one of the most distinguishing features that I had thought was just "personality quirks" I later found to be related to traumatic encounters. I jump when someone comes into my periphery and have other hyper sensative awareness of my immediate surrounding and environment. I always make a noise on the threshold of a door because I was encouraged to do such things in my modification when I was a youngster. In situations involving large groups of people I can identify whose attention I have instinctively. If I'm correct or not doesn't matter, I will approach the person. I have never been used to the "games" people play. I'm direct and since leaving my place so many years ago and while there I've had few friends though I've always been "popular". I've had more fistfights and romantic interludes than Prince has had names. But at other times I am reclusive and depressed and during these times I know that the world is fucking with me and I have no control and I think about the feeling I had at that place and how depression was dealt with...I become estranged from anyone and can't leave the house. I think about suicide. I come to this site and see and remember about my time there so long ago, and for so long I've tried to make it work for me, use my "tools". IT helps little, as I've chosen to feel what I feel. It can't be chemical. All the doctors and especially my shrink are wrong, don't they know that everything I need is inside of me. I'm supposed to feel good when I feel bad. There must be a reward for this trouble inside. This is a lot of my life that is effected by the experience I endured. I bought in fully to the idea that I was nothing and my life would go nowhere for two years. Then in six months the place that had so ruefully worn away any individual thinking and rendered me not much more than a scared, betrayed slave; changed into a shelter from the outside world. We were threatened with the realities of the street and warned that without program thinking we were destined for failure. Then they turned us loose after a dinky graduation ceremony and that was that. The only thing, ergo, I got from the program was that without it I'm lost. I hate the program because there is no program. The only thing gained was a euphoric utopian bubble that lasted for a little while, ending exactly the first time I confronted one of my friends or roomates by program standards. There was no message. There is no secret. The program did nothing but hurt. ME. The real ME. Whatever depression related problems or teenage angst I had when I went there was distracted from or distorted by lengthy group sessions in which I was told what my problems were starting on the first day by people whose names I hadn't even learned yet. "Confrontation" style therapy ripped me and my already delicate disposition towards the world and my family life, and replaced it with NOTHING but more angst and indecision. It left me with almost no social skills and a distain for manual labor.
I digress, but in the end these places fuck royally with you religiously/spiritually, pyschologically, and painfully. The emotional growth aspect is equal to rage. It fed on anger and it spawned it likewise.
