this is going to be long, but I think it is important. I agree that parents had a totally different experience.
While it sounds like many of you are not speaking, there are those of us who have had extensive talks with our parents about the whole thing and have a really close relationship that we had never had before...
it took a long time for me to be able to even broach the subject because at first i was just so fucking grateful to be out that all i did was work and try to live with all the shit i was going through. i actually didn't want to BURDEN my parents after it was all over because i saw how much they had been washed; it seemed that they saw some things, but that because i came out and was outwardly doing so much better than i was before, they figured "well, it worked", little knowing that it was all will-power and choice by that time... and fear, i guess. they wanted to leave it behind too.
anyway, the other part of it was that i could imagine, with the lack of education and openness about the truly scary programs out there that my parents (at the time they put me in) were acting from their own fear for me (albeit misplaced) and a naive gullibility, that "the professionals know best, and can be strong where i have failed...". they totally felt like it was their dysfunctions that led me to doing whatever (which was true) but also that they had let me down as parents before the program, so they whipped themselves more than i ever could for being in there... i know it's not the same thing but the one thing THEY did learn in the program that regardless what all happened to me i consider good, is they learned to APOLOGIZE TO ME, and that is what it sounds like most of you are missing... not to sound any way but sincere, 4 years after i got out, i blew up about the whole shit heap because even though a lot of things were different, i was still simmering with rage and frustration, resentment, hatred under the care i felt for them again, and demanded that they understand that
1. i never had an addiction although i used, and therefore did not need to have been in there
2. i said i know we should be past this but i don't think you get it, so i graphically described the humiliations, trauma, how it felt to me, the nightmares, the hopeless fucked up pointlessness i continued to feel etc etc etc
3. i needed to hear what it was like for them, so that i could blow away all the lies they were told about what was happening, and also because when they talked about things like parent's week-ends, raps and how they were treated like truant kids too, they saw a lot more how intense it must have been for us being in it day in and out with the additional abuses and breaking down we endured... not to mention that we lost YEARS of our fucking LIVES...
4. i told them i had to have them stop relating to me like i was a product of the program. fucking lingo and watching me and being so conscious of my god-damn "character defects" (they always used to talk to me in that "are you okay, sounds like you're ..." and then drop the appropriate program-ism on me, so that i felt like screaming)
whatever. it's funny how "over it" i feel until i start to get into how it all felt then and after...ugh. all i'm trying to say is that both parties have to become totally willing to face up and 'fess up, cause that shit runs deeeeep. we had to pretty much go through it ourselves, on our own, and after that, honestly i could care less in a lot of ways too. that sounds odd but after all that, i know my parents started to tell other parents they knew who had family problems what to look out for in shitty programs and sort of did what they could in little ways. they were completely bankrupted by the whole thing and had to work all the time just for us to survive and same with me, so i never blamed them for not trying to fight anything; besides, they tried to contact other parents who were in the programs for a while to band up and kept getting shut down over and over. needless to say, they have pretty much had nothing to do with program people since, except others that i have kept in touch with. most of the parents have their own guilts and shames to deal with but most just aren't ready or willing to look at it.
almost done here! i guess the thing is that most of us see our parents and what they did in a "what i would have done" kind of way, but from the perspective of what we know. in the same way as nobody else can say what they would have done in our shoes (i'm sure we've all talked to some shithead who said "man, that's screwed... I WOULDA DONE..." whatever, like they would have a clue how they'd respond to having their lives yanked out from under them in an environment like that), i agree that most of them were just coerced and unhealthy to begin with and did not do this to us out of vindictiveness or lack of care... most of them were pretty screwed up too! i do wonder whether they blocked their own understanding just because they were feeling like they didn't do much better either...?
