My "Act"

A long time ago one of my reader friends "encouraged" me to take "The Training"--Erhard Seminars Training or EST. Whatever your opinions or considerations about this (and you may have a lot of them, I sure do), I would ask you to suspend them for the time is takes to read this post. During the 80s I participated in a lot of the EST programs and I found them very useful. I probably stopped about the time Erhard sold the business to his trainers and left the country. There have been a lot of assertions about the man and the programs that I choose not to comment on other than to say that the issues seemed to be well clouded with large sums of money.

My friend has since taken the successor program, The Landmark Advanced series; and while not promoting it to me, talked about how he found it useful to discover his "act," and how it seemed to him that what I am working on here is like symptoms of something underlying or deeper--my "act" as it were. The "act" is apparently in the form of an injunction that comes from very early experiences that you give yourself and organize your life around. His is "Don't fuck up!" That's what I would consider a "nice" one. You know, all masculine and strong. By contrast the ones I have been examining for me seem wimpy and self-demeaning: "You don't deserve it!" (Not enough of an instruction or rule); "Don't really trust anyone!" (But I do, though often to my chagrin), and the current leading candidate "Don't trust yourself!"

That's feeling a lot closer to the mark, and sufficently "yucchhh" to me that it probably has a piece of the real action. Plays into the victim shit rather nicely.

I'm willing to play with this for a while. I trust my friend and his instincts. I'm probably not going to be taking the Landmark program. I'm not willing to play the required enrollment game, besides I'm already "sharing" my inquiry with you. But I'm going to keep looking at this for a while yet, and looking at those early years. Funny that the first other piece of writing I started working on since starting this blog is based on my childhood. Or maybe not.