Here is a talk from TED by Diane Benscoter, a former Moonie, on how cults rewire the brain. I include Landmark Education in this definition.
Sunday, 26 July 2009
Wednesday, 8 July 2009
Does Landmark Teach You To Tell the Truth?
Of course it does! Isn't that the principle? To live your life with integrity and authenticity. You wish and don't hold your breath.
My former partner who succumbed to the lure of Landmark as a way through a mid-life crisis took an advanced course on "communication". One of her tasks was to speak to me about something she had withheld from me. I recall a long and tortuous phone call as she attempted to reveal to me her "omissions", "avoidances", or to be plain, how she had been living a lie.
Her mentor in the course had insisted she carry through her task. At the time I believed her. Why not? Well, because in the end even she couldn't bring herself to tell me the truth.
The truth implicated other friends and actually it was through one of them that I learned the truth when she herself learned it. She passed it on to me. Now I know. The strange effect of this knowledge is to help me come to terms with my situation, not my former partner's.
Landmark didn't help her. But what it did was rather more insidious. It gave her a pretext, a cover, a smokescreen that she could use to pretend to be playing the game and thereby hope to sucker others into believing it. As I did for a while.
Any system or course can be abused as my former partner did with Landmark. That's why it is important to have ways of verifying and testing one's procedures. Landmark resolutely sets itself against any of this.
If it did it would not be scraping the barrel for its suckers to get their money.
My former partner who succumbed to the lure of Landmark as a way through a mid-life crisis took an advanced course on "communication". One of her tasks was to speak to me about something she had withheld from me. I recall a long and tortuous phone call as she attempted to reveal to me her "omissions", "avoidances", or to be plain, how she had been living a lie.
Her mentor in the course had insisted she carry through her task. At the time I believed her. Why not? Well, because in the end even she couldn't bring herself to tell me the truth.
The truth implicated other friends and actually it was through one of them that I learned the truth when she herself learned it. She passed it on to me. Now I know. The strange effect of this knowledge is to help me come to terms with my situation, not my former partner's.
Landmark didn't help her. But what it did was rather more insidious. It gave her a pretext, a cover, a smokescreen that she could use to pretend to be playing the game and thereby hope to sucker others into believing it. As I did for a while.
Any system or course can be abused as my former partner did with Landmark. That's why it is important to have ways of verifying and testing one's procedures. Landmark resolutely sets itself against any of this.
If it did it would not be scraping the barrel for its suckers to get their money.
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