I'll Be You(17)

If it’s not painful it means that you’re taking the easy route…Ignore the pain. A mandate to ignore your instincts. Which, when your instincts were wrong (as mine so often had been), was excellent advice. But what about when your instincts were warning you that something was wrong? If you set yourself on fire, the pain is the first thing that alerts you to potential damage.

As I flipped through the pages, a printed Excel spreadsheet slipped out from between two pages and fell to the floor. I picked it up and studied it. It was a list of prices:

Level One—$3,000

Reenactment 10-Story Series—$5,000

Weekend PSS Workshop—$4,500

Level Two—$5,000

Individual with Dr. Cindy—$4,250



The spreadsheet went on and on, most of the items on it neatly ticked off and highlighted in yellow. I skimmed it, all the way to the bottom of the list, where there was a sum total: $112,475.00.

I stared at this figure. It seemed impossible. Had my sister really just spent six figures on a self-help regimen? Putting aside the sheer luxury of that—Elli had that much money just sitting around?—there was something strongly not right about a group that charged that much for advice. I felt a sharp twist at my sternum. Culty. The neighbor’s word gripped me tighter now, less benign, more poisonous. What was this group?

Charlotte was barreling down the hallway at me from her bedroom, her eyes wild, a plastic Disney princess tiara in one hand and a matching wand in the other. She lifted these over her head, triumphant. “Tweasure!” she shouted. “Bewy tweasure now!”

I shoved the spreadsheet back in the binder, but not before my eye drifted back to the last item on the list.

Upper-Level Ojai Retreat—$12,500.



So that’s where my sister was: a GenFem retreat of some sort. Knowing this should have made me feel better. Instead, an amorphous unease pressed down, a black blot threading through my mind. I knew, without being able to say why, that something was terribly wrong.



* * *



—

That night, after we’d wrestled Charlotte into bed, I looked up GenFem on my phone. The organization’s website was reassuringly normal—slick and professional, with modern fonts and a gray, gold, and pink color palette. Inspiration—Transformation—Reclamation, it read. Lose “Yourself” and Find Your “Self” with GenFem’s Personal Success Method. I had no idea what this meant, but apparently the “system” involved sitting in circles with other women and laughing, doing stretches against a sunset backdrop, typing soberly on laptops while talking on the phone. The women in the photos—and they were all women, though in a wide variety of ages and ethnicities—had a roseate glow to them, as if lit by God herself.

They didn’t look like any cult members I’d ever seen. Nor did the woman on the site’s founder page—Dr. Cindy Medina, PhD, LMFT, CHT—bear any resemblance to a cult leader. She was probably mid-fifties, and looked attractive and well groomed—I sensed she’d had some work done around her chin and eyes—with her hair in a smart graying bob and a gold silk scarf tossed around her neck. She wore wire-rimmed glasses that she peered over with a cryptic, all-knowing smile. There were photos of her standing next to Hillary Clinton and Greta Thunberg, her name listed on the roster of international women’s conferences in Dubai and Iceland. I skimmed her biography: Dr. Cindy Medina, a world-renowned clinical psychologist and motivational speaker, developed the GenFem Method to empower women to achieve their best selves, free of the structures that have thwarted their achievements.

So my sister had felt thwarted. I wondered what “structure” was thwarting her, and then I wondered whether that structure had been me.

I clicked through the rest of the website, looking for information about GenFem’s Ojai retreat. The organization’s contact page had four addresses on it—centers in Santa Barbara, Sausalito, Toronto, and New Jersey—but nothing in Ojai; although I did find mention of a private healing retreat in the Topatopa Mountains on a page titled “Advantages of Becoming a Senior-Level Member.” (Other advantages: round-the-clock life Mentors, one-on-one Reenactment sessions, and a customized GenFem license plate holder.)

I dialed the phone number of the Santa Barbara center but it went straight to voicemail. “Hi, I’m trying to locate my sister. Her name’s Elli Hart, and she’s apparently at your retreat in Ojai. I’m wondering if you could call me back with some information about how to get in touch with her there.” I left my phone number and hung up. I had a feeling I wasn’t going to be getting a call back anytime soon.

This accomplished, I went back out to the living room and confronted my parents where they sat watching The Bachelorette. “Did you know that Elli had joined some sort of self-help group?”

My mother muted the show and gave my father a sidelong glance. “GenFem?”

“You know it?”

My mother shook her head. “Not really. She mentioned it a few times. She invited me to come to a meeting with her once but, you know, I’m already stretched so thin.” She waved a hand, her wrist thick with clattering energy beads.

“Is it a legitimate organization?”

“They have some kind of…educational center, I think they call it, over in Samarkand. Kathy from my yoga class says her daughter went a few times and it was a kind of feminist group. Classes in how to be more centered and assertive. Things like that.”