Hi, this is going to be my first post and I'm going to be really vulnerable and conscious while writing this. It is a story about how Owen Cook has negatively impacted my life and it's also a post seeking some advice or outside voices before I seek therapy about this issue.
First and foremost: I have to give positive credit to Owen and not just talk on the negatives. Growing up, when I was very young, Owen Cook helped me to believe that it was possible to become better at game and dating, and things like that. I was very shy and awkward and seem to be on the spectrum of mild ADHD, borderline mild Aspergers, but not nearly as intense as Owen had or anything.
Owen was immensely helpful and because of him, Julien, and other people giving out advice to go meet people and be myself and improve myself. I became "successful" at dating when I used to be rejected over and over again.
I have to give credit for his positive impacts, especially since he had some level of Asperger's, allegedly; he did do a great job improving himself and starting the whole dating community movement.
This gave me a lot of trust in Owen and I experienced a better life between the time I was 13 and 21 from him, I even met a girl who I dated in a serious relationship for 3 years. Because of all this good advice, I really trusted him and hung onto every word he said, I remember taking notes on every word and sentence in his Youtube videos on success advice and self development and spirituality and then testing them in real life to see what is true or not.
Here is where it starts to get bad:
Eventually, as many of you on this forum have seen, Owen began to switch to giving out mainly spirituality and self development advice, rather than dating advice. This was when I began to experience negative effects on my life. I started to become very neurotic, anxious, and self-resistant towards normal human experiences like making money and getting fit because of his advice such as how it's bad to "get lost in the physical" and "energetic parasites" and "low vibration vs high vibration". How you "will age faster if you access the energy of death", these buzz words are part of the huge problem it caused me.
Honestly, that kind of verbiage for his theory sounds kind of crazy now, just typing it out. And before you may judge, I am speaking as someone who is aware of ego, meditation, and has had lots of the same spiritual experiences discussed on these forums. I am aware that I am not my body and that I am either consciousness experiencing the body or a soul that is a fragment of God experiencing my life, and even that doesn't begin to express how amazing life is. But I digress.
That being said when he began to give this advice I took it way too seriously and it caused me to get totally emotionally and mentally stuck for a whole year, I thought the solution was to watch more of his videos to really understand what was going on about. It made me get more convinced/deeper into his theory work and made me more and more neurotic and stuck. I am 22 right now FYI.
His new spiritual content completely damaged me psychologically for half of my passions. The things I am passionate about are many things, such as environmentalism, spirituality, inventing products, theory work and research, and music, these are all unaffected by his theorizing. BUT in terms of dating, fitness, making money (which I am not obsessed about but it is unhealthy for me to limit myself when I would treat business and customers with utmost ethics and love kind of like how Leo would) I feel completely neurotic now and stuck in the "materialistic" areas of my life because he always talked about how it is bad to "get lost in the physical" and he basically demonized it, maybe unintentionally, but it had that effect on me. Now there's a split in my life between spiritual and not spiritual rather than just different experiences and levels of love...
I ended up accumulating $3,600 to join his High Status Communication course in order to get his help directly because I was so stuck from this neurotic loop that his content caused me. It took a lot of sacrifice to acquire that money, by the way, as a student who is busy and focused on studies and building skills and enjoying my relatively normal life. I thought I really needed it because I could not handle living that way any longer being stuck like that in a loop of being a fan and follower and getting more stuck the more I followed.
Nevertheless, when I joined the course Owen did talk to me but he didn't speak very much to me, he answered maybe like 4 or 5 of my questions and then after 8 weeks I was removed from the program because that's the time limit. Most of the weeks it was other coaches, like his cameraman and team, or his personal trainer, who by the way are all cool. But those people are not Owen, and he didn't give much time to answer questions for any of the students as he was always in a rush on the coaching calls, he would come to speak about dating for like 30 mins to an hour then log off without time for questions, maybe two students out of ten could ask a question and oftentimes they would just ask how they could make more money in their coaching business or how they could run container events or something which was not relatable to me at all at the time. I did not expect his program to be such little mentoring for a "mentoring" program that costs as much as 4 new iPhones. There was video course content in it too which had some pretty good stuff but a lot of it is stuff you can learn from his videos, there was some useful stuff in there but the advice in there for business and marketing and public speaking are not really applicable to my life right now, maybe the speaking for socializing but I am already alright for that.
Looking back at the old video recordings of Zoom Calls in the course, the original students had much more time to ask questions when the program first started, with calls going on for like 7-8 hours, so maybe back then it was real mentoring. He revealed a lot of interesting things by the way, like how Tony Robbins treated his rich clients unethically (he would swear at them and hang up on them if they wanted to go even a minute over the call time even when they paid him a million dollars per year for his coaching). Also how Owen knew Eckhart Tolle's daughter in law through a friend or connection that was dating her and how Eckhart Tolle loves alcohol and drinks a shit ton behind the scenes and how that caused him to be disillusioned when meeting his heroes. He also talked about how the vast majority of spiritual coaches did not embody the spiritual values like love and compassion and kindness when shit hit the fan when he was working with them, like how they would throw tantrums over parking tickets in LA or use money unethically.
These kinds of eye-opening scenarios really helped me in some ways but they did not help me to stop being neurotic and completely stuck from his spiritual advice, his advice being overall dogmatic and might not be based so much in reality, much like the dark sides of religions.
I asked Owen, on the coaching, how could I help people with fitness if them improving their bodies might create a bigger ego and how I was afraid of losing people, that I'm helping, and myself "in the physical" or so he calls it. His only response was that fitness is actually a great spiritual practice or something. The other question I asked was how I can stop getting stuck and neurotic from his advice and taking it the wrong way and I recall he said that it sounds like I was overthinking it and I need to relax.
Anyway, there's about no way I can confront Owen more about this issue and ask him for help as he will either be too busy to help answer these questions, for his very serious students, unless they are very rich or in his program, and even if they were serious students, like I was he might not have the time or energy to genuinely help a student a lot for these.
Conclusions:
One of the signs of a more effective teacher, like Leo, is that they know that students need to ask questions and consuming lots of theory without any way to have Q and A, or warnings which Leo speaks of very clearly in his forums and videos, will cause lots of damage and misinterpretation. Maybe even poor mental health and that's exactly what happened to me.
Before all of this I had an easy time with life and I was much happier. Now I feel stuck and resistant to doing the things I am motivated to and I feel like I have a hard time shaking off the hours and hours of theory I consumed from him. The effect is similar to if someone spent years looking at redpill or blackpill content and becoming psychologically damaged, except I was wise enough to avoid those awful ideologies but I wasn't wise to avoid Owen's ones and the negative effects they have had on my life.
His demonization of ego, getting lost in dopamine, materialism and physical world experiences, caused me so much stuck-ness. Every-time I save up a lot of money, like over a thousand now or get "too fit" I start to feel anxiety that I might be losing my soul or getting lost in the physical and being "lowered in my vibration" etc. etc. Him saying that I can't want or desire certain things because its "low vibration" etc etc.
And his response to people that have neurotic loops is that an entity or energetic parasite is running them and causing them to suffer, by the way, that's what he actually says sometimes, especially to people that struggle with neuroticism. And in the grand scheme of things, perhaps something like that does happen to some people, but its hard to get told that and feel gaslit from Owen, this spiritual coach, while he is making millions of dollars, romancing attractive women, and taking care of his fitness, and hanging out more often with high status people because of their status. And I can kind of even understand that some people can get lost and completely run by their ego or lust or desires but he demonizes that so hard, sometimes those people are having a good time and things are ok. He calls that effect of being run by ego being possessed by an "energetic parasite and losing your soul", he has even begun calling it more religious things in his more recent videos.
It just seems so contrary to me, the way he is living and the advice he is dishing out. If he would've just said something like, live your life however you want but these spiritual concepts might help you and didn't demonize a ton of things then maybe it wouldn't have affected me this way. But in every video he demonizes a ton of things. Leo didn't affect me this way because Leo says that it is up to you and your consciousness and awareness and choice on how you want to live your life and God loves all things and doesn't judge you and that God wants to experience all things, it's a much more free and open kind of theory.
Not to mention he calls people without results "losers" while he calls people that have a ton of results, but get lost in obsession, as "low vibration" so basically to him the only "good" are people who have good results, or the results they want, while being high vibration or something? It's just super hierarchical and problematic sounding to me.
I just feel so negatively affected and shamed and stuck from Owen's advice, like I went through a religious cult almost. I feel ashamed and betrayed almost by all of this. Especially the part where I can't get help from him unless I have a lot of money to spend. I do forgive Owen and feel that he did not do this intentionally, and I still appreciate the good he has done for me, but I still feel upset and distraught that someone I trusted so much caused me so much damage in my life. Do you guys have any advice? I would just like to hear anything that can help me start to unravel this and let go of my limiting beliefs or at least build new ones. Or even hear something that I need to hear that I don't know. Thank you so much for reading <3 Also, sorry if this sounds like rambling or incoherent I tried to write as clearly as I could but some of these are hard to explain.
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