MIND FIXERS: The History of Mass Therapy With its Roots in Mind Dynamics Institute, Misuse of Zen Insights, and Hyping the Positive Thinking of New Thought Religion.

ICSA two-day virtual summer conference July 11-12

Saturday, July 11, 2020 - 11:05 -11:50

"MIND FIXERS: The History of Mass Therapy With its Roots in Mind Dynamics Institute, Misuse of Zen Insights, and Hyping the Positive Thinking of New Thought Religion." (Joseph Kelly, Joseph Szimhart, Patrick Ryan)

The title for this presentation, “MIND FIXERS: The History of Mass Therapy With its Roots in Mind Dynamics Institute, Misuse of Zen Insights, and Hyping the Positive Thinking of New Thought Religion,” covers a vast arena for specialized workshops that range from one day to several weeks. Borrowing techniques from encounter group formats, military boot camp training, and the mindfulness movements these specialized groups operate as unregulated mass therapy businesses and are not licensed as mental health professions. The stated purpose of these “large group awareness trainings” is to increase self-realization and success in life. The outcomes, however, are problematic with some critics claiming that a form of “brainwashing” is taking place that emphasizes promotion of the workshops while any real-life gains are highly questionable. Some participants report psychological and social harm. The speakers will guide a discussion to address the criticisms.

This two-day event will include a variety of presentations, panels, and workshops for former members of cultic groups, families and friends, professionals, and researchers.

More info: https://www.icsahome.com/events/virtual-summer-conference

Register: https://icsahome.networkforgood.com/events/21475-icsa-online-summer-conference

Carol Giambalvo's Cult Information and Recovery

Carol Giambalvo’s interest in cults and thought reform began in 1978 when her step-daughter began exhibiting a drastic personality change following becoming a devotee in ISKCON. She began researching cults and thought reform and lectured in local high schools, churches and civic organizations. The more information she gathered on the indoctrination processes and thought reform used in cults, the more concerns arose about her involvement in est and The Hunger Project. In 1983, she and her husband, Noel, left their associations with est, The Hunger Project and Sterling Institute and began a personal search for information to aid their recovery process. Since 1984, Carol has done exit counseling and writing in the field, as well as serving as director with several organization’s boards, organizing and conducting recovery workshops and working with hundreds of people who have walked away from destructive cults. 

Personal: Carol is married to Noel Giambalvo and currently resides in Florida. She is the parent of two children and the step-parent of three, with seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. She is currently retired from family intervention work, but serves as a consultant and Director of Recovery Programs for the International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) and serves of their Board of Directors, as well as serving on the board of reFOCUS.

You can reach Carol at: carol.giambalvo@att.net

http://www.carolgiambalvo.com/

Self Inflation and Contagious Narcissism

Joseph Szimhart
jszimhart@gmail.com

http://jszimhart.com/blog/sweat_lodge_deaths
December, 2016

After watching CNN’s two-hour, December 4, 2016 documentary on the rise and fall motivational speaker James Arthur Ray, I came away from it with a sense of appreciation for good film making as well as a sullen gut reaction to the horror of three people dying in one of Ray’s over-crowded, very expensive, “spiritual warrior,” sweat lodge challenges. The sweat lodge scam was one of his best personal income ventures.

I will explain below why modern sweats, like fire-walks, in my view are scams.

The filmmakers managed to convey fairly and in depth an aspect of American culture that emerged in spades by the late 19th century. Rugged individualism and the positive programming of the American Dream—Be All You Can Be—has been co-opted by a billion-dollar self-help industry of large group awareness workshops. I include many mega-churches lately run by Robert Schuler and currently Joel Osteen in this heady mix with est/Landmark, Lifespring, Psi-World, Amway, and the long list of mass training gurus including Tony Robbins, Werner Erhard, Covey, Eckhart Tolle, James Arthur Ray, and Byron Katie. There are dozens more. If you read and believed Norman Vincent Peale, Og Mandino, and Dale Carnegie, you are in this ballpark. You dwell in this social institution called Self-Inflation University.

Maybe you, the modern seeker, read some Nietzsche and Ayn Rand to reinforce this selfism. Maybe you took yoga classes or seek that special diet. Maybe you absorb the cosmic infusions from ambient music. Maybe you speak to the universe and believe that the universe will respond to your positive thought—you know, the law of attraction since someone let that “secret” out of the bag. Self-improvement, self-development, self-realization, enlightened self-interest, the selfish gene, the higher self, self-awareness, and mindfulness.

Maybe you tried affirmations from a New Thought book or religion—over one hundred years ago, the most famous one was Every Day and in Every Way, I Am Getting Better and Better. Millions of Americans were doing it. You came to believe that religion can be a more precise science than neurobiology. Forgive me—I meant “spirituality” as you are by no means merely religious like those calcified old ladies in the pews of common churches.

Be all you can be? What on earth can that mean? And how much BETTER can you get anyway? We get the incentive. Any healthy human being gets that much: We all want to improve. But at what and how? This is where the self-help gurus come in. Nearly everyone that pays out hundreds or thousands of dollars up front for one of the life and prosperity workshops or intensives is already lost. They do not know and they want to know what will work for them and what is blocking their potential. That is why they are there. To make a breakthrough! Somewhere in life their egos have been damaged, wounded, or traumatized, or in the least somehow limited. Common regulated therapy is too slow or is not working. Maybe they have not gone deep enough and you need a deeper experience.

Narcissistic traits that we all have and need are not bad—we need them to get by, to put our best selves forward to get a job or a spouse. Traits are not disorders. We must believe in ourselves to some degree or we might not get up in the morning. Our best self can be compromised by anxiety. Anxiety is the most commonly diagnosed psych disorder. We all feel it to some degree nearly every day, but most people cope with it well enough. Those who do not cope feel wounded. Forces around them and within them reflect a poor self-image or at least one not good enough.

Wounded narcissists are not bad people, but they are particularly vulnerable to mass therapies that promise to tap that special self within that is pure and wonderful once the layers of social conditioning and trauma are “broken through.” If only those god-damned, self-imposed limitations and environmentally fierce blocks could be somehow removed, they say to themselves. Well, the run-of-the-mill self-help guru or life coach is there for you to help engineer a break through. Just sign the waiver and prepare for several days or more of a psychological roller coaster.

Break throughs are those a-ha moments when the client feels a profound release or insight that has a potentially life-changing effect. These engineered breakthroughs may be authentic—some people do change bad habits after a mass therapy workshop—but at what price? For most, the positive take away is short term or vague at best, especially when we read testimonials from the “94%” (claimed by Landmark) satisfied customers. They sound like testimonials from rare Amway success stories. The cost is more than money.

Most of the mass trainings promise to change you or “shift” your perspective. Let me get to the point. Anyone who is placed in an extraordinary situation or experiences an ecstasy will absorb the influences and language in that environment. The influences include the admonition to spread the good news of your transformation at the Bobby Ray or Whoever Tony workshop, and maybe to ask for forgiveness of anyone you may have harmed to somehow end past karma. Of course, when you so energetically ask for forgiveness or exude over your “experience,” you are also recruiting. And that is the point. The owners of these businesses want to funnel as many people as they can into their self-experience machines that will spit out recruiters at the other end. The model is understandable if one is selling cars, herbal products, or cosmetics, but it gets very strange when the product is your Self.

The question to ask is what self emerges from a J A Ray sweat lodge ceremony? Can that sacred self, the “spiritual warrior” be forced into manifestation during an engineered experience in group trainings or spiritual retreats? The answer is no. That is the scam. The good feeling of having made a breakthrough in front of a crowd after a public confession will always subside. All highs from ecstasy subside when the endorphins stop dancing in your brain. However, the leader tells you not to let this insight go, to reinforce it in how you communicate with others and choose your path going forward. So, you adopt the language of the group or life coach, and you start sounding like one of “them” to your friends and family. The change is that you sound like one of them and not that you have suddenly become a better person. The point is that you could have become a better person with a little effort all on your own and still sounded like yourself.

One definition of a brainwashed or radically influenced person resides in language: If he talks like us, he is one of us. This is true for any culture, be it Austria or a gang in Chicago. However, you have a better shot at being your authentic self as an Austrian than you will as a gang member. It is a matter of constriction. Smaller groups with enthusiastic members will tend to self-seal or create an us-them culture.

J R Ray’s sweat lodge experiencers were in shock when people died. They all had to question why they put up with so much pain and why they lost their common sense. Those who broke away finally did make a real breakthrough. They no longer trusted the narcissist who absorbed them into his theater, his culture, his personality cult world. They shed the language and re-learned how to talk authentically. They no longer believed that men should aspire to be gods who are the true spiritual warriors.

Just ask Zeus.

J A Ray violated authentic sweat lodge intent.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/01/us/canada-sweat-lodge/

James A Ray's comeback angers victims
http://jszimhart.com/blog/sweat_lodge_deaths

The Bizarre True Story of the Pop Psychology Cult That Seduces Philip in This Season of The Americans

Ruth Graham
Slate
April 6, 2016

 

If you are interested in religion, The Americans is one of the meatiest shows on television. There’s Pastor Tim, the nuke-protesting minister who serves as a father figure to teenage Paige, who was baptized in Season 3. There’s the Soviet-style atheism of the two leads, undercover spies Philip and Elizabeth Jennings. And then there’s Erhard Seminars Training, or EST, the cult-like pop-psychology phenomenon that has attracted FBI agent Stan and his ex-wife Sandra, and is playing an increasingly significant role in Philip’s life this season.

EST was founded in 1971 by a handsome former encyclopedia salesman named Werner Erhard, who had changed his name from John Paul Rosenberg a decade earlier. He launched EST, in San Francisco and it quickly spread across the county. EST was not officially a religion, but a training program meant “to transform your ability to experience living so that the situations you have been trying to change or have been putting up with clear up just in the process of life itself,” as Erhard put it. At its peak, thousands of people a month were paying hundreds of dollars to partake in weekend training seminars in order to “get it”— EST-speak for a vague kind of self-actualization.

EST meetings took place in swank hotel ballrooms, and attracted professionals and celebrities like Valerie Harper and Yoko Ono. Talking, smoking, eating, and note-taking were forbidden during seminars; breaks were rare. Even when trainees went home in between sessions, they could not drink or take prescription drugs. Session leaders alternately berated attendees as “assholes,” and led them into trances. Trainees were strongly encouraged to recruit others.

For a while, it worked. Here’s how afascinating profile of the program in Psychology Today described the epiphanic moment of a seminar in 1975:

The light dawned slowly, with Ted chirping, “See? See?,” and then one and another acknowledged eagerly that, yes, they got it, and gradually a swell of exultant revelation swept the place. It was amazing to behold. They were perfect exactly the way they were.

EST was part of the Human Potential Movement of the 1970s, which emphasized human agency and personal growth as a response to generational ennui. Not coincidentally, Erhard had drifted through Scientology and a program called “Mind Dynamics” before launching EST. In the mid-1980s, he renamed EST “The Forum” and by the early 1990s he had left the country, fleeing tax problems. Later, the Forum morphed into the Landmark Forum, which continues to sell a program of empowerment-via-seminar.

On The Americans, EST seminars are depicted as both intense and a little dippy. Stan’s girlfriend, whom he met at EST, encourages him to use its techniques to handle a problem with his boss. “Be clear and direct about what you're feeling,” she urges him. “If his problems or lack of clarity are causing him to stand in your way, then your truth and clarity will blow right through him.” The FBI doesn’t work like that, he tells her wryly.

Philip can’t really partake of the full EST experience, because it involves a kind of public confession. As a man who has killed easily dozens of people, many of them innocent, his “truth and clarity” are in a different category than those of housewives with naughty fantasies. But it’s clear that the program is cracking something open in him. It helps him confront the memory of his first murders at age 10, and it’s clearly one of the forces making him increasingly uncomfortable with his double (triple, quadruple...) life. He can’t turn to religion, because to do so would be to betray the political values he has devoted his life to. But EST is performing similar work on him in its imperfect way.

There’s a lesson in this for other storytellers handling religion, spirituality, and related movements, no matter how silly or short-lived. The Americans could have mocked EST. But instead, the show is picking at why Erhard’s snake oil might have appealed to so many thousands of hungry people, including one who just happens to be a brutal killer. It’s easy to sneer at the opium of the people. But it’s far more interesting to ask why the masses are lighting up.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/04/06/the_true_story_of_est_the_pop_psychology_cult_that_seduces_philip_in_this.html

The Return of Werner Erhard, Father of Self-Help

Peter Haldemannov
New York Times

November 28, 2015

The silver-haired man dressed like a waiter (dark vest, dark slacks) paced the aisle between rows of desks in a Toronto conference room. “If you’re going to be a leader, you’re going to have to have a very loose relationship with this thing you call ‘I’ or ‘me,’” he shouted. “Maybe that whole thing in me around which the universe revolves isn’t so central!”

He paused to wipe his brow with a wad of paper towels. An assistant stood by with a microphone, but he waved her off. “Maybe life is not about the self but about self-transcendence! You got a problem with that?”

No one in the room had a problem with that. The desks were occupied by 27 name-tagged academics from around the world. And in the course of the day, a number of them would take the mike to pose what their instructor referred to as “yeah buts, how ’bouts or what ifs” in response to his pronouncements — but no one had a problem with them.

In some ways, the three-day workshop, “Creating Class Leaders,” recalled an EST training session. As with that cultural touchstone of the 1970s, there was “sharing” and applause. There were confrontations and hugs. Gnomic declarations hovered in the air like mist: “We need to distinguish distinction”; “There’s no seeing, there’s only the seer”; “There isn’t any is.”

But the event was much more civilized than EST. There were bathroom breaks. No one was called an expletive by the teacher.

This is significant because the teacher was none other than the creator of EST, Werner Erhard.

Pound another nail into the coffin for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notion that there are no second acts in American lives.

“I am committed to the opposite of that idea,” Mr. Erhard said a few weeks after the leadership class in Toronto. “I don’t think there’s a person who walked out of that room who isn’t a second act.” To say nothing of their instructor, who, at age 80, may be more of a third or fourth act.

There was a time, boys and girls — the Me Decade, Tom Wolfe called it — when Mom and Dad wore mood rings, attended encounter groups and in general engaged in a tireless amount of navel gazing. If the so-called human potential movement had a single avatar, it was Werner Erhard.

EST (Latin for “is” and an acronym for Erhard Seminars Training) was equal parts Zen Buddhism and Dale Carnegie. Aspiring “ESTies” flocked to hotel ballrooms across the country for combative training sessions during which they forwent meal and bathroom breaks to take responsibility for their lives and “get it” by discovering there was nothing to get.

Diana Ross, Joe Namath, Yoko Ono, Jerry Rubin and several hundred thousand other seekers got it. Newsweek anointed Mr. Erhard “a celebrity guru who retails enlightenment.” There were doubters. To New Times magazine, he was “the king of the brain snatchers.”

The criticism intensified as EST grew. It was labeled a cult that practiced mind control (verbal abuse, sleep deprivation), a racket that exploited its followers (heavy recruiting, endless “graduate seminars”).

Much was made of Mr. Erhard’s tangled Don Draperish past: his days as a car salesman in Philadelphia, his dabbling in Mind Dynamics and Scientology, his desertion of his first wife and their four children to reinvent himself on the West Coast.

Even his name was fake, lifted from an Esquire article he read on the plane to California. (“The Men Who Made the New Germany” included references to Ludwig Erhard, the minister of economics, and Werner Heisenberg, the atomic scientist.) Mr. Erhard was born Jack Rosenberg.

In 1985, he repackaged EST as the Forum, a kinder, gentler iteration of the training that was also more success-oriented. “In the ’80s, people started to think a little bit, and it was possible to use a less-confrontational style,” he said. But tax disputes, company lawsuits and an ugly divorce from his second wife kept Mr. Erhard in the news media cross hairs.

The flameout came in 1991. In March of that year, at the same time that I.R.S. officials were publicly accusing him of tax fraud, “60 Minutes” broadcast a report on Mr. Erhard that depicted him as an abusive father and husband who had sexually molested two daughters from his second marriage. Shortly before that show was televised, he sold the Forum to a group of employees, gave his Great Dane to a friend and fled the country.

“My reputation was destroyed by ‘60 Minutes,’” Mr. Erhard shouted between sips of Dragon Well Supreme green tea and a fistful of the pills he takes for various ailments. (He has no indoor voice — a professional hazard, perhaps.)

He had taken a suite at the London NYC hotel, where he had traveled with his Dutch-born third wife, Gonneke Spits, from Toronto to see friends, do a little business and visit his favorite chiropractor and tailor. He was also in the city to meet with a reporter — virtually the only press he has done in more than two decades.

“It was clear that I had to remove myself from the work, or the work was going to get very damaged,” Mr. Erhard said of his self-imposed exile.

But it was the Church of Scientology that actually drove him out of the country. According to Mr. Erhard, the “60 Minutes” allegations were the culmination of a smear campaign organized by Scientology officials to get back at him for poaching clients and ideas.

“There’s no question that I was declared fair game by L. Ron Hubbard,” he said. “In the doctrines of Scientology, that meant they could destroy me financially, socially or reputationally.”

This was a long time before the book (and the movie) “Going Clear” exposed some of the shadier practices of Scientology. But a 1991 article in The Los Angeles Times described how the church had indeed targeted Mr. Erhard as a “suppressive person,” hiring at least three private investigators to dig up dirt on him and pass it on to the news media. One of them, Alan Clow, said he shared his findings with “60 Minutes.”

As for the I.R.S., Mr. Erhard sued the agency (winning $200,000 in damages) for falsely claiming he had evaded taxes.

The daughter who had accused him of abuse later recanted, admitting she had lied to receive an advance on a book. And an article in The Believer stated that the “60 Minutes” segment was riddled with so many discrepancies that CBS deleted it from its public archives.

After leaving the country, Mr. Erhard settled in a friend’s apartment in Tokyo, with, he said, no more than “a pocketful of cash” to his name.

He had kept the business rights to the Forum in Japan, and for several years, under the rubric of “mastery,” he conducted seminars for professionals coping with Japan’s financial crisis of the early 1990s. He also did some consulting work for Landmark, the Forum’s successor, run by his brother Harry Rosenberg.

In 1996, Mr. Erhard came down with a mysterious debilitating illness. A friend referred him to his doctor in the Cayman Islands, who ultimately diagnosed the Epstein-Barr virus. Mr. Erhard recovered on Grand Cayman, where he and Ms. Spits (a former EST executive) bought a villa in George Town, which remains their home base when they are not traveling.

For several years before his latest professional reincarnation, Mr. Erhard consulted for businesses and government agencies like the Russian adult-education program the Znaniye Society and a nonprofit organization supporting clergy in Ireland.

Enter the Harvard economist Michael Jensen. Dr. Jensen, who is famous in financial circles for championing the concepts of shareholder value and executive stock options, had taken a Landmark course in Boston at the suggestion of his daughter, who mended a rocky relationship with Dr. Jensen after taking the course herself.

“I became convinced we should work to get this kind of transformational material into the academies,” he said, adding that he considers Mr. Erhard “one of the great intellectuals of the century.”

In 2004, with the help of a Landmark official, Dr. Jensen developed an experiential course on integrity in leadership at the Simon Business School at the University of Rochester. The class was offered there for five years, with Mr. Erhard signing on as an instructor during its third year. It has since been taught at several universities around the world as well as at the United States Air Force Academy.

As far as its philosophical underpinnings go, Mr. Erhard struggled a bit to describe the course without resorting to its Delphic phraseology (“ontological pedagogy,” “action as a correlate of the occurring”).

Sitting in front of a bank of computers in his hotel room, he read excerpts from the 1,000-page textbook he is working on, such as: “As linguistic abstractions, leader and leadership create leader and leadership as realms of possibility in which, when you are being a leader, all possible ways of being are available to you.”

Briefly, the course, which owes ideological debts to the Forum and to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, takes an experience-based, rather than knowledge-based, approach to its subject. Students master principles like integrity and authenticity in order to leave the class acting as leaders instead of merely knowing about leadership.

Its promoters believe the course has broader applications both within and outside of academia. “They should take it to government,” said Paul Fireman, the former chairman and C.E.O. of Reebok, who has consulted with Mr. Erhard on his recent work. (Mr. Fireman says that Reebok’s stock price jumped “from the $6 or $7 range to the $25 to $30 range” after he introduced his employees to the Landmark training.)

Landmark, for which Mr. Erhard continues to help develop new programs, is far more mainstream than EST ever became. Currently, according to Harry Rosenberg, 130,000 people a year participate in its offerings, which are available on every continent except Antarctica. It has a stronger corporate presence than EST or the Forum; in addition to Reebok, clients include Microsoft, NASA and Lululemon.

Still, Mr. Erhard’s emphasis on personal responsibility, on being rather than knowing, is embedded in the Landmark workshops. “All of the Landmark programs are based on the ideas and methodology that Werner developed,” Mr. Rosenberg said. “The basic intent has not changed.”

In fact, Mr. Erhard casts a fairly long shadow in the culture at large. His influence, wrote Lucy Kellaway in the Financial Times, “extends far beyond the couple of million people who have done his courses: there is hardly a self-help book or a management training programme that does not borrow some of his principles.”

Whether that’s a good thing or not probably depends on one’s attitude toward such books and programs.

“Erhard made palatable the notion that the end justifies the means,” said Steve Salerno, the author of “Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless.” “Which is partly responsible for the climate of what I call happyism. If your happiness is all that matters, anybody who stands in the way becomes detritus in the ruthless pursuit of individual perfection.”

Criticism of this sort does not faze Mr. Erhard. Certainly, he’s weathered worse.

In his ninth decade, he is consumed with his latest mission, putting in 10-hour days lecturing and teaching three courses a year in addition to completing the textbook.

His recent health challenges include a battle with septicemia that left him having to learn to walk again (a timer in his suite reminded him to stroll around every half-hour), but he still works six days a week.

While he writes, he listens to music: Renée Fleming, the Serbian composer Stevan Mokranjac, Sérgio Mendes. “You’re going to get a kick out of this,” he said, scrolling through the playlist on one of his computers. “Gonneke! Where’s ‘Brasileiro’ on here?”

His wife, a stylish platinum-haired woman whom Mr. Erhard leans on to negotiate the more mundane demands of life, helped him find the album by Mr. Mendes in question. The surdo-drum thumping of a batucada band filled the room.

In their downtime, the couple likes to travel. Tokyo, Amsterdam and London are favorite places, along with Hawaii and the West Coast, where Mr. Erhard’s seven children live. He now enjoys a very strong relationship with four of them, he said, and a good relationship with the other three.

He also has 11 grandchildren, and one of his current preoccupations is the numbing effects of digital technology on millennials. Warming to the subject, he read aloud another passage, this one from a dense Heidegger essay calling for a “comportment toward technology which expresses yes and at the same time no.”

”The cost to this generation is enormous,” Mr. Erhard said. “They are losing access to their humanity.”

Maintaining access to his own humanity may be Mr. Erhard’s biggest project. Floating around the screen of another computer was the word “impeccability,” a reminder, he said, “to deal with whatever I touch with care.” If he learned his lesson the hard way, maybe there is no easy way.

“Here’s how it is for me,” Mr. Erhard said, leaning in, giving his vocal cords a break. “When my integrity is lacking, I am clear that I just got to be a bit smaller as a person. And the thing you have to remember about integrity is it’s a mountain with no top.”

The clock chimed. He stood and stretched. Time for another few laps around the room.

A version of this article appears in print on November 29, 2015, on page ST1 of the New York edition with the headline: Werner Erhard.i

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/fashion/the-return-of-werner-erhard-father-of-self-help.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=0

Large Group Awareness Training

Cult Observer
Volume 15, No. 1, 1998

In the 1960s the encounter group movement was born. Advocating enhanced communication and intensified experience, this movement evolved into something that was part psychotherapy, part spirituality, and part business. In some scholarly articles, these groups were referred to as "large group awareness trainings" or LGATs. Erhard Seminars Training (est) was the most successful of these groups, and it has been widely imitated. Even though it no longer officially exists, in the minds of many est is identified with the entire LGAT movement. It is in a sense the progenitor of a myriad of programs that have been marketed to the public and the business community. Lifespring is, perhaps, the next best known program after est.

It is probably not an exaggeration to estimate that there are hundreds of training programs in the genre that est made famous.  However, because most of these programs are businesses, they will usually emphasize that which they want potential consumers to think distinguishes them from their competition.  "Exciting" words and phrases, such as "breakthrough," "unique," "your full potential," "must be experienced," and "changed my life" are used again and again with training after training.

The est model of self-transformation is structured around an intense weekend experience which brings together several dozen or several hundred people and a "trainer" with one or more assistants.  People are together morning, afternoon, and evening. Breaks, even for the bathroom, tend to be highly structured and limited.  Participants are led through a long series of exercises that proponents say are designed to cut through psychological defenses, increase honesty, and help people take charge of their lives.  Undoubtedly, many variations of this basic model exist, and some LGATs may depart substantially from this model.

Although reliable scientific data are not available, probably at least a million people in the United States have participated in at least one LGAT, with several hundred thousand having gone through est alone.

Because many observers of this phenomenon have associated such trainings with the new age movement (NAM), LGATs have also been called "new age transformational training programs," or "new age trainings."  According to Dole and Langone, the new age can be defined as "an alternative religious paradigm that is rooted in Eastern mysticism, eclectic in its practices and beliefs, tolerant (or undiscerning, depending upon one's perspective) of nontraditional practices and beliefs, and optimistic about humanity's capacity to bring about a great evolutionary leap in consciousness."  New age transformational trainings use an eclectic mix of psychological techniques and exercises that proponents believe will improve one's spiritual, psychological, and material well-being.

Some observers and scientific researchers have also associated some LGATs with at least the potential to cause psychological distress to some participants.  Some compare the trainings to thought reform programs, or "brainwashing," and to "cults."

The implied, if not explicit, religious nature of many of these trainings and the potential for psychological damage in some trainings have resulted in lawsuits against some trainings and employers who have sponsored them.  On February 22, 1988 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issued a notice on new age training programs which conflict with employees' religious beliefs.  This notice gave official credence to the claim that some of these trainings are fundamentally religious in nature, even though they may be corporately organized as a business.  An article from Labor Law Journal elaborates upon the EEOC document.

Recently, AFF developed a packet on LGATs, containing the articles noted above as well as other articles.  With a few exceptions, the information in this packet tends to be critical of LGATs.  This is because the consumers who seek information from AFF are likely to have already been exposed to the sophisticated "sales" packages and activities that most such trainings excel at producing.\ There is no shortage of glowing testimonies and four-color brochures lauding the benefits of these programs. But the consumer will not so easily find material that examines negative aspects of the practices of some of  these trainings.  The packet is an attempt to rectify the informational advantage that LGATs have.

The new packet emphasizes scholarly articles because we believe that this area cries out for scientific research.  Given the person-hours devoted to LGATs during the past two decades, it is astounding how little solid scientific research has been conducted.  Indeed, there is not enough research to make any sweeping generalizations about this genre of training program.  The research on est suggests that a small, though certainly not insignificant, percentage of participants were psychologically harmed by the training in ways that are detectable by standard measures of psychological distress.  How much "subtle" harm occurs is still open to dispute.

I know of no research, however, that convincingly demonstrates positive behavioral effects of these trainings.  In my opinion, one of the best studies from a methodological standpoint was "Research on Erhard Seminar Training in a Correctional Institution" (Hosford, Ray, E., Moss, C. Scott, Cavior, Helene, & Kerish, Burton.  Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology, 1982, Manuscript #2419, American Psychological Association).  Of 313 inmates who volunteered for est training in a Federal Correctional Institution, 150 were randomly selected for the training, while the balance acted as a waiting-list control group and were given scholarships to be used upon release.  The groups did not differ on demographics or variables related to criminal history.  They were given a full battery of psychological tests and biofeedback instruments, with half of the group pre-tested and half post-tested (to control for the possible contaminating effect of testing).  Three-month and 12-month follow-ups were conducted to assess behavioral outcomes (incident reports, furloughs, work performance, etc.).  Although the psychological tests reflected some positive change, these self-report changes did not manifest themselves in alterations in physiological measures or in actual behavior.

The research and anecdotal evidence seem to indicate that LGATs are very successful at producing positive opinions about the trainings -- an outcome that the financial officers of every service business would value.  However, whether or not they have a substantial positive effect on behavior that is not due to placebo factors, is still an unanswered question.

There are also a host of ethical questions that can be raised about how many of these trainings recruit new trainees and persuade graduates to continue to take more courses.  We hope that the material in the new packet will help readers appreciate the complexity and subtlety of the issues raised by LGATs.

42 Hours, $500, 65 Breakdowns: My lost weekend with the trademark happy, bathroom-break hating, slightly spooky inheritors of est

Laura McClure
Mother Jones
Volume 34/August 2009

After nearly 40 hours inside the basement of Landmark Education's world headquarters, I have not Transformed. Nor have I "popped" like microwave popcorn, as the Forum Leader striding back and forth at the front of the windowless gray room has promised. In fact, by the time he starts yelling and stabbing the board with a piece of chalk around hour 36, it's become clear that I'll be the hard kernel left at the bottom of this three-and-a-half-day Landmark Forum. I have, however, Invented the Possibility of a Future in which I get a big, fat raise, a Future I'll Choose to Powerfully Enroll my bosses in, now that I am open to Miracles Around Money.

My reluctance to achieve Breakthrough Results is clearly not shared by many of my fellow Forum attendees. Even on day one, most seem positively elated to have plunked down 500 bucks for a more efficient, passionate, powerful life. "Hey, it's cheaper than therapy," a therapist-turned-real estate agent tells me. He ponders how to persuade one of his employees to pony up for the Forum. She's going through a rough patch, he explains - the recession, her marriage.

Not that being broke or brokenhearted would make her a minority in this room; several attendees talk about being between jobs, and one woman says she's on welfare. In the scribbled shorthand of my furtive notes, PW stands for "incidents of public weeping." I lose track after the PW count hits 65. Landmark Education, a for-profit "employee-owned" private company, took in $89 million last year offering leadership and development seminars (and cruises, and dating services, and courses for kids and teens). It claims that more than 1 million seekers have sat through its basic training, which is offered in seven languages in 20 countries. Its consulting firm, the Vanto Group, has coached employees from Apple, ExxonMobil, JPMorgan Chase, and the Pentagon.

Though it's hardly a secret, Landmark does not advertise that it is the buttoned-down reincarnation of the ultimate '70's self-actualization philosophy, est. Erhard Seminars Training was founded by Werner Erhard, a former used car salesman who'd changed his name from Jack Rosenberg, moved to Northern California, and dabbled in Dale Carnegie, Zen, and Scientology before seizing upon the idea that you, and only you, are responsible for your own happiness or unhappiness, success or failure. Est's marathon Transformation sessions were legendary for their confrontational tactics (Erhard calling his students "assholes"), inscrutable platitudes ("What is, is, and what ain't, aint"), and the pressure put on participants to bring in new recruits for the next cycle of events.

In 1985, Erhard changed est's name to the innocuous-sounding The Forum. Amid controversy over his convoluted tax records, he left the country in 1991 and slid into obscurity. But before he did, he sold the company's "technology" to his former employees, who used it to create The Landmark Forum. Erhard's brother, Harry Rosenberg, is Landmark's CEO.

Like a successful grad of its own program, Landmark has shed its past hang-ups and realized Breakthrough Results. "We are on the list of offerings in the human-resources departments in hundreds of companies around the world," boasts PR director Deborah Beroset. The company's language of personal productivity, confidence, and communication (much of it trademarked) has become white noise in corporate America - and possibly in your personal circle, too. "Authentic life," anyone? Landmark's corporate clients bring not just respectability but more warm bodies bearing checks. (Landmark relies entirely on word-of-mouth advertising.) The yoga apparel chain Lululemon pays for its employees to enroll in Landmark. Other firms have been sued by employees claiming they were pressured to attend the Forum: In 2007, a Virginia man accused his former employer of firing him for his "refusal to embrace Landmark religious beliefs." Not that Landmark itself condones such arm twisting. At the start of my session, we were asked to affirm that we were attending of our own free will. A couple of people who confessed otherwise were asked to leave. Still, I talked with several who'd been sent by their employers.

The profitable field Landmark helped pioneer is now crowded with life coaches, time-management gurus, and productivity bloggers. Like David Allen's Getting Things Done or Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Landmark is just one of dozes of quasi-philosophies that promise to empty your inbox and fulfill your personal goals. And maybe survive the recession. Since the Great Depression, when Dale Carnegie's seminars on how to win friends and influence people became popular, the personal development industry has bloomed under darkening economic skies. Forget work/ life balance; that's so 2008. How to do more in less time is today's hot productivity trend. (Landmark's website touts a survey in which one-third of Forum grads reported that their incomes rose at lest 25 percent after participating; 954 percent of those attributed it to the program.) Yet if Landmark is just another outpost in lifehacking country, why does it seem so insidious?

Part of it is the in-your-face, hard-sell ethos embedded in the corporate DNA it inherited from est. Forum grads are urged to stay involved and "invite" friends and family. After finishing the Forum, I received calls asking me to volunteer at the Landmark call center and come in for one-on-one coaching. The company also vigorously guards its reputation from critics. After I told Beroset I'd be writing an article on my mixed feelings about the Forum, she called several times and sent me an email that might be described as threatening - but in the most benign, centered kind of way.

I first heard about Landmark while working as a Peace Corps recruiter. Every now and again I'd see it listed at the end of someone's resume, occupying the same spot as, say, a Kiwanis leadership award, or a pastime like water polo. Applicants described it as a professional development seminar - most had been signed up by employers - and gave glowing reports. "You should try it," they invariably added. I forgot about the whole thing until a generally sane, well-meaning friend called me one weekend with a frog in his throat. He was at some time-management seminar, he'd really gotten a lot out of this thing, and would I want to come by and learn more next Tuesday night? It was hard to say no. But then I googled Landmark.

Eventually, as part of an ongoing attempt to hack my own overscheduled life, I did sign up for the Landmark Forum. I vowed to go in with an open mind and to follow the rules, no matter how restrictive. That meant taking just one meal break per 13-hour session, no Advil or other over-the-counter drugs, no speaking out unless called to the microphone by the Leader, and wearing my name tag at all times. I signed a six-page disclaimer in which I declared that I understood that after attending the Forum, people with no history of mental or emotional problems had experienced "brief, temporary episodes of emotional upset ranging from heightened activity ... to mild psychotic-like behavior."

At 9 a.m. on a Friday I find myself sardined into a basement room with 129 other people, listening to David Cunningham,j a boomer in a dark suit and bright purple shirt, whose first language seems to be Tent-Revival Baptist Preacher. (I later learn that he was raised a fundamentalist in Florida.) He informs us that he has personally led more than 50,000 people to Transformation. He's here to tell us that "anything you want for yourself and your life is available from being here this weekend." He starts by taking a few questions from the floor. A querulous man observes that the phrases carefully ruler-lined on the chalkboard seem like poor English. ("In the Landmark Forum you will bring forth the presence of a New Realm of Possibility for yourself and your life.") David agrees. "It's very poor English. You know why? Because the usual confines of language would not allow your Transformation this weekend."

Another man is called to the mic. He wants to know how Landmark is different from est. David sighs. "If I had to sum it up, here's what I'd say: They're both about Transformation, but est was very experiential. It was the '70s, okay? Your access was an experience. Your access this weekend is going to be just through conversation. We realized we could do it just through conversation." And that's the last we hear of that.

A slight, blond woman sitting next to me confides that she's here only because her boyfriend paid her way - with the subtext that this was an offer she couldn't refuse. She shows me a packet of notes tied with a bow. They're from a friend who attended a Forum and thought it was brainwashing. In the corner of the top sheet is written, "To be opened on 'breaks.'" Why "breaks" in quotes, I wonder?

I soon find out. "Break" is a misleading term at an all-day workshop that offers no snacks, no drinks other than Dixie cups of water, a single mealtime, and only loosely scheduled pauses to use the bathroom. Also, every break has a corresponding assignment. The first one: Call someone who'd like to hear from you and tell them where you are. I call my brother. "So, it's like the Hare Krishnas of time management," he says slowly. On the next break, I hid in a bathroom stall and read a Landmark flyer seemingly translated from Martian: "What would it be like if the San Francisco center was your center of being, and reflected in this, you were being your center? ... What if your way of being in the center gives the center its being and you are given your being from the space created in the center?"

By ten o'clock Friday night, 13 hours in, David is curing headaches with visualization techniques (an old Erhard trick) and redefining basic math. "How many items am I holding up?" he asks, holding up a Kleenex box and a chalkboard eraser. "Two," we say in unison. He puts the eraser down. "Now how many am I holding up?" he asks. One? "Two," he says. "The box and everything else." We repeat this until it makes sense - kind of. David promises that tomorrow, people will start to pop.

Indeed, some attendees have popped even before they return to the basement at nine the next morning. Others pop while tearfully offering "shares" about being molested or abandoned, about illnesses and divorces, their suicidal parents. There is applause for stories of calling loved ones and offering forgiveness, and David gently prods the storytellers to invite their family members to attend a Forum - or even pay for them to attend. A woman re-creates a beautiful conversation she had with her mother this morning and ends by singing "Wind Beneath My Wings."

Next, David calls up a woman - I'll call her Rose - who is estranged from her siblings. She reports that when she called her sister this morning, it did not go well. "I'm going to get a little intense now," David warns us with a smile, which he drops as soon as he turns to Rose. "You know the mod of celebration after the last share?" She nods. "What's the room in now?" David shakes his head ruefully. "You were 'screamed at' by your sister? There's no such thing as screaming." People start fidgeting and making for the door; there hasn't been a bathroom break in three hours. "You see, people are leaving," David says. "This is why people don't want to be around you, why your siblings don't want to be around you. You're too dead to feel," he says.

By now, tears are streaming down Rose's face. She asks to sit down; he says nothing. Finally, she thanks David, and he gives her a long hug before she takes a seat. Later, I walk over to tell her that I didn't like how David treated her. To my surprise, she disagrees. After being publicly humiliated, she phoned her sister again, and this time her sister listened. "I guess this is what I needed to hear," Rose tells me, smiling.

By Sunday, I'm in open rebellion. I come bearing contraband- a newspaper, coffee, snacks, and Advil. "How are you?" I ask the minder at the door as I slap on my name tag. "I'm truthful," he says, giving me the stink-eye. I Invent the Possibility of staying far away from Landmark seminars in the future. We get Monday off. When I take a hard seat in the basement for Tuesday's final Special Evening, I'm surprised to find I almost - almost - start crying. It's like seeing a room of beloved camp friends after a year apart. The air is festive and buzzing with chatter about our day and a half away from each other. I think, This is great! No wonder people have brought along dozens of friends to sign up.

David quiets the crowd and sends the friends away with a group of minders. Turning to the rest of us, he says, "You know how I wished you big Problems on Sunday? Well, now I wish you big Breakdowns. Because a Breakdown is nothing more than the gap between your life now and the life you're committed to living. Your job is to step into that gap." He smiles. "When you came in here Friday morning, you were so certain about who you were, weren't you? You walked in certain, and tonight you're walking out uncertain. It could take years to become certain about who you are again. That's what the rest of the Landmark Curriculum for Living is for: to help you resolve that uncertainty."

Suddenly, I want him to love me as his student, to make him smile, to hear him tell me I'm doing a good job in my life. There are more "shares"; David tears up for the third time in two hours. "I love you forever," he tells us. "If you ever wonder if someone loves you, the answer is yes. David loves you."

And then, without warning, he launches into the hard, hard sell. "I am committed to having every one of you register for the Advanced Course tonight," he says. He's no longer smiling. We can demonstrate our commitment to ourselves, to David, to Landmark - all for $650, a $200 discount - but only if we act now.

Before I get up and leave for good, I spot Rose. She's sitting in the front row, gazing expectantly at David, ready to take the next step toward Transformation, Possibility, and EnrollmentTM.

Sidebar Articles

The Hunger Artist

In 1977, est guru Werner Erhard had a vision: He was going to end world hunger by 1997. To that end, he started the Hunger Project, a nonprofit that quickly picked up celebrity sponsors including John Denver, Valerie Harper, and Jimmy Carter's son Chip. But, as Mother Jones reported in December 1978, the group had no intention of actually feeding the starving, just raising "awareness" of hunger - and est. The article also exposed Erhard's complicated web of offshore tax shelters. In response, est threatened to sue. It didn't, but participants in one seminar were instructed to "focus all your negative energy on the people responsible for this terrible slander." Twelve years after it was supposed to become obsolete, the Hunger Project now has only one former Erhard associate on its board and notes it has "no ties to Mr. Erhard or his interests."

Landmark Moments

1971 - Werner Erhard has breakthrough while driving across Golden Gate Bridge; founds est (Erhard Seminars Training)

1973 - Erhard drives a black Mercedes with the vanity plate "SO WUT."

1975 - Est claims to have trained 65,000 people; Erhard dreams of training 40 million.

1975 - John Denver releases "Looking for Space," about his est enlightenment. Later, he asks other est grads to stop sneaking backstage.

1976 - Ex-Yippie Jerry Rubin recounts Erhard's spiel: "He listened to people's miseries ... laughed in their faces and screamed, 'YOU ASSHOLE, YOU CAUSED IT!'"

1977 - Woody Allen encounters a defensive est acolyte in Annie Hall.

1979 - Mork & Mindy features David Letterman playing a guru name Ellsworth, founder of ERK (Ellsworth Revitalization Konditioning).

1985 - Est changes its name to the Forum.

1988 - Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk attends the Forum; later credits it with his "big epiphany moment."

1989 - Nicolas Cage buys Erhard's palatial San Francisco pad, which one boasted a soundproof room, an elaborate security system, and a bedroom painted black.

1991 - Erhard goes into exile. Landmark buys est's "technology" and reportedly promises to pay Erhard a licensing fee for 18 years.

1993 - While in Moscow, Erhard appears on Larry King Liive; claims Scientologists are out to get him.

2002 - Six Feet Under's Ruth Fisher tries the Plan, "One of those '70's self-discovery clubs that yell at you and don't let you go to the bathroom for 12 hours."

2006 - Erhard breaks media silence in Transformation: The Life and Legacy of Werner Erhard, a film co-produced by his lawyer.

2007 - Erhard unveils new management philosophy coauthored with a Harvard Business School professor and the CEO of Landmark's consulting arm. Message: "integrity is the pathway to trust."

2009 - Landmark claims to have trained more than 1 million people. 

Ex-Employees Describe Abuse In Suit Against est's

Don Lattin
San Francisco Chronicle
April 3, 1990


Former employees of EST founder Werner Erhard say they were forced to obey the pop psychology guru in a manner ''akin to God'' and to submit themselves to ''numerous instances of verbally and physically abusive behavior.''

In sworn statements, the ex-employees also charge that they were required to worship Erhard as ''the Source'' and were controlled with exhausting work schedules, loyalty oaths, threats and emotional abuse.

The allegations -- by five former staff members of est, of the Forum and of Werner Erhard and Associates -- were filed last week in San Francisco Superior Court in support of a wrongful termination lawsuit against Erhard by Charlene Afremow, a longt ime associate of the human potential movement czar.

Vincent Drucker of San Anselmo, the former chief financial officer of est, said in one of the affidavits that a program begun in the late 1970s ''put great pressure on the executives, including myself, to surrender to 'Source.' ''

Erhard often compared the relationship between himself and his trainers ''to the bond between a samurai lord and the samurai vassals,'' Drucker said. ''Mr. Erhard threatened me with death on two occasions,'' he said, by citing ''certain people in the Mafia.''

Allegations Denied

In a statement released yesterday, Erhard denied all the allegations, calling them ''ridiculous fabrications from a few disgruntled former employees.''

''Responding publicly to these unsupportable accusations point by point would only further the malicious intent of the individuals in question,'' he said.

Erhard's weekend est trainings -- launched in 1971 and repackaged as the Forum in 1984 for a more corporate clientele -- are among the most financially successful human potential movement seminars. Nearly half a million people took the est training, and 500,000 have participated in the Forum, an Erhard spokesman said.

Werner Erhard and Associates, which runs the Forum and several other consulting businesses, last year took in $ 45 million in U.S. revenues, the spokesman said.

Born in 1935 as Jack Rosenberg, Erhard created his ''personal transformation'' empire by combining ideas from Zen Buddhism, Scientology and some of the alternative psychotherapy and self-motivation techniques developed in the 1950s and 1960s.

Today, initiates to the Forum pay $ 595 for two consecutive weekends designed to inspire ''a breakthrough in personal effectiveness'' and produce ''a new experience of vitality and aliveness'' through a ''challenging, rigorous inquiry . . . into the profound possibility of being.'' Groups of 100 to 250 people participate in the workshops.

Range Of Opinions

Opinions vary as to whether Erhard is a leading-edge thinker or slick purveyor of meaningless psychobabble, but the accusations in the court documents paint one of the darkest pictures yet of his San Francisco-based organization.

Former est trainer Irving Bernstein of Mill Valley, who quit in 1985, said in one affidavit that ''the Source'' was understood ''to mean that Erhard was akin to God.''

''Leaving WEA ( Werner Erhard and Associates) was looked upon as an act of heresy,'' stated Bernstein, who said employees ''essentially committed their souls forever to do the Work and do what Erhard asked.''

Michael Breard of Corte Madera said in his court declaration that his ''interview process'' for becoming a personal aide to Erhard involved spending two days ''cleaning the bilge of the boat on which Mr. Erhard was living with a toothbrush and Q-tip.' Breard, who said he was hired on Erhard's staff in 1984, stated that he was told by Erhard's brother, Harry Rosenberg, that he would be harmed if confidential information about Erhard's posh lifestyle were ever revealed.

Breard said he was told that ''Mr. Erhard had a friend in the Mafia'' who would ''take care'' of anyone who leaked information.

Wake-Up Massage

He said one of his duties was to wake Erhard up every morning by ''kneeling at the foot of the bed, putting my hands under the covers and massaging his feet and calves in a particular manner.'' Breard also was supposed to make sure that Erhard's toiletries were lined up in an exact row each morning. ''Mr. Erhard was an incredible perfectionist and was extremely verbally abusive if tasks were not performed according to his exact specifications,'' he said.

Breard said that he was physically struck on one occasion but that Erhard's usual way to ''berate me would be to scream obscenities at me in a voice which is louder than I can describe.''

At the request of Erhard's attorneys, the affidavits were put under court seal last week by Superior Court Judge Ira Brown. For a short time, however, they were open for public viewing and photocopying. The suit is set for trial April 16.

In previously filed court documents, Erhard's attorneys have denied Afremow's allegations of age discrimination, sex discrimination, defamation and the intentional infliction of emotional distress.''

Based in San Francisco, the Forum is offered through 35 Werner Erhard and Associates offices in the United States and 14 other offices around the world. Erhard has also expanded into the corporate consulting and personnel management business in recent years through a network of franchise businesses sold under the name Transformational Technologies, Inc.