My mother could be one of the cruelest and coldest people I knew. She lacked empathy for people and saw the world as being filled with lazy people who just were working hard enough to get to a better place in life. People always believe me when I tell this part of the story, but they’re always shocked when I reveal the next part…

My mother was a new-age spiritual guru.

That’s right. My mother, the narcissist, the woman whose cruel child abuse tactics I have spread all over the internet, was a pretty well-known spiritual medium and energy healer. At least, that’s what she told the people who paid to sit on the phone with her.

She would clear out their chakras. Talk to their spirit guides. Sometimes, she would even call up their dead pets and give them all kinds of super magical advice based on what the stars were doing.

When she hung up the phone, however, my mother changed.

The spiritual guru slipped away and in her place was the screaming, demeaning harpy sitting on piles of animal feces and trash. She would run people down, and criticize their looks, and the way they lived their lives. She loved making fun of people who were different from her and meanly commented that marginalized communities brought their struggles on themselves.

My mother sat atop the early wave of new-age spirituality.

She sold her skills and spent thousands of dollars buying things like crystals and The Book of Enoch. She burned incense, held seances, and appeared on podcasts along with people who were friends with the Dalai Lama. She was into her beliefs wholeheartedly, thinking that God had sent her on a special mission to commune with humans and aliens alike.

When she died, though, my mother was not some open-minded bastion of enlightenment. Cold, bitter, and alone, she was more close-minded and suspicious of the people around her than ever before. That’s because she took a wrong turn and fell into a trap. That trap was the new-age-to-alt-right pipeline.

The strange connection between new-age…