Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > The Seed Discussion Forum
F---ed
Antigen:
Yeah, Marc. I hear ya.
For most of my time in affiliation w/ the cult, I wasn't the kid in the program. I was the little sister. So I didn't fully understand what was going on when my older brothers and some of their friends went in. All of our real friends quit coming around and my mom told me, if she bothered to tell me anything, that this was way, way better! We have Seed love now! Well, little kids being little kids will accept whatever the tribe favors and play along as best as they can. But it bugged me. When my brothers came back home, they were busy.
Not that we ever had been the Brady Bunch or anything. But there was something different, missing, weird and deeply disturbing. Everybody said they loved me and each other and I said it back, but it was confusing as hell. Love ya? I don't even know ya'. And these loving people never did hang around very long or become a part of that get along I remembered. But that old druggie past was gone and, I was told in every possible way, we're better for it. So who was I to argue? I threw myself into it, following my family. But I never caught up. My tribe had gone somewhere wonderful and left me out and didn't seem to miss me at all, or even themselves.
It was spooky.
My dad always held onto some reservation about it all. But toward the end there around `82 or so, even he was pretty thoroughly brainwashed against me. More bitter still, unlike my mom, he never loved the cult. Always chaffed under the forced public intimacy and many, many other subtle and overt aspects of the whole thing. But he was it seemed, brainwashed pretty hard against me. That pretty nearly blew my mind. It left me jaded.
Funny thing. After two kidnapping attempts, an extradition, some weeks at a group home and a court date against my parents and some Straight ppl, I returned to Stone Mountain to my job at Arbey's. These folks had known me for, oh, maybe a month or so? And they noticed a change in me. My boss asked me what was wrong, why I was so angry and mean since coming back from Florida. I cried real tears. I hadn't had that kind of just normal friendship in so long, I was beginning to think it had all been my imagination.
And before you can get all rude, Lauderdale, no, this was nothing inapropriate. Just an old dude w/ kids of his own who enjoyed his job managing teenaged and college age employees just asking why I seemed so angry and unhappy. I just told him I had learned a lot on that trip.
What I learned is that no good deed ever goes unpunish. I had been carrying a torch for something that was, for all I could tell, long dead and buried and happily so as far as anyone else cared.
I wasn't broken and defeated by my time in Group. I held out, waiting for my liberty to go rejoin the human race. When it finally was over, it seemed as though no one noticed the passing of our elan vital.
So yeah, I do stick on this, stubournly. Whenever I hear someone gushing about how wonderful the Seed was, especially members of my own family, it comes accross as "Oh, I like you and me and everything much better this way!"
I don't know about the hundreds and hundreds of others. I think they're at WalMart right now doing their pre-shift LGAT session or arguing out whether to vote for the blue bellied Fabians or the red bellied Fabians, if they're even vaguely aware of the coming elections.
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
--- End quote ---
Ft. Lauderdale:
Eudora I wasn't thinking a rude thought...
I was actually feeling sorry for your messed up time.
Somehow my family that was totally fuc*** up in the 60's and 70's and all landed pretty well after alot of events occured.
In the 60's My mom was in and out of nut houses having nervous breakdowns and getting psyco analyzied. In my opinion, mostly because my grandfather remarried after my grandmothers death to someone the same age as my mother and the money no longer was going to her.
My dad was a drunk. A somewhat functioning one. He did go to AA and spent the last 25 years sober & happy before he died. By the way he was very very involved with AA. They divorced, remarried each other and divorced each other again.
One of my siblings went through the program and never stepped into the doors again. She's one of my closest friends today. My other 3 brothers never went through the program. I never thought they needed to. Especially the one thats ten years younger than me. I onced asked him about 20 years ago when he was 21 if he had ever even smoked pot. He replied "no I have never had a Marijuana cigarette". Since he said it like that I believed him.
I was away from my family for a number of years , years ago. That was probably the best all the way around for all of us.
Today my mother is 80 happier than she has ever been. (& not just because she out lived my father) (a little humor).
I just spent Easter with my entire family. We had a blast.
I honestly enjoy all of them and them me.
We really do love each other & it shows. I would do anything for any of them. They are family.
I think I honestly learned that from the Seed.
I'm grateful for my life and what I have.
cleveland:
I can't deny that I went to the program looking for a sense of belonging and family, and in part, I got it. I went through the 'hazing' of being a newcomer, I learned the new seed vocabulary and behavior, and I did my best to fit in. I remembered, after reading Marc's account, how I felt when I betrayed my best 'pre-Seed' friend by essentially lying about him, calling him a druggie and saying that he didn't care about me. I loved this guy like a brother, and he was a casual pot smoker at worst. Once I crossed that bridge it was easy to try to totally yield to being 'straight.' And I still didn't know what being straight was - all I knew was that being straight was whatever Art and the Seed said it was.
Then I saw other people that I loved, go from being 100% Seedlings - people I admired and respected, some were on staff - to being persona non grata (Bob Ch***, Ray K., my brother - some were gone for good, some just 'started over' - but I was increasingly cynical. My new 'family' was as unpredictable as my old one in some ways.
When I left the Seed, I felt terribly ashamed and rarely talked about it. When I did, people acted as I expected - as if I had two heads or a hunchback. I felt it was further evidence of failure on my part.
Is some ways, I felt that my Seed experience had been positive. I did feel that I understood people much better than I had as a really naive, unhappy teenager. I also knew how to 'fake it til you make it' and act happy when I wasn't - valuable in social situations.
However I was plagued by insecurity, self-doubt and loneliness - since I felt them pre-Seed, I can't say that the Seed was a cause. But at any rate I did a lot of soul-searching after I left.
In some ways I felt total freedom - since I had already completely remade myself once, it was now easier to remake my life. That prepared my for big life changes - new jobs, careers, ending one marriage and starting another. I wonder, if I had never been in the Seed, would I be as resilient. And is that good or bad, or am I missing something I would have had if I had never been in the Seed?
I don't know. Like Lauderdale, I am a happy, loving, person today. And maybe I'm just lucky to be able to say so.
w[ This Message was edited by: cleveland on 2006-04-19 12:43 ]
marcwordsmith:
Well, we all have weird and troubled stories, I think, but I give the prize to Ginger. Most of our families were sucked up to some degree into a cult; Ginger's family WAS a cult! Actually, it's amazing, Ginger, what you've done--giving us this forum, and giving everyone all the survivor forums--as a way of responding to your intensely weird, cult-drug-rehab-suffused childhood. Talk about turning weakness into strength! I mean . . . thank you.
Walter, I understand your ambivalence, because you're a happy person now and wouldn't change anything. My suspicion is that the reason you're happy now is because you're a kind, honest, open-hearted, intelligent, naturally self-aware person who, one way or another, was going to do the soul searching necessary to find peace and clarity in life, with or without an ordeal like The Seed.
For myself, when people ask me, I put it like this: I wouldn't trade the life I have now for any hypothetical alternative life I might have had if I could have avoided the Seed.
But at the same time, if the clock was turned back to 1972 and I was fourteen years old again, and some god-like entity told me that I could go through the Seed again and live the life I've lived, with the wonderful adulthood I've had and all the blessings in my life today, OR skip the Seed and take my chances, I would skip The Seed and take my chances.
I interviewed Maia Szalavitz by phone in early March, and I submitted the interview to THE SUN magazine, for possible publication. Don't know yet if they'll use it, but I am going to take a little liberty here and quote a relevant portion of it. Speaking of all the "tough love" programs in aggregate, she said this:
"Based on my observations, the people who seemed to get the least damaged were those who basically said 'This is fucked up, and I?m just gonna fake it until I make it.' Another subgroup of people who did reasonably well were those who genuinely did have big drug problems. They didn?t have to make up a lot of false confessions, and they could believe they were being helped. The people who did absolutely the worst were those who really didn?t have much of a problem going in, but who had to make up stuff, and who resisted doing so, and therefore got the most punished."
Antigen:
Thanks, Lauderdale. It honestly does mean a lot to me for you to respect my side of things.
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys
--P.J. O'Rourke
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