Verbalizin:

You seem to be here largely as an apologist for Katie and/or various aspects of LGATs, which are quite controversial and generate serious complaints.

Your lengthy posts seem to eventually and essentially blame the victim, rather than take into consideration that LGATs and unprofessional self-help gurus often hurt people due to the dynamics, structure, content of the program and lack of professional training concerning the facilitator.

If you want to rely upon self-help gurus and LGATs to some extend within your life that's your choice.

But for others to question the value of such relative amateur help from unqualified people and regard it as potentially unsafe is reasonable given the facts.

Again, as you pointed out, people that need advice and input regarding problems can always discuss things with friends and/or family for free.

It seems to me that friends and family are in a position to give better more informed advice than Byron Katie.

After all, unlike Katie, they have a personal knowledge and history and rather than relying upon some formula or guessing process they can actually comment and offer feedback with some authority.

Otherwise, there are helping professionals like marriage and family therapists, pscyhologists and psychiatrists available in almost any community.

Many offer help through nonprofits on a sliding scale.

There are also support groups that help people with specific problems such as grief, divorce and substance abuse.

Support groups are often free, Though some may have a fee and include a professional staffer at a community services or social service within a community.

Thanks for the feedback, rrmoderator. I don't mind being labeled, although I don't agree with the label, because I'm not running for office and I'm sure that neither you nor any reader of these forums will be influenced by a label. If I were to propose a label for me, it would be "just some guy trying to figure things out." I won't say more on that in order to avoid excessive length.

Few questions for you:

1) Could you refer me to the researchers who identified the traits of dangerous groups?

2) Can you give an example of a group or movement that someone unsuccessfully proposed for inclusion in the RR database?

3) Are you familiar with an organization called Contegrity?

Best,

V

Quote
Verbalizin

I suspect that Katie and her work are useful primarily if not only for coddled, neurotic types like me whose problems are, it is obvious to everyone else, alive nowhere but inside our own skulls. If you are a more seriously traumatized survivor of war, sexual abuse, torture or having to listen to loud hip-hop music, I'd look elsewhere. That's not an indictment, necessarily. The fact that Lipitor doesn't cure cancer doesn't mean we refuse to prescribe it for people with high cholesterol. Every tool for its job.

V

Hi Verbalizin,

No one is claiming that the various self-help, self-awareness, personal-development, human potential programs don't posses some valid, helpful, and/or legitimate content. Scientology uses some basic Freudian stuff and clinically, "abreaction" has been found to be useful since it was used to treat shell-shocked soldiers during WWI. The LGATs use a lot of common-sense or basic therapeutic stuff that most people might find some benefit in. Earlier cults offered up a replacement "family" and a sense of purpose to many alienated or disaffected adolescents. Its the hidden agendae that are part and parcel of these groups that distinquish them from real education, therapy, or counselling. Almost by definition, gurus have odd, destructive, or devient personality traits that make themselves known in the "programs" they design and the people they control. Also, the adulturation or absurdist extreme to which they carry the material is characteristic as they are made up by (mostly) uneducated and untrained amateurs who have motives beyond the so-called "improvement" of their followers. I wouldn't wander into one of these things without the expectation that I could be exposed or infected with something of a viral nature I might not even realize for months or years. As a class, these groups are loaded with intellectual and emotional "pathogens" from which the usual "protection" is no barrier. That's their business, after all - ~breakingthrough~ those barriers.


Ellen

Verbalizin:

See [www.culteducation.com]

Contegrity, is reportedly "an organization whose two founders hail from Landmark Education Corp., which has ties to Werner Erhard and Associates and the Erhard Seminars Training, better known as 'est.'"

For those who don't know about est or Landmark...

See [www.culteducation.com]

Contegrity appears to be another LGAT.

You don't seem like a researcher or someone really investigating from your posts. Instead as stated before you come across as an apologist, or what some people would call a "troll."

Researchers regarding LGATs have been previously linked such as Philip Cushman, a clinical psychologist.

If you dig into the database you will find many more. There is also a Links page.

Almost every day there are groups , movments or leaders proposed for inclusion in the database of the Ross Institute.

Very few make it in because those naming and proposing such groups don't offer links to news articles, court documents regarding the group, leader or movement that could potentially be archived.

Some end up commenting on this board, which is open to the public.

The Byron Katie article is now included within the database under Information/General Information.

See [www.culteducation.com]

Though there is not enough material to warrant a seperate subsection for Katie.

Ellen,

So well said!!!! Excellent description!!!! I love it!!!!!

skeptic

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Verbalizin

And it's your interpretation of that event today that now causes you to resent and fear and dislike LGATs.

When I first started out of the LGAT-induced trance, I used LGAT thinking to analyze the confusion I was feeling. I used all the mindgames I could to assign all responsibility to myself for my LGAT experience. However, I now see it differently. I take no responsibility for the fact that some people are sociopathic and will con and manipulate others for their own gain.

That's a fact of life, it's not my interpretation. And another thing that's true for me is that I don't like such people and their scams. And I'm not going to use a mindgame to talk myself out of either.

Yes, I can find value in the fact of having been exploited. The turnaround, however, is too one dimensional. It's just one piece of self-examination. It's hardly inclusive. There's positive and negative in this life. The new age admonitions to 'always be happy' and 'never think a negative thought' are desperate attempts to deny life's darkness. That's how I see it, and BK teaches that.

I think I ended up in the LGAT, in part, because I was already into positive thinking and turnaround thinking. I believed all people were good &/or meant well, and any negative judgments I had were about ME. (ME ME ME, *I* think badly, there are no bad people, it's all about ME). I found out differently. My desperate need to see life as all positive set me up for the LGAT. This selective, all-positive thinking might feel good, for awhile, but your feet aren't on solid ground.

After reading about Byron Katie on this board, I was interested to see her in action. Here is a link showing a session with an Israeli woman who tells Katie that she's afraid of war.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qwerzf5gIH0

I've never seen anything so insane in my life, outside of a mental institution. I've watched other videos and read parts of her writing, and now I am just stunned, once again, at what people will pay money to believe.

Katie's reasoning is more deranged than anything put forth by Landmark Education, though there are basic parallels. She incorporates Landmark's extreme existential you-create-everything and blame-the-victim philosophy, but then she essentially attempts to turn reality completely on its head with her reversal questions. "My father abused me" becomes "I abused my father." This doesn't even begin to make rational sense, it's like insisting you can wear your hat on your feet and walk just as easily, if not better.

My friends and I have been watching these videos with our jaws on the floor.

In this one, Katie is dealing with an Israeli woman essentially suffering from PTSD, who needs some basic therapy and human support and understanding. She's afraid of war. Of course she's afraid of war. This is perfectly normal and sane, given where she lives.

But according to the New Age Self-Help snake-oil soul "savers," no one need or should ever be afraid, ever be upset, ever be angry or feel guilt or shame or anything "negative." By promoting this patently ridiculous concept, they create the illusion that people actually could walk around in a state of bliss all the time -- and this they call a state of "grace" -- by simply disconnecting from their egos, their rational selves, and their critical minds.

If they just did back-room lobotomies it would be so much easier -- but they'd sell less books.

Landmark and other LGATs of course trade in this counterfeit psycho-babble, at the expense of people's lost minds and souls, but Byron Katie seems to take it to a new level perhaps because she was, for many years, actually barking mad.

So we have a barking mad woman now telling people to just "reverse" their thinking until they can convince themselves maybe nothing is what they believed, maybe everything is ass-backward, maybe everything is just FINE if they only stop thinking rationally . . . and people are calling her a guru and "the real deal."

She actually tells this poor woman that she shouldn't worry about war, because the FLOWERS ON THE TABLE are not worrying about war.

That's right. The flowers. They're not worried. They have no brain. Be like the flowers.

What a sick, sorry situation we're finding ourselves in today, people. We are devolving. We need to be rational in order to survive. It's our critical minds and rational thinking and respect for pain, fear and danger that allowed us to rise up out of the primordial swamps, harness fire, build cities, create laws, art and our greatest ideas. These New Age lunatics will have us drooling like the mental patients they once were, incapable of correct action because we no longer trust our most important faculties.

What the fuck is going on in this world???

There are consumer protections for objects, for baby car seats and tires and medications -- but what about this faulty New Age psychology, these damaging mind viruses delivered in respectable hard-cover packages and CD sets? We don't feel they can be regulated because people are "free" to believe what they want, but at the least they should come with some kind of warning!

WARNING: The enclosed material may be hazardous to your mental and psychological health!

WARNING: The enclosed material may have been fabricated by a former mental patient or sociopath and has not been tested for accuracy or validity!

WARNING: The enclosed material may be at the very least a waste of your money, and at the worst may confuse you to the point of psychosis!

WARNING: You may fall into deep depression after viewing the enclosed material, realizing you have just financially contributed to the growing New Age Empire of Mass Derangement and you've been taken for a complete fool

Byron Katie was once locked up and she should be again, IMHO.

WARNING: The process you are considering subjecting yourself to uses known techniques of mind control. As a result, you will likely lose your ability to know that your mind is no longer your own, or under your control. But, frighteningly, you will THINK you freely and willingly CHOSE your new thoughts, your new self, your new life. IT'S A HOAX! BUYER BEWARE.

vlinden, let me know if you write your book because I'd like a copy. I could read your writing forever. You have a way of describing and exposing and zeroing in on the new-age insanity that I love to read!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! What you've written about Katie here knocks my socks off!

skeptic

Hey, thanks Skeptic. I think you're pretty insightful as well so don't underestimate your own posts on this board. However, I'm really floored by Nutrino, who doesn't post anymore. Where did he go? I'm going to put a post looking for him, maybe he's lurking around.

Truthfully I feel like I've spent a fair bit of my time here screaming and raging, whining and moping, cursing (sorry, I curse a lot) and venting incredulity so I don't know how helpful that is to anyone. But thanks to my ex's descent into Landmark/Hades, and my sad, increasingly mythic (within my own personal legend, of course) pursuit, I have now lost myself in the many threads of this board, and in the underworld of cults, mind control, LGATs and all that seems to be connected . . . which is quite possible everything . . . I'm hooked, is my point. This stuff is fascinating.

I was arguing about Byron Katie with some sad apologist wackaroon on the Cults forum. He asked how she could possibly be so successful and still be insane. Ah, those who don't know their history . . . don't know much, it turns out.