Wow. Interesting that you blame some other kid for you "getting smoked" instead of blaming your parents and Thayer.
One of the perspectives that comes from growing up and being an authority figure and being a parent is that you learn how very much of whatever goes on the various parents and other authority figures are responsible for.
Kids blame themselves when Mom or Dad gets in a bad mood and yells at them.
Kids blame themselves when their parents divorce. They blame themselves when their parents beat, molest, or rape them.
Kids blame other kids, in group settings, for what parents or other authority figures do to the group, and when the parents or authority figures lay blame for something the parent or authority figure chooses to do (like "smoking" a group) on some particular kid, the other kids never question it.
Kids have a tremendous capacity for self-blame, and blame of the other kids, because it is incredibly psychologically threatening for a child to contemplate that the adults running his life are imperfect.
Intellectually, a child will know parents or other authority figures are fallible---but they'll know it only as a fact to repeat back by rote when asked, "I'm not perfect and I make mistakes, you know that, right?" or, "Nobody's perfect, not even adults, you know that, right?"
Kids will repeat back that they know that nobody's perfect.
In practice, however, kids hugely overestimate the times when something bad is the kid's fault versus how often something bad that happens to the kid is an adult's fault.
The reason is that if the kid (or another kid) is a screwup, the kid can presumably count on the adults in charge to protect them from any real harm----so the kid is safe. On the other hand, if the grownups running a kid's life are screwups or malicious, the kid's in danger, constantly, of death or disability---his fate hangs on that adult screwup's next bad decision.
When kids get abused, the reason their grownup selves tend to screw up and repeat the cycle and abuse the children *they* are in authority over is because that new adult's perspective of their own childhood is frozen into a child's perspective of the events.
I had a friend who was raped when she was five, along with a five year old friend of hers, by her twelve year old brother and his friends. In her 40's, she still viewed that as consensual sex---until I shook her out of it by saying, "Jane, with anyone else, not you, would you call someone having sex with a five year old consensual, or rape? With anyone else, not you, would you say a five year old child could possibly give consent to sex?" She said no, she started sobbing, she got into counseling, and that was the day she started recovering from that rape.
Even in the most extreme cases of abuse, the abuse victim's perception of the abuse stays frozen in the perspective of the child that he was when it happened----until treatment, when either through competent, mainstream therapy or self-help books, or counseling from a friend, the adult goes back and looks at what happened through adult eyes as if they were looking at some other parent and some other kid---not themselves---and uses adult maturity and understanding to re-evaluate events.
It isn't right, ever, for an adult to punish one kid for something that kid didn't do---especially for something the adult knows full well some other kid did. Adults who do that are screwups.
The military may sometimes do collective punishment to build unit integrity, but they do it to adults who have knowingly volunteered for that and been screened for being mentally and physically healthy. They don't do it to kids.
It is no other kid's fault that some adult screwup smoked you. It never was that other kid's fault. When some adult told you that was the other kid's fault, the adult was screwing up. Again.
It's no other kid's fault, nor is it your fault, that your parents screwed up and put you in the care of adult screwups.
Some adults are functional, healthy, responsible people who still make mistakes, but are competent enough as adults to be trusted to care for a child.
There are kids who are screwups. Some grow out of it, and some don't. There are people who grow up to be irresponsible adult screwups with lousy judgment. Some adult screwups have bad judgment, some are sadistic bullies, some are both.
Adult screwups usually still have functional reproductive organs and frequently have children. Jobs as staff in places like Thayer pay really sucky wages and nobody but adult screwups are going to take those jobs. Good therapists work in places with better pay and working conditions, and still help some very damaged kids. People who aren't screwups work at jobs that pay better than that, or have better working conditions.
The few adults who are competent and have better job options (better wages, better working conditions) who choose to work with difficult kids aren't going to work at a bottom-of-the-barrel shithole like Thayer.
Most of them are locals, right? These are adult screwups---big fish in a tiny pond---who will tell you they have better options but are just dedicated. It's a lie. They don't have options that will pay better and still let them be a big fish in the pond with lots of control and power over a very powerless, captive set of victims.
You didn't get "smoked" because of what some other kid did. You got smoked because the adult in charge of you was a loser who was either enjoying the power *or* had the very poor judgment to participate in something as stupid as inflicting collective punishment on children.
Accept it---your parents made the gross judgment error of putting you in the care of some colossal losers. You may have needed help straightening yourself out---but you needed it from people who weren't clueless losers.
