In this rich and deeply personal experiential and opinion piece, CDA Trustee Priscilla Eyles tells us how a society geared towards the needs of non-Disabled, non-minority people has let them down, partly by failing to recognise, understand or adapt to their attention-deficit, hyperactivity and autism conditions, a situation that caused her to struggle with relationships, jobs and service providers (including therapists) and even propelled her into the clutches of a cult.

Chapter 3 – The cult experience

That course my mum introduced me to was the Landmark Forum, the start of an elaborate pyramid-type study-scheme run by Landmark Education (now Landmark Worldwide).

I would later realise Landmark Education was a cult whose goals were to keep ensnare people in their web of courses and ultimately use them to boost their profits.

They keep you in their series of Large Group Awareness Training (LGAT) courses, get you working long hours for them for free in between courses, lure you into their ultimate indoctrination course, called the Introduction Leader’s Programme (ILP), and ultimately, persuade you to become an unpaid Landmark promoter tasked with recruiting (or as they called it ‘registering’) new members to bring in profits.

The ILP, which I did twice because I failed to get the 15 Landmark Forum ‘registrations’ needed the first time round, involved hours of cold-calling and recruiting strangers and people in your network to come to their introductory events.

This cult used coercive control (aka psychological manipulation) techniques such as indoctrination sessions (in the first course – the Landmark Forum) which included guided regression exercises where people who may’ve previously been seen as together and as respected leaders in their communities, were left bawling like abandoned little children as cult disciples directed them to imagine ‘being fearful of everyone in the room’.

Course leaders would then ‘build people back up’ by coaxing them to understand how comically absurd this fear had been, causing tears of pain to turn to tears of laughter and leaving the victims totally indebted to Landmark for this engineered ‘high’.

Myself and many others who went through these courses became quickly enmeshed with our fellow group members, bonded through sharing a uniquely intense emotional experience that many people outside Landmark would struggle to understand.

One of the most trying elements of the course was the group confessions, with many sharing extremely personal and traumatic information about their lives with everyone, such as enduring alcoholic and abusive parents growing up.

Sessions also included being verbally abused by the ‘totalitarian leader’, with a whole section of the Forum course dedicated to aggressively berating us and telling us how much we were all ‘assholes’ and destroying our lives and the people in it with our ‘victim’ mentalities.

We learned to parrot ‘thought-stopping’phrases and loaded language that was designed to stop us questioning their often contradictory, dogmatic and simplistic material and their unethical and dangerously coercive practices.

People who may’ve previously been seen as together and as respected leaders in their communities, were left bawling like abandoned little children

For example, whenever anyone had a valid concern about any aspect of the program, Leaders would tell us to accept their ‘coaching’ and that any doubt- thoughts were just a ‘racket’ and so we needed to look inside ourselves for the ‘real issue’(what was really behind the question or feedback or ‘who are we being?’ as they framed it).

This meant Landmark never had to be accountable for any of their extremely harmful behaviour.

If people continued to speak out against what a leader was saying during a session, they would inevitably be publicly humiliated and berated by the leader for being ‘resistant to coaching’ and told things like their stubbornness in ‘being right’ was why they were ‘failing’ in life (“How is being ‘right’ working out in your life?”).

They also used any insecurities about personal failings people had confessed to to further undermine outspoken members. Ultimately, those who dared to challenge them would be held up as a bad example to the group to dissuade others from speaking out.

All these coercive techniques are designed to breed compliance and dependence on them through embedding the fear of standing out and being subjected to aggressive and shaming ‘coaching’.

I learned how even people with no previous history of mental issues had been triggered into psychosis and psychiatric breakdowns.

They also constantly played upon the fear of failure outside the cult, the fear of going back to being ‘mediocre’ and ‘playing small’ without the cult’s support and courses that had supposedly resulted in longstanding members’success.

As Robert Cialdini has outlined, the influencing techniques that cults use in their early stages work by making you feel wanted and giving you ‘instant friends and attention’, a process called ‘love bombing’, an addictive feeling for anyone like me looking for acceptance.

Landmark’s ideology is extremely individualistic and neo-liberal, declaring that only you are in control of your life. It entirely ignores any socio-economic issue outside your control, like the challenges of being a racialised, queer person with neurological conditions living in an ableist, white-dominated society.

They further exacerbated the shame in me around my chronic neurodivergent issues with time management. Because, in their rigid logic, lateness was being ‘out of integrity’ and you had to ‘restore integrity’ to a room full of people if you arrived even a few minutes late.

I was once verbally abused by a Landmark seminar leader for being 15 minutes late to an ‘assisting agreement’. He shouted at me so aggressively in front of others that I was driven to tears. I was the one who had to apologise. Being late can still lead to a rapid disintegration of my self-esteem today.

During the ILP, I got confirmation of the dangerous nature of Landmark for emotionally vulnerable people, when I had to listen to a woman telling me that their female partner had killed themselves due to being ‘triggered’ into a depressive episode on the Forum (they had bipolar).

Afterwards, when I did more research on cult survivor forums during lockdown I learned how even people with no previous history of mental issues had been triggered into psychosis and psychiatric breakdowns.

I was once verbally abused by a Landmark seminar leader for being 15 minutes late. He shouted at me so aggressively I was driven to tears.

I was lucky; I was able to eventually regain a sense of myself and re-connect with my boundaries and true values. I left after five years because I was exhausted and fed up of talking to anyone and everyone about Landmark. I had felt imprisoned and like I had become a zombie.

But I would go on to join another cult for three years in a phenomenon known as ‘cult hopping’, and was left with a long-term trauma – probable Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) – guilt at how I’d manipulatively tried to recruit people as well as bouts of rage, shame, hurt and a deep sense of betrayal. It permanently tainted my pre-cult idealism.

I believe if I had been diagnosed with ADHD and autism earlier in life and referred for treatment, I may have never been so vulnerable to cults like Landmark and nor would I have suffered so much at school and work.

I could have instead found like-minded people in the neurodivergent community and earlier unpacked my trauma as multiply marginalised person; a process that has been crucial to my development.