Fornits

Fornits Home for Wayward Web Fora
An open discussion about the troubled parent industry

Yeah, it is a rude awakening when you finally realize what they did to you.

My closest buddy got married about ten years ago.  So this was 14 years after we had graduated.  He told her about the place and she said, "It was a cult."  And he tried to defend it but couldn't.  And then when he told me, I was like.... well, not a cult!  It was strange and all but a cult?  And then as we discussed it, how absolutely bizarre it all was and how none of it was based in reality I finally had to accept that I had attended a cult, based on the cults Synanon, EST, LifeSpring, concocted by a furniture salesman to make money.  

It also took hearing people tell of their own experiences for me to realize I went through that too.  I mainly had focused on the friendship I had made while I was there.  We "talked" about our time there often over the last 24 years, but we never really "discussed" what we did until he tried to explain it to his wife.  She heard his description and without any reservation, from a completely neutral and rational viewpoint, said CULT.  And as we began to really talk about it, and read other peoples statements, it became so crystal clear so quickly.  We didn't really need to be convinced, we just needed to hear someone else, someone we could trust, tell us what we had felt deep down for years.  

And it is because of feelings of guilt I suppose.  Feeling like you were supposed to have been cured, but knowing you weren't, but assuming everyone else was and you were somehow the only one who just didn't get it.  

But what truly made it clear for me is the complete inability to be able to describe the place and the things we went through so someone who was not there could actually understand.  And because it is so impossible to easily explain something we were so familiar with, in language an ordinary person could grasp, sealed it for me.  I knew it was a cult because only a cult would be so odd as to defy normal description.  (Not to say a cult is the ONLY thing that is hard to describe.)  Just that the experiences we went through were so far from normal, so far out of touch with reality as others understand it, that you are left feeling like you are describing being abducted by aliens.  Nobody believes you.  The things you are talking about defy both accurate description and therefore accurate understanding.  Like trying to tell someone how it feels to be water boarded and they don't think what you are describing could possibly be THAT bad!

The CEDU Documentary did a good job with Raps.  They said, "You really have no idea what it is like to have fifteen people get up, move across the room from you, knowing they are all about to scream at the top of their lungs at you."  And most people don't have any idea what that is like and would have trouble truly understanding.  

And NOT being able to clearly explain CEDU, RMA or any of the other places leaves you feeling awkward and a little helpless.  Like you are trying to describe in detail a nightmare you had a couple of nights before where you are saying, "And you were there, but it wasn't really you.  I mean it was, but you looked like someone else, but I knew it was you because when you told me to grab the grapefruit... or was it the sewing machine?..well anyway, you were there and we were running for some reason, trying to get to the bus station but I can't remember why, but they needed grapefruits.  And I just remember you kept getting your feet stuck in wet cement and you kept sinking deeper and deeper and I kept trying to help you because we were in a hurry, but every time I tried to scream at you to hurry I dropped the grapefruit and it kept rolling across the freeway, which was weird because we were at school and there's no freeway there, and your mom kept driving by us and she wouldn't help..."  

That's how I feel when I try and describe RMA and the stuff we did there.  Like I am trying to describe a dream I had that is hard to remember and full of such nonsense nobody takes it seriously.

I saw Mel is 1985.  He was extremely disgusting.  Obese, walked like a duck.  And I too remember the food stains.  But what I remember the most was him walking up to the girls, who had never met him, and embracing them like they were his children but definitely in a pedophile sort of way.  The staff really did worship him and when you saw him, your first reaction was...okay, so where is he?  And then they point him out and you're like... The fat guy who looks like he just fell out of the ugly tree?  I listened to him talk for about five minutes before deciding he was clueless, making shit up as he went along.  Everything sounded like "...and the fish was THIS BIG!"  And everyone went oooh and ahhh on cue.  Pathetic.

It was just as bad when Dan Earle suddenly became director.  He was coming up to RMA and they made about forty of us walk down the driveway and pick up all the branches and pine cones, remove any rocks large than a marble, so his Highness would have a smooth entry.  Everything got polished spic and span, like some God was arriving.  Same for Mel when he showed up.  Yet I had met Dan prior to his ascending the throne and was not impressed then either.  It would be like praising Caroline Wolfe or Randy Eide.  Pathetic people with nothing original coming out of their mouths except made-up crap.  

Mel breezed in to town, spew a bunch of nonsensical psychobabble at everyone, then poof, he was gone.  And I don't remember a single student feeling like it was a wonderful day that he had blessed us with his presence.  I think everyone was just glad he had left and the tension and feeling like a shit storm might happen any minute was over.  

Yes, big, ugly, foul smelling like he hadn't bathed in a week, big bushy 1970's mustache with a gut that made his thin black shirt bulge.  Not even a suit and tie.  Just black slacks that looked like he had swiped them from a Goodwill store, ass crack showing every time he moved.  A black tee shirt, bulging at the waist, belly showing, with mustard stains on it like he couldn't wait long enough to get to the wonderful buffet line that was RMA's feeding trough, so he robbed a hot dog stand on the way through Bonners Ferry.  Just a really foul human being.  What little hair he had wasn't combed.  And his face looked like he had just tried to run a marathon.  Sweaty, grimy.  The guy was really and truly disgusting.  

The reason you don't find pictures of him is probably because nobody would want a keepsake.  Look at a painting by Dan Earle.  Same grotesqueness.  His artwork is probably the closest thing that can truly come close to the horror that was Mel Wasserman.

I wrote a similar post on another site where the CEDU Documentary is being made.  How you got so little education, and the tools didn't work, and how your parents expected a miracle and all they got was a big bill to pay and a messed up kid.  How you thought you'd just hug and smoosh your way to success and how none of that or any of the other nonsense they instilled in us had any practical use on the outside.  

All of this is why suicides are not a practical measurement of failure.  Finding out what percentage were stunted educationally, who might not have completed college or perhaps had to wait many years to complete it because the Kool Aid hadn't worn off and they couldn't find direction enough to succeed.  Finding out how many had failed relationships, with parents, close friends.  How many jobs people had to hold before finding something that they could just do.  How long it took graduates to feel part of normal society again...  These would be worth investigating and tallying up.

I remember coming home and feeling awkward around my own friends.  Unable to relax and enjoy anything.  Always feeling like my parents were harshly judging me, waiting for the miracle to show itself.  Having this sense of being on top of the world, with a vague sense of direction, but no clear cut plan or goal, both of which seemed just out of reach.  I waited for the miracle too.  That somehow everything would just work, but it didn't.  That I would eventually feel normal, act normal, and it took years.  So many lost years.

Considering that he watched so many of us in such a fetal position, I wonder if all of his creations are based on kids hunched over, looking pathetic and exhausted and weak.  And that he saw all of us, at least in his mind, naked.   Very disturbing painting.  I think it is missing a Kleenex box though.

I would have to say I lied in all of them.  I wasn't really all that messed up when I got there having only missed homework assignments enough times to piss my parents off.  So I always had virtually nothing to cop out to.  

The propheets and workshops were all so bizarre I found it difficult to participate because little of it made sense from the standpoint of asking myself "How is this going to ever help me?"  The Truth felt like a CIA interrogation session and made me extremely uncomfortable having to listen to people telling the most horrible stories, some of them so disgusting I was ready to throw up.

The Childrens felt contrived.  I can accept that our childhood was supposed to be a time of innocence and happiness and that we might long for those days, and I can see a bridge between adult-hood and a desire to sometimes act like a child.  But that concept could have been explained in ten minutes.  No need for a 24 hours sleep deprivation.

The I want to live had problems.  A buddy of mine was finally feeling good about himself.  He was close to life probably for the first time in his life.  Yet he was forced to get up against death, fighting to get there when he didn't want to be.  And I felt like I too was far closer to life having done nothing in my life to suggest was on a path to dying young.  So clearly we had to lie to please.  This goes back to the concept that we were all made to constantly feel equally bad about ourselves, even when compared to kids who really had serious problems, long histories of abuses.  

I had a big problem with the Summit for the reasons described in the earlier post.  I would not agree to the violence rule.  I held out for hours, but another staff named Chuck Selent also held out because of something related to not eating anything not given to us.  He was on a very expensive vitamin supplement regimen he refused to stop just for the workshop.  He was ready to walk out.  So they ignored my refusal to agree to the violence rule and I basically got away with it.  I never did agree.  Then came the life boat exercise and I made up an excuse why the first three people in the circle were the three people who got life boats.  Had I been given twenty, I would have given out twenty.  And the storyline was BS.  We were supposed to be within twenty miles of shore. So I looked at it intellectually. Having been a strong swimmer all my life, I knew I could swim twenty miles and survive.  So giving out all my boats seemed realistic.  

What I do remember specifically lying about were parts of my Ishi and I think the Summit.  On the Ishi I fabricated a story of having seen a Falcon land on a branch near me, and that it didn't fly away for more than an hour, so I said my Ishi name was Trusting Falcon.  There was no Falcon.  I used the Ishi to catch up on sleep.  During what I think was the Summit, they drive you to Spokane, Washington and make you wander around looking for some total stranger to do a kind deed for.  They gave you some money and off you went.  I took off, made sure I wasn't followed, spent the money at Burger King, and went to a Museum and looked at artwork.  Came back and said I helped a bicyclist who had fallen by giving him first aid and bottle of soda.  Technically it was a true story.  But it happened before I went to RMA.  

But I always had to lie in raps and propheets because I never really did anything wrong.  I shoplifted about 400 Star Wars figures when I was 9 years old back in 1977, so I could have scenes of hundreds of Storm Troopers standing around in formation.  Then I stole Rebel Soldiers so I could have huge battles.  Past that... I had to lie to keep it so I wouldn't get talked to for having nothing really bad to say about myself.  And I never actually felt bad about the shoplifting.  I went on a spree at age 9, most kids steal something at some point in their childhood, and back then what I stole was cool and we had a blast playing with them and I earned some popularity points because I had such a vast collection.  I could have retired by now selling those things.  I guess I feel bad about not keeping them.  They would brighten up my bedroom.  

I guess what pisses me off is that before RMA and after RMA, I never really lied much if at all.  Never had the need.  RMA forced me to make lying a regular part of my life for two years, to hide my true feelings, my true thoughts, and act differently than who I am.

Mare definitely had some lungs.  That woman was the only person at RMA who could scream and yell louder than Caroline Wolfe.  

I mainly remember her raps.  She might have known a lot about the Wilderness, but when I was at RMA, she never did any of the expeditions with us, except the Ishi.  And that took place mainly on campus anyway and was a really weird experience.  But her raps were loud, and she had so little insight of others.  Aside from making the usual RMA speeches and using the usual RMA phrases, she was probably one of the dumbest people I had met.  Everything that came out of her mouth, unless it was her area of expertise like Wilderness or nursing, was always wrong.  

Dan was generally cool, but he also liked to yell.  I can't say his Wilderness skills were top notch though.  On our Final Voyage and our Final Quest, he got lost and couldn't find his way out without help.  He might have known a lot about nature in general, but his map skills made me laugh.  I remember he couldn't find RMA even though we were on Katka and within a handful of miles...and could see the campus.  See it!  

It was terribly sad when Mare gave birth to Luka and he was just big enough to fit in the palm of a hand.  So small and fragile.  I am glad to hear he is 21 now and made it.  Back then we feared every day he wasn't going to last much longer.  

RMA changed people and Dan and Mare were not immune.  While I was there I could see the good side of them.  Dan was friendly and enjoyable when he wasn't playing staff member.  Mare jumped in a bit deeper and much sooner and had Kool-aid breath from gargling the psychobabble too much.  Two other staff who were there during my time, Brett and Lisa Carey were much the same.  All four of these people seemed to have arrived with good intentions.  I think they all really wanted to help kids.  But the system was designed to break people.  And they all broke.  Which is sad.  

I think in many ways, we can regret what happened to them as much as regretting what happened to us because of CEDU and RMA.  We didn't want to be there, they did.  We got to leave, wanted to leave and were able to survive by leaving.  They stayed, their goodness was broken and eaten away by a system designed to do that, and they stayed...becoming part of the system.  CEDU was like the Borg.  Resistance was futile.  

Sorry to hear Dan passed away.  All my love to Mare and her children.

Raps were held 3 times a week for us on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.  They lasted three hours.  During the week you could put in a "Rap Request" to try and get a specific student or staff member in to your rap ahead of time.  

On the day of the rap, the staff would be in the office going through all of the requests, along with their own, and putting together all the raps that would take place that day.  Usually four to six, each with 15-20 students and 1 to 3 staff facilitators.  

Raps took place after lunch so everyone was hanging out around the "pit", a seating area in the living room where most announcements would take place.  The staff would walk in, many of them smiling, knowing who was going to be getting destroyed shortly in his or her raps, and then they would announce who was in what rap and what room to go to.  There was often quite a bit of humiliation involved in this process, as someone above noted, where people would get their names called and a staff would make a snide comment about them and students were expected to giggle, laugh or whatever to look good and stroke the ego of the staff.

Once in the raps, you tried to get a good seat, which for me tended to be next to the staff chair.  Most of the "power" staff generally took a seat in a particular spot each time, and since you couldn't yell at someone next to you, sitting next to a staff, or actually two seats over, was a good spot.  And since the students generally put the chairs in to a circle to set the place up, if you were there early you could grab a more comfortable chair.

Once the staff were there and everyone was seated, you had to listen to some psycho-babble speech from the staff before things begun.  Then you'd hear the magic words "Let's have a rap!" and all hell would break loose.  Anywhere from three to fifteen people screaming to get the floor, usually the loudest and most persistent got to go first.  They would mostly be upset at a fellow student for some minor thing they had done like take an 11 minute shower instead of 10, hogging the washer and dryer, not "pulling their weight" or something equally trivial.  On rare occasions you might hear someone get "indicted" as the term was, for something serious like planning to run away, admitting to taking drugs on a home visit (which meant an older student because you didn't go home till after a year, so these people had managed a year or more in the program and yet took drugs the moment they had a chance, suggesting the program didn't really work.)  There could also be "breaking bans", which meant you spoke to someone you had been banned from communicating with, banning itself being a violation of our civil rights and right to freedom of speech.  But mostly the indictments were for the most trivial matters.

Then other people would join in.  In order to talk to someone, you had to be somewhat across the room from them so as not to be physically intimidating as usually people who were talking tended to be on the edge of their seat, fingers pointed, screaming at the top of their lungs, which is definitely threatening.  So you would point at someone across the room, make eye contact, letting them know you wanted to switch seats with them, and if they had nothing more to say, or weren't planning on saying anything to the person being talked to, they would get up and switch seats.  So if you are the person being yelled at, as you watch, two, three, seven, ten, fifteen people all scrambling to move across the room from you, this can generate quite a bit of fear and anxiety because you know every single one of them has something to say.  Not necessarily anything true, or anything relevant, as often people who keep the heat on you rather than let it end and potentially mean someone else gets yelled at.  There was a lot of fake indictments to keep the rap moving but against others, so as to avoid getting yelled at yourself.  

I remember one rap where I could tell a student, whom I barely knew kept switching with me.  Anytime I would switch seats, he would be quick to jump up and change.  Or if he couldn't, he would wait so he could get in to position to be able to indict me when the current person being talked to was finished.  So I made shit up to say to the person to keep things going, saying something everyone could comment on so more people would want to join in and go "Yeah, me too!"  and in doing this I managed to get him to change places one too many times and the staff member caught him and said sit down!  Commenting that he had switched about six times during the indictment on the other student but had not actually said a word.  And this kind of killed the current indictment so suddenly another student got yelled at and since I was sitting right next to the guy, he couldn't say a word.  So I had basically manipulated the rap for over an hour to prevent myself from being yelled at, and I know everyone else did similar things.  It wasn't always hard to know if you were about to be yelled at.  Especially if during the first seconds of the rap, one of those fifteen people trying to get the floor were yelling your name, but lost out.  Waiting and knowing you are going to be screamed at is an intimidating and fearful way to spend three hours.

One aspect of raps rarely mentioned is how students at the school were often meant to feel equally guilty about events in their life compared to others who might have had less crap or more crap go on in theirs.  An example would be going to death row in prison for jay walking, whereas someone else went there for murder.  If you had little about your life that was horrible, staff would try and create something.  I know for me, my parents divorce was a rather simple affair, it wasn't a battle, there was no fighting, my father moved close by and he remained a part of our lives.  The divorce had nothing to do with me.  But the staff tried to make me feel horrible about it, suggesting my father divorced my mother and I was partly to blame at age 7.  It was bogus, but this is what they did.  You had to feel guilty, horrible, deep penetrating anguish all the time, and God help you if you had trouble crying because generally they don't stop until you cry.  I also was meant to feel bad for my being adopted too.  All of this to make me feel as bad as people who had raped others, been raped by others, kids who had been molested by family members, kids who had OD'd on drugs, or had severe alcoholism and so on.  I got sent to RMA because I missed some homework assignments but was made to continuously feel bad about myself on the same level as others who had just terrible lives.  And Raps were the main place where this took place.  

So to sum up, Raps for the most part had no positive sides.  In some ways it was better than just punching the daylights out of someone for trivial crap, but there was no other outlet allowed.  Walking up to someone and just saying, "Hey dude, we're all waiting here, next time could you try and keep your shower down to ten minutes?" didn't happen.   Said in a calm voice, most would have just said yes.  But it paid off to say it in a rap instead, and at the top of your lungs. You "looked good" in front of staff if you indicted people in raps, so there was a reward of sorts for doing this even when it was for trivial stuff you should have tried to solve out of a rap.   Raps were about generating deep emotion and anger in the students and then leaving it undirected.  Leaving it undirected might not have been intentional, but it was the usual outcome as there was really no actual therapy, just screaming and yelling.  Staff often used bottled terms that had been so over-used they had no real impact.  The terms were often vague, so students were left to guess what was said and what it all meant.  At the end of a rap, people either pretended to be elated, having really dug deep and experienced something profound, or they had blank stares, were exhausted and had no clue what to do next except stagger down to dorms for dorm time glad they had a day off before doing another rap.  

Do they work?  No.  They claim they helped save thousand of druggies over the years.  But I could walk up to a druggie every day of their life and ask in a calm and serious voice, "You ready to do something else with your life, or are drugs working for you still?"  Unless the druggie really wants to stop and do something else, they won't.  Yelling and screaming aren't going to work.  And if I also say, "And if you do decide to change, I am here for you," I think this is far more positive and would have a better chance of getting through to the person.  Showing them that not everyone has given up on them.  But it has to be said with truth and some amount of care and love so the druggie can know that is there.  That they might not have to do it alone.  But ultimately, unless they want to change and quit, nothing will happen.  

Using raps on teens who have no power to walk out or defend themselves, who might not have actually done anything horrible... it is useless.  Raps were rarely used to deal with the issues related to why the student was sent there by their parents.  It was usually just anger management for trivial shit that happens when 120 people live in close quarters, unable to leave in an environment that is foreign, far from home, scary and full of fear.  Not once while I was there did anyone ever ask me about missed homework assignments.  But they did spend a lot of months trying to determine if I had ever used drugs or had sex, because that shit they loved to talk about.  Why?  Because all of the staff had done it.  And not in a good way.  Staff had been known to have raped people before becoming staff.  Of having been prostitutes.  Of having serious alcohol and drug abuse problems.  And they figured since they had been weak once, everyone else must be lying because they must have done it too.  And this is where making all of the students feel equally horrible about themselves winds up being the whole purpose of raps.  

Hope this description helped.