The Landmark Forum cult? October 10, 2006
Posted by Niels in : Life, the universe, and everything, Personal , trackbackLandmark Education, aka “the Landmark Forum”, is the most prominent of a style of “human potential” seminars known as Large Group Awareness Training (LGAT). Just some of the many others include PSI World, est, Promise Keepers, Lifespring, the Mankind Project, and the Kairos Foundation/More to Life (source: Wikipedia). There are a lot of people out there who say these weekend seminars transformed their life, but there’s also a lot of people out there who call these companies cults.
I’ve had a number of friends go through LGAT seminars. Some of them I respect a lot. All of them have had overwhelmingly positive experiences. Of course, since Landmark is essentially brainwashing its participants and reprogramming them, that’s about what you’d expect. Which is not to say the program doesn’t work, just that you have to take these opinions with a grain of salt.
I’m considering taking one of these programs, but if anyone’s going to be messing around inside my head, I want to be fully informed beforehand. So this morning I started reading about them in depth.
As a basis for comparison, at Art of Attraction we train people on specific skills, such as body language, flirtatious conversation, and relating to others. For most people, these skills are closely intertwined with their emotional well-being. As I learned the skills to be more socially successful, I also become more confident, more independent, and felt better about myself.
Landmark Education offers the opportunity to address your emotional state directly. Using a combination of hypnosis, NLP, emotional contagion, and motivational speaking, they break you down emotionally and rebuild you. Some people’s lives are shattered by the experience. Some people find a new inner strength that enhances all their relationships, but others find themselves unable to relate to anyone outside the Landmark community.
You might think that reading all this would turn me off, but to be honest, I’m more curious than ever. I’ll be reading more about Landmark and other LGATs over the next few months. Here’s where I’m starting:
Negative info on Landmark:
http://www.rickross.com/groups/landmark.html
http://forum.rickross.com/viewforum.php?f=4
Pros and cons:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~anco/mental/randr/main.htm
Tons more links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landmark_Education
(The neutrality of the article is under dispute, so skip the article and go right to the links section at the bottom, organized by positive and negative opinions.)
Comments»
Ask me about this sometime.
If you want to check out some more information on Large Group Awareness Training organizations, including links to research articles and relevant videos, check out this new blog:
The Truth about Human Potential Seminars
http://lgattruth.blogspot.com
I’ve been on the more to life course. i did it many years ago, i had always heard it was similar to landmark but hearing this summary of it, it sounds absoltely nothing like it - maybe they have the same goal i have no idea but as for nlp, hypnosis etc, not at all. Any tools/processes you learn you go through yourself, although there is help and support if you need it - the work you put in i suppose equals what you getout of it, most people get a hell of a lot out of it. I
myself am a therapist, healer, bodyworker etc who has experienced lots of forms of healing including hypnosis and nlp etc - what i can say is that the processes on the more to life you are in your usual state of mind doing them, guiding yourself. i think they are a great way to gain empowerment for yourself in a very down to earth cut the crap way, that have beautiful and uplifting results on all levels.
as for reprogramming, if you wanna reprogramme yourself (or let go of the beliefs about yourdelf and life that are false and don’tserve you) like i said the tools cut through the crap ( the crap could be the drama invested in therapy concepts for example - they are kept so simple there is no need to have any particular psychological standpoint from which to come from), I still find the more to life tools in all the different forms of healing work i do to be a great point to work from.
I went on the More to Life course about 15 years ago. It was then called The Life Training.
I went with some trepidation, as they did not say beforehand what the course was about. The course was very, very intensive, over about 3 days. However, I did not feel brain-washed. There were some very positive outcomes for me, although I have to admit that I did not keep up with practising the techniques, and the effect has worn off.
I was extremely concerned that there were some very vulnerable people there, who were encouraged by the ‘trainers’ to air their problems in public. The trainers were not qualified psychiatrists, and I was concerned that they might have done more harm than good. For example, one guy described in some detail how he was sexually abused as a child, and I was concerned that after bringing all this stuff to the surface, the trainers did not do enough to support him in his fragile state, and instead moved onto somebody else.
On the whole, I would say that if you are reasonably stable and secure you could benefit a lot from one of these LGAT courses. If you have some serious unresolved hang-ups, there is a risk that matters could be made worse for you. By analogy, a fitness course might be a great idea for someone who is already reasonably fit, but a really bad idea for someone with a heart condition.
It did not feel like a cult. For example, they have never contacted me since the course, and they have not asked for money, etc. A few years ago, I bought some course follow-up material from them at fairly minimal cost, and they did not use that as a sales opportunity.