Large Group Awareness Training
Large Group Awareness Trainings (LGAT) are controversial in our culture, with incomplete agreement as to whether they are truly abusive. To the author's point of view, LGATs employ many elements of cognitive abuse and thought control. Elements that indicate a cultish nature to a LGAT include:
- The stock in trade is not special knowledge, as purported, but pressure and release, which produces an altered state of consciousness, and feelings of gratitude. While most LGAT alumni find the actual training time memorable, they are hard put to explain what they now actually do differently in their lives.
- Unlike most abusive communities, there is not a requirement to live together. But there invariably is a strong push to develop a larger and larger organization, with alumni that identify with the LGAT
- Like abusive communities, there is an emphasis on recruitment of new members. There is usually less vigilance and enforcement about members leaving (perhaps because it is not practical)
- Members are taught not just that they may now know a few things more after the training but that they are now enlightened in a qualitative way, in other words, they are cognoscenti
- Members are pledged to secrecy, ostensibly to protect trade secrets or prevent the knowledge being let loose outside the organization where outsiders would be unprepared for it. Actually secrecy has several other purposes. It 1) makes participants feel special, 2)supports 'shock' during the training which is part of the altered state produced 3) supports a high price point for material that actually has long been in the public domain
- Trainings may be expensive, potentially comprising financial exploitation. Moreover, heavy investment will strengthen commitment to the LGAT, lest the feeling, that it was a large waste arise