A Brush With Greatness

It was the summer before junior year of college. I was living with my parents and working as a security guard at the same electronics company where my high school boyfriend's mom worked the assembly line. It was dull, I did a lot of reading, and I spent a lot of time chatting with my best friend, who was working the phones (and a few of the partners) at her father's architectural firm. There were good things about that summer, but my relationship with my parents wasn't one of them.

I'd been in group therapy during the school year, but I was somewhat adrift that summer. A childhood friend had hooked me up with the security gig, and she did me a further solid by suggesting that I go with her to her group therapy session in the big city. It had helped her communication with her family, she said. It helped her be more...actualized, whatever that was. Well when I looked it up, it was certainly something that she didn't need. Her parents were quite brash. When I was the reluctant host of a diet restaurant in my senior year of high school, my friend's parents, Phyllis and Albert would swan past me at the host station, stand in the middle of the place and say loudly "Where's my table?" These were people who said what they wanted and got what they wanted. What did they need with therapy?

I'll never know the answer, but on one bright summer day I went with my friend to her therapy session. It was held in an anonymous looking building on the edge of Chinatown. We took an elevator, I believe, to a floor that had a reception area of some sort and an open space behind it, with rows of chairs set up as a classroom. A green rolling chalkboard stood in front of us, and between it and us were some perky folks who were there to impart wisdom. One guy wore a peach colored Izod shirt. I could tell that things were about to get smarmy.

The only therapy I could compare this to was my therapist at school. I'd see him once every few weeks in a converted 1920s bungalow that was one of the original buildings on campus. And I went to his group session, all of us seemed to share the blight of being liberal arts misfits attending an agricultural college. We sat in a circle, in a dimly lit room and took turns sharing. I believe that there are studies about the optimal physical orientation for sharing intimate details in a group. Circles work, and being seated in rows facing Ken and Barbie orients you for a different kind of learning.

They welcomed the group and asked the people who brought guests to introduce them and say why they had brought them today. What each of them, in turn, meant to say was "As we all know this is a cult with a splash of multilevel marketing thrown in, and if I bring a friend who might convert you'll give me an extra goodie like the ones you've gotten me hooked on." But the way it came out of each of them is "This is my friend Fifi and I brought her here because I love her." 

Then they invited the guests into the large room next door, without our hosts. We were too polite to say no. Because our person loved us and wanted us to be happy. 

Our person was a motherfucker.

For an hour, people told us about the miraculous lifting of life's misery by way of the things we'd learn in a simple one weekend seminar. Man I love a good testimonial. A before and after. I was completely in love with those Ayds diet ads in the back of Ladies Home Journal where the person lost a billion pounds and you could see their ribs again. So I was an easy mark. I wanted to be more powerful and persuasive (still do. still am not). I saw these people's stories as the future me who would finally have direction and be motivated and completely unlike myself. And at the end of the hour I had written a check for $350, which I had because of my job, and I vowed to lie to my family about my whereabouts for a weekend and somehow get to the location of the seminar and, as they say these days, do the damned thing.

I was so proud of myself. I was going to do something and change my life and I was completely converted in no more than an hour. I wanted to be a better and less miserable person. This was the answer.

So when I got home and told my sister, who was home visiting, that I was going to do EST, she was livid. "Everybody who does EST is an asshole, and you are not going to do it. You are going to call the bank and cancel that check and then you are going to tell me what is wrong and I will help you. But you are NOT doing EST."

She did talk to my parents, who lightened up. I never did EST. I ended my friendship. I was ashamed that the folks at EST had managed to con me, even when there were so many signals that something was wrong. I have always counted this brush with a cult to be a blessing in disguise. I saw a cult up close without being swallowed up.