NewDayNews Recovery Forum

My Experience with est: Part 2: The Hook

Posted By: Joseph <Send E-Mail>
Date: Sunday, 7 May 2006, at 11:23 p.m.

In Response To: My experience with est: Part 1 (Joseph)

My Experience with est: The Hook

I had attended my first est guest seminar at Barbara’s post training, and decided that I would never, ever, take est. I also realized I had two crazy friends on my hands in Barbara and Bobby. I tried my best to not even discuss it with Bobby, because I was in a state of disbelief that he would so quickly be sucked into this.

My exposure to cults at the time was somewhat limited. I had grown up in Hollywood in the 60’s and remembered the bald headed Hare Krishna’s coming up and giving me incense on the street. I thought they were silly. I had seen movies about religious cults and how young people could get sucked into them

One of the Roadshow Players was a girl named Jane who was a year or two older than us. She had just returned home from Europe where she had been a Christian missionary. She had a baby son named Christian. I wasn’t sure if what Jane was involved in might be a cult. It didn’t seem like it, since I never met other missionaries from her group. She just seemed to be like he rest of us, just with a kid and a bunch of pamphlets with religious cartoons in them.

It was a confusing time in my life. I was 21 years old. I had recently moved away from home to a garage apartment. I was starting to work full time for my Dad working at trade shows at the local convention centers. Nights and weekends, the Roadshow Players would perform. We would do one show a night during the week and two on Saturday, usually taking Sunday off. A lot of stuff was happening.

One weekend Barbara came down and stayed at her parents house. She was “assisting” at the San Fernando Valley est Center down on Sherman Way at the 405 Freeway. I asked her what she was doing there, and she told me that she was mostly working on a phone bank calling up other graduates and inviting them to sign up for graduate seminars. I asked her how much they paid her to do that, she replied, “nothing, it’s an opportunity”.

Then she surprised me by telling me that she and William had broken up. William didn’t appreciate est, or her new friends at the big est house in San Luis Obispo, where she had been spending a lot of time. She had moved out and gotten and apartment.

Barbara and I had this little side agreement. We had always been attracted to each other, and commented many times that if we ever ended up in a situation where we both were single, that we would give it a shot. So, right on the spot I reminded her of that.

She seemed receptive, and asked what I had in mind. I asked her if she would like to go up to Big Bear Lake and rent a cabin with me for a weekend. She accepted, and we made plans for the next weekend.

I was totally out of my mind at the prospect of this. Almost immediately after high school ended, my first serious girlfriend who I was with for two years broke up with me. I went immediately into the Academy where nearly everyone in the program but me was gay (guys and girls). Let’s just say, I hadn’t had any…uh… female companionship in two years. So, I called up to a real estate office in Big Bear and reserved a cabin.

Friday night came, and I was anticipating Barbara’s arrival in the valley so we could drive up to the lake. Then she called and said she couldn’t come. I was absolutely devastated. I told her that I had already sent a check up to pay for the cabin and it was non-refundable. Finally, I offered to drive up to San Luis Obispo and pick her up. She agreed.

San Luis Obispo is one hell of a long drive on a Friday afternoon. According to Mapquest, it’s 201 miles from where I was living. I would have to drive up there, pick her up, drive all the way 201 miles back to L.A., then head east into the San Bernardino mountains another 108 miles to the pristine setting 8,000 feet above Southern California.

But, I did it. All 501 miles and not starting until about 6:00pm.

The weekend seemed to go well. Barbara spent most of it telling me more about est and her new est friends, and how I really should think about taking est.

At the end of the weekend, I drove her back to San Luis Obispo and stayed the night in her new apartment. She surprised me again by telling me that I wasn’t the only guy she had slept with since breaking up with William. I was somewhat stunned, since she had probably been broken up with him for all of two weeks. She told me she had also been sleeping with Bruce, he guy who introduced her to est, and one other person.

She went on to tell me that she wasn’t interested in getting involved in another committed relationship just then, and wasn’t sure what “we” were, but that I just had to give her some “space”, and if I would just take est, I’d know what that meant.

The next morning, I drove back to L.A. happy from having broken my 2-year streak of being celibate, but more confused than ever about Barbara.

For the next few days I didn’t hear from her. I tried to call, but couldn’t catch her at home.

Then a tape showed up.

I popped the audio cassette into my car player and drove to the store. Barbara sounded very sad on the tape. It was apparent something had happened. I wondered if her est bubble had finally burst. Then she explained on the tape that the night after I left her apartment, she went to the est house to a party where she took LSD. I found this shocking because I had never known Barbara to take drugs.

At some time while she was high on the LSD, her old boyfriend William showed up and asked if he could speak with her privately. She went with him, and got into his car. He grabbed her head and smashed it into his steering wheel. Then he drove her to the house they used to live in and sexually assaulted her and beat her.

She said she finally escaped by climbing out a bathroom window after being held there for more than a day.

I immediately called her on the phone, and left a message on her machine that she had to call me back, and if I didn’t hear from her in an hour, I was coming up to San Luis Obispo to find her.

She called back, and sounded a bit better than she had on the tape. She said that she needed to talk to me because after being raped and beaten she decided that having all this sexual activity with different guys was probably a bad thing for her. That Bruce had invited her to move into the est house, and she was in the process of doing that. She said that she and Bruce had made a agreement to be exclusive with each other, and that the people at the est house would protect her and make sure nothing bad would happen.

I was kind of overwhelmed by all of this. Bruce was in his mid-thirties, and to a guy like me aged 21 looked like a bald old man. I couldn’t imagine what Barbara could see in him, or why he would want to be involved with somebody so much younger.

I told her that she didn’t have to do that, if she wanted, she could come down and stay with me in my tiny garage apartment, but she declined. She said that she had created being raped and had taken responsibility for it. I asked if that responsibility included calling the police and reporting William, and she said it did not. She wanted to put it behind her and experience moving on with the rest of her life.

Over the next several days, I was really devastated. I felt badly for Barbara being assaulted, felt bad for myself for getting dumped so quickly.

More than anything else, I was starting to hate est. But, I thought I probably owed it to myself, and my now two friends who had taken this thing to really figure out what it was.

I went to the public library and found a book called “The book of est”. This book actually provide a blow by blow description of the actual training from start to finish. I was amazed that the author had broken his agreement about not disclosing the data.

From the book it appeared that est was most of all very verbally abusive. I certainly was no stranger to curse words, but it looked like est trainers rarely uttered a sentence that didn’t include the words “fuck”, “shit” and “asshole”. In fact, I learned that people who enrolled in the training were repeatedly called “assholes”.

I read the whole book, but I just didn’t get it. Why was Barbara, and now Bobby so happy to be shut in a hotel ballroom for sixty hours, and verbally abused by some stranger?

A few days later, I got a letter in the mail from Barbara. She wrote that she was “creating better things”, and that the only way she had survived her rape and beating was est and the support she received from her new roommates at the est house. That Bruce had created so much space for her to take responsibility for what happened to her.

Then she wrote that she was enclosing a $50.00 scholarship for me to take the training. That she knew if I took the training that I would “get it”. I couldn’t believe that with all Barbara had been though, she would pay $50.00 to do something for me.

For the life of me, I don’t know what happened to me in that moment. I picked up the phone and called the San Fernando Valley est Center and told them I wanted to be in the next training. They explained that the only held trainings in my area every month, and that one had already stared. I’d have to wait, unless I wanted to go out to Newport Beach the following weekend and take it there. I said, “Sign me up! And oh yeah, I have a $50.00 scholarship”.