History of Large Group Awareness Trainings (LGAT)

February 9, 2020
Philadelphia, PA 19147

Overview

• ·       Large Group Awareness Trainings (LGAT)
• ·       Ground Rules
• ·       Erhard Seminars Training (est)
• ·       Lifespring (John Hanley)
• ·       Lawsuits
• ·       Crowded Field of LGAT’s

Large Group Awareness Trainings (LGAT)

LGAT was a name coined for personal development programs in which many people at one time receive intense, emotionally focused instruction over a period of hours or days to help them begin to discover the full potential for their lives.

Described by Michael Langone (1998) as:

• ·       part psychotherapy,
• ·       part spirituality, and
• ·       part business.

“Large-group awareness training refers to programs that claim to increase self-awareness and facilitate constructive personal change.” – Dennis Coon (2004)

Coon says LGAT’s combine:

• ·       psychological exercises,
• ·       confrontation,
• ·       new view-points, and
• ·       group dynamics, to promote personal change.

LGAT’s sometimes combine:

• ·       techniques of hypnosis,
• ·       guided imagery
• ·       suggestion,
• ·       modeling,
• ·       leveling,
• to conjure a new reality for the participants.

Notable LGAT programs, which originated from the human potential movement of the 1950s and 1960s, include:

• ·       Actualizations (Stewart Emery),
• ·       Lifespring (John Hanley),
• ·       Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP).

Ground Rules

In their 1992 book Perspectives on the New Age James R. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton argued that est used "authoritarian trainers who enforce numerous rules," require applause after participants "share" in front of the group and de-emphasize reason in favor of "feeling and action."

Participants agreed to follow the ground rules which included:

• ·       not wearing watches,
• ·       not talking until called upon, in which case they waited for a microphone to be brought to them, 
• ·       not talking to one's neighbors.
• ·       Not eating or leaving their seats to go to the bathroom except during breaks -- separated by many hours.
• ·       Participants who were on medication were exempt from these rules, and had to sit in the back row, “The Victim Row”.
• ·       These classroom agreements provided a rigorous setting whereby people's ordinary ways to escape confronting their experience of themselves were eliminated.

Erhard Seminars Training (est)

• ·       1971 - Erhard  held his first Large group Awareness Training session, for nearly 1,000 paying attendees, in San Francisco.
• ·       1974 - the est training was delivered at the U.S. Penitentiary at Lompoc, California, with the approval of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
• ·       1975 - Est claims to have trained 65,000 people.
• ·       The est training presented several concepts to these new attendees, most notably the concept of spiritual transformation and taking responsibility for one's life. The actual teaching, called "the technology of transformation," emphasizes the value of integrity.
• ·       1975 - Est claims to have trained 65,000 people.
• ·       The1977 - Werner Erhard had a vision: He was going to end world hunger by 1997. To that end, he started the Hunger Project, a nonprofit that quickly picked up celebrity sponsors including John Denver, Valerie Harper, and Jimmy Carter's son Chip.
• ·       est training presented several concepts to these new attendees, most notably the concept of spiritual transformation and taking responsibility for one's life. The actual teaching, called "the technology of transformation," emphasizes the value of integrity.

The Hunger Project

• ·       1977 - Werner Erhard had a vision: He was going to end world hunger by 1997. To that end, he started the Hunger Project, a nonprofit that quickly picked up celebrity sponsors including John Denver, Valerie Harper, and Jimmy Carter's son Chip.
• ·       Mother Jones reported in December 1978, the group had no intention of actually feeding the starving, just raising "awareness" of hunger - and est.

The Forum

·       1991 - Erhard sold his "technology" to brother Harry Rosenberg and moved out of the country, facing bad press for both his movement and a soured personal life.

·       1983 – In the USA, a participant named Jack Slee collapsed during a portion of the seminar known as "the danger process" and died at the hospital to which he had been transported.

·       A court subsequently found that the est training was not the cause of death.

·       A jury later ruled that Erhard and his company had been negligent but did not give Slee's estate a monetary award.

·       1985 - Est changes its name to the Forum.

·       1991 - "est" (Erhard Seminar Training) movement had hit some 700,000 converts.

·       1991 - Erhard goes into exile. Landmark buys est's "technology" and reportedly promises to pay Erhard a licensing fee for 18 years.

·       1993 - While in Moscow, Erhard claims Scientologists are out to get him.

·       2007 - Erhard unveils new management philosophy coauthored with a Harvard Business School professor and the CEO of Landmark's consulting arm. Message: "integrity is the pathway to trust."

·       2009 - Landmark claims to have trained more than 1 million people.

Lifespring

·       Lifespring, founded in 1974, was a private, for-profit, New Age-human potential organization. Lifespring stated they trained more than 400,000 people through its ten centers across the country.
·       John Hanley Sr., Robert White, Randy Revell and Charlene Afremow founded Lifespring in 1974.
·       Prior to Lifespring, Hanley worked for the company Holiday Magic.

Lifespring Lawsuits

·       More than 30 lawsuits were filed against Lifespring for charges ranging from involuntary servitude to wrongful death.

·       The suits often claimed that the trainings place participants under extreme psychological stress in order to elicit change.

·       The group had to pay out large amounts of money to participants who required psychiatric hospitalization and to family members of suicides.

·       The first jury decision came in 1984 in which Deborah Bingham testified she'd been in a psych ward for a month after attending two Lifespring courses and was awarded $800,000.

·       Gabriella Martinez testified that she heard her trainer's voice in her head the night she swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills; Lifespring settled out of court.

·       In 1982, the family of David Priddle accepted an undisclosed sum when they sued Lifespring after he jumped off a building.

·       Artie Barnett's family also reached an out of court settlement, when Barnett, who couldn't swim, drowned during a Lifespring training.

·       In 1993, Pittsburgh lawyer Peter N. Georgiades won a $750,000 settlement for a Lifespring trainee who was institutionalized for two years following Leadership training.

Crowded Field of LGAT’s

The profitable field Landmark helped pioneer is now crowded with life coaches, time-management gurus, and productivity bloggers.

Landmark is just one of dozens of quasi-philosophies that promise to empty your inbox and fulfill your personal goals.

·       Alpha Seminars

·       ALTRU Center

·       Arica School (Oscar Ichazo)

·       Atlas Project

·       Avatar Course (Harry Palmer)

·       Call of the Shofar (founded by Simcha Frischling)

·       Circling Europe (John Thompson & Sean Wilkinson)

·       Context Training (Randy Revell)

·       Contextuelles Coaching (Maria & Stephan Craemer)

·       Choices Personal Growth Seminar

·       Dimensional Mind Approach

·       Direct Centering (Gavin Barnes, aka Bayard Hora Associates, aka The Course, aka Naexus)

·       Exegesis

·       HeartCore Leadership

·       Insight Seminars (John-Roger)

·       Leadership Dynamics

·       Life Dynamics

·       Lifestream Seminars (James Roswell Quinn)

·       Life Training / Kairos Foundation / More to Life (W. R. Whitten and K. B. Brown)

·       Mankind Project

·       Mastery in Transformational Training

·       Men’s Leadership Alliance

·       Mind Dynamics (Alexander Everett)

·       NXIVM (Keith Raniere)

·       ONE (Oury Engolz)

·       PSI Seminars

·       Relationships

·       Silva Method (formerly Silva Mind Control) (José Silva)

·       Sterling Institute of Relationship (Arthur Kasarjian)

·       Zarvos Leadership and Coaching

Resources

• Intervention101.com: to help families and friends understand and effectively respond to the complexity of a loved one's cult involvement.
• CultMediation.com: offers resources designed to help thoughtful families and friends understand and respond to the complexity of a loved one’s cult involvement.
• CultRecovery101.com: assists group members and their families make the sometimes-difficult transition from coercion to renewed individual choice.
• Cults101.com: resources about cults, cultic groups, abusive relationships, movements, religions, political organizations and related topics.

•      CultNEWS101.com: news, links, resources (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Email)

Joseph Kelly

1300 S. 13th Street

Philadelphia, PA 19147

(267) 679-5493; e-mail: joekelly411@gmail.com

Patrick Ryan

1300 S. 13th Street

Philadelphia, PA 19147

(215) 467-4939; e-mail: pryan19147@gmail.com