Anyone familiar with the Landmark Forum?

[Coleman]

Hi all. I've been listening to FDR for about a year and my personal growth journey has really taken off since then. Thanks Mike & Stef for all you do.

 

I recently got a flurry of recommendations for the Landmark Forum from people in a 12-step meeting I've been attending. Looking over their website I'm not sure if it's a gimmick or if it's worth the $625. Changing your life in a weekend sounds a little too good to be true (and reminds me of Mike Cernovich's admonition that mindset is life-long work; there's no shortcut). I'm wondering if anyone here is familiar with Landmark and can recommend for or against it?

[Dylan Lawrence Moore]

Many people in my real estate investors group have done it and they swear it was one of the most life-changing things they've ever done.

[MiraiRonin]

Hi Coleman. I've had some friends do the Landmark Forum who say that it's improved their lives immensely, but I'm torn about it for the following reasons.

 

Firstly, what I've heard from my friends and what I've read suggests that it's about enforcing personal responsibility, stopping your history from determining your future, and not projecting your past onto your relationships. All of that sounds damn good. In fact, it sounds like the call-ins to Stef about relationship or self-knowledge questions. Back when I first started listening to FDR Stef would go in in deep with these callers for an hour or more. Stef's approach is to question the caller thoroughly about their question, situation, personal history and childhood, draw parallels between the past and the decisions the caller is making today, and discuss how to overcome those patterns of behavior.

 

Importantly, Stef insists on absolute personal responsibility and honesty. He unhesitatingly calls out lies, contradictions, evasions, minimizations, and any attempt to avoid answering questions. Through this, the caller comes to realizations they may not have otherwise. The Forum's method includes something of this, so that appeals to me. On the other hand, Stef counters the caller's resistance with reason and evidence (usually by pointing out something the caller said but then tried to gloss over). Some reading I've done suggests that when Forum participants make excuses, and especially if they criticize Landmark's methods, they are met with abuse, mockery, and public shaming in front of a group that has been primed to police your and each other's behavior. Less correcting factual errors via logic and more silencing dissent via emotion.

 

The other reason I don't like the Forum is also the reason I didn't join; the ferocious, manipulative, borderline-abusive hard-sell. I attended a home introduction to Landmark, and went through one of these for two hours, and it was miserable. I almost caved but thankfully another friend who was there (and didn't sign up) gave me the social backing I needed to refuse. My memory of that event has kept me away ever since. On top of that, my reading suggests you get called on throughout the Forum to sign up for the advanced course, and are required to bring a friend or family member to the "graduation ceremony". There, your guest is surrounded by Landmark sales reps and pressured to sign up for the Forum. This is exactly what happened when my sister attended the graduation of a Forum-going friend. I don't want that again; not for me, sure as hell not for anyone I care about. So that's a big and enduring turn-off. And just to put the cherry on it, the friends who did the course seem to have cut me off, and I think it's because of my persistent refusal to follow them.

 

Here are the sources I've been referring to. Have a look and see what you think.

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/karin-badt/inside-the-landmark-forum_b_90028.html

 

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/dec/14/ameliahill.theobserver

 

http://www.xojane.com/newagey/landmark-forum-cult

 

http://www.gq.com/story/landmark-forum-get-confident-stupid-gq-may-2005

 

http://www.philosophyforlife.org/category/landmark-forum/

 

http://www.mypracticalphilosophy.com/shelp/landmarkforum.htm

 

EDIT: Mentioned the personal experience of Landmark's hard-sell to one of my siblings.

[ofd]

http://www.fdrpodcasts.com/#/182/freedom-part-3-siblings

Starts at around the 1:18 mark.

 

[MiraiRonin]

Thanks ofd. That's some good background to why Stef takes this approach, and one I hadn't heard before.

[gneiss81]

I received a phone call from a friend in 2005. We had met on a meditation course a year or so before and had stayed in loose contact since.  (I've since stopped meditation).  When when she called I was pleased to hear from her.  She asked about my life etc for a while then chatted about hers.  Then she told me about the Landmark forum and how it was changing her life, she felt amazing and finally had clarity about what she wanted.  Something inside me though was saying 'this is not right'.  There was something odd about the way she was raving about the course.  So I asked her, 'Did you call me on your own or have you been asked to call and recruit people?'  Turned out it was a recruiting call.  That turned me off the whole thing.  If she had been honest from the start then that would have been acceptable with me.  So it may be good material on the Landmark course, but it is marketed in a bullying way which I don't like.

[dysfunc_survivor]

I've been involved with something similar, and too made those silly calls. Anyone having an ACE-score over 1 I would suggest to stay away.

It did me some good, and it did a lot of harm too, for me personally. One of the most destructive results was the notion that I had been "healed" and needed nothing else, like for example therapy. Being who I was back then (I was 21), I'm not sure therapy had helped me better, since I couldn't distinguish between good or bad mental health services. It was a start of self knowledge for me, but a very shaky one.

[Spenc]

My friend did it last fall/winter.  He asked me to attend the event after the seminars where they recap some of the things and then try to sell the people like me, attending as guests, on signing up for the future seminars.

 

My issue with it at the time came from the stories being told by the leader of the local chapter [or whatever they call it] and some of the people who volunteered to speak about the experience they had at the event.  The guy talked about how his life improved when he stopped carrying around resentment for his father and decided to forgive his father for everything and take responsibility for having a good relationship and doing more for his father.  There were good parts of this, like deciding to not let the resentment control his attitude any longer and to break from that rut in his life.  Then someone else spoke about her alcoholic father and enabling mother and again, how she decided not to let that run her life anymore (good!) by forgiving them and showing them more love and help (not so sure this is good!).

 

They had people who have 'graduated' the seminars go around to different areas of the room and be like a liaison to answer questions and sell you on Landmark.  I spoke to my friend's girlfriend about what I didn't like about their approach, and then I also discussed it with the liaison guy.  He didn't really offer any compelling explanations for why this was a sensible and sustainable way of dealing with past issues.  He also told me about a similar experience of having a father he never connected with and after Landmark it seemed like he was doing more to try to earn the love and approval of his father.  It was pretty sad to listen to this.  They helped him identify a problem with receiving no affection and approval from his father.  They offered him the support to take control of his life.  But the solution they came up with was that he could "take control" by being more active to still try to reach his father.  It seems to me like the father is unlikely to change, especially when he is rewarded for his neglectful behaviour by getting more effort and consideration from his child.  Eventually, I would expect the son to hit a breaking point and have an emotional crash....Maybe I'm missing something?  It just seemed a little off to me.

[Spenc]

So I knew I had heard this in a previous FDR podcast:  Stef's brother had done Landmark back when he and Stef were in business together years prior to the podcast.

FDR168

At the end of the podcast, Stef talks a bit about Landmark and how it came out of this hippie guru type who was in California and evidently was tied up with the church of scientology (which explains the formation of Landmark's tactics of recruitment and influence).  Apparently, the guy had also been driven to flee the country to escape investigations around child molestation or something like that as well.

 

Anyways, the more pertinent information was about how Stef had relayed the experience of his brother at Landmark.  I'm pretty sure it is talked about in greater detail though in a much later episode, like the early call-in shows when Greg, Nate and Rod(zilla) were the common participants, like the Volume 3 set.  But I can't be sure that's quite accurate

[Mole]

On 4/19/2017 at 8:25 PM, dysfunc_survivor said:

I've been involved with something similar, and too made those silly calls. Anyone having an ACE-score over 1 I would suggest to stay away.

It did me some good, and it did a lot of harm too, for me personally. One of the most destructive results was the notion that I had been "healed" and needed nothing else, like for example therapy. Being who I was back then (I was 21), I'm not sure therapy had helped me better, since I couldn't distinguish between good or bad mental health services. It was a start of self knowledge for me, but a very shaky one.

So what road do you think was the right one for you at the end of it? Therapy? Books? Etc.

[dysfunc_survivor]

On 2017-07-15 at 1:54 PM, Mole said:

So what road do you think was the right one for you at the end of it? Therapy? Books? Etc.

That's a difficult question to answer in retrospect. In a perfect world one road could have been sufficient, but in reality I think it was necessary to work on my issues from several angles. Many therapists or seminars have a one-size-fits-all approach, consciously or not, and many suffer from megalomania and the belief that they have answer to all issues and it adds an addictive, cult-like element to it.

I think an educated and wise male role model (therapist) would have been very beneficial. This is because my father was not, so in one way or another that's what I was looking for. Group therapy or seminars was not ideal, and the social settings was detrimental to making progress.

[Somewhere]

I once attended Insight, which is a cousin of Landmark with less aggressive marketing. These courses are collectively known as Large Group Awareness Trainings (LGATs). Attendees are supposed to keep the material secret but there is an accurate, detailed and entertaining account of the more traditional EST/Insight experience here: http://www.caic.org.au/psyther/lgat/lgat1.htm (for later pages, just edit that web address, changing the 1 to a 2 etc, because the links on the pages themselves don't work). The Landmark syllabus is apparently a little different, but similar. The emphasis, as others have mentioned, is on taking personal responsibility; to some that is a revelation, but if it's something you already do, then you will probably not benefit from the course, apart from the experience of a weird sleep-deprived weekend.

[madman]

Hi Coleman. Like king Arthur said in the holy grail, run away, run away! I did the forum in the mid eighties at the behest of my na friends. It was a travelling sideshow/ revival that whisks into town, grabs everyone's money that's in a 12 step group, and disappears into the ethers. After reading the other posts I do remember the hard sell/ bullying that went on to get me to get that money so I could go to this absolutely life changing thing. It was basically a sleep deprived boot camp for mystic followers of bill w. The reason they bully is cuz they have no reason to offer. They told me to "imagine the possibility of forgiving the people you hate the most" or something to that effect. I thought for 2 seconds and said that's easy, my parents! So I forgave them with na's and Jesus' blessing and floated out on angels wings. The weight of the world was lifted off my shoulders. I arose from the culty water to start my life anew and sin no more. Sorry about all the creepy religious metaphors but it was a creepy experience. I was exploited again.

I also paid more than they're charging now. It was all the money in the world to me cuz I was young and poor. They said we don't care how you get it. Steal it if you have to but get that money and come to the show! 

I went to acoa (adult children of alcoholics) around that time which was brand spankin new. I thought all this childhood stuff is stupid, I'm outta here. I'ts a whole bunch of people belly-achin about the past. I was done with my past cuz I got saved by the forum.

Fast forward 3 decades. I listen to Stef and find out I might need therapy. I find out all of my dysfunction has it's roots in my not so wonderful childhood. That same childhood that I had been bragging about since I went to the forum and decided to forgive my abusers so I could love them and hang out with them to make jesus and na happy.

Sorry this is so long but I feel too passionate about this topic to be able to leave it alone. If the forum had a face I would like 5 minutes alone with it and a baseball bat. It's not bad that I forgave my abusers. It's bad that I forgave and forgot, meaning I did not process while the abuse was fresh in my mind.