I'm sorry I didn't see this post about Joyspring earlier. Skeptical, if your wife has done this training, I hope she's OK.
In the 1980s I did a number of LGATs in Cape Town. First the I Am training, then a couple of others that were either single day sessions or an evening a week for a few weeks, then Joyspring. This was over a couple of years. I remember Pat Grove quite clearly (I believe he calls himself a "life coach" now) as well as Buster and Wendy Sefor. I was in an iffy emotional state beforehand and still in an iffy emotional state afterwards, but the thing that nearly took me apart was "Joyspring" - a misnomer if ever there was one. I Am was all right, not too traumatic, even quite fun by the end of it, but seemed designed (after the first couple of days of hammering and psychological breakdown) to love-bomb people and draw them in to spend more and more money on trainings, give more and more of their time to the organisation for free, be more and more zealous, "share your fantastic experience" with friends and family, bring more and more of them along to "guest events" so they could be persuaded to go through the same. It was incredibly coercive and manipulative, looking back on it. If you refused to let yourself be drawn in, they'd say you were "stuck" and "hadn't got it". But Joyspring was a mindbender - perhaps not for everyone - some people seemed to come through it quite well and raved about it afterwards - but certainly for me it was. There were real issues in my past that I hadn't been able to come to terms with, and to put yourself in the hands of untrained, power-crazy, robotic people in that emotional state is a recipe for disaster, and for me it was a setback that lasted many years and changed my relationships drastically, and not for the better. After a while I ceased all contact with the organisation as I realised that the trainings and continued involvement with the organisation changed people - sometimes suddenly and sometimes quite gradually - in ways I was deeply uncomfortable with. There were lots of marriage breakdowns, an inordinate number of wives who moved out to be with other women (usually other training "graduates") and husbands who moved out to be with men, leaving lots of shocked and traumatised children behind. Even where marriages remained intact, there also seemed to be a lot of extramarital affairs among "graduates", some involving people who had never considered marital infidelity before, and a sort of unspoken social pressure on the other spouse to be OK with the situation.
I think the reason people don't talk about exactly what happens on the trainings is twofold: one, probably the main one, is because the "graduates" are being pressured to bring new people in, and telling them exactly what they will be confronted with would put most people off. And two, because a lot of the effect of what happens on the trainings is unique to each person, very deep in their own minds, and isn't actually easily explained by means of the activities that happen on the training. That's hard enough to talk about for those have had a good experience, but for those who have a bad experience, there's really nobody to talk to about it other than perhaps someone else who also did one of the trainings and had a bad experience. It's very isolating. You can't talk to the people who are happy with their experience because they'll use all the training jargon phrases against you, to convince you that you're the one who's responsible for yourself being messed up.
I only stayed around for as long as I did because of the sort of spiritual seduction of "transformation" associated with the original I Am training. There was one particular "special realisation moment" during the training, but the problem with that was that unlike following a sustained spiritual practice, through which you might work towards a sense of enlightenment, in the I Am training you were kind of catapulted into it momentarily with no real idea of how you got there or how to integrate it into everyday life. Shortly before I started doing the trainings I seem to remember that there was a lot in the papers about a "graduate" of I Am who had committed suicide ... I suppose that should have been a warning to me. I also seem to remember a charge subsequently being brought against Pat Grove (for practising as a psychologist without training/a licence? Something to that effect) as a result of which he had to make a minor change to the training programme, for whatever that was worth. I honestly wouldn't recommend these things to anyone, least of all people experiencing emotional or psychological difficulties. The effects can be very disturbing and are not easily or quickly shaken off.
In the 1980s I did a number of LGATs in Cape Town. First the I Am training, then a couple of others that were either single day sessions or an evening a week for a few weeks, then Joyspring. This was over a couple of years. I remember Pat Grove quite clearly (I believe he calls himself a "life coach" now) as well as Buster and Wendy Sefor. I was in an iffy emotional state beforehand and still in an iffy emotional state afterwards, but the thing that nearly took me apart was "Joyspring" - a misnomer if ever there was one. I Am was all right, not too traumatic, even quite fun by the end of it, but seemed designed (after the first couple of days of hammering and psychological breakdown) to love-bomb people and draw them in to spend more and more money on trainings, give more and more of their time to the organisation for free, be more and more zealous, "share your fantastic experience" with friends and family, bring more and more of them along to "guest events" so they could be persuaded to go through the same. It was incredibly coercive and manipulative, looking back on it. If you refused to let yourself be drawn in, they'd say you were "stuck" and "hadn't got it". But Joyspring was a mindbender - perhaps not for everyone - some people seemed to come through it quite well and raved about it afterwards - but certainly for me it was. There were real issues in my past that I hadn't been able to come to terms with, and to put yourself in the hands of untrained, power-crazy, robotic people in that emotional state is a recipe for disaster, and for me it was a setback that lasted many years and changed my relationships drastically, and not for the better. After a while I ceased all contact with the organisation as I realised that the trainings and continued involvement with the organisation changed people - sometimes suddenly and sometimes quite gradually - in ways I was deeply uncomfortable with. There were lots of marriage breakdowns, an inordinate number of wives who moved out to be with other women (usually other training "graduates") and husbands who moved out to be with men, leaving lots of shocked and traumatised children behind. Even where marriages remained intact, there also seemed to be a lot of extramarital affairs among "graduates", some involving people who had never considered marital infidelity before, and a sort of unspoken social pressure on the other spouse to be OK with the situation.
I think the reason people don't talk about exactly what happens on the trainings is twofold: one, probably the main one, is because the "graduates" are being pressured to bring new people in, and telling them exactly what they will be confronted with would put most people off. And two, because a lot of the effect of what happens on the trainings is unique to each person, very deep in their own minds, and isn't actually easily explained by means of the activities that happen on the training. That's hard enough to talk about for those have had a good experience, but for those who have a bad experience, there's really nobody to talk to about it other than perhaps someone else who also did one of the trainings and had a bad experience. It's very isolating. You can't talk to the people who are happy with their experience because they'll use all the training jargon phrases against you, to convince you that you're the one who's responsible for yourself being messed up.
I only stayed around for as long as I did because of the sort of spiritual seduction of "transformation" associated with the original I Am training. There was one particular "special realisation moment" during the training, but the problem with that was that unlike following a sustained spiritual practice, through which you might work towards a sense of enlightenment, in the I Am training you were kind of catapulted into it momentarily with no real idea of how you got there or how to integrate it into everyday life. Shortly before I started doing the trainings I seem to remember that there was a lot in the papers about a "graduate" of I Am who had committed suicide ... I suppose that should have been a warning to me. I also seem to remember a charge subsequently being brought against Pat Grove (for practising as a psychologist without training/a licence? Something to that effect) as a result of which he had to make a minor change to the training programme, for whatever that was worth. I honestly wouldn't recommend these things to anyone, least of all people experiencing emotional or psychological difficulties. The effects can be very disturbing and are not easily or quickly shaken off.