EST and Lifespring and Sensitivity Training are cults. The seminars, being copied from them, are cult indoctrination.
When I was getting a degree in psychology from Georgia Tech, I took a class (intro. to psych. testing) from a professor emeritus who was the former head of the psychology department at Georgia Tech.
He had also done a great deal of work for the military and industry.
He was an eminent scholar and a brilliant man who never made emphatic statements that he couldn't back up, who virtually always qualified any statement he made with any even minimally necessary scientific caveat.
His class was taught simultaneously as a graduate and undergraduate level class. The only difference was the graduate students had to do one more report than we undergrads.
He stated, unequivocally, as an aside in class that the "Sensitivity Training" of the 1970's had done a great deal of psychological harm to a great many people. When we asked how, he said they had stirred up a lot of emotions and feelings and memories that they then had no clue how to resolve, and that that was very damaging.
To the extent that the WWASPS seminars are "Sensitivity Training" all over again, and it is crystal clear that they are, I trust this eminent expert's highly educated opinion that they are psychologically harmful and *for NOBODY*.
To the extent that people who have been through them advocate them to others even after having been told that all the experts in treating psychological casualties and in how the human mind works say that these practices are *harmful*, I infer that those people have been inducted into a cult and are still in that cult mindset.
I infer this because no decent person would recommend that other people participate in something that could do them serious, long-term if not permanent harm.
While I have sympathy for people who have been captured by a cult and had their minds imprisoned within its destructive framework, I cannot allow them to attempt to recruit others into the cult without my speaking up and denouncing that cult for the extremely harmful, deceptive, unethical, and abusive thing that it is.
This includes anyone who has ever been through the WWASPS seminars and still recommends them to others as a positive thing.
WWASP cult members/victims are, in my highly educated and well-informed opinion, ultimately as inherently dangerous as the TM'ers, the Moonies, the Scientologists, the Elizabeth Clair Prophet sycophants, the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Branch Davidians, the former Heaven's Gate cult, the Hare Krishnas, or the former People's Temple cult.
I would *strongly* encourage anyone even remotely considering enrolling their child in a WWASPS facility to purchase and read this book:
http://www.apologeticsindex.org/books/r ... gbonds.htm(_Releasing the Bonds: Empowering People to Think for Themselves_ by Steve Hassan)
If you can dredge up the money for WWASPS tuition, then for the sake of your whole family's mental health, in case you're wrong, you can dredge up $25 and a few hours to read a book.
If you still choose to use WWASPS (or you're not the custodial parent and the other parent so chooses), make a safety pact before your child goes:
1) Because seminars are required to go home, participation is coerced even if they say it's not. Because of deliberate peer pressure by the "trainers" that your child will be very vulnerable to, any secrecy oaths are coerced and therefore not binding.
2) Just like you always told your child to tell you if an adult touched their private parts, even if the adult made them promise not to and they had to promise to get away safely, if your child makes any secrecy promise, anything the facility wants them to keep a secret is someone touching the private parts of their mind and is the kind of secret you *tell*---in this case, that they tell you, as their parent, that they've been told to keep a secret from them and everything they've been told to keep secret.
But the most important thing is not to go.
Intelligence is not protection from cult indoctrination. Often intelligent people are *very susceptible* to being indoctrinated into cults, and may stay in the cult all their lives until they die of old age.
If WWASPS-required seminars are based on EST, Sensitivity Training, and/or Lifespring, as they *strongly* appear to be from the link--earlier in the thread--to the husband and wife account of their seminar experience, then WWASPS is a very dangerous cult.
Do not take the risk that you or your child will be sucked into it and never escape.
Timoclea
