I'll Be You(39)

I didn’t blame my sister for the path that my life had taken without her. Would things have been any different if she’d stayed, and we’d watched our novelty twin act fade away into bit parts in children’s movies? Probably not. Maybe, though…maybe if she’d been there to prop me up, I wouldn’t have fallen so low.

But that kind of conjecture is pointless. If I’ve learned nothing else from years of rehab, it’s that the person responsible for your addiction is ultimately always yourself.





12




IT HAD NOW BEEN six days since I arrived in Santa Barbara and I’d said I was only going to stay a long weekend, but no one seemed particularly concerned about the fact that I was still there. Probably because the minute I left they would have to start changing Charlotte’s Pull-Ups themselves. The way I saw it, my ongoing presence was a sign that things with my sister were decidedly not right—that she had not, as my mother insisted she would, figured out her shit and come back to retrieve her daughter. And yet my mother’s capacity for intentional blindness was breathtaking. Behind his morning newspaper, my father was looking more gray and drawn by the day—he understood, surely, that something had gone sideways—but my mother’s chirpy positivity was like a bulldozer, paving him under.

“So what do my girls have planned today?” My mother was buzzing around the kitchen, spooning chia seeds into coconut milk, squeezing lemon into her green tea. I sat next to Charlotte at the breakfast table, cutting bananas into coins that the toddler shoved into her mouth with slimy fists.

“First the park,” I said. “Then maybe we’ll go to the aquarium.”

My mom brightened. “Doesn’t that sound nice?”

It did sound nice. It was also not at all what I had planned for the day.

I’d spent the previous evening, after my return from my sister’s house, doing deeper internet searches on GenFem. There wasn’t much to be found. I started with their website, searching for clues, but the pages offered no insights about what I’d seen at that Ojai compound. None of the photos featured women with shaved heads or identical dresses, just ones that looked like people you might run into in the Whole Foods produce aisle. The group’s website copy didn’t help, either: It could have been taken from a corporate marketing newsletter, full of anodyne promises about building internal strength strategies and reenacting critical moments in order to transcend past choices and building an international matriarchal sisterhood.

I read it over and over, trying to figure out how this generic pabulum had convinced my sister to walk out of her life. Then I plugged GenFem and cult into Google, just to see what came up.

It spit out a few results, most of them posts from a subreddit titled “r/cults.” I clicked on a post by a woman who identified herself only as “a former member.”

    I’m not putting my name here bc GenFem is litigious AF and I don’t want to end up being sued but I spent $67,000 over the course of a year on “seminars” and one-on-one sessions that were supposed to launch me up some ladder to enlightenment & success and instead all I ended up was broke. Dr. Cindy just kind of…gets into your head. And not in a good way. The women do whatever she tells them to do out of fear of pissing her off and getting a Sufferance. Like, she thought my boyfriend was holding me back and when I told her that I didn’t want to dump him, she told me that I was just insecure because I was overweight and didn’t have any self-confidence. And maybe she was a little bit right but it all felt so intimidating. My punishment was losing 20 pounds so fast that my hair started falling out. Oh, and she encouraged me to do all kinds of vengeance shit to him that was borderline illegal, too. All in the name of some kind of perverse female power. STAY AWAY.



I found a few other mentions of the group online, primarily on self-help bulletin boards where members attested to positive life changes that they attributed to their membership in GenFem—I’m so much happier and more confident! I was bankrupt and now I’m a millionaire! A Yelp page for the Canadian center had a few one-star reviews, mostly from people who complained the program didn’t produce the miracles they’d expected, especially considering the cost. But these had been drowned out by a deluge of five-star reviews, all suspiciously similar.

A little further digging and I learned that Dr. Cindy Medina had previously owned a therapy practice in Connecticut, but had abruptly shut it down a decade back. A local Connecticut court website listed a lawsuit that had been filed against her by three former clients, but there were no details. GenFem had sprung up a few years later, thousands of miles away on the opposite coast. Dr. Medina did have a degree in psychiatry, and a PhD in psychology, from colleges I’d heard of; but she also had certification in hypnotherapy and “neurolinguistic programming,” which Wikipedia categorized as a pseudoscience.

After that, the well ran dry. GenFem had managed to exist under the radar, as far as the internet was concerned.

I wondered if I should enlist Caleb’s help—he’d been a reporter once, maybe he knew more about detective work than I did. And then I wondered if I was just trying to come up with an excuse to call him because I liked him. And since I could already count all the ways that might spin out badly and lead to further disappointment, I froze up entirely. Instead, our last correspondence had been a shrug emoji, which I’d sent as a cryptic response to a text he’d sent: How’s it going? Any news from Ojai?