Billed as a “personal development company”, Landmark Forum claims to have transformed the lives of millions worldwide. Is it a cult with corporate characteristics or introducing a new relational paradigm?

Text by Emily Steer

I’m standing in front of 150 strangers talking about my abortion. Well, they were strangers until two days ago, as was the man who sits grinning on stage, willing me to spew my guilt, rage, and pain into the microphone. I talk about shame and losing all sexual feelings in my body. I read a letter addressed to my boyfriend, taking responsibility for everything I have done and felt in the relationship since. I feel sick in my stomach and sweaty in my bunched-up fists as I speak. My voice shakes and I am conscious of my skin burning red. But I know at the end of this lies salvation.

I remember little of what the man at the front told me. One thing that sticks out is that he got me to repeat the line, “I had bacon for breakfast today and I had an abortion”, until the words lost their emotional meaning. It took about 15 minutes, and I was in floods of tears by the end, but something did seem to have shifted. What I remember most were the powerful embraces as I returned to my seat. People squeezed my shoulders and told me they were proud of me. Women let me know they had the same experiences and that my sharing had opened something up for them. The teenage boy next to me told me I was brave as I sat down. I floated home that evening, the headlights and street lights along Camden Road seeming to glow brighter than ever. Then I felt alive and receptive for the first time in two years as I climbed into bed with my boyfriend, as though a heavy and depressing coat had slid effortlessly off my back.

My euphoric epiphany happened almost a decade ago in the drab Euston office block of Landmark Forum, an organisation that markets professional and personal development courses. Since my abortion, I had tried cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to deal with the unexpected shame and death of my sex drive that arose in its wake, as well as an array of drugs to numb myself. I had gone to Landmark frustrated, desperate, and feeling totally alone. This was the first time I felt like I had my body back, and all it took was three days.

The Landmark Forum is part of Landmark Worldwide, which sprang from Werner Erhard’s Seminar Training (est) and was renamed the Forum in 1991 in San Francisco. It has strong connections with the Human Potential Movement, which started in the 1960s and promises a superhuman capacity to deal with everything from emotional struggles to physical health issues, through intensive communal work. Landmark has been compared with Scientology, which also uses public sharing and high-pressure marketing techniques, and other groups that draw cultish devotion from their followers, such as NXIVM and Lifespring. These groups offer an enticing sense of speed and solution that is lacking in many psychotherapy practices – the promise to get “fixed” in an instant. Within a time-starved, impatient contemporary world, these groups have an undeniable appeal.

Landmark’s programmes have vivacious leaders who push participants to share publicly, with a strong focus on inter-participant group work, in which smaller breakouts of five or six focus on “holding each other to account” for their actions. Transformation and limitless possibility are central tenets. In 2011, Time called Erhard a powerful driver of “transformative” personal development: “The American obsession with transformation isn’t new. It’s about as old as the nation, but it was Werner Erhard … who created the first modern transformation when he founded est. seminars in 1971. It’s a tribute to the power of his central concept that more than 20 years after he sold his ideas to a group of employees, Landmark is still the natural first stop in any transformation tour.”

Landmark still retains a vibe that could be described as distinctly American, with bold expressions of emotion and shameless encouragements to promote to friends and family at which my mostly British group squirmed. But today it has a powerful stamp across the globe; when the group celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2021, it claimed that over 3 million people had participated worldwide. Landmark Forum is the first step in many courses, which promise miraculous new ways of relating to yourself and the world around you. As a methodology, it’s comparable to many things: the strict framework of Alcoholics Anonymous, the philosophical teachings of Buddhism, and the richly confessional nature of group therapy. At its root, it encourages participants – with intense psychological pressure – to take responsibility for their reality.

I don’t remember discovering much I hadn’t before in terms of insights and theories, but the ferocity with which they were delivered encouraged an evangelical feeling of enlightenment. It boils down to one simple realisation: everything is meaningless, so you can choose to see, believe and react to what’s in front of you in any way imaginable. Why not pick the route that works best for everyone? Within its mishmash of therapy, religion and philosophy, I would compare the internal process that I was taken through most closely with CBT, if a CBT session were to go on for three full days in a row. In both types of work, I found myself ignoring my gut feelings and psychologically “choosing” how to think and behave instead. But the heady effect of the weekend is more akin to drug-taking than any kind of therapy, as though I was soaring on a majestic wave that I knew, in my gut, was going to drop from underneath me once I spent too much time in the real world.

Despite feeling like a mad daydream, Landmark borrows a lot from the corporate world. First entering the Forum, the room appears shamefully drab, with bland office ceiling tiles, lines of identical chairs, and numerous boards around

the room with bullet points and definitions of Landmark’s distinct terminology. The last is also not too far removed from the feel of large corporations, in which employees are encouraged to see their role and work through a set of strangely defined terms that seem to bear no relevance to the use of these words in the outside world. Similarly to a corporation, there is also pressure for everyone to follow the same script and outlook, with “loyalty” rewarded and those seen as disruptive being publicly called out. Hours are spent with the seminar leader running through branded PowerPoint presentations, while thick information sheets are handed out and participants encouraged to write their intentions.

The majority of people at Landmark work for free, with seminar leaders themselves having come through the Forum, before volunteering in more administrative or organisational roles. Every leader has a story of how their life has been turned around by Landmark, often impressing that they are working for free because of everything it opened up. Some now have highly successful businesses; others talk of overcoming illnesses or reconnecting with estranged family. Very quickly, participants are encouraged to bring people in their own lives to graduations or open evenings and are chided for being “out of integrity” if they don’t want to. I mostly lied about who I was going to ask and rarely went through with it.

A huge part of the Landmark experience involves participants writing letters and making calls to people outside of the programme, “taking responsibility” for ways in which they have wronged them. For the person making the call, this can feel incredibly freeing, taking responsibility while also believing it will absolve everything that lurks in the relationship. On Reddit, scores of worried friends and relatives who have been on the receiving end of these calls share their own experiences, wondering why their loved one is suddenly talking about “rackets” (Landmark’s term for the resentments we hold against other people) of which they were never even aware. Sometimes these calls do lead to genuine connections and breakthroughs in stagnant relationships – as they did for my boyfriend and me.

At the more sinister end, I’ve seen survivors of childhood sexual violence encouraged to call their abuser and take responsibility for their demonisation of them, repeatedly encouraged to see their own role in feeling like a victim. Often the participants who come to share at the front recount giddy experiences of finally releasing a heavy grudge. Others share with more of a tinge of resentment that the call wasn’t received with the same ecstatic joy in which it was intended. This is similar to the impact I have heard recounted for AA’s “making amends”, in which friends and relatives who have been routinely taken advantage of can feel pressured to immediately forgive and forget (though people I know who have been through AA themselves have told me the responsibility is firmly planted at their own feet with no expectation of quick absolution).

The bombastic intensity of the Landmark Forum is said to have inspired both the Wachowskis while creating The Matrix and Chuck Palahniuk’s writing, including Fight Club. I recognise a lot in both: the mind-bending potential of The Matrix, in which an individual learns to shape and control the world around them, and the heady escape and connection provided by Fight Club’s self-help and community groups. The euphoric rush of Landmark and its intense approach to recruitment has many asking if it is a cult. At the end of my Forum weekend, a group of freshly “graduated” participants, with wide gleaming eyes, encircled another member’s 18-year-old daughter and told her how much she needed to sign up and change her life. I still remember the look of genuine terror on her face.

While inside, the cult question comes up often. Seminar leaders joke about brainwashing, laughing that if friends and family express concern we can answer, “Perhaps I needed my brain washed.” Participants bounce this idea around among one another, especially in the early stages of the training. In moments when I found myself sold into Landmark, I would encourage others out of their fears. When I found myself with nagging doubts about being asked to invite friends and family to yet another open evening, I tried to shut down that part of myself, enjoying the benefits too much to want to question the underlying cult vibes. This is where this side of such groups can become so dangerous; the “open-minded” approach can lead to constant questioning of legitimate gut feelings.

Ironically, while Landmark promises the change of boundless potential and connection, it can cause walls to go up. The highly specific use of language and terminology creates a world in which those within Landmark feel intimately connected to one another, while those outside, in the participant’s authentic community, begin to feel like a different species, incapable of seeing the world in this shiny new way. While you’re inside, it feels as though the answer to this is to keep bringing more people in, rather than allow them to keep seeing things in their own way and relating to them there. In fairness, it’s a criticism that has been levelled at psychotherapy, too, in which close friends and family members sometimes feel as though they have lost someone to a new set of definitions and boundaries. Something intended as self-improvement can become a tool for self-satisfaction, leading to a frustrated belief that everyone around you should get fixed, too.

There are numerous examples of this kind of structure going horrifically astray, with some groups turning sharply into toxic cults. The argument against Landmark being a cult is usually that it has no one single leader – though one could argue that Erhard’s multi-thousand-pound talk fee places him well into cult-figure status – and that it does not function as a religion. NXIVM, led by Keith Raniere who has now been convicted of racketeering and sex trafficking, followed a similar format to Landmark’s seminar structure, while also taking inspiration from Ayn Rand’s objectivism and aspects of Scientology.

A 2017 New York Times investigation into NXIVM uncovered years of emotional and sexual abuse at the heart of this marketing-programme-cum-cult, which counted Hollywood actresses and high-ranking CEOs as its members. Subsequently, two seasons of the documentary The Vow followed the fall of the cult and the trials of its senior leadership. NXIVM recruited members through its Executive Success Programs, which were promoted as a series of personal and professional development courses, promising to break down “limiting beliefs” and anxieties that stopped people from living to their full potential. Those who had been through these programmes described a rich sense of euphoria and connection, with many signing up to work at higher levels. Forbes was the first mainstream platform to question the ethics of NXIVM in a 2003 cover story, with forensic psychiatrist John Hochman describing their unusually rigid, corporate-sounding terminology and tactics as a form of mind control, “aimed at breaking down [Raniere’s] subjects psychologically”.

Once people have been broken down, they become far more susceptible to manipulation, with any concerns attacked as limiting beliefs. This aggressive brainwashing was used in a particularly evil manner once women, many of whom had spent years having their instinctive beliefs challenged within NXIVM’s training programmes, were coerced into sex slavery. Some had food withheld if they didn’t respond to texts sent by their “masters” within a minute; others had Raniere’s initials branded on their pelvises; many had to send naked photos of themselves as blackmail collateral. While at the time numerous women reported having powerful gut feelings telling them to leave, they had become so used to challenging and pushing these down that their abuse was seen as a further tool of self-empowerment.

The community was also used upon itself. Members were encouraged to forge strong emotional relationships with one another, and many began as fulfilling connections, which eventually became a tool for manipulation and control. Smallville actress Alison Mack, one of Raniere’s deputies, served two years in prison for her role in recruiting and sex trafficking women. She described her time with the group as “the biggest mistake and regret of my life. I am sorry to those of you that I brought into NXIVM. I am sorry I ever exposed you to the nefarious and emotionally abusive schemes of a twisted man”. Like many cults, NXIVM promised limitless potential, while largely preventing members from realising this in the outside world. One member testified in court that Raniere turned her family against her (they were also within NXIVM) and told them she had made an “ethical breach”. She was kept in solitary confinement and blocked from communicating with anyone beyond her captors. Her “misdeed” was confronting NXIVM’s leader after finding out that her two sisters were also in a sexual relationship with him. All three women had been pressured into having abortions.

Lifespring, another Human Potential Movement organisation, founded in 1974, similarly used intensive methods that were described in a 1986 report as “deceptive and indirect techniques of persuasion and control”. The group was led by John Hanley Sr., who had worked with Erhard at seminar company Mind Dynamics, alongside Robert White, Randy Revell, and Charlene Afremow. Like Landmark, Lifespring offered various levels through which members moved towards the final “leadership course”, which enabled them to put their learning into practice in their lives. In reality, however, they were ever more cut off from the world around them than before. Humiliation and fear were used as tactics to challenge members, with group leaders often screaming at individuals. Two lawsuits highlight the dangerous lengths that they would go to: one member who died of asthma exacerbation was told her symptoms were psychological, while a man who couldn’t swim was made to jump into a river, in which he drowned. The group relied heavily on recruitment by its own members, pressuring friends and family to join, being told the world was at stake if they didn’t. It also used coercive tactics to stop people from leaving, with ex-members reporting bombardments of aggressive phone calls pushing for re-enrolment. (It is worth mentioning that in my time doing Landmark seminars, I freely joined and left as I desired, and received no hostile or invasive calls after finally finishing.)