There is a recent book for professionals, that most libraries would have.
Cognitive-Behavior Therapy for Severe Mental Illness [www.appi.org]
It even has a DVD, with role-play.

In that book, it shows how there is scientific evidence in several studies, (page 6-7) that an increase in life STRESS occurs right before hospitalization for people with bipolar and mania, and also for people WITHOUT previous psychiatric disorders.
So its the extreme STRESS of these LGAT seminars, and everything that goes on with them, including triggering traumatic memories and PTSD, sleep deprivation, food deprivation, and dozens of other things ALL AT ONCE.
All of that massive stress for many days, is triggering severe mental breakdowns in people, which can lead to hospitalization.

They know this of course, which is why they have their release of liability, they know the seminar triggers hospitalizations and suicide attempts and death by suicide. Not only for people with previous mental health issues, but also for people who have never had a mental illness.
That is why they try to protect themselves.

Just triggering PTSD by these amateurs, hacks and quacks, would certainly lead to cases of suicide. PTSD is lethal, and triggering it like they do in these seminars, then just leaving people with untrained people, is lethal.
Once the PTSD pain gets triggered, it doesn't stop, and that leads to many many suicides, that happen rapidly.

They know all this of course, its in the disclaimers.
Their philosophy is, pay in advance, welcome to The School of Hard Knocks, and the malpractice we do to you, is your fault.

Thankyou for your kind words, it means a lot. Landmark really doesn't go with the natural course of the heart, but is regimented.

I had a lot of problems relating back to my life post-landmark. Firstly, all my spare time! i was there 3-4 times a week and then the weekends for the ILP as well. I had time to breath again and to make myself dinner. I also had a lot more money.

During my time at landmark my psychosis involved believing people could hear my thoughts, and talking to people in my head. I would tell people about it, and naturally they told me it was crap. However with landmark there are always justifications, "don't look for evidence", "talking into no agreement". So my life with filled with this all day long, and after landmark i learnt again to develop relationships with people, and to love them and myself for who they are. After landmark i had time to do uni work, get up in the morning, choose what i was going to wear, go shopping, think normally. be in reality. i can honestly tell you that i have no happy memories of my time at landmark, i consider that 18months to be a complete waste of my life, you know when you look back, and you don't think happily on things?

Landmark involves a lot of looking back at past events, incidences and the decision you made. and yes, those memories are dimmed. all that looking back all the time made the other memories fade as apparently those were the decisions in life. By the way what crap, i can tell you that the way you a brought up, your environment and genetics are the real deal.

Hi,

I feel sorry for what you went through after the ILP ... how about doing sth else, finding new things to do you love, outdoor activities, or learning
sth new? the wold is so full of wonders, nice people and things to learn and know. Probably I don't have to tell you, it helps with heart breaks and
everything else

Quote
MartinH
Hi,

I feel sorry for what you went through after the ILP ... how about doing sth else, finding new things to do you love, outdoor activities, or learning
sth new? the wold is so full of wonders, nice people and things to learn and know. Probably I don't have to tell you, it helps with heart breaks and
everything else

Yes that's what you discover after you leave landmark!! thankyou for your condolence. i discovered yoga, the gym, cooking, reading books, and gardening (and i'm only 22!)

I'm sorry that you folks had to go through this. I had similar experience with ISA. You can read in the thread on it if you search for ISA Experience.

I too became psychotic and I haven't recovered years later. I felt so alone like I would be the only one to have been affected by these things. They make you feel like that though. They use all the tricks in the book just to pump their bulls**t into you. I think once they push you over the edge then it's hard to come back into this society where everyone has their ego. Maybe there is another type of life you have to lead. I used to love socialising and groups of people and things but now I don't know if I will ever care again. Part of me doesn't care if I become a recluse aslong as I have inner peace.

To say I dislike these kinds of organisations though is an understatement.

I experienced psychosis while involved with landmark.

I believe that the psychosis is a result of the type of information that they give you. The information is false, misleading, circular, illogical, irrational, extreme and totally subjective. Yet they present is as factual, almost scientific, and objective. Your brain tries to wrap itself around all of this new, overwhelming and erroneous information and finds itself unable to function properly. You will experience psychosis because the content is in itself psychotic.

All minds works with a 'schema' - ie. an internal representation of the world. It is different for different people. Landmark gives you werner erhard's schema, his understanding of the world. They present it is a how the world is (and the leaders do believe that this is how the world is), rather than telling you that it is simply one human being's (warped) belief system (maybe because they do not know themselves). So, you already have your own schema, which your entire life revolves around and which you have had, and has developed, since you started making sense of the world when you were born, but then you go to landmark and they give you a totally different one (their own). There is no way that this cannot result in confusion. For those with highly developed mental schema, it will cause disruption and will most certainly be problematic. They also try and destroy your own understanding of the world, leaving you in a position where you now have this new value system which you did not choose, you did not ask for, and which you have no idea how to make work in your life since it doesn't belong to you. There is no way you will not have a mental breakdown, or that your life will stop working in some way.

If you look up 'thought traps' (which are mistakes in thinking) - [therapyinmontreal.com] - you will see that landmark uses every single one. If you had a healthy mind before you went in, you will definitely not have a healthy mind once you come out. Landmark 'distinctions' are just unhealthy thinking.

There are of course some things in landmark that could be useful to someone who is irresponsible/immature - e.g. being responsible for your life. However, they take it to an extreme. According to landmark, you are not responsible for your own life but for the entire world. They define responsibility as being responsible for things that you yourself didn't even do. PLUS, the average person hears the word responsible and somewhere is likely to think of blame/fault since that is its common usage. So landmark sets you up with a word which they say on the surface is positive, but the mind will most likely hear a negative in there which also sets up a strange conflict in the mind.

landmark is the creation of mentally unstable people who live not in the real world but in their own mental land of their own making. or should i say of werner erhard's making. in some ways, one shouldn't expect to be anything but psychotic from listening to them. it is no different from going to talk to a schizophrenic person about the world and expecting to make sense of it all.

The more I think about these types of groups and their methods I start to accept that what happened to me was not so strange.

These groups and their methods would produce psychosis. Only a misguided fool would claim that they don't have any potential to do this.

It's unbelievable that this crap exists in mainstream society. I hope they get banned and outed. All of them. Shown for what they are.

What you are saying newfuture is correct. They are trying to quickly and brutally alter your inner world and thought structures.

Most intelligent people are not operating on the basis of thought though. They have an inner state and feeling that guides them.

I mean who are the "success" stories? What kind of people are they? It seems that it would only work on people who are naive and already heavily conditioned and responsive to such attempts to be manipulated. Then they would soak up this new information without any critical thought and become like these programmed robots.

Then they tell everyone not to speak to loved ones of what happens there because nobody would understand. This is what paedophiles tell the children they abuse.

@billy77 - What happened to you is not strange at all. It is in fact appropriate given what was being put into your mind. For people who go in and take it in and don't experience many ill effects afterwards (although I had over 60 people come as guests and over 50 people register for the courses and of those who took the courses, most that I have spoken to experienced some detrimental and ill-effects; often people just will not talk openly about the negative side effects), I believe that their mind cherry picks parts that sound right or makes sense to them. If you are like me, though, I have a very good memory - almost photgraphic - so I remember a great deal of what I hear and process deeply. People like that are going to emerge from landmark reallly messed up because if your mind is such that you absorb a great deal of info and process it on a deeper level than most people, you have now gone and taken in a large amount of crapola that your brain is now going to have to deal with.

It's accurate to say that most people don't process through the brain alone, but through the body. I had a strange experience whereby my mind took in all of the information but my body went insane - I was even having problems with my vision and was unable to sleep, stopped eating and lost a ton of weight. The mind/body are connected as we know.

I can tell you from having been in the inner workings, there are no success stories. I have never met more miserable, negative, self-absorbed, insular, unhappy people pretending to be successful in my life. All they do is talk about their stories, about how they'd had a 'breakthrough' when they realized that at the age of 3 they got left in the shopping mall and made up a story about how their mom and dad didn't love them and how that had influenced every relationship they'd had since. The funniest was seeing people declaring new possibilities like happiness while frowning and with tears in their eyes.

The "success stories" by their definition is those who enroll lots of people and those who have given up their lives to volunteering. Some people are so proud of volunteering that they happily show off that they "work plenty" and don't get paid for it. I met someone who had been volunteering for 17 years every weekend!!!!!!!!!! And they are proud to show off their stupidity.

But in landmark you are not a volunteer - you are a 'person who assists'. They tell you that to be a person who assists is to be someone who is committed to making a difference in the lives of others. They tell you that if you assist, you get to 'stay in the conversation' and 'deepen the distinctions' (meaning get more brainwashed) and that you get 10x more back than what you put in (how is that even quantifiable?). And on every course, there is even a statistic kept for how many people the leaders/volunteers can get to assist by the end of the course. In their 'reinvention of the enterprise' document, they say that the people who assist are integral to landmark. Because without this free labor, landmark would CRUMBLE. At some point, they try to get you to say that you ARE landmark... "Self at the level of enterprise". (they set you up for this in the advance course when they talk about 'levels of self': self as individual, self as family, self as organization, self as world... and that most of us operate oh so selfishly as individuals, but for our lives to work, for us to play a 'big game' we should take on "self as world" - through enrolling and registering people into landmark of course). HAHAHA. I have to laugh when I say all of this back to myself - what crapola is all of this. It's sad, very very sad.

Yes, basically afterwards I could not process it all. It was just too much. It was too mental all of it.

The thing I was involved with, The Institute For Self Actualization is just another Landmark clone. It's amazing how similar these things are even though they pretend they are such unique and special. All the methods are the same, all the techniques.

These "assistants" they have didn't seem like successful people. Sure, they were nice people some of them, but it all seemed very fake and like they were heavily conditioned to something or other. They still seemed lost once you got talking to them, just pretending to be this thing that had been created for them. I mean who wants some made up persona and set of rules? It was impossible for me to become one of them. I hate the stench of bullshit. I just feel sorry for them now as it is sad like you say.

I just hope more people read a forum like this before they get involved because we live in a democratic society and these things should be open to scrutiny instead of their fake way of telling people that they can't possibly have a clue unless they go and do it.

I didn't know it was possible to feel that bad. For all the damage that has been done, we are blessed to no longer be part of that deeply dysfunctional and dark world. Let's hope and pray that others in the midst of LGATS survive and eventually see the light too.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/21/2012 11:29PM by newfuture.