by Adelaide Bry
As I noticed people squirm, I was delighted that I wasn't bothered by the four-letter words; I had done enough encounter to handle the fuck-shit-cunt routine like a street kid. Later I learned that people occasionally leave the training ostensibly because the language is too raw for them. The trainer's response to a woman who questioned the use of these words was " 'Spaghetti' and 'fuck' are the same. They're only words. The difference is the significance you add to them."
It seemed to me that the idea was to reduce us to pulp, to attack us where we're most vulnerable, to eventually have us identify those areas of our lives that don't produce results. "When you reach a critical mass of observation," Werner says, "things can begin to disappear."
I looked around and noted that all but one of the exit doors had signs across them saying "NO EXIT"; the other door had an est volunteer in front of it to prevent entry from outside. Although the doors are not locked and no one is ever barred from leaving, I resigned myself to accepting that I was going to feel trapped, like it or not.
I turned my full attention to the trainer, Stewart Emery. Incredibly handsome, his suntanned face was set off by a luxurious head of silver-gray hair. I judged him to be about thirty-seven. At that moment he didn't look like someone I could snuggle up with, but I saw the potential. Many women friends who trained with some of the other trainers developed crushes on them; it seems to be part of the syndrome -- the need for transference and identification.
Stewart told us what we needed to do to get the training. "If you stay in the room during the training, you'll get it. If you sleep through the training, as long as you are in this room sleeping, you'll get it.
"Trying to understand the training, using your head to understand the training, and trying to figure it all out are inappropriate ways to get this training. What you need to do to get the training is just to follow instructions and take what you get."
I was surprised about the permission to nod out. I also wondered how it was possible in those straight-back chairs lined up with no space right and left and only a foot or so in front. When I heard the first blissful snores that afternoon, and dozed off myself the next morning, I stopped wondering.
Stewart said, "The truth puts people to sleep. It goes right to what's unconscious in them, and most people are unconscious. For the truth to get to the truth in people, it has to get through the unconscious. So if you can make people uncomfortable in their unconsciousness, enough just to make them aware they are unconscious, then you have a better chance of letting some truth strike the truth in them."
The process of getting the truth, whether we got it in a conscious or unconscious state, wasn't going to be painless. "You are going to be intimidated, insulted, frightened, nauseated, enraged, and humiliated," Stewart told us. "You are going to feel every feeling there is to feel." He added that we might vomit, cry, get the shakes. We might also get bellyaches, headaches, and every other kind of ache before the training was over. After he described the training he told us that we now had an opportunity to leave if we wanted. We would get our full tuition back by mail.
It sounded grim -- but it was also a challenge. I opted to stay. Others weren't so sure. A dozen or so hands went up, waving frantically.
To share, a trainee raises his hand and waits for the trainer to acknowledge him. He then stands up and waits for a member of the volunteer logistics team to rush forth with a microphone. Then he shares whatever is on his mind: a thought, an experience, an objection, anything that he wants to say, however irrelevant or irreverent. The trainees are instructed to applaud following each sharing. The applause does not signify agreement; it only denotes an acknowledgment that the trainees got what the speaker shared.
"I don't like paying $250 to be called an asshole," one man complained. Stewart flashed an enigmatic, generous smile, his first of the day. "Thank you. I got that." The questioner, looking slightly dazed, sat down.
A woman asked why she couldn't sit next to her husband.
"We do what works for the training," came the blunt response.
A man suddenly got up and headed for the door as if going to the men's room. Stewart asked him if he had forgotten his agreement. He shook his head and returned, flushed and angry, to his seat. A few minutes later he waved his hand for the microphone. "I want to share that any time I want to get out of listening, I go to the bathroom," he told us. Stewart beamed. "You got it about the bathroom."
Hour after hour people shared their points of view. For me it became boring, inane, exhausting. My chair became a jail cell. Of all the genius that had gone into est, I decided, the most ingenious was making people sit and do nothing and become aware of how hard it is to sit and do nothing. I was so accustomed to my physical comfort that to sit for sixty hours in that uncompromising chair seemed, that first couple of hours, something I could not or would not endure. It occurred to me that one of the problems with psychoanalysis was that the required couch was too damn comfortable. As I ruminated on all the objectionable aspects of the seating arrangements I realized that I was on the brink of rage over, of all things, my chair. From that I got that I had never let anyone tell me where and when to sit. Or to do anything else, for that matter. I saw that it was going to be almost impossible to avoid myself as long as I remained in the training.
I looked up from my reveries to see est volunteers collecting candy bars. Candy bars, for God's sake! It seemed that people had begun to feel guilt about holding on to goodies they had hidden in their handbags and pockets contrary to their agreement. As one confessed and turned over her cache, others followed. The room was soon a sea of raisins, peanuts, apples, chocolate bars, sandwiches, chewing gum, and an assortment of other forbidden fruits being passed to the waiting volunteers. The trainer didn't seem to find it funny, but the rest of us were hysterical. Long after the first rush to cleanse ourselves was over, periodically someone would call for a microphone to share that he or she wanted to turn in a guilt-laden edible.
Stewart told us that by the following weekend two-thirds of us would have broken at least one of our agreements. I thought the figure unfairly high and was certain I would not be among the defaulters. I was wrong on both counts. About half the room would stand up the next weekend to acknowledge they had cheated and another large contingent would join them when Stewart said that if we weren't sure if we'd cheated or not, we had. I was in the second group. For a glass of red wine I drank after agreeing not to.
The hours rolled by. Without a watch and with the hotel drapes pinned closed, I had no sense of time. The training was just barely endurable and mostly agonizing. I yearned for activity, interaction, anything to escape from the endless passivity I had been thrust into from a life that was a model of motion.
Stewart continued to hammer away at us. Most of us don't enjoy any degree of aliveness, he pronounced, because we are content to stay at a level of existence where we neither experience nor participate in life. In fact, a lot of us "go unconscious" a lot of the time.
"I tune out while I'm driving," a young woman shared. "Last week I went off the road and narrowly missed a major accident. I woke up and jammed on the brakes in front of a giant elm tree."
"When you are responsible," Stewart thundered, "you find out you just didn't happen to be lying there on the tracks when the train passed through. You are the asshole who put yourself there."
The theme of responsibility prevaded every aspect of the training. In fact, if I were to sum up in a few words what I got from the training data it would be that we are each the cause of our own experience and responsible for everything that happens in our experience.
"I know that your agreement with everyone you know is that life is tough," he went on, "and that you have to be cool to survive. I want you to get that that doesn't work.
"It also doesn't work to wave the traffic on the freeway in the opposite direction to the way it's going. The traffic doesn't give a damn about you and neither does life. You have to be responsible for the way it is rather than stuc
k in the way you want it. You set it up this way. Now dig it.
"However it is for you, that's the way you've set it up and no amount of resistance will change that. Now you have a choice. You can keep resisting. Or you can choose it. You can bitch about it. Or you can take responsibility for it. If you are willing to acknowledge that you are cause in the matter, then you can be responsible for it instead of having it run you."
It was powerful stuff and I had a hard time staying with it. I had spent half a lifetime blaming the dissatisfaction of my life on a sad, angry father who had worked his way through Harvard and then went nowhere; on a sad, angry mother who learned to read Greek and Latin at Smith and then spent the rest of her life in a flowered housedress, eating to drown her misery; on an ex-husband who was compulsive, guilt-ridden, and who tried but couldn't give me what I wanted; and on bosses and shrinks who never quite lived up to my expectations.
I had begun to see my own responsibility in all this some years before I took the training, but the est experience deepened my experience of being the cause of my life. It also became clearer how I manufactured both my problems and my pleasures.
The irony was that I had never had a problem taking credit for the joys and successes of my life: an early career as a magazine writer, followed by a wonderful stint writing and broadcasting a radio program, followed by a successful public relations career, followed by a return to college in my middle years to study psychology and, subsequently, by my becoming a psycho-therapist. Through the past several years, my children have brought me incredible joy in their sanity and ability to function well. My daughter is now at Harvard Business School and my son at the University of Colorado Law School.
It was too painful for me to accept that I, not anyone else, had caused the anguish and despair that had marked so much of my life. While the trainer kept hammering at this theme, and I complained to myself and anyone who would listen to me (outside the training room) about the interminable repetitiveness, eventually my resistance gave way and I got it. I got that I had total responsibility for my life -- all of it, the happiness and the sorrow. It was -- and continues to be -- an incredible revelation.
The dinner break late in the evening was a mad dash for a toilet and then some lukewarm soup and chow mein at a nearby Chinese restaurant. I was dizzy, as were the three trainees who had spontaneously become my dinner companions. Strangely enough, I was also not hungry. After visualizing delicacies of every variety throughout the day, I could eat barely half of what was on my plate. I noticed when we were ready to leave that a lot of the plates were still half-full. Either becoming enlightened was stilling our appetites or discovering we were assholes had made us too nauseous to eat.
We swapped stories about what had brought us to est. The one I liked best came from an intense young man who earlier had openly acknowledged that he was homosexual. "It started when I ran into an old friend on the street one day," he told us. "He looked marvelous, sort of blissful So I said to him, 'What are you on these days?' He'd been into every drug imaginable. And be answered, 'I'm on est these days.' I hadn't heard of that one so, naturally, I asked him if he had any for me. Whatever it was, I wanted it. Let me tell you" -- he chuckled -- "I freaked out when I heard it wasn't something you smoke or eat!"
The rest of Saturday night for me was one long headache. Around midnight the complaints became louder and more frequent. In response, the trainer finally asked people to raise their hands if they had any kind of ache or pain. Over half the hands in the room went up. He picked one trainee to come up front for a demonstration.
What followed was a rather incredible exercise in taking responsibility for your own experience of your body. Based on the notion we'd already looked at in relation to our life situations, which is that resistance only makes things continue, the technique we were now shown was a way for us to go deeper into our pain, to experience it totally. Miraculously, the pain disappeared. The technique assists you to experience the pain fully -- for example, a backache or headache, by experiencing very specifically its color, size, shape, and how much liquid it would hold if it were a container. For me it has become an invaluable tool in both my life and my practice. (Although est tells people with medical problems to see a physician, several trainees told me that they had gotten rid of medical problems during the training.)
We were finally released to return to beds and bathrooms in the wee hours of the morning. Tucked into our psyches were a couple of other throwaway techniques to blow our belief systems. One that I found incredibly effective was to tell myself just before sleep to wake up on time alive, alert, and refreshed. The next morning, on four hours of sleep, I felt terrific.
When I had hauled my exhausted body out of the hotel that first night, I had felt that I wanted to get as far away from est as I could. I had a backache; I was tired; I was bored; I was also, surprisingly, anxious. I resented everything and everyone connected with est, and especially the trainer for holding a mirror up to my act and not letting me forget my agreements. Was more of the same all I was going to get for my $250? I had a sinking feeling that the whole thing was an enormous fraud. I finally fell asleep more curious than furious. The next morning, though I felt better, I was soon outdoing Lewis Carroll's White Queen; I had 5,000 impossible thoughts before breakfast. And, again, I went off to "transform" my life.
Having taken the time for a second cup of coffee, I arrived at the training a few minutes after nine. My greeting was a stern reminder that I was late. "Who is responsible for your having broken your agreement?" the training assistant asked, as he stood, arms folded, in front of the door into the training. I was, I told him, and dutifully recited out loud, "I acknowledge that I broke my agreement."
One woman among the latecomers refused to take responsibility for her lateness. She argued and cajoled but, of course, got no sympathy and no agreement with her position. All she got, over and over, was the question, "Are you willing to take responsibility for breaking your agreement?" Eventually she realized that her whole life had been based on breaking agreements and refusing to acknowledge that she had. Sobbing as though her heart had broken, she finally capitulated and was allowed into the room.
I was impressed, again, at how each element of the training was directly related to the way each of us leads his life. Even people's excuses for not taking the training were the same excuses that kept their lives from working.
The second training day began with sharing. A man in his mid-forties dressed, anachronistically, in a gray suit, white shirt, and blue tie, got that he had become a college professor so that he could put everyone down the way he felt they had put him down. "I simply had to prove I was right and they -- my parents, everybody -- were wrong. Now I know I'm a phony. I don't really know anything."
A woman got up to confess that she had once been raped. She had been out with a man she had picked up at a bar. At the end of the evening, she invited him back to her apartment. It was there be raped her.
Stewart prodded and questioned her mercilessly. She finally got that her identity had become "rape victim." She had made it the primary event in her life, and had talked about it to anyone who would listen, endlessly. And she got that playing "rape victim" wasn't a winning game.
A sophisticated-looking businessman took the microphone to announce that he thought the training was a rip-off. "I don't think you people know what you're doing," he said, "and unless things change soon I'm not going to stay here much longer." "Thank you," Stewart responded. "I acknowledge I heard you." The man remained standing as though waiting for something more and finally sat down only after he was asked to surrender the microphone to a volunteer.
Stewart's responses were becoming predictably familiar, but I never got a sense that they were by rote. When he said, "Thank you. I got it," that meant he didn't agree or disagree with the trainee; he had just listened carefully to the communication and let the trainee know that the communication had been received.
A young schoolteacher admitted, halti
ngly, that he wished he could love someone but he couldn't. By now the trainees were beginning to see the rackets people run. A loud groan ran through the room.
The trainer launched into a diatribe about love. "I know what love is to you jerks," he barked. "I don't call you on your bullshit and you don't call me on mine. We don't talk about love to assholes who don't know who they are. When you know who you are, then we will talk about love."
I snapped to attention. How many times, I thought, had I believed I was in love only to find that when the going got rough I wanted out. My idea of love was lots of terrific sex and a civilized, undemanding friendship.
"Not being able to love is your racket," bellowed the trainer. "If you want to know who you were, keep up your old patterns. If you want to know who you are, give up your old patterns."
The training "genius" then stood up. I've heard that there's one in every training -- a sophisticated, bright, well-read intellectual who has usually done both therapy and some of the Eastern disciplines and is still seeking the way. "I know all this data you're putting out," he announced. The trainer told him he was "possibly the biggest asshole in the whole room." If he knew so much, Stewart wanted to know, how come he didn't act that way? "What are you hiding? What is happening to you right now?"