Phallocentric Champ Sells Out to Woman, Gets $2.5 M. for Condo

The New York Observer/January 27, 2012

By Max Abelson

How The Sterling Institute Finished Off My Marriage

November 20, 2010

By a former Sterling wife

Women's Weekend Registration Application

See also: Sterling Agreement for Weekend

Sterling Agreement for Weekend

See also: Women's Weekend Registration Application

"His little brainwashing fest wasn't working on me"

November 1999
By a weekend walkout

I'm writing to tell you about my experience around a "Sterling weekend" I attended in Oakland [recently]. A very good friend of mine did the weekend a couple of months ago. She lives in L.A., but did it in Oakland. She called me to tell me how much it changed her life, how wonderful it was, how she was already working on improving her relationship with her father, etc., etc.

My friend strongly recommended I do the weekend and gave me the number of another close male friend and his wife--who lives near me and also did the weekend a few years ago. She was impressed with the fact that after "the weekend" this couple, who had been divorced--got back together and remarried. So she gave me his phone number and asked me to call him. I didn't, but about a week later he called me (apparently she gave him my number). He was pretty insistent we get together, and he seemed like a fairly nice guy, so I agreed to meet him one evening to hear about it.

I finally agreed to do the weekend, without ever really questioning the odd fact that very little actual information was being offered about it. But I trusted my friend so implicitly, that I gave in and said, "Why not, it sounds pretty interesting."

I won't belabor the details of the weekend; they [essentially] parallel the descriptions I subsequently discovered on your web site. I only wish I had taken the time to investigate before I went.

On the morning of the second day (Sunday) I had an altercation with a Sterling [devotee]. At the end of Saturday night, while waiting outside for a cab to take some of us to our motel, I had to take a leak. I went back up the front steps to go inside, but all the doors were locked. So I came back down, went around the corner of the "site" and pissed in the bushes. I was spotted by the building's security person (not a Sterling guy) and he took my name and apparently reported me to the Sterling leaders.

When I arrived back on Sunday morning I was greeted by a pretty intimidating barrage from a [Sterling leader]. But I refused to back down or apologize. Instead, I used the opportunity to stand up in total defiance of him (by this time it was very clear that I had stumbled into a brainwashing [group sic]). This infuriated him and we continued to argue as the rest of the "men" filed into the auditorium.

He finally told me I couldn't come back until I apologized, acknowledging my "disrespect of the site" and promising that I would not break any more of their rules. I told him I would do neither. We glowered at each other for a bit then he said that he would leave for five minutes and return for my decision. He came back and I told him my position was unchanged. This Sterling follower then handed me back my name tag and I went back in--knowing full well that I would soon elect to leave anyway.

My purpose was to "win the battle" and show him his little brainwashing fest wasn't working on me.

A half hour into the "group meditation" I picked up and left, realizing this might be my best (and last) chance to do so. Naturally, I was confronted by the leaders who tried to convince me to stay. But to no avail--I was out the door and very soon on bus back home.

That afternoon, back home, I discovered your web site and poured over it well into the night. The following morning (Monday) my "sponsor" called me to find out what happened. I explained the story to him, venting quite explicitly and expressing my disgust with both Sterling and him. Even though I kept hanging up on him and he kept calling back. I actually enjoyed the opportunity to vent my feelings.

At one point I told my Sterling sponsor in a phone conversation that I would do everything in my power to "deprogram" our mutual friend (I e-mailed her your web site Sunday night). He then told me that under no circumstances was I to talk to her about Sterling. He kept demanding that I promise not to do that. Of course I didn't and he kept getting angrier. Finally he said that if he had to keep asking me, it would "not be over the telephone." I asked him if that was a threat and he just kept repeating--"I need you to promise me you won't talk to her." I told him to get fucked and hung up.

After reading your web site I realize he himself may be in a fairly precarious position; not only was his sponsored "man" a malcontent who "failed to live up to his commitment," but I also stood to interfere with our mutual friend's involvement.

My sponsor told me on the drive up Saturday morning that our friend has already introduced the idea to three or four of her other male friends. I have a feeling he's in for a hell of a lot of push ups [a form of discipline/punishment often meted out to Sterling's devotees] or worse!

My friend has not attended any follow up events, and I sincerely believe she has no real knowledge or understanding of what these people are up to. She seemed genuinely shocked when I described the details of my experience (I spoke with her by phone Sunday afternoon). But, I'm not sure I can trust that.

Volunteers Bring Schools More Than They Bargained For

Oakland-Based Charity Pushes its Founder's Views on the Sexes

San Jose Mercury News/September 15, 1996
By Sarah Lubman

International Community Service Day Foundation

As a new school year begins, hundreds of schools throughout California and the nation are receiving application forms from an Oakland-based charity to become one of its 1997 volunteer projects.

Some two dozen schools and community centers will be selected to get new playgrounds and coats of paint from the International Community Service Day Foundation.

If the past is any guide, they're also likely to get an extreme view of the sexes that stems from ICSD's unpublicized roots in the Sterling Institute of Relationship, a for-profit firm with a history of complaints stretching from Oakland's Better Business Bureau to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Allegations of fraud and complaints ranging from physical abuse to damaged marriages trail in the wake of the institute, which preaches that women must yield to men's egos.

Parents at Santa Teresa School in South San Jose knew nothing about those complaints when they applied to ICSD for a new playground and landscaping last year. But some were soon disturbed by the foundation's practice of reciting a creed and separating the sexes at weekly planning meetings on campus.

So was Caroline Fong, principal of 98th Street Elementary School in Los Angeles, where ICSD volunteers installed security lighting, painted murals, and put in new benches, two playing fields and a basketball court last spring.

Although they liked the results, Fong said teachers and parents were offended by the separation of men and women, group hugs and New Age emphasis on emotions.

''We thought, 'What did we get ourselves into?' '' said Fong, echoing the reactions of educators from British Columbia to Brooklyn.

The source of such discomfort stems in large part from the strong links between ICSD and the 15-year-old Sterling Institute, which share the same founder and president, A. Justin Sterling.

The institute's stated purpose is to ''transform the quality of people's relationships by defining the differences between men and women.'' It runs $500 weekend seminars, segregated by sex and filled solely by word of mouth. The weekends are based on Sterling's contention that men are simple, combative egotists, so it's entirely up to women to make relationships work.

''In a serious, long-term, committed relationship with a man, there is absolutely no room for your ego,'' Sterling writes in his 1992 book for women, ''What Really Works With Men.'' ''Get it stroked elsewhere.''

That message is not widely accepted these days. It also hasn't been personally effective for Sterling, whose wife left him two years ago.

But it's not just an extreme view of sex roles that disturbs many people. Margaret T. Singer, an emeritus professor of psychology at UC-Berkeley, and other experts on psychological manipulation said they've had reports from participants that Sterling's weekend seminars and affiliated men's and women's groups are controlling and domineering. The men's weekend ends in a naked ''rite of passage'' that sometimes gets rough, participants say.

Sterling refused several requests for an interview.

The institute gets new business through groups it sponsors for seminar graduates that Sterling and other staffers promote during the weekends. Although the groups for men and women exist mainly to recruit people for the seminars, dozens of former members say that goal wasn't made clear to them before they joined; an institute official disagrees that it wasn't clear.

Group members also must pledge to do volunteer work for ICSD, which always has focused on community service projects, but now emphasizes fixing up public schools.

Workshop participants
must agree to secrecy

Sterling's controversial weekends began as one-day workshops for women in 1979. He expanded to men in 1981, and the weekends became intense, two-day ordeals with participants required to sign lengthy waivers in advance. The release swears them to secrecy about weekend events, waives their rights to a refund and permits videotaping by the company. For the men, it warns that participants ''may threaten or engage in acts of physical violence.''

For years, people didn't know that they would be required to sign a waiver until they arrived at the seminars, which often were held in remote locations. Many graduates also said they had to fill out detailed questionnaires that included questions about their sex lives.

Lee Wheeler, a mechanic for the city of San Jose, is one of many Sterling veterans with positive memories of the weekend. Wheeler took a men's weekend in 1986, and says he learned to trust other men. Felice Chang, a marketer for a Sunnyvale technology firm, emerged from a 1994 women's weekend feeling liberated.

But dozens of graduates described Sterling's seminar format as intimidating and misleading. They tell of being verbally abused and physically threatened.

''It was supposed to be a relationship seminar,'' says Susan Frost, a Massachusetts courier who got her money back in small claims court three years ago. ''It's an abuse seminar.''

Peter Rosomoff, the institute's executive director, won't discuss the weekends' content. He said the company has distributed the liability release in advance for the last two or three years, and stopped using remote sites because people objected. The institute holds 18 to 20 weekends a year in Oakland, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Seattle and New York, although there are no records of it being authorized to do business in New York or Washington states.

Oakland's Better Business Bureau said the complaints it got about the Sterling Institute led it to drop the company as a member in 1993. Patrick Wallace, the bureau's president, said the first gripes came from female callers who were too scared to file written complaints.

''The claims were nasty enough to make me very nervous,'' Wallace said. ''Particularly when people told us, in anonymous calls, that they were afraid, brow- w beaten. My God, no wonder they don't get more complaints.''

In her letter to the bureau, Frost - then Susan Evjy - said, ''It got to the point for me that after hours of listening to (Sterling's) abuse I finally broke down into tears.''

Institute sued graduate
who criticized it on TV

Some people also said they were cowed by the Sterling Institute's 1994 breach-of-contract lawsuit against Sue Watson, a weekend graduate who criticized the firm on Canadian television. Rosomoff said the company dropped its suit against Watson in 1995 because she had no money, but Watson's lawyer said the company backed down as soon as it learned Watson was about to countersue and invoke her First Amendment rights.

Along with several anonymous calls a year, the BBB has received nine written complaints since 1992. It now rates the Sterling Institute as ''unsatisfactory.''

Rosomoff said the company cut its ties with the agency because the BBB unreasonably criticized the company for using a profanity in its seminars.

Several women have complained to the FBI as well, saying the Sterling Institute's seminars were abusive and misrepresented. The FBI's Buffalo, N.Y. office sent a letter this spring to Oakland's Better Business Bureau, saying it is investigating allegations of fraud against the company. An FBI spokesman declined to comment.

According to more than 20 people who took the seminars, the weekends follow an exhausting routine. They said male and female assistants - all group members who work for free - ordered them to be quiet and wait for hours for Sterling to show up as video cameras rolled.

When the audience got antsy and began to complain, Sterling made his dramatic appearance - voice first, over stereo speakers, then in person. Participants said he told them to share traumatic experiences, vent anger at the opposite sex, hug and compare sexual escapades before crowds of up to 200 people.

Several men said Sterling warned their groups never to confide true feelings to women, because they'll ''use it against you.'' Both sexes said their groups broke down in tears, then bonded in a dimly-lighted ceremony - a naked, drum-beating ritual for men and a candlelight procession for women.

Weekend of lecturing,
lack of privacy, little sleep

Throughout the weekend, many participants said, Sterling expounded on his views into the early morning and humiliated those who disagreed.

By Monday morning, 22 graduates said, they were disoriented after three hours of sleep a night or less for two nights in a row, followed by cold showers taken at Sterling's instruction. Many shared hotel rooms with up to three strangers, sleeping two to a bed.

There was no lunch break. Several people said they were followed to the bathroom, or allowed to go only after haggling with the women and men posted at doorways.

''It was a complete subordination of your will,'' said Jennifer Saso, a law student in Santa Cruz who took the weekend in 1986. ''It was late hours, deprivation of food, sleep, and freedom of movement, repetition, and restraints on your liberty.''

Her description jibes with accounts by 12 other women in California, New York, Massachusetts, and Canada, some of whom took the weekend as recently as last year.

At the end, graduates said Sterling exhorted them to join local groups to ''live the spirit of the weekend'' and tell others about it.

The men's weekend is wilder. In the fall of 1994, police in Spencer, Mass., picked up a Sterling weekend dropout found walking along a road at 6 a.m., shirtless and in tears. The man said he'd been blindfolded and shoved into a room of naked men. Police went to the site - a 4-H camp - and arrested Douglas W. Kilby of Toronto, a Sterling volunteer who wouldn't talk until a Sterling colleague gave him permission.

The case rattled the officer who interviewed Kilby.

''The loyalty they displayed to Justin Sterling and the institute was just phenomenal,'' said Spencer police officer Michael Cloutier. ''(Kilby) cried and sobbed, but it wasn't a remorseful kind of sobbing. It was about relaying information about the Sterling Institute.''

Kilby, who pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge, couldn't be reached for comment.

Rosomoff said the man who pressed charges was troubled, and that he was ''escorted,'' not violently pushed into the room. Police wouldn't release the man's name.

The Sterling Institute also appeared in a police report in Long Island last year. The 1995 complaint came from the family of a man who returned from a weekend so emotionally shaken that police first suspected he had been drugged, said officer John Keary. No charges were filed.

Claim of obscene
terms about women

Some people don't last the weekend. Richard Levick and Greg Casey, a professor and a U.S. Senate aide from Washington, D.C., attended the 1994 weekend in Spencer. They said they left in disgust on Sunday, fed up by both the seminar's format and by highly offensive comments Sterling made about women - including the statement, ''Women are . . .,'' using an obscene term for female genitals.

''You can't have relationships when women are the enemy. That's clearly what he was talking about,'' said Levick, a 38-year-old professor at American University.

Although two other men who took weekends in 1994 and 1995 recount the same crass comment, Sterling's right-hand man emphatically denied it.

''I've never heard him say that. He has the highest regard for women,'' Rosomoff said. He added that less than 1 percent of the institute's 30,000 graduates have complained or demanded their money back.

So how do people wind up taking a $500 course for which they can't get any advance information? The answer, graduates say, lies in the aggressive, emotional recruiting techniques of the groups known as Men's Division and Family of Women.

Early on, graduates of the weekends formed loose ''Sterling communities'' in California, New England and Canada. Members socialized, spread word about the weekends and did community volunteer work.

But in 1986 the institute divided ''Sterling community'' members into the Men's Division and Family of Women, according to Ed Collins, a Santa Clara systems analyst, and other Sterling veterans. The groups were incorporated as the non-profit Men's Division and Family of Women, Inc. in 1995 but still consult regularly with the Sterling Institute.

Rosomoff said the change came from the grass roots. But he also said the Sterling Institute gives the groups ''formats and forums'' for recruiting seminar participants - the company prefers the term ''enrollment.''

Rosomoff said no one has been misled or manipulated by the men's and women's groups, which charge annual dues of about $125.

But Aimee Pollack-Baker, a social worker in Boston, said that she joined the Family of Women partly because Sterling said it was a place for women to get the support they'd never get from men. More than 40 other former Men's Division and Family of Women members gave similar accounts.

Rosomoff disputed that: ''I tell (men) very specifically they shouldn't join if they're looking for a support group.''

In 1990, more than 100 South Bay Men's Division members from San Jose and the Peninsula quit, saying the Sterling Institute was too authoritarian and obsessed with recruiting.

Most members of the post-weekend groups don't last beyond a year. Some said they were attracted to the group by its community service, or by the prospect of a new circle of friends.

Participants cite pressure
to volunteer and to recruit

Sue Van Patten, a Santa Clara teacher, took the weekend and joined the Family of Women in 1994 after a divorce. She soon was spending four nights a week on the group due to what she describes as intense pressure to volunteer and to recruit people by invoking their trust.

''If you didn't, they'd say, 'What's your barrier?' '' Van Patten says. ''They'd go around the group and hound you until you said, 'OK.' '' She said she quit after a year because Sterling activities left her little outside life.

Both Van Patten and Renee Stevenson, a manager for a high-tech firm in Sunnyvale who joined the women's group for three months last year, said they were put off by the relentless recruitment, and by rhetoric that equates enthusiasm for the group with the right attitudes toward men.

The recruiting strategy comes through in Family of Women documents. One how-to manual used in 1994 explains why members are assigned ''buddies'' to call weekly: ''They will begin to learn about delivering the (weekend) to each other and to other women and the value found in this - life is enrollment.''

John Kimura, a teacher at Harold Holden Ranch in Morgan Hill and a 10-year Men's Division veteran, said the weekend and the Men's Division strengthened his relationship with his wife, Susan, a Family of Women member. Other marriages haven't been as fortunate.

Linda Blinder, a 47-year-old artist in Brookline, Mass., said she almost divorced her husband of 15 years over his involvement in a Sterling men's group. Serge Blinder, a bank executive in Boston, won't comment. But his wife said their marriage went downhill last year after Serge began spending more time with his Men's Division team, going to several meetings a week, and spending several hours a night on the telephone.

Linda Blinder said she found a flier for a Sterling recruiting barbecue that warned men to keep it secret, and that referred to wives as ''whining bitches.''

Soon Serge Blinder was also volunteering for ICSD and support work at Sterling weekends, Linda said, likening his time away from her and their 11-year-old son to an affair. Blinder filed for legal separation this summer but reconciled with her husband after he quit the men's group and agreed to seek therapy.

The Sterling Men Of Woodstock: A Series (Part III)

The psychology of cults and secret societies

Woodstock Times/August 15, 2002
By Paul Smart

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3

Kathryn May is a New Paltz-based psychotherapist who's had extensive experience deprogramming New Age enthusiasts who have fallen under the spell of cults. Among her clients have been a number of men and women formerly associated with A. Justin Sterling's Men's and Women's Weekends, as well as the ad hoc local "teams" that carry on his teachings. She sees them as an offshoot of "est," Werner Erhard's infamous training movement of the 1970s now known as Landmark Forum or, for those being recruited, as simply "The Forum."

"I first became aware of these groups when I had a client who asked me whether he should go to one of the Men's Weekends and I urged him to stay away because of the dangers that are always involved in such things," says May in a recent interview. "It's basically just a new incarnation of that classic bad idea wherein someone announces, "I have discovered the secret of life and if you will sit in this room with me I will impart it to you and you will have great prosperity." It's a very arrogant viewpoint that encourages people that their happiness is above everyone else's, and to undertake any means to achieve whatever they wish to achieve. It encourages evil through the destruction of friendship, trust, cooperation and any real sense of belonging to a community."

May unequivocally calls Sterling's Institute of Relationships a cult.

"Any therapy that promotes itself as the answer but won't tell you what they actually do is suspect," she says. "It's mind control and mind control is always dangerous. Getting out from under such group-supported thinking is a long, hard process. It means the person getting out has to face the fact that they've been living a fantasy, and nobody wants to know that they've been duped. Sterling presents himself as the good father these men and women are convinced they never had. And he preys on people's wish to find quick fixes for everything. He attracts people who are vulnerable."

May talks about the similarities between cult victims she's worked with. The hardest thing is to get people to actually face the complexities of life and stop wishing for only the good to come. She groups together most of the most successful New Age prophets, from the TM/Maharishi-influenced Deepak Chopra and John Grey to James Redfield of The Celestine Prophecy and Neale Donald Walsch of those Conversations With God.

"Even those right-wing Republicans who think Bush/Cheney can do know wrong are acting cultish," May says. "They all feel they've joined something big and influential and somehow gotten the ear of God. They may vary in their techniques, but it's all about power."

But why does there seem to be such a prevalence of Sterling graduates in Woodstock, New Paltz and other more affluent, seemingly progressive communities? May speaks about the affected towns' long histories of "magical thinking," including great tolerance and attraction for off-beat lifestyles and therapies.

"I just think that attitude of, "I'm doing what makes me happy and that's what's most important so you should be happy too" is not right," May says. "It's a modern sin. And snake oil salesmen like Sterling and Erhard play it up for their own prophet."

I look up some facts on both men to see where May has been coming from.

Erhard was born John Rosenberg, a Christianized Jew, in Philadelphia in 1935. In 1960 he left his wife and children to move to St. Louis, where he worked his way from a car salesman to a management trainer after culling the lessons of L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology tomes, psychology's Human Potential Movement, Alan Watts' Zen teachings and Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. He held his first Large group Awareness Training session, for nearly 1,000 paying attendees, in San Francisco in 1971. By 1991, his "est" (Erhard Seminar Training) movement had hit some 700,000 converts by the time Erhard sold his "technology" to brother Harry Rosenberg in 1991 and moved out of the country facing bad press for both his movement and a soured personal life. Since then, Rosenberg turned est into The Forum.

Sterling, it turns out, graduated from Brookline High in Massachusetts in 1961 as Arthur Kasajarian. In the 1970s he moved to California, took est, and opened a restaurant. He began to do Erhard-like corporate training until he started noticing how unhappy so many executives were about their work. In 1979 he changed his name and started giving one-day workshops for women. In 1981 he incorporated his Sterling Institute of Relationships. He's been averaging a cool million a year since from his personal appearances, enough to pay for his $10,000 a month alimony and child support load, not counting the anguish of being barred from seeing his daughter, who's accused him of molestation.

Both therapies, it turns out, utilize high entrance fees for initial training weekends. Those weekend seminars, in turn, require expert bladder control to sustain the long sessions without breaks. Trainees are kept up for hours, repeated rote information, urged to change their lives to achieve greater success in all areas of their lives. Ambition and confidentiality are stressed. And the leaders maintain behind-the-curtain, wizard-like personas.

"Everybody has a certain need for certainty," says Woodstock therapist Peter Blum of his town. "You put on a certain pair of glasses, you see the world in a certain light. It takes time to realize that uncertainty is, in fact, better. It seems to be our gestalt to seek groups, be it the volunteer fire department, the bowling league or, God help us, the KKK to find a comforting hierarchy. It's as if everybody needs to belong to a club."

Blum, who's currently finishing a book entitled Good Hypnosis, Bad Hypnosis, says that despite their initial rhetoric, many New Age groups like Sterling work on a principal of exclusivity and the stressing of differences. He mentions the old community ideal of barn building as an anachronistic alternative.

"It all comes down to finding ways of getting the things we need in life," he says. "I feel fortunate to have always had close men friends and good relationships. I think it's important to always stress what we have in common."

Looking through the history of fraternal organizations and secret societies in America, pages and pages of names and acronyms appear. They came in three great waves, the first concurrent with the upheaval of the Revolution and including the advent of Freemasonry and the Oddfellows. During he Civil War, The Order of the Knights of Pythias was founded by a Washington, D.C. businessmen seeking to re-establish a sense of brotherhood among men. He got Abraham Lincoln's blessing and a Congressional charter. Soon, other groups sprang up with equally noble causes. They included the Grange, the Benevolent & Protective Order of Elks, the now right-to-life Ancient Order of Hibernians, and a secret society now known simply as the KKK.

Eagles - another fraternal organization - started the third wave when competing Seattle theater owners got together to create an "Order of Good Things" and finished a meeting with a keg on hand. Eventually, the group grew to 1,700 communities. Six twentieth century presidents were among their members. Among their renowned deeds were the founding of Mother's Day, the plan for Social Security, and the movement towards workman's compensation insurance. Similar turn-of-the-century groups have included the Lions, Kiwanis and Rotary International.

According to Woodstock historian Alf Evers, now in his 90s, the most notorious of local men's groups he's come across in his voluminous studies was the Unified Order of Junior Mechanics, which was organized in the 1840s by local men opposed to immigration of any kind. The group faded after a number of years and then returned in the early part of the twentieth century after the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony came into existence. Artists were seen as immigrants and the Order secretly worked to make their lives miserable.

"There's always been a good amount of spiritual gullibility to the town," Evers says. He lists examples stretching from the Stillwellites of the 1820s, who he described as "confused Methodists," through the introduction of Eastern religions at Overlook Mountain House lectures in the late 1800s to the arrival of the New Age in lockstep with socialism at the Maverick.

"I remember when est swept through the town, with every one going down to hotel function rooms to allegedly better their business minds," notes poet Ed Sanders, as good a contemporary historian for the town as one can find. "Of course this was also the town where Breatharians got a following. There was this creep who came through town saying he didn't eat and lived only on air. You had to pay a fee to see this guy, but then they caught him chowing down on chicken wings at 4 in the morning somewhere in Vancouver. Turns out he lived on late night take out."

Adding in the Rajneesh crowd of the 1980s, various local dabblings into the occult and more recent fascinations with various forms of Buddhism, native shamanism and Hinduism, Sanders turns back to the lessons he learned writing about Charles Manson in his groundbreaking study, The Family. He says modern starvation ranches that charge several thousand a week to worship "fitness" only exist for those vulnerable enough to be gullible to such scams. Ditto the dark power of Yale's Skull & Bones secret society, which seems to have played a formative role in the education of our current President.

"There's always this thirst to perfect one's act," he says. "There's also long been a clubbiness among men in general, from Boy Scouts on up. It's a survival mechanism in the vale of tears, a class thing that allows some to separate from others. I think Mark Twain talked about it all as the Royal Nonesuch. It's not really dangerous until guns come along. Otherwise, it's one of the things protected under our Bill of Rights, as is the shining of flashlights into these dark lairs where the club members hide."

Soon after last week's newspaper came out I ran into a local professional at the same bar/restaurant on the rural fringes of town where I'd just interviewed women about their experiences with Sterling. The man pulls me into a corner of the crowded, festive room and starts to spill his guts about the Men's Weekend, dating in Woodstock, and the problems he's run into as an aging, single man. He confesses two stories that are particularly memorable - one about how he came home to his girlfriend's house after attending a Weekend meeting and she discovered red war paint behind his ear. The slip-up ended his relationship. The second story concerned a once-close friend who'd gotten increasingly into men's teams.

"At first it seemed to do P a lot of good," the professional in the restaurant says to me. "But he couldn't not talk to me about it all the time. It affected all his relationships."

The man pauses a moment as something passes through his eyes. He then starts ranting against the woman who broke their relationship after discovering the war paint. She drove him to it, he says. But then he stops himself again and bluntly confesses how confused it's all left him. "I just want help now," the man confesses, quietly.

I call around town and ask several people who seem knowledgeable about how groups and community work together about their experiences with Sterling men and women. Michael Berg, the visionary founder and director of Family, surprises me with his viewpoint.

"When I look at the overall impact they've had in this organization's life, the good outweighs the bad," he says. Local men's teams have helped him and others he knows with a number of community projects. They helped a lot with construction jobs at the Woodstock Youth Center. They've done invaluable work at all of Family's shelters and administrative buildings. They regularly clean local highways. And they help each other.

It's all very similar to the public work of the many fraternal organizations and secret societies that have long run parallel with that open form of society we tend to see as our only community.

"It's all about building up people's self-esteem and valuation of themselves," Berg continues. "Once a society reaches a place where everyone's doing business and no longer thinking much about socialization, other means become necessary for funneling people into good acts, which are usually only possible when undertaken by groups. Whether the group is Rotary or Kiwanis, the Lions or Fire department, they become a good way for people to bond, not only with each other but with their community."

I bring the whole messy subject up in the company of extended family and pull some words of wisdom from my mother-in-law, Linda. I show her this series. She shakes her head, recognizing a world she knows, albeit in the Midwest and not Woodstock.

"You know," she says, somewhat bemused. "It's like all those dancers who've learned their technique through Arthur Murray Dance Schools. They are great when they dance together but they just can't do it when faced with someone who hasn't had the same training. It's sad, really." I tell her how, sometime in the near future, I'm going to go back to the Sterling fire pit in the manicured forest just off the center of Woodstock. I've promised to explain myself, I tell her. I want to be a mensch.

"Mensch, schmensch," Linda says. "Take someone who knows how they dance. Don't ever try dancing alone. That's not the point."

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3

The Sterling Men Of Woodstock: A Series (Part II)

Cigars and cold consequences: Revelations of Sterling-shattered relationships

Woodstock Times/August 15, 2002
By Paul Smart

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3

Susan B. has asked that we meet at a bar/restaurant on the rural fringe of town. After years of embarrassment and trepidation, she wants to come clean about her relations with the Sterling Institute of Relationships and its local manifestation in bonafide and maverick men's teams and women's groups.

"One of the worst things this group has done is kill a lot of women's trust in dating," Susan B's saying. She's nervous and explains why. "That man over there's Sterling. All his friends have done the Men's Weekend. I can't really go out in this town without running into them, and they all seem to have a smugness, a narcissism, even, that makes it hard to go out. When I went out with one for about a year I'd find things I'd told him privately were passing around the local gossip chain within a day or two." I stop her mid-sentence and ask how that can be. Just that morning I'd been talking to K., the man who brought me to a local men's team meeting. He'd told me how much I'd hurt the men of Woodstock by breaking the sense of confidentiality that feeds the group's sense of trust and intimacy. Hadn't I understood that I was allowed to visit the team based on an implicit promise that I wouldn't discuss what I saw and heard around its firepit, not even with my wife? I could take away my feelings, but nothing more.

But, I asked him, hadn't I made it understood that I was a reporter? "I thought what was said around the fire didn't leave that space," I tell Susan B. She laughs bitterly. Just then another woman who has actually been through a Sterling weekend for women comes in. We move to a table.

Mary W. talks about the Women's Weekend she went through several years earlier. A single mother whose kids are now grown, she says she found herself drawn into plunking down $600 when an old friend suggested she try it.

"What can I say? I was vulnerable," she now recalls. "What bothered me most about the whole thing was that no one warned me what I was in for. We all gather and get taken to this large hall with a stage and then left there for hours in what looks like complete chaos. There are 200 women present. Anytime someone wants to leave the room to go to the bathroom you have to explain yourself to these cop-like women at the doors. No phone calls. Lots of papers to sign. No leaving once you're in and all this talk about confidentiality."

I tell Mary W. that as with all sources in this story, names will be juggled. We don't want to inhibit, or initiate retribution. After all, we're working with community here. "You know what freaked me out? This whole thing comes down to this one guy who's a master at what he does," Mary W. continues. "There are all these tenets, these things presented over and over again as facts that you're not supposed to write down. Finally, when everyone's getting a little crazy because it's been hours that they've been waiting for something to happen, with plants screaming that it's all just like something their husbands would do, you hear Sterling's voice booming out of speakers like the Wizard of Oz. Then he appears and starts engaging everybody's anger. Turns out he's been watching everything on hidden cameras. He got me going about the idea of committed relationships, turning everything I said around to fit what he wanted to say. Before I knew it, I was up on stage with him, crying, and everyone was thinking I was a plant."

Mary W. looks shaken by her memories. Susan B. touches her hand. Wanting to break the tension, I bring up a bit of research I did in which I discovered equal mentions, in a Yahoo search, for two other Justin Sterlings: one, a Dungeons and Dragons character, the other a renowned porn director best known for his dirty masterpiece, New Age Hookers. It breaks the discomfort of revelation.

"I've always considered these men's groups as sort of an evil thing, insidious because they mask themselves as something they're not," says Susan B. "I got to know a man who was involved. Then it turns out this man I was dating, who was kind of vulnerable to anything New Age, went to the Men's Weekend. The result was that he was never quite in the relationship and always on the phone to his teammates, doing some sort of phone tree thing and pretending he wasn't. And everything I told him in private seemed to end up in Woodstock's gossip circles before I knew it." When Susan B. takes a step further and starts calling the men she dated who had done Men's Weekends as narcissistic and misogynist, Mary W. perks up again.

"I had to eventually cut off all my friendships with these people, it creeped me out so much," she says. "I don't want to be looked at as an enemy, just as I refuse to believe or support their basic credo that the differences between the sexes need reinforcing. I believe men and women really can be friends." She pauses, gathering courage, then confides another element learned from her Women's Weekend.

"You're taught that it's the job of women to set the timing for sex, and men's role to say how the sex takes place," Susan B. says. "One of the rules is that women should wear a 'when' costume whenever they're open to having sex - something provocative. Then the men get to choose method, be it through objectification of the woman or position."

Mary W. involuntarily shudders at her own memory of such antics. "Thank God people phase out of it," she says with a throwaway laugh. "It's a cult, as far as I can tell. It's definitely a cult."

I'm talking to Bill M. about other matters when he suddenly grabs my hand and says enough's enough, he wants to thank me for writing about Sterling. It's a subject he's wanted to talk about for some time now, but his trust in fellow men has eroded. Bill M., it turns out, was once a high up in local men's team circles. He brought countless men into the Men's Weekends. He even served as Justin Sterling's driver for a spell.

"It was the stupidest thing I've done in my life," he tells me. "If the general purpose of life is to be a sensitive and thinking individual doing stuff for yourself, your family and your community, then what's the purpose of subordinating one's will to not only a group, but a group of men who have all been brainwashed by one man's cynical views of how life should be. It was all about putting money into Sterling's pocket. Think about it: $600 a person, 200 people a workshop, 30 or so workshops a year. The guy's a millionaire!"

Bill M., a successful business owner in his own right, says that he eventually had to undergo several months of therapy with a cult deprogrammer to get the bad habits he learned from Sterling out of his system. He had found himself getting ever-more aggressive. A marriage was ruined. He made bad business decisions. Worst of all, the amount of time he found himself spending with Men's team work hampered the time he was spending with his kids.

"Was there mind control involved?" Bill M. asks himself. "When you're in it, not at all. As soon as you start to pull away and realize how hard it is to separate one's thinking from all the rote pieces you've learned in the group" yes, definitely. It took me a long time to get through all that this stuff brought up in me. I guess I was vulnerable when I joined, wanting to better all aspects of my life as quickly as possible. And the men who were in it were all respectable. Now they won't talk to me. That, in itself, was hard to deal with. In my mind, there's little difference between what I saw here and what I learned when I visited Dachau a while back and talked to the kids of Nazis. They all thought they were right, too."

Before I can stop him, he's talking about the brainwashing methodology of the infamous weekends. "I went with someone who knows this field well, who books New Age speakers, and he said he's never seen anyone as good as Sterling," he says. "The way things work, you're up to 2 a.m. the first night, asked to leave your analytical mind behind. Then you're back up at 6 doing all these exercises. For long spells you have to listen to Sterling's right-hand-man, a real bore of a guy. Eventually, around 3 a.m. on the final stretch, Sterling says something to the tune of, 'If we're really going to talk about relationships we're going to have to talk about sex,' and he hands out like 200 cigars and three guys get chosen out of the audience and led onstage to discuss the best sex of their lives in full detail. Sterling starts talking about how, if a woman really loves a man, she shows him so through blow jobs."

Bill M. turns me on to Jerry L., another stalwart of the local scene who I'd met at a number of Woodstock parties over the years. He tells me how scared he got at his weekend, with Sterling asking if anyone had questions. Those who raised their hands had glow-in-the-dark nooses put around their necks and were led away into a basement.

"After about two hours, we were led upstairs, again in single file, left hand to left shoulder," Bill M. says to me. "The door opened and I saw 188 naked men in war paint dancing crazily in manmade fog, their leader banging a ram-headed scepter rhythmically against the floor. Someone wordlessly indicated that we were to strip and enter the gauntlet line, which Sterling described as a rebirth canal, where everyone struck me as I passed beneath. One man in war paint jumped into the 'tunnel' and fiercely growled at me. For the first time in my life, I punched someone."

Both Jerry L. and Bill M. describe the aftermath of the weekend as traumatic. For Jerry L, there were weeks of anonymous calls from men calling him "pussy" and talking about "consequences."

For Bill M., the first days following the weekend seemed to verify Sterling's prediction that he would henceforth have great sex because of what he'd learned. So he started applying Sterling rules to his life: spending a half-hour listening to his wife each day without interrupting her; finding a simple thing to do for her to let her know he loved her. Yet along with the good rules came others: daily phone calls to buddies and team captains, meetings, the writing of chain letters, recruitment.

"If you were late for anything, if you missed protocol, there were always consequences," Bill M. says. "If you didn't make the grade you were thrown off the team. Within a year, the turnover was pretty total. Within a year I started to wonder what I was doing wasting all my time doing this stuff. All this talk of loyalty and they're kicking people out. All this talk of confidentiality and they're telling you how to think, then talking about you behind your back. Once I left the group none of these men would speak to me again. I'd joined because I respected them. They were important people in Woodstock. I look at it all as evil now, as pure and utter evil."

"The final straw for my marriage was when he took the kids off for one of his men's retreats," says Joan F., who's chosen to meet me in another bar/restaurant on the rural fringes of town. She, too, has pointed out men she knows who have been through Sterling. None acknowledge her presence. So she talks.

"I didn't know what was up until the boys came back and wouldn't look me in the eye when I asked them how things had gone with their father," she continues. "They're under ten, mind you. Finally, the youngest breaks into tears and tells me how they were taken in a car to some place far away, and not to their dad's friend's house. They were told they weren't to play with girls. Girls weren't allowed. Turns out the whole weekend was spent with the dads telling their sons what being a man was like. The kids were sworn to secrecy but they were scared because their father and the other men were all swearing a lot and shouting. The littlest told me he was told specifically not to tell me anything. Need I say how angry this made me?"

We are joined at our table by Agnes L., who's given up on dating Woodstock men because of her run-ins with Sterling graduates. I tell them about Susan B. and Mary W. Everyone laughs, talking about the lines they've heard, the similarity of approaches from those in the teams.

"I knew I was being discussed in these teams every time I went out with one of these guys," Agnes L. says, tossing her hair back defiantly when someone catches her eye from the bar. "And I mean discussed in infinite detail. And these guys included health professionals I had to go to in the community, business owners."

"You want creepy," Joan F. chirps in. "When I suggested we go to couple's therapy he had to check with his men's group first. They said it would be okay but then he refused to talk about any of that side of his life in the sessions and believe me, it was taking up a good 40 percent of his time by then."

"You know they do garage sales for the groups?" Agnes L. counters. "Everything had this sinister yet totally mundane feel to it. Everything they say and do is so damned important. What happens in the group stays in the group, like, and yet what's said in our relationship or your marriage is open game to make it through half the male population of Woodstock or New Paltz without a second thought."

Joan F. looks serious a moment and then starts talking. "Sure, there's a lot of narcissism in this town, maybe from the recording scene, maybe the art," she says. "But to separate sexes? It's infantile. If there's anything in our world we can take for granted and not work on it's the fact that men and women are different. Why base a cult on that? There are so many more important things we can work on in our relationships and our communities. We learn this in high school and college. We gain hobbies and interests and political beliefs. Now to flatten it all with this stuff?"

"It's cowardice," replies Agnes B. "But it's also sad, really. It's a cry for help."

I think back to my talk with K. after the first installment of this series came out.

"What you did was absolutely not in line," he said, as angry as he said he was hurt. "You were to honor our confidentiality. Now, a lot of men in this town have been hurt. You've mixed up definitions of confidentiality and secrecy and broken these men's sense of trust. If we had known what you were going to do we would have asked you to leave."

I told K. I had been straight about my being a journalist, through and through. I don't leave my analytical mind behind. Anywhere. And more than confidentiality, I'm a proponent of openness. And I love my wife. She's my best friend.

"You let your fellow men down," K. continued. "I've gotten calls from some very prominent men in this community. You've hurt them."

He asked me if I'd come to explain myself to the Sterling Men of Woodstock. I said I would, in time. First I had things to do with my wife and community. I had a series to finish, I told K. But I'd be back to explain myself. I'd definitely be back.

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3

The Sterling Men Of Woodstock: A Series (Part I)

A line in the dirt: Woodstock's Sterling society redefines
the modern man

Woodstock Times/August 15, 2002
By Paul Smart

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3

K, my intermediary, is standing beside me next to a cold firepit in manicured forest just off the center of Woodstock. I've reached him through B, who'd been mentioned by M as an accessible alumnus of the local men's group scene. K's explaining, in full daylight, the ways in which his experience of Justin Sterling's $600 a pop Men's Weekend has helped him find and nurture his male power, which in turn has helped him in all his relationships, from marriage to dear old dad.

K says that the next Men's Weekend is coming up June 2 in Newburgh. They only occur twice a year on the East Coast. He and the other men around the firepit don't think I'll be able to write about local men's teams and what they mean unless I can feel what they have felt.

I'd heard these guys tend to proselytize. A couple of local musicians told me they'd started offshoot men's groups to avoid such evangelism and focus better on manly pursuits. They had warned that official Sterling Men's teams tended to spend inordinate amounts of time trying to identify and lure big men of the community to pony up bucks for the big weekends.

I ask where the $600 goes. They tell me, with forced laughs, that Sterling himself pocketed all the money. I asked whether it was true, as I'd heard, that the weekends involved little sleep or food, lots of aggression and competition, naked body painting, berating, and the occasional fist fight.

"Everything that goes on in the men's weekend is protected by vows of confidentiality," K says. "We couldn't tell you what goes on there if we wanted to and besides, it's an experience you need to feel in your gut to understand, otherwise it can fall prey to over-intellectualization."

T, a boy in his late teens who has been talking about problems he's had with his sister, says the best thing about the men's weekend is the testosterone power one pulls from spending so much time in a room with 200 other men all being real men.

The leader of this team of men, who had originally invited me to join him and the others on a trip to Manhattan to actually hear Sterling speak, steps forward to explain things. "The purpose of the men's weekend is to engage in the process of locating the source of your power by discovering and dissolving the barriers between you and manifesting that power so that you can experience total freedom as only a man can and with that freedom be the man you've always wanted to be," he says. Everyone in the circle nods their heads in agreement.

I note that the statement sounds rote, as if learned. O repeats what he's just said again: "The purpose of the men's weekend is to engage in the process of locating the source of your power by discovering and dissolving the barriers between you and manifesting that power so that you can experience total freedom as only a man can and with that freedom be the man you've always wanted to be."

Another man, Q, says men need to repeat things exactly to get them right. Otherwise, we lose objectivity. Someone else, F, explains things to me in further nuts and bolt fashion. "To get things right a man needs directions."

"Once you decide to do the weekend it's an unalterable decision," K says.

Q shows me what to do if I choose to go. He suddenly cups his testicles in both hands, bends over double and violently bellows out the fiery man words "Fuck It!" with all his might.

K draws a line in the dirt with his Rockport-clad foot.

"Don't worry about the money. We'll find ways of helping you raise that," he says. "As with all of us here, I am certain you will gain immeasurably from doing the weekend. You will strengthen your knowledge of what it is to be a man. I have brought you here, Smart, believing you to be a good man who will not do his fellow men wrong."

The men around the firepit in the tamed wilds of Woodstock all make honest, heartfelt eye contact as I scan their faces. They range in age from late teens to early sixties. I know the private histories of several who have battled depression and breakdowns, creative hiatuses and marital discord in recent years. One of my colleagues here at the Times was once among them. Their sincerity almost aches.

"So tell us, Smart," K asks, his voice shifting slightly from New Age support to pre-teen taunt. "You ready to cross the line and say fuck it? You ready to be a man?"

The Sterling Men's Division teams of Woodstock have been the subject of much talk around town ever since their arrival in the area during the early 1990s. According to current members of two teams of a dozen men each, as well as watchers and ex-members, between two hundred and three hundred local men have gone through over the past ten years. There are also women's teams and Women's Weekends, the last of which took May 5.

I'd had an interest in this field for years. As a kid, I remember James Dickey coming to our home and propositioning my mom, then going on to fame as the author of that early 1970s bulwark of manliness, Deliverance. Or Robert Bly in a poncho declaiming the wonders of maleness over the kitchen table where I noshed, all of eleven, with my brother and sister. It was right around that time when all the professors on the campus where my dad taught hiring coed babysitters so they could all run off on "Extra Sensitivity Training" weekends.

As an adult, I'd tried reading Iron John, Bly's 1990 treatise on male mentorship and the need for guys to get back in touch with their inner wild men. I was having trouble dating, finding work, maintaining happiness as I descended into middle age. I grew uncomfortable with my father and brother. Thinking about myself in male terms seemed to narrow the field of options, at least by half.

But it was never something I really wanted to act upon. For one, I was never asked to join a group. I guess my friends and I are not the team type. Chalk it up to being a writer. I like to observe and comment, to visit but not stay.

I explain all this in the Woodstock woods before the men's team who have invited me in and drawn a line in the dirt for me to cross. They'd asked more questions of me than I of them. As anyone who's tried his hand at reporting knows, it's hard to keep track of things when one's own mouth is moving. Self-consciousness invades one's senses, clouding them. At least, I thought to myself, I'm offering myself to them as much as I'm taking a story from what I'm encountering.

Was there a man I wanted to honor that afternoon? I tell about my Alaskan stepfather, Chris, and how we had to pull the plug on him last fall. Are there any pressing issues in my life as a man? I explain how I'm newly married, about to go through a public ceremony honoring our elopement last November. I worry that I hold on to jealousies when they're unwarranted. I'm not quite comfortable in my new skin.

F says I should trust my gut. My wife's probably cheating. Everyone nods.

No, no, no, I say. That's not what I was talking about. I worry about my worries and have raised myself to honor my doubts. This revelation results in team silence.

What kind of story do I want to write? I explain how many people in our community have opinions about the Sterling groups, having heard from ex-members or angry women about them. Some say they're a cult, espousing an abdication of male responsibility in relationships. There have been documentaries and news exposes about Men's Weekends and EST tie-ins and not-for-profit scams and corporate training programs. I wanted to set the record straight by observing a meeting.

The men around the dormant fire explain how teams and the men in them, as well as the results of the weekends, can be both good and bad, as men are. They tell me that everything I've heard is true, but not because of doctrine. "Men are kind, men are assholes and jerks, men are gentle and loving, they steal and can kill," O says, quietly but firmly. "If a relationship is broken because a man has found his power after attending a Men's Weekend, it means there was already something wrong with that relationship."

Men talk about how important they've found it to be with other men. The stressing of confidentiality is to protect the intimacy of teams. Men can then feel free to share everything they can't share elsewhere in their lives within them. I ask about marriage. K tells me it's different, that he hadn't felt this strong about himself as a man since he was a kid, playing team sports and hanging with his buddies out on Long Island. He saw it as a substitute for the military service he never had. Everyone uses last names to strengthen these team roles.

Q confides that his own marriage got better after his weekend, although there were some rocky moments at first. "It was like I came back a different man. She had married me when I was still a feminist," he says. "It took her a while to get used to my new strength. That can be a problem."

T asks O why the trip to Manhattan was cancelled. O explains that Sterling had called it off for a couple of hours in the afternoon for some reason and new plans had been made. Then why did the other team go, calling us pussies, T continues? O says he will talk more about it later. Not now.

F stands forward and breaks a growing tension by explaining to me what sort of power it is that the Men's Weekend unleashes. "I used to go into Stewart's for coffee each morning and stand in line with everyone and it was as though the guy or girl behind the counter couldn't see me," he says with complete conviction and utter heartfelt seriousness. "After my weekend I came into the Stewart's and it was as though the whole world had changed and I was Mike Tyson. My very power commanded attention."

I stare at the line in the dirt and try to remember whether Stewarts' was self-serve.

"I'm gonna have to ask my wife about this," I say.

No one calls me pussy-whipped. No one says I'm a wimp. I explain that the weekend they want me to "step into the adventure" just happens to fall between my wedding celebration and our honeymoon. K starts to note how my wife might appreciate that, what with the concurrent rise in my testosterone level that could be expected. But O quiets him. He says they can all appreciate my honesty and besides, it's not recommended that anyone try major life changes too soon after a Men's Weekend.

Everyone's asked to name a "win" from the past week. T talks about how he's finally convinced his sister to do the weekend. K speaks about beating a traffic ticket. Q has just finished a six-month contracting job. F's nephew just participated in his first track meet and seemed to finally take to a sport and show his killer instinct, something F had been pushing him to do for over a year. O talks about some inner victory having to do with man's need to recognize and honor his own bullshit, but I don't remember it well because I was to speak next.

I talk about my writing, about finally feeling confident about it. I talk about a long talk I'd had with my wife the night before in which we'd spoken about spirituality and leaps of faith. What was nice was the way we stopped trying to make points and just listened to each other. I wondered whether they were picking up on my bullshit now.

F steps away from the firepit and urinates, the sound of Woodstock traffic in the background quiet.

T. puts his arm around my shoulders and squeezes. O does likewise from the other side. K starts to sum up the three hours we've just spent around what would normally have been a lively fire. He talks about how he's learned how things can change. That morning the plan had been to go to Manhattan with thirty-or-so Woodstock Men to hear A. Justin Sterling, author of What Men Really Want, address his followers. Now here a few of them stood around the fire they stood around at least once a week. Only it was still light. He spoke about what a joy it had been to meet me, Smart, and explain what the Men's teams were about. To look back over the experience of the Men's Weekend that had so changed his and the other men's lives. He said how he'd looked deeply into himself this evening and learned still more about his troubled relationship with his father via the mirrors of other men's experiences. He acknowledged the hurt he felt before coming to the meeting when his six-year old son turned down his offer to come to the men's circle and go with his mom to watch Disney videos instead.

Touching stuff, K's summing up. After a good ten minutes, longer than I've had any man's hands on me outside of a doctor's office, everyone puts their open palms over the imaginary fire and made a whooping sound that crescendoed as they raised their hands and made fists.

We step back over the line in the dirt K had made earlier.

"So, Smart. You going to say Fuck It and step into the adventure?"

I decline. No one pushes me further.

"You want to join us tonight and make bread for the women's weekend over at my house?" K asks. "All men. It should be fun."

No, I reply. I want to get back to my wife and tell her all I've seen and felt. But I now know better than to tell them this. These men, after all, are really trying.

"I got work to do," I say. "Maybe next time." ++

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3

Bay Area Service Foundation's Mixed Legacy

Some Parents at South S.J. Elementary School Uneasy with Group's Rites, Ties

San Jose Mercury News/April 17, 1996
By Sarah Lubman

At first, the offer of free help seemed like the answer to the dreams of an elementary school still trying to recover from a devastating fire.

With the help of a parent, a Bay Area non-profit group called the International Community Service Day Foundation chose Santa Teresa Elementary School in South San Jose as one of its annual projects. Next month, hundreds of volunteers plan to build a new playground and library shelves, landscape, paint murals and help spruce up the school that was damaged in an arson fire in December 1994.

After nearly two months of regular contact with the Oakland-based organization, however, some Santa Teresa parents now want out.

They say they're uncomfortable with the tone of ICSD's Saturday morning team-building sessions for volunteers at which parents and teachers have been asked to form a circle, repeat a ''creed'' that includes belief in ''miracles,'' and join the foundation for a fee that ranges from $5 (student) to $1,000 (''Miracle Maker'').

''I don't trust them,'' said parent Joyce Collier, who went to one meeting with a neighbor. ''I won't go back.''

Peter Rosomoff, a member of ICSD's board and the group's treasurer, said the 10-year-old foundation has no agenda beyond fostering a sense of community.

''We're not there to promote ourselves,'' he said. The group has led projects in more than 250 communities throughout North America, mostly in public schools.

And Santa Teresa Principal Linda Barrientos said she's sympathetic to the foundation's stated goal and supports its efforts.

Certainly, ICSD has left good impressions in many other districts. Carol Myers, a San Jose Unified School District trustee and an East Side Union High School district teacher, recalled the foundation's 1991 work in East Side as ''pretty positive stuff.'' Trustee Kent Bates, of the Franklin McKinley School District in San Jose, said that while the group's meetings at Hellyer School sometimes were ''a borderline revival,'' the work they accomplished - repairing water fountains and repainting the school's exterior - was ''terrific.''

Yet Santa Teresa parents aren't the only ones to raise questions about the group.

Asked to leave

Three school districts have asked the foundation to leave in the past 10 years, including two in Canada, Rosomoff said.

In addition, officials from three Silicon Valley districts where ICSD has been active say that although their schools benefited, they developed qualms about the group's approach. A school official at one of the Canadian districts say they also were troubled by the group's links to a for-profit firm called the Sterling Institute of Relationship.

The Sterling Institute, which shares an Oakland address with ICSD, was founded in 1978 by Arthur J. Kasarjian. Kasarjian changed his name in 1979 to A. Justin Sterling, according to court records. Sterling teaches $500 men's and women's weekend seminars based on his philosophy - outlined in a 1992 book - that since men are ''slaves to their egos,'' women are ''100 percent responsible for the success of their relationships.''

''At any moment, a man can be a 'killer' or a 'hero,' '' wrote Sterling, who is president and founder of both the Sterling Institute and ICSD. '' . . . It is up to you to bring out the hero in your man.''

At least two former Sterling participants have likened the institute to a cult, and say it pressures seminar graduates to stay involved and recruit members. Two cult monitoring groups, the Spiritual Counterfeit Project in Berkeley and the Chicago-based Cult Awareness Network, said they have received a small but steady stream of complaints about the seminars.

[Note: WARNING! The Cult Awareness Network (CAN) was recently bankrupted and bought up by Scientology. We strongly recommend you do not contact them for assistance.]

Most vocal critic

Sterling's most vocal critic is Sue Watson, a Canadian secretary whom the Sterling Institute sued in 1994 after she publicly criticized the group and blamed it for destroying her marriage. The suit, filed in state court in Alameda County, alleged that Watson breached a confidentiality agreement with the Sterling Institute and revealed trade secrets. Sterling, who Rosomoff said was traveling and not available for an interview, dismissed Watson's account in court documents as ''misleading and false.''

The Sterling Institute dropped the suit in 1995 because it was ''too expensive'' and Watson had no money, said Rosomoff, who is also a Sterling Institute director. He added that the institute doesn't force recruitment, but ''encourages referrals.''

But Watson's comments also took on the non-profit foundation. In a court statement and a recent interview, Watson called ICSD - then named the Sterling Community Service Foundation - a ''front group . . . which tries to get good publicity for Sterling'' through community projects.''

Watson's statements are ''lies,'' Rosomoff said. He added that ICSD, whose federal tax statements show no financial support from the Sterling Institute, explicitly warns members not to mention or promote the for-profit firm.

Rosomoff acknowledged that while part of ICSD's creed reflects Sterling's philosophy - ''There are differences between men and women which we honor, value and respect'' - the fact that so many ICSD volunteers are Sterling seminar graduates simply reflects their desire to help and isn't intended to promote the institute.

But some school districts tell a different story.

Joan Beck, assistant superintendent for the Coquitlam School District in British Columbia, said foundation volunteers tried to recruit parents to join the Sterling Institute while helping to fix the grounds of a local elementary school in 1993.

The volunteers were ''trying to encourage parents to become involved and take seminars at $500 a weekend,'' Beck said. The foundation left at the district's request, although members kept calling parents, she added.

Rosomoff acknowledged there were problems in Canada, and said some foundation volunteers ''were being over-enthusiastic'' about the Sterling Institute. ''It happens,'' he said. ''We can't control what people do.''

Unaware of complaints

Both Rosomoff and Gwen Tillman, ICSD's executive director, say they aren't aware of recruitment attempts or complaints in other school districts.

But officials in three Santa Clara County school districts have expressed reservations about having ICSD volunteers back.

In 1993, the foundation painted and helped install playground equipment at two East Palo Alto schools. Michele Murnane, a project coordinator for the Ravenswood City School District, said one employee was repeatedly invited to what appeared to be Sterling-related activities, including a ''male bonding'' weekend.

Murnane said parents felt pressured to form a circle and praise ICSD. ''I wouldn't want to do the experience again,'' she said.

Officials in San Jose's Alum Rock and Berryessa Union school districts also said they had numerous questions from parents and teachers about ICSD, and weren't sure they would want the group back. Alum Rock prohibited ICSD from soliciting people to join the foundation during its work there last year, said Linda Latasa, the district's assistant superintendent for business. The group complied, she said.

''We were concerned that it could have a religious affiliation,'' she said. Foundation director Rosomoff denied the group has any religious identity.

The principal of Berryessa's Northwood School wrote Justin Sterling an effusive thank-you letter after the group helped spiff up the grounds in 1994. But Patricia Stelwagon, an assistant superintendent in the Berryessa district, said more than a dozen parents complained about the group, and she's not sure she would want them back. The principal could not be reached for comment.

''Schools are always so vulnerable, because we need so many things,'' Stelwagon said. ''We're not good at saying, 'What do you want from us?' ''

Some Santa Teresa parents are asking that very question.

Collier and seven others who attended recent ICSD meetings or fund-raisers say they are uneasy about being asked to join the non-profit group.

Foundation officials say membership donations are split evenly between Santa Teresa and the foundation, and will help fund Santa Teresa's $120,000 project.

Several parents also said they were bothered by the predominance of outside volunteers at the meetings, along with group hugs and what they viewed as odd, sometimes spiritual exercises.

Robin Mingione said she was particularly put off when a meeting leader told her to shut her eyes, imitate a sheep and migrate toward other people making the same sound.

'Wasn't real comfortable'

''I kept my eyes open, didn't make a noise and went toward the people who were baa-ing,'' she said. ''I wasn't real comfortable.''

Tillman, ICSD's executive director, said the animal-imitation exercise was probably intended as an ''ice breaker,'' and that some longtime ICSD activists may hug each other out of familiarity.

Mingione and parent Karen Beach say they plan to ask Barrientos next week to either cut ties with ICSD or ask the group to change its approach.

Barrientos said she contacted three principals in Oakland, Franklin McKinley and Alum Rock districts who had prior contact with ICSD and none had misgivings about the group. She did acknowledge that she and several parents were ''taken aback'' by the school's first meeting with ICSD.

But, she added, ''I really think the goal of the project outweighs any unusual aspect of the meetings.''

"Sterling made my husband a Neanderthal sexist"

September 2002
By a former Sterling spouse

I am extremely angry that the Sterling Institute of Relationship took priority over my marriage! At one point my husband was going to two meetings per week, until 11:30 PM. He also had a division meeting once a month. We never went anywhere as a couple.

The men in Sterling seem very dysfunctional.

In my husband's group one guy's wife lived across the street from him with the kids for years, but was not divorced. All the husband did was constantly attend Sterling meetings, but nothing changed. His wife and kids were still living across the street.

Another wife of a Sterling man I met just ran off to Mexico. And all he did, was go to more Sterling meetings.

One member of my husband's team was always unemployed.

Then there was the arrogant, obnoxious controlling attorney, whose wife left him too.

The Sterling approach seems to be torturing women through emotional abuse and/or ignoring them to the point of insanity. Many women simply leave, rather than go crazy. But Sterling men will explain this away by saying, "All women are wacko anyway."

It seems to me that Sterling men must be very emotionally needy. They also appear to have some kind of addictive, compulsive-obsessive disorder.

The official Sterling Team T-shirt has a caveman with a club saying, "Hang onto your balls," in big letters. It's just a weird, sick, group and I blame them for the failure of my marriage.

Once I bought my husband $300 tickets for a show on our anniversary. He said the Team would be "mad at him" because he'd miss his "Big Stick" camp-over with them if he went. He actually did go camping with his Team rather than staying with me for our first anniversary.

Sterling says, "Keep your commitment to the Team." But it seems to me that his family was almost always the last thing on his list of commitments. Shouldn't a man's family be more of a priority?

My husband didn't show up for his own birthday party. Instead there was another camp-over and then a night of beer drinking with the Team.

He'd actually run in terror rather than be late for his Team, but it was always OK to leave me waiting for hours.

Returning my phone calls also appeared to be a chore. It was as if he would somehow be degraded for doing this. But if someone from his Team called, he would phone him back immediately.

Sterling men are like little boys, and wives become their mommies.

I underwent a biopsy and the doctor instructed me not to drive myself home. However, I did anyway because my Sterling husband went straight from work to his Team meeting. He didn't even call. When I tried to locate him, his Team members just laughed at me.

I later found notes in my husband's office from Sterling meetings that said, "If your are stupid enough to cheat on her, don't be stupid enough to let her find out." And there were other pearls of wisdom such as, "Give them a good fuck" and "Never let them win an argument." Then I read what seemed like their primary directive, "Don't be pussy whipped."

Sterling Women tried to induct me. But all they did at their meetings was rehash past marriages. They needed to move on! And it seemed like they worshipped Justin Sterling too.

No woman should go through what I did. My feelings meant nothing. The Team was all my husband lived for. No matter what I did, it didn't make a difference. I worked, cleaned, cooked, did the laundry, kept my figure and was always faithful. But still no respect. I fought to hold my marriage together, but in the end it was beyond hope.

Finally, I just couldn't take it any more. It was just too hurtful. I told my husband that it was his Team, or me. He chose Sterling. This organization made my marriage hell. Sterling men act as if women are all stupid and not worth hearing. And a Sterling man listens to his Team, not his wife. Sterling men treat women like dirt.

At first your Sterling man may seem cute, but men involved with Sterling are sick. Remember they think they're normal, but they aren't normal. It's like drugs to them. They will choose the Team over a person, family, or child. I hate Justin Sterling and his organization. Sterling made my husband a Neanderthal sexist. In my opinion Sterling men are brainwashed and they need deprogramming.

Run for the hills, women! This is a warning. I wish someone had warned me. Leave while you are sane or they will drive you crazy. They won't stop, but you can stop hurting. Leave while you can.

"Stay away from men in the Sterling men's group"

July 2001
By a former girlfriend of a Sterling man

I am a victim of the Sterling men's group. I have read about other women and men on this website and can see that I am not the only one once involved with someone in this group.

I was fortunate or unfortunate to have met a wonderful man five years ago. He came to my home town and rode in like a "knight on a white horse." Everyone in my life, family, friends and most of all me, thought he was too good to be true. Well, the first six months of our relationship he was wonderful, but slowly things started to change.

The first sign of something strange was one day I could not find him. My phone was gone too. Finally I found him in my basement hiding with the telephone and talking really loud. When he was finished and came up the stairs I asked him why he was hiding with the telephone. He said then that he belonged to a men's group and needed some privacy, that their conversations could get loud and he did not want to disturb me. I thought this was very strange--to hide and talk on the phone. What could be so private?

From then on, it began. More secrets and more phone calls. Long hours on the phone with these men and constant meetings. He informed me that every Saturday for two hours in the morning there would be phone calls to these men and he would never miss one--no matter what. When we went on vacation together he had to make a two hour call. It went on. He was not working, but still went to meetings constantly and began to treat me badly.

He became very discouraged because there was no men's group in my area. He tried desperately to recruit my friends (males) into the group, but did not succeed. He quit his job and said that he did not like working there any longer and told me, five days before moving, that he was going to another state for a new job opportunity. I was shocked, but there was nothing I could say to keep him with me. Even though he said he loved me more than any other woman he had ever met.

He went away. I had found out later that he moved because there was a large group of Sterling men there. His new job was nothing like he had described and his employer said he was gone a lot and thought he was spending all of his time driving to see me. Not true, he was in men's meetings in the middle of the day, on the phone with the men for hours and recruiting men for the men's weekend.

Well, that job did not work out so he moved again and now is in California where there is an even bigger Sterling men's group. He spends at least 10-12 hours a week working with the men and their group. He does not have a job. It seems to me that he spends too much time with this group.

He once said that he wanted to get married and have a family, but never showed any type of commitment. He even became physically violent when we talked about the group and blamed me for everything that went wrong in our relationship.

I must say to women, stay away from men in the Sterling men's group. They will use you and hurt you in the end. The men's group is first in their lives and you and your family will always be second. They truly believe in the "Caveman theory" and will treat you like a second class citizen.

"High powered lights"

December 2000
By a former member of Sterling's "Family of Women"

I attended the Sterling Weekend many years ago and was involved in its so-called "Family of Women," which at that time had only recently been formed. I was a member for about a year or so after my weekend experience.

The information posted at your site is accurate. But I did not see any information regarding the high powered lights, which were used around the perimeter of the room during the weekend I attended.

During the course of the weekend I attended there came a point when I was becoming quite disoriented. It seemed like I had entered an awake/sleep stage. It was at this point that Justin Sterling became extremely angry with one woman who was wearing sunglasses. He belittled her--screaming at the top of his lungs about her "attitude" and the fact that she was wearing sunglasses. I remember this so clearly, because she answered, "the lights are hurting my eyes!" The thought ran through my mind, what lights? At that moment I woke up and clearly remember looking around the room (for the first time in hours) and realized that there were large lights (like those used in movie productions) beaming down from around the entire perimeter of the room.

A small alarm bell went off in my head at that moment and I resolved to stay alert for the remaining time of the weekend.

The reason I mention this episode is that upon my return from the weekend a few of my friends became interested in my experience and they eventually all went to the weekend too. I asked them a couple of years, after this whole episode of my life was over, if they recalled the lights, but none of them did. I have often wondered if this was some element related to coercive persuasion techniques, which was being used.

My final weeks involved with this group sounded off yet more alarms--some of them were:

While waiting at the airport for a friend to return from the weekend I was standing close to some men from the men's group. They had not noticed me and when the women from the group started arriving in the terminal I heard one of the men say, "Thank God, they've got that look back in their eyes again. Nothing like a weekend to get her back into line."

While attending a Family of Women session led by Justin Sterling in my home town, a woman had the nerve to say that she felt "uncomfortable" about recruiting women who were not ready, or could not afford to take the weekend. Justin screamed at her, "This is not a democracy!"

There were many other incidents. I came to a realization about Sterling, which is--for a group, which preaches about relationships, they actually destroy them [sic]. I also realized that since becoming involved with them I had seen very few of my non-Sterling friends and spent very little time with my family.

I left the group (with no problem) and then spent the next two to three years working to get my friends out!

Due to the schedule and tone of the "Women's Weekend, I would not like to repeat that experience.

I am disturbed to see that this group still exists and that they have upcoming weekends scheduled. In my opinion if anyone from this group asks someone to attend one of their "open houses," or to enroll in their weekend they should say no. That is, do yourself a favor, save your money and just say no!

"Commenting from the Outside"

September 2001
By a sister of a Sterling "Family of Women" member

My sister has been involved in the Sterling organization for many years and it seems like a cult. Anything that encourages sleep deprivation, takes a percentage of income from it's members and negates their families, is a cult in my book. Her "Family of Women" (FOW) are generally a collective of sullen-faced miserable types, and they dominate her every thought and choice.

At our family events, they are always present and try to recruit us. I put my foot down once and said, "This is Christmas, we are trying to enjoy the holiday together as a family. Please, stop marketing this crap to me. My life is quite fulfilled, thank you."

When her kids were small and really needed her, the FOW would call meetings arbitrarily during the week, pulling her away from her children. The FOW did not seem to care. My sister was vulnerable and they took advantage of that. Her kids have obviously suffered from that neglect. I have read her Sterling materials and the rhetoric used seems almost Draconian.

My sister has lost her sense of humor, much of her connection to her children and the respect of her immediate family. I spend as little time as possible with her because I cannot bear the usual gaggle of Sterling women who are constantly present in her life. She is like a sheep now. And she certainly does not appear any happier since finding Sterling.

But I am commenting from the outside.

I worry about organizations like Sterling that prey on women and men in this manner.

"After the initial Sterling weekend, there's something called 'Point Team'"

"My Thoughts and Experience With the Sterling Institute of Relationship."

May 3, 2007
By a former "Point Team" member

After taking a couple sessions with an intuitive life coach, he encouraged me to get involved with men, so as to get more in touch with my masculinity. This included going on a weekend initiation at the Sterling Institute of Relationship. This is my experience...

Without getting into all the gory details, the weekend is made up of Justin Sterling teaching and instructing men how to be men with varying techniques, mostly derived from EST, a 1970's pop-psychology fad. It's all in a very militaristic environment, with punishments for late arrival, needing permission (and not always getting it) for washroom breaks, and at the end, a rite of passage that requires everyone to strip naked and bang on drums.

You may very well get in touch with your inner power, but how real is it? I felt very empowered initially, and went to weekly meetings of other men who also attended a weekend. It's all very secretive and requires commitment to absolute confidentiality, adding to the sense of belonging and bonding with other men.

Then the wheels fell off.

As hindsight is always 20/20, I became angry at myself for allowing such influence into my life, but I'm getting ahead of myself. The particular small group I was part of where part of a larger, provincial group. This small group was formed by a number of men wanting more of a spiritual slant on the whole thing, as opposed to just the cave-man element. The problem was that in their allegiance to the larger group, they maintained much of the same rituals, jargon, meeting style, and rules. The more time went on, the less I got out of it. It was more of a whining session, with men going over the same issues week after week.

After the initial Sterling weekend, there's something called "Point Team", which is meant to ground you in the principles learned from the weekend. It's an 8-week course of meetings and activities, kicked off by another initiation rite. It was in that initial evening that the end began...

In essence, you're treated like a 17 year-old kid sent to military school to be broken by humiliation and abuse. It's an outside meeting with a crowd of Sterling adherents, and two or three leaders, guiding us through the night. Throughout the evening, it's "single file - no talking"; everything is timed with a stop-watch. We're told to come up with a team name, but because we won't conform to the crowd's pressure to take on their version of it, we're ordered to dunk our heads in buckets of freezing, polluted river water, as well as the river itself. Plus, it's pouring rain and everyone but the team-mates have rainwear. It's only one or two degrees above freezing. We were also coerced into doing push-ups, and jog here and there, even though I had a severely twisted ankle.

After getting home, I gave my head a shake and wondered why or how I ever could have let that happen to me. I'd gained too much self-respect to ever allow such abuse to take place, so I went through a weeks-long process of having to forgive myself for not resisting such abuse and humiliation.

I'm over 50 years old. I'm a stable, intelligent person who has been around the block a few times, and part of my past happens to include living in a very close-minded religious assembly. I am well-educated in the techniques used by such elitist groups, and I saw it all that night, including - worst of all - the intimidating, abusive, and demeaning process of tearing someone down and building them back up again in front of a group of people.

Others in the team later described it as bizarre, sick, and over-the-top. Also, a relative of one of the team-mates said the same thing (he was part of the crowd, observing). Needless to say I quit, and some time later quit the whole men's team thing altogether. I saw how crowd/group mentality can be so powerful. I saw how otherwise rational human beings can be led to such incredible behavior.

In my mind, it is our responsibility and life purpose to increase our consciousness by means of increased awareness, facing challenges, learning about ourselves, and moving on if need be. I see the Sterling chapter in my life as an important stepping stone; one that taught me some valuable lessons, but not from the words of Justin Sterling's mouth, or any one else's. I liken it to a car-wreck that sends one to the hospital - what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Lessons:

1. Don't join anything if they keep secrets. They are deciding what is best for you without your consent.
2. You already possess the knowledge and wisdom you desire.
3. Keep it simple. Be joyful. Seek transformational wisdom. Be eclectic.

"Sterling made my husband a Neanderthal sexist"

September 2002
By a former Sterling spouse

I am extremely angry that the Sterling Institute of Relationship took priority over my marriage! At one point my husband was going to two meetings per week, until 11:30 PM. He also had a division meeting once a month. We never went anywhere as a couple.

The men in Sterling seem very dysfunctional.

In my husband's group one guy's wife lived across the street from him with the kids for years, but was not divorced. All the husband did was constantly attend Sterling meetings, but nothing changed. His wife and kids were still living across the street.

Another wife of a Sterling man I met just ran off to Mexico. And all he did, was go to more Sterling meetings.

One member of my husband's team was always unemployed.

Then there was the arrogant, obnoxious controlling attorney, whose wife left him too.

The Sterling approach seems to be torturing women through emotional abuse and/or ignoring them to the point of insanity. Many women simply leave, rather than go crazy. But Sterling men will explain this away by saying, "All women are wacko anyway."

It seems to me that Sterling men must be very emotionally needy. They also appear to have some kind of addictive, compulsive-obsessive disorder.

The official Sterling Team T-shirt has a caveman with a club saying, "Hang onto your balls," in big letters. It's just a weird, sick, group and I blame them for the failure of my marriage.

Once I bought my husband $300 tickets for a show on our anniversary. He said the Team would be "mad at him" because he'd miss his "Big Stick" camp-over with them if he went. He actually did go camping with his Team rather than staying with me for our first anniversary.

Sterling says, "Keep your commitment to the Team." But it seems to me that his family was almost always the last thing on his list of commitments. Shouldn't a man's family be more of a priority?

My husband didn't show up for his own birthday party. Instead there was another camp-over and then a night of beer drinking with the Team.

He'd actually run in terror rather than be late for his Team, but it was always OK to leave me waiting for hours.

Returning my phone calls also appeared to be a chore. It was as if he would somehow be degraded for doing this. But if someone from his Team called, he would phone him back immediately.

Sterling men are like little boys, and wives become their mommies.

I underwent a biopsy and the doctor instructed me not to drive myself home. However, I did anyway because my Sterling husband went straight from work to his Team meeting. He didn't even call. When I tried to locate him, his Team members just laughed at me.

I later found notes in my husband's office from Sterling meetings that said, "If your are stupid enough to cheat on her, don't be stupid enough to let her find out." And there were other pearls of wisdom such as, "Give them a good fuck" and "Never let them win an argument." Then I read what seemed like their primary directive, "Don't be pussy whipped."

Sterling Women tried to induct me. But all they did at their meetings was rehash past marriages. They needed to move on! And it seemed like they worshipped Justin Sterling too.

No woman should go through what I did. My feelings meant nothing. The Team was all my husband lived for. No matter what I did, it didn't make a difference. I worked, cleaned, cooked, did the laundry, kept my figure and was always faithful. But still no respect. I fought to hold my marriage together, but in the end it was beyond hope.

Finally, I just couldn't take it any more. It was just too hurtful. I told my husband that it was his Team, or me. He chose Sterling. This organization made my marriage hell. Sterling men act as if women are all stupid and not worth hearing. And a Sterling man listens to his Team, not his wife. Sterling men treat women like dirt.

At first your Sterling man may seem cute, but men involved with Sterling are sick. Remember they think they're normal, but they aren't normal. It's like drugs to them. They will choose the Team over a person, family, or child. I hate Justin Sterling and his organization. Sterling made my husband a Neanderthal sexist. In my opinion Sterling men are brainwashed and they need deprogramming.

Run for the hills, women! This is a warning. I wish someone had warned me. Leave while you are sane or they will drive you crazy. They won't stop, but you can stop hurting. Leave while you can.

"Stay away from men in the Sterling men's group"

July 2001
By a former girlfriend of a Sterling man

I am a victim of the Sterling men's group. I have read about other women and men on this website and can see that I am not the only one once involved with someone in this group.

I was fortunate or unfortunate to have met a wonderful man five years ago. He came to my home town and rode in like a "knight on a white horse." Everyone in my life, family, friends and most of all me, thought he was too good to be true. Well, the first six months of our relationship he was wonderful, but slowly things started to change.

The first sign of something strange was one day I could not find him. My phone was gone too. Finally I found him in my basement hiding with the telephone and talking really loud. When he was finished and came up the stairs I asked him why he was hiding with the telephone. He said then that he belonged to a men's group and needed some privacy, that their conversations could get loud and he did not want to disturb me. I thought this was very strange--to hide and talk on the phone. What could be so private?

From then on, it began. More secrets and more phone calls. Long hours on the phone with these men and constant meetings. He informed me that every Saturday for two hours in the morning there would be phone calls to these men and he would never miss one--no matter what. When we went on vacation together he had to make a two hour call. It went on. He was not working, but still went to meetings constantly and began to treat me badly.

He became very discouraged because there was no men's group in my area. He tried desperately to recruit my friends (males) into the group, but did not succeed. He quit his job and said that he did not like working there any longer and told me, five days before moving, that he was going to another state for a new job opportunity. I was shocked, but there was nothing I could say to keep him with me. Even though he said he loved me more than any other woman he had ever met.

He went away. I had found out later that he moved because there was a large group of Sterling men there. His new job was nothing like he had described and his employer said he was gone a lot and thought he was spending all of his time driving to see me. Not true, he was in men's meetings in the middle of the day, on the phone with the men for hours and recruiting men for the men's weekend.

Well, that job did not work out so he moved again and now is in California where there is an even bigger Sterling men's group. He spends at least 10-12 hours a week working with the men and their group. He does not have a job. It seems to me that he spends too much time with this group.

He once said that he wanted to get married and have a family, but never showed any type of commitment. He even became physically violent when we talked about the group and blamed me for everything that went wrong in our relationship.

I must say to women, stay away from men in the Sterling men's group. They will use you and hurt you in the end. The men's group is first in their lives and you and your family will always be second. They truly believe in the "Caveman theory" and will treat you like a second class citizen.

"High powered lights"

December 2000
By a former member of Sterling's "Family of Women"

I attended the Sterling Weekend many years ago and was involved in its so-called "Family of Women," which at that time had only recently been formed. I was a member for about a year or so after my weekend experience.

The information posted at your site is accurate. But I did not see any information regarding the high powered lights, which were used around the perimeter of the room during the weekend I attended.

During the course of the weekend I attended there came a point when I was becoming quite disoriented. It seemed like I had entered an awake/sleep stage. It was at this point that Justin Sterling became extremely angry with one woman who was wearing sunglasses. He belittled her--screaming at the top of his lungs about her "attitude" and the fact that she was wearing sunglasses. I remember this so clearly, because she answered, "the lights are hurting my eyes!" The thought ran through my mind, what lights? At that moment I woke up and clearly remember looking around the room (for the first time in hours) and realized that there were large lights (like those used in movie productions) beaming down from around the entire perimeter of the room.

A small alarm bell went off in my head at that moment and I resolved to stay alert for the remaining time of the weekend.

The reason I mention this episode is that upon my return from the weekend a few of my friends became interested in my experience and they eventually all went to the weekend too. I asked them a couple of years, after this whole episode of my life was over, if they recalled the lights, but none of them did. I have often wondered if this was some element related to coercive persuasion techniques, which was being used.

My final weeks involved with this group sounded off yet more alarms--some of them were:

While waiting at the airport for a friend to return from the weekend I was standing close to some men from the men's group. They had not noticed me and when the women from the group started arriving in the terminal I heard one of the men say, "Thank God, they've got that look back in their eyes again. Nothing like a weekend to get her back into line."

While attending a Family of Women session led by Justin Sterling in my home town, a woman had the nerve to say that she felt "uncomfortable" about recruiting women who were not ready, or could not afford to take the weekend. Justin screamed at her, "This is not a democracy!"

There were many other incidents. I came to a realization about Sterling, which is--for a group, which preaches about relationships, they actually destroy them [sic]. I also realized that since becoming involved with them I had seen very few of my non-Sterling friends and spent very little time with my family.

I left the group (with no problem) and then spent the next two to three years working to get my friends out!

Due to the schedule and tone of the "Women's Weekend, I would not like to repeat that experience.

I am disturbed to see that this group still exists and that they have upcoming weekends scheduled. In my opinion if anyone from this group asks someone to attend one of their "open houses," or to enroll in their weekend they should say no. That is, do yourself a favor, save your money and just say no!

"Commenting from the Outside"

September 2001
By a sister of a Sterling "Family of Women" member

My sister has been involved in the Sterling organization for many years and it seems like a cult. Anything that encourages sleep deprivation, takes a percentage of income from it's members and negates their families, is a cult in my book. Her "Family of Women" (FOW) are generally a collective of sullen-faced miserable types, and they dominate her every thought and choice.

At our family events, they are always present and try to recruit us. I put my foot down once and said, "This is Christmas, we are trying to enjoy the holiday together as a family. Please, stop marketing this crap to me. My life is quite fulfilled, thank you."

When her kids were small and really needed her, the FOW would call meetings arbitrarily during the week, pulling her away from her children. The FOW did not seem to care. My sister was vulnerable and they took advantage of that. Her kids have obviously suffered from that neglect. I have read her Sterling materials and the rhetoric used seems almost Draconian.

My sister has lost her sense of humor, much of her connection to her children and the respect of her immediate family. I spend as little time as possible with her because I cannot bear the usual gaggle of Sterling women who are constantly present in her life. She is like a sheep now. And she certainly does not appear any happier since finding Sterling.

But I am commenting from the outside.

I worry about organizations like Sterling that prey on women and men in this manner.

"After the initial Sterling weekend, there's something called 'Point Team'"

"My Thoughts and Experience With the Sterling Institute of Relationship."

May 3, 2007
By a former "Point Team" member

After taking a couple sessions with an intuitive life coach, he encouraged me to get involved with men, so as to get more in touch with my masculinity. This included going on a weekend initiation at the Sterling Institute of Relationship. This is my experience...

Without getting into all the gory details, the weekend is made up of Justin Sterling teaching and instructing men how to be men with varying techniques, mostly derived from EST, a 1970's pop-psychology fad. It's all in a very militaristic environment, with punishments for late arrival, needing permission (and not always getting it) for washroom breaks, and at the end, a rite of passage that requires everyone to strip naked and bang on drums.

You may very well get in touch with your inner power, but how real is it? I felt very empowered initially, and went to weekly meetings of other men who also attended a weekend. It's all very secretive and requires commitment to absolute confidentiality, adding to the sense of belonging and bonding with other men.

Then the wheels fell off.

As hindsight is always 20/20, I became angry at myself for allowing such influence into my life, but I'm getting ahead of myself. The particular small group I was part of where part of a larger, provincial group. This small group was formed by a number of men wanting more of a spiritual slant on the whole thing, as opposed to just the cave-man element. The problem was that in their allegiance to the larger group, they maintained much of the same rituals, jargon, meeting style, and rules. The more time went on, the less I got out of it. It was more of a whining session, with men going over the same issues week after week.

After the initial Sterling weekend, there's something called "Point Team", which is meant to ground you in the principles learned from the weekend. It's an 8-week course of meetings and activities, kicked off by another initiation rite. It was in that initial evening that the end began...

In essence, you're treated like a 17 year-old kid sent to military school to be broken by humiliation and abuse. It's an outside meeting with a crowd of Sterling adherents, and two or three leaders, guiding us through the night. Throughout the evening, it's "single file - no talking"; everything is timed with a stop-watch. We're told to come up with a team name, but because we won't conform to the crowd's pressure to take on their version of it, we're ordered to dunk our heads in buckets of freezing, polluted river water, as well as the river itself. Plus, it's pouring rain and everyone but the team-mates have rainwear. It's only one or two degrees above freezing. We were also coerced into doing push-ups, and jog here and there, even though I had a severely twisted ankle.

After getting home, I gave my head a shake and wondered why or how I ever could have let that happen to me. I'd gained too much self-respect to ever allow such abuse to take place, so I went through a weeks-long process of having to forgive myself for not resisting such abuse and humiliation.

I'm over 50 years old. I'm a stable, intelligent person who has been around the block a few times, and part of my past happens to include living in a very close-minded religious assembly. I am well-educated in the techniques used by such elitist groups, and I saw it all that night, including - worst of all - the intimidating, abusive, and demeaning process of tearing someone down and building them back up again in front of a group of people.

Others in the team later described it as bizarre, sick, and over-the-top. Also, a relative of one of the team-mates said the same thing (he was part of the crowd, observing). Needless to say I quit, and some time later quit the whole men's team thing altogether. I saw how crowd/group mentality can be so powerful. I saw how otherwise rational human beings can be led to such incredible behavior.

In my mind, it is our responsibility and life purpose to increase our consciousness by means of increased awareness, facing challenges, learning about ourselves, and moving on if need be. I see the Sterling chapter in my life as an important stepping stone; one that taught me some valuable lessons, but not from the words of Justin Sterling's mouth, or any one else's. I liken it to a car-wreck that sends one to the hospital - what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Lessons:

1. Don't join anything if they keep secrets. They are deciding what is best for you without your consent.
2. You already possess the knowledge and wisdom you desire.
3. Keep it simple. Be joyful. Seek transformational wisdom. Be eclectic.