What it is with seminar sales tactics, seminar inductions into multi-level-marketing schemes, seminars about movements like fringe Christian movements, the Moonies, and pretty much any high-control group with a charismatic leader or leaders that sucks you in to do things that are not always *genuinely* in your best interests as observed by a hypothetical objective, reasonable person is this:
They need to get past your abstract reasoning faculties and your bullshit detector, and to do that they have to induce a highly suggestible, highly receptive state in you.
One of the ways different organizations do that is with certain kinds of mood music, colors, letting you get kindof hungry and thirsty and then providing sugary drinks and snacks---the sugar rush makes you more suggestible. Talking while looking you intently in the eye (or it looks like they are---frequently they're talking to the bridge of your nose to keep you from having the same effect on them). Using disapproval to induce a breakdown, and encoraging a chain reaction in everyone in the room by "love bombing" the first and subsequent guys who break down---what you have to do is have a large enough group that *somebody* is already hanging on by their fingernails, eh?
By having a high degree of physical control over seminar participants---ie, participants commit in advance to stay for the whole thing, or a set period of time, they can bring a lot more factors in to set the conditions for optimum suggestibility.
Then once they have your rational faculties and your bullshit detector disengaged, they can put in place pretty much whatever ideology they want.
Oh, and the people leading the seminar, or presented as "success stories" are snappily dressed, bright, confident, competent---they're walking commercials with all their human faults and insecurities and problems air-brushed over for the seminar----and they'll tell you all about how horrible their "before" picture was.
It's the same song and dance, but a *lot* of cult-type ideologies use it, and even otherwise very sensible and practical people are vulnerable to it. *Anybody* can fall prey to it.
So the trick to avoiding it happening to you is never attend anything like that, and if you ever find yourself in attendance at something like that, particularly where someone tries to get you to agree, in advance, to stay for a certain period of time no matter what----Leave Immediately.
(The exception would be licensed professionals running an adult rehab program with a squeaky-clean reputation if you really, really needed rehab. The tactics can be used for good as well as for evil---but never trust *anyone* in these where part of the object is you shelling out large sums of money---as is the case with "fix your teen" programs. They want your child's college fund and the equity in your house and anything else you can scrape together.)
Going to *anybody's* stay-for-three-days seminar is like going up to Kobe Bryant's hotel room.
You're likely to get analagous results.
Timoclea
