I went on a self-improvement "retreat" with my mom

[Music] hey guys what's up and welcome back to my channel so today we're gonna discuss something I've been wanting to discuss for a while so if you follow me on Instagram or on Twitter you'll know that I went on this self-improvement retreat with my mother and it went as her emotional support because I think it's [ __ ] but we'll get into it let's start with the basics my mom has a life coach and his name this is a code name is Blake Blake is a fraud I think Blake is an absolute hack I told my mom since day one this guy is ridiculous and as my therapist said anyone can call themselves a life coach also my aunt looked into a course of certification to become a life coach and it's a total of two and a half hours so if you want that as a career you can do it today and be certified by tomorrow it turns out calm down I just had coffee and I'm just like so my mom had this life coach Blake he charges an inordinate amount for someone who doesn't have any degrees in like psychology or anything of this sort like we're talking about six or seven hundred dollars an hour which i think is absolutely insane but anyway I said that I had an awful feeling about him my mom then went on a retreat with him last year with my aunt and a group of other people of course so they went on that retreat my mom had a good experience the retreat is marketed as self-improvement specifically for CEOs so it's specifically for people who run a business and have a lot of really intense responsibilities and have a lot of people working beneath them so it's catered to that positive experience apparently so she asked me to go on this second retreat with her with Blake in Bali so let me just say one thing all of the participants except one or two were nice people and were smart people and none of this is a reflection on them so what I'm talking about this retreat I'm not talking about them I'm talking about the people running it and my experience that's it I'm not judging any of the participants there because they were all nice and smart people which is why it was confusing like why they would listen to this idiot but anyway I agreed to go to Bali with my mom and I'd already been to Bali so I knew it was a beautiful place so I was like you know what of course the central reason was to be an emotional support for her so I did the forty hours of travel to get there and I was very clear with my mother saying that I don't support Blake I don't support what he's doing I think that he's a hack and that's why I ran a background check before going on this trip because I was like I want to know what this person is done it turns out that the name he's going by is not his real name like he changed his first and last name which wouldn't necessarily be a red flag if it just were that but then I also saw that he started a lot of businesses I saw that he had debtors so people he owed money to and the background check doesn't give you all that much information it's not like they explained the context of everything so I still tried to keep an open mind though I was like this is bizarre the point of me going was to be a critical eye and to look at it and say whether I think it's legit or not being inside the situation rather than far away it is to be noted that Blake also wanted my mother to invest in his company which does these retreats which I thought was also a terrible idea the people running this were Blake so Blake had a partner in this business called Sam and then they had these two kind of like secretary type women who we won't name because it's not important but they both reminded me of Manson girls like long hair flowy dresses very hippie very creepy it creeped me out I don't know it just made me feel off so when I first met Blake I'd talked to him via video chat once for a life coaching thing my mom did not important but I'd never met him in person and as soon as I met him in person I got Jerry Maguire vibes and I mean that in the worst way possible like you know at the beginning when he's slimy and you don't like him because he's just kind of like a shitty kind of like salesman type personality well that's kind of how I felt with Blake and I just felt very uneasy immediately also because he had this habit of hugging everyone and I don't just hug you if I don't know you or if I like you already I'm not gonna hug you first of all and he kept saying I'm so happy you're here I'm so happy you're here and they did this thing everyone him Sam and the two women secretaries always did this really annoying voice instead of having their natural normal voice they'd be like it's important to Ike really sometimes let go and disconnect from pane and I was just like why are you talking like that why wow I'm getting like really angry so a couple of things happened on this trip that made me feel extremely extremely alarmed and I'm not gonna call this group a cult I'm gonna just say that they have very culty traits the first night we were there I had a full-on panic attack and started crying at dinner which was great pretty much all the other participants there were I think 18 in total saw that so that was cool mainly because as much as I can laugh about it now and as much as I can be fired up about it now when I was there I felt extremely isolated just uncomfortable for the simple reason that as far as I knew everyone seemed to be buying the [ __ ] so the first night they were talking about what we're gonna do for the rest of the week you know like the daily schedule what time we wake up whatever everyone there just seemed to like eat up all the [ __ ] he said like he could say the most basic platitude and people would be like oh my god like he could literally say live laugh love and someone would be like and that alarmed me that really alarmed me because I was like this guy could say the sky is green and everyone here would agree mind you we were in Bali at this point in the middle of [ __ ] rice fields there was nothing around us I took hours to get to where we were so the first night we also were supposed to get blessed by monks I was okay with even though I'm not a religious person because for me blessings are just good intentions compared to you know like actually participating in religious rituals which we'll get to because it's very important mind you this was not marketed as a spiritual retreat it was marketed as self-help there was no implication of any religion or spiritual [ __ ] so we're sitting in like three rows and I'm at the end of a row and it's like nighttime it's pretty much pitch-black out and the monks bless everyone except for me they forgot me and it was very humiliating because like they were packing up and then my mom was like wait you forgot her and so like everyone turned to look at me be like open it was just really not a moment for me so then a blessing name and my mom was a little bit annoyed at Blake at this point because a lot of logistical things went wrong and I'm not gonna bore you with the details but essentially it was supposed to take us two hours to get to the place in Bali and it took us five because they forgot to send a car for us it was a whole thing so my mom was already not so you were happy with Blake then when they forgot me my mom was like - Blake this is your job to make sure that every in order you know so the next day we have this kind of therapy session and my new are days were from 7 a.m. to 8 or 9 p.m. straight activities and always being with people like you had maybe one hour to yourself while we were having this therapy session we're all sitting in a circle and this like weird Hut thing that also was deeply unsettling to me because it was like there were candles it looked like something like something was about to be sacrificed and so we had this therapy and in the spirit of keeping an open mind I participated in everything I could except for one thing which we'll get into so when we were having this therapy we had like three questions we kind of had to answer first why were partaking this retreat second what a high point in our life was now in a low point like specifically in the moment like what's going well for you what's going badly when I had to respond as to why I was there I was just very honest and I said I'm here to support my mom because realistically you guys probably can tell I would never go on a trip like this it's just not my jam I keep self-help on my shelf and that's it in therapy which is probably what other people who were in this should be seeking because I feel like this guy's not the answer so I said that a high point was that like my job is going well my marriage is going well and a low point was that my mental health is not going well and I got like teary eyed saying this which is so embarrassing because I don't like crying in front of people I don't know even though I've cried on camera before I just don't like it in person because it's really awkward and then people try to cheer you up but they don't know you so they don't know what to say walk out the door and you see someone that you know and they ask you how you are you just have to say that you're fine when you're not really fine but you just can't get into it because they would never understand also I kind of wanted to be the badass there because I was the only heavily tattooed one and I just really dropped the ball on that and another thing I said was that I also felt a bit of anxiety about being there I was very open about that because everyone had a specific purpose and I was just there as a supporter for my mom so I kind of felt like I fit in less okay so it makes you feel outside so my mom then has a talk with Blake I can't remember about what one-on-one I wasn't there Blake has the audacity to tell her that the night prior the Munks hadn't blessed me because they could tell I wasn't committed to being there and that I didn't really care about being there and so they chose not to bless because they could tell quick note so I talked to my mom about this conversation and a quick clarification apparently what he said was that the monks it was like they didn't see me because I was only there for her so it's almost like I was invisible which honestly to me is just as bad but I just figured I'd clarify that needless to say that's [ __ ] my mom tells me this and of course I might rape because first of all I think it's pretty committed for me to just leave everything pre film everything edit everything do a 40-hour trip to be there for my mom to me that shows enough commitment but I digress understandably I'm irate because I can tell that Blake is trying to manipulate my mom cuz he's trying to make her think like I don't give a [ __ ] and I'm just kind of there it was just kind of disgusting to me cuz I really did open up in that therapy session like I cried for I cried okay I really did open up so it really made me feel like [ __ ] that he was just like I yeah she doesn't care and I'm like I participated more than some of the participants but go off Blake at this point Blake is really just on my [ __ ] list like I already even like him before but after this I'm like no honey it's not it's not working everyone have to write a bio in third person which sounds so douchey everyone have to write a bio and some people have like blocks of text I have like three lines cuz I wanted to be as vague and as anonymous as possible we also had an outline of our schedule even though it ended up changing and it was all quite detailed right so it was interesting that they left this out so when we were there we always pretty much ate every meal together and they were like oh yeah so we want you guys essentially to try to be vegan this week and I was like I don't really have a problem with that I eat vegetarian 99% of the time so I didn't have a problem but I just thought it was weird that they wouldn't tell us that before pretty big aspect to control in someone's life what they eat or don't eat especially cuz it was a fixed menu so it's not like you could pick it was actually pretty good but they also had another rule and this one bothered me more where they were like yeah we think you shouldn't drink alcohol this week and I was like [ __ ] if I have to listen to your [ __ ] for 24 hours and I can't have a mojito or a glass of wine really for a lot of people myself included this was partially a vacation because you're taking time off work so it is kind of a vacation even if you're working on your so I'm like if I can't have a drink like one I'm not talking about getting slammed or hammered I'm really just talking about one drink I didn't like that I didn't like the controlling aspect of like you decide our schedule you decide when we eat you decide when we drink like can I breathe you know like it just felt very constraining especially because we had very little free time so it was just a lot to be asking especially for me where this is my job I make my own schedule I eat what I want when I want if I want to have a [ __ ] drink I'm gonna have one and here all of a sudden I can't control any of it whatever it's all together concerning not just that by itself okay so his last name his fake last name like the the name he's going by now he chose the last name that sounds Italian but it's not Italian because I'm Italian Italians my first language I know an Italian last name when I see one the type that sounds like it would be but if you actually know you know that nobody has that last name my mom and I were talking with this other participant who was Italian so we're all speaking in Italian and he comes up to us and he's like oh it's my Italian crew or whatever and he's like you know I'm Italian as well and I had to laugh because his real last name is Irish and my mom knows that because I told her and my mom was like really cuz she was just testing him now to see if he would tell her the truth he's like yeah don't you know my last name is and my mom's like yeah I'm gonna talk to you about that so then they go off and we were about to go for some reason we had whitewater rafting that day which was fun but completely irrelevant compared to the purpose of the retreat but anyway my mom goes to talk to him because she wants to confront him about the fake name thing and he says oh yeah everyone in California changes their name which I'm like I don't know anyone who's changed their name but if you want to rebrand that's fine but if you want my mom to be an investor it's probably better to tell her that before rather than after when me does a background check and I find out and then I tell her because then you automatically look shady he just says that everyone in California changes their name and he thought it wasn't important and my mom understandably was annoyed because she's like if I'm gonna be an investor you need to be transparent with me you can't just like hide things it doesn't really inspire a lot of trust does it it's also like what could he be hiding about the company the last thing that happened before whitewater rafting is my mom told Blake that I was pissed at him for the Munk situation Blake has the audacity to say oh yeah people get sent when you hit a soft spot and I'm like yes that's definitely what it is it's a soft spot it's not you being a manipulative prick but okay it's also important to note that his partner in the company Sam he actually used to teach at a very very very prestigious university so like he was viewed as the intellectual but it turns out I don't think he's an intellectual on the contrary I think he's I'm not gonna get that shitty I don't think he's an intellectual I think he just says platitudes and people are shook like both him and Blake are as deep as a 13 year old girl on tumblr that's just it okay but anytime Sam spoke it was like he [ __ ] created the universe people are like legitimately this is something that Sam said so you can judge for yourself how deep he is he said that in life there's good and bad and there's dark and light and I'm like yeah we know like this is not brand new information but he'd say it with the voice like the in life there's darkness and there's light and it's our job to find our purpose through that and it's like [ __ ] we know like we know I can turn the lights on and off yeah light and dark we got it okay so anyway another thing to be noted you know how I said there were like 18 participants well it turns out that a good number of those participants are actually people in training to work for Blake in this company so a bunch of the people who did therapy with me never said they are soon to be employees so they're essentially on payroll but acted like they were participants so it's like they were very much manipulating the narrative right because it's like if you're sitting in a circle and someone's talking about how much Blake helped them and how great he is and everything and then you find out their own payroll you're just kind of like so is any of what you're saying true or is your name your name like what is the deal and we found this out via myself my mom and the other Italian person that was with us talking and adding up [ __ ] we all separately found out so they never were open about that at the end of the retreat my mom called Blake out for this then the next day there was a spiritual thing and that's why I said there was no emphasis on the spiritual in the descriptor and the selling of this retreat it just said it was for self-improvement we were supposed to go in part in an emotional cleansing now like I said this wasn't marketed as a spiritual retreat so I was kind of confused as to why in a self-improvement retreat they would kind of impose spirituality especially because there was no agreement with all of us that we were all spiritual or that we were all you know in the same boat so I was kind of surprised that they would kind of impose that as like the whole day in the schedule too so I was like so the more I found out about this ceremony the more I didn't want to go simply because if I don't believe in something I'm not gonna partake in a ceremony I find that deeply disrespectful if if that's to me it's equivalent to going in a church and doing communion when you don't believe in God I stopped doing communion specifically because of that so I didn't want to partake in another ceremony where I flat-out don't believe any of it just think that's a shitty thing to do and I opted it out but Blake tried to make myself and my mom feel guilty for not going to that by saying oh are you just gonna chill by the pool while we do our cleansing and it's like if I don't believe I'm gonna be cleansed why would I just go to that that seems more disrespectful to me than anything else throughout the retreat there were a lot of moments of this kind of weird imposed spirituality that I was like where is this coming from because they never mentioned anything about you know connecting with a higher spirit or whatever that made it feel all the more culty let's talk about the cult red flags here there's control over what you eat drink do and your schedule of the day there's a pushed narrative about what you should believe in and connecting with a higher purpose we're in the middle of nowhere so a little bit vulnerable and at risk like where we were in Bali at that point was in the middle of nowhere then after we changed and went into a city but until then we were in a mold no way during the retreat we had speakers come talk to us and a lot of these speakers were people who once worked for massive massive companies such as Google Google wasn't one of the companies but of that immense size so the people were coming to talk to us were people of high rank and that's an important thing to note here to everyone here was a CEO or had money okay so there was a very very specific kind of participants and a lot of these participants that I'm not gonna go into detail because this is not my story to tell had gone through some seriously traumatic life altering [ __ ] okay so everyone who was here was in some way hurting to various degrees so that's also the coat list of taking people who are vulnerable and trying to help towards the end blake realized that i was not on board with all this I was respectful the whole time I never called anyone out I really just told my mom as we went this is weird this is weird this is weird and I made jokes about cults with her and the other Italian person because it really did feel like a cult but he could tell that I was just not on board with it and I think he knows that I'm trying to stop my mom from investing anything it's to this day so I really did not want to interact with him because he just made me feel uncomfortable he always tried to pull the hug thing to the point where I pretended to be on phone calls when he'd come so he wouldn't hug me so I feel like I got a little bit heated and I took a little break and I'm still hated but I'm gonna calm down so the bottom line is that we need to be extremely careful because my mom is not a stupid person none of the people who participated are stupid people it's that when you're a con man you can really sell something that doesn't exist to people and that's what he did and he continues to do it because these people all want to find a meaning in it so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way where you'll say I'll deliver this and people are so convinced that you will that they have this kind of placebo effect of yeah you delivered when in reality he didn't and that's what's concerning none of these participants are dumb it's that he's appealing to whatever problems they have in their lives so then you can take advantage and I'm not okay with that so I'm sorry if this video was a [ __ ] show these guys thank you so much for watching let me know what you think in the comments down below and I'll catch you guys next time

Channel: READY TO GLARE

Views: 354,529

Rating: 4.9533749 out of 5

Keywords: self-help, self-improvement, mental health, wellness, wellbeing, story time

Id: oq57X8z7HKA

Length: 19min 29sec (1169 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 20 2019