Inside The Deep End: The Rise of Teal Swan and Her Controversial "Completion Process" Program

Author, speaker and "spiritual catalyst" Teal Swan has a process for overcoming trauma that her devoted followers swear has changed their lives—but she's picked up plenty of critics along the way.

By Natalie Finn Jun 26, 2022 12:00 PMTags
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Content warning: This story discusses suicide and sexual abuse.

Amid questions about her methods and accusations that she's presiding over some sort of cult, spiritual healer Teal Swan presses on.

The mission of the 38-year-old's burgeoning eponymous empire of online videos, books, "synchronization" workshops and merchandise remains, according to her website, "the transformation of human suffering to an empowered and authentic life," which entails digging deep within to get at the root of that pain—even if it hurts.

Which is why her site also advises, "Teal Swan is not recommended for those who simply want to feel good."

The author, artist and public speaker has a massive following, including 1.3 million YouTube subscribers, and she denies that she is in any way a cult leader. (Her "Ask Teal" videos also open with the disclaimer that she is not a medical professional, nor should her content be taken for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.) But her approach to curing what ails you has attracted its share of scrutiny nonetheless.

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Shot over several years, the four-part Freeform docuseries The Deep End, which premiered in May and is streaming on Hulu, examined both sides of the coin: the devoted community Teal has built around her, buoyed by people who have nothing but faith in her abilities and how she wields them—and also the various criticisms and the results of a private investigator's quest to find out if Teal is doing more harm than good.

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When contacted for comment, a rep for Teal directed E! News to the videos she made last month reacting to each episode. They range from Teal enjoying a lot of episode one (while also noting that "soundbites just don't work to accurately portray what I am doing. I wish they did, it would make my life a whole lot easier") to "Just, wow" in response to part four.

"What they showed didn't happen," she said, alleging some scenes were concocted through editing. "I can't even believe this sort of deception and misrepresentation is allowed."

Regarding Teal's reaction, series director Jon Kasbe told E! News, "Her response to the series aligns with how we've seen her treat others who leave the group or disagree with her, crafting narratives to discredit those with alternative perspectives to her own."

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They were "transparent with Teal and her team about the editing process," he said, "and made clear throughout production that Teal or anyone within the group could ask us to stop filming at any time." Her team, he added, connected them with the investigator on the show, as well as encouraged they speak with her critics.

"The series," Kasbe concluded, "is a true representation of what we experienced over the three years and the footage shows the complexity of one of today's most controversial spiritual teachers."

The Deep End opens quite literally, with Teal and one of her female followers in a pool, the woman shaking and sobbing in her arms.

"This is what it can be like," Teal assures her. "You can trust me."

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Then it's on to a speaking event in front of hundreds of people—all members of the "Teal Tribe"—including a young man who has her face tattooed on his arm, a woman who tells Teal she saved her life in 2011, and another who says she has stopped "moving forward" and can't find the motivation to do anything.

Which prompts the question from Teal that's been at the root of so much of the controversy surrounding her methods: "Why are you still here?"

As in, why are you still alive? She then advises the woman to visualize not being here. "Play out both sides," Teal says. "I'm literally saying, go to the worst of the worst-case scenarios and make your mind up."

Who Is Teal Swan?

Teal was born Mary Teal Bosworth in Santa Fe, N.M., on June 16, 1984. Growing up in Logan, Utah, she says in The Deep End that she "scared [her] mother to death" from the age of 5 with what she now refers to on her website as her "extrasensory abilities," including being able to read minds and channel the departed. She was ostracized and bullied as a child, she recalls. Doctors diagnosed her with everything from schizophrenia to bipolar disorder, and Teal says she first attempted suicide at 17.

In her 2016 book The Completion Process, Teal wrote of enduring "13 years of torture" by someone she says sexually abused her, held her captive in a pit, drugged her and threatened her family's life.

It was 2001, she wrote, and "Despair was like a tornado that chased me no matter where I ran, and I was tired of running. I wanted death. And so I did the opposite of what I had always done. I turned around and ran straight into the tornado. I committed emotional suicide."

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 She found that confronting her worst memories and feelings, giving them "permission to consume" her, ultimately resulted in a "lightness of being," Teal wrote. "I felt relief. The feel of the feeling itself was evaporated by my choice to dive into the feeling instead."

When she was 19, she moved in with Blake Dyer, introduced in The Deep End as her head of operations. In the show, she credits him with making her feel safe for the first time in her life and teaching her how to trust—and people have thanked him for saving the woman who's since saved them

"I don't really feel like a hero," Blake says. "I was there, a loving person, at this right time."

Their romantic relationship only lasted a year, but they continued to live and work together. "I've had five marriages," Teal says, "and Blake's stayed with me through all of them."

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The Rise of Teal Swan

Teal started to acquire an enthusiastic following more than a decade ago doing energy-healing sessions at The Cosmic Spiral, a new-age book store in Salt Lake City. It was "a hub for everybody who didn't fit in but was into that kind of stuff," Teal described it on The Gateway, the 2018 Gizmodo podcast about her burgeoning wellness empire. At the store is where she took on the moniker "the Spiritual Catalyst."

In 2012 she founded her company Teal Eye, but it was her weekly "Ask Teal" YouTube videos that turned her into an in-demand guru.

Teal wrote in The Completion Process that she had already become a career "spiritual luminary" when, inspired by the "inner-child work" she did during years of trauma therapy, the design for her breakthrough program started to take shape, a process "that would make even the most wounded and fractured person whole again."

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What Is the Completion Process?

Though she goes on to detail the 18 steps involved, Teal describes it in her book simply as "the process of putting yourself back together"—and if that entails smashing yourself apart first to find the broken bits that were preventing you from being really whole, then that's what needs to happen.

Talking to a group at the start of a retreat on The Deep End, she warns them that they may end up realizing things about themselves that result in serious reconsideration of their life choices, even ones as irreversible as the decision to become parents. "My rule is," Teal says, "if you want to come within 50 miles of me, you better be ready for the deepest end of the pool."

The guests break off into small groups and are tasked with trying to relive the worst moments of their lives. There's crying and screaming. One woman calls home and tells whoever's on the line that she's going to be a different person when she comes back.

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Why Some Call Teal Swan Dangerous

"The people were not ready for it," Swan says in The Deep End, referring to the critics who have described her as a "narcissist" at best and "dangerous" at worst. She calls her haters the "festering wound" in her life.

Some critics point to one of the central aspects of her practice—helping people access alleged repressed memories—as suspect in and of itself. Experts remain torn over the validity of such memories, whether they're real or imagined, and if it works sometimes, which outcome is more prevalent?

In her video response to episode three of The Deep End, Teal said that any scene implying that their methods were causing people to have false memories was the result of manipulative editing. "I am very, very aware of the risk of false memory when it comes to memory work," she said. "It is a module I teach when I am training my practitioners in the Completion Process." 

Planting false memories, Teal added, "is not only unethical, it's downright dangerous and goes against everything I stand for."

On the podcast and the docuseries, Teal and her associates also acknowledge that some of her critics have called her a "suicide catalyst" because more than one of her devotees have taken their own lives.

The Gateway brought up the May 2012 death by suicide of Leslie Wangsgaard, who along with her husband, John, sponsored Teal's first workshop in Salt Lake City back in the late '00s.

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Teal recalled having "that very serious sit-down" with Leslie "where we had to say, 'OK, we either are or aren't committing to life,' because every time I gave her a suggestion, she'd stop in two days...Then we have to ask the question, 'Do we really want this to work?' What's interesting is, when she asked herself that question, the answer was, 'No, I'm done.' So there was nothing that any healer could ever do for that type of vibration."

Leslie's husband, John, shared on The Gateway that his wife had a history of mental illness in her family and that she'd been trying to wean herself off of anti-depressants. Through her work with Teal, John shared, Leslie had uncovered repressed memories of being sexually abused by her father. (Her father had died, but John told The Gateway host Jennings Brown that Leslie's mother denied such a thing ever happened.)

Years later, John remained a supporter of Teal's, telling Jennings that she "has the ability to see things that you and I do not." Regarding his wife's death, he said, "Teal had absolutely nothing to do with this whatsoever."

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Teal Swan Defends Her Methods

Teal highlights her own experience staring into the void as what makes her uniquely suited for what she does, which includes confronting followers with suicidal ideations head-on.

"The first thing is," she explained on The Gateway, "I validate where they are. That's what other people won't do. People are too afraid of it. The approach that everyone else takes is, 'Let me tell you why you're wrong for feeling this way.' My approach is, 'No, it's right to feel that way. It's right that you feel like killing yourself right now.'"

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Meanwhile, on The Deep End, a montage of online critics are seen in their own YouTube and TikTok videos calling her "detrimental" and "destructive" and wondering, "Who regulates this stuff?" There are also blogs dedicated to debunking her teachings.

In November 2019, BBC News reported on a mother named Sarah, whose 18-year-old daughter Casey had taken her own life. Sarah said she found out after Casey's death that she had been a member of the private "Teal Tribe" Facebook group and, two weeks before she fatally shot herself, had posted about a previous suicide attempt.

(The BBC article, which is also shown in The Deep End as an example of Teal's negative press, notes that some names had been changed.)

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According to BBC News, in the replies to Casey's Facebook post, two people shared Teal's video titled "What to do if you are suicidal," in which she describes suicide as "our safety net or our re-set button that's always available to us." (Teal also advises anyone having suicidal thoughts to seek medical attention.)

When she instructs viewers to visualize their death by suicide, Teal says she means to help people realize that getting on with life is the only viable option. "It does matter if you are here or not here… You don't want to die," she says in the video. "What you want is an end to your pain."

(The description of the video with that title, dated Jan. 19, 2020, currently notes, "Because of YouTube's press-pressured policy, a small portion of the original video had to be removed in order for this video to be posted.") 

Critics accused Teal of romanticizing suicide with her visualization technique and "re-set button" analogy. Sarah was also upset that a video post was the only response to her daughter's cry for help.

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"What a huge missed opportunity and an incredible mistake," she told BBC News. "While I believe that there [was] more than one undercurrent happening in the life of our daughter, you would have to convince me otherwise that Teal's teachings did not play a significant role in the mind of our daughter when she took her life. It's almost like a rehearsal."

Backstage at one of Teal's workshops in Chicago, when asked about the concern that she was glorifying suicide, she told BBC News, "That's pretty funny. It's really funny to me." She said she found the idea that she was a proponent of suicide "ridiculous" and that would be obvious to anyone who watched her videos.

At the same time, Teal continued, "This is the worst part of my career. You start a Facebook group hoping that it's going to be a place for all these individuals to come to...We think about this all the time. You've got people who are vulnerable. What are you supposed to do when you can't catch all of it?"

What Teal Swan Has Said About Being Called a Cult Leader

"What do I say to people saying I run a cult?" she said on The Gateway. "Here's the thing: A lot of people are going to demonize me because of my honesty. I have the perfect recipe for a cult, and I f--king know it... I have a demographic of people who are miserably isolated, and who need belonging, desperately. That's what makes me safe...These people are desperate. They need my approval. They will do whatever the hell I say. The only reason that it is not steered there is because of my ethics. I've lived in a cult."

In telling her personal story, she has alleged that some of the abuse she suffered was at the hands of a satanic cult, a memory she had repressed and dug up through intensive therapy.

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"There is nothing worse than being accused of leading a cult when you grew up in one that is incredibly horrific," Teal continued on the podcast, "which is why there is no financial buy-in like there is in a typical cult. There is no consequence for leaving. People do it all the time. I teach people to follow their own internal guidance system. That is probably the worst thing you could ever do if you want to have a cult."

In a 2021 appearance on The Shay Rowbottom Show, Teal again addressed the cult talk, saying her critics continue to say that about her "because they know it's going to scare people off me."

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What's Next for Teal Swan?

She merely wants to revolutionize mental health care, or that's the idea. Being labeled dangerous "prevents people from coming through the door," she says on The Deep End. "I want the process I take people through around suicide to be something that's adopted in the mainstream psychology fields. But I didn't understand that people thought it would be possible that maintaining the concept of suicide would cause people to commit suicide."

But she hasn't been deterred, as her schedule of upcoming speaking engagements all over the world would indicate.

"This career is where I live and die," she says on the show. "I'm trying to end the cycle of suffering. It's like, you're either in or you're out. You either understand this or you get off the ship. I'm gonna carry it to the ends of the earth. If I say I'd like to go to the point where I'm considered more spiritually influential on this earth than the pope, people would be like, 'Yeah, that's not going to happen.' F-k that it's not going to happen."

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