--- title: What is deprogramming? description: Deprogramming is the work of freeing ourselves from the stories, assumptions and values of the culture we were raised in, so that we can see them as stories and not simply as the way things are. In shamanic cultures it… url: "https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/wiki/what-is-deprogramming/" updated: "2026-11-10" category: The recovery --- # What is deprogramming? Deprogramming is the work of freeing ourselves from the stories, assumptions and values of the culture we were raised in, so that we can see them as stories and not simply as the way things are. In shamanic cultures it was part of every shaman's training. In Therapeutic Shamanism it is essential, because the Taker thinking we grow up in is largely unconscious and is at odds with an animist way of experiencing the world. ## What does 'deprogramming' mean? In everyday English the word is best known from the United States in the early 1970s, when families hired people, Ted Patrick above all, to persuade relatives to leave new religious movements, often by holding them against their will. That practice was, and remains, controversial.^[1](#note-1) In Therapeutic Shamanism the word means something quite different. It is a voluntary and personal process of becoming aware of the conditioning of the dominant culture, and choosing healthier stories to live by. There is an echo between the two all the same. Looked at against the whole span of human history, the dominant culture shows the marks of a cult: hierarchy under charismatic leaders with little accountability, persecution of those who do not fit, control of the narrative, and harm to the mental and spiritual health of its members. "These are all characteristics of a cult."^[2](#note-2) Deprogramming, here, is freeing ourselves from that culture's hold. See [What are Taker and Leaver cultures?](/wiki/what-are-taker-and-leaver-cultures/) 1. Wikipedia, "Deprogramming" (accessed 1 November 2026). 2. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter Three, "Seeing Taker Society for What It Is". ## Why was deprogramming part of shamanic training? Because a shaman has to be able to see their own culture from outside. "Deprogramming from the stories of the culture that you have been raised in is an essential part of training to be a shaman anywhere, and this has been true throughout human history." Shamans lived at the margins of their tribes, both part of them and distanced from them, not because they were above everyday life, but so that they could see the tribe's stories for what they are and still be close enough to help.^[3](#note-3) So in most cultures, part of shamanic training involved periods of doing things in ways they were not normally done, to shake the trainee out of social norms. An apprentice shaman might have to wear their clothes back-to-front or inside-out, walk backwards, stand whilst everyone else sat, or shout when everyone else was quiet. They were also told things only shamans knew, including that the stories the tribe believed to be true were not literally true, but were there for social cohesion and to keep the tribe in right relationship with the other-than-human. This came at a cost, which is why indigenous people sometimes say, "Who on earth would want to be a shaman?"^[4](#note-4) 1. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter Three, "Wearing Your Clothes Back-To-Front". 2. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter Three, "Wearing Your Clothes Back-To-Front". ## Why do people today need it? Because of how deeply the dominant culture is in us. Much of Taker thinking "is not only different to shamanic thinking, it is inimical to it. The problem, though, is that we are steeped in Taker thinking." We are raised in it and so immersed in it that it is our default way of thinking, and most of the time we do not even realise we are thinking that way.^[5](#note-5) So when people learn shamanism they tend to bring Taker perception to it without knowing, and a lot of present-day shamanism is, to varying degrees, "infected with Taker society thinking."^[6](#note-6) Deprogramming is also the way to our own Soul. Our domesticated ideas of what it is to be human keep us apart from our true nature, so "If we are to find our true Soul, and who we are really meant to be, then we need to begin deprogramming ourselves from the stories of the dominant culture that we live in." One of those stories is that our true nature is bad, and that without civilisation we would be savage, selfish and violent brutes: "This is simply nonsense."^[7](#note-7) See [What does domestication do to us?](/wiki/what-does-domestication-do-to-us/) 1. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter Three, "Peeling Back the Layers". 2. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter Three, "Being Able to See What Shamanism Really Is". 3. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter One, "How We Lost Our Souls". ## What are we deprogramming from? From ways of thinking so familiar they seem like common sense. Growing up in Taker society, we absorb things like thinking that we are more intelligent or conscious than other species, dividing the world into living and non-living things, materialism and excessive consumption, the idea that we can use and abuse other animals, plants and the Earth as we wish, the idea of ownership, taking everything and leaving nothing, thinking in hierarchies, treating inequality as normal and okay, oppressing sections of society, violence, and thinking that the spirits are 'just' imaginary, "And so many other things."^[8](#note-8) Underneath them all is the story that this way of life is simply normal and how things have always been, what the writer [Daniel Quinn](/wiki/who-was-daniel-quinn-and-what-did-ishmael-teach/) called the Great Forgetting**Great Forgetting.** Daniel Quinn's term for the mass amnesia by which Taker culture erased the knowledge that humanity ever lived any other way, dismissing almost all of our story as 'pre-history'. [Read the full answer](/wiki/what-are-taker-and-leaver-cultures/). Deprogramming includes the Great Remembering**Great Remembering.** The counter-movement to the Great Forgetting: the recovery of the buried animist knowledge, already underway. Therapeutic Shamanism understands itself as part of it. [Read the full answer](/wiki/what-are-taker-and-leaver-cultures/), the recognition that Taker society is only a few thousand years old, a small part of human history, and that it is the thing that has diverged from the tens of thousands of years of Leaver culture**Leaver culture.** Daniel Quinn's term for the animist tribal peoples, hunter-gatherers above all, who took only as much as they needed and left the rest, living in reciprocal right-relationship for the vast majority of human history. [Read the full answer](/wiki/what-are-taker-and-leaver-cultures/) before it.^[9](#note-9) 1. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter Three, "Seeing Taker Society for What It Is". 2. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter Three, "Seeing Taker Society for What It Is". ## Why is our own conditioning so hard to see? Because it feels normal, in the way a difficult childhood can. In therapy, clients often describe their childhood as 'normal' even when it clearly was not, because as children they had nothing to compare it with; "we have a great capacity to normalise what happens in childhood and not fully appreciate its impact on us."^[10](#note-10) A culture works on us in the same way. Much of it lives in language. The value judgements of hierarchy are built into the words we use without thinking, so that 'higher' means better, 'ascent' is good and 'descent' is bad, and animals are 'lower': "Notice the language here (most people do not)."^[11](#note-11) Even calling the dominant culture a 'culture' or 'civilisation' can normalise it and give it a legitimacy it does not deserve.^[12](#note-12) 1. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter Three, "The Normalisation of Violence and Abuse". 2. Paul Francis, [*Rewilding Yourself*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/rewilding-yourself/), Chapter Two, "The Sky-Religion's Conditioning Is Pervasive". 3. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter Three, "Coming Back to Sanity". ## How is deprogramming done in Therapeutic Shamanism? Partly by noticing. "Shamans sometimes talk of the need to 'stalk' oneself", meaning becoming aware of our own thoughts, preconceptions, belief systems and biases, so that they do not unconsciously distort what we experience. Hierarchical thinking is the first thing to stalk: "We have to become aware of it and choose healthier concepts, stories and imagery."^[13](#note-13) It is not comfortable work. Getting past the layers of distorted thinking about what it is to be human "is not going to be light and fluffy. It does mean facing things that most people do not want to face."^[14](#note-14) Partly by experience. We probably cannot fully experience the world as our animist ancestors did, because domestication**Domestication.** The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. [More about this](/wiki/what-does-domestication-mean/) and the Fall**The Fall.** The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. 'Fallen culture' is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. [Read the full answer](/wiki/what-is-the-fall/) have changed how our brains are wired, but "we can train ourselves to perceive the world in a more animist way and retrain our brains to think more animistic thoughts."^[15](#note-15) Journeying and imagination both play a part. In *Finding Your Deep Soul*, for example, there are imaginative exercises in which the reader 'shapeshifts' into one of their animist hunter-gatherer ancestors, owning almost nothing, part of the land and alive to everything around them, and imagines living in a pristine landscape from before agriculture, far richer in life than any we know now.^[16](#note-16) And partly by choosing better stories, taken from the healthy templates of hunter-gatherer life and then applied to the times we live in. See [Can modern humans recover an animist way of seeing and undo domestication?](/wiki/can-modern-humans-recover-an-animist-way-of-seeing-and-undo-domestication/) 1. Paul Francis, [*Rewilding Yourself*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/rewilding-yourself/), Chapter Two, "Our Interpretations Colour Our Experiences". 2. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter Three, "Working with the Human People". 3. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter Three, "Peeling Back the Layers". 4. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter One, "Exercise 2: Being a Hunter-Gatherer Animist", and Chapter Three, "Exercise 11: Becoming Human". ## Does deprogramming mean rejecting everything modern? No. Not everything in modern culture is bad, and even in the cultures that came after the Fall "there is usually something of value in most things if we look hard enough", although the truly healthy stories have to be looked for further back.^[17](#note-17) Nor does it mean abandoning modern life to live in the wilds. That is not something most people can or want to do, and it would not answer the question that matters, which is how to make animism and shamanism practical and useful for the times we live in now.^[18](#note-18) The aim is to see our own culture clearly, keep what is worth keeping, and let healthier stories shape the rest. 1. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter Three, "What Stories Shall We Choose?". 2. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter Three, "Peeling Back the Layers". - [What does domestication do to us?](/wiki/what-does-domestication-do-to-us/) - [Can modern humans recover an animist way of seeing and undo domestication?](/wiki/can-modern-humans-recover-an-animist-way-of-seeing-and-undo-domestication/) - [What are Taker and Leaver cultures?](/wiki/what-are-taker-and-leaver-cultures/) - [How has spirituality been used to justify domination?](/wiki/how-has-spirituality-been-used-to-justify-domination/) - [What is masking, and how is it linked to domestication?](/wiki/what-is-masking-and-how-is-it-linked-to-domestication/) - [What is a taboo, and why did every people have them?](/wiki/what-is-a-taboo-and-why-did-every-people-have-them/) - [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/) (Chapter Three, seeing Taker society for what it is) - [*Rewilding Yourself*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/rewilding-yourself/) (Chapter Two, stalking hierarchical thinking) - [all courses](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/shamanic-courses/)