Life in the realms of the possible

Life in the realms of the possible
(c) Melina Magdalena, 2006

1. My Landmark Forum
I got two phone calls this week from friends who invited me to a Landmark Special Event. Although I didn’t attend the event, this contact was beneficial, because it got me thinking again about the phenomenon.

I did the Landmark Forum on the Valentine’s Day weekend in 2004, and my seminar series later that year. The friend who introduced me to Landmark went on to assist at other Forums, and to do the other courses, for which she had to travel back and forth from Adelaide to Melbourne for several months. She and her mother were both really excited about Landmark Education.

I was a touch and go candidate for the Landmark Forum. Considering my background of deep depression, and my longstanding refusal to be medicated for this condition, I weighed up the risks of registering and finding it all too much, against the possibility that I was well enough to participate. I was intrigued during the registration process to discover that the Landmark Forum was not a therapy, because no one had been able to quite explain to me exactly what it was. But I had seen the effects it had on people I knew – their enthusiasm, joy and earnestness – and I wanted some of that. My years of counseling had brought me to a point of being able to function and be more or less productive, but I still felt weighed down with sorrows that I couldn’t budge.

DAY ONE
I spent day one feeling bewildered and overwhelmed, and determinedly positive that whatever was going to happen to me would be all right, so long as I wasn’t blamed for what had happened to me. The idea that what had happened, had happened in the past and was no longer happening, was attractive to me. I knew it held a key to transformation. It has taken a couple of years for me to gain perspective on what this means in terms of my ongoing recovery and healing (see below).

DAY TWO
I spent most of day two in tears. I even got up and shared with the whole group, the letter which I had written for homework. This was cathartic. I hadn’t cried in front of my counselors. I hadn’t cried in front of my friends. And my crying in private had always had an unsatisfactory quality to it – I needed to gush forth my river of tears, but they always dried up almost before they had started, while I got busy with all the other things that needed to be done.

DAY THREE
On day three I let go of my fear of other people. Not completely, but so that my fear no longer drives my every action. Unreasonably, so I can raise uncomfortable matters with others and even breach taboos when necessary. The processing time between when something happens to me, and when I begin to react, has become considerably shorter. I’m now able to trace back more often, the triggers to my reactions, and confront those who wrong me. I’ve learned to advocate for my children, and I feel all right about playing some of the social and bureaucratic games that I was previously too proud to engage in. I am aware now, when I am choosing a role and playing those games, and am not being played by others.

It is essentially this that has transformed my outlook. In the Landmark Forum, I made a choice to own my trauma. It means that my trauma no longer owns me.

DAY FOUR
I started getting some memories back, that I had not had access to since childhood. This was remarkable as it brought me into the present.

DAY FIVE
I was spectacularly unsuccessful in inducing other people to embark on Landmark journeys of their own. I did invite several people to the final evening, and several people came – one signed up, but then pulled out, because she simply couldn’t find the money to pay for it. The others were polite, expressed their happiness for me, but declined the offer to do the Landmark Forum themselves. Even (and especially) my children have adopted a cynical attitude towards it, perhaps because I prioritized my participation in the seminar series and made them stay home alone one evening each week for ten weeks.

The only person I have directly influenced to do the Landmark Forum was only convinced months later after another friend of hers had done it.

2. The Money Stuff
While I’m very happy to talk about the Landmark Education Program and to share the benefits that I gained from my participation in it, I continue to question its elitism.

I thoroughly endorse Landmark Education’s claims that it offers a transformational experience, which could benefit every person on the planet and lead to world changes in attitude and behaviour, could solve all kinds of global problems and be the driving force to a better world. The problem is that Landmark Education is simply not made available to the marginalized sectors of western communities.

Take my most recently thoroughly happy friend, for example. She gets by on the Disability Pension, but she’s very happy to be spending every cent at the moment, to get her Landmark training completed. From week to week, she has almost nothing left to live on, because of the cost of travelling back and forth to Melbourne. She has also borrowed money in order to participate in Landmark.

Because of the intensity of her studies, she has little energy to look for work that might assist her to manage a little more comfortably. I respect her choice. I’m really very happy for her. I can see the direct benefits she has reaped, from taking part in Landmark Education. This intense level of participation won’t last forever. When she’s had enough, she will move on to other things, taking with her what she’s learned. She can do this precisely because she is not responsible for anyone else on the planet.

What I would like people to consider, is the disproportionate cost of my friend’s participation. It’s not a matter of limiting treats, meals out, movie dates or that annual holiday, and budgeting in order to prioritise the Landmark Education process. No – she’s jumped right into the bathwater and taken the baby with her.

Landmark offers no concessions whatsoever. When I did the Landmark Forum, I was rudely shocked to discover that nothing but water and a chair to sit on was offered to us for the hundreds of dollars we had paid to be there. The expectation that on top of the registration and travel costs, we would be in a position to buy restaurant meals each night was something I hadn’t realized, and certainly hadn’t budgeted for.

Landmark Education keeps its overheads low by doing things like telling participants they needn’t worry about accommodation when they have to travel interstate, because local participants will offer them a place to sleep when they get there.(This is probably true. The nature of the work encourages close and deep bonds to be forged between participants.)

The method of handling disgruntlement is to shove it all back on participants, who are coached into believing that we are choosing to blame Landmark Education instead of choosing to rise above our own circumstances.

I feel it is a great shame that the benefits of Landmark Education remain unattainable by people in marginalized sectors of our community, because they do not have enough money at their disposal to even contemplate participating in the programs on offer. These are people in the welfare social underclass, people with children who depend on them for food and shelter, the elderly, the sick and the poor.

One argument is that if one counts the number of hours spent participating in the Landmark Forum and divides the registration costs by the number of hours the cost per hour is relatively low – certainly comparable with the sliding scale of counselling services. It might be further argued that doing the intensive five days of Landmark Forum would reduce the number of subsequent hours of counselling required by newly energised, newly transformed Forum graduates. Even if this is the case, most people pay for their counselling session by session, and do not have the $500 required upfront.

Another argument is that the welfare mentality will necessarily reduce the impact of the Landmark Forum on participants. This is the idea that something offered free, or at a reduced cost, will not be appreciated or embraced to the same extent as something purchased for the full price. My proposal is that the proportionate cost of registration must be considered within the context of a participant’s disposable income. Something that is unaffordable simply isn’t a possibility.

3. Landmark Trauma
I checked out the web before and after doing the Landmark Forum. I’ve always been frightened that I’ll get brainwashed into a cult, and wanted to make sure that was not the outcome of Landmark Education.

One of the saddest accounts I found was by a woman who had been coached to take responsibility for the fact that she was sexually abused as a child, and later raped as an adult. This woman’s story touched me deeply. As a survivor of rape myself, it left me in a quandary wondering why I had responded so positively to the Landmark Forum.

Just Google landmark education and you'll find links to similar accounts.

I’ve tried writing about this several times in the last three years and got nowhere. During this time, I’ve used Landmark concepts and technologies off and on both consciously and unconsciously, and benefited greatly from this. My outlook has remained much more positive, on the whole, and I’ve coped with some heavy losses and disappointments during that time.

My life has changed dramatically since I embarked on my Landmark Education. I’ve found a partner, something I couldn’t even invent as a possibility for myself until nearly a year after I’d done the Forum. I’ve completed my Graduate Diploma in Education and can even contemplate a future of enjoying a teaching career, again something I never thought was possible for me. I compiled, edited and published a book. I’m writing regularly and creating artworks. I’m living as full a life as I can manage, at the moment, and am even able to look ahead and create my future. My family life is the happiest it’s ever been.

I am still extremely resistant to the concept of forgiveness, and am touchy to the extreme, about being labelled a victim. I have no desire to let go of these two aspects of the identity I’ve created for myself. As a participant in the Landmark Forum, I was wary of being asked to take responsibility for being raped and abused.

The idea of self-blame is the clincher here. Like every human being I have regrets and broken promises. There are things I wish I’d done, and other things I’d rather forget I did. Before I did the Landmark Forum, I blamed myself for everything except for being raped. My self-hatred was the underlying issue behind everything that happened to me, everything I did. It took some time, (much longer than five days), but I made a choice to let that go.

When the topic of leaving the past in the past was raised, under the guise of taking responsibility for our futures, in the interests of our freeing ourselves in order to be open to the possibilities it might present, my hackles rose and I fought hard against this. It sounded like I was being asked to accept that I had created and desired everything that had ever happened to me (and everything anyone had ever done to me). I think this was on Day Three. I didn’t talk to anyone about the way I was feeling.

There has never been any doubt in my mind about who is responsible for raping me. This is not so easy for every person who has been raped. Many people are raped in circumstances society holds up as though they really had asked to be abused. This is the effect of living in a society which habitually blames victims.

I was able to resolve the issue of taking responsibility for being raped, by objectifying the experience to some extent. I also separated the act of rape from its impact on me. The idea that it happened in the past and was no longer happening was the key. The fact that I continue to experience the impact of being raped is distinct from the experience of being raped. That is the ongoing trauma, with which I continue to deal every day.

In choosing to own my trauma, I let go of being that self-hating, self-blaming, anger-dependent, fear-addicted victim. Whereas previously I wallowed in the mire of being unable to control my emotional and life-stopping reactions to the constant reminders and triggers to being victimised, I now allow myself to feel what I feel, express what I experience, and to make conscious choices about how I live my life.

I was not a person who repressed or concealed the fact that I had experienced trauma. Perhaps too, the nature of my trauma was not as deeply entrenched as it is for some. I was ready to open myself to the possibility of owning my trauma.

This has been possible for me because I had already reached a healing plateau in my journey. I have to take a longer perspective and acknowledge the other factors that have been part of my life and healing process. The counselling I did was undoubtedly life saving, and the studies I’ve undertaken have also contributed to my developing confidence and points of view.

My experience of Landmark Education has been positive. I guess I’m one of the lucky ones. There are no quick, instant, universal fixes, but I wanted to add my story to those that recommend Landmark Education for people who can afford it.