As someone who ended up in a private program, I have to say it was partly my fault as much as it was my parents because none of us expected what was to come. Even though I know we were all equally fooled it still did not repair the family we had that never worked in the first place. My parents just say that they did they best they could at the time given what they knew, and the end results was what they wanted which was me alive and that was most important. They say even if it meant locking me up in a cage, as long as it meant that I was alive that it was worth it. I laugh at that, because I know, not them, that I was not close to death, not like they thought at all. So I think there was a huge disconnect. They weren't in my life at all and only showed up when I needed help or got in trouble so that's all they saw, and not all the good things I did everyday when they were not around. So I think that then once "the experts" got involved and kept telling them I was bad, or chemically off, or whatever that they believed it. They always thought of themselves as messed up, so they figured, of course so would I be. I have never been that honest though about the feeling involved and what went on and the humiliating and degrading and permanently psychological anxiety that came with the experience. If I went into that kind of detail the guilt factor would be very real for them quite possibly, I don't really know. But they cling to the fantasy that I was seconds away from death and all means necessary were appropriate even if it meant making a deal with the devil. I disagree with this philosophy, now, because I think the lasting psychological anxiety that comes from the experience is not worth it. It's like searching for the person before the experience, and never quite finding them. I can dress up like them, talk like them, and act like them, but it's like I'm an actor within my own body, I am not all quite there. Some part of me is left, inside a deep shell within myself, buried , that can never be opened in fear of what I might find. So what is left is a surface that seems just as smooth as before, but in truth it is paper thin. A slight breeze will knock it over and reveal the invisible truth buried just beneath, colored by my own sense of shame and self doubt. So that leaves three of us who really gained nothing from it all. It makes you wonder what would of happened if another path had been followed. Maybe something better. Maybe something worse. Probably the same, just in another way. The end result was inevitable, which was completely dissolution of family, the only sane solution to the insanity of our existence. Some things are better left unsaid. Untouched. Unknown.
