Letter 3 — This Is How You Are Thinking
“This is how you are thinking. This is how you are feeling.” When you deny it, they call it stubbornness. When you accept it, they’ve won. There’s no door out of that room.
For a long time, I didn’t think of it as brainwashing. I thought of it as finally being told the truth about myself by people who cared enough to be honest. The mechanism that made this possible is specific. It can be named.
The Numbers
Let me start with who was involved.
The five voices.
The shaman. My ex. Her middle sister. Her youngest sister. And me — against myself.
Five people, all agreeing on one thing: I was the problem. Crazy. Fake. Obsessive. Possessed. Selfish. Five voices. One target. And the target believed all five of them.
But here’s the part I couldn’t see from inside it.
At first, you think the correction is clarity. Someone is finally telling you the truth.
Then you begin rehearsing explanations before conversations happen.
Then you start asking whether something will cause conflict instead of whether it is true.
By the end, you are your own prosecutor. The shaman doesn’t need to be in the room. You are doing her job for her.
This Is How You Are Thinking
The shaman would say: “This is how you are thinking. This is how you are feeling.”
Not as a question. As a statement — delivered with the certainty of someone who has spiritual access to your interior world that you yourself don’t have.
In the beginning, I said, “No, that’s not what I meant. That’s not how I was feeling.”
They called that being stubborn. Giving excuses instead of accepting the truth.
My ex put it more precisely: “Even if you don’t feel that way, if there’s even one per cent of it being true, that’s something you have to accept about yourself.”
Think about that logic.
Someone tells you what you’re thinking. You deny it. That denial becomes proof they’re right — you’re just too stubborn to accept the truth. The sign is always the same: the room with no door.
If you deny what they tell you → you’re stubborn.
If you accept what they tell you → you’ve admitted they’re right.
Either way, your internal reality gets replaced with theirs. You cannot win in that room. You can only stay in it until you stop trying to leave.
The Sister Hair Example
My ex’s youngest sister told my ex that having short hair didn’t look good on her — that she should grow it long. Normal sister opinion. The kind of thing people say.
Here is who she was, before the shaman named her.
She knew about both her sisters’ queerness and accepted them without hesitation. She was, as a heterosexual, a genuine fan of gay culture — enthusiastic, warm, at home in it. She made blunt comments sometimes. That was her personality: direct, unfiltered, not always reading the room. Not hostile. Just herself.
The shaman looked at this girl and said: she is conservative. She doesn’t want her sisters to date women. She wants them to date men.
Then the hair comment arrived, and the shaman had the evidence she needed.
She told the youngest sister, “You’re being jealous. You want your big sister to date men.”
The sister denied it.
My ex scolded her for not accepting her “true intentions.”
The sister couldn’t escape. Deny the interpretation → you’re not accepting truth. Accept the interpretation → you’ve confessed to jealousy and homophobia. The shaman took a blunt personality and assigned it a motive. She took directness and called it concealed homophobia. She took a girl who had accepted her sisters without question and made her the threat inside the family.
The room had no door. The only variable was how long before you stopped trying to find one.
The Complete Isolation
The five-against-one dynamic was just the start. The shaman systematically removed every other voice.
Friends: She gave spiritual reasons. “Some of them are too possessed. Too depressed. Too stubborn. Don’t tell them about the ceremonies — they won’t understand. And if you tell them, the rituals will be tainted. The money you spent on them will be worthless.”
She made me complicit in my own isolation. If I told my friends what was happening, I would ruin the expensive spiritual work we were doing. Then she sent me a blog post. The argument: smart people don’t care about social networks. When you become successful, the network orbits you. Connection is something you earn through achievement.
You have your family. Why do you need friends? People stick around when you are successful.
The isolation didn’t feel like deprivation. It felt like focus. By the time she said you have your family, the family she meant was my ex’s. My parents had been framed as frauds. My ex’s family had been positioned as my real family. My friends had been reclassified as spiritually dangerous or simply unnecessary.
When I finally told my middle school friends what had happened, they said two things. The first: you sound like someone who just got out of a cult. The second was harder. They were not happy that I hadn’t contacted them when it was happening. They felt betrayed — not because I had disappeared, but because when they had tried to reach me, I had defended my ex and the shaman. I had chosen the system’s version of events over what the people who knew me longest could see clearly.
The isolation doesn’t just remove outside voices. It turns you into the instrument of your own removal.
Parents: The shaman told us not to contact my parents. “They abandoned you. And they’re selfish like you.”
She wasn’t entirely wrong. My parents are Christians. When I came out as queer, my mother ghosted me for months while we lived in the same apartment. My father told me I was possessed by Satan. When I was sick, he refused to pay for doctors: if you wanted independence, fix your own problems.
They had rejected me. The shaman knew this. She took that reality and reframed it as a spiritual reason to cut them off entirely. She didn’t lie. She just reframed. And I had already learned I couldn’t rely on my parents. So cutting them off felt like accepting reality, not isolation.
By the time the shaman’s control was complete, I had no family support, no friends, no partner’s family — they were being recruited against me — and no self. I’d been told I was fake and couldn’t be trusted. Just my ex. The only one I could trust. The only one to lean on.
This is why the control was so complete. When you have no one else — when your Christian parents have already told you you’re possessed — you can’t risk losing the one person who stayed. Even when that person is being used to destroy you.
Beyond the isolation, she dismantled how I saw myself. You’re all fake. We’re all truthful. Making it a binary: either you believe us, which is the truth, or you believe yourself, which is lies. You have bad qualities that cannot be borne — not flaws to work on, but qualities so unbearable no one could tolerate them. Your emotions are fake. Happy? Fake. Sad? Fake. Loving? Fake. Any self-esteem you have is just arrogance, making it impossible to defend myself without proving her point.
And the worst part: how the shaman reframed our entire history together.
She had pity. You had an obsession. It was never love.
Every memory of being loved — rewritten as pity. Every moment of connection — rewritten as my obsession. I repeated these words in my unsent letters until they became my truth. This is what it looks like to lose not just a relationship but your entire sense of being lovable inside it.
From a temple where I’m learning that my own account of my own interior is the only one with real authority,
Emotionally yours, Suinny
P.S. If you’ve ever been in a room where agreeing proves the verdict and disagreeing also proves the verdict, you already know what it costs to stay. And you already know the only way out isn’t through the argument. It’s through the handwriting. The accumulation. The case file you build yourself.
Next week: She called me cleverly evil. The distinction mattered to her. I want to show you why.