User talk:Abd/Landmark Education/Abd/Criticism of Landmark/Abd bliki

"The basis is being kept in a hotel ballroom for 10 hour days with little sleep, listening to the same thing over and over and over." My sister said that they did basically 15-hour days when she participated in the Forum: 9 in the morning till midnight. Also, it can sometimes seem like they're saying the same thing over and over; e.g. how many times do they say something is a story? They're applying the same concepts to different situations. Leucosticte (discuss • contribs) 03:30, 5 September 2014 (UTC)


 * Right. The issue is the "basis" of the training. I.e., is "sleep deprivation" essential? There are certain distinctions that are used frequently, "story" being an example. He was in the 1986 Forum, pre-Landmark. That was intermediate in time between the original training and the present. The present Forum is from 9 AM to 10 PM, with some variations from that, not much. That is 13 hours, but there are 2.5 hours of breaks.


 * This is what the Forum actually does: There is a maintained focus on the Forum issues, for three days. There is little time for anything else. (The Tuesday night closing session is just that: a closing session, with guests invited.)


 * For anyone in reasonable health, the Forum is not the grueling physical trial that the critical propaganda makes it out to be. And what the materials say is that if you have a problem, tell the Course Supervisor. I've seen a participant allowed to nap in an unused room in the Center, as an example. (She had cancer and was in chemotherapy. She completed the Forum, a seminar, and the Advanced Course.)


 * My own stand is that accommodations could be considered. An example of a possible accommodation would be allowing someone with a special need to do the Forum twice. It or something like it could be done. Doing it again is already possible (review is half price and includes another free seminar, so it's really not that much money extra).


 * The actual accommodation would be allowing a person to complete and be considered a graduate with some alternate plan. Since the Forum is scripted, spreading it out is theoretically possible. Unless, of course, the "pressure cooker" is really necessary. Is it? Has this been tested? Could the Forum be broken up, for example, into a series of three one-day workshops? It's pretty clear to me that to realize corporate goals, Landmark must, in some way, decentralize. How about a "mini-forum," organized like that, led by Seminar leaders, costs kept low and tuition low, completion of which would then qualify a participant to a review at low cost, in a "Full Forum" with a full Forum Leader? Based on seminar tuitions, three one-day workshops could have a tuition on the order of $60 per session, $180 total. Completion could be spread out, the sessions would each follow a Day Format for the regular Forum. This would actually allow much more affordable access to the technology. Then for another $350, these graduates could take the regular Forum. Actually, they would be much more like reviewers, I think current review tuition is $275 or so, depending on location, and it includes a free seminar (perhaps $125). Basically, this would drastically lower access costs, with little or no negative impact. The improvement in participation logistics would probably increase overall income substantially. Landmark has closed Centers (such as Cleveland), but not replacing them with some other form of access. The result is large swathes of the United States with no access to participation unless people fly in.


 * The Forum does depend on some substantial group size for function, probably, but what is unclear to me is the minimum size for function. (There would be another minimum size based on economics.) Seminars run with smaller sizes, and there is no requirement for a Forum Leader! Seminar Leaders receive the same basic training already, some of them could easily qualify to lead a Forum, with a little extra training.


 * However, there is high institutional inertia. Landmark has developed its own strong suits, its own "winning formula." It works for most people. They don't want to screw it up. "The way it is" is heavily defended. Ironic, perhaps, but far from surprising. Somebody raise the FA/DP flag, eh? Is it time yet?


 * Landmark has also declared, in the Originating Document, goals that are not well-realized in the present actual practice. To accomplish these without taking centuries, it may need structures for developing broad new consensus rapidly.

The Sarah Fazeli story
The Sarah Fazeli story, I've just linked to, could be a wake-up call. I was discussing this with a grad, he's in the ILP, and he was incredulous. That couldn't happen! Basically, what she experienced is full of contradictions with what we know. He suspected she was delusional or lying. I don't. I think she was hit with a Perfect Storm, where what is rare but within possibility piled up.

If I was coaching her, I'd ask that she look at how she caused this, because the report is easily analyzed that way. However, how did we cause this? (I.e., the Landmark community, which includes Staff, the Leader body, and the graduate body.)

I'm inventing a new term, "racketing," a verb. I.e., I don't like your story, so I'll racket you. "You are running a racket." And when that story keeps coming back, from many people, I'll racket them all. There is a story that keeps coming back, we hear it from so many people that it's practically ubiquitous. It is trivial to racket it, because it is a story. But are we responsible for how we occur to people? Or are they to blame, and reading the comments from grads on that Sarah Fazely piece, definitely, we blame her. She's wrong. It was her fault, and she is, of course, to blame for "no sex," her sexual abuse, etc. Ah, "responsible." That would be the applicable distinction, supposedly we don't blame anyone, but we do. We do it to survive, just as the training and our analysis of the rest of our lives informs us.

Yet what actually happened? Hardly anyone is looking at that. The critics and those who immediately fall for "cult" think they know. The report confirms their racket. But we are trained to distinguish what happened from story. I take Sarah Fazely's account and try to extract the what happened from it, and I end up with a "what happened" that is a Perfect Storm.

My friend kept saying, "too many unlikely events strung together." However, I don't think the events are that unlikely, just not common experience. He said, "If the Forum was like that, it would have failed long ago, it would be dead." He's right. The Forum is not like that. Usually. Back up. What happened? At least, what is her testimony, as distinct from her conclusions? I assume error in report as a possibility, in addition to the obvious heavy interpretation.


 * Woman has loss and distress in her life.
 * Grad encourages her to go to a Special Evening (sounds like that, this is not a standard introduction.).
 * She has worries and reservations, she reads about Landmark on the web, and is afraid. But she has promised her friend that she will go. She goes late, out of her fear.
 * She is listened to by two grads, breaks down, they comfort her, and she is enrolled in the possibility of transformation, and registers. She pays $300 as a deposit. (Really? That's high for a deposit, it's at most $200. Either something odd happened there, or she is not an accurate witness. Upset people often aren't!)
 * She has second thoughts, and attempts to get a refund.
 * In a conversation with someone at the Center, she is assured that she can get a refund.
 * I assume this was with a staffer, highly experienced at "overcoming resistance." The staffer asks her questions that Sarah can't answer, all of which raise doubt for Sarah. After all, she's not a grad! Sarah says she'll think about it.
 * Sarah gets a series of phone calls from the Center. She gets increasingly angry. She gets on the phone, intended to tell "them" off.
 * After a conversation where her resistance is again probed, she asks again for a refund. She is told that is not possible. Why not just pay the $200 and see what the Forum is about? She agreed, but was conflicted. Her survival instincts were screaming at her. Don't go!
 * She was then told that the price had gone up. Her sense of being swindled increased. She paid, apparently (she is not clear about that.)
 * Her apprehension increasing, she attended because she'd spent the money.
 * So far, all this is within what might happen, this is, unfortunately, within the normal behavior of Center Staff. *Not* the normative behavior. This was probably 2012, and the New Enterprise reforms had not heavily penetrated the Landmark machine. I don't know the present state, I'm a bit out of touch with the Boston Center. I do know that focus on "customer service" has increased.
 * My long-term observation of nonprofits has led me to notice that when one believes one is serving a noble cause, it justifies being a total asshole. I've seen people in nonprofits do what they would never do in a for-profit organization, as to back-stabbing, vicious politics, etc. In for-profit situations, people certainly act for personal gain, etc., but it's much more predictable. Landmark is ostensibly for-profit, but is actually far more like a nonprofit, it's obvious from the vast dependence on volunteer labor. That is all defined as the Assisting Program, as just another training, but ... it's essential to the economics, or else tuition would have to drastically rise. People do this, Seminar Leaders put in long hours, with no pay and not even expenses (AFAIK), because they believe this work is valuable for humanity (together with valuing the continuing training that they receive). And that motive, "doing it for the benefit of humanity," is quite dangerous. It's not wrong, and it can connect with the Self, but when it gets connected with survival instincts, people will kill for it. A little sales pressure, a little powerful domination in leading a session, that's mild.


 * There was an emphasis on not taking bathroom breaks. Someone was shamed for getting up to leave.


 * Ah, "reminded of the agreement." Using language that occurred to Sarah as mocking. I might guess that the Leader was an estie, and was regressing, possibly under stress. That's consistent with what happens later.)


 * There is talk about registering for the Advanced Course within the first hour.


 * Really? This is one of the bizarre and difficult-to-believe aspects of the report. If this happened, the Leader was deviating heavily from the regular format. I come up with a speculation as to why, it could explain this.


 * Members of the assisting team come to the mike, again early.


 * Really? Again, outside the format. The Leader is laying something on thick, expecting resistance. She really wants to make sure that participants are prepped. Control.


 * Sarah begins to conspire with other participants.


 * Or it occurs to her that way. This is totally believable. Participants do this. At meals, they tell each other how horrible it is, etc.


 * Within the first few hours, the Leader brings up enrolling others, inviting them.


 * (Sarah again mentions the $300 deposit. Basically, this is a red flag that Sarah's memory is defective. This is extremely unlikely. But, when we are under emotional stress, our memory is quite unreliable!)


 * And mention of enrolling others in something that the participants would not yet have experienced, you might as well hand out "Join My Cult" buttons. Actually, not a bad idea! Maybe I should have some made. I'd think that Sarah's memory has been mushed together, except for what she then reports.


 * Participant raises the issue of promotion, she doesn't want to do it, "does she have to?" She is "enrolled" in dropping this and thanks the Leader.


 * A man points out that "it's been a little over three hours" and "the only thing I've heard is how we should sign up and pay for more courses."


 * Setting aside the story, setting aside "should," all that, there is still a conversation happening about continued participation in the first few hours, certainly the first day, of the Forum. This isn't explainable by Sarah mashing her three days together. If she is delusional, it's much deeper than the ordinary delusions of selective and imprecise memory.


 * The Leader ("Chris," likely not the real name) acknowledges the man for his honesty, and reframes all this as resistance.


 * The second day, the man "expressed the same feeling." Sarah is not a careful witness, but, then again, she is not a graduate. This time the mike is taken away from the man. The Leader asserts control.


 * The third day, the man is asked to leave.


 * Sarah was offended by the "no writing" rule.


 * Sarah was set up, to be offended, by everything that came before. There is nothing unreasonable about the rule. I have seen this rule enforced, by a Forum Leader, many times. It only applies to the Forum, I think, I'm not sure about the Advanced Course, I forget. The problem here is not the rule itself, it is something else that I've never seen at this level of training.


 * Participants are told to hold other participants accountable.


 * Really? At the Forum? In the Advanced Course, participants are told to support other participants, so that "everybody gets it," but this is still not anything that involves a judgment of "violation of rules." Participants are told, if we can believe Sarah, to judge others as being in violation, and to confront them? If this had happened my Forum, I'd have been considering walking out, right then, concluding, "Ah, it sounded good, Too bad it's been corrupted!"


 * The woman sitting next to Sarah tells her to stop writing. Sarah is angry.


 * Sarah assesses the interactions between the Leader and participants as abusive.


 * Sarah is an outsider. This assessment is common for those outside the conversation. "Abusive" is a story, but when there is rapport and connection and enrollment, it is not abusive, it is "tough love," and is taken that way. The confrontation is normal in the Forum. Assessing the difference requires knowing the result. Why is Sarah "outside the conversation"? It's obvious. She was obviously not ready from registration, but nobody looks for that. The standard goal is to keep her registered and get her into the room, trusting that the Forum Leader knows how to handle resistance and actually empower the participant. And they do. Usually.


 * Sarah asked questions, and was told that she was ignorant, that the Leader knows better.


 * The Leader asserted control and domination by making participants wrong. This is, again, a story, but an obvious one. Leader guidance of the Forum is essential. This Forum -- from the story -- is spinning out of control. Who is responsible for that? (The training "stand": we are responsible for everything in our lives. However, we, as graduates, sometimes use that and apply it to racket others.


 * Sarah reveals her personal story of pain, and it occurs to her that she is told it is her "fault."


 * Werner Erhard wrote about this, explaining that the assumption of responsibility is a stand, not the truth, that it exists to empower, not to blame. Sarah's occurring, though, is quite common. It can be expected to be common with participants who are not engaged and enrolled in the conversation, and if the distinction is not made crystal clear.


 * Participants conspire with her that she was abused in the coaching.


 * Sarah is inspired to make a statement. She is highly motivated to express herself. She prepared a statement with passion, Saturday night.


 * She read the statement. The Leader has the mike turned off. The Leader attempts to physically push her from the stage. Sarah defies the Leader, and won't leave.


 * The Leader asks her if she wants a refund. Sarah says, emphatically, Yes.


 * Sarah does not tell if she got a refund, or anything more about that.


 * Sarah was booed. Some participants thanked her. The assistants who broke up that conversation called it a racket. It appears that Sarah left, on Sunday, though she doesn't, as far as I've seen, confirm that.


 * Sarah concludes that she should trust her instincts.


 * I'll agree with Sarah. Not that Landmark is a cult, but that she should never have been in the course at that time, i.e., she clearly wasn't ready for it, it was a set-up to fail, and, indeed, not only should Sarah trust her instincts, so should Staff, and not attempt to override survival instincts. The person to override them, if that is to happen, is the guest or registrant, as a free choice, being satisfied with the choice. Sarah was never satisfied, and nobody checked to make sure. Sometimes we can successfully confront survival instincts. This takes maximum skill and is extremely dangerous. One slip and you have created a person who sees you as a dangerous enemy. You'd better be clear about your own motivations!

-
 * and this is what I suspect: the Forum leader was in trouble, experiencing pressure to meet measures for Tuesday night. So she took steps, outside the format, intended to increase guests, acting out of her own survival instincts, and using strong suits, including high assertiveness and domination. If this was a pattern, rather than some momentary (one-time) aberration, her numbers were going down, that would be clockwork. I'm suspecting that the whole Center might have been in trouble, trying to survive, and the "sales behavior" may have reflected that.


 * Staff know that most registrants will experience doubts, resistance. They develop skill at talking registrants through that, and see a registrant agreeing to participate as "success." They may fail to check for warning signs that a registrant might be experiencing being bullied or pressured against her survival instincts. I'm not aware of specific Staff training, and the manuals or regulations are not published, to my knowledge. What I can say is that I've never heard a concern expressed about such possible warning signs, no concern that there could even be such a phenomenon as abusive registration, other than an SELP Leader calling having an enrollment conversation in order to "get" someone to register (perhaps to go to an Introduction) as "slimy."


 * Leaders know that everyone is resistant to enrolling and registering family and friends. How the Leaders handle this is crucial: the resistance is commonly rooted in survival instincts. To move beyond survival instincts requires special conditions. From Sarah's account, assuming she isn't actually lying (as distinct from making some mistakes, and factoring for Sarah's interpretive stories), those conditions were absent and the Leader attempted to control them into existence, which often fails, as survival demands. This is avoiding domination, and it's instinctive, obviously (for adolescence and beyond). That's why it's so common.


 * There may even be short-term success, as Sarah's registration counted for measures of the Leader of that Special Evening, and as Center management would see Sarah's continued agreement to participate as a success. However, whenever apparent success has behavior behind it like what Sarah reports, the well is being poisoned. That is, some water is being extracted, some people are actually still being transformed, but a substantial population is being convinced that Landmark is a cult or at least abusively sold. It would be like the sales force of a company increasing short-term sales by convincing customers to buy a product that wasn't appropriate for them. Skillful sales always discovers and maximizes the customer's ultimate satisfaction, that's what builds business, long-term.


 * Graduates may walk away, even saying that this was positive and useful for them, but then are carrying a story: "But the constant sales pressure was really a turn-off."


 * I've called many graduates. That conversation is out there, it's common. Some of us, most of us who participate long-term, come to understand that something like sales is a necessity, that we have resistance to sharing, overcoming this is part of the training, and we know that what is offensive about this is essentially unskillful, to be avoided.


 * But the community and Landmark as an organization are not handling this conversation. It is being racketed. This has long been an open secret, there was a massive reform movement that actually led to the process now called the New Enterprise, and the issue of "pressure," was prominent. This crystallized into an objection over the use of "measures" as a standard of performance, i.e., simple numbers of guests and registrations. It is predictable that this usage will lead to some level of abuse if there is no care or caution to prevent that.


 * There is no apparent systematic use of other measures, such as routine exit surveys that would look for signs of damage arising. Do we ask graduates if they felt pressured? I can imagine a response to that suggestion! "Don't bring the conversation over pressure into the space!" As if it wasn't already there! (I wouldn't mention this, except I've encountered exactly that response, with something much less obvious than asking participants, but simply talking about it with an Introduction Leader in a clearing after an Introduction.)


 * There is an elephant in the living room. I've long studied internet criticism of Landmark, and most of it is relatively easy to dismiss by anyone with normal, routine Forum experience. Some of the most effective and powerful aspects of the Forum will be externally criticized, through misunderstanding, misreport, and blaming judgment that fails to consider the results.


 * However, the claim of "hard sell" and "pressure" are persistent complaints. We take the language of racket and attempt to apply it to Landmark criticism, as if the critic were a person. It isn't. It is the human community, overall, which is, perhaps, mostly asleep but also partially awake. We are, in fact, applying "racket" to the human Self, attempting to repress it. How's it working?


 * We have the racket, we persistently complain about others criticizing Landmark, and we don't alter our behavior, we have a "fixed way of being." They are wrong. We are right.


 * And damage is accumulating. The market is large enough, and penetration low enough, that registration has not yet collapsed. But we cannot realize the corporate vision of Landmark without waking up, ourselves, and applying the technology to our own collective rackets, those we conspire on, as seen in Sarah's report.


 * My goal here is not to make "Chris" and the Staff wrong. They are doing what they think necessary for success, but something is missing, the presence of which would make a difference. This may actually be a good example to study because the Leader is not named. The Center is not named either, though we might make an educated guess. It doesn't matter. What happened to Sarah could theoretically have happened at any Center if there are not measures in place to prevent it. And any Leader could have a "Bad Weekend." I'll add that to extrapolate from what Sarah reports to actual Forum Leader behavior, I have to take small hints I've seen from actual Forum Leaders and color the entire behavior with those, and perhaps look at Pressman's stories as well. Put together the worst events with the worst possible construction, and still I don't quite get to what Sarah reported.


 * However, among other things, compassion for someone like Sarah is missing. The recognition of Sarah's stand is missing. Her stand was an aspect of our collective stand for human freedom, it was the Self. She was, in fact, highly Self-expressed, with courage, though without training and thus, as could be expected, heavily mixed with story. Her stand inspired others present in her Forum. We didn't like that! It's clear in graduate comments on Sarah's blog. The commentary there was enormous, 283 comments, I haven't scanned all of it, much less read it all with care, but I was looking for any taking of responsibility by graduates, any expression of compassion or acknowledgment for her stand, as we are trained to do in leader programs. I didn't find it, and that is why I commented.


 * It's about time.


 * But what if Sarah's report is so distorted that it's completely unreliable for anything? So what? We do not need to discover "truth" here. "Chris" is not on trial, nor is Landmark, nor is Sarah. If what she reported happened, what is our response?


 * Do we collectively stand for integrity in how Landmark is marketed?


 * Do we collectively stand for honesty on the part of participants and an ability for Forum leaders to handle dissent without becoming "dictators?" Essentially, do we distinguish leadership from control?


 * If a Leader fails to lead, do we have measures in place to recognize this and ameliorate damage? An obvious measure would be refund requests or participant expulsion/walk-out.


 * A Registration Manager asked me to have anyone with a negative conversation about pressure from an Introduction to call him. From my experience with him, he would actually have listened and he would not have made the caller wrong. He'd have acknowledged any errors on the part of Staff or Introduction Leaders or the Assisting team, and would have done what he could -- which could be a lot -- to remedy them. That's Landmark functioning.


 * Part of the corporate vision is that Landmark becomes reliable. We aren't, not yet. We won't be reliable until we set up structures for fulfillment that handle our excesses in "registration," Landmark as an organization needs what we all need individually. An essential part of this is recognizing breakdowns, and not blaming them on others. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 15:49, 5 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Like I was saying earlier, at the Forum I went to, they said that writing was recommended against, but no longer prohibited the way that texting on cell phones currently is. They did tell us that it's only at the Forum that they discourage writing. Leucosticte (discuss • contribs) 01:18, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Right. However, Sarah's report was from 2012. But my Forum was in 2011, and I remember Roger Smith telling a participant to stop taking notes. It was very direct, not blaming and shaming, just an instruction from an instructor. The fellow put his notebook away, and I remember seeing him in a whole series of courses after that. I could tell more of the story, but it would involve naming identifiable persons as participants, etc. It could have blown up, big time, if handled unskillfully by Smith. I'll say that the participant was a powerful man, very much not some pushover. It is a failure for an instructor to get into a power struggle with a student, just as parents who get into power struggles with teenage kids lose. Avoiding domination is survival for them, and get into a power struggle with someone tougher or more resilient than you, Bad Idea. Yes, you can bully and threaten, if you have a big enough stick, but ... they simply hide and/or leave with resentment. Classic. Clockwork. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 13:39, 6 September 2014 (UTC)