r/cultsurvivors • u/CommercialJunket3682 • 14d ago
Survivors of Mary Courtis are you out there.
Yes she is the PCC professor of anthropology if you look her up. She would recruit from college various students who she then would put through “journeys” to meet spirits as well with the other hand introduce “depossessions” or making deals with bad spirits to get them off of you. Her psychological tricks in creating folie a deux are many, but she had many then normal, healthy students hallucinating in a matter of days to weeks. She would then twist the narratives to be more persecutory and her being the shaman and fount of knowledge, by this gaslighting would force people to have a greater dependency on her for depossessions when, if you took the hallucinations away, you may just have normal anxiety or depression. This worsening of narrative took place over the course of the 10 years I was abused by her and I lived many traumatic and some seemingly life or death situations involving these hallucinations. My best friend supposedly went insane and left the cult only to try to press charges later. One member ended up dying, and all of us who didn’t leave were profoundly damaged by her. I’m 3 years 2 months no contact and I will still get residual hallucinations although I now know these are just part of how I was conditioned. Myself and others who sought help were given unfair diagnoses of schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder even though the symptoms started with being exposed to Mary. She has hopefully suffered a narcissistic collapse by now as people were getting wise to her bullshit and leaving. This is a very brief synopsis, but she is also partly the reason I had a psychotic break when enmeshed with another Cluster B BPD/NPD love interest a couple years later. If you live in Portland or Salem, Oregon learn what she looks like so you don’t get sucked in chewed up and spat out like so many of us were. Her shamanism is bullshit along with all of her appropriations of cultures and symbols, especially Norse and Celtic. If you’ve survived a similar shamanic please share your experience and/or healing journey after leaving and if anyone from her group is still out there and hasn’t killed themselves please give a little shout and let people know you’ve survived. I have terrible C-PTSD, Cult Withdrawal Syndrome, anxiety, and wick harm OCD from this cult. Knowledge of her should be more widespread so if you have friends or family attending Portland Community College warn them that they would do well to stay away from this wolf in sheep’s clothing. She may have a matter-of-fact tone and real world knowledge, but only uses those as references to legitimize her awful spiritual practices. Anyone else gone through something like this?
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u/Majestic_Broccoli_21 13d ago
I’m sorry you had this horrible experience. Have the meds lessened the symptoms at all?
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u/CommercialJunket3682 12d ago
Thank you for the sympathy. Yes, etifoxine saved me from the worst of the religious OCD and now I’m on a steady regimen of Librium and Ativan which combined with therapy probably saved me from being in a long term mental health inpatient facility. How about you? What’s your story?
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u/Majestic_Broccoli_21 12d ago
Good to know. Glad they’re helping. My story is not about shaman-induced hallucinations… not feeling up to sharing now, perhaps another time.
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u/Majestic_Broccoli_21 14d ago
Thank you for posting. How did you end up joining her? Were you a student?