If I had gone to Straight Incorporated for anything, it's just what my mother years later keeps saying; 'You were heading down the same path as your brother'. Her answers to why she put us in there are never the proverbial 'Honest' ones simply b/c she never sticks to any diatribe of complete sentence explanation.
My mother, Mary Anne Ford/Disheroon, never had the time to watch her kids. Alot of her years before giving birth were years were spent with people she didn't know where her father dropped her off and kidnapped her from her mother - his divorced wife of many years. Her three older brothers were very hateful and shady towards her.
When her teenager, male children began to shut her out and establish their own identities and hate their parent(s), she flipped out by way of bitter speech, physical assaults, and neglect.
Add this onto her never having gotten extended or helpful counseling for her three miscarriages mixed in with a total of four children, two per marriage, and two divorces. She spent three years in a Tech/Vocational school for Nursing w/ license, so she didn't really get any example of world studies integral to becoming more tolerant of oneself and the world; Humanities, Government, Maths, etc. Put this on top of running a county hospital terminal floor where all you do all day is get to watch people stew in their depression at the inevitable.
And then, forget about it, we came to Florida. 'Nuff said. Father was paying unadjusted child support, she started working at another hospital here in Florida at around; $8, 9, tops 10 bucks per ?!? Raising four children ?!?
She had no time to supervise, aid w/ homework beyond 'Did you do your homework ?', and generally befriend her children outside of being mentally and physically whooped after a shitty day's work, only to come home and go through her embittered ritual of having to live with her mirroring children and then off to a lonely bed.
Back in the very young days my brother and I got in trouble, and used to get our asses kicked sometimes from the sissy older kids who were trying to make some kinda impression in our neighborhood back in Texas. And shit rolls down hill you know; my poor sisters. And those same kids that used to influence us younger kids weren't being supervised by their 'middle class' employed parents either. My brother wound up in state juvee center for all their unbridled breaking and entering, a feat that was more than fully brought on by the influence of those older children. My brother never sold me out. By the time he got out of Tx. juvee, my mom was divorced from her second husband, and was off to Florida, leaving me with my real father who had been in and out of our lives with his myriad of relationships with women since I was a baby.
My mother's reason when she stopped through Tyler, Tx. on her way out to Florida was; 'There is nothing here for me'.
Fuck you Mary Anne, I am just waiting for you to die so I can piss on your grave.
Wouldn't you know that as a baby I began to identify with my mother inasmuch as my older brother identified with my father. So, where my brother found in himself anger, independence, and fight; I identified with my mother who I recognized first in learning to feel her feelings of jealousy, fear, and pure insecurity.
My father was the only child of his parents. Just after high school my father signed on for the next fifteen years in the Navy. Later, he met my mother in or around Maryland and they moved down to Texas.
My father says 'they' together chose a divorce because 'they didn't have anything left to say to one another'. My mother, being the emotional rollercoaster, would say, 'Your father has a black heart', and, 'He just left one day'. Years later I discovered from my mother that he took off to North Carolina. Neither he, nor she chooses to broach the subject of their ending of their marriage, and for what ideals they will not say either. I have my own secret reasons why I imagine my father left my mother and why my mother can't speak about her relationship-stifling emotions, and they still choose to take those realities to their graves. She says she did not try to stop him.
My brother used to take advantage of my insecurities developed from identifying with my materner. But he sometimes managed to keep me out of harm's way as well. Some day he and I will be fast friends and I will kick his ass for beating up his best friend, and just for being a great and seriously cool cat.
My brother gets out of juvee and comes to Florida. He's been inside for about a year or two, give or take, and as a teenager he wants to experience life again. He probably got into what you would call the 'wrong crowd'. Skipping school, dark clothing, drugs, crime, general rebellion as want; once out of juvee.
I came around to Florida for a summer vacation and then I decided to stay. Both my dad and step-mom said that my choice here was a big mistake.
I'm locked in depression in Tyler, I am unsupervised, I am already reaping the whole; 'Did you do your homework' w/o any inkling to delve into my troubles in school or psyche. Father and stepmother were busy making money, I am not complaining about money making, and making it for their two new children; my halfbrother and halfsister. Once, at the dinner table, my Tyler folks told me they were considering sending me to my stepmother's brother's, Danny, home to live. They said something in the way that I wasn't acting right. I don't fully remember the particulars of the conversation and I am certain they will deny it, but I distinctly remember feeling betrayed. For at least five hours a day I was left unsupervised, after school, in that house. Children picked on and harassed me horribly for being silent on the bus in Tyler.
Could moving to Florida have been worse ? So many thousands of parents left their children in "Pay and Dump" facilities so they could work and not have to deal with child rearing (Dr. ). There are children all over our world who literally are left on the streets as babies w/ no parents whatsoever. These infants grow to live in the streets and the sound that comes from their mouths is identical to the sounds of starving canines and feral beasts.
My folks in Tx. say, 'We tried to phone you a couple of times to see how you were doing and they wouldn't let us speak to you'. This is their guiltless explanation for dropping the ball. I can't properly formulate the equation of their movements, but child support and avoided court issues come to mind about the actions of my parents when it came to child rearing. My brother, after copping out of Straight Incorporated, went to Tx where my father and stepmother got him some more well wishful counseling. Yet psychological and animalistic behavior still ensued. They had no idea or perhaps could not have asked the right questions to such an amount of innocent and damaged goods, for they had passed him off just like me many years before.
However, I was safely tucked harmlessly away in Straight. Under supervision in Straight, I was allowed to call my father a coupla times and tell him that everything was good and that I was 'finally getting help for my drug problem'. I am trying to keep my opinions out of this historical and assume that my reader is sentient; if you haven't already - please note that drugs is not and never has been a factor in my life.
So, when I come to Florida my brother becomes my major influence once again for lack of supervision. We skip school, we hang out w/ some of his friends. I start to dress in dark clothing and I do things recklessly and wear my haird black like Lord Byron the Romantic hero. My g/f inspires me with greats like 'the Cure', and 'the Smiths'.
One day I come home from school and my mother goes crazy throwing things, and my brother is gone. Mother and I had been arguing for some time these last few days. She says my brother has gone to get some help. She tricks me into skipping school saying that we are going to have a picnic. Two days short of two months in Charter Hospital my mother finally gathers enough money to inaugurate my three year sobatical in Straight Incorporated.
I endure restraining, loss of all identity, pure and total breakdown, loss of all and any potential properties for three years, spit therapy, brainwashing through constant berating of personal and private habits up to whole fault of family issues being blamed on me down to use of bathroom 'privileges', other cult type iconistic reprogramming such as confrotation of nonexistent sexuality, confrotation from myself to other children over things that were quite normal quarks and accidents such as speaking out of turn. I make it through the total annhiliation of my whole being and worlds of education and lack of schooling for three years. I endure my mother's constant whining about my length of my stay. She couldn't understand why I couldn't grasp the steps (Step 1: Admitted we were powerless over alcohol and drugs, that our lives had become unmanageable.) and the program, and she couldn't know that I was not receiving any counseling for her reasoning as to why I was there or w/e: I was becoming like my brother.
For reasons that were taboo to speak about, I was not allowed to speak about anything that might have aided my incarceration or attempt at some mental stability or stability in my life at all. No. Whenever any patient mentioned that he or she, or I, was in there to get help b/c they had issues with their family...that child would be spit on or yelled at or berated with the most horrid insults about why we were the only persons at fault. And we were coerced into doing this as if our lives depended on it, we were manipulated and made to fear physical threats, beatings, food rationing, if we did not do what we were told to do just like we were ALL told we had to mistreat others this way in total therapeutic anonymity. Everyone was made to believe that this cult was the life and heartbeat of their very existence, our sole means for survival - and these words and similar were yelled to us by one another in pure therapeutic anonymity, that gratitude was the key to our graduation.
Of course, to add to this inescapable unbreakable chain my life had thus far proved to be, I graduated. I have said in earlier posts what a farce this was. There were a couple other kids in front of me who more than ready to graduate. I used to "motivate" (a form of violent movement of the arms) to get called on in the upper level phase "raps" (a group therapy session). Staff members constantly would ask me why I was there, or why I even bothered motivating. Nevertheless after being there for the last three years they found no choice but to work me more and graduate me even though I never believed I was an addict. My poor dumb mother made herself nearly monetarily bankrupt in some haze that she thought that my work, my suffered abuse, would bring to her a family not already cauterized by more than just her unsympathetic appetites. During her time of three years of keeping me incarcerated my mother lived with other people. In fact, the home I lived at in short bursts (Straight was constantly setting their patients back on levels so to keep the money rolling in) with my mother was the property of another Straight family living there. What a madhouse that was.
I get out of Straight @ eighteen and within a couple of weeks I am suicidal. I am fighting with my mother as if I had never been in Straight at all. I skip school and quit my new job because I am too depressed. I go to live with my father and stepmother. I am happy for cos I get a license and a G.E.D. I drop out of junior college because I am too nervous around others. I quit several jobs because I am too depressed. I start to confront everything and everyone around me as if they were all patients, at least they were to me since this is what I had been doing every single day out of the last three years in Straight. By this time I am a fully starving dog even when fed. I growl at everything and everything is fearful and wrong. My father gives me a car and I don't even know how to show happiness. I yell at my friends constantly and they disown me after a short period of time. I get in trouble with the law for assaulting others and destroying property. I have very reckless relationships with people just the same as we were required to do in Straight Inc.
Six months to a year later my mother takes me back in down here in Florida. Straight is now on its last few months of still being open and all the old rules of restraining and 'In Your Face Spit Therapy' are gone thanks to Children and Families (Human Resources) in Florida. I try to get a job there on staff. My application is denied. I return to the old building and ask why I am being denied. Where they were hiring, I am now met with opposition by old friends saying they were never hiring.
And now the present day here I am trying to reconcile the theft that was purely exacted to me throughout my life and in those three years. I am working at it, but its hard for me to be moralistic and forgive and forget that shit. I look at my halfbrother and halfsister, and even my other two sisters who lived with me here in Florida while I was going through Straight Incorporated, and realize that most of what I was experiencing - they will never have to experience. They will never have any remotely similar relationship to my real mother and father that I have unless subtractrions (subtract three years of paid assault at Straight Inc.) are made.
So my motives for wanting to be a staff member there are because that is the place I identified with for several years, much the same that a rape victim identifies with his/her rapist. In the case of brainwashing and cultthink I can definitively say that it has taken three times as many years to have memory recall where I can remember anything that happened in Straight Incorporated. I was not going to go to school anytime soon, I couldn't find a job I liked cos I had already worked at every fast food restaurant available practically.
I would not want to be a staff member now even though sometimes I secretly wish I were still in Straight today. At least I wouldn't have to face the neglect of my prideful parents. I wouldn't have to face that world. I can't say that anything from Straight Incorporated has helped me now except to believe my own lies better.
If I were a staff member I would be teaching others how to live in a very unhealthy coccoon before and many years after their graduation.
So the issue is not whether I approve of staff members or not. Not until the last year have I realized the fuller extent of what was done to me in Straight Inc. and throughout much of my prior life.
Blaming prior cult members might not be an issue unless they are still in denial about the type of illegal therapy they are using and what it has made them and what it really does to others and society.
Would you blame someone weakened by family life and then cult thinking if they were suckered and resuckered into deeper folds of the already accustomed lies and false ruling thought and programs
Then again, some people don't have the parent's that I have.
[ This Message was edited by: animals all of us on 2004-03-28 23:47 ]