I'm a writer in California looking to interview people who have gone through Sterling Institute weekends, whether your experience was positive or negative. Anonymous responses okay.

I did the Woman's Weekend in Oct 2000. I really got sucked into the Sterling philosophy hoping that it would please my live-in boyfriend at the time. He did the Men's Weekend and he paid for me to do the WW in Newburg, NY.

I arrived back from the weekend all starry eyed and filled with the conviction that I could keep my boyfriend and that he would marry me even though he told me right after we moved in together that he wouldn't. I joined the Family of Women immediately after the weekend. According to Sterling the only way to have a succesful relationship is to only share my feelings with other women that I trust and under no circumstance discuss my feelings with my partner.

Fast forward...now that it has been six years since I did the weekend I would tell anyone not to do the weekend. He takes little truths and mixes them with lies and the FOW enforces this crazy philosphy.

Unfortunately my boyfriend ended up breaking up with me in 2002 and I moved away. I thought he was such a man of honor because he was in the men's division. He ended up breaking up with me and not telling me why because according to the men you don't discuss your feelings are anything else with your female partner. And right after that he slept with my best friend who was also my "little Sister" and sponsored her in the Women's Weekend. So the FOW had no philosophy about when your man cheats on you except to trust them no matter what. There was nothing honorable about this man and certainly none with my "best friend".

I am just so grateful to be out of this crap. Another observation is that Sterling men date Sterling women but only for sex. They use the venerability that the women who did the weekend came back with.

PS: on the day that I was packed and moving to home I saw some pictures on the table. It was a picture on penises. My boyfriend laughed and said this is what we do.

I did the Sterling Woman's weekend in December 1996. At the time I had broken off a five year relationship and had lost most of my friends since that boyfriend didn't like my friends. I thought is was a good experence and joined the family of women. I enrolled two women into the weekends. One woman maried a man in the mens division the other left the FOW to take up drinking.

At the time I did the weekend I was single and dated the a man who did not do the weekend for several years. I stopped dating him and looked for someone to spend the rest of my life with. I dated a few men in the mens division but that did not last since I would not sleep with them. I went on one date with a man from the mens division that I later saw on "Blind Date" the TV show 10 worst dates. I met a man not involved in the group and left FOW to return to school.

I worked on ICSD on several projects. I miss ICSD very much and when that program ended the Family of women seamed to have lost their purpose. I held a management position for ICSD for two projects.

I did morning Admin on two weekends, the admin team is all women except for the mens admin manager. the team goes in the moring before the weekend starts and has breakfast with the production team at 7:00 then you set up the room for when the women come in. They need to sign a realese form, then the turn in their dish for dinner. they then check in with the registration table and their registration form is pulled. then they get a name tag and wait in a waiting room. After the women are checked in we helped set up for dinner and left when all the infomation was entered into a computer. You are there for a few hours we left around noon.

I did trunk packing for a mens and a womens weekend. Back then you went to the reginal office and the trunk were stored in a "cage there". Everyone goies into teams and the trunks are unpacked and compared to list. The items that are not needed are put in a pile and then you go through what you do need to make sure it works and you have the right amount. Anything missing you get from the pile. Any item that you can not find are bought at the store with money that is reimbursed by S.I.R.
Then you have lunch, then all the item are neatly packed in the trucks then you go home.

I was on the WAD team and entered the registration form ito a computer before the weekend and went to the weekend on the friday before and had dinner with the production team.

I was also the Regional Finance Manager for the South West Region. At the time I was the Regional Finance Manager S.I.R. paid for half the rent for the office and the office phone bills, S.I.R. used 10% of the office for storage and the office was used for training and production meetings. The dues collected $30.00 every six months was used to pay 1/2 the rent and other bills need to run the office, reimburse people for their phone bills for manager calls.

I was also in leadership training and led a program.

I left the FOW in 2001 when the FOW split from the Mens Division and the split from S.I.R. I have been attending College and have married since I left and do not have time to return to the family of women.

I would be happy to answer any questions you might have.

Wowwoman:

What do you see as wrong with the Sterling weekend?

What does Sterling teach about women and relationships that you strongly disagreed with or that you now disagree with?

All these workers you describe setting up weekends like the production team. Who gets paid?

I was on the production team for the Mens Weekend in spring 2001. That is the hardest work I have ever done and not paid. I paid to fly up to Newburg to work. I was so indocrtinated with Sterling-ese that I thought I would acheive a goal because we had to have goals even when we volunteer. The problem was and still is I could not understand the wording of the goals and how on earth did working and I mean two days straight with very little sleep would cause me to meet my goals.

The women I worked with were drill sargents. They cut me no slack because it was my first time on production. And the things we had to do really distrubed me because I was in a relationship with a Sterling man before...see my previous post. When the men would come in the hospitality room on their breaks we were to wait on them hand and foot and massage their feet and backs. We prepared a dinner for the men and was asked to dress up like pirate wenches as bare as we could go. That was one thing I did not do. We had to put on a little production number and then take one man to be his servant for that night. j

Every detail had to be perfect. The first day we were gathered in the seminar auditorium with the men on production and I made the mistake of sitting on a chair. Someone asked if the men needed to decontaminate the chairs because a woman sat on it. Absurd. The chairs had to be apart a certain amount and not 1/2 inch either way.

I was so glad to get home and vowed that I would never, ever, put myself in such a demeaning setting for women.

Now, I did enjoy meeting the women at my weekend 10/2000 and I enjoyed my meetings with Family of Women. Some really great women and I made some great friends. Of course when I moved back home and out of FOW the phone calls were less and less. But to be fair my calls were less and less too. Now, having fours years away from all that lingo and enrolling people to do the Weekend, in other words we were free marketing for Justin Sterling.

Sterling said nothing that hasn't been said before and I knew that when I was doing the weekend. The part when the women broke down and pouring their heart out I sat out. And there were a few women who sat out. I was practically pushed in the circle so I would have a breakdown so Justin could build me up. I did not breakdown. The whole weekend was taped all of it was taped.

That was my experience with the Weekend both as a participant and on production. Whew! Glad I'm out and have a clearer head.

There was no pay offered for any of the jobs that I described but the commitment time involved did not interfere with my dating, personal friends or work.

The trunk packing was one day for a few hours for one day and there was a pot luck lunch. There wasn't much work involved and I was able to meet some of the men.

The Finance manager job was once a week for 3 hours I did that for about a year. Most of the time was spent having fun. We would pay the bills once a month dues were collected four times a year. Most of the people turned in their payment requests so that they were balanced to the bills and receipts. Fund raisers were a few times a year and they were balanced when they were turned in we just had to review the bookkeeping. At the end we had to set up QuickBooks for the split between the men’s division and the FOW that took an extra Saturday.

WAD team was one night for a few hours.

Leading a program you attend your weekly meeting and a monthly meeting of the leadership team. At the monthly meeting you plan the branch meeting and talk about any problems you might have with your program.

M. A. was the morning of the weekends and you had to work on two weekends and there was one, three hour meeting before the weekend and a clearing call.

ICSD was not connected to the FOW at the time I work on that project. ICSD was a project to improve a school. That involved one meeting a week for six months and one weekend for the project weekend. On one I just went to the project weekend and painted.

I worked on a well weekend and was able to attend the well for free for working on the well. The wells are weekends put on by the FOW for women that have done the weekend. They are usually held at a summer camp on the off season. The costs for the wells were around $50.00 and included meals. They start on a Saturday and end on Sundays and include a full night’s sleep, and no cold showers.

There was no pay offered for any of the jobs that I described but the commitment time involved did not interfere with my dating, personal friends or work.

The trunk packing was one day for a few hours for one day and there was a pot luck lunch. There wasn't much work involved and I was able to meet some of the men.

The Finance manager job was once a week for 3 hours I did that for about a year. Most of the time was spent having fun. We would pay the bills once a month dues were collected four times a year. Most of the people turned in their payment requests so that they were balanced to the bills and receipts. Fund raisers were a few times a year and they were balanced when they were turned in we just had to review the bookkeeping. At the end we had to set up QuickBooks for the split between the men’s division and the FOW that took an extra Saturday.

WAD team was one night for a few hours.

Leading a program you attend your weekly meeting and a monthly meeting of the leadership team. At the monthly meeting you plan the branch meeting and talk about any problems you might have with your program.

M. A. was the morning of the weekends and you had to work on two weekends and there was one three hour meeting before the weekend and a clearing call.

ICSD was not connected to the FOW at the time I work on that project. ICSD was a project to improve a school. That involved one meeting a week for six months and one weekend for the project weekend. On one I just went to the project weekend and painted.

I worked on a well weekend and was able to attend the well for free for working on the well. The wells are weekends put on by the FOW for women that have done the weekend. They are usually held at a summer camp on the off season. The costs for the wells were around $50.00 and included meals. They start on a Saturday and end on Sundays and include a full night’s sleep, and no cold showers.

The things I didn't like about the FOW was the lack of confidentiality. But I was warned about that early on, I also warned my “little sisters” so they would not be hurt by that. A woman told me that she had said something in her program about her daughter being molested and someone not in her program told her daughter about her mother talking about her being molested. So I always remembered not to say anything that I didn’t want everyone to know.

There were also I lot of women given leadership power that made mistakes that hurt people or became power bitches. In my orientation program there was a topic about fathers that got very deep. The discussion was stopped because of the time, FOW programs are from 7:30 to 10:30. One woman in the program had to seek professional help because of what the program brought up for her.

I did not do weekend production because I didn’t want to take the time off of work. The production team needs to be available from Thursday to Monday of the weekend and they also need at least day to recover. They have to commit to a certain number of weekends which I think was either two weekends or four weekends. I also think there were a lot of clearing calls and pre-weekend meetings. I was told that they had to bring their own food and they were not allowed to leave but when I worked MA we ate with production and when I worked WAD I ate dinner with production. If they left the weekend they were kicked out of FOW. I know of a situation of a woman disagreeing with Justin and she was told to leave the weekend and was not allowed in program, so “they say”. She did not want to go back to weekend production and did not want to return to FOW.

At the time I was in the FOW I was single and was working “The rules” which are the rules for dating. One of the rules is to be busy and at the time the FOW worked great for me. The kept me busy and I met some men in the men’s division that became very good friends. I knew enough of the sterling speak to appear committed to living the weekend. I didn’t recruit very heavily but was able to bring people to check it out; most of them didn’t want to do the weekend. Being the finance manager kept me from being pressured into doing the jobs that I didn’t want to do. My boyfriend that I had for a while was not recruited by the men and I brought him around a lot.

The women on the other hand were all over any man I brought to any event. They would ask very personal questions of them and would want to know the state of our relationship and when was he going to propose marriage. I always prepared men I brought around on how to answer the questions before we got there. The programs did not always fit single women. I was in a program were the topic was men and I was one of two in the program that was not married and the other person left after a few weeks. I was also the only one that worked.

The programs were fun and helpful. We did community projects. When people would tell you stories that were surprising or shocking, my life did not seam so bad compared to others. The best program I was in was the leadership training program. After completing that program I was promoted at work to department manager and got a big raise. I was also put in charge of a huge project at work and did a great job on it. Only about half of the women in my leadership training completed it.

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jackmingo
I'm a writer in California looking to interview people who have gone through Sterling Institute weekends, whether your experience was positive or negative. Anonymous responses okay.

I'd be happy to talk to you about my experiance.

Jackming, I will be happy to discuss my experience with Sterling Weekend. I've posted my experiences on this thread...see bwmn. Do you want to discuss on this forum or email?