Haunted child

A small boy is driving his mother to distraction - waking at night, hearing phantom noises and fixating on his absent father. Douglas attends an innocuous motivational course involving esoteric philosophy and mysteriously abandons his wife and child to "live in a specific, pre-ordained way according to the tenets of a spiritual leader." Is it a predatory cult or the solution to all their problems? And how can a small child be expected to understand adult thinking at its most complex and self-destructive?