HANGING TOUGH : Learning the Ropes at Psychodynamics Institute Is a Daylong Test of Emotional Fitness and Trust

The pretty young woman stood alone, swearing she would take a flying leap. Perched about 15 feet above the ground, her back arched against a telephone pole, Marji Mook, a 27-year-old construction management consultant from Tustin, balanced precariously on a narrow wooden platform barely large enough to contain both of her quaking feet.

Below, a crowd of nearly a dozen people watched, egging her on, encouraging her to jump. And there wasn’t a priest or cop within screaming distance to talk her out of it.

After insisting again--”I’m going to do it!”--to the onlookers’ amazement she drew a handkerchief from her pocket and tied it over her eyes, bent her knees and stretched out her arms, Superman-style. On the ground, fists clenched, teeth gritted, all hearts pounded as one.

Suddenly Mook dove into the air, and for a split second seemed to defy everything Isaac Newton had discovered about gravity three centuries ago. Then, just as her arc of flight turned downward, her hands miraculously found a small, triangular-shaped bar suspended eight feet away, which she clutched with every ounce of might in her slender arms. A cheer went up. She let go and gently floated to the ground, dangling at the end of a taut safety line attached to the metal buckles of her mountain climber’s harness.

When she touched down, several bystanders rushed over to congratulate her and offer hugs and smiles at her adrenaline-charged stunt.

Are these folks a little crazy or something?

Nope--it’s just another Wednesday night at the Psychodynamics Success Institute in Lake Forest.

At the PSI Center, as its tongue-twister name is commonly abbreviated, Mook was part of a group negotiating a rigorous series of physically and emotionally challenging obstacles dubbed the “Great Ropes.”

They grappled up parallel logs suspended from the ceiling by steel cables, wobbled across a cable bridge, seesawed along the tightrope known as the “HeeBee-GeeBee” and, ultimately, made like Flying Wallendas off the “Parrot Perch.”

A self-help obstacle course designed to identify and alter behavior patterns, the Great Ropes is modeled after programs used for decades to make Scouts out of boys and Marines out of men. But unlike Uncle Sam’s finest, this group of recruits had to enlist for just one night of the sweats instead of several weeks of boot camp.

Stranger yet, not only were the participants doing it voluntarily, they were even willing to pay $120 a head for the privilege of running this unique gantlet.

More than the typical daylong ropes classes, which usually meet Fridays and Saturdays, this was the foreboding “ultimate challenge,” customized for those who have pushed their endurance to the limits--and still want to push a little more.

The PSI Center, which houses the Great Ropes course and a couple of administrative offices the size of utility closets, is hidden in a quiet neighborhood mini-mall, next to a pay-for-play racquetball court. In fact, before being converted last summer by PSI owners Ellie Ryan and Nancy Pearson, the room was just one more racquetball court.

Ryan is a practitioner of neuro-linguistic programming, the relatively new study of successful behavior patterns. Using her training as a foundation, Ryan developed what she calls “kinesic engineering,” the relationship between physical activity and communication, which adds a psychological dimension to the ropes course.

Before adapting the ropes concept into a compact course in an indoor setting, Ryan explored a variety of unconventional paths to self-awareness, including fire-walking (in which people are taught to walk over a bed of hot coals without experiencing physical harm).

“I wanted to know why fire-walking works,” Ryan said. But because of the quackery that can surround activities as exotic as fire-walking, Ryan decided to channel her energies into something a little more down-to-earth.

“The ropes course is more acceptable in our society,” she said. While professing that kinesic engineering can help participants achieve psychological breakthroughs without years of therapy, she maintains that the institute is not offering “a one-day quick fix.”

But she does say that because of her training, she can assist those who undertake the program to recognize real-world patterns in the way they handle the course’s obstacles.

“When you come in, we ask what your goals are, what your limitations are. The main benefits are self-esteem and team-building,” Ryan said. “Some people get spiritualism out of it--what I call the ‘woo-woo’ world. But I try to keep that totally out of this.”

For some who have completed the course, the constant references from the staff to the “analogies to life” present in each task can get slightly irritating. “It got in the way for me,” said one participant who otherwise praised the course.

Still, most ropes course graduates--everyone who completes the course gets a diploma--say they experience genuine boosts in self-confidence and trust (many of the obstacles require teamwork).

So the ultimate challenge, the Great Ropes, was created to provide an extra-potent morale booster shot.

As PSI staffer Nancy Pearson put it at the start of a course: “Remember where your limitations were, where that red flag came up before, and do it a way you think might not work. That’s your challenge for tonight.”

Beyond all the potential insight that is touted, the Great Ropes also appears to have a high fun quotient, an adventure that owes as much to Walt Disney as to behaviorist B.F. Skinner.

The regular course, which costs $75, typically begins with a “trust walk,” in which the participants are led single file--all blindfolded except the leader--on an excursion outside the center. The purpose is to foster quickly a sense of group unity and interpersonal communication, since each person depends on information supplied by the one in front.

After the trust walk ends back inside the building, groups of three people practice the “trust fall,” in which one person stands rigid and falls backward into the arms of the other two--only after feeling secure that the teammates are ready to make a solid catch.

Next, the acrobatics begin.

There are trust falls from a 5-foot-high platform, the incline and balance logs, the tandem logs, the cable bridge, the HeeBee-GeeBee (a taut cable tightrope with tricky crisscrossing support lines) and the Parrot Perch, the pole from which Mook made her flight.

Ryan said it is crucial that before any of the real action starts, each person is asked to state his or her name and announce to the other members: “I agree to take this challenge.”

“This is very important, because the person is accepting responsibility for his or her own safety,” she said--even though each participant has already signed a release-of-responsibility waiver before embarking on the program.

“And if they say it in a shaky voice, we stop and find out what the fear is that’s hindering them,” Ryan said. “If they say it in a strong, confident voice, we know they really are ready.”

No one has suffered injuries beyond minor scrapes and bruises on the ropes course. Safety helmets and mountain climber-style harnesses are distributed, along with instructions to “make them as secure as you are comfortable.”

Pearson explained: “Right away, people are making choices about what makes them feel secure. We strive to remove any sense of fear about safety. But again, each person is responsible for his or her own safety, so it’s up to them to make sure they are secure about each thing they are doing.”

To the harnesses are hooked support lines of mountain-climbing strength. Each person is assigned a staffer, who anchors the safety line from the ground. Participants are shown how to operate the equipment by the staff--which varies from five to eight per session, depending on the size of each group. (The way the program is designed, no more than four people can be tackling challenges at once.)

Then it’s up, up and away.

Oh yes, everyone gets a handkerchief so that just in case any of the obstacles seem too easy, they can do them again--blindfolded.

Because Mook had sailed through the first course with few snags several weeks earlier, she eagerly signed up for the ultimate challenge. Before the evening began, she said: “My toes still tingle when I think about (jumping for) the trapeze. I want to tackle the challenges differently this time.”

Differences this time around were adjusting the trapeze bar to its maximum distance from the Parrot Perch and using her blindfold. The changes had the desired effect, and Mook’s adrenaline was pumping. “Now that I think about this (the ultimate challenge), I’m feeling like, God, what am I doing here?”

Pam Mason, 36, a friend of Ryan’s, was visiting from Palm Harbor, Fla., when she got a call from Ryan to take part in the ultimate challenge. Not having experienced the regular course, she was, when faced with the parallel logs, skeptical that she could scale their imposing height.

“I knew I’d never get up to the top,” Mason said shortly after amazing herself and inspiring her classmates with the tenacity of her eventually successful climb.

Talk to others who have experienced the course, and you begin to believe Mook’s assertion that “anyone who goes through the program is a natural salesman for it.”

In the middle of this class, a visitor stopped by. David Suter, community services supervisor for the Irvine Recreation Department, heard about ropes courses back in 1980 and went through the PSI program himself.

Suter said he was impressed enough to want to incorporate a course into his department’s juvenile diversion programs aimed at steering troubled youths away from drugs and other forms of delinquency.

“For anybody who’s got a self-esteem or self-confidence problem, this can be a great help,” Suter said. “It promotes decision-making and heightened self-respect.”

It may even be possible that such physically and emotionally demanding tasks carry positive health benefits.

One Great Ropes graduate is Julian Whitaker, a physician and author who specializes in preventive treatment of heart disease, diabetes and other afflictions at his clinic in Newport Beach.

“It was a rush--that’s what I kept saying over and over,” Whitaker said. “The experience I got was exciting--it was interesting that you could experience all the fear and anxiety when you know that nothing (bad) is going to happen.

“As a physician, I have a suspicion that (activity like this) would enhance the immune system. I have a friend who had put himself in these kinds of frightening situations (like) mountain climbing. He claimed it stopped a cancerous growth and slowed his heart disease.

“I think that kind of stimulus to the body has a significantly powerful effect on a person’s mood, confidence, sense of well-being, immune system and overall general health,” Whitaker said. “Like anything else, the effects wear off in time. But a regular fix of that kind of activity would probably make people a lot healthier.”

Mike Baumeister, 24, an engineer for McDonnell Douglas and an enthusiastic bicyclist, took the ultimate challenge for another reason.

“I was in a 100-mile race recently, and I stopped at the 70-mile mark. I keep coming back to my experience on the tandem (logs). I came so close to canning it so many times. Sticking with that event taught me a lot. I’m sure after tonight it’ll sink in. I think this will help me with the cycling, not to mention other things in my life.”

Barbara Fulmer of Irvine is a former advertising sales executive who recently quit her career of 15 years to explore new directions. She found numerous life parallels in the regular ropes course, and said its effect was far-ranging, even weeks after going through it.

“I keep coming up with new things from it,” Fulmer said. “I’m surprised how strong it still is. I think the most profound is that when I look back at my career, I find that I had to work real hard to get to the top, but once I got there--get me down. It was the same feeling I had going up the Parrot Perch. I enjoy the challenge, but I don’t know how to stay and enjoy it. Even when I was making gobs of money, I had to quit and go find a new challenge.”

Another side of the ropes course that Ryan is stressing is the corporate applications. The institute has hosted groups, at $145-an-executive, from such large firms as McDonnell Douglas and Nissan to mom-and-pop businesses such as Irvine-based Gordon Moving & Storage.

Paul Cutnick, manager of training for Nissan Corp.’s data processing center in Gardena, said an independent management training consultant brought his firm to PSI as part of a 13-day program for Nissan’s middle-management staff.

“We were looking at the objectives of improving communication, teamwork and confidence-building among our management staff,” he said.

Initially, Cutnick said the idea of sending management trainees to what looks like an oversized playground set did seem “a little on the edge, so to speak.”

“But if you look at what we were trying to accomplish, it makes sense. . . . Sometimes problem solving is too complex. We need to make things happen, and that has a lot of parallels in this (Great Ropes) environment. One of the key elements of the ropes course is to make things happen rather than stand around and talk, which happens a lot in the corporate world.