If i'm not mistaken, there was also one of Yoko-ono and John Lennon.
"Give Peace A Chance."
Speaking of motivational phrases... who is that actually said "Today is the first day of the rest of your life?" Synanon folks seem to think it was Chuck Dederich... Did a google, nobody knows, but one source attributed it to Abbie Hoffman! Talk about two people heading in opposite directions! Ha!
My dad used that phraise several times with me since benchmark.. Every time i get pissed off and tell him never to use that phrase again. I don't know if it started with Synanon... My dad claims it is a "Christian phrase" but i never heard him use it until he sent me to Benchmark. I believe i've heard it at AA meetings as well... Whatever it came from, I
vividly remember my counselor using that phrase immediately after exiting Friendship Workshop... Lots of little buttons... snippets, phrases.. set me off.
I probably shouldn't hate AA, considering it's voluntary, and it works for some... I mean i have respect for those who can make it work for them... But for me. If i was an alcoholic or an addict, i could never go to one of those meetings again. I would rather die. It's just too many bad memories. They made all kids go to AA meetings regardless of their issue. Whether it was ADHD, or anxiety, or depression, it was all an addiction that we could overcome if we just "let go and let god"... Schizophrenia too... We sat in little groups together with staff escorting us and were not allowed to share, but they would let us go up and get those chips... We couldn't get coffee either, since coffee was a drug... They gave us lots of Aderall though, and Prozac, and Xanax, and Trazidone etc etc etc. Is it legal? Who knows.. Getting government employees to get off their asses and do their jobs with any degree of competence is... difficult.
To this day, "let go and let god" means giving up control of myself to another.. one who will abuse that trust... Because program was the God... Program could save you... I suppose AA has the same issue (if one was an agnostic), but nobody forced anybody to do the steps in AA... Even if you were court-ordered you could just sit there. We, on the other hand, had to convert, had to admit that our lives were unmanagable (even if they were fine)... We had to rewrite our life story until we got it right, until it was "truthful" and we were being "real". We were headed down the wrong path, towards insanity, death, or jail... If we were at Benchmark, we needed to be there (implying somehow, some higher power had wanted us to be there, or that we had put ourselves there because we knew we needed help)... Mystical Manipulation... CEDU and stepcraft, est and synanon, bits and pieces of anything that worked...
