It's Tuesday and all of us drive to the forum. They ask if I'm excited and I shrug. I am morbidly curious and definitely want to know what's up with this whole forum thing, but I am still extremely cautious of it. They charge an awful lot of money. I could spend 1/5 as much money and go to a convention in the same city, which costs a lot more money to throw, where I'd have a lot more fun.
We get inside and I fill out a card that asks for a whole lot of information just for me to attend. I suspect telemarketers will be calling me. I put my name tag on and we sit down. A blonde, middle aged woman wearing all black steps up and starts talking to us. It is heavy sales pitch. She talks a lot about the breakthroughs that Landmark helps people to achieve and interacts with the audience.
She asks questions and lets people respond with a raise of hands. She tells us that Landmark isn't about changing us, it's about finding out who we really are and throwing away behavior that doesn't benefit us. She does a lot of reassuring that this is not a scam and pulls out all the stops to counter everything negative I have read on the internet about them. She assures us that nobody is forcing us to be here and heavily encourages those in the audience who don't want to be here to leave.
This sales pitch lasts for about an hour. I am irritated by it because of how obvious and scripted it is. However because Sarah, Leah and Rachel are there with me I implore myself to keep an open mind.
We have discussions with each other about how Landmark benefited people who had just completed it. We ask Leah how it helped her and she doesn't appear to actually know. She says she has a new perception of how to interact with her dad and that it inspired her to apply to a college she's been afraid of applying to despite what her parents think about her career of choice. In other words, what Leah got out of the Landmark Forum was the courage to apply to school. She seems unsure, and it's almost as if she feels pressured by Sarah and Rachel to give enthusiastic answers. I am suspicious but I know Leah will never tell me the truth.
The blonde woman begins a presentation that is actually educational instead of a sales pitch. She talks about the difference between what we know we know, what we know we don't know, and what we don't even know we don't know. She brings up the past and tells her story about how she was rejected and cheated on by boys when she was a teenager. I admit that blonde woman is very good at telling stories and I find myself excited. She then talks about how her past rejects affected the way she approached men.
Putting on a pair of sunglasses, she exclaims that men are lazy and stubborn. She walks over to a man in the audience, introduces herself to him and shakes his hand. She immediately begins giving a dialogue about how she can tell just from the way he dresses and shakes her hand that he is a lazy, stubborn mule. She uses the way he talks as evidence that he is a jerk. Then she goes up to the front of the room and says that most of us don't even know we are wearing these glasses.
When you go to the Landmark forum, she says, the glasses are taken off. You see life for what it really is. She takes the sunglasses off and walks over to the man, introducing herself again. Instead of being gruff and standoffish, she is cheerful and enthusiastic.
"Hi, how are you? Nice to meet you, oooh you're cute!"
People clap after this. It makes sense, even to someone like me. The people close to me in my life love me, but since I am an acquired taste many other people who don't know me dislike me. I had one person in my college class hate me for years, convinced that I was an overly dramatic psychopath and that I was stupid. Not to toot my own horn but one of my "identifiers" is that I'm smart. That is how teachers refer to me, my close friends, family, and heck even one of my enemies in high school listed the reason she hated me as "She's just a gross, know-it-all nerd. She may be smart but intelligence isn't everything!". As for the psychopath bit, I mentioned in my previous post that I have been through therapy. I have been evaluated by several psychiatrists and declared sane. The bottom line is that this person hated me. Some of the things she pointed out were valid--yes I did get into arguments quite a lot. Yes, I could be defensive. This woman however thought I was the literal scum of the earth. She hated me. And she used her having been around me for years as evidence of this.
Does she really know me? No. Not a single person close to me appears to think these things about me. And I trust those people to be honest. Not even an ex-friend of mine who I had a falling out with believes those things about me, and she has every reason to dislike me. Understanding that she had her own biases that were leading her to dislike me rather than it being something inherently wrong with me is something that has helped me a lot. However, that philosophy can be dangerous. I've met some pretty awful people who genuinely believe that anyone who dislikes them is just plain wrong about them. Terrible, terrible things have been done with the excuse of "oh you just don't understand me". I sincerely hope that Landmark covers the distinction between when other people are letting their bias distract from reality and when other people are offering valid criticism.
Blonde woman goes on and picks up a chair, holding it out like a weapon.
"Hello, I'm jealous of any woman that even so much as looks at you, I think you're a stubborn mule who can't be trusted and will ultimately disappoint me and that you're probably lazy too. Wanna date me!? Why doesn't anybody want to go out with me? WHAT'S WRONG WITH THEM?"
The audience laughs.
She explains this in even more detail, and then has people who went through the forum describe what changed for them. A few came up and told their stories, but in all honesty it sounded the same. Rehearsed. Everything was vague and generic. I expected to hear sob stories about orphans and abusive parents but instead I just got generic descriptions of how empowered they felt. One girl did mention that she came out to her parents, but that was the most detail I got. At this point I knew this was one giant sales pitch, but ultimately, I was curious and it was no longer irritating. I wanted to figure out what exactly this was all about.
We have a "break" in order to allow people to sign up for the forum. I go and sign up. Apparently, there's another hour in which people will share even more, but we decide to leave and get ice cream. All of us have to be awake at 5AM the next day and it was already 9PM. We didn't want to be out until midnight. I was assured by Sarah and Rachel that I wasn't missing anything dire or important. Leah seemed very relieved to be leaving. That was odd.
I put my $150 deposit down, got some ice cream and we booked it. I will be attending a Landmark Forum in November.
I am going into this with a skeptical, open mind. I want to figure out the mystery of what exactly the Landmark Forum is, how it can help me, and how it is such a money grubbing organization. I know I can gain some knowledge form their "technology", but at the same time... there is something fishy about the forum as a whole. Many people have gone in and called it brainwashing or a cult, and I want to find out exactly where it falls. Open mind, closed wallet.
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