Tamara P
1/5
Scientology Light is the name of a post I read from 2012 about a terrible experience a lady had with this organization. My experience does not come close to hers, however, I do think this organization is walking a thin (not to mention dangerous) line between self-help and manipulation.
Aside from reading the course syllabus, I signed up without doing my due diligence so shame on me for that.
The outline of the course was great, I expected to pick up some new techniques to deal with anxiety, communication, etc. I did not expect to walk into a dangerous pseudo therapeutic session in which participants are told "you are still not there or not getting it" if they do not have a breakthrough while speaking into the microphone. The runaround a lady received from the speaker when she asked about taking notes was almost enough to cause a headache. I guess it is one of their techniques, if you ask a difficult question I'm going to talk in circles until the person gives in and pretends to get it. I actually had a participant tell me they had to make up their breakthrough because they did not know what else to say to the speaker.
Once I had walked out mid-session I did my research and found its origins come from Werner Erhard, born Jack Rosenberg who combined various techniques (a quick Google search will show the techniques he combined) including Scientology. He read Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard the founder of Scientology and applied some of his findings to EST (Erhard Seminars Training) which in 1991 was re-branded and repackaged and is now what we know as the Landmark Forum.
I've done a lot of work both on the inspirational side of personal development as well as scientifically validated therapy techniques and I was appalled at what I saw during my one day and two hour participation in this cult like seminar. My danger flags were raised early Friday morning with their whole enrollment thing which sounded like a pyramid scheme to me. I figured I would give it a chance and stayed for the full day Friday and came back for Saturday. I left two hours in on Saturday morning after the presenter allowed a participant to share their current struggle with addiction without letting this person know they are in no way qualified to be handling addiction issues in this manner. While they do include warnings in their waiver of liability, the ethical thing to do is to let people know their lack of qualifications in dealing with addiction when someone steps up to share, but hey, that probably would hurt their money making scheme so why stop them?
The way this company goes about making money is completely reprehensible and disgusting. People go to these sessions under the impression that they’re going to be helped by professionals and that is just not the case. The speaker spent half of Friday on a thinly disguised sales pitch telling us to make sure we enroll others in the possibilities we were creating for ourselves during the sessions and to bring someone on Tuesday night. Landmark encourages participants to go and have difficult conversations with people that they may have not been in contact with for years and do not provide them with the tools they need on how to have these crucial conversations. This organization is encouraging people to go and have these conversations without a warning, "oh by the way, we are not teaching you how to do this but go on, call them during the break, do it tonight! Bring them back on Tuesday night so they can see this transformation that you've had!"
Please do your research, there are other very valuable self-help seminars or therapy that you can use this money towards. I get the allure of a three day weekend giving someone a major breakthrough. In my own personal experience, there is no instant fix to years and years of bad habits and/or trauma. Permanent change takes work and tends to be a slow progress, the fact that some of the participants may be opening a can of worms without the proper tools to work through it could cause them irreparable harm.
