This isn't going to be a story of my life or past prior to these events. Rather, it's about why I have chosen to go through with the Landmark Forum and the event that lead up to my attending a Tuesday night guest session for a friend. Names and certain irrelevant details (locations, etc) have been changed to protect both my identity and the identity of the others involved. Enjoy.
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It is cold, even for March. Sweeping the hallway I overhear an interesting conversation between Rachel (the one in charge of everything) and our new paid intern whose name I never bothered to learn. The intern is doing a one month trial to see if she'd be a good fit for this place, and she has flown out here from over a thousand miles away just to give it a shot. This isn't entirely uncommon in the field I am in. I am a measly volunteer because I lack the experience to qualify for a paid position and I am instead learning on the job. All of that is irrelevant however.
"It's fantastic, you really begin to get your life together and understand other people," Rachel gushes. "You begin to see people for who they really are instead of just noticing their bullshit."
The intern is agreeing though not with quite as much enthusiasm. Having been out of earshot for most of the conversation, I don't have any context. Intern girl agrees that she should definitely attend whatever Rachel is talking about because she sees how it can apply in her life.
Rachel starts to talk again.
"There are days when I have my own problems and I'm acting immaturely and I will be all upset that so-and-so is yelling at me. I'll say 'stop yelling at me!' and Sarah will be like 'No I'm not yelling at you, I'm yelling at your bullshit'. That's what it is all about. Learning to get over yourself and realize when you're the one making everything miserable for yourself. There's who you are as a person and you are wonderful and then there's the bullshit you put yourself through to make yourself miserable. Once you realize that that isn't you you can really start to move on from it and that's what it's really all about."
"What are we talking about?" I chime in.
"The Landmark Forum, it's like... it's sort of an educational course you can take on living life."
There isn't much I have to say in response to that.
Sarah is Rachel's assistant, for lack of a better term. In many ways she is her own boss though she does have to report to Rachel. The two are good friends and I've seen them call each other out on stuff. Time goes by as I remain a volunteer. The nameless intern leaves, claiming that she does not feel the place is really the best fit for her. I don't fully understand but I forget about her quickly enough. We get a new intern who I befriend, but she eventually leaves. That intern did not want to do the Landmark Forum. After she left I heard some interesting tidbits about how the intern was committed to "being mediocre" and refused to adhere to the lifestyle and philosophy of the business. It just wasn't a good fit.
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We're caught up to modern times. I've been offered a more official position with actual work days. In exchange for my work I get education and a discount on services. Sarah's sister, Leah, is out to visit for a month or so and I quickly find out that Leah is here to attend a Landmark forum and have her life changed. Leah is fresh out of high school. Over the weeks leading up to Leah's forum, I hear a lot about Landmark and their philosophy. I decide I'm going to look this up and see what it really is.
Google search yields interesting results. The curriculum on Landmark's website makes enough sense--reads a lot like typical psychology theories to me--and the first page of results is promotional garbage. They definitely made search engine optimization a priority. I start to uncover claims that Landmark is a religious cult. I learn about their history as a business, about EST and about all their questionable, pushy business practices. There are plentiful articles about independent studies showing it to be successful, journalists who went through it and approve of it, and journalists who went through it and found it to be a scam or cult. Usually in the comments some people are vehemently defending Landmark Education, while others talk about relatives or family members who got sucked in to the "cult".
Perhaps it's not for me.
Hanging out with Rachel one day though changes my mind. She really begins talking about Landmark and what it's all about and it made a lot of sense to me. Basically, Landmark is a three day long experience which teaches you some of the basic skills to get through life. Much of it is stuff you already know but you don't apply it for whatever reason. Its necessity hasn't gotten through to you. Rachel compares it to knowing how to eat right and exercise but not doing it because you haven't had anything major in your life happen to change your behavior. Landmark is that "major experience".
Rachel explains Landmark's philosophy as this: you begin to realize that you have let your past define who you are now and in the future. Say you are adopted but 30 years later you still have this complex in which you feel sorry for yourself because your parents abandoned you. That, according to Landmark, is on you and not on your parents. Why should what these two strangers 30 years ago did affect you in the present? We repeatedly allow things that have happened to us to define who we are.
She points out my tendency to recoil and "shut down". I am someone who suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Last year, they labeled me as cured or "functional". Since starting my volunteer position and being around these people who are positive I have definitely improved a lot more. I have a lot of crap from my past that most people never have to deal with and it has affected the way I interact with other people and my level of social anxiety. I am so terrified of how others will perceive me and of failure that I tend to shut down emotionally and become unavailable to others. Think of it as a turtle recoiling into his shell.
Online, I have a tendency to get overly defensive. I try to explain everything to other people and I don't like feeling attacked. This of course stems from my having parents who blamed anything and everything on me and constantly pointed out my flaws. I have improved a lot though I can still fall into the trap of getting defensive about stuff that doesn't matter and engaging in long arguments on forums or in comment sections.
We move on. Rachel says that she knows my recoiling isn't me. The girl hiding in the corner and being afraid of talking isn't me. She says that when the real me comes out and I'm confident in myself, she is floored by me. I am wonderful to be around and when I shut down I'm not just keeping myself from having any fun, I'm selfishly keeping other people from being able to experience the real me. I think about this for a second. She goes on to say that Landmark can help because it's about realizing what causes me to shut down and then letting it go and getting over myself.
Rachel expands on this even further and says that the vast majority of drama in our lives is an illusion. We create drama in our minds by making mountains out of molehills. For example when you have a fight with someone, and they slam a door in your face, and you get all these feelings about how they dislike you or want to get divorced or whatever else. In reality what happened was words were said, a door was slammed. This doesn't mark the end of a marriage. It doesn't mean the other person hates you. All that happened was that they slammed a door.
We get ourselves all worked up about how we perceive other people and how we perceive situations and forget our own bias. We are biased. The way we experience the world is based on our own knowledge and experiences and often that can make us judge people or situations blindly. We may find evidence that another human being is a stubborn jerk when in reality we've never given them the time of day to actually know a thing or two about them. There may be a person you've disliked for years who is actually pretty cool. That's your perception messing up what is actually there. Ever meet someone--bullies in school perhaps--that was convinced they knew everything about you and that you were a bad person? Did those people actually know you? Probably not. That is the philosophy of Landmark. You get rid of those blinders or tinted glasses so you can see situations for what they really are instead of getting caught up in your own self-created drama.
There is truth to this. There is a lot of pop psychology about this. In fact, in my Psychology 101 book there's an entire section dedicated to perception and how our brain makes assumptions in order to prevent bad things from happening again. The basic summary of the section is that, say you were mugged by a person who was bald. You may get a bad feeling about new bald people you meet. Your mind is trying to use past experience to protect you in the future. In some cases, this is useful but in many others the result is just you making assumptions about people you really know nothing about.
A self-help book I read (my grandmother sent it to me) called The Misleading Mind by Karuna Cayton digs pretty deeply into this theory. That book was fantastic and I highly recommend it.
So ultimately, I agree with the philosophy, but something in my stomach can't swallow throwing $525 down the toilet to attend a three-day seminar. I figure I'll just apply this philosophy to my life and leave it at that. Leah attends her forum and then I am invited to go to a Tuesday guest forum which is 3 hours long with her. I would be going with Leah, Sarah and Rachel. The three of us. On Monday Leah spends a lot of time talking about how she really feels changed since she went to the forum and how she really sees things a different way.
Leah isn't any different to me. The only thing different about her is how she is talking about the Landmark forum. That raises some alarm bells in my head. Nonetheless I agree to go to the Tuesday night thing. I like those people, I hope to someday get a job working for them where I am actually paid, and going to a free thing couldn't hurt. I went home and did more research on the Landmark forum. This time I found a lot of stuff defending it against the cult claim. I am more relaxed about Landmark now.
The truth is that I do have a lot of shit from the past that is affecting my life right now. I desperately want some way to work through this. I am someone who has been through therapy before and for some reason it never helped me. I knew why I acted the way I acted. I knew that things from my past were affecting me now. But all a therapist ever did was suggest I get a hobby which, while it has helped it hasn't fixed the problem. So maybe applying this psychology to my life will help me. Maybe Landmark will help me.
And that, my friends, is where this journey begins...
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