On 2004-03-06 21:05:00, Anonymous wrote:
"Can anyone give me information on this program? My sister is thinking of sending her 20 year old daughter there. I need ammunition!!! "
Okay, D'oh. The daughter is *20*. So you send the daughter to Fornits or other places on the Net to read about abusive programs, and if she *decides* to go anyway, you get a commitment from her to write you letters on a schedule, and to leave you a statement written in advance in front of an attorney--set it up so the attorney is *her* attorney--that if you don't get the letter she wants you to presume she's being prevented from sending it and file a writ of habeas corpus.
That way, *if* the daughter decides to go, she has set up in advance a way to get right back out if the place is abusive. Not all treatment programs are.
Now, if the daughter does *not* want to go, the usual way parents coerce legal adults into programs is they threaten to cut off all contact and support if the kid doesn't go.
So you tell your niece that if she doesn't want to go to this place and her mom makes that threat, that she can move in and sleep on your couch until she gets her feet under her and gets a job, etc., and that, as her family *you* will not cut her off.
This is, of course, unless she's a heroin or coke addict or something and really *needs* to go into rehab and the place is a reputable rehab OR unless she's psychotic or depressed and won't take her medication and is an *imminent* danger to herself or others.
You don't need "ammunition"---the girl is 20. You can and need to offer her choices so that her mother can *offer* her treatment if *your niece* thinks she needs it, but can't coerce her.
Yeah, a parent threatening to disown you is still powerful emotional blackmail. Unfortunately, when a control freak does that kind of emotional blackmail, the blackmailed person has only two choices---either refuse to be controlled and let the control freak make good their threat OR continue to be controlled, probably for life.
I don't know that the mother is doing this, but it's the usual threat used to get an over-18 but young adult into a program.
