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Loela
Acid Reindeer, what happened with your sister, and have you learned to accept what did happen?
in early 2004 she decided on a course of action that really hurt me, in concert with other family members who had all done Landmark, est and/or the Forum (my mother and uncle had taken the Forum via their respective work and my other uncle had participated in est/Forum/Landmark in a big way, from 1975-95; he had convinced his wife to take Landmark, relatively recently).
I told her that I did not want to have anything to do with her until or unless I had forgiven her. the uncle heavily into Landmark I dropped all contact with, for the sake of my own sanity.
in the mean time she took various Landmark courses with her then-boyfriend, who had convinced her to take the Basic and Advanced Courses, in an effort to save their relationship. I also suspect that they may have taken courses specifically designed for couples. they split up and her boyfriend took revenge by revealing intimacies about their life together in a magazine article, without even changing her name in the article to protect her privacy. (he did, however, not mention Landmark in the article.) after I found about this, I phoned up my sister and said that I forgave her. I just had wanted to say that I felt sorry about had happened with her boyfriend.
more recently, we continue to have a strained relationship. I called her up about another revelation that I found out about her, while going through a hard time myself. I ended up dumping on her.
she told me that she no longer takes the courses and she does seem more like her old self. we have hardly any contact so I don't know if she comes out with the Landmarkisms like "he chose that [way of life]" reaction to a homeless man we saw. (we met back, when, around New Year's?)
she does seem genuinely happier and more mature. she told me that she had given up her wish to have anything more than a mediocore life. whether you consider that all right or not depends on your point of view. I don't know whether to think of that as tragic or a sensible choice or both.
as far as my family in general, my trust in them took a big hit.
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Sometimes no matter what you do, the person you are concerned about has to have the experience, regardless of what that experience might be. I have had to learn that as a mother of a 19 year old son. I could share all the pearls of wisdom I have and in the end, it would be for naught. All I can do is step back and watch it happen. [u:c6d88cca55]That[/u:c6d88cca55] is one of the most difficult parts of parenting. The same would be true for a sister or friend... would it not?
it seems we have two different ways of looking at the world.
I don't accept that anything "has" to happen. the sister of my father's second wife died by drowning, at a young age. if someone learned a lesson there, they payed a really steep price for the tuition.
and her sister didn't learn any lesson at all.
recently I hung out at the place where a friend lives. she had a mutual friend, an alcoholic over. he had a forty ounce there on the table. now, I could have taken the liquor, poured it down the drain and said, "you want to quit the alcohol? start now!" would have made me really unpopular, though, quite probably. so I didn't do that and one of the rationalizations that passed through my mind had to do with, That wouldn't cure him, but again, it mainly had to do with the risk to me.
or I suppose I could have said, He needs to learn that lesson. not sure what lesson he'll learn, though.
basically, a lot of the talk about "learning lessons" and "being judmental" comes from social cowardice. I suppose if you really piss off people at way they will at least see what values you happen to have.
in the end, my actions may not have made any difference, but they may have, and now I'll never know.
part of it had to do with the fact that ISTR, she changed a little when she took the basic course and a lot when she took the advanced.
some of her cousins and I had discussed by e-mail the possiblity of staging an intervention but we all managed to talk each other out of it. still I had felt prepared to draw my brother in, even though we hadn't spoken in nearly twenty years, up until I called him up to ask him what he thought.
actually, as I recall, I think he more or less said, "it's too bad, but she has to go through this..." or words to that effect.