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Chastain
I guess that using this board is an avenue to voice our problems and address the issues that this group caused.

Chastain,

This definately a good place to start. I'm not sure about PSI, but for me I've found a lot of people that feel like I do about Landmark and have also been under the influence of Landmark at some point in their life like I was.

I still have a ways to go, but atleast I'm here and making progress and being constructive rather than destructive.

"You are the victim of LGAT thats true, but you recruted your sister and only you are responsible for that."

you have no clue.
people who have been indocrinated, have no clue.
how can there be ANY responsibliity for that which you
have NO CLUE about??

I found this on another site and posted it here.


PSI Seminars
PSI Seminars employs a well-tested and highly refined formula to get your money. Their methodology is neither proprietary nor unique, and is described in any scholarly work about cult dynamics.
What follows here is a below-the-surface interpretation of what happens during a weekend PSI. This will not be obvious to most participants because the language used at the PSI is carefully designed to conceal and distract.
The invitation
Recruitment is via invitation from a trusted friend, so you start out with a very open mind. This is much more effective than seeing an ad in the newspaper. In fact, PSI Seminars does not buy advertising--instead they rely on the free yet powerful word-of-mouth advertising from their members.
The speakers
PSI speakers are charismatic, that is, they are very good at being persuasive. They appear believable, trustworthy, caring, intelligent, and worthy of admiration. They are well-paid, highly trained professionals, selected for their speaking abilities. These are the only paid employees you'll see at PSI.
The "volunteers"
The member-volunteers you meet, including the friend who brought you, are sincere in their belief that PSI Seminars is good for you. They have been convinced themselves, and are being strongly encouraged to convince others. In fact, PSI Seminars assigns them recruitment homework, as spreading the word is an integral part of their growth as a member. They are encouraged to take PSI Seminars as far as possible by attending course after course, each costing hundreds, even thousands of dollars. At these meetings, members are trained how to recruit.
The psychology
PSI Seminars preys on people with low self esteem or who are somewhat depressed or dissatisfied--in other words, the majority of the population. People are looking for answers and PSI Seminars claims to have all of them. They begin with what I call the "christmas present."
The Christmas Present
Imagine seeing a box under the Christmas tree. It's very nicely wrapped, undoubtedly placed there by someone who cares about you. It's a very large box and has a note saying "Something very special, just for you." You can only guess what's inside, but you know it's got to be something very special indeed. You can't wait to unwrap it because you know it will make you happy.
This is how PSI Seminars gets you interested--by telling you it has something you want without actually giving you a single detail about what it is. Consider the name, "PSI Seminars." What does it mean? Absolutely nothing. Unless your like the name the “Piss and Shit Institute.” This was also true of their previous name, "Est," and of the Landmark offshoot "Scientology," which offers you the wonders of "Dianetics."
PSI Seminars is an empty box to be filled with treasures that only your imagination can provide. This is a popular advertising technique. Think of that car commercial where you get only tantalizing glimpses of the "stunningly redesigned" product. You get no specific details, only a vague framework upon which to place your wildest dreams of what you want the product to be. It makes you want it even before you really know what it is. That's how PSI hooks you. Their members are told they must not reveal any information to outsiders about what actually goes on in the meetings because that will somehow ruin their benefit. In truth it would just undermine PSI’s recruitment strategy.
Breaking you down
Once you're hooked into attending your first PSI, the psychological work begins in earnest. This is where PSI Seminars borrows heavily from successful cult operations--operations that have been powerful enough to lead people to take their own lives in the name of the cult, like Heaven's Gate. Of course PSI has no interest in mass suicide--they want hordes of live, happy, paying customers. Remember, PSI’s sole purpose is to collect money.
The first thing PSI needs to do is kill your own opinions, your own ideas, your own independent thoughts. They'll ask "who are you being" and tell you that you are being a bad person. Your ideas are your "stories" which you need to "let go" of. Your opinions are your "racket" that you use to justify everything you do. If you question anything presented in the meetings, that's your racket, your story, a result of you being a closed-minded person, a person who just won't let go.
And PSI Seminars will provide the physical and emotional stress that facilitates "letting go."
Your weekend PSI Basic is four consecutive full days plus an extra evening. The schedule is 3 p.m. to midnight each day. No food is provided. Breaks are three hours apart, and you are told that if you take an unscheduled break--even for the restroom--you will ruin the experience and not get the benefit for which you have paid. The idea is to create physical and mental discomfort by exposing you to marathon sessions. Such a schedule inhibits critical thinking and impairs mental alertness (true adult education professionals recommend breaks at least every 50 minutes to keep participants alert and learning).
When you finally get home you are exhausted, it's after midnight, and yet you have a homework assignment (usually some sort of writing). And you have to be finished and back in session early the next morning. There is little time for sleep. Sleep deprivation is a common technique that cult leaders use to make people's minds malleable and highly open to suggestion. Prisoners of war are routinely subjected to sleep deprivation in the hopes they will reveal secrets to their captors.
Another borrowed technique is public humiliation. You'll be coaxed into getting up in front of the entire group of 150 people to spill your guts, revealing your deepest and most embarrassing secrets. This often reduces people to tearful sobbing, which is amplified by loudspeakers. Again, if you don't do it you're sabotaging your benefit. This activity is designed to break whatever self esteem you have left and leave you desperate for something to depend on.
And that something is PSI Seminars. Exhausted, feeling worthless and helpless, having "let go" of your individuality (but also hopeful for rescue), a charismatic speaker tells you there is an answer, that PSI Seminars "technology" can give you the power to make yourself strong again, to make you feel good again. You've already been told that the life you've been living is unworthy, hopeless, and born of ignorance, "rackets," and "stories." You've even been convinced that your family, friends, and lovers are also ignorant and suffering from not knowing the benefit of PSI Seminars. You'll believe almost anything at this point, and you'll be ready to submit yourself to the particular brand of pack mentality that PSI Seminars offers.
You are ready, in PSI speak, to have a "breakthrough."
They don't have to convince you to go out and kill yourself--there's no need to go that far. All they have to do is convince you there's a reasonable likelihood that PSI Seminars, through its special technology that no one else has, can fix you. And on the final graduation evening you'll have your poor ignorant friends and relatives along so that PSI Seminars can offer to fix them too. And of course you'll need to spend another $3000.00 or so for your next "advanced" course. Then another $4000.00 for the leadership course.
Denying reality
The only way PSI Seminars can keep you paying is to keep you in the dark about what PSI really is. So in a very clever twist, PSI’s mysterious technology, the one you use to make yourself happy, is centered around denying reality --pretending things are something they are not. Now here's the twist: the fantasy that PSI Seminars helps you construct includes PSI Seminars membership itself as its basis. Once you have become dependent on the fantasy, you will go into debt, if necessary, attending courses and giving up your time as an unpaid "volunteer." A volunteer taking notes in the back of the room. All this because without PSI Seminars, the unthinkable could happen: your fantasy would collapse, and you would feel the way did during those first marathon sessions.
Building the fantasy
With PSI's help, you can look at a bad situation and through a fairly simple exercise draw conclusions about it that make you feel good. You use the power of creative interpretation to infer positive outcomes. Essentially you make up your own reality by selectively ignoring the facts in front of you. Got a bad performance review at work? Well forget about that—your negative reaction to it is just a "story" anyway—and remember the time last year when your boss said "Good work." Problem solved! (or to put it more clearly, Problem ignored!)
At PSI Seminars you have hundreds of peers telling you it's perfectly ok to think this way, that it's ok to automatically assume, for example, that it's your partner's problems, not yours, that's causing strife in your relationship. Why face problems if you can simply decide they don't exist? Better yet why not just leave the relationship; it doesn’t exist anyway, Right?
Brainwashing?
Brainwashing, or mind control, or voodoo; just very effective advertising. PSI Seminars uses well-tested psychological techniques that take advantage of natural weaknesses in human personalities. Advertisers do it all the time with ads carefully designed to appeal to your most basic emotions--sex, power, fear, etc.--those that reside below the threshold of critical thinking. PSI Seminars does it in a more interactive, much more powerful way: they imprison you in a room, convince you that critical thinking is bad, and then, appealing to your emotions, pound their message into you.
And their message is this: Keep giving us your money and you'll be happy.

Jeri442,

PSI sounds like a mirror image of Landmark Education. It is also mentioned that it is an off shoot of EST.

I wonder if there are any direct connections between PSI and Landmark. Even the verbage that is described about PSI is the same as Landmark.

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PSI sounds like a mirror image of Landmark Education. It is also mentioned that it is an off shoot of EST.

I wonder if there are any direct connections between PSI and Landmark. Even the verbage that is described about PSI is the same as Landmark.

Actually I want to say I am sorry. My last post was something someone told me about and I copied here. I was later told this post was written about Landmark but someone had copied it and changed Landmark to PSI.

But the fact remains what was written on this post fit PSI perfectly. I fell for this because someone I trusted told me about PSI. I trusted her like a sister and bought off on this changing my life. It did change my life; It ruined it. I destroyed my first marriage, lost family, friends and my self respect. I recruited friends to this and it cost them their relationships and their money.

If anyone reading this is considering going to PSI; PLEASE DON'T..

(I guess that is my public service notice for the night.)

This was on another thread so I pasted it here because it applied to me and possibly others.

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Posted: 12-09-2003 09:48 PM Post subject: Post-landmark concentration syndrome Reply with quote
Before my involvement with landmark as a staff member, I was in a career which required me to ingest a large volume of information on a daily basis. On a typical morning, I would read four or five newspapers front to back, and would throughout the day zip through a number of other documents and an average of 200 e-mails per day.

What follows is what a few other former program leaders and staff members have referred to in other threads...

After leaving staff, on a typical day, I can barely manage to get through one newspaper, and at times have had to stack them up until I can concentrate enough to be able to make it through a one-column article. Sometimes the pile gets high enough I end up tossing them instead.

Being able to appropriately concentrate or focus on what is in front of me is nearly impossible these days. It's taken up to a month at times just to finish a magazine. I used to read three or four novels per week, a typical novel now takes anywhere from a week to two months depending on the length and amount of concentration I can muster.

At times, it takes two hours or longer to compose one reply to a thread on the system. First there is figuring out what I want to say and how to phrase it. Then there is the first edit to ensure no jargon has leaked into the comments. Then follows the second edit to ensure that if jargon has been removed, that the reply still makes sense.

Before I ever got involved, I was a human vacuum cleaner for information, taking in everything I could, understanding it as I went along, and processing the facts to come up with a large mental reference library. Now, it takes a concerted effort to focus long enough to watch the evening news. A friend tells me this is another lingering effect of the programming.

Still looking for the route to get back to where I was before getting involved in landmark. I recall reading somewhere online that people claimed increased clarity after doing the forum... yeah right.

Perhaps why some former staff go back again? When in an environment where the programming is active, they can function?

Hope thank you for bringing this up. I too have been having problems with trying to concentrate with my daily activities every since I was involved in PSI. I used to enjoy reading and writing and find I can't concentrate on what I am reading.

I too went to a PhD for therapy and found she also didn't know anything about LGATS and the effects it's had on people. Since I've been seeing her she has started reading up on these groups and is amazed the effects this is having on people. She even told me that during her sessions with other patients, at least some not all, she has learned that they too are victims of these groups. She also does court ordered divorce counseling and has started asking couples who are ordered to counseling if one or the other has been to this training. She told me that three out of ten new couples have gone to this training and shortly after their return one or the other file for divorce. I wonder how many people simply slip through the cracks?

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Jeri442
Hope thank you for bringing this up. I too have been having problems with trying to concentrate with my daily activities every since I was involved in PSI. I used to enjoy reading and writing and find I can't concentrate on what I am reading.

I have had the same problem since Landmark. I also have problems focusing on other tasks and activities that used to not be a problem.

However on there is hope. I am regaining my abilities to concentrate!

"And PSI Seminars will provide the physical and emotional stress that facilitates "letting go."
Your weekend PSI Basic is four consecutive full days plus an extra evening. The schedule is 3 p.m. to midnight each day. No food is provided. Breaks are three hours apart, and you are told that if you take an unscheduled break--even for the restroom--you will ruin the experience and not get the benefit for which you have paid. The idea is to create physical and mental discomfort by exposing you to marathon sessions. Such a schedule inhibits critical thinking and impairs mental alertness (true adult education professionals recommend breaks at least every 50 minutes to keep participants alert and learning)."

I am still having problems "letting go" of this. My counselor said I should put this behind me but that it will take time. After being involved with PSI these last few years I am having problems returning to "normal."

Does this ever go away?

"And PSI Seminars will provide the physical and emotional stress that facilitates "letting go."
Your weekend PSI Basic is four consecutive full days plus an extra evening. The schedule is 3 p.m. to midnight each day. No food is provided. Breaks are three hours apart, and you are told that if you take an unscheduled break--even for the restroom--you will ruin the experience and not get the benefit for which you have paid. The idea is to create physical and mental discomfort by exposing you to marathon sessions. Such a schedule inhibits critical thinking and impairs mental alertness (true adult education professionals recommend breaks at least every 50 minutes to keep participants alert and learning)."

I am still having problems "letting go" of this. My counselor said I should put this behind me but that it will take time. After being involved with PSI these last few years I am having problems returning to "normal."

Does this ever go away?"

Jeri, I've dealing with this for over four years now and it still hurts.

www.thevillagenews.com/story.php?story_id=27029#comments

Don't know if this will work but this is a link to a news article on PSI Seminars. You can leave comments.