A Gut Feeling: Is there any such thing?

I've lived my whole life trusting my gut feelings. My intuition about things and people and situations. I've always had the impression that it served me well, like an early warning system, alerting me to something wrong. Guiding me to steer clear. It's a tried and true survival system. Ignore it at your peril.

So now I go to this Landmark seminar, and they're urging us to invite our friends and family to a session, so they too can share in this empowering education, and an alarm goes off in my gut the size of the state of Kentucky. I immediately feel manipulated and used. Pushed and put upon and angry. I mean here is this company that doesn't advertise. They get all of their business through word of mouth. They sell training in empowerment, self-expression and freedom in life. And I even like the product. But there is this constant pressure to share it and bring people to an introduction, so they can become customers too.

Over the last several years, I've taken several of their courses and I find value in the strategies they teach. And though I've never liked the pressure to invite people to the programs, I haven't had a reaction of this magnitude. But last week, something primal, visceral and compelling rose up in me, and the internal resistance to being pushed to invite people initiated a fight or flight reaction. My chest tightened and I wanted to scream. It turned into an overpowering aversion to being there at all.

The notion that there is something going on that is not good for me arose in my thoughts, and I found myself examining the program for additional flaws. I did online searches and watched a French TV program that claimed to expose the program as a cult that uses brainwashing to seduce its clientele. I watched and I listened and I wondered where all that is coming from. In my experience, which is substantial, Landmark is definitely not a cult, and there is no brainwashing going on. On the contrary, the program taxes you to think past your assumptions, manage your mental filters and take responsibility for being the cause of your own life.

The technique involves suspending your disbelief long enough to consider other possibilities for how you view life and make choices. Alternatives to your accepted reality present themselves and opportunities open up. There is room for creativity where before there was resignation. An example is my relationship to being a polio survivor. Most people would agree that I had no choice about having polio. It just happened. I can resist or accept. Doesn't that seem obvious? But in Landmark, there is another possibility. I can actually choose polio. This has nothing at all to do with what's true. But choice is a more powerful place to stand, or come from with respect to my circumstances, i.e. having polio. In the moment that I suspend my disbelief and choose polio, I gain a sense of power and freedom, out of which I then see possibilities for thinking and action beyond what was previously available to me. I am now, as they say in Landmark "at choice." True or not, it feels and works better.

Is this living in a lie? Is it playing a game? Maybe so, but how much of what we think we know is really created anyway? If we are story tellers, why not tell a story that empowers you? Why not tell the story that makes you feel good about yourself and your life? That's what Landmark is selling.

Now suddenly I have this reaction, this powerful emotional opposition. I can see myself at age five, being held down on a hospital bed while an angry and frustrated nurse shoves a suppository into my butt. I'm screaming, and she hurts me. To this day, I wonder if she was out of control too. Beside herself with this hysterical five year old who wouldn't cooperate with being in an isolation room for three weeks with a high fever and limbs that were no longer working, and no access to her Mommy. They were forcing me, making me do things against my will, and I was fighting back.

The next memory that comes up is being molested by my brother, being made to do things I didn't want to do, allow him to touch me in ways I didn't want to be touched, holding in my outrage, tolerating the intolerable. For years. The next memory that comes up for me is of being raped. I think I was 19. He held me down. He made a point of hurting me and told me if I fought back he would hurt me more. I controlled myself, made myself allow it, disgust roiling inside me like poison.

All these memories came percolating up inside my mind and body. Is it any wonder I don't want to go back to the seminar? Nobody in their right mind wants to feel those feelings, relive those memories. But wait! All they did was tell us to bring guests. And I've already said I like the training. So what's the deal?

I'm open to suggestions.