"Thank goodness, my family did not wait"

"May God place his angels around the innocent who are sucked into this farce"

March 2002
By a Landmark Forum participant

This is the third day since I walked out of the Landmark Forum.

At about 5:30 PM on the third day of the Forum, my daughter arrived and was literally scared to death. I left the session, and accompanied her to the hotel restaurant to talk. She was shaking and visibly frightened. She informed me that she had been on the Internet checking out the Landmark Forum, and had come to the conclusion that it was really a bad mind-control program that wanted nothing more than my money. My husband and pastor also agreed.

Immediately, I began to defend the Forum as being up front. How quickly I was becoming one of "them" without even realizing it. Still, my daughter and family were more important than any program and I had no regrets in walking back into the Forum, retrieving my purse and leaving.

As I have now stepped away from the Forum for some 60 hours, I have realized several things.

First, the Forum is nothing but a sales pitch for more training.

Second, mind control is used to manipulate attendees into attributing their "breakthroughs" and "transformations" to Landmark. And the mind control games they play strip people to the bone about past experiences, then they build them up with possibilities.

Third, doubts began to nag at me before I attended the Forum and throughout the Forum. My first doubt came when I read on their own corporate website that journalists who attended didn't like their nagging sales pitch to attend more training. Another doubt surfaced when during the first 14 hour day, at least 8 hours was devoted to why we should do more and more training. A defining doubt surfaced when on the second day, 30 minutes before the session started, the Forum leader came up to me and after some pleasantries said, "It's a shame we have to offer the Forum first, because the advanced course is..."

Thank goodness, my family did not wait. They came and I left.

The next day my pastor came by to make sure I was OK. And, I really was, but yet, someone had tried to take away my dignity in that place. Fortunately I am a Christian, and have a very strong personal relationship with Jesus Christ. During the entire event, I continually prayed that the Lord would reveal to me what He wanted me to learn. He is and will be my only "transformation."

As I recall their philosophical talk now, I realize they were only playing with words. Christ taught me through this experience that all people have problems of various degrees, but that we should never offer to help someone and ask them to pay us for doing it. Also, I thank God that I honestly had no critical problems in my life at that time, and that I had allowed the Lord to take my past bad experiences and extinguish and then reduce them to only memories.

Well, I've said some of what's on my heart. Still, I pray for those who completed the Forum and those invited to the sessions for their sales pitch.

Many Forum attendees during my weekend were reduced to tears and felt that hope was being stripped from their lives. My only regret is I didn't approach the microphone and publicly share my personal testimony of transformation though Jesus Christ. Christ doesn't want my money, only me, and He is giving me more blessings and happiness than I could ever put into words.

May God place his angels around the innocent who are sucked into this farce.