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I took the Landmark Forum in 1996. At that time, I was 49 years old, had been married for 27 years, and my two daughters were 13 and 5
years old. I was completely preoccupied with my work. I was a doctor who took care of people who had had an illness or injury affecting the brain; my work included evaluating the particular ways in
which the illness or injury had affected the person's abilities – disorders of attention, language, memory, and such. Designing rehabilitation plans to address their difficulties, and monitoring and guiding the ongoing
rehabilitation work. Over the years, I had let my friendships slip away, and over the past about five years, it had become my habit to work 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. I had gradually become less and less
involved with my wife and daughters, and by the time I took the Landmark Forum, I had almost completely withdrawn even from those relationships. I had
thought of my work as a calling, but over time, as I had become more completely preoccupied with it, it had come to seem more like a great burden. And, there were parts of it, especially writing up the evaluations
and rehabilitation plans, with which I had always struggled. A colleague at the hospital at which I was then working had, in an extraordinary generosity, taken on helping me develop a more effective approach to
getting my writing done. She had herself taken the Landmark Forum and saw that there might be something of value to me in my taking it. Over the course of about six months, we had coffee and a bit of
conversation from time to time, and she talked with me about what might be available to me in taking the Forum.In the end, trusting her, I decided to take the course. The Forum takes place over the course of 3
consecutive full days – Friday through Sunday – and the following Tuesday evening. One of the conversations that takes place during the Forum is about making people wrong – blaming other people, or blaming
yourself – when something seems to be going wrong in your life, how we fall into making people others or ourselves wrong, and the cost of doing so. Listening to this conversation, listening to what the
Landmark Forum Leader and others saw and shared from their own lives, I came to realize that I had been blaming my wife for years and years for whatever didn't work in my life, and – in blaming her – had been gradually
withdrawing from her, and everyone else, into my work. It was a shattering realization. I also saw, out of the work that was going on in the Forum, that what there was to do was simply to call my wife, and tell
her what I had discovered, and apologize. I did that. And in that single conversation with her, I transformed our relationship. Out of that conversation, I got back my relationship with a woman I had
loved for almost 30 years, and got back my relationships with my daughters – whom I treasured above everything in life and from whom I had estranged myself. And, as I went on to build an entirely different life,
with my family at the center, my work – the care of my patients – stopped being a burden and became again a vital calling. Roger C. |
