I have walked through this terrain myself.
Not as a victim, but as someone who has seen from the inside how distortion operates when authority, spiritual projection, and psychological pressure collapse into one field.
Years ago, I attended a professional self-development workshop led by Lionel Santucci.
The container presented itself as corporate personal growth.
The facilitator, however, displayed an unmasked devotional fixation on Krishna and used it to justify authority, purity narratives, and unquestioned obedience.
From the very first days, red flags were visible:
• non-neutral interventions
• emotional manipulation disguised as “teaching”
• subtle pressure to conform
• authoritarian dynamics
• spiritual language used to override personal boundaries
But the real fracture came at the end of the program.
The facilitator asked me — and another man — to cut our hair as a sign of devotion.
He claimed we had “signed a contract” at the beginning agreeing to follow his instructions and to never disclose any practice from the workshop.
This was framed as spiritual surrender, yet its structure was pure coercion.
I refused.
I packed my bags and prepared to leave.
That is when the manipulation surfaced with full force.
He threatened to stop the entire workshop for everyone, without any refund, placing the blame on me if I did not comply.
The group, already under his influence, spent four hours trying to convince me to obey.
At one point, after so much collective pressure, I even questioned whether I had lost touch with reality or whether everyone else had fallen under his mental grip.
In the end, I yielded to the pressure and allowed someone to cut my hair.
The traumatic impact was not the haircut.
The wound was the moment I stepped away from my inner authority and abandoned my own knowing.
It took months to recover.
I filed a legal complaint against Lionel Santucci, because responsibility does not vanish simply because someone hides behind spiritual language.
In hindsight, I can see the archetypal pattern:
he played the shadow-guru, the one who exposes where I had given away my sovereignty.
And I played the one who needed to reclaim it.
But insight does not absolve abuse.
My clarity today does not erase the ethical and legal implications of what happened.
I share this here not to dramatize, not to seek sympathy, and not to craft a redemption arc.
I share it because I understand, from direct experience, how subtle and perverse these dynamics can become when spiritual projection mixes with psychological pressure and charismatic authority.
This is why sovereignty is not a concept for me.
It is lived experience.
And this is why I refuse any structure — spiritual, psychological, or relational — that asks someone to give up the authority that belongs to their own inner truth.