Any experience with encounter groups?

[birchswing]

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I've been watching The Americans, which takes place in the 1980s, and features a program called est (lower-case on purpose), which appears to be a very formal type of encounter group. Mad Men in the late 1960s showed the protagonist in a much less formal encounter group.

I'm wondering if any of the older members of the forum have any personal experience with encounter groups or if anyone can give more information on their origin and the effects they have? It seems that they don't exist much anymore—is that right?

 

[splik]

not quite - look up landmark forum - that's what est is called now (there are some differences). they are not encounter groups though (which are dead and is what you saw on Mad Men) - they are part of what are called large group awareness trainings. there is some overlap in that they borrow ideas from encounter groups which grew out of the human potential movement. some people think they are cults. others find them valuable.

 

[MacDonaldTriad]

I haven't talked to someone who preaches est in over 20 years, but what I remember is:
"No one is the victim of circumstances, take responsibility. Your actions dictate your fate. You alone can succeed or fail." I always felt like saying "Yes, I got that. I don't need to go to your meetings to get that." The cult label comes from the need to convince others to think like they do.

 

[birchswing]

Interesting. I liked the more free-form nature of the encounter group in Mad Men. I wonder why they fell out of favor.

 

[smalltownpsych]

Interesting. I liked the more free-form nature of the encounter group in Mad Men. I wonder why they fell out of favor.

It is probably because group therapy has a potential to be very harmful. Group therapy and self-help groups is an interest of mine and I have also worked in the troubled teen industry that was at one time completely dominated by EST and Synanon philosophies so I saw first hand some of the harm that this caused. Easiest example to grasp is seeing group pressure to get an individual with a trauma history to "open up", "you need to get it out", etc. I told the group (and instructed the est type "therapists") that they needed to stop trying to force them to do something they didn't want to do because that already happened to them before.

 

[nitemagi]

Landmark is like EST-lite, even though it came from the same lineage. They're really doing "therapeutic" work without naming it as such. I think this really happens in all avenues of human life (we have therapeutic experiences all the time), but the difference is this is with more force/pressure, done by those with limited experience on the dangers of their work. That's why nowadays they often have exclusion criteria, officially, for anyone with a mental illness.

 

[MacDonaldTriad]

Depending on your definition of "mental Illness", that is like saying you will only treat people who don't need treatment. At least it would require a grey area to say some people who need therapy don't have mental illness. Maybe we are guilty of this belief in that we delegate much of the therapy to non-psychiatrists.