David G. Bromley

Lifespring

LIFESPRING TIMELINE

1946:  John Hanley, Sr. was born.

1971:  Hanley graduated from Milwaukee Economics at the University of Wisconsin.

1972:  Hanley was invited into Alexander Everett’s Mind Dynamic program where he began to learn coaching and training.

1972:  Hanley conceptualized what was to become the advanced 5-day course.

1973 (December): Hanley partnered with Randy Revell to create Basic training.

1974:  Lifespring was founded by Hanley and several others. Hanley was the majority owner.

1977:  Hanley had produced fifteen permanent trainers.

1989:  Hanley authored Lifespring: Getting Yourself From Where You Are To Where You Want To Be.

1990s:  Lifespring was disbanded in the mid-1990s.

2019:  John Hanley, Jr. founded and became managing owner of Triton Leadership Coaching, which is headquartered in Petaluma, California.

FOUNDER/GROUP HISTORY

Lifespring was one of a diverse series of psychotherapy-based movements that emerged through the 1960s and 1970s in the U.S. as part of the broader human potential movement (Coon 2004; Miller and White 2007; Tindale 2001; Zeig 1997). These movements were organized to create positive, significant changes in their individual lives by facilitating their ability to actualize their full potential. One set of these movements enrolled large numbers of participants, as opposed to individual therapy, in workshops, trainings and seminars. These large group awareness training programs (LGATs) included movements such as Mind Dynamics, Erhard Seminar Training (est), neuro-linguistic programming, Tony Robbins seminars, and Silva Mind Control. The various programs shared in common personal, experiential development training events during which large groups of individuals participated in instruction about reaching their personal full potential and fulfilled lives. In order to realize their potential, individuals do not need to change but rather they simply need to actualize the self they already are. Once they understand that they are totally responsible for everything that happens in their lives, that they are in total control, they are empowered to move toward full self-actualization.

The central figure in the development of Lifespring, John Hanley, Sr., was born in 1946. [Image at right] He graduated from Milwaukee Economics at the University of Wisconsin in 1971. The following year he was invited into Alexander Everett’s Mind Dynamics program where he began to learn coaching and training. He then began conceptualizing what was to become the advanced five-day course. In 1973, Hanley partnered with Randy Revell to create Basic training. Along with several others, Hanley then founded Lifespring in 1974 as majority owner. By 1977, Hanley had produced fifteen permanent trainers to run Lifespring trainings (John Hanley website n.d.). He articulated the Lifespring organization principles in 1990 in his book, Getting Yourself Where You Want to Be. [Image at right] The organization formed ten centers in the U.S. and claimed to have trained over 400,000 people before disbanding in the mid-1990s amid a series of legal suits. In 2019, his son, John Hanley, Jr., founded and became managing owner of the training/coaching firm Triton Leadership Coaching, which is headquartered in Petaluma, California.

DOCTRINES/BELIEFS

Lifespring asserts that it does not have formal doctrines and disavows “beliefs” as a primitive level of awareness that creates an illusion of certainty. Rather, Lifespring operates on a set of assumptions and principles that shape the relationship between trainers and participants and structure the training rituals (Adams and Haaken 1987). These assertions include the following:

Life begins with a natural, pre-social self; that self is then distorted by social and cultural belief systems. Life will work when individuals rely on “natural knowing,” by experiencing rather than believing, and by re-connecting with and actualizing that original, natural self.

Individuals are perfect just the way they are. The path to a fulfilling life, therefore is not change of the world around them but rather to a accept the world as it is and empower the self by actualizing and living in harmony with the true self.

Individuals have chosen and therefore are responsible for everything that happens in their lives. Counterintuitively, this means that parts of life not conventionally thought of as outside the individual’s span of control, such as choice of one’s parents and criminal victimization, actually are the result of individual choices. There are no miraculous events, positive or negative. The solution to problematic outcomes such as those that participants are experiencing is to be “at cause” rather than “at effect” in their choices, which a natural, actualized self will do.

Participants’  lives are not working; that is why they have sought out Lifespring. If individuals’ lives are not working it is because they have been making agreements they do not wish to keep. The solution is to empower and actualize the true self through Lifespring training. The result will be that individuals will make appropriate agreements and decisions, which will mean that life works better.

Many of what are experienced as social problems of the day will be ameliorated if a sufficient segment of the population is self-actualized and acts in accordance with the true self.

RITUALS/PRACTICES

The Lifespring training generally involved a three-level program starting with a “basic” training, an “advanced” breakthrough course, and a three-month “leadership program” which taught the students how to implement what they learned from the training into their lives (Freeman 2023; Krupit 2023; Cushman 1987; Adams and Haaken 1987). The various components of the trainings included lectures, which created a common informational base; working with another participant, which involved focusing on issues of emotional significance to the dyad; whole group exercises, which  focused on a single issue; and guided imagery, which involved closed eye exercises. The fundamental goal of all of these components was to remove blocks to becoming aware of and actualizing the true, inner self, which is the repository of all one really needs to know (natural knowing). These various components had a significant impact on participants given their high-intensity, rapidly flow, and intense emotional involvement.

The basic training was composed of successive sessions on Wednesday night, Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday day and night, Sunday day and night, a Tuesday night post-training session ten days after graduation, and a post-training interview. The sessions together cummulated to forty-five hours. Evening sessions began at 6:30 PM and lasted until 11:30 or 12 or later. Saturday sessions started at 10 am and sometimes lasted until midnight. Sunday sessions started at 9 AM and lasted until approximately 6 PM (Cushman 1987).

One important element of Lifespring trainings was that they were trainings, not seminars or debates. It was therefore imperative that the trainers, who most often were male, maintain control over a sizeable gathering. This was accomplished in part through placing the trainer on a raised stage with a stage-controlled sound system and a meticulously ordered seating system. More importantly, the first order of business in the training was the assertion of ground rules. While participants were allowed to discuss and even challenge training rules, the process continued until acceptance had been achieved. Participants who did not agree to comply with all the rules were asked to leave. Rules included, for example, speaking only when recognized by the trainer, mandatory attendance throughout, punctuality, avoidance of alcohol and drugs during the training period, and conformity with tightly organized food and bathroom breaks. Early in the training process, the trainer asked participants to share problems they are experiencing. To the extent that participants acknowledged that they were struggling with issues and needed to change, they entered a period of liminality; they agreed that they did not wish to return to their former way of life but did not know how to achieve the new way of life they desired and the trainer promised. The trainer therefore became the only path out of this liminal state.

ORGANIZATION/LEADERSHIP

Lifespring was a for-profit organization headquartered in San Rafael, California. It was founded in 1974 by Hanley and several others, with Hanley as the majority owner. The organization later expanded to a number of other U.S. cities. Organization revenues were generated by enrollments in the various trainings. In addition to individuals enrolling in the trainings, numerous corporations and public agencies reimbursed their staff members who agreed to participate, with the objective developing management skills, facilitating conflict resolution, and resolving personal issues. Some business schools, including Harvard, floated the idea of including the course in their curriculum (Fisher 1987). Young adults and well-educated individuals were most likely to enroll in the trainings.

ISSUES/CHALLENGES

Lifespring was relatively short-lived. It was founded in 1974 and collapsed by the mid-1990s. During its roughly two decades of operation it received both favorable and unfavorable portrayals in the media and professional publications (Freeman 2023;  Krupit 2023; Miller 2007; Haaken and Adams 1983; Primeau 1988; Fisher et al 1990). Many participants evaluated the trainings as valuable and profound, but some studies assessed them as promoting detrimental psychological characteristics such as grandiosity and identity confusion.

A primary cause of the group’s demise was the more than thirty lawsuits filed against it, some with large settlements. Lifespring officials had begun receiving reports in the 1970s about negative emotional reactions among some participants and subsequently did implement some screening mechanisms, but damaging legal cases were initiated before or in spite of these initiatives. There were various grounds for legal actions, sometimes pursued by former participants themselves and sometimes by others acting on behalf of former members who had died. There were, for example, cases of psychotic breaks with hospitalizations, suicides, and deaths following failure to take critical medications (Fisher 1987). Major legal defeats and settlements began in the early 1980s and spread through the early 1990s, each involving settlements of several hundred thousand dollars.

Lifespring also came to the attention of anti-cult groups of that era, which created additional negative media coverage of the movement (Passantino and Passantino n.d.). One notable opponent, who was linked for a time to oppositional groups, was Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. She explored participation in Lifespring briefly before distancing herself after being troubled by the nature of some of the ritual exercises (Fisher 1987).

While Lifespring finally closed its doors in the mid-1990s, a number of smaller groups sprung up in North America (e.g., Momentus, Insight Seminars, Visionworks, Vistar). None of these achieved the size or stature of Lifespring, however. The basic principles of Lifespring and other LGATS did later gain a positive reception in China (Zhang 2018). A more direct successor to Hanley’s organizational tradition was the formation of the training/coaching firm of Triton Leadership Coaching in 2019 by his son, John Hanley, Jr.

IMAGES

Image #1: John Hanley, Sr.
Image #2: Cover of Hanley’s book, Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.

REFERENCES

Adams, Richard and Janice Haaken. 1987. “Anticultural Culture: Lifespring’s Ideology and Its Roots in Humanistic Psychology.” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 27:501-17.

Coon, Dennis. 2004. Psychology: A Journey. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth.

Coon, Dennis. 2003. Introduction to Psychology: Gateways to Mind and Behavior. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth.

Cushman, Philip. 1987. “Description of the behavioral structure of the training.” Cult Education Institute. Accessed from https://www.culteducation.com/group/1026-lifespring/12661-description-of-the-behavioral-structure-of-the-training-.html on 15 December 2023.

Fisher, Jeffrey et al. 1990. Evaluating a Large Group Awareness Training. Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag.

Fisher, Marc. 1987. “I Cried Enough to Fill a Glass.” “Washington Post Magazine, October 25. Accessed from https://www.washing tonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/magazine/1987/10/25/i-cried-enough-to-fill-a-glass/c75b0dda-e8ea-46f9-8aea-8e4afdd0cfbe/?noredirect=on on 10 December 2023.

Freeman, Cameron. 2023. “Confessions of A Cult Leader: Thursday Evening of the Lifestream Basic Seminar.” Accessed from https://cameronfreeman.com/personal/confessions-cult-leader-lifestream-seminar-experience/basic-thursday/ on 11 December 2023.

Haaken, Janice and Richard Adams. 1983. Pathology as “Personal Growth:  A Participant-Observation Study of Lifespring Training.” Psychiatry 46:270–80.

Hanley, John. 1989. Lifespring: Getting Yourself From Where You Are To Where You Want To Be. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Krupit, Mike. 2023. “Five Lessons Learned at My First Awareness Training.” Trajectify. Accessed from https://www.trajectify.com/blog/2020/2/18/five-lessons-learned-at-my-first-awareness-training on 10 December 2023.

John Hanley website. n.d. Accessed from https://johnhanleyphdtrainings.com/johnhanley/ on 15 December 2023.

Miller, William. 2007. “A Brief History of Confrontation in Addiction Treatment.” National Institutes of Health. Accessed from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK571073/box/ch1.b5/?report=objectonly on 15 December 2023.

Passantino, Bob and Gretchen Passantino. n.d. “’Lifespring’ for Christians? Momentus and Mashiyach Minstries Attract Followers and Controversy.” Christian Research Institute. Accessed from https://www.equip.org/PDF/DM494.pdf on 24 November 2023.

Primeau, Marty. 1988. “When Weird things Happen to gullible People.” D Magazine, August 1. Accessed from https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/1988/august/when-weird-things-happen-to-gullible-people/ on 10 December 2023.

Tindale, R. Scott. 2001. Group Processes: Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Zhang, Li. 2018. “Cultivating the Therapeutic Self in China.” Medical Anthropology 37: 45-59.

Zeig, Jeffrey K. 1997. The Evolution of Psychotherapy: The Third Conference. Hove, East Sussex, England:  Psychology Press.

Publication Date:
20 December 2023

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