Landmark Forum Program - Don't Do It

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Saintsfan29

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A few years ago, my wife convinced me to sign up for the Landmark Forum with our two sons. We would do it together as a family. I have been a Protestant for 35 and have recently converted to Catholicism. I didn’t like the idea of doing the Landmark Forum but the rest of the family wanted to do it, so I went along. While attending the three-day forum, I discovered very quickly it’s all about repackaged Existentialism and has nothing to do with the Christian way of life.

Over the three days, you are sequestered in a big room with the other participants. You are pressured not to leave for any reason during each day, which can last at least 8 hours. You are given breaks for lunch but it’s a very quick 30 minutes.

There is one head speaker or facilitator who leads the discussions all three days. He speaks about what Landmark’s philosophy is and how to apply it to your life. We were encouraged to reflect on our life choices and understand our motivations behind them. What they teach you is you can define your own reality, including what is happiness, sadness, good and bad, and all general morality. Whatever you believe, it’s all our choice. If you choose to believe in something, including God, it’s your choice. If you choose to believe in evil, it’s your choice. Think something that happened to you was good or bad, it’s your choice.

At some point on the second day, a few other brave souls and I got fed up, chose to stand up and argue with the speaker about him saying God and morality are all in our minds. To our protests, we were simply told we can choose to believe it or not. It’s all a choice. That said, no one ever pressured us to accept any of their teachings. But again, explicitly, they teach nothing in the world exists. WE give it meaning, not God, who is an apparent figment of our imagination. This clearly doesn’t jive with my Christian worldview.

I will acknowledge there are some genuine benefits to encouraging people to reflect on their behaviors and actions and see the true motivations behind them. But our Catholic faith can do that for us. I admit I made some genuine realizations about myself during the three days. But shouldn’t our Catholic faith do that for us?

In the end, I found the Forum to be hollow and nothing more than rehashed Existentialism or New Age thinking. Both very dangerous to our ability to wage spiritual warfare and not open doors for evil influences in our lives to pull us off track.

Landmark Forum will always deny being any kind of life philosophy or being put in any kind of box. In my humble view, you’d be better off going to a Catholic retreat at your local parish or talking to a priest for guidance. Not to mention, you’d save thousands of dollars.
 
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Welcome to Church!
I am glad that you didn’t stay in that.
All this reminds me of New Thought movement and/or Course of miracles and is scary how it comes in many wrapped shapes and in the end leaves you with nothing good when you go away.

 
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Well, first of all, they’re trying to sell you on the idea of something, right? Strikes me as the old 70s “I’m OK,You’re OK”, except they’ve added “unless you disagree”

At such seminars, there is usually an Amway presentation at the end… :roll_eyes:
 
Saintsfan29 said:
Over the three days, you are sequestered in a big room with the other participants. You are pressured not to leave for any reason during each day, which can last at least 8 hours. You are given breaks for lunch but it’s a very quick 30 minutes.
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I’m not the world’s most social person, so that sounds like torture.
 
I did Landmak many years ago.
I thought it functioned for people as intensive group therapy. I thought the ‘assigning meaning’ bit was focused towards people with big chips on their shoulders, to help them ‘let go’ and move on with their lives.

My main criticism was the intense focus to recruit others to attend their sessions. In this respect it felt cultish.
 
Saintsfan29 said:
Over the three days, you are sequestered in a big room with the other participants. You are pressured not to leave for any reason during each day, which can last at least 8 hours.
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As a general rule, I would never, ever participate in ANY program that pressured people not to leave while it is going on. These are basically mind control/ mind retraining programs of the sort originally developed to motivate salesmen and the like. They are bad. I don’t care what philosophy is being pushed, if people can’t walk in and out during the presentation, it’s bad. Avoid. Run far away.
 
It definitely is a group therapy environment. That’s the subtle peer pressure of it. But the “assign meaning” piece was not just for the afflicted. It’s the foundation of their message and for everyone.

To your point, they also use heavy pressure to get you to sign up for the net level of training. In my opinion, Christians should not be doing this training, period. I will lead you down a path contrary to our Catholic teachings and possibly open doors to the enemy.
 
I attended several Landmark events, mostly around 10 years ago in Philly.

The guy I worked for was a huge Landmark “evangelist.” He wanted all of his employees to attend and paid for the events. The cost could be $500.

I have degrees in philosophy and religious studies from a seminary so I’m not so vulnerable to the godless, existentialist philosphy and socialist influences. However I warn other Christians about attendance at Landmark events.

Landmark events are somewhat like a blend of a Catholic weekend retreat, group counseling and a small Christian fellowship church. Of course, this is mostly for godless, existentialists. They try to help people meet and become friends like a fellowship church.

There are aspects of their programs that have had a positive influence on me, at other times I would have prefered to have been in a dentist’s office.

They try to help people to identify early, negative influences that still are affecting one’s outlook on life. That could be the effects of a verbally abusive parent or the effects of a traumatic divorce, etc.

There are some heartwarming reports from those who attend. They recognize something about a parent, call the parent during a break and have a “breakthrough” in the relationship. Then they later report the exciting news to the group.

Landmark is a FOR-profit organization. So there is an element of hard-sell in what they do. They train attendees to tell others about the program and invite them to a free visit. The visitors will hear about all of the “breakthroughs” and will be encouraged to $ign up to get some breakthroughs of their own.

There are also some aspects that cause Landmark to have gotten a reputation for being somewhat cult-like. The forum leader is a bit like a bishop in a Christian church. They are revered. You are not allowed to be late or to leave early. One method they seem to use is to have a teenager chastise an adult for being late.

I created a bit of a stir one time when my only opportunity to attend Sunday mass was Saturday evening. Their afternoon session ran a little late so I left in a way that was minimally disruptive. However someone from the org came after me to try to talk me out of it in the hallway. I went to mass.

continued in the next post
 
continued…

At the Forum I attended there was a sad message on the blackboard. It read something like, Life is empy and meaningless and it is empty and meaningless that it is empty and meaningless.

Obviously this is very sad in contrast to our beautiful Christian belief that a loving, benevolent God created us, sent His Son and Spirit to save us and teach us, and gives us an opportunity to chose to be beloved adopted children in his loving family.

I think the empty and meaningless concept provides an empty slate for people to imagine a new future for themselves. Unfortunately what they imagine for themselves may be quite delusional.

I recall one guy who gleefully reported that he came to know himself–as gay–and so felt free to leave his wife and family.

We should not ignore Landmark or similar. They are attracting people who are looking for meaning and healing from life’s emotional scars. I’m confident there are opportunities for Christians to do a better job addressing those longings in people while helping them to grow in their knowledge and love for God.
 
I just did some research on this Landmark Forum and sure enough it is a program that bought or broadly licensed all the intellectual property of Werner Erhard’s est trainings, which were the big trendy self-discovery thing in the 1970s. There was another spin-off of est around the late 70s or 80s called Lifespring that was the same program, only new-age oriented.

All these trainings have the same basic structure; you get cooped up in a room for hours, they exert control over you, then they probe your background to try to make you have a breakthrough about alleged emotional issues holding you back, and then if you have such a breakthrough you’re supposed to testify about it to the group. If you’re not feelin’ it then the group is supposed to work with you to push you into a breakthrough. It’s basic mind control stuff not dissimilar to that used by military training.

It’s also been softened a lot over time. I remember when this stuff was invented in the 1970s, stories of people not being allowed out of the room for bathroom breaks or food breaks for hours. They had to let up on that because it was going way wrong and people were bringing lawsuits. The whole business grew out of sales motivation training where, according to sources I read on this back in the 1980s, they would humiliate salesmen in front of the group, flog them, and lock them in coffins for hours. This was supposed to motivate them to go out and sell more.

Of course they push you to go out and recruit others to come to the program, because several of the people who invented this were from the MLM industry. It’s a big pyramid scheme.

I’m a bit flabbergasted that this stuff is STILL making the rounds 50 years later. I know from a psychological standpoint it is probably effective for some people and that’s how it manages to keep going even though the 70s were a long time ago, but honestly, this is cult stuff. It’s messing with your mind. Run far away from it.
 
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Never heard of the Landmark program. It sounds awful. Thanks for sounding the alarm.

That being said. Some of the techniques that it sounds like the program uses can indeed be effective at “reprogramming“ people who quite frankly could use a little reprogramming. But the catch is - who is doing the reprogramming and why and how. Landmark sounds like a bad deal, a for profit deal - that is a huge red flag.

The Catholic Church offers programs that use similar techniques but they aren’t as overbearing or invasive. I’m thinking of Cursillo and CRHP. If someone is interested in these types of retreats that offer you a new outlook on life then they should stick to the ones that have been approved by the Church.
 
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1Lord1Faith said:
The Catholic Church offers programs that use similar techniques but they aren’t as overbearing or invasive.
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I think one of the problems with the Church using these techniques is that certain leaders and certain organizations do become “overbearing or invasive”. For example, based on what I have read, it certainly sounds like the Legion of Christ and some chapters of Opus Dei used these same types of techniques. Aspects of Opus Dei are very much MLM as well. I read up on these techniques when young partly so I could be sure to recognize and avoid any organization doing that sort of thing. That would include any Catholic organization that tried it on me.
 
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Is this similar to these parish “Awakening” events?
How do these Landmark people get their $$, do people pay to go to their events?
 
Believe it or not, people do actually pay to attend Landmark and similar events.
Or, as shown by one person’s post on this thread, sometimes an employer or someone else pays for another person (like their employee or their family member) to attend. Some people see these seminars as motivational training or success training and think if they attend them, or make their employees attend them, then they’ll be more successful in life and at work.

PT Barnum was right…
 
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I don’t have time to read through the thread, sorry.

Here’s my two cents anyway.

I did the Landmark Forum in 2003. Over the next four years I did many more of their programs and gained a great deal from them.

In fact, part of my return to the Church was a result of what I learned and applied from my time in those Landmark Education courses.

Yeah, there were a lot of fru-fru new agey types in the group. But there was an equal or greater amount of people of religious backgrounds, predominantly Christian and Jewish.

The programs aren’t for everyone, to be sure, but they can have a very positive impact on some people’s lives. They aren’t a cult. They aren’t a religion.

Incidentally, several years ago, I had to go through the three-day training for the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. This program was created by the late Stephen Covey, a member of the LDS.

There is no way that Mr Covey didn’t rework the Landmark Education materials into his own system — with massively better marketing — particularly in the early part of the program. I sat there during the training seeing everything I’d learned in Landmark, but with tiny changes in language and design.

Personally, I thank God for what I gained in all those Landmark courses. They helped bring me back to the Church, and they gave such an incredible push to live out my faith with integrity!

But I would 100% send my family and friends to the Seven Habits training instead in the future. I find that program to be so much more accessible and useable in daily life.

Anyway, carry on. Gotta get to work — it’s a long walk from my kitchen to my guest room (home office).
 
Well said. I agree. Pretty spot on. But they now charge somewhere around $800+ for the privilege.

I still want to emphasize Christians should not attend. The core of their teachings are directly opposite of what we’re taught in the church.
 
They charge a minimum of $700-$800 per event. After the three days, they hard-sell you to sign up for their advanced classes for $1000+. Crazy!
 
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