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At the time, I was very active on the old alt.psychology.nlp newsgroup, and was anxious to go to a seminar. I knew Carmine from the group, and so I picked his. Several weeks after the training, I moved to Atlanta and went to work for him as an assistant.
That lasted maybe four or five months. I quit mainly to take a computer programming job, but there were other reasons. Carmine had managed to stir up a tremendous amount of controversy in his circle, and nearly everyone I knew was distancing himself from him. I decided to break ties with him, and have not spoken to him in almost a decade.
Carmine never harmed me personally in any way, but he had a Macihavellian air about him, and it bothered me. On stage, he often said that he didn't care about morals or ethics, only consequences. That's certainly evident in the story of his dealings with the child molester, recounted below. (Edit: Whoops! That story is actually in a different article.)
Back then, that story impressed me. After all, it worked. But clearly, Carmine had a habit of crossing the line, and his approach was completely unethical.Carmine is a very charismatic man, and very skilled with NLP. His presentations really were interesting to watch, and I think a lot of good did come of them. After all, NLP is a very powerful toolset for creating change.
However, in my experience, NLP seems to attract a lot of cult-like behavior, both in trainers and students. In many ways, the unregluated nature of NLP provides a free license for anyone to build their own personality cult.
Several years after severing ties with Carmine, I read Peter McWilliams' book, Life 102: What to Do When Your Guru Sues You, about his experiences withdrawing from a cult, and I have to say that his description of John-Roger might as well have been a description of Carmine Baffa.
I also got chills watching Al Pacino's character in the movie The Devil's Advocate, because he too might just as well have been playing Carmine -- though of course, he was playing Satan. In the movie, Satan isn't a monster, but a well-spoken, charming man. Evil isn't necessarily about constantly doing bad things, but rather doing whatever serves you, without caring whether it's good or bad. And that's basically Carmine's philosophy.
My experience with Carmine left me fairly jaded. I no longer recommend any NLP training. If you're interested in learning, you're better off just studying and practicing on your own. There are plenty of books and videos and even flashcards out there. If you feel you must take a training, ask around first and see if the trainer actually teaches content or just prefer to dazzle you with their skills. (Carmine sometimes liked to insist that students were "getting it unconsciously.") I do know the trainers over at essential-skills.com personally, and they share my view on keeping things practical.
Anyway, I left this web page up for ten years despite my reservations about Carmine, and I've decided to keep it up now, because it is a good description of how these kinds of seminars go down.
However, in April 2008, Carmine Baffa was arrested and charged with felony rape, sexual assault, child molestation, aggravated child molestation and aggravated sexual battery. Apparently, he's taken to abusing his clients these days, and since this page wound up in the news, I felt I needed to come out and publically declare that I do not support Carmine Baffa in any way, and have not even spoken to the man in ten years. I was young and naive when I wrote this article, and no longer agree with its sentiment.
-Michal Wallace
My mom asked me why I was going to Atlanta. Even after planning this trip for two months and looking forward to it every day, I didn't know what to tell her.
I'd shown her a little NLP once. I showed her how she looked to her right when she remembered something in the past, and looked to her left when she pictured the future. I showed her how she unconsciously plotted her whole life along a timeline, and how she could change her experience by messing with that line in various ways. But timelines were easy, and only a small part of what NLP is all about.
I looked at my mom, handed her a book and walked away. It was Bandler and Grinder's The Structure of Magic, the one that started it all twenty years ago.
Ten minutes later I was out in the kitchen, washing dishes, and my mom finally shows up, holding the book.
"That's neat," she said.
I nodded. "Could you explain it?" I asked.
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
"Exactly."
When I got to the airport, my host had not yet arrived. While I watched for her, I had time to replay my ideas of what this training might be like.
I'd heard stories about Carmine for months, and I'd read through all the writings on his web site. People seemed to think he was superman. His posts to the newsgroup had certainly given me plenty to think about over the past year.
Once he shared a method for structuring time with me. I'd always pictured the past off to my left, and the future off to my right, and after reading one of the NLP books, had experimented with a timeline that flowed through me, with the future in front and my past behind me. Carmine likes to imagine himself in the middle of a giant soccer ball, with different positive memories and resources and future plans flicking on and off all the different faces, like TV sets changing channels. I tried it on, and it felt amazing, so I was eager to know what else he could teach me.
I had no idea what sort of content would be covered in the training. The title was "Ericksonian Hypnosis and NLP" but he had promised that the training would deal mostly with creating change in people conversationally and through metaphor.
As I was wondering again what that might actually mean, the airport loudspeaker crackled to life, and a voice announced a page for Michal Sabren. I laughed when I heard my last name replaced by my internet handle, and hurried down to meet my host.
It took another hour or so for everyone to filter in to the training, mingle a bit, and get settled. There were some thirty or so chairs lined up in rows, like a theater. A taller chair and a stool were up front. It all seemed pretty ordinary.
There were no name tags, and that surprised me. I kept looking around, trying to guess which guy was Ross Jeffries. I found a likely-looking guy of about 24. "Are you Ross?" I asked.
He wasn't, but he'd met Ross once. Ross was the tall skinny guy in the back. I heard him introducing himself to someone a bit later, saying, "I'm Ross Jeffries, breathing fire and dripping slime." He used that same line at least two more times during the evening, so I did not have the best first impression of the self- proclaimed master of speed seduction.
I did meet a lot of great people that night, and as I was attaching faces to the names I knew from the internet, and attaching names to the people I never heard of, we were all asked to sit down. Someone who'd trained under Carmine before, asked me if I was ready. I admitted I wasn't.
Eventually the lights dimmed. Carmine sat in the tall chair. He really did look much younger than 40. I would have guessed 28, and very in shape. His voice was powerful and upbeat, a little like a celebrity at a thanksgiving day parade, and he when he talked, he talked with his hands.
I remember he was pretty quiet for a while, and then sometime later he was pacing back and forth and people brought him some water. I remember feeling very awake and aware the whole time, but for the life of me, I can't remember what he said. Carmine's like that.
The weekend is a blur to me. It seemed to last for months, and it felt good. My blood was rushing, I couldn't stop smiling, and I could almost feel my brain cells rearranging themselves.
Carmine told stories, and lots of them. He talked about clients he'd had, things he had done. He told us about his niece, and how she got everything she wanted, and how easy it was to just step into her behavior.
That was one of his big things: unconscious modeling. We learn to talk by watching and listening to other people, and doing what they do. Why not learn everything else this way? Unconsciously, stealing their behavior.
We did a pair of exercises at one point. We paired up, and mirrored one another. In the first exercise, we did motion, and it was a lot like dancing. Partners had to move the same way, breathe the same way, and keep track of everything all at once. Then we did it with voices - one person would start talking, and the other chimed in, saying the exact same words, in sync. After a while it was hard to tell who was making the words and movements up. Actually, I'd been doing that for years. I saw it on Night Court. When Carmine introduced the exercise, people laughed because I started silently mouthing his words. I wasn't being a smartass. I was learning.
Carmine gave us his learning state. We anchored our best sexual experience, feelings of competence, surprising ourselves, wisdom, wisdom, and other such powerful states. Then we fired the anchors all at once. You should have seen the way people in the room lit up.
We had a calibration exercise. We'd watch the person as they thought of a person they liked, a person they didn't like, and someone they felt neutral about. Then they thought of one a second time, and we'd tell them which one they had in mind. We did it three ways. First we faced each other, then we did it side to side, and then we did it back to back. The point was not to guess correctly, just to pay attention.
We did that exercise again later with colored shapes. Carmine drew them on an imaginary blackboard. He said he could really see it. I wanted to see it too. I asked him to hypnotize me so I could see it as if it were really there. He told me that was psychotic. He also said that if I really wanted, he'd trance me out later. I let it go.
There were more exercises, and demonstrations. Carmine would bring people up in front of the group, and he'd change them. You could see it in the way they moved and breathed and smiled. He'd bring people up, and talk to them for a bit, and then leave them there, and then come back. He brought me up a few times. I don't remember what he did. What I remember was looking out at the people in the room and being aware of every single one of them.
I think Carmine sees his classes that way. He's aware of everything. He throws darts - I remember several times when I busted out laughing and no one else did, because something he said seemed to be aimed at me personally. I wasn't the only one, either.
The one thing Carmine didn't give was a lot of information to play with consciously. He works that way. He tells his stories and talks about anything except the topic he's teaching, and yet you learn that topic anyway. It's not immediate. It unfolds in the days and weeks after you're home.
All in all, Carmine is an excellent trainer. He's probably the most dynamic and energetic public speaker I've ever met, and it was well worth the price to watch him onstage and model him, even without all the other learnings I got.
Ross Jeffries was not what I expected: He's older, taller, and not quite as obnoxious. He really does go on about his cat. The response from most of the people I talked to was that he's "really not as bad as all that."
Personality aside, when Carmine gave Ross ten minutes to talk about tonality, Ross lit up the stage. His energy, and his way of teaching is completely different from Carmine's. Ross gave us something to work with consciously.
Basically, he lead us through different sounds. We found the sounds we made when we were curious, excited, playful, and fierce, and made them out loud, one after another, and this created some pretty powerful states.
During a break, I heard Ross talking about modeling. He seemed pretty amazed at how much Carmine could accomplish nonverbally, and he was modelling away, even asking if it were necessary to talk to anyone at all in order to seduce them.
Ross changed with everyone else during this training, so I see no point in making judgements about him. I don't expect him to change his packaging, because he's already got an incredible marketing plan. As for the content - Speed Seduction itself - I suspect Ross will take it to a whole new level.
Since I don't sleep much, I spent some of my free waking hours listening to a copy of Richard Bandler's Neurosonics tapes. Each of them is about 45 minutes long, from what I understand.
I caught about fifteen minutes of the first one, five of the second, and I think one of the six had something to do with a five year timeline and imagining different colored squares.
I'd say more, but that's all I remember.
One of the things that stands out in my mind about the training was the "Get Free Stuff" state. It was particularly interesting because Carmine didn't tell us about it, except that at his last seminar he had thought it up. When he went home, he tried it out himself and got a free video card.
The next day a herd of us trainees went out to lunch. I bought a sandwich, but since the training was so high-energy, I doubted it would fill me. It turned out the waiter brought an extra sandwich, and I wound up with it for free. He also brought me an extra glass of lemonade. A free sandwich, granted, is nothing spectacular (although it was a pretty tasty sandwich). The point was that such "lucky" little events never used to happen to me.
On a similar note, I had originally booked my flight home for 6:00 Monday morning, in order to make it to work. Later I decided to just take Monday off, but the airline was going to charge me $50 to change my flight, or else I'd have to fly standby. During the training, the airline called and left a message, saying my flight had been canceled but they'd booked me on the next one.
Some of the other trainees and I talked quite a bit about influencing the outside world. Someone told me once about people who became so "lucky" after studying NLP that they spent a year living quite well just playing bingo two nights a week.
I came away with the notion that consciousness can be thought of as a way of navigating through the possibilities available in the universe at each moment. I don't know if I'm ready to believe that you can install luck like that in a person, or that it is a skill that can be learned, but it's certainly something I want to think about and explore.
I missed the last bit of the training. Carmine asked me if there was anything I wanted, so I nodded towards the imaginary blackboard.
"Wesley," he said, "Take this guy over there and trance him out. I want him on the floor."
Wesley's a great guy. Earlier in the weekend, he'd given me a ton of ideas for dealing with one of my students, whom I'd posted about on the newsgroup, and he'd been helping people out all weekend with the exercises. Wesley works with Carmine and is a practicing hypnotherapist. He's got some really amazing skill when it comes to language patterns. Words just flow out of him.
We went over, sat down on the floor, and he tranced me. The process was more or less like what had happened with the Neurosonics tapes. In other words, I let my mind drift, and I was imagining in my mind what it would be like to be in the room across the hall, where an art auction was taking place.
Every once in a while, I'd realize Wesley was telling me to come out of my trance and open my eyes. I didn't ask why he did that. I just trusted it. I do know what I got out of it, though: the realization that it was my trance, and I was taking myself in and out, and Wesley was just there to help.
The next thing I remember is lying on the ground, perfectly conscious but with my eyes closed, and not wanting to open them, because he'd said to open my eyes only as quickly as it would take for my mind to sort things out and give me exactly what I wanted. Well, I knew I wouldn't see a blackboard when I opened my eyes. Every cell in my body screamed out that it wouldn't let me. So I kept my eyes shut.
When I finally opened them, there was no blackboard. I did not realize until right now, though, that Wesley's language pattern worked perfectly. "Open your eyes only as quickly as you get what you want," was the basic message that I heard. I had expected to change what I was getting. Instead I changed what I want.
Asking to see imaginary things as if they were real was asking to become a psychotic. I can see imaginary blackboards now, or anything else I want. In fact, I always could. My way of imagining is the same as it ever was, but now I can quit complaining and just use it.
So thanks, Wesley. Good task.
I crashed when I got home. I couldn't stand anyone. Everyone around me seemed so stuck, so boring. I thought about all the things I wanted in life, and all the things I had, and how different those two realities were. Moving from one to the other seemed like an impossible journey.
Carmine warned me about that, or perhaps he installed it. He told me about a lady at the training, and how he wanted to make sure changes happened slowly for her, because everything he taught was so new that she might not be able to take it in all at once. He said she'd get culture shock, and he wanted to avoid that.
It hit me anyway. I told a friend that everything had changed for me. Other people were suddenly different. I wanted to just leave- pack up, move to Atlanta, and work for Carmine.
She said to give it a while. It was I who had changed.
As I write this, it is two weeks since the training. I have been thrilled, bored, angry, euphoric, proud, self-pitying, infatuated, repulsed, energetic, tired, and just about every other emotion, one right after another.
I had asked Carmine for an apprenticeship, because I know I could learn so much more from him. I'm learning from him right now, and he's hundreds of miles away. But I find myself learning from everybody now, including myself.
To be honest, I don't know that I came out of Carmine's training knowing anything more than I used to about "hypnosis" or "nlp". But that's not what I went for. I've become a better writer, a better teacher, a better student. I feel more in control of my life than ever before. I feel like an adult.
You see, when I was very young, people used to tell me that I and my classmates were the future of America. That we could do anything we wanted in life. That message has been sleeping in me all these years. Carmine's training was its alarm clock.
Would I recommend that someone take a training from Carmine
Baffa? Most definitely, but I'd give a warning. Be prepared to have
your mind blown, your reality turned upside down, and to have one
heck of a lot of fun. No.
Peace.
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