This pinned page has links to download PDFs of my articles, Pyramid of Abuse and Toxic Institutional Dynamics. Continue reading
Gaslighting for God: A Satirical Guide to Save Yourself from Spiritual Narcissists, by Becky Garrison
Countless resources shine light on dark details of malignant individuals and institutions. But Becky Garrison uniquely equips us with her master class in surgical satire. Gaslighting for God pokes holes in their persona puffery, unmasks their manipulations, and defangs their Medusa snakes of disinformation.
~Brad Sargent, abuse survivor blogger at futuristguy
I’ve been friends with Becky Garrison for 20+ years and she is someone I’ve learned much from on topics related to abuse, trauma, and recovery. In Gaslighting for God, she uses her in-depth knowledge of narcissism and perceptive analysis to turn Kingdom Klieg lights on abusive leaders in Christianity and other spiritual spheres. Her searing satire helps flay and display what motives and methods underlie such malignant ministers, in a way that mere non-fiction can’t quite do. This is a read we need!
Check out the Gaslighting for God publisher’s page at Lake Drive Books.
10 Years of Refinements in the Pyramid of Abuse Graphic
This post tracks the history of my Pyramid of Abuse and Scales of Accountability graphic from 2014 to the present, shares the changes I made along the way, and gives the reasoning behind them.
The 2025 version features these new revisions: (1) A name change from “Loyal Opposition” to “Conflicted.” (2) Changes to the ordering of the Pawns layer. (3) Addition of a second accountability scale to show level of complicity of those in Pawn layer roles. (4) With the addition of this new scale, I’ve updated the graphic title to “… SCALES of Accountability.”
I’ve been blogging about spiritual abuse for nearly 20 years. From the feedback I’ve received, it’s clear that the most widely helpful resource I’ve produced has been my Pyramid of Abuse and Scale of Accountability graphic and the descriptions of roles people play in a toxic system.
If you aren’t familiar with this resource, read this article. It goes layer by layer, role by role, to lay out the framework of who does what in an abusive organization. Here’s the main graphic from that article, alongside the new version, so you can compare and contrast. Continue reading
Peace-Making and Nation-Building in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Invictus
June 24th marks 30 years since the South African Springboks won the Rugby World Cup. This would be a great time to revisit the movie Invictus, to reflect on how Nelson Mandela and others used sports for peace-making and nation-building in post-Apartheid South Africa — reunifying skills that our nation needs!
The Invictus Blu-ray picture-in-picture feature shares clips of interviews with key players from that era. These men and women from the worlds of politics, sports, and journalism offer valuable insight into how and why this sporting event led to significant racial healing.
There are several other great documentaries about the 1995 Rugby World Cup and racial reconciliation in post-Apartheid South Africa.
Reconciliation: Mandela’s Miracle
Emphasizes the political dimensions of peace-making and nation-building.
The 16th Man
Emphasizes how Nelson Mandela’s personal support and encouragement of the Springbok’s rugby team released them to play a substantive role in national reconciliation and transformation.
The Wrong Side of the Bus
Shares the personal transformation journey of one South African man as he returns to his native country and finds interracial reconciliation and peace there.
Long Night’s Journey Into Day
Long Night’s Journey Into Day shares four stories of violence that occurred during the South African Apartheid era and were addressed during the country’s post-Apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and explores the necessity of forgiveness.
Futuristguy’s Field Guides: Essential Concepts and Visual Frameworks
If you are not familiar with my writing, here are key materials I’ve produced so far [as of June 2025].
These provide the foundation for the entire Futuristguy’s Field Guides project, though this content relates mostly to the first two Field Guides.
ESSENTIALS
The field of “abuse” is massive … so much detail to absorb, so many patterns to perceive and concepts to describe, so many possible directions to pursue. I’ve delved mostly into authoritarian systems, how their leaders function, and social/cultural grooming that seeks to implement “totalist” psychological control.
To force myself to extract the core of crucial topics, I developed a series of tutorials, using a format of three PowerPoint slides per concept. The first slide summarizes the concept, the second and third slides expand key points of information and typically give a series of graphics that embody the emotional impact of the concept. This link goes to a page with my tutorials on systems, systemic abuse, societal oppression, and nine “Essentials” that expand upon them.
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PYRAMID OF ABUSE
My first major framework was the Pyramid of Abuse and Scales of Accountability. I developed the first version of this graphic in 2014 and have posted updates several times since. You’ll find a PDF of the 2021 Pyramid version at this link.
This particular article has probably been the most often referenced piece I’ve produced. It’s based on my having found myself in five major situations of spiritual abuse in churches, parachurch ministries, and Christian non-profits. These totaled about 20 years out of the last 50 since I became a born-again Christian. It’s gone through several updates, and I’ve edited it slightly for this PDF. More refinements are forthcoming.
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SYSTEMS AND SYSTEMICS
Systems thinking is crucial to understanding how institutions work. It gives us clues on how abusive processes and procedures find their way into organizational strategies and structures – and how harm can continue from an institution, even if malignant individuals who infused their abusiveness into it end up removed. You’ll find a PDF of basics on systems at this link.
Readers on Twitter have indicated interest in issues of institutional dynamics and what constitutes an “industrial complex.” So, I put together sections from three source articles and one case study for this article on Toxic Institutional Dynamics. Contents include:
- Describing Systems and Systemic Abuse
- Seven Elements in Social/Organizational Systems
- Devolving from an Open System to a Closed Industrial Complex
- Mutually-Benefiting Platforms and Pushback by Those Victimized
- Focusing in on Five Platform Element Clusters in an Industrial Complex
- An Example of My Process for Detecting the Pieces
- Sources for this Article [links to earlier posted versions]
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DEALING WITH SICK LEADERS AND SYSTEMS
My material on how pyramid systems work included a framework for what to do about individuals who demonstrate they are between unhealthy to outright malignant, yet who hold roles of influence in organizations. It also included parallel processes for addressing institutional systems that are unhealthy to extremely toxic. You’ll find the descriptions and charts toward the end of this compilation page, which has the entire original material I posted on pyramids. [See Step 5, Overview. Dealing with Toxic Leaders Who Need Healing and Sick Organizational Systems That Need Repairing.]
People in positions of power may prove to be UNqualified to lead at this time, due to immaturity and/or lack of skills. At least those unqualified may experience growth to a point of becoming qualified to lead. Others may even demonstrate themselves to be DISqualified from leadership, perhaps permanently, due to abuse of power, or other severe character issues of deficient morals and ethics. This Field Guides page details these distinctions and qualification criteria, and the following links give additional background.
Annotated Reader’s Guide to Futuristguy on Abuse Recovery, Advocacy, and Activism
Building Blocks in a Certification System for Healthy Leaders and Holistic Organizations – Part 2
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COMPASS OF SOCIAL CONTROL CULTURES
Over the years, I realized that there were significant differences among the various abuse of power situations I’d experienced. This led me to develop a framework that captured distinctives of social control systems. I started with three ways – chaos, charisma, and compliance – that authoritarian leaders used to groom people for totalistic psychological control. Eventually I added five other types that I have experienced and/or seen in organizational systems, and that have examples in history we can use as case studies. You’ll find the series of six posts with my most recent version of systems of social control on this compilation page.
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A Flowering Plant and a Field Guide Progress Report
Bloom Where We are Planted
These are photos I took today – June 19, 2025 – of flower clusters on our family’s hoya plant.
If you’ve never seen hoya flowers up close, when still growing, they look like a spray of pink plastic stars on spindly streamers.
When mature, they look and feel like velvet, light pink with an orange-ish button and yellow dot in the middle. They often get a drop of liquid forming in the center of each star. The flowers smell like a pungent, sweet perfume at this stage, and the floral fragrance can literally overtake a room.
Within a few weeks, the stars and their streamers dry up and fall off, leaving behind the node on which they flourished. That node grows a tiny bit each time it hosts a flower cluster, and will serve as a host for more clusters as time goes by.
Look at the length of the nodes in the photo, and take a guess at how old our plant is …
Book Review: Presence Based Witness by David Fitch and Gino Curcuruto
PRESENCE BASED WITNESS by David Fitch and Gino Curcuruto is available for Kindle. and in a print version.
The way my brain works is to look for systems of interconnected items, zoom in on details, and find helpful patterns. So I appreciate frameworks that take some large system or other and break it down into a process that shows the flow among the items, without disconnecting the elements from one another. That, thankfully, is what David Finch and Gino Curcuruto have done for us in their booklet, Presence Based Witness.
Finch and Curcuruto’s booklet may be a short read, but it is long on insights. They write accessibly, with potent personal stories that illustrate the six practical steps in this personal, presence-based process for connections and conversations. The approach they describe puts us in a role of humility. They show us what it looks like to be present in a place with other people, observe and listen carefully to what is going on, and then say what we see of how God is at work there. This tends to open opportunities with people who are curious, ready, and/or willing for us to share with them the good news and to watch for the Spirit’s activities among us.
Even though their way slows down our pace, it is not passivity: We must be actively engaged in whatever place we are rooted into, with whomever the Spirit is putting in our path. It also removes us from the often pushy and mechanistic tactics of so many conventional approaches to evangelism that get legitimately critiqued as relationally manipulative and culturally colonizing.
Presence Based Witness would be great to use in a group study or teamwork training. Every short chapter offers multiple issues to discuss, relevant Scripture to consider, and stories to get us started. I highly recommend this booklet!
Disclosure: I was on the launch team for Presence Based Witness and had early access to a draft version.
Thoughts on Resistance Movements in The Hunger Games Saga
To prepare for next month’s release of Sunrise on the Reaping, I’ve been listening to the audiobooks of The Hunger Games trilogy plus The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Besides getting into the flow of the epic plotlines, I’ve been listening more specifically for clues about the resistance movements in Panem.
I especially hope Sunrise will share origin stories for all kinds of resisters who populate Suzanne Collins’ saga. We eventually see rebels who are stylists and game-makers, politicians and peacekeepers, merchants and workers, Capitol and District, citizen survivors and Hunger Games victors. How did they get to a point of moving beyond trauma to action? To me, this mystery feels like a missing piece we need to tie the series together. I’ve been collecting my thoughts on resistance movements in Panem …
As to origins of long-term efforts to implant resistance, in Mockingjay, Collins states in passing that President Coin was behind organizing the underground. We also learn during the rescue of Peeta that there are spies in the Capitol, and that covers get blown when there are such drastic actions.
But Collins drops some of her most intriguing clues about the underground with details about probable merchant rebels in District 12. Connecting the dots in The Hunger Games, we see that seeds of resistance were in place even before Haymitch’s Hunger Games 50.
Katniss’ friend, Madge Undersee, is the daughter of the mayor. After the reaping, it is Madge who gives Katniss the mockingjay pin as her district token to wear in the 74th Hunger Games. Madge tells Katniss this pin has been their family a long time. She also says that it belonged to her aunt, Maysilee Donner, who wore it as a tribute in the same Games that Haymitch won.
We learn from the video of Haymitch’s Games in Catching Fire that Maysilee and Haymitch were allies for a time in those Games. The mayor’s wife (only named as Mrs. Undersee) is the twin sister of Maysilee Donner—one of District 12’s three other tributes besides Haymitch sent to the second Quarter Quell. Maysilee’s parents owned the local sweets shop. Mrs. Undersee, Maysilee, and Katniss’ mother were all friends in their growing up years. Maysilee perishes in the Games As adults, Katniss’ mother eventually becomes an apothecary and healer for the community, and Mrs. Undersee suffers from debilitating headaches [perhaps due to PTSD?], for which she takes morphling. When Gale receives a whipping for illegal hunting, Mrs. Undersee gives Madge permission to give half a dozen vials of the drug to Katniss’ mother to administer to Gale. Healing and helping victims of Panem’s cruelty … both acts of rebellion.
How far back does Madge’s pin go? The mockingjay has long been a symbol of rebellion. The mockingjay species may have begun during the Dark Days of the Districts’ fight against the Capitol. And we’re told that when the Capitol’s jabberjay surveillance birds failed, they were released into the wild to die, but mated with mockingbirds and created a species the Capitol did not intend. So, this pin could even be more than 75 years old when Madge gives it to Katniss.
Katniss notes that the mockingjay pin is made of gold—worth enough to feed a family for a year. Quite a gift … and it certainly represents a large investment, even for a merchant family. Why did the Donners have this in pin the first place—regardless of whether they purchased it from someone else, or had it custom-made? I’m hoping we find out more about this iconic pin and the mockingjay symbol in the forthcoming Panem installment, Sunrise on the Reaping …
Presence Based Witness by Fitch & Curcuruto available for pre-order
PRESENCE BASED WITNESS by David Fitch and Gino Curcuruto is available for pre-order on Kindle.
I’m on the launch team for this short book that offers practical frameworks for making sense of “evangelism.” I appreciate that the authors reject manipulative, hit-and-run methods for supposedly reaching others for Christ, and that they give us solid steps for a rooted-in presence, for whatever place we’re in.
This is a 5-star read for real-world witness–consider pre-ordering!
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