OZ wrote above:

'However, even knowing that the philosophy is misguided, it takes a much longer time for them to change their behaviours back to pre LE times. A classic is the learned behaviour of aggressiveness towards others which was formally backed up by not having any fear, (Saturday Night exercise)'

Neurologists have identified a process called 'kindling.' The more you repeat a certain pattern of emotion (aggression is an excellent example), this trains specific pathways in your brain and body to work together more and more efficiently--to become a programmed reaction unit.

They've established this using Positron Emission Tomography scans (PET scans), in which one can see specific portions of the brain 'light up' and become metabolically active when a person does certain things.

Persons with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) have characteristic kindling patterns that show up on PET scans. Theyve done lots of this research on combat veterans.

What this has demonstrated is that the more people express anger, the more readily they become angry. The old 1960s 'let it out' encounter group exercises where people supposedly were freed from anger by expressing anger turned out to make the problem worse, not better.

So your central nervous system can still be predisposed to react aggressively, long after you've intellectually rejected the mindset that once justified the anger.

Any training exercise in which people are pressured to aggress on each other will not free them from anger, just train them to get angry more quickly.

Watching violent movies and TV, or watching other people behave violently will have the same effect.

Thanks, Corboy and Oz, for your insights.

It is puzzling, my reaction to my LE experience. Here is my theory about it:

Friday night, before we broke for dinner, one of the assistants announced that the final evening session would start at 7:35 PM. It was 6:05 PM when she made this announcement. OK, so we knew we had 90 minutes to grab a bite. I agreed to drive with another attendee to a local resaurant. But first, this gal had to visit a friend in the front office. Now food is very important to me, and the opportunity to get the heck outa there was, too. But I digress...

We arrived back at the LE meeting room at 7:33. I checked. A few people trickled in behind us, but none of them arrived later than 7:35. Scott, the FL, tore the group a collective new a**hole for being "late". I was infuriated, but recognized this was a manipulation to control us. My dinner partner stood up to challenge Scott. I mumbled, "don't bother, it's a set-up." She replied, "I know".

The funny thing was, several people sitting around me also stated they heard 7:35 as our start time, not 7:25, as Scott now claimed.

By the next day I was still steamed about the manipulation, but the same people who the night before had sworn they heard 7:35, were now telling me, "No, they told us to be back by 7:25. Really. That's what they said." They had become Pod People!

I couldn't believe anything Scott said after that. I took the exercises for what they were worth, found some value in dropping persistent complaints (rackets), that sort of thing. But I took everything I heard the rest of the weekend with a grain of salt.

The Saturday Night Fear exercise convinced me I just wasn't "getting it". I sat there with my eyes closed, dutifully trying to conjure up morbid fear of everyone in the room. Many in the room were sobbing and wailing. Me? Nothing. Nothing at all. I kept thinking how stupid this was. The joke, of course, is everybody is afraid of everybody else. Except me, I guess.

I noticed that most of the attendees became pretty grim and humorless. I can usually get anybody to laugh or smile, but this was a tough crowd. And I don't think it was exhaustion, either. Some seemed to resent my joking around. I wouldn't want to party with unreconstructed LE grads!

One of the benefits I have derived from landmark is, I haven't watched more than three hours' worth of TV since attending LE. Now I spend my spare time at this Forum.:D

It is called 'gaslighting'

The term comes from the old days when rooms were lit using gaslight flames. I cannot remember the name of the movie or the exact details, but the scenario went like this:

This husband decides to drive his wife crazy. He does so by covertly manipulating the physical environment.

He turns down the gaslights, pretends he has not. Or at other times, he turns the lights up bright. When his wife complains the light is too dim or too bright, her husband plays innocent, says the lights are just fine and hints that she's nuts.

Telling people to return from dinner at 7:35 pm and then screaming abuse at them for 'being late' when they arrive at 7:33 pm, then telling them they were supposed to be back at 7:25 pm

that's gaslighting.

Remember what Drew Kopp tells us in his description of the LGAT room set up.

For we have learned on this message board how the room environment is reportedly being manipulated--several tempreture changes per day, chairs too close together, even a pre-selected color scheme for the seminar rooms.

Hope told us that for her this was the most obnoxious thing--she wasnt told the truth that she'd been kept up until 11:30 pm and that doing the homework after the group would've kept her up until 1 pm.

Its a sure recipe for sleep deprivation. Under those conditions, how can people remember that the forum leader told them 'Be back from dinner at 7:35 pm' and not '7:25 pm'?

All this zaps your sleep wake cycle

The reprimands might also physical stress response system.

Dont go nuts trying to analyse semantics. It is like trying to calculate the number of digits in PI--you'll go on forever and never reach an end to it.

***They're not likely to change the room set up any time soon. You can change semantic recipes much more rapidly than tried and true recipes for room set up and thermostat jiggling.

As long as you're aware of this, you can recognize similar LGAT set ups and *stay away from them* and warn your friends to *stay away.*

*Trying to analyze the semantics is a waste of your attention. And *vulnerable former participants may possibly risk having prior LGAT conditioning re-triggered*, and that will hamper their recovery, not aid it.

Just keep your eye on the stuff you can directly observe using your senses

--

Re: gaslighting.

The name of the movie is "Gaslight."
Ingrid Bergman was in it. You can watch it for free on the internet.

They do much of this in LE. The people who recruited me into LE leaned toward the metaphysical, (not all of them do), and would refer to gaslighting as "Coyote Medicine," in an attempt to legitimize it as spiritual. There are probably dozens of terms used to describe this behavior.

I have since seen one of my former "friends" listed and discussed on a site that deals with fake shamans.
On the aforementioned site, it is pointed out that many of these people are grossly unqualified, appropriating terms from various ethnic spiritual practices, and using these terms to label their own, made-up procedures.