"Landmark ruined a good friend"

January 2001
By a Forum participant's friend

A good friend of mine for many years attended the Landmark sessions. He is one of a large group of "twenty somethings," all good friends and quite closely knit. Our friend HAD a great job, and was a wonderful person to be with.

We noticed a change in him immediately after he started attending these seminars, and it wasn't long before he was very aggressively recruiting us all to attend. His entire attitude had changed. His rational thinking and decision making was totally warped. He started losing us as friends very quickly.

He had apparently been aggressively recruiting at his workplace so intensely that he was spoken to by his boss about it. I remember receiving a call from him asking me to come. He called me from the "institute," and all I could hear in the background were other people on the phone doing the same thing--telemarketing to their friends. I told him I wasn't interested in going dozens of times. He gave me speeches about how great it was, yet he could never exactly tell me why, or what it was really all about.

My friend's bizarre behavior peaked and he lost his job, along with most of his friends. Accounts of his strange behavior are too numerous to mention. He fell into great debt, but because of this new "attitude," which he attained from Landmark, he claimed to be more successful that ever.

My friend's delusions of success could be seen through a series of phantom projects he claimed to be involved in. He claimed he was building a coal mine in China, a hotel in Grand Cayman and networking for the 100 biggest banks in the world--all this with a college diploma in photography. He even made fake proposals seeking investors. His efforts actually resembled bad high school projects. But he claimed to be meeting with important Chinese and Cayman government officials for discussions. Finally, at this point he really seemed to fall off the deep end and truly lost almost all of his friends.

But I did give him one more chance.

Nevertheless, my good friend is now bankrupt, living with his parents, has virtually no friends and no future--other than the pipe dreams he has created in his own mind.