by Adelaide Bry
A case in point occurred on the first day of the training. A man I estimated to be in his middle forties, successful, sure of himself, had flown up from Florida the evening before to take the training. He was obviously excited about this commitment and presented himself to us with pleased expectation written on his face.
At the registration table he was asked if he had brought a letter from his therapist giving permission for him to take the training. This was a requirement because he had answered affirmatively to a question on the application form that asked if he had ever been hospitalized for psychiatric care or a mental disorder. Because he had forgotten or thought it irrelevant, he hadn't gotten the letter. Although he had been hospitalized twenty-five years previously, and despite his long and costly trip, he was told that he would not be allowed to take the training.
He screamed and pounded on the table and threatened dire consequences and pace the floor. But the decision, confirmed after a call to California, remained no. I watched him leave, rejected and dejected, suitcase in hand, and wondered if he'd be back. Would I? I asked myself. I wasn't sure that I would have.
One of the most striking things about being an est volunteer was the chance it gave me to observe at close hand, and to be a part of, the est community.
I saw that Werner has created a situation where people clamor to volunteer.* It saves the cost of thousands of salaries and it provides est with dedicated people to attend to the myriad details (chair arranging, bathroom maps) that contribute to est's success. Werner told me that what people really want to do with their lives is to make a contribution to the well-being of others. He said that people who experience themselves find that purpose within themselves.
* est says that 6,000 to 7,000 graduates work as volunteers In the course of a year.
The basis of the volunteer program is that it is a real-life after-training workshop in which you get to experience responsibility along with other est graduates. A free postgraduate course, in effect. Volunteers repeatedly told me that they felt they got more from their work than est got from their services. It was certainly true of my own experience. I later learned that it is a requirement of the assistants program that people remain in it only as long as they get at least as much value from assisting as they contribute.
The est volunteer experience is also a pleasurable and fulfilling one for most. One can't be around est offices and events without noticing that everyone seems intensely involved. The offices have a softly humming and confident busyness.
Everyone -- and this includes old pros as well as first-timers -- seems to be "on purpose," which is an est term for getting the job done. Although nothing is supposed to interfere with the task at hand, Werner has told staff members, "This is not a war. In doing our job in est, we are not to think in terms of allowable levels of casualties. Each individual is to be respected and no individual may be sacrificed for any reason." Quite impressive and quite different from the offices I've worked in.
My feelings about this aspect of est, the sense of community and eager commitment, is that it fulfills a deep need in contemporary American society. Critics of est have compared it, disparagingly, with old-time religion. If one defines religion as a belief system, then est would not qualify as a religion. (When the question was actually posed to a trainer during a seminar, in classic est-ian fashion, the response was, "I got it. It's not and if that's what you experience it's O.K.")
What est does have in common with traditional Western religon is its sense of service, of mission, and of course its definition of a way of being and experiencing. And, like many religions, est has its own language. Not only does this language provide a unique way of communicating, it also immediately identifies whoever uses est phrases as an ex-asshole, a member of the club.
This experience of belonging -- in a special place, with a particular group of people -- was once provided by one's church. Today an est graduate might put in long hours of painstaking work and have such an experience -- a sense of belonging, of serving. I've seen a similar kind of fervor among volunteer workers in a political campaign. The difference between the est and the political volunteer experience is that est-ers experience satisfaction in their lives and activists can merely hope that their efforts will change their lives.
An interesting aside is that for a while there was a rule against sex between est staff members. To the relief of all who mentioned it to me, that rule has been rescinded.
Working at est means instant friends, confidants, and people who sincerely are interested in one another. Several times when I was at an est office someone would burst into tears and immediately find both a sympathetic ear and assistance in getting whatever the tears related to. The problems shared were intimate ones -- a bad trip with parents, a lover, a boss. Nothing seemed too private, too embarrassing, too crazy to hide. Time and time again I was struck by the contrast be- tween an interchange among est grads and the comparative superficiality of communication between friends and colleagues on the outside. If the former sometimes made me uncomfortable, ultimately it was far more satisfying than the latter.
What did I get from the intense experience of being an est volunteer?
The high point of the weekend came when the man in charge of logistics said to me, after I had mapped the shortest and most efficient route to the bathrooms, "Thank you, Adelaide. You have done an excellent job in writing these instructions." Wow! I was high for hours. From which I got that it's a lot more satisfying to be on purpose than scattered, and that I enjoy someone else's approval for "a job well done." I also got that both my intention and my attention determined the quality of my work.
As for my understanding of the est operation, I finally got why the est organization is so successful. The value of its philosophy and techniques is only part of the picture. The rest comes from the fact that people give their best efforts to est, that out of the intense focus, discipline, and caring of staff and volunteers has come an incredibly tight, efficient, and effective business.
Each est volunteer "gets off" on doing his job, be it toilet-cleaning or supervising, when his work is completed. Multiply one worker's experiences several thousand times and you get several thousand super-efficient, happy, and devoted workers. Free! They not only care about what they do, they bring loving concern to what they do. It works!
Richard M. Dawes, M.D.
Dr. Dawes is Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Louisiana State University and is on the Board of Directors of De Paul Psychiatric Hospital in New Orleans. He was a general practitioner for twelve years before he returned to school to become a psychiatrist He decided to take the est training after reading Marcia Seligson's article on est, which first appeared in New Times and was reprinted in Cosmopolitan. His former wife, his present wife, and his two children have since taken the training.
I'm enthusiastic about est because it works. I've seen it work with myself, my patients, and my friends. I have broken through so many barriers, for both myself and my patients, that I can only be high about it. Until now I have always been a therapeutic nihilist, exploring everything but never enthusiastic about anything.
In my own life, I have faced many things that have been uncomfortable. During the Truth Process, I got in touch with material inaccessible to me during my seven years of analysis, which is a reflection of how intense and effective the est experience is. I picked depression as my item and I got In touch with my body feelings of "coldness." I began to shiver. The picture that came to mind was of me as a little boy of five on a day when It had actually snowed in New Orleans. I had packed snow into my pockets to bring home to my mother and then passed out "cold" on the sidewalk. I experienced a tremendous fear of being alone, it was exceedingly powerful. In all my years on the couch I had never gotten In touch with that alone feeling. When that process was over I was so relieved that I laughed uproariously, as did so many others.
I have a twenty-year-old son with whom I have had terrible communication. He
had been severely depressed and we were always afraid to talk, to tread on each other. Of course, what we did was to tread on each other. What you resist is what you get, as they say in est. He took the training and our communication is now terrific.
After the training, I took the Communication Workshop, which really put everything together for me. it was a spiritual experience. I realized that I had never communicated In my life. Werner said, "To communicate you have to have absolute admiration and respect. You can't be a brilliant therapist without love, admiration, and respect for the patient." I do love my patients now, regardless of their trips. I experience their experiences and get fulfillment from my work in a way I never thought possible.
Work with my patients has changed since I took est. A teen-ager I had been working with for some time, who was hostile, paranoid, isolated, bitter, and a borderline schizophrenic, was so obnoxious that I really didn't want him as a patient. He's now become someone with whom I'm working very well. I can laugh with him now. I can call him on his tough-guy games. And I've started to work with him to experience his loneliness. While I used to help patients strengthen their defense mechanisms, now I have them experience rather than repress certain patterns and they go away. This same young man, for example, now force-feeds his depression. [In this context, to "force-feed" a depression would be to experience it fully instead of trying to get rid of it by various means.]
A woman patient who had had multiple hospitalizations realized, in the process of being helped, that she was a psychosomatic cripple. Because of my est training, the seductive-manipulative aspects of her moaning and complaining became clear to me. When I communicated this to her, she was able to tell me, "If I face my feelings, I'll die." She had never gone that far or been that honest before. She became more alive. When she left the hospital, the staff remarked on how much she had changed.
I see now, also, that there are some patients who don't appreciate and don't want to experience feelings, who would rather have medication or electric shock. Even so, I respect them and acknowledge where they are. And then cut through their games.
I have sent twelve patients from New Orleans to est trainings in New York and San Francisco. I've done that because it works, because it's therapeutic, regardless of their disclaimers that est is not therapy. The training encourages people to work through and experience their barriers and get out of the cognitive mind which dominates so much of our culture.
Out of these twelve patients, three didn't like it -- they thought it was atrocious, boring, exhausting. All three had had lots of therapy and were isolated, intellectual people. One week after they were back in therapy with me each one of them cried for the first time In our work together. They got in touch with feelings they had been avoiding for years. Two out of three now acknowledge that they got a lot from the training. The third still denies it was helpful; he, I observed, got the most from it. The other nine sound even more enthusiastic than I do. I find, incidentally, that I communicate better with est graduates than with other people.
There is currently some resistance to est from other psychiatrists in New Orleans. They have heard about it from me and are curious. A colleague who does a group at a hospital where I have individual patients is amazed at the change in my patients, how they are breaking through their barriers. A couple of others, though, are antagonistic because they think Werner is a con artist, or because of his name change.*
* See Chapter 8 for discussion of this.
It's scary for therapists. They have to feel uncomfortable about something that threatens all their years of training. I, too, was scared that last day of the training. I wondered how I could continue all the stuff I had learned when it didn't mean anything.
I am convinced est offers true transformation. And in an amazingly short period of time.
6
est Goes to Prison
"I got that what happened to me ain't no mistake. I planned it that way." -- A prisoner in Lompoc's maximum security section
"I'm here for bank robbery. It doesn't take too much smarts to walk into a bank and tell them to hand over the money. I kick myself in the ass every time I think about it. I know I got more potential and qualifications than to do something like that. But I was impatient. I wanted it then. est brought me a lot of realizations and I guess you could call it waking up."
I was in the office of the psychologist of the Federal Correctional Institution at Lompoc, California, listening to one of the thirteen convicts who would be talking to me about est.
I was there to see for myself what est had done for prisoners; almost every story about Werner Erhard and est had mentioned the prison training. I was there also for a colleague of mine, a psychiatrist who is head of psychiatric services for the city of Philadelphia. I would report to him what I had experienced so that he could consider the value of bringing the training into the city's prison system.
Because of what I got from the training about agreements, I was experiencing some guilt. Neither before nor during my visit did I divulge that I was writing this book. The letter requesting my visit had come from my colleague and referred only to that aspect of my investigation which related to his work. (Later I let the people I had met know about the book. The prison psychologist kidded me for not being up-front. "Didn't you get that it would have been O.K. to have walked in here and told the truth?" I didn't then, but I would now.)
The reason I withheld this information was that I wanted to get the real story rather than a public relations fabrication. I felt that admitting the full truth about my visit would prevent me from getting to their truth.
In est terms, my reasons were irrelevant. Reasons aren't real; people make them up to justify what they want to do. What mattered was whether I was willing to take responsibility (and the consequences) for what I was doing. I was, which meant that I was prepared to incur the wrath of the authorities, to get tossed out of the prison, to suffer the pangs of guilt, and to face whatever else might result from my half-truth. As I now put this into perspective, it occurs to me that my experience was exactly what the est prison training was all about: taking responsibility for making and breaking agreements.
I flew to Los Angeles and then boarded a Greyhound bus for the four-hour ride through rolling cowboy country to the federal prison. The next morning, after I had spent an anxious night at a nearby motel, a curious cab driver ("No visiting hours on Thursday, ma'am") deposited me before an enormously high fence topped with three strands of barbed wire and a fifty-foot-high glass tower, which were a visitor's welcome. The object of my journey, a huge gray concrete building, loomed before me from across a vast empty plain.
Feeling small and vulnerable, I waited with my driver for an acknowledgment of my presence. It came out of the air, as though from nowhere, with a curt "What do you want?" I identified myself to the faceless voice and after a short wait was allowed through the wire fence, whereupon I identified myself again and was admitted to the reception area.
The intimidating security structures, the bars on every window, the gray tiled corridors -- all reminded me of every prison movie I had ever seen. It was both awesome and sobering. If the whole thing smacked of a grade-B jail tale, the climax to my entrance scene was in the best tradition of Hollywood slapstick. Shaken after my solo walk across the flat, empty space between the fence and the building, I asked the receptionist what I could do with my suitcase. He considered the question seriously before suggesting, apologetically, that it would be best to lock it up. "We have a lot of thievery around here," he explained, poker-faced!
Dr. Scott Moss, the mental health coordinator and a charming and knowledgeable man, soon appeared to escort me to the first of my appointments. I was grateful for his presence, especially as we moved through the huge, busy corridor where prisoners and staff walked briskly about their business. It wasn't until after I cleared the third barrier that the full import of what I was up to hit me: If, in fact, sixty hours of est training could transform some of the rapists, murderers
, burglars, and other criminals who populated Lompoc, what might that mean for the society at large? Intrigued by the possibilities but skeptical, I decided to just stick close to Dr. Moss and keep my ears and eyes open.
I had fortunately arrived in time to listen in on a series of interviews by two students from San Francisco State University who were doing their masters theses about est at Lompoc.
In the initial encounter, a researcher stated that the investigation was not related to the prison, that the prisoner's name would not be used, and that he should feel free to be as honest as he wanted since nothing would be used for or against him. Each was asked the same questions, which dealt primarily with what he had experienced from the training.
The first, a good-looking young black (all but two of the prisoners I met were black), grinned self-consciously when asked what he thought of the training. "Cool, man, cool. And I got that what happened to me ain't no mistake. I planned it that way."
I could barely believe my ears. A ghetto youth assuming full responsibility for his life instead of blaming it all on bad housing, vitamin deficiencies, overcrowded schools, a father who had deserted, no money or jobs or love? It was exactly what I wanted to hear but I mistrusted it. Too glib, I thought; he's getting off on his performance.