult personality typology introduced by the 1920s guru GI Gurdjieff, developed by Bolivian guru Oscar Ichazo in the 1970s, and then refined by Claudio Naranjo and others. It supposedly helps people identify themselves as one of nine personality types, each ruled by an essential sin (pride, gluttony, anger and so on). It then suggests a way to challenge your personality type and shatter its defences. Naranjo would often talk about killing your ego, or ‘waging holy war on the ego’. That has proven to be a carte blanche for authoritarian male therapist-gurus to terrorize their students.
Jennifer joined a student in her 20s and stayed at TH for several years. She says:
The techniques were supremely confronting. There was a lot of shouting, especially in my time. Jorge yelled at us a lot, he demanded a lot from us, parading around holding a machete. Techniques that today I label as violent, humiliating and re-traumatizing for many.
For example, in one exercise, TH students would construct a model of their egos and then smash it up. Jose says: ‘Can you imagine how dissociating that was?’ In another exercise, students were given a sack of rocks that they were told represented their parents, and they were then encouraged to scream at and attack the sack. This atmosphere of violent emotional venting sometimes spilled over into violence against each other - in one incident, a student kicked one of the teachers so hard she broke a rib. Jennifer says:
I remember one student being tied to a chair and another student would have to shout insults at them and push them until the chair fell over, and then they continue insulting them while they’re on the ground. There were incidents like that which I didn’t like, but I felt paralysed. The teachers of my era say now that we feel were enchanted, under a spell.
The emphasis, as in much of Gestalt therapy, was on venting emotions, on healing through intense catharsis (hitting pillows, screaming, angry confrontation and so on). Jennifer says:
There was almost a compulsion to emote. I remember during an exercise on releasing anger, a classmate telling me, ‘just cry so Jorge doesn’t criticize you’. So I did, just so Jorge would leave me alone.
At the end of every year, Jorge ran an 11-day psychedelic retreat at his farm in Guasca called El Llamado de Alma, or call of the soul. Jennifer remembers:
Participants took something every day - peyote, magic mushrooms, MDMA, and some substances we didn’t know what they were but Jorge’s son Igor [who ran psychedelic ceremonies] gave them names like ‘the tiger’, ‘the snake’ and so on.
Mariam, who was a senior teacher at TH, says:
It was insane. Extremely high doses, and then not much sleep and then another drug experience the next day. There was no processing or integration. I’ve heard stories about people having psychotic breaks and having to leave in the middle of the retreat, and the response would be ‘whatever’. When you use something as powerful as psychedelics, you need to be really careful. But Jorge is a very aggressive person. So not only was there no care, there was aggression, this attitude of ‘be tough’. He likes to take everything to an extreme.
Liberating Eros
Gestalt therapy has since the days of Fritz Perls encouraged participants to explore their authentic sexuality in group sessions. In the encounter sessions at Bhagwan Rajneesh’ ashram, for example, participants would all be naked and would sometimes end up having sex (or even getting raped).
Claudio Naranjo’s Seekers After Truth programme also involved large group sessions of up to 200 people where participants stripped naked and explored their sexuality with other male and female participants, in ways that did not always involve informed consent given prior to the sessions. The SAT course included an exercise exploring three different types of love - Phila (admirative), Agape (nurturing) and Eros (desiring). Participants would be encouraged to explore these different types of love with each other (whether they were married or not). Both TH and Igor Llano’s AWE school used this exercise. TH students would also explore their feelings for the same sex through pairing off, touching and kissing. In AWE’s psychedelic therapy course, Jorge ran a constellation therapy exercise where the male participants all held each other’s genitals.
The theory behind these sorts of erotic exercises was to help students heal and liberate their Eros, their sexual life-force or libido, which has been repressed by western civilization. And some students appreciated this work - Maria, a TH student who enjoyed her time at the school and felt it was a healing experience, tells me TH helped her to overcome her feelings of guilt and inhibition with regards to sexuality after leaving the church.
If people want to explore ‘conscious sexuality’ in large groups, good for them. But it’s an unusual training process for Gestalt therapists, not to mention psychedelic therapists - how to be polyamorous, how to heal people through erotic touch. And it doesn’t always seem to have been taught carefully with clear guidelines on informed consent. On some occasions, according to former students, Jorge encouraged male participants to touch female participants’ bodies without seeking their verbal consent. This sort of behaviour, potentially traumatizing and degrading, created a permissive environment in which students and staff become complicit in unethical behaviour and therefore less likely to confront the guru-leader for his own abusive behaviour.
TH’s exercises were intense, but most students got something from them. Maria tells me she found the school somewhat culty in its reverence for Jorge, but she nonetheless found her time at TH healing:
At this moment I have a lot of gratitude for Jorge, because he taught me many things, he helped me a lot in my process, I am very grateful to him and his teachings.
Jose, who traveled thousands of miles to study at TH, says he found a new family there:
For starters, the school offered a community. I think that's very important. It offered a sense of belonging to a family. There were many of us. And some of us ended up doing exercises and classes there seven days a week.
Jennifer says:
There were many moments of warmth, of tranquility, of silence. It was like all the time, a duality between a lot of confrontation and then a lot of love and support. Sometimes we were up til three or four in the morning, crying together. We were really like a brotherhood. But perhaps it was bonding through trauma.
Other interviewees say there was genuine therapeutic value to some of the exercises and ideas, but they came from the tradition of Gestalt, not from Jorge.
Jorge’s cultic manipulation
TH had a chaotic and free-wheeling atmosphere, but it was also very controlling, with Jorge as the circus ringmaster amid all the chaos. Francesca says:
Jorge was the only authority in the school. What he said had to be completely accepted by everyone. He was like a God in his little kingdom. He and we would joke that it was a cult. The truth was always there for us to see.
Mariam says: ‘Jorge used his therapeutic knowledge to manipulate you. He knows your issues and then he used that to keep you there.’ Alfredo, another TH student, says:
Jorge has been manipulating people’s minds for 20 years, he has a lot of knowledge of character types, he knows how to set traps for people.
People offering therapy (whether licensed therapists or self-appointed healers) gain access to the innermost secrets, deepest wounds, most shameful fears and desires of their clients. This unburdening of one’s soul is one of the things that can make therapy so healing. But in the hands of a manipulative abuser or high-control cult, it can also be soul-destroying and enslaving - you have told your abuser exactly how to control you for their own ends. This is why therapeutic abuse is so damaging and why ethical safeguards are so important.
Jennifer says:
The main motivation people came to TH was for healing. Jorge presented himself as a saviour who could heal us all, particularly young women. He became not just a shaman but a father figure: ‘come to me, I’ll take away the sadness, I’ll fix you, I’ll help you heal your sexuality’.
For many students, the promise was to make them incredible healers. Jennifer says: ‘You felt you’re going to become an amazing therapist, you're going to learn shamanism, you're going to change the world.’
Once drawn into the school, Jorge and his staff exerted ever-increasing control over people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviour. Dr Steven Hassan’s BITE model of high-control groups is useful:
Like other high-control groups, TH would gradually separate members from outsiders, especially people’s families. Mariam says:
It wasn’t like blatantly cultic groups where you actually live in a compound and don’t see your family. But for example, in my case, I have a very close relationship with my father. And Jorge was saying to me all the time that this was not a healthy relationship, that I was too close to my father, that it got in the way of my life. He even insinuated that maybe my father had abused me. Which was not true. It seemed like the whole idea was that if I distance myself from my father, then he would become like my father-substitute.
Jorge insinuated the same idea to others, such as Jose:
I remember when Jorge told me in public situations that I had been abused as a child. I carried this idea for years, doubting my own memory, until I began to understand the manipulation behind it: to make me feel responsible for his bad behaviour towards me.
Jorge would also separate TH staff and students from each other, says Mariam:
He would triangulate. So he would talk bad about everyone behind their backs - talk about Teresa to me, and about me to Teresa, putting everyone against everyone else so he would keep control.
Scolding, bullying, and spiritual threats
Jorge could be charming and charismatic, but he could also be terrorizing, tearing strips off people and dissecting their personalities in public sessions (supposedly for their own good). Alfredo remembers:
We all experienced tremendous humiliations. And since your only circle is the school, you don’t want to feel humiliated in front of your only circle because you no longer have external friends or family - everything is the school.
He became like an absolute monarch in the court of TH, with students longing for his approval and jealously competing to be one of his favourites. They likewise became terrified of his disapproval. Jennifer says:
He had an expression he used at that time: ‘ I'll put you in the freezer.’ It meant he would ignore you. He would also make these shamanic threats about anyone who crossed him, like ‘I’m going to send the snakes , they're going to die energetically’, or ‘I'm going to send Metatron.’
Jose suffered particularly acute humiliation. He was a young man in his early 20s, who had moved to Bogota from Spain, and initially been a favourite of Jorge’s. But any favourite could suddenly fall out of favour and come in for merciless psychological abuse. Jose remembers:
Jorge and his team accused me constantly of being a manipulator, of being arrogant, or thinking myself superior and wanting to go around authority. At first, I actually felt flattered by all the attention I was getting. But it really started to get me down. On one occasion, Jorge threatened me publicly: ‘You don’t want me to curse you’.
Jose saw a therapist not affiliated with TH, but he was told to stop seeing that therapist and instead see one who worked at TH, from whom he received the same message - you’re arrogant, you have a problem with authority, and so on. ‘When you hear it from all the teachers you start to believe it. My self esteem hit rock bottom. I became highly dissociated.’
Money, sex, power
What was the point of all this manipulation? The usual motivations: money, sex and power. Alfredo says: ‘If Jorge saw he could get a lot of money out of you, he would make you one of his proteges, make you feel special, take you on as a therapy client.’ People would spend hundreds and thousands of dollars for TH workshops. Jorge’s farm at Guasca grew ever more luxurious over the years, his collection of horses expanded, he became wealthy.
Meanwhile, the TH staff slaved away for little to no pay. Jennifer remembers:
We worked from Monday to Sunday. It was a lot of work and we were always very tired. Some of the workshops would end at three or four in the morning, and you can’t go to bed, you have to stay up late because when people are tired the ego gives up easier. And the pay was never good.
Francesca agrees: ‘I worked for TH as a teacher for four really hard years, and I never got paid.’ Instead, Jorge tried to sell parts of the school to the teachers. Mariam remembers:
He offered a share to us at a very expensive rate. I talked to friends who are lawyers and they said it didn’t sound like a good deal. So I went back and said I didn’t want to do it. And they put me in a ‘hot seat’, in front of all the staff, and they were basically telling me the school couldn’t grow because of me, I was stopping everything, and it was all because of my issues. It was really traumatizing.
Most seriously, Jorge would manipulate young female students for sex, telling them it was a part of their healing process. He created a flirty, permissive, sometimes boozy atmosphere at TH, in which he encouraged dirty talk. Francesca says:
We got used to demeaning comments to women - seductress, hija de puta, gordita. It’s quite common in Latin American culture.’ There was also the sexual innuendo, his comments about their bodies, asses, afros. There were slaps on the ass or on the head.
Maria recalls:
The atmosphere reminded me of religious groups where the pastor is desired and all the women want him. Here it was no different - young girls flirting in front of Jorge, shaking their ass.
In private and out of view, Jorge wasn’t merely flirting, he was hitting on multiple young female students, finding moments when they were alone and coming on to them, grabbing them, and in some cases having sex with them, while telling them it was for their own healing, that they had a demon within them or some childhood trauma which he could heal through sex. A dozen women later came forward to publish anonymous testimonies saying they had been coerced or manipulated into sex acts by Jorge, often being told it was for their healing. He had a particular target - women in their early 20s who were Enneagram type 2 - ‘the helper’.
Jennifer was one of his victims:
We were all a similar age, mid-20s; all Enneagram type 2. He said ‘this is going to cure you, you have a spirit in you’ or something like that. With me, he started getting closer to me, showing interest and a protective attitude. He would call me aside, tell me about certain issues and how he could help me. Little by little he would make sexual advances, touching me, then kissing, then sex. It was a very confusing experience. I was in my early 20s and he was in his 40s. I didn’t understand what was happening. It was like becoming his favourite, but then he distances you from others, so you became isolated and very lonely. And then, as time goes by, he finds another favourite. And you begin to realize that you don’t want this, you’re not attracted to him. There was also a lot of guilt at being with a married man.
Other young female students said they engaged in sex acts at Jorge’s suggestion, thinking it was part of their therapeutic process, and only years later did they look back and think ‘that was an ethical boundary violation, a sexual assault’.
Besides money and sex, what seemed to motivate Jorge most of all, in the views of ex-students and staff, was love of power. Jose says:
That’s the most important point, I think, and it’s the same with Claudio Naranjo and Fritz Perls. It’s all about power over others.
This love of power over others is evidence in Jorge’s fondness for matchmaking. He would often set up students, tell them they should pair off, have sex with each other, and go out with each other and even have children together. This is something one often sees in high-control groups - they take control of members’ sexual behaviour and choice of partner. I asked Jennifer why Jorge loved to matchmake.
I guess for power, to increase loyalty and put him at the centre of everything. And if other teachers are having sex with students, then everyone is complicit and people are less likely to complain about his behaviour. Several of these match-made relationships ended really painfully.
Why did people stay so long?
One thing I wonder, when interviewing people in abusive high-control groups, is why did they stay so long - my interviewees stayed from four to eleven years in TH, and even brought friends and relatives to this place of abuse. Francesca says:
We weren’t in a prison, the door was always open to leave, but we stayed. Why? Because we felt we belonged. We felt it was ours. Because we found family, because we shared some beautiful things. There was a really big bond. Whoever was there made TH their life. We took lessons all week and the weekend. I spent my birthday there, Mother’s Day, everything. We had been through so much – good and bad – seeing each other throw up, get naked, get hit, fall in love. In the outside world nobody understood what was going on here. If we lost this place where we belonged, knowing how extreme it was, I felt I wouldn’t belong anywhere else. It was too shameful to go out, nobody would believe us.
Mariam agrees:
These groups cater to some very basic human needs, such as the need to belong and find approval or acceptance. When you are in this group, you're going through such deep and intense experiences, you share the most intimate aspects of your life, you're really vulnerable. You have no defence, no protection. And you also go through these peak experiences so you feel you have finally found where you belong and you don't want to lose that. So you start compromising.
Because the need to belong is so strong, group members become complicit. They saw illegal or abusive behaviour happening, they sometimes took part in it, and they kept silent. Francesca says:
We felt very bonded to each other, like a family, but if it was a question of defending your friend or Jorge liking you, we always chose Jorge’s approval first. Or at least…you gave in, because you didn’t want to lose everything that TH meant to you…Everybody saw what was not right. But everybody was scared because nobody wanted to lose Jorge’s affection. We put up with the bullying because we wanted to stay so badly.
The school was the students’ and staff’s whole world, and they had a phobia of being cast out and shunned. Alfredo says:
The people at the school are your best friends, your brothers and sisters. And the one who has power over them is Jorge Llano. So if you ever go against him, he can close the doors on you. People stop talking to you. You become an unworthy person, until you fall back into Jorge’s good graces. I saw one of my best friends kneel in front of the whole school and beg Jorge for permission to return. It was that level of humiliation.
And staff knew that if they ever complained about something they had seen happen, Jorge and his team would turn it around so their complaint became about their issues. Mariam says:
Gaslighting is typical of all cults. Whenever you disagree with something or express discomfort, they turn it onto you - it’s because you have issues with authority, or with your father, you should work on that. They never take responsibility for anything, because they’re perfect. So you stop saying anything. And then there’s peer pressure because everyone is on the same page, so it’s not just Jorge saying ‘this is your issue’, it’s everyone. And eventually you start thinking ‘maybe it really is a problem with me’.
Jorge would try to keep people in TH, if they were still useful to him, by disparaging or undermining their attempts to set up their own therapeutic ventures. And, like many a high-control group, those who left were always described as having irredeemable psychological and moral problems. Alfredo, for example, left TH and denounced Jorge for his various abusive practices. Jorge responded by sending out an email to all TH members warning that Alfredo was a dangerous narco gangster who sold students drugs, lied, cheated, and even poisoned Jorge’s dogs. Alfredo had a demon within him, supposedly, and would get what was coming to him.
Bringing down a God
Eventually, one by one, the ‘survivors’ I interviewed managed to escape TH after several years within it. Mariam says:
When I first left TH, I still wanted to come back. They say you can leave the cult, but the cult doesn’t necessarily leave you. Back then, I didn’t know everything I know now, and still saw value in the school. But when I tried to start my own therapy school, Jorge saw it as a threat and kicked me out of TH. That was a blessing in disguise. Slowly, I started to understand what had happened to me and how I had been mistreated and manipulated, how I was a victim of mind control. That’s really tough - the ground moves from under your feet, everything you thought was real and good suddenly is not. I started looking back at all my years in TH, all the things I experienced, and realizing how traumatizing it was. I also experienced moral injury, because I had enabled some of what happened as part of the teaching staff.
Francesca finally left because she felt so psychologically bad. She says she had to do a lot of therapy to get to the point ‘where I can talk about it without crying’. Jose left as well - he was kicked out - and spent two years feeling physically sick and mentally dissociated. Some of the survivors I spoke to are still dealing with fear and trauma years after leaving TH, although others say they feel happy finally to be free of TH.
In around 2020, some of the women who had studied or worked at TH began to meet up and share their stories. They began to piece the picture together, realize how many students had been in secret relationships with Jorge, and that they had undergone systematic manipulation and abuse in the name of therapy. Finally, in 2023, when they heard about Jorge hitting on yet another young female student, they decided to go public. They started to publish their accounts as anonymous testimonies on the Instagram page Rompiendo el Miedo, or Breaking the Fear. The page features 21 testimonies from TH students and staff, men and women, including 12 women’s accounts of unwanted sexual advances from Jorge Llano during TH retreats and therapy workshops. The testimonies were published at the same time as another Instagram page - Gestalt Sin Abuso - which contains accusations of abuse by other teachers in the Claudio Naranjo lineage.
The publication of the testimonies on Rompiendo el Miedo was a shock for those TH members who had only seen the good side of TH, and who felt their lives had been healed and improved by Jorge. Maria, who appreciates her time in TH, says:
It hit me very hard when all this happened, I confess that I cried. It was very difficult for me to accept all this about Jorge, because I held him in high esteem. He helped me a lot in my process. I knew him, his wife, his family.
Some people were furious that others had spoken out, and the people who published the anonymous testimonies came in for online abuse. Francesca recalls:
One of the things that was hardest for me was to read comments from people who were close to me, students and friends. The comments made me feel sick. ‘They’re liars, traitors, feminists’. Being excluded and denounced like that is so painful…We’re not trying to get Jorge in jail. We’re just trying to say that this hurt us. But no, they can’t see that because I guess it hurts too much to see how fooled you’ve been. There’s a lot of shame in this. I’ve been dealing with this for years since I left. I have found strength. But I’m still scared, to the point where I get sick.
Jorge initially ignored the allegations, but as testimony after testimony was published, the pressure built up, and finally he resigned as head of TH and published a long post on Instagram, blaming the lineage he came from for any harm he caused:
I have been a channel of forces and a carrier of lineages of healing and emotional recovery, of personal empowerment, of health, and spiritual love… Hearing that this process was inappropriate, excessive, or misaligned for some individuals is something I regret. I took it from my teachers in blind and faithful love and passed it on to others…I have been contaminated by those processes and the baggage of that Dionysian Gestalt that we loved, but now we see that it also caused harm…I can understand that these approaches are no longer appropriate and relevant for participants in Gestalt training. The old Gestalt that some found wonderful and healing, today we see that for others it was tough and even harmful…I am stepping away from the school and the Human Transformation Foundation; I am withdrawing legally and civilly…
Meanwhile, a Whats App message he sent to a private group of loyal students showed a less repentant side:
3.36 am in the forest. My heart is pure.
Yes it’s true I slept with 5 women from the school in these last 25 years and I had a brief relationship with two of them and with another 5 it was counter-transference. To grab the breasts or a kiss, nothing morbid, to validate a lesbian, break the father-projection etc, all outside of the school. Never in any school exercise or without full consent. This is my truth!
He then accused his accusers of also sleeping with their students, and of being ‘scavengers’ on a ‘witch hunt’. He suggested he would start a new group soon to work on shamanism.
Jorge then disappeared from public view, although he resurfaced and has started organizing workshops again. Other senior teachers are still active in the global Gestalt network. Jorge’s son Igor is still running AWE, his popular psychedelic Gestalt school, which still holds Gestalt retreats at Jorge’s farm in Guasca. Meanwhile, in March the newspaper El Pais published a long feature about the accusations against Jorge, featuring interviews with some of the women who wrote testimonies. For the women who lived so long in fear, it’s a triumph that the first result when you Google his name is now an article in one of Spain’s leading newspapers about his abusive acts.
This is not a story of one bad apple. In part two, we will look at how some of the abuses committed at TH emerged - as Jorge himself said - from the lineage of ‘Dionysian Gestalt’ which Claudio Naranjo created, and which is still taught at Gestalt schools around the world. As Mariam says:
There's different levels. Of course there's a big issue about Jorge Llano, this charismatic leader who had a lot of power and how he abused and manipulated people. But I think the bigger and deeper issue is that the whole approach and philosophical underpinnings of Gestalt contributed to this. It comes from the top because Claudio Naranjo used the same techniques.
If you have experienced abuse or coercive persuasion in a psychedelic context, you can contact SHINE Collective, a support group for people who experience psychedelic abuse. There are also many organisations that support cult survivors such as Freedom of Mind. Cult expert Dr Steve Hassan and I have an event on psychedelics and cultic social dynamics on April 17 online, tickets here.
Here is an article on therapist abuse and the signs to watch out for.
It’s always so heartbreaking when people come to heal or with good intentions to help others and end up being harmed like this.
But I do want to say for anyone reading, not all Gestalt schools are like this! I did 2 years at the Gestalt Institute of Toronto and had a fantastic experience.
I’ve since recommended the school to many people and have known many people to do the training there and also have fantastic experiences.
Also many of the most grounded, heart centred, mature, self-aware, and brilliant people I’ve met have been Gestalt therapists. It’s a remarkable modality in the right hands.
The time I’ve spent training in Gestalt and seeing Gestalt therapists as a client has been incredibly valuable to me.
I’m clearly a huge fan of the modality but it really depends on the therapist so much!