My second encounter with an ‘opportunity for transformation’

My second encounter with these LGAT groups was more recent and a little more, perhaps, insidious. It is what really prompted me to begin researching them.

This time was different than my first experience because this friend has been, unbeknownst to me, deeply involved (though on and off) with Lifespring and the Legacy Center for the last 15 years. This friend attempted to recruit me during a phone conversation, albeit subtly, into the Legacy Center in Raleigh, NC.

To help illustrate why I use the word insidious I will first explain our connection. We had been friends for about two years after having met through a local social networking website for photographers. We developed the kind of friendship where I regarded him as a confidant. I thought of him as a safe, older, wiser friend to have of the opposite sex. I felt like he was one of the very few people I could tell all to. He was a patient listener, and was there when I needed someone to just vent, or use as a sounding board if I found myself at some kind of turning point in my life. Especially comforting since I don’t have close relations with my own immediate family, and I was in a new city making new friends and trying to make a new life for myself. However there were times when he would say things that just didn’t appeal to my common sense, intellect or critical thinking. Even at times some things were even just a little off-putting in a boundary-crossing sort of way. But I would just shrug those moments off and take from the friendship what did help or make sense.

Looking back on some of our email conversations, he would use phrases that I now recognize as common LGAT jargon, such as:

• choosing to choose
• creation of vision
• I promise to help you process
• communicating your authentic experience
• asking me to pass on a hug to a friend of mine he’d never talked to or met for “a personal leap” (starting up her own business)
• “no inauthentic flouting of God” when discussing the ’08 Presidential election
• we are all in this world together, and share the responsibility for it
• find the way to participate in -be the Sources for- a world that’s fully connected and ‘in The Dance’
• to choose the next challenge as one that stretches me
• setting myself up to win, but win big
• I know why the choices I am making are important to me
• who I can see experiencing myself being on the other side of the challenge…

You see, I never asked him to coach me, or be a mentor, but this is obviously what he felt he needed, or wanted to do anyway for his own purposes. I generally went along with it by never questioning him or engaging him in further discussion about some of these things mentioned above. Like I said, I just appreciated having (what I thought) a safe, neutral friend to talk to. In hindsight, I realize now that he literally fed off of this and would frequently probe me for my news, thoughts, and personal developments. I generally tried to be careful of what I would tell him to a degree, some things are just best kept to one’s self. But there were times where he would successfully lead me to opening up.

The thing that really irked me and turned me off of our friendship was his timing in his attempt to recruit me. I was in a bad spell. I was feeling confused, lost, alone, stressed and frustrated with the way things were going in my life at the time. He then offered me an “opportunity for transformation” that he claimed had helped him through such difficulties. My first question was “does this transformation cost money?” I reminded him that I had no money. But then he offered to help pay, again in a subtle way. His words were something like “if you’re willing to make the commitment I will help you through it”. I didn’t see any sense in it at all, especially since I knew he wasn’t much richer than I was. He’s basically retired and lives on a fixed income. My final words on the subject were that the last thing I needed at this extremely stressful turning point in my life was to drop everything to devote myself to a mysterious transformation that he wouldn’t describe or reveal the actual cost of. It just didn’t make any sense to me. No thanks. End of conversation.

Afterward, I continued to work through my problems on my own. Then one day something clicked out of the blue and I made a connection that spurred me to do a little research on the Legacy Center. My Raleigh friend was trying to recruit me into the same thing my Las Vegas friend did with the Choice Center. Ack! Moreover, I found out that my Raleigh friend had attempted to recruit at least 3 other mutual friends that I know of. Mutual friends that we had made through the same social networking site. I communicated with each one, and they all mentioned he was uncomfortably aggressive in his manner. Apparently his tactics with them were variably more aggressive than with me. In two cases they were contacted out of the blue for a coffee or lunch date, then basically probed about their personal and professional life, dreams, wants, and wishes before the surprising sales pitch was presented at the end.

They each felt that, as a result of his recruiting tactics, they could no longer trust him and wouldn’t answer any more calls from him. Such a crappy feeling to have your trust betrayed like that. They each also stated in so many words that they really wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt that, as a friend, he truly wanted to share with us what he thought would be a wonderful experience. At the same time, myself and one of those friends both felt completely disturbed by the thought that we were just being used all along as pawns for his “game”.

Once I realized that I was not the only one who was unwittingly being coached by a wannabe guru with hidden motives (a wolf in sheep’s clothing?) it became a huge motivator to gear my research and interests towards helping the public be aware, and to be careful of who you trust. Thus, this blog, and hopefully bigger endeavors in the future.

NOTE: In a future post I will discuss the last phone conversation I had with this man. But to give you a preview, I asked him as many questions I could think of to get as much information as I could about his involvement with the Legacy Center before I revealed to him the research I had done, as well as my previous experience with a similar group.