It's amazing how so many things about that place are such a blur in my memory. Kid's names and faces, staff's names and faces, the sequence of events over the 2 1/2 years, tools and shit from those absurd propheets, all sorts of things. But I can remember the exact noise those doors made when they slammed shut in the mudrooms or the dorms. For those that went to BCA, the smell of a leech field these days just makes me shiver with fear. The taste of powdered milk, something I loved to take camping with me pre-BCA, makes me vomit just out of the memories it conjures up.
To me, that's the sign of how abusive BCA was. When you try to get into it mentally, the confusion and the manipulation just clouds your memory too much. Staff tried to hard to convince you that what they were doing was right that it's just so hard to sort everything out.
But your senses don't lie. Those sensory memories, whether it be a Bob Dylan song coming on the radio, or those other sounds, smells, and tastes...they all became this conditioned stimuli to me. And even many years later, when I encounter one of them, I get this terrible feeling of anxiety, and sometimes, if its a vivid enough conditioned response, I'll even start to sweat and breathe harder.