Fornits

Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform => Straight, Inc. and Derivatives => Topic started by: SurvivorEMSR on April 17, 2003, 11:59:00 AM

Title: Acting out
Post by: SurvivorEMSR on April 17, 2003, 11:59:00 AM

I must say that I didn't like the punishments the group would receive on the part of the "misbehaving," but I did enjoy the entertainment. One winter Pathway made us do song groups where we would learn new songs. A fifth phaser who had been started over and was "acting out" refused to sing and when confronted by staff, he put his song sheets on the floor and pissed on them. None of staff would go near him to restrain him for fear of getting pissed on.  Ahhh, the good old days of Pathway. Anyone else?

Title: Acting out
Post by: LeighBright on April 17, 2003, 12:54:00 PM

That's hillarious! But I can't imagine anyone getting away with something like that in Straight. In my mind, that guy would have been slammed into and on top of his urine and then sat on by a bunch of large guys. Then, on the ride home he'd be berated for reeking of urine. That's amazing no one did anything. I'm always fascinated that some people can get away with stuff like that. What year was that, by the way? How soon after they became Pathway?

Title: Acting out
Post by: ehm on April 17, 2003, 01:41:00 PM

I guess by the time I went into the program, 1986, ?misbehaviors? were not that clever anymore. Not like their old school brethren, ?jerk? anyway.
The misbehavior word itself implies a very young mentality. Not to mention the way they acted. It was really sick to watch some of those girls revert back to infantile freaks. And the cutting..!? I remember girls ?clicking? over their cut marks on their arms. That was just too much! Really sad and pathetic to me. Such obvious torment.  It was humiliating just to watch. Remember the pacifiers?
I often wonder if those girls made it. Over all it was horribly sad.
The intake age was so frightfully young. Kids that were barely 13. This one boy, who was a misbehavior, after a while was kept in the time-out room every day. You always heard the crying, but you never saw. You always heard the scuffling, the pounding,the yelling..screaming..scratching...
One afternoon some shit was going down and the boy ended up biting his tongue in half! All of the sudden you hear from the time-out room, ?Oh my God, he?s bleeding from his mouth!? We were all told to face forward of course. An  Emergency med. team came and carried him out on a stretcher? his face was coated in blood. He didn?t come back. I?ll never forget him, he was still 12 I think. Sometimes I wonder about him.
 
Morli

Title: Acting out
Post by: Tampa survivor on April 17, 2003, 05:33:00 PM

The young ones....
I was one.  I was 13 going in and 15 going out.
Your words about the boy in the intake room still bring it back after 21 years.....
2 years.  5 splits.  Shipped across the country for failure to comply.  Pain and lonliness no adolescent should endure.  
Morli, I hated the older kids who complied and called me sponge and baby for not going along.  

I was hardened. By Straight.  I was a sensitive boy at 12-13.  Straight killed parts of me for a long time.   That I totally decomposed in my 3rd year of college (at 20)is no surprise.  I tried to get out of Straight and just "be a normal family" again. HS went fine, pretty cheerleader girlfriend, popular enough for me.  I couldn't figure out WHY I DESERVED IT.
 As soon as I finished HS, I started drinking like never before.
It took me a long time to figure out that drugs and alcohol WERE poison, even if it made Miller Newton right in some perverse way....
Still have quirks.  We all do here.
Thanks Morli, a post hasn't grabbed my soul like yours in a while and a half.
Take care everyone.
Bill Hadley
St Pete & Atlanta
12-80/12-82

Ps In St Pete 1981, boys carved too, and that urine stunt in another post would've landed a broken leg, or worse.  GAR-OON-TEED!!
I hung spit on a staffer's face and got beaten to shit for it.  Real beatings.  Nice place for a 13yo

Title: Acting out
Post by: hedwigfan on April 18, 2003, 10:04:00 AM

In Atlanta, a guy named Dennis (?) stabbed a kid named Chad in the chest with a steak knife. It was in the bathroom, right before dinnertime. I remember Chad being carried out to the hospital and Dennis being brought before the group. I think he actually did it on purpose so he could get out of Straight. Anyway, we were instructed not to speak about what happened with our parents or foster families--anyone who mentioned it would be started over or something like that. Really, what we all needed was a trauma counselor! The worst part is, Chad ended up coming back to group after he got out of the hospital.

Title: Acting out
Post by: Majiktrvls on April 18, 2003, 10:39:00 AM

How sad is it that our minds were so warped that we did not even think it was weird for Chad to come back to group after that whole ordeal.  We all welcomed him back. AS if he would have "died on the streets" if he did not come back, hell he almost died inside of Austell Road. A newcomer in my home that nite mentioned it, and the other oldcomer quickly shut them up, freaking out that she would get started over. She was ranting for a while about talking behind backs, until she realized that thru her rantings, she was the only one doing so! The parents only caught a bit of what had happened, just enough to make them wonder, but being brainwashed like us, they made us keep quiet about it. That is messed up.

Title: Acting out
Post by: Antigen on April 18, 2003, 03:21:00 PM

I think I was a whole lot more washed than most.

I remember a single moment of clarity that was so overwhelming that I very nearly fainted. A boy named Bobby, who at least one of you knew personally, was being marathoned, beaten up and trotted out in front of group from time to time for confrontation. I heard the bumps and scuffle and the screams and yelling and I thought "I wonder when that dumb son of a bitch going to quit fighting and just go along?" Not that I wanted him to really "make a change" in the privacy of his own mind. Just that I didn't understand that that's what was going on in me and around me.

The last time they brough him out in front of group, here's what I "saw":

Bobby was still being defiant. He wouldn't even go down the stairs and stand in front of group willingly. Instead, the oldcomers had to drag him down the stairs and accross the room and then hold him up in a standing position to face Group. Otherwise, it looked like he would have just collapes down on the floor like a baby throwing a tantrum. And he refused to look at the person talking to him, instead, just staring off at a point somewhere far behind the top of the back wall over the entrances to the bathrooms.

The group was in a frenzy of self rightious anger and scorn, flapping like manic seaguls on acid. One after another of us took our turns to stand up and holler at him about how pathetic and stupid he was acting, how much we loved him and wanted him to get straight and assuring him that we wouldn't give up until he decided to work his program. Finally, staff called on his little sister, Cathy. She stood up and started along the same script with a pretty convincing delivery. And she had an effect on Bobby different from all the rest. Bobby sort of lit up a little bit.

I watched as this boy came out of his stupor just a little bit and started searching the room with his eyes for the source of his sister's voice. Cathy couldn't continue. Her voice failed as she sat down and sobbed into her hands. And Bobby kept trying to find her with his eyes, but he couldn't find her.

For about an eternity or 30 seconds, it's hard for me to tell, I realized what I had just taken part in and that this sort of thing happened all the time and that I always saw it the way I described above. Then Bobby was hauled off somewhere; maybe back to the timeout room up above staff offices or maybe out front. I don't know. Staff was talking and so I was 'paying attention to the person talking' and not looking where I wasn't supposed to look.

Then there was a round of motivation followed by some songs and I turned my mind back to the weary task of coming up with something to say in case I got called on next and trying hard to hang onto, but not give any sign of, what I really thought.

I was so washed by the time I split that, when asked by HRS investigators and others, I couldn't recall the details of all of the horrible things that happened right in front of my eyes. Even if I could remember in my own mind, there was this simultanious track running, reminding me what Group would say and what I would be expected to say about any of it if called on by staff.

The right of self-defense is the first law of nature; in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest possible limits. ... and [when] the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.
-- St. George Tucker, Judge of the Virginia Supreme Court 1803

Title: Acting out
Post by: ehm on April 18, 2003, 03:36:00 PM

Antigen wrote 4-18-03:

I was so washed by the time I split that, when asked by HRS investigators and others, I couldn't recall the details of all of the horrible things that happened right in front of my eyes. Even if I could remember in my own mind, there was this simultanious track running, reminding me what Group would say and what I would be expected to say about any of it if called on by staff.

It's such a curse when trying to portray what Straight was like to those who were never there.
Tragic and frustrating as hell.
Morli