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\u305d\u306e\u4e2d\u304b\u3089\u629c\u7c8b\u3057\u3066\u3054\u7d39\u4ecb\u3057\u307e\u3059\u3002<\/p>\n
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\u8efd\u5999\u3067\u8f9b\u53e3\u306e\u30a8\u30c3\u30bb\u30a4\u30b9\u30c8\u30fb\u30b3\u30e9\u30e0\u30cb\u30b9\u30c8\u3068\u3057\u3066\u306e\u8a9e\u308a\u53e3\u306e\u4e0b\u306b\u3001\u5bb6\u65cf\u3084\u30d1\u30fc\u30c8\u30ca\u30fc\u3001\u540c\u50da\u306b\u5bfe\u3059\u308b\u30a2\u30eb\u30d5\u30a9\u30fc\u30c9\u6c0f\u306e\u6df1\u3044\u611b\u60c5\u304c\u307b\u306e\u307c\u306e\u3068\u611f\u3058\u3089\u308c\u308b\u3068\u3066\u3082\u7d20\u6575\u306a\u8a18\u4e8b\u3067\u3057\u305f\u3002<\/p>\n
\u4ee5\u4e0a<\/p>\n
\u4ee5\u4e0b\u539f\u6587\u3067\u3059<\/p>\n
You\u2019re O.K., but I\u2019m Not. Let\u2019s Share.
\nBy Henry Alford<\/p>\n
Wesley Bedrosian<\/p>\n
IF, like me, you are not in the habit of sharing highly personal tidbits of your life with 148 strangers for 13 hours a day, three days in a row, then let me, uh, share with you what that experience feels like. It feels like intergalactic jet lag, or like someone has pumped your head full of a global weather system, heavy on the cumulonimbus. Some of the 148 strangers were crying so much, they looked as if they had been boiled.<\/p>\n
We had all paid $550 each to spend a glorious summer weekend in a fluorescent-lighted basement meeting room near Madison Square Garden, at the Landmark Forum. Taught in 7 languages in 20 countries and, according to its Web site, boasting more than a million attendees, the Forum is the cornerstone workshop of Landmark Education, a company formed in 1991 when Werner Erhard sold the \u201ctechnology\u201d behind his EST seminars to his employees, who then devised a kinder and gentler approach to human development.<\/p>\n
Though Landmark is viewed by some as an incubator for overly assertive or blissed-out automatons who bear a strange predilection for the phrase \u201cgot it,\u201d the eight-time Oscar-winning composer Alan Menken, the Boston Philharmonic conductor Benjamin Zander and Paul Fireman, the former Reebok chief executive, are all Landmark graduates, as are employees of Exxon Mobil, JPMorgan Chase, NASA and the Pentagon, who have been coached by the company\u2019s consulting firm, the Vanto Group.<\/p>\n
Just then we were each sharing with the person sitting next to us the previous night\u2019s homework \u2014 write a letter to someone you\u2019ve been \u201cinauthentic\u201d with, to tell about \u201cthe possibility you have invented for yourself,\u201d and then \u201cextend an invitation.\u201d I was sharing with Loretta \u2014 a 40-something former stand-up comic who thought she might have to end her 13-year relationship with the father of her two children because she had had an affair with a 19-year-old. Gulp.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, I\u2019d written my letter to all the people in my life who dumped on my writing without front-loading any praise first. \u201cThe possibility I\u2019ve created for my life,\u201d I read, \u201cis that other people\u2019s opinions are not everything. I invite these people to zip their proverbial \u2018it.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
Roger, our Forum leader \u2014 66, voluble, a more vehement Sam Waterston \u2014 chose that moment to reiterate that we\u2019re meant to tell our partner how \u201cgenerous\u201d or \u201cstingy\u201d at reconciliation his letter was. When Loretta looked down at my letter and simply cocked her head, I realized I\u2019d had my first breakthrough of the weekend \u2014 Old Me might have been mildly offended, but New Me redirected the pain by imagining members of the Pentagon doing this exercise. New Me wonders, did Robert Gates \u201cextend an invitation\u201d to Osama?<\/p>\n
The jargon is bracing. \u201cSometimes I\u2019m like, \u2018That\u2019s garbage,\u2019 \u201d said Natalie Cook, the Australian beach volleyball player who attended the Forum in 2007 and who is set to go to her fifth Olympic Games in 2012 in London. Indeed, it\u2019s hard not to smirk at a philosophy at least one of whose main tenets (\u201cYou can have any result for yourself or your life that you invent as a possibility and enroll others in your having gotten\u201d) is a copy editor\u2019s nightmare. But Cook credited Landmark with helping her to \u201ccomplete relationships I\u2019d ignored or walked out on. One was with my volleyball coach who\u2019d taken me to two Olympic medals.\u201d The actor and singer Anthony Rapp (\u201cRent\u201d) added in an interview that Landmark can be \u201cexplosively powerful at reconciling families.\u201d<\/p>\n
What seems to drive all this personal growth is the Forum\u2019s pressure-cooker atmosphere. Attendees are constantly encouraged \u2014 no, badgered \u2014 to get up to the mic and share. (\u201cIf your hand isn\u2019t raised,\u201d Roger said to my group repeatedly, \u201cthen you\u2019re not in the Forum!\u201d)<\/p>\n
THE Forum I attended generated a Com\u00e9die Humaine\u2019s worth of plot development: a 33-year-old woman called her mother to tell her that she is gay; a 30-something gentleman called the mother of his illegitimate child and said he wanted to be involved in the life of the child whom he has heretofore almost wholly ignored; a 19-year-old woman read a letter she wrote to three men who raped her four years earlier.<\/p>\n
What sets all this soul-baring in motion? Here\u2019s the setup. During class, there are two 30-minute daytime breaks and a 90-minute one for dinner; each break brings an assignment. You\u2019re not allowed to take notes during class (too distracting), and the only thing you can consume in the room is water.<\/p>\n
Roger is up on a platform and talks for an hour or so at a stretch. The gist is that humans tend to collapse what happened in their past with the story that they tell about what happened in the past. Forgive and forget; if you cling to your \u201cstory\u201d that your father was a mean drunk who beat you, you\u2019ll get trapped in that word-picture, and never open up any possibility in your life.<\/p>\n
In delivering this message, Roger raises weighty questions and makes lots of challenging literary references, but everything important is said twice (everything important is said twice). It\u2019s like he\u2019s talking to a Nobel-winning cat. He wants conflicts recounted as \u201cI said \u2018\u2014 \u2014 \u2019 and then she said \u2018 \u2014 \u2014 \u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
If you tell him, \u201cMy boss was surly and unpleasant,\u201d Roger will say: \u201cNo, she wasn\u2019t surly and unpleasant. What did she say?\u201d This is grueling to watch, though it leads to some breakthroughs; the exercise\u2019s humiliation\/approbation axis is highly reminiscent of \u201cAntiques Roadshow.\u201d Once the conflict has been limned, the sharer is encouraged, regardless of his antagonist\u2019s malfeasance, to forgive or apologize to that antagonist \u2014 a fact that caused one of my classmates, hilariously, to raise her hand at one point to ask, \u201cIs the other person ever wrong?\u201d<\/p>\n
Though the in-class hours emotionally exhausted me, the breaks were what killed me. During one, when we were meant to call someone and tell about the discoveries we were making, I called my boyfriend once and my mother twice, but neither picked up.<\/p>\n
Though I\u2019d written in my application that my current malaise was a mostly self-imposed social brownout (I quoted the Sartre line \u201cHell is other people\u201d), my class hours unbosomed in me the anxiety that I\u2019d abandoned my 82-year-old mother in the independent-living facility she entered in North Carolina three years ago. I called her three more times during the break, and couldn\u2019t get her to pick up. (Roger had told us not to leave messages or resort to e-mail.)<\/p>\n
Back in class, I kept a low profile, anxious that my flop sweat might contact the microphone wiring and electrocute me. Roger encouraged us to make \u201cunreasonable demands\u201d of ourselves, but short of parachuting directly into my loved ones\u2019 living rooms to unspool the fascinating details of my latest act of human growth, I wasn\u2019t sure what else I could do.<\/p>\n
I couldn\u2019t be late for class: Roger continually cited promptness as an essential \u201ccommitment.\u201d Indeed, one night, four classmates and I ran three blocks back from dinner lest we be castigated; at another point, a former E.M.T. named Sonia received a standing ovation when she told the group she had asked the driver of her stalled bus to write Roger an excuse on letterhead.<\/p>\n
During the program, I kept an eye out for anyone going over the rails. Landmark has been criticized for having unleashed some monsters: a reporter from The Independent, the British newspaper, spoke with a woman whose executive husband was taken to the Forum by a colleague. \u201cSome women might like it if their husband suddenly started saying he loved them all the time, but I found it scary,\u201d the woman said. \u201cHe was weirdly euphoric and animated. Then he became very depressed.\u201d She added that he had panic attacks for a long time after.<\/p>\n
In another case, according to Time magazine, a Landmarker\u2019s fianc\u00e9e said that her partner had become robot-like, leading her to start an anti-Landmark hot line.<\/p>\n
I encountered no weirdly euphoric Landmartians in my group, though I did talk to several people who were dismayed at the pejorative nature of some of the Forum\u2019s terminology, like \u201cinauthentic.\u201d Also, one participant, a licensed clinical social worker, told me he thought the group was too large. \u201cAll these breakthroughs and all the crying \u2014 it\u2019s easy for the other people here to think, \u2018What\u2019s wrong with me?\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
Indeed, the contrast between my classmates\u2019 seismic life-shakings and my own inability to get my mother on the phone deepened. But I took a strange kind of solace in the fact that some people\u2019s phone calls went slightly awry. Kelita, a Chicagoan who flew in for the Forum after her boss raved about it, said that when she called her mother and said she wanted to \u201cshare some of the discoveries\u201d she\u2019d made at the Forum, her mother, using her childhood nickname, blurted, \u201cPeaches, it\u2019s not all about you!\u201d I sympathized, but silently vowed to inscribe her mother\u2019s statement on my gravestone.<\/p>\n
Indeed, if a theme emerges from the stories you hear in the Forum, it\u2019s that nobody has a casual relationship with his or her mother. When, a few years back, a 106-year-old showed up for the Forum and was asked what she was \u201cworking on\u201d at this point in her life, she replied, \u201cI want to be a better mother.\u201d She brought her 82-year-old son to the Tuesday night graduation session that concludes all Forum weekends; when he was asked why he had come, he said, \u201cMy mother made me.\u201d<\/p>\n
In my Forum, class members engaged in even more mother-talk when Roger introduced a beguiling if facile concept called \u201cstrong suits.\u201d He asked us to think back to early childhood, to any vivid incidents that caused us to think, \u201cI\u2019m on my own,\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t belong\u201d or \u201cSomething\u2019s wrong here.\u201d The way we dealt with these incidents is a defense mechanism, or problem-solving technique, that we use throughout our lives, but which will not bring happiness. Since then, I have twice introduced friends at gatherings to the concept of strong suits; it is a limited vehicle for psychoanalysis, but a fabulous party game.<\/p>\n
By weekend\u2019s end, many of us seemed to have struck an uneasy peace with our individual conflicts. Loretta had come to the mic to recount a heart-to-heart with the father of her children, to whom she promised fidelity; tall and commanding Rob \u2014 Dennis Haysbert in a navy suit \u2014 had scheduled a dinner with his daughters, had a long conversation with his boss about time management, and upped his involvement in Easter Seals. I had told my boyfriend, Greg \u2014 for the fifth time in seven years \u2014 that I love him, and had said \u201cI hugely admire you\u201d to a poet friend beset by his obscurity.<\/p>\n
But I had not called my mother. I resented the pressure Roger had created around the act. And part of it was manners \u2014 if my mother asked where I was calling from, I didn\u2019t want her to feel as if I was \u201cworkshopping\u201d our relationship.<\/p>\n
I punted. Before our Tuesday graduation, I sent my mom an e-mail \u2014 our mutually preferred form of communication \u2014 and invited her on a trip to Charleston in October. She was thrilled. When two people at the Tuesday session \u2014 to which I brought Greg \u2014 asked if I\u2019d called my mother, I sprayed them both with, \u201cI\u2019m taking her to Charleston!\u201d \u2014 non-confrontationalism as expectorant.<\/p>\n
Three days after the Forum, I finally reached my mother by phone. I stammeringly told her that I love her (the second time I\u2019d said this to her as an adult). This excited her. I told her about the Forum; when she heard that we\u2019d spent a lot of time asking one another \u201cWhat\u2019s possible now?,\u201d she enthused that she was going to start asking this at the dinner table at her retirement home; I refrained from pointing out that asking the elderly \u201cWhat\u2019s possible now?\u201d might yield a frank discussion of motor skills.<\/p>\n
Two months after the Forum, I\u2019d rate my success at 84 percent. I\u2019m more prone to telling loved ones and colleagues, in person and without glibness, that I love or admire them. But I still operate from a base position that people are a lot of effort. I know in my heart that hell is other people. But now I\u2019m open to the possibility that heaven is, too.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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