Darrington is in Blue Ridge, Georgia.
And if it just started in Fall of 2004 after the Mexican govt. closed Casa By The Sea (which, iirc, was where someone said Dace was), how could we *already* have program graduates?
Okay, it's April. Our 6 mos. "graduate" is either a troll *or* fresh out and wet behind the ears and if the brainwashing wears off has to fear getting sent back---unless he/she is 18.
Ginger---I'd like to know if this is a troll. I *don't* want any information about identities. But if you can ethically say, I would like to know whether our Program Critic and our Program Cheerleader in this thread are coming off the same IP address. If they're at least different people, at least we won't be wasting our time answering.
I can believe someone went there for a month or a few weeks and had time to form an impression of Dace Goulding.
I can believe that we've got someone fresh out whose real personality is still suppressed by the Cult personality coercively implanted by WWASPS.
Dude, please look up Strategic Interaction Approach, Steven Hassan, and his book "Releasing the Bonds: Empowering People to Think for Themselves."
You probably will find aspects of the cult personality you want to keep. You probably will find aspects of your real, original personality you want back.
I don't know if early therapy to reintegrate your personality will save you a lot of pain from breaking down later with PTSD when the brainwashing wears off. It might decrease the severity.
Yeah, sure. Right now you're thinking, "I was not brainwashed, I don't have a problem."
You were, and you do. Therapy with a *competent* therapist to put your personality back together will make you less likely to relapse into whatever problems you had, because the cult personality's good and helpful aspects will be wholly part of you while the parts of your real personality that are individually you and *not* harmful to you will be back---basically, you won't snap back and forth like a rubber band over the next five to ten years.
You probably will have to wait until you're 18 and out from under your parents and the threat of being sent back, but find a county to live in that has a real good county mental health program based on ability to pay. And you'll probably need to hand them the book, because the techniques may well be new to the therapist, but being a basically competent therapist, he/she will be able to learn them and apply them to guide you into recovery.
Or, if you're just skeptical, remember "SIA: Strategic Interaction Approach" so when you realize you need some help, you can google it and you don't have to find your way out the hard way.
Basically, WWASPS is like poking a hole in the sidewall of a tire and putting a tire patch on it. When you get up to speed on life's freeway, it's gonna blow out on you. If you weren't broke, they broke you before sticking the patch on. If you were broken already, they smashed you down further before slapping the patch on.
But the patch is a quick fix. It wears off, and when it does, it leaves you really screwed.
You can find your way out of the worst of it on your own, but it takes time and pain. And tends to screw up your long-term finances and job prospects.
Get your sidewall fixed *right* before that patch blows on you. Usually takes about five years. And you get *better*, after awhile, with the patch gone, because the patch might as well be made of toxic waste---toxic to the soul--and I don't mean that in a religious sense.
When it blows, it's liable to leave you scared of therapists and paranoid about getting help. Use the positive effect of your cult personality's faith in therapy to get it fixed *now* rather than later and you will be a much happier person in the long run.
Because if you let it go until it blows, you're going to feel like your life's been on hold and you've been running in circles for years.
That kinda happened to me, not in quite the same way, when I postponed treatment for post-rape trauma. I ended up having to recover on my own. I wish I'd gotten competent therapy soon after so I wouldn't have made so many mistakes while I was locked into the mental prison of that damage.
Not *everything* you got out of there is bad. But you're going to want to do some environmental cleanup on the toxins and get the hole in your soul fixed right before you have that blowout.
Yeah, I'm sure you think I'm presumptious and full of myself. Maybe I am.
But remember SIA: Strategic Interaction Approach---because you might decide you need it someday.
Yeah, you're probably going to tell me now how I'm full of it and the program did you so much good.
I've heard it before---invariably from people who've been out of it for too little a span of time to have the bad aftereffects from the cheap and shoddy job they did kick in.
It's not residential treatment and therapy I have a problem with---It's lousy half-assed *hack* therapy. WWASPS treatment model frankly sucks rocks, and they apparently do a lousy job of screening treatment candidates to make sure they're even applying their treatment to the right patients if it even worked in the first place.
You shouldn't come out of an expensive and prolonged course of therapy needing *more* therapy to fix where the first bunch screwed up and left a ticking time bomb in your head.
The sad thing is it *could* be done right. There are *good* strategies for long-term modification of genuinely self-destructive behavior. Careful, compassionate, supportive ones *not* based on coercive persuasion techniques.
Doing it right takes empathy and compassion, which is harder to find in people than harshness and blame. Doing it right can be insistent and firm and sure---something you can't just laugh off or BS through---without the bad side effects of a harsh hack job.
But to do it right you not only have to be compassionate and empathic, you also have to know what the hell you're doing. It's harder work for the therapist and facility than therapeutic hack and slash.
It's also durable and far more permanent, nurturing the resilience of the person to better fit them to deal with hardships later in life when they come along---as they do for everyone.
Funtional Behavioral Analysis with a Behavior Intervention Plan and supportive therapy works a hell of a lot better than the crap they use.
*sigh*
Timoclea
