Post by william on Mar 10, 2014 10:20:17 GMT
IF, like me, you are not in the habit of sharing highly personal tidbits of your life with 148 strangers for 13 hours a day, three days in a row, then let me, uh, share with you what that experience feels like. It feels like intergalactic jet lag, or like someone has pumped your head full of a global weather system, heavy on the cumulonimbus. Some of the 148 strangers were crying so much, they looked as if they had been boiled.
Wesley Bedrosian
Wesley Bedrosian
We had all paid $550 each to spend a glorious summer weekend in a fluorescent-lighted basement meeting room near Madison Square Garden, at the Landmark Forum. Taught in 7 languages in 20 countries and, according to its Web site, boasting more than a million attendees, the Forum is the cornerstone workshop of Landmark Education, a company formed in 1991 when Werner Erhard sold the “technology” behind his EST seminars to his employees, who then devised a kinder and gentler approach to human development.
Though Landmark is viewed by some as an incubator for overly assertive or blissed-out automatons who bear a strange predilection for the phrase “got it,” the eight-time Oscar-winning composer Alan Menken, the Boston Philharmonic conductor Benjamin Zander and Paul Fireman, the former Reebok chief executive, are all Landmark graduates, as are employees of Exxon Mobil, JPMorgan Chase, NASA and the Pentagon, who have been coached by the company’s consulting firm, the Vanto Group.
Just then we were each sharing with the person sitting next to us the previous night’s homework — write a letter to someone you’ve been “inauthentic” with, to tell about “the possibility you have invented for yourself,” and then “extend an invitation.” I was sharing with Loretta — a 40-something former stand-up comic who thought she might have to end her 13-year relationship with the father of her two children because she had had an affair with a 19-year-old. Gulp.
Meanwhile, I’d written my letter to all the people in my life who dumped on my writing without front-loading any praise first. “The possibility I’ve created for my life,” I read, “is that other people’s opinions are not everything. I invite these people to zip their proverbial ‘it.’ ”
Roger, our Forum leader — 66, voluble, a more vehement Sam Waterston — chose that moment to reiterate that we’re meant to tell our partner how “generous” or “stingy” at reconciliation his letter was. When Loretta looked down at my letter and simply cocked her head, I realized I’d had my first breakthrough of the weekend — Old Me might have been mildly offended, but New Me redirected the pain by imagining members of the Pentagon doing this exercise. New Me wonders, did Robert Gates “extend an invitation” to Osama?
The jargon is bracing. “Sometimes I’m like, ‘That’s garbage,’ ” said Natalie Cook, the Australian beach volleyball player who attended the Forum in 2007 and who is set to go to her fifth Olympic Games in 2012 in London. Indeed, it’s hard not to smirk at a philosophy at least one of whose main tenets (“You can have any result for yourself or your life that you invent as a possibility and enroll others in your having gotten”) is a copy editor’s nightmare. But Cook credited Landmark with helping her to “complete relationships I’d ignored or walked out on. One was with my volleyball coach who’d taken me to two Olympic medals.” The actor and singer Anthony Rapp (“Rent”) added in an interview that Landmark can be “explosively powerful at reconciling families.”
What seems to drive all this personal growth is the Forum’s pressure-cooker atmosphere. Attendees are constantly encouraged — no, badgered — to get up to the mic and share. (“If your hand isn’t raised,” Roger said to my group repeatedly, “then you’re not in the Forum!”)
THE Forum I attended generated a Comédie Humaine’s worth of plot development: a 33-year-old woman called her mother to tell her that she is gay; a 30-something gentleman called the mother of his illegitimate child and said he wanted to be involved in the life of the child whom he has heretofore almost wholly ignored; a 19-year-old woman read a letter she wrote to three men who raped her four years earlier.
What sets all this soul-baring in motion? Here’s the setup. During class, there are two 30-minute daytime breaks and a 90-minute one for dinner; each break brings an assignment. You’re not allowed to take notes during class (too distracting), and the only thing you can consume in the room is water.
Roger is up on a platform and talks for an hour or so at a stretch. The gist is that humans tend to collapse what happened in their past with the story that they tell about what happened in the past. Forgive and forget; if you cling to your “story” that your father was a mean drunk who beat you, you’ll get trapped in that word-picture, and never open up any possibility in your life.
In delivering this message, Roger raises weighty questions and makes lots of challenging literary references, but everything important is said twice (everything important is said twice). It’s like he’s talking to a Nobel-winning cat. He wants conflicts recounted as “I said ‘— — ’ and then she said ‘ — — ’ ”
If you tell him, “My boss was surly and unpleasant,” Roger will say: “No, she wasn’t surly and unpleasant. What did she say?” This is grueling to watch, though it leads to some breakthroughs; the exercise’s humiliation/approbation axis is highly reminiscent of “Antiques Roadshow.” Once the conflict has been limned, the sharer is encouraged, regardless of his antagonist’s malfeasance, to forgive or apologize to that antagonist — a fact that caused one of my classmates, hilariously, to raise her hand at one point to ask, “Is the other person ever wrong?”
Though the in-class hours emotionally exhausted me, the breaks were what killed me. During one, when we were meant to call someone and tell about the discoveries we were making, I called my boyfriend once and my mother twice, but neither picked up.
Though I’d written in my application that my current malaise was a mostly self-imposed social brownout (I quoted the Sartre line “Hell is other people”), my class hours unbosomed in me the anxiety that I’d abandoned my 82-year-old mother in the independent-living facility she entered in North Carolina three years ago. I called her three more times during the break, and couldn’t get her to pick up. (Roger had told us not to leave messages or resort to e-mail.)
Back in class, I kept a low profile, anxious that my flop sweat might contact the microphone wiring and electrocute me. Roger encouraged us to make “unreasonable demands” of ourselves, but short of parachuting directly into my loved ones’ living rooms to unspool the fascinating details of my latest act of human growth, I wasn’t sure what else I could do.
I couldn’t be late for class: Roger continually cited promptness as an essential “commitment.” Indeed, one night, four classmates and I ran three blocks back from dinner lest we be castigated; at another point, a former E.M.T. named Sonia received a standing ovation when she told the group she had asked the driver of her stalled bus to write Roger an excuse on letterhead.
During the program, I kept an eye out for anyone going over the rails. Landmark has been criticized for having unleashed some monsters: a reporter from The Independent, the British newspaper, spoke with a woman whose executive husband was taken to the Forum by a colleague. “Some women might like it if their husband suddenly started saying he loved them all the time, but I found it scary,” the woman said. “He was weirdly euphoric and animated. Then he became very depressed.” She added that he had panic attacks for a long time after.
In another case, according to Time magazine, a Landmarker’s fiancée said that her partner had become robot-like, leading her to start an anti-Landmark hot line.
I encountered no weirdly euphoric Landmartians in my group, though I did talk to several people who were dismayed at the pejorative nature of some of the Forum’s terminology, like “inauthentic.” Also, one participant, a licensed clinical social worker, told me he thought the group was too large. “All these breakthroughs and all the crying — it’s easy for the other people here to think, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ ”
Indeed, the contrast between my classmates’ seismic life-shakings and my own inability to get my mother on the phone deepened. But I took a strange kind of solace in the fact that some people’s phone calls went slightly awry. Kelita, a Chicagoan who flew in for the Forum after her boss raved about it, said that when she called her mother and said she wanted to “share some of the discoveries” she’d made at the Forum, her mother, using her childhood nickname, blurted, “Peaches, it’s not all about you!” I sympathized, but silently vowed to inscribe her mother’s statement on my gravestone.
Indeed, if a theme emerges from the stories you hear in the Forum, it’s that nobody has a casual relationship with his or her mother. When, a few years back, a 106-year-old showed up for the Forum and was asked what she was “working on” at this point in her life, she replied, “I want to be a better mother.” She brought her 82-year-old son to the Tuesday night graduation session that concludes all Forum weekends; when he was asked why he had come, he said, “My mother made me.”
In my Forum, class members engaged in even more mother-talk when Roger introduced a beguiling if facile concept called “strong suits.” He asked us to think back to early childhood, to any vivid incidents that caused us to think, “I’m on my own,” “I don’t belong” or “Something’s wrong here.” The way we dealt with these incidents is a defense mechanism, or problem-solving technique, that we use throughout our lives, but which will not bring happiness. Since then, I have twice introduced friends at gatherings to the concept of strong suits; it is a limited vehicle for psychoanalysis, but a fabulous party game.
By weekend’s end, many of us seemed to have struck an uneasy peace with our individual conflicts. Loretta had come to the mic to recount a heart-to-heart with the father of her children, to whom she promised fidelity; tall and commanding Rob — Dennis Haysbert in a navy suit — had scheduled a dinner with his daughters, had a long conversation with his boss about time management, and upped his involvement in Easter Seals. I had told my boyfriend, Greg — for the fifth time in seven years — that I love him, and had said “I hugely admire you” to a poet friend beset by his obscurity.
But I had not called my mother. I resented the pressure Roger had created around the act. And part of it was manners — if my mother asked where I was calling from, I didn’t want her to feel as if I was “workshopping” our relationship.
I punted. Before our Tuesday graduation, I sent my mom an e-mail — our mutually preferred form of communication — and invited her on a trip to Charleston in October. She was thrilled. When two people at the Tuesday session — to which I brought Greg — asked if I’d called my mother, I sprayed them both with, “I’m taking her to Charleston!” — non-confrontationalism as expectorant.
Three days after the Forum, I finally reached my mother by phone. I stammeringly told her that I love her (the second time I’d said this to her as an adult). This excited her. I told her about the Forum; when she heard that we’d spent a lot of time asking one another “What’s possible now?,” she enthused that she was going to start asking this at the dinner table at her retirement home; I refrained from pointing out that asking the elderly “What’s possible now?” might yield a frank discussion of motor skills.
Two months after the Forum, I’d rate my success at 84 percent. I’m more prone to telling loved ones and colleagues, in person and without glibness, that I love or admire them. But I still operate from a base position that people are a lot of effort. I know in my heart that hell is other people. But now I’m open to the possibility that heaven is, too.
A version of this article appeared in print on November 28, 2010, on page ST1 of the New York edition.
Wesley Bedrosian
Wesley Bedrosian
We had all paid $550 each to spend a glorious summer weekend in a fluorescent-lighted basement meeting room near Madison Square Garden, at the Landmark Forum. Taught in 7 languages in 20 countries and, according to its Web site, boasting more than a million attendees, the Forum is the cornerstone workshop of Landmark Education, a company formed in 1991 when Werner Erhard sold the “technology” behind his EST seminars to his employees, who then devised a kinder and gentler approach to human development.
Though Landmark is viewed by some as an incubator for overly assertive or blissed-out automatons who bear a strange predilection for the phrase “got it,” the eight-time Oscar-winning composer Alan Menken, the Boston Philharmonic conductor Benjamin Zander and Paul Fireman, the former Reebok chief executive, are all Landmark graduates, as are employees of Exxon Mobil, JPMorgan Chase, NASA and the Pentagon, who have been coached by the company’s consulting firm, the Vanto Group.
Just then we were each sharing with the person sitting next to us the previous night’s homework — write a letter to someone you’ve been “inauthentic” with, to tell about “the possibility you have invented for yourself,” and then “extend an invitation.” I was sharing with Loretta — a 40-something former stand-up comic who thought she might have to end her 13-year relationship with the father of her two children because she had had an affair with a 19-year-old. Gulp.
Meanwhile, I’d written my letter to all the people in my life who dumped on my writing without front-loading any praise first. “The possibility I’ve created for my life,” I read, “is that other people’s opinions are not everything. I invite these people to zip their proverbial ‘it.’ ”
Roger, our Forum leader — 66, voluble, a more vehement Sam Waterston — chose that moment to reiterate that we’re meant to tell our partner how “generous” or “stingy” at reconciliation his letter was. When Loretta looked down at my letter and simply cocked her head, I realized I’d had my first breakthrough of the weekend — Old Me might have been mildly offended, but New Me redirected the pain by imagining members of the Pentagon doing this exercise. New Me wonders, did Robert Gates “extend an invitation” to Osama?
The jargon is bracing. “Sometimes I’m like, ‘That’s garbage,’ ” said Natalie Cook, the Australian beach volleyball player who attended the Forum in 2007 and who is set to go to her fifth Olympic Games in 2012 in London. Indeed, it’s hard not to smirk at a philosophy at least one of whose main tenets (“You can have any result for yourself or your life that you invent as a possibility and enroll others in your having gotten”) is a copy editor’s nightmare. But Cook credited Landmark with helping her to “complete relationships I’d ignored or walked out on. One was with my volleyball coach who’d taken me to two Olympic medals.” The actor and singer Anthony Rapp (“Rent”) added in an interview that Landmark can be “explosively powerful at reconciling families.”
What seems to drive all this personal growth is the Forum’s pressure-cooker atmosphere. Attendees are constantly encouraged — no, badgered — to get up to the mic and share. (“If your hand isn’t raised,” Roger said to my group repeatedly, “then you’re not in the Forum!”)
THE Forum I attended generated a Comédie Humaine’s worth of plot development: a 33-year-old woman called her mother to tell her that she is gay; a 30-something gentleman called the mother of his illegitimate child and said he wanted to be involved in the life of the child whom he has heretofore almost wholly ignored; a 19-year-old woman read a letter she wrote to three men who raped her four years earlier.
What sets all this soul-baring in motion? Here’s the setup. During class, there are two 30-minute daytime breaks and a 90-minute one for dinner; each break brings an assignment. You’re not allowed to take notes during class (too distracting), and the only thing you can consume in the room is water.
Roger is up on a platform and talks for an hour or so at a stretch. The gist is that humans tend to collapse what happened in their past with the story that they tell about what happened in the past. Forgive and forget; if you cling to your “story” that your father was a mean drunk who beat you, you’ll get trapped in that word-picture, and never open up any possibility in your life.
In delivering this message, Roger raises weighty questions and makes lots of challenging literary references, but everything important is said twice (everything important is said twice). It’s like he’s talking to a Nobel-winning cat. He wants conflicts recounted as “I said ‘— — ’ and then she said ‘ — — ’ ”
If you tell him, “My boss was surly and unpleasant,” Roger will say: “No, she wasn’t surly and unpleasant. What did she say?” This is grueling to watch, though it leads to some breakthroughs; the exercise’s humiliation/approbation axis is highly reminiscent of “Antiques Roadshow.” Once the conflict has been limned, the sharer is encouraged, regardless of his antagonist’s malfeasance, to forgive or apologize to that antagonist — a fact that caused one of my classmates, hilariously, to raise her hand at one point to ask, “Is the other person ever wrong?”
Though the in-class hours emotionally exhausted me, the breaks were what killed me. During one, when we were meant to call someone and tell about the discoveries we were making, I called my boyfriend once and my mother twice, but neither picked up.
Though I’d written in my application that my current malaise was a mostly self-imposed social brownout (I quoted the Sartre line “Hell is other people”), my class hours unbosomed in me the anxiety that I’d abandoned my 82-year-old mother in the independent-living facility she entered in North Carolina three years ago. I called her three more times during the break, and couldn’t get her to pick up. (Roger had told us not to leave messages or resort to e-mail.)
Back in class, I kept a low profile, anxious that my flop sweat might contact the microphone wiring and electrocute me. Roger encouraged us to make “unreasonable demands” of ourselves, but short of parachuting directly into my loved ones’ living rooms to unspool the fascinating details of my latest act of human growth, I wasn’t sure what else I could do.
I couldn’t be late for class: Roger continually cited promptness as an essential “commitment.” Indeed, one night, four classmates and I ran three blocks back from dinner lest we be castigated; at another point, a former E.M.T. named Sonia received a standing ovation when she told the group she had asked the driver of her stalled bus to write Roger an excuse on letterhead.
During the program, I kept an eye out for anyone going over the rails. Landmark has been criticized for having unleashed some monsters: a reporter from The Independent, the British newspaper, spoke with a woman whose executive husband was taken to the Forum by a colleague. “Some women might like it if their husband suddenly started saying he loved them all the time, but I found it scary,” the woman said. “He was weirdly euphoric and animated. Then he became very depressed.” She added that he had panic attacks for a long time after.
In another case, according to Time magazine, a Landmarker’s fiancée said that her partner had become robot-like, leading her to start an anti-Landmark hot line.
I encountered no weirdly euphoric Landmartians in my group, though I did talk to several people who were dismayed at the pejorative nature of some of the Forum’s terminology, like “inauthentic.” Also, one participant, a licensed clinical social worker, told me he thought the group was too large. “All these breakthroughs and all the crying — it’s easy for the other people here to think, ‘What’s wrong with me?’ ”
Indeed, the contrast between my classmates’ seismic life-shakings and my own inability to get my mother on the phone deepened. But I took a strange kind of solace in the fact that some people’s phone calls went slightly awry. Kelita, a Chicagoan who flew in for the Forum after her boss raved about it, said that when she called her mother and said she wanted to “share some of the discoveries” she’d made at the Forum, her mother, using her childhood nickname, blurted, “Peaches, it’s not all about you!” I sympathized, but silently vowed to inscribe her mother’s statement on my gravestone.
Indeed, if a theme emerges from the stories you hear in the Forum, it’s that nobody has a casual relationship with his or her mother. When, a few years back, a 106-year-old showed up for the Forum and was asked what she was “working on” at this point in her life, she replied, “I want to be a better mother.” She brought her 82-year-old son to the Tuesday night graduation session that concludes all Forum weekends; when he was asked why he had come, he said, “My mother made me.”
In my Forum, class members engaged in even more mother-talk when Roger introduced a beguiling if facile concept called “strong suits.” He asked us to think back to early childhood, to any vivid incidents that caused us to think, “I’m on my own,” “I don’t belong” or “Something’s wrong here.” The way we dealt with these incidents is a defense mechanism, or problem-solving technique, that we use throughout our lives, but which will not bring happiness. Since then, I have twice introduced friends at gatherings to the concept of strong suits; it is a limited vehicle for psychoanalysis, but a fabulous party game.
By weekend’s end, many of us seemed to have struck an uneasy peace with our individual conflicts. Loretta had come to the mic to recount a heart-to-heart with the father of her children, to whom she promised fidelity; tall and commanding Rob — Dennis Haysbert in a navy suit — had scheduled a dinner with his daughters, had a long conversation with his boss about time management, and upped his involvement in Easter Seals. I had told my boyfriend, Greg — for the fifth time in seven years — that I love him, and had said “I hugely admire you” to a poet friend beset by his obscurity.
But I had not called my mother. I resented the pressure Roger had created around the act. And part of it was manners — if my mother asked where I was calling from, I didn’t want her to feel as if I was “workshopping” our relationship.
I punted. Before our Tuesday graduation, I sent my mom an e-mail — our mutually preferred form of communication — and invited her on a trip to Charleston in October. She was thrilled. When two people at the Tuesday session — to which I brought Greg — asked if I’d called my mother, I sprayed them both with, “I’m taking her to Charleston!” — non-confrontationalism as expectorant.
Three days after the Forum, I finally reached my mother by phone. I stammeringly told her that I love her (the second time I’d said this to her as an adult). This excited her. I told her about the Forum; when she heard that we’d spent a lot of time asking one another “What’s possible now?,” she enthused that she was going to start asking this at the dinner table at her retirement home; I refrained from pointing out that asking the elderly “What’s possible now?” might yield a frank discussion of motor skills.
Two months after the Forum, I’d rate my success at 84 percent. I’m more prone to telling loved ones and colleagues, in person and without glibness, that I love or admire them. But I still operate from a base position that people are a lot of effort. I know in my heart that hell is other people. But now I’m open to the possibility that heaven is, too.
A version of this article appeared in print on November 28, 2010, on page ST1 of the New York edition.