Actually, the ability to hold two contradictory views at the same time is a sign of brainwashing. Ex. Honesty, the first and most impotent rule was always enforce, right Straightlings? So then, why did we laugh like a bunch of luatics whenever someone put in to leave after their "3 day eval". Wtf could be funny about staff routinely breaking the first and most imptent rule with full complicity by parents, clients and all?
It was nervous laughter..
But that's completely different from having the ability to
entertain a notion w/o accepting it as fact. In fact, it's sort of opposite. And, according to Aristotle, is the mark of an educated mind.
But I'm with ya'll on your conclusion anyway. I really quit being angry about this stuff, at least that part of it that's years gone now. Like you, Dragonfly, I might very well have put my daughter in a program if I didn't know better. It was then that I really, really understood what my dad did. Still at a loss, however, to understand my mom. She took to it like a fish to water, everything and everyone else be damned.
That's still a very raw spot w/ me. Not just cause they took my mother, either. But because it seems so many ppl are going along the same path these days, though more gradually.
So? I act angry and threatening when I'm scare. What of it. I went through an experimental behavior mod program as a teenager and it turned me out a bit like a former POW that way.
I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life, I absenteed myself from Christian assemblies.
--Benjamin Franklin, American Founding Father and inventor