When you talk with someone from Straight Incorporated, meaning someone who has survived torture; you should proceed with care. Actually, it IS similar to speaking with someone who has PTSD, like a war veteran.
Imagine this; you're spit on and sat on at least once, or both during the whole time you were in Straight Inc. Say you were in Straight for no more than three months (highly unlikely if you were ever taken in by them, you don't find any Jews who were in a concentration camp for merely a few days do you?). But as a post-requirement to that kind of treatment you are now required to do that to others. But things aren't still as fucked up as they could be if you are going to imagine a stay at a boot camp.
Every, and I mean EVEry, person I have had the opportunity, distinctly, to chat with, email, discuss issues with regarding Straight, and they had been in Straight at one time or another and/or graduated - you're going to have to find creative ways of dealing with acute aggression. I don't mean simply shutting the fuck up when you are talking to someone who is a god simply because they have survived a 'holocaust' and their self esteem has been buried, raked and mixed in with coals of total fucked upness. They want to talk to you, they want to tell you who they are. But sadly we don't always know how to say what it is we are trying to remember, we were told not to talk about it. Think I'm kidding?
Look at it this way. Everyone has the right to protect themselves. Everyone has the right to be self centered when they are speaking to other people and not to 'give in' when they want something. But the only way I can describe speaking to someone who has survived a thing like rape, spit therapy, SEVERE degradation and oppression, and genuine and pure anti-education (meaning that Straight basically taught it's patients how to do more drugs, how to fuck over relationships, and how to live only inside the confines and walls of a prison), with criminal and poverty stricken mindset.
If you 'survive' watching your friend destroy themselves physically, if you 'survive' seeing one of your best friends leave you; you will probably be okay in a year or two. But what if you are made to watch every one of your friends near you get hurt every day for, say, two or three or four years? Some of these children in boot camps like Straight have stays that go beyond four years. We watch as our families stop existing. Our family becomes the people who are in the same situation as we are, our brothers and sisters are our enemies. We become our own enemies. Health in the real world sense does not exist in a gulag or a boot camp like Straight Inc.
Many people make the mistake of stating Straight-like advice to victims of this type of severe trauma. Advice of this nature only would serve, as a course, to inflict more damage upon yourself if you happen to be in any kind of relationship with any traumatic survivor or really a survivor of oppression of this nature. YOu know the advice I am talking about. Maybe the survivor is trying to convey to you what they experienced. So you say, "Well, it's the past.", or, "Move on from that, change your life", or, "Get a life", or, "Change is the only constant".
These kinds of clever quips and answers / solutions do not apply to the question of what to do when dealing with someone who has literally survived an onslaught and mental breakdown of many different forms of torture. If you are not sure what I mean by torture, look up the many different stories of survivors of Straight found on Wes's website;
http://www.thestraights.com. They are all over the place. Ask me what they did to me if you don't know what torture is. Ask any Jewish person who has a distant relative who spent time in a camp. Those kinds of answers apply to projective type problems that have no lasting solution where the victim is forced to carry themselves into new situations that life presents economically and financiall, familial, and socially as well as personally but the former situation of knowing that you were actually near death and put at risk to all kinds of illnesses daily for the time you spent at Straight. Just like if you are a child and you are cut off from your family for more than twenty years or so and then you suddenly find them, you are going to have questions, you are going to feel alot of things, you are going to want to talk about it. And if that were to happen you know that not much else would consume your life until that were resolved. These kinds of trauma do not take small, minute answers because these are not small issues. The only answer to approaching someone who has survived this kind of trauma and situation is patience and time. Perhaps it is true that time is the only thing that can heal a broken heart. Perhaps if you have no time and no patience you should not deal with a survivor of Straight. See because for your own safety it might be better since most of the survivors I know will hurt your impatient ass. I know one survivor who put a gun to his father's head simply to make him sorry for putting his child in Straight. When I talk to him he's glad every day that he's in jail, no joke he is confident about his answer, because he believes he would have killed his parents by now much the same way many Jewish people want justice for those who killed their families. Fucked up to want to kill your parents and know you want to do it ain't it? That's what Straight did to it's patients. It was literally creating crime while it was doing crimes. And advising a survivor of any trauma to simply forgive does not help either. Forgiving and forgetting may actually be the same action, but that shit takes work and not simply blowing someone off with that kind of shitty and ignorant quip. Are you going to help them finally forgive their trauma because you know what you are saying, or are you just talking some shit you saw in a book or read on the t.v. or heard from some other trauma victim or an enlightened guru you bought some shit from? Most Straight survivors I speak to seem to have a developed ability for confrontational communication, on a very mental level but not just trying to establish some kind of dominance or controlism such as in normal domestically violent situation. From the outside a trauma victim looks to you like they need help. But everybody is human, and not one person does not wish to be understood so that they can help themselves.
Its important to understand what anyone is saying and not just trauma victims. Its not what a person is ever actually saying, but what they are conveying; the message underneath so to speak. You can see it in a person's eyes, the way the speak and their body language.
When you are in communication with a survivor of any major trauma you, if you are smart, should recognize first who you are dealing with. YOu still think what I am saying is ludicrous?
Imagine if you were to act very disrespectfully like some kind of white supremist to a black person but you were doing it in an atmosphere or way that was really inappropriate. What is rather the typical first thing a black person might do? They start calling you cracker, or they walk away, or you get your cracker ass beat, or ... they start looking for the nearest black person.
Or imagine for a minute that you were in a conversation with a war veteran. IT would probably behoove you not to be all disrespecing them, and you'd better at least recognize - if nothing more and if you are trying to carry a new conversation with them - that what trauma causes and does has some definite side effects on any human person.
No, you don't have to kiss the ass of Straight survivors. For your own safety and for the well-being of your properties and your own intelligence, it would at least make sense not to try to circumvent the fact that most survivors of any major trauma you speak to are coming from a deep knowledge and understanding of what pain really is.
Think you know what pain is? Try going to prison for a few years. Try being raped. Try being in the front lines in a way where you are directly responsible for your brother's or sister's life, or at least you were tricked into really believing you were, beside you. Try telling your best friend that they are a piece of shit and spitting on them, then tell them that you love them and care for their safety, and then see if they want to hang around you anymore. This is pain on the level of powerlessness similar to things that life throws at us such as a loved one dieing of a cancer or natural causes or what have you. But trauma of this nature is avoidable in the way that pedophiles are put into jail so that they can no longer commit sexual crimes, so survivors of any kind of secluded, isolative assaults of this kind know about powerlessness in a way that most do not.
The reason you do not, if you are smart, attempt to get around the very core essence of acknowledging anyone's possible, inherent message is that you lose tremendous respect for that person. The loss of that respect, in my opinion, in this sense is even more so since you are dealing with someone who is more than likely involved in humanitarian issues whether creatively, humanitarianly, or in law or of some other kind of, and I hate using this word, philanthropically. But still you don't have to care about any survivor. Who the hell cares if anybody was in Straight? So then; no one cares.
I don't have to waste time quoting the well known fact that trauma of this nature generally creates and highly mitigates crime levels and statistics. Males who are raped by other males are typically known for keeping it quiet, and commiting crime of domestic and assaultive as well as highly felonious actions, plus they generally do not have a feeling of safety in any relationship that requires deeper commitment to anyone where communication is involved.
You find any female who has been raped (it doesn't even have to go so far as rape, we may just be discussing the full loss of privacy (such as full lose of private bathroom use) in every situation of daily living) and try to discuss personal issues with her, you will note an immediate sort of wall arising where that person is directly in fear of her own safety, first and foremost.
Trauma also does not merely stem to the person that it was done to. It effects the every one of the people, family - friends - new acquaintances, around them; another reason why it is clever to at least realize who and what you up against.
I have yet to meet any Survivor of Straight Incorporated who does not have severe issues with communicating with others. All of them, they are all deeply and empathetically involved with humane issues that people who might be involved in those same issues cannot fathom the level of synergy that a survivor has toward the same work.
It behooves you to watch over the safety of a Straight survivor for your own well being if you happen to be hanging out with them. They tend to trust a little too much, open up a little too much, and generally don't have the 'social skills' you might think you have over them since you were never exposed to things that deepen and characterize the full array of human emotions, psyche, and physical being. Call it a disability. But you are, truly, in the presence of greatness. And not just because they survived a whole hell of a lot more than you did or ever will in seven of your own lifetimes, but because they have a deeper understanding of public and private knowledge than the regular person will; it's in our bones and blood. Morals and ethics dictate many kinds of action or non action, but many times when we learn these in school it is easy for anyone who can memorize information to regurgitate it.
You are dealing with someone, when you are communicating with anyone who has with their life survived unbelievable stress at a young age where most children would find themselves able to commit murder or suicide, who has a core knowledge of complete lawlessness, fully unethical behavior and total lack of moral codes of any kind. So, only then, would it be easier for you to see when someone like this finally does come in contact with anything remotely to do with self-esteem and its actions, or any kind of right living; they want to talk about it, they want to do that, they want to know it intimately as they did it's opposite - at least most of the time. Survivors of assaultive, psychological and severe trauma often display hyper-abilities that go way above and beyond normal talents in the way of creativity, paranormal, detection and reconnaisance, psychic, legal, and every humanitarian issue. For that matter people of this nature may typically outwork, outcompete, and outman a person who has not been in a survivalist situation (not the kind on television either).
You are, truly, dealing with greatness.
