Get Confident, Stupid!
CONTINUED (PAGE 3 OF 4)
She's glad to hear from me, and I say, "Listen, uh, I think I've been inauthentic with you." And she says, "No you haven't." And I say, "Whew! Great! Talk to you later. Love you!" Now I feel like a bad Landmarkian and a bad brother.
Giving me the impetus to come clean with my sister is admirable, but I'm troubled by something else: the effect the group has had on me. I hadn't even known there was a group until, cell phone still in pocket, I realized I wasn't part of it. I begin to sense the group congealing, becoming monolithic. Suddenly there is a magnetic core, and all those not yet attached to it are being sucked in. Then it gets worse.
Back in the ballroom, a dark-haired woman in her early thirties tells us about a phone call she's just made to her father, during which, right as she was in the middle of spelling out for him all the lifelong complaints she was now prepared to forgo thanks to the Landmark Forum, he interrupted her to ask for her password to an Internet site. He was Web surfing.
Tears begin falling. She says this means her father doesn't love her, just like when she was little and he failed to show up for her school play because he was drunk. All around the room, people are making sympathetic noises. Even me.
Condon comes down from his platform and approaches the microphone, and I think he's maybe going to giver her a hug or something. Instead, he says, "That never happened."
Never happened? How does he know?
He grabs some chalk and draws two circles on the board. One represents the day her father failed to show; the other represents her interpretation of it. "They have nothing to do with each other," he says. His failing to show did not hurt you, he tells her. How you perceived it hurt you. You go around blaming your father for your problems when really it's your view that has created a barrier. You need to stop running this racket. You need to go call him again and "get complete" with him. Unyielding in his belief in her father's cosmic innocence, stern Condon is interested only in the facts.
It's a new story now, apparently more appealing, because enlightened nodding spreads across the room like contagion. I cannot fathom the great eagerness with which everyone has received the leader's perverse psychology lesson. (I suppose those two circles he drew on the board really drove it home.) All I can think is that although this woman seems like a perfectly nice person, her father really didn't love her very much and she's right to be sad.
Mine is a singularly dissenting opinion. I feel painfully self-conscious. It's cold outside the core. By the end of day one, the Landmark Forum has become not so much a test of how much bad news I can take but how much loneliness. The Landmark method is working.
···
Condon raises the emotional stakes early the next morning when catches a woman taking notes. She denies her transgression and squirms in her chair.
Why do you deny it? he asks, and then turns his attention to all of us. You behave in this room just like you run your lives. You cheat; you don't keep your word. You eat in your chairs. You leave the room during sessions. You come back late from breaks. You speak out of turn. And the rest of you let this happen. The message is clear: Who will police the group if not its members?
I decide that Condon is the greatest teacher/facilitator I have ever encountered, and watching him work is almost worth the price I've paid in exhaustion and stress and dollars.
My admiration for Condon's abilities grows even as my opinion of the ever more adhesive group diminishes. His morning vigilante challenge inspires a handful of core participants, including my UFO friend, to begin monitoring our integrity. "People," they yell into the atrium as our break time dwindles. "Five minutes! Don't be late, people!" And it hits me how much I hate people who use the word people to address large groups.
···
To transform, to live your life powerfully, you must move into a realm without fear, and so we talk a lot about what frightens us.
Near the end of an endless day, Barry leads us in a visualization exercise about fear that goes something like this: We are told to close our eyes as he reads to us from what sounds like a bizarro relaxation script. "Imagine that are afraid of the person next to you," he says. "Very afraid."
He's quiet a minute, lets the anxiety he's inspired percolate. I start to hear uneasy, emotion-suppressing sighs.
"Now…imagine that you are afraid of everyone in the room. Imagine that you are afraid of every single person in the city of Oakland, hundreds of thousands of people."
I'm sitting near the front of the room, and behind me, off to the left, I hear whimpering.
"Imagine you are afraid of every person in the United States." The whimpering intensifies. "Imagine you are afraid of every single person, all 6 billion people in the world." The whimpering becomes sobbing: further behind me someone might be hyperventilating.
"Don't go unconscious!" he yells. "That's just your way of checking out!"
The sobbing becomes wailing. And then, from right behind me, some lets rip a wild, primal, angst-ridden, high-decibel growl, like I once heard from my dog when she having a wild dream.
Then Barry says, "Just wait! There's a surprise on the other side of this. Something absurd!" Sobbing, growling, and whimpering fill the air.
"Now, are you ready for the surprise? Imagine the person next to you is—guess what?—afraid of you." Barry breaks into a giggle just this side of maniacal.
"Now imagine everyone in the room, in Oakland, in America, in the world, is afraid of you!"
The sobbing begins to turn to laughter. We open our eyes onto a world in which we are powerful because we don't feel fear, we instill it. I guess. I'm not particularly moved by the exercise. But Barry's performance has provoked in the group a hasty swing of the emotional pendulum that reveals an ever growing willingness to be led. I know everyone is tired, but their mutability disgusts me. I'd thought we were supposed to become more powerful here.
TAGS Self-improvement, Men's Lives, landmark forum, self-help
Page 1 2 3 4
Giving me the impetus to come clean with my sister is admirable, but I'm troubled by something else: the effect the group has had on me. I hadn't even known there was a group until, cell phone still in pocket, I realized I wasn't part of it. I begin to sense the group congealing, becoming monolithic. Suddenly there is a magnetic core, and all those not yet attached to it are being sucked in. Then it gets worse.
Back in the ballroom, a dark-haired woman in her early thirties tells us about a phone call she's just made to her father, during which, right as she was in the middle of spelling out for him all the lifelong complaints she was now prepared to forgo thanks to the Landmark Forum, he interrupted her to ask for her password to an Internet site. He was Web surfing.
Tears begin falling. She says this means her father doesn't love her, just like when she was little and he failed to show up for her school play because he was drunk. All around the room, people are making sympathetic noises. Even me.
Condon comes down from his platform and approaches the microphone, and I think he's maybe going to giver her a hug or something. Instead, he says, "That never happened."
Never happened? How does he know?
He grabs some chalk and draws two circles on the board. One represents the day her father failed to show; the other represents her interpretation of it. "They have nothing to do with each other," he says. His failing to show did not hurt you, he tells her. How you perceived it hurt you. You go around blaming your father for your problems when really it's your view that has created a barrier. You need to stop running this racket. You need to go call him again and "get complete" with him. Unyielding in his belief in her father's cosmic innocence, stern Condon is interested only in the facts.
It's a new story now, apparently more appealing, because enlightened nodding spreads across the room like contagion. I cannot fathom the great eagerness with which everyone has received the leader's perverse psychology lesson. (I suppose those two circles he drew on the board really drove it home.) All I can think is that although this woman seems like a perfectly nice person, her father really didn't love her very much and she's right to be sad.
Mine is a singularly dissenting opinion. I feel painfully self-conscious. It's cold outside the core. By the end of day one, the Landmark Forum has become not so much a test of how much bad news I can take but how much loneliness. The Landmark method is working.
···
Condon raises the emotional stakes early the next morning when catches a woman taking notes. She denies her transgression and squirms in her chair.
Why do you deny it? he asks, and then turns his attention to all of us. You behave in this room just like you run your lives. You cheat; you don't keep your word. You eat in your chairs. You leave the room during sessions. You come back late from breaks. You speak out of turn. And the rest of you let this happen. The message is clear: Who will police the group if not its members?
I decide that Condon is the greatest teacher/facilitator I have ever encountered, and watching him work is almost worth the price I've paid in exhaustion and stress and dollars.
My admiration for Condon's abilities grows even as my opinion of the ever more adhesive group diminishes. His morning vigilante challenge inspires a handful of core participants, including my UFO friend, to begin monitoring our integrity. "People," they yell into the atrium as our break time dwindles. "Five minutes! Don't be late, people!" And it hits me how much I hate people who use the word people to address large groups.
···
To transform, to live your life powerfully, you must move into a realm without fear, and so we talk a lot about what frightens us.
Near the end of an endless day, Barry leads us in a visualization exercise about fear that goes something like this: We are told to close our eyes as he reads to us from what sounds like a bizarro relaxation script. "Imagine that are afraid of the person next to you," he says. "Very afraid."
He's quiet a minute, lets the anxiety he's inspired percolate. I start to hear uneasy, emotion-suppressing sighs.
"Now…imagine that you are afraid of everyone in the room. Imagine that you are afraid of every single person in the city of Oakland, hundreds of thousands of people."
I'm sitting near the front of the room, and behind me, off to the left, I hear whimpering.
"Imagine you are afraid of every person in the United States." The whimpering intensifies. "Imagine you are afraid of every single person, all 6 billion people in the world." The whimpering becomes sobbing: further behind me someone might be hyperventilating.
"Don't go unconscious!" he yells. "That's just your way of checking out!"
The sobbing becomes wailing. And then, from right behind me, some lets rip a wild, primal, angst-ridden, high-decibel growl, like I once heard from my dog when she having a wild dream.
Then Barry says, "Just wait! There's a surprise on the other side of this. Something absurd!" Sobbing, growling, and whimpering fill the air.
"Now, are you ready for the surprise? Imagine the person next to you is—guess what?—afraid of you." Barry breaks into a giggle just this side of maniacal.
"Now imagine everyone in the room, in Oakland, in America, in the world, is afraid of you!"
The sobbing begins to turn to laughter. We open our eyes onto a world in which we are powerful because we don't feel fear, we instill it. I guess. I'm not particularly moved by the exercise. But Barry's performance has provoked in the group a hasty swing of the emotional pendulum that reveals an ever growing willingness to be led. I know everyone is tired, but their mutability disgusts me. I'd thought we were supposed to become more powerful here.
TAGS Self-improvement, Men's Lives, landmark forum, self-help
Page 1 2 3 4