This blog post is entirely my opinion and is in no way legal advice or information. Hire an attorney that 1. you trust (take a pause and listen to your gut) and 2. has expertise / experience in the field (represented at least ten paid clients on the same type of issue you are seeking counsel about) to help you determine your particular course of action when presented with an NDA.
Over my four decades on the planet I have noticed that every time I have been presented with a Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) or have talked to friends who have signed NDAs, the resulting experience involved emotional or mental abuse. Occasional false imprisonment!
Wild to say that but the pattern seems clear to me.
Multiple times I have spent four figures on business or media coaching programs. Typically a couple of people in my program had received big settlements for situations I didn’t get to hear about but that clearly were causing them anguish that was only amplified by the communication stifled by the NDAs attached to the settlement.
When you’re in a situation where damages have happened and you just want it to be over with, often you don’t think through the consequences of signing away your right to own your story.
As a Reiki Master, one of the first things I do in treatment for a client is to clear their chakras. It is pretty typical for me to find the throat chakra blocked. While simple for me to clear, the physical and emotional symptoms of a blocked throat chakra can be really difficult. When the root cause of the throat chakra blockage isn’t resolved it will just continue to come back!
So much of trauma healing involves owning your story and writing it out, telling it to a stone and releasing it to a moving body of water (that one works well), talking to someone, etc…
I cannot reduce trauma healing to a paragraph but for the sake of this article let us agree that stifling your ability to self express manifests in the mind, spirit or body who will always keep the score. The potential suffering you are agreeing to is not laid out in an NDA.
I love to ask folks in my aerobics class when we are doing a chakra based visioning of a dream life when we get to the throat chakra “What would it feel like to feel fully self expressed?” because it is such a pivotal part of being a human on the planet. Certain things can only be expressed through you individually and if you have something you cannot talk about it can eat you alive.
I was tricked into signing an NDA by another attorney when I was in practice because I was anxious to begin a job. When I am anxious, my nervous system isn’t allowing me access to my full intuition. It was a mistake. I am glad that the experience didn’t last very long but the toll on my mental health in that work environment was really intense. That attorney has and continues to reap what they sowed (both of them, the attorney who tricked me and the attorney the NDA protected) and I wish them the life they deserve.
I came across a copy of it later after I had been fired / quit and realized what I had signed and remembered what I was told it was when I signed it. Anyway, fool me once… it will spark in me an ongoing distrust of the NDA as a tool that only supports folks who have abusive behavior to hide.
I used to think, okay maybe never an NDA but in the instance of working for a fantastic artist you love who is making work that needs to have an element of surprise! Maybe that is the exception.
Then I made friends with a man whose husband worked for the most famous Virgo pop star on the planet. I was surprised he wasn’t a fan of hers and it turned out that the husband’s experience working for her involved at least a bit of false imprisonment overseas, poor communication and being stuck someplace without being able to communicate with home. And not being able to talk about the experience afterwards!
I didn’t sign an NDA, I didn’t get info from someone who signed the NDA and the story is vague but I trust it. Sounds like it is probably worth really taking a long pause and meditating on whether or not it is worth it to sign an NDA even for an artist you love who is making work you long to be part of.
A friend who worked for Dolly Rebecca Parton said she referred to NDAs as “just a piece of paper” and preferred to trust out loyalty over time with behavior. (Trust what people DO not what they say they will do.) Dolly was a Capricorn sun, Virgo Moon & Rising, Mercury in Capricorn. I trust her NDA practices as a model for my own life.
Taking a pause and checking my intuition is the wisdom I apply to all aspects of my life. For my calendar it isn’t just that I have “availability.” I pass the project, event or client work through my intuition, and through how I would feel to do the thing. My peace is expensive.
If presented with a document don’t just sign it. Take a long pause (and if they won’t wait for your pause consider “Why are these people trying to rush me and what do they gain from rushing me?”) and consult your intuition. Most of intuition development is just self trust.
Let’s talk about red flags for a minute!
Red flag to me just means slow down and consider.
I came up with a rule in dating when I was just 23 years young that has served me well. Seven red flags is too many.
I don’t need to get to seven red flags to know that a situation isn’t a good one for me any longer. But I do know that I need to be consulting my intuition the whole way (and if I can’t seem to access my intuition I turn to people I trust including psychics) because my spirit team has access to way more information than I do in the conscious world.
In hindsight, over my lifetime, my intuition has a 99.9% rate of being correct. (Once they wanted me to drive in a snowstorm to an Imbolc ceremony and I just pulled off to a parking lot to meditate on making the trip and figured out a way to participate remotely instead of risking the drive.)
Of course, a lot of lessons come from needing to learn one way or another and some people only understand the language of pain. If that is you, godspeed. Sign whatever and experience the consequences.
But if you are out there considering an NDA, pray on it! I always think about how much of those settlements those women were spending on trying to feel better from the experiences they weren’t allowed to talk about.
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