Quote
It is a human tendency to collapse what happened, with the story we tell about what happened. This collapsing happens so fast it becomes hard to separate the two, and we think of them as one and the same.
and therein lies the incompetence and illusionary perspective of the landmark 'psychologists' and 'therapists'.
At first glance, this statement seems so true. Then you look at it again (although it is from this point on that many fall prey to the deception of landmark's deranged ideology), and it is in fact NOT so. What happened and how we interpreted and experienced what happened are interrelated, it is a whole experience and the interpretation we make is made according to our knowledge and experience of our inner and outer environment up to that moment, this is a NATURAL human response and is NOT incorrect as the landmarkian quacks would insist.
This 'collapsing' theory is about as far fetched and fictional as a quack can dream. The 'story' is the part where we share a legitimate experience and NO ONE has the right to give an alternative interpretation to that experience for us. Calling it a 'story' is likely the beginning stage to creating a sociopath, it totally devalues and crushes empathy and compassion.
If a person happens to be phobic, OCD, DPD, or any other personality and/or mood disordered, and tends to interpret experiences abnormally, it is NOT for a landmarkian quack to try to restore the 'experience' with his or her own self serving bogus alternative interpretation. In fact landmark shouldn't be counselling such people period. Landmark claims it screens out people with serious emotional or psychological problems but the section of their 'flagship forum' where they begin teaching about the 'collapsing' crap contradicts their claim of not accepting people with major issues. Is it not the case that when a therapist is treating a seriously troubled patient, like a person suffering from delusions perhaps, that the therapist will attempt to bring that person back to reality by offering alternative scenarios than what is being experienced or perceived by the patient? Isn't that what the forum leader is doing when they begin to plug in a different reality to what has been described by the participant? Is that something to do when one believes they're dealing with a non-disturbed or non-mentally ill person?
"Iatrogenic disorder" comes to mind when I think of a lekkie therapist telling someone they've 'collapsed' an experience with a story. Iatrogenic basically means "A disorder produced by a physician (can also apply to psychologist). The term is used generally to refer to any abnormal condition, physical or mental, caused by the effects of attempts at treatment."
Basically, the forum leader (playing 'therapist') suggests that an issue or dysfunction is present and thereby creates/implants it. Now he or she has something to 'treat' and can 'legitimize' his/her philosophies, methodologies and suggestions on what is or is not truth. Now it is possible to create the illusion that the landmark forum really 'works'! Most people don't stop to think that they didn't have alot of the problems they 'realize' they had after an intensive weekend of battery, multiple deprivations, unbridled verbal abuse and self defense mechanism shredding. That is what psychotherapy looks like in the hands of careless, untrained, uneducated, and unethical opportunists deluded just enough to claim they're making a positive difference to mankind.
Those stunned bastards (forum 'leaders') do so just for the little gold stars they get and so their psychopath leader(s) can live lives of luxury and zero-accountability.
I think of the James Rowe that went missing after his forum, he had no psychological illness prior to his forum. Afterward, he did. Somehow, the implantation/suggestion of dysfunction caused more damage in him than in others, because he disappeared afterward.
The baffling word of choice in the above quote is 'collapse', the flawed logic is in the refusal to accept reality and real experience and try to create a delusion instead, only the delusion ends up being filled with endless labour, financial devastation, mental breakdown, dissolved relationships, and no real friends left to help on the recovery journey if one is privileged enough to find it.
I'm no shrink or moral philosopher but I propose that Landmark sucks in every possible definition of the word.