You know, I found John Bradshaw's books very helpful in getting my head back together from various stuff in my childhood (which did NOT include a BM program, thank Ghu).
One of the things he's really big on is "healthy boundaries."
When you talk about people tearing each other apart, like in group, I can see some of what happened to all of you. Even if you went in with healthy boundaries and it was your parents who were the fruit loops, your personal psychological boundaries were forciblly torn down in group. You probably came out alternating mostly randomly between *no* boundaries, and *closed* boundaries.
I would encourage Carey and any of you guys who got upset about the whole Carey flap to borrow his books from the library or buy copies.
One of the most vital steps to fixing what was done to you is to relearn what healthy boundaries are, so you aren't spending every minute having to guess at what's normal, and to rebuild those healthy boundaries---or build them for the first time, if you've never had them.
The programs probably taught you little or nothing about healthy personal psychological boundaries, because all their mind control techniques required forcibly tearing down whatever boundaries you did have.
Getting healthy personal boundaries back will go a whole hell of a lot of the way towards restoring your ability to interact with and form healthy relationships with non-program people.
One of the things one of my profs said in criticizing "Sensitivity Training" programs was that they had done a lot of harm to a lot of people's minds by stirring up all sorts of crap in them that they had no idea how to resolve.
That sounds to me a lot like what the programs do, and why they have so many psychological casualties.
The real military tears people down in boot camp and builds them back up into soldiers, BUT the real military has had thousands of years of practice, in various incarnations, at rebuilding what they tore down----and a completely, brutally objective way for sorting the programs that rebuilt recruits into good soldiers from those that left them non-functional wrecks----Combat.
The programs tear people down and *try* (we hope--the less bad ones try, anyway) to build them back up into an "acceptable" persona. But they don't have any quality control comparable to the Combat the military has to deal with---so they don't get that feedback loop as to what works and what doesn't going on. They don't have any controlled follow up *at all* to show what they're rebuilding, long term, or how well or badly they're doing it.
The other thing the military does that the programs don't do is that the military flushes out the section 8 individuals before or during Basic as unsuited to be broken down and built back into soldiers---the military knows the limitations of their techniques.
The programs *select* for section 8 individuals and think "break them down, build them up" efforts will work on such individuals. There is no objective evidence from anywhere in human history to indicate that this approach is likely to be effective.
So anyway, you end up with a lot of people who've been broken down, but not built back up very effectively at all. Some, like Ginger, have done a pretty good job of rebuilding themselves.
Others, like those snarling back and forth over the Carey thing (among other things to snarl about)---well, it's like you don't have a very good psychological sense of what you can control and what you can't, or where you end and the other guy begins. Boundary issues.
The Bradshaw books contain safe, sane, positive, helpful techniques for improving those issues. They are *very* *very* good books for how you take yourself, as a human being that's broken down in some ways, and build yourself back up into a you you can like better and be more comfortable and happy being.
If, after reading them, you decide you want or need to chooose some sort of therapy for something, their information also gives you a good yardstick for sorting out a therapist that you can trust to be able to help you rebuild your damaged bits from the herd of therapists that might not be as good.
If you hadn't figured it out, I'm a big believer in therapeutic solutions that keep the patient in the driver's seat with a high degree of control and fully informed choice.
