Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > The Seed Discussion Forum

THE SEED SUCKS

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GregFL:
If you remember people yelling that at you as you rode down the road with your oldcomer watching your every move, wearing  a white seed tee shirt,Seed license plate up on the dash,  your hair parted on the side, a pack of smokes in your top pocket, and your eyes glazed over from lack of sleep,lack of food, and hour after hour of repetitive mind control practiced on your young mind, you have come to the right place.

In 1973, my father and step mother tricked my sister and I into the Seed St Pete and wham, we were thrust into a subculture experience that in retrospect, was truly bizzare.Never in my mind did I think that my family would be involved in a cult, and it took me years to even sort out that I was.

I eventually had to leave st pete and find sanity somewhere else, and my entire high school experience was ruined, my family shattered, and a deep divide between my father, my step family, and worst of all, my sister and I, existed for years.

I have long since healed my anger, but the memories of being 14 and being forced into a thought reform cult will never go away. I  spent a  part of my young adult life trying to understand what really happened there but it was too close personally and sometimes the confusion, shame and anger prevented me from really taking an objective look.  That is no longer true.

Most people whom went to the seed do not talk about it anymore unless it is in brief whispers, or in short pre thought out sound bites."The seed sucked"  "It was hard but I needed something" "I don't want to talk about that, it was a long time ago"

"I would be dead, crazy or in jail without it" and on and on. Ever stopped to challenge those thoughts? Ever wish you could speak to other people whom were there and remember the freaken insanity of the whole situation, or ever just wanted to really know what the hell it is they were doing there? was it all really just a random program, or did art Barker's "techniques" really come from somewhere else?

Well,  if you said yes, welcome, and lets get this party started.

 

















THE SEED, THE SEED, THE SEED, THE SEED, THE SEED, THE SEED, THE
SEED, THE SEED, THE SEED, THE SEED, THE SEED, THE SEED, THE SEED,
THE SEED, THE SEED, THE SEED, THE SEED, THE SEED, THE SEED, THE SEED,
THE SEED, THE SEED, THE SEED, THE SEED

art barker, art barker, art barker, art barker, art barker, art barker,
art barker, art barker, art barker, art barker, art barker, art barker, art
 barker, art barker, art barker, art barker, art barker, art barker, ART BARKER,
 ART BARKER, ART BARKER, ART BARKER, ART BARKER, ART BARKER, ART BARKER, ART BARKER,
 ART BARKER, ART BARKER, ART BARKER, ART BARKER, ART BARKER, ART BARKER, SEED, SEED,
 SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, DRUG REHAB ST PETERSBURG DRUG REHAB ST PETERSBURG.

SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED,
SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED,
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SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, SEED, ART BARKER, ART BARKER,  ART BARKER,  
ART BARKER,  ART BARKER,  ART BARKER,  ART BARKER,  ART BARKER,  ART BARKER,  ART BARKER,  ART BARKER,
art barker, art barker, art barker, art barker,  seed, seed,  seed, seed, seed, seed, seed, seed, seed,
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seed, seed, seed, seed, seed, seed, seed, seed, seed, seed, art barker, art barker, art barker, art barker,
art barker, art barker, art barker

debi:
I too am a graduate of the Seed in St Pete. It disrupted much of my life for many years.

I was the first student from Tyrone Jr High School. I believe it was 10/71 (or 72). I must say that it really angered me when even a couple of years later in Gibbs High School total strangers would come up to me and curse me for being a "Seedling"....even though I was no longer a part of that whole scene.

Luckily I had started working, and surrounded myself with those older (20-somethings) from work that accepted me for myself.So I had no need for teenagers to associate with, especially since they were still entering the Seed in droves...

But I truly felt isolated and as though no body could understand me for many years.

Many things are no longer in my memory, thankfully my brain switched them off. I do know that I was never quite able to believe a person that said "I love You"....for a very long time. I always wanted to know "why?"

Anonymous:
Hi Greg and Debi, and any other friends I've never met who might be reading this. I'm an ex-Seedling too. I did a Google web search on "the Seed" and "Art Barker" and discovered this site.
I have so many thoughts on this topic, I know I can't write them all in one post, but I'll try to get down the essentials. I am 44 years old and I live in California. I was in the Seed in Ft. Lauderdale in 1972, when I was 14. It came as quite a shock to me to be "kidnapped" by my parents into a "drug rehabilitation center," as I had never conceived of myself as a "druggie," having only tried pot a handful of times. I had no warning that it was coming . . . anyway, to jump ahead in my story a bit, in the years immediately following my experiences in the Seed, I found that--of the kids I'd been in the Seed with, and who had, like me, and like most everybody eventually, gone back to their old friends and gone back to experimenting with substances--I seemed to be the only one who still needed and desired to talk about the Seed a lot. The other ex-Seedlings I hung out with had apparently found a way to put it behind them without much trauma . . . it's all very mysterious to me still, how different people processed the Seed. I wish I could find and speak with some of the kids I knew at the time!
Anyway, here's a thought/insight that I'll share which helped me a lot when I realized it, and it came to me just about fourteen years AFTER the Seed . . .
 I realized that, even with all the abuse, all the sleep deprivation, the all-night "coming down on me" sessions with my oldcomer and his cronies, the little and big humiliations, the thing that had really damaged me the most, the thing that had really hurt and twisted me up the worst, was that I had participated in my own brainwashing. I had tried, sincerely tried, to make the Seed's catechism true for me. That is, I had BETRAYED MY OWN EMOTIONAL REALITY . . . I had been an accomplice in my own mind-rape at some point, by trying to convince MYSELF that they were right, and that I had only read books like Siddhartha to be "cool," had never had any real friends, and, you know, the whole litany, that I had been utterly worthless and "full of shit" before the Seed and that I was grateful to the Seed for bestowing authenticity on my wretched self. So  . . . it was my  own inner attempts to destroy myself that actually wounded me the most . . . and once I could forgive myself for that, I began to heal a lot quicker and my life got a lot better. Now I'm not saying that I should have blamed myself in the first place, or that we were ultimately "responsible" for what happened to us--that's not the point. (Perhaps it was inevitable that I would have to try and convince myself the Seed was right, as opposed to trying to "con" the Seed which I never for a moment imagined I was capable of.) I'm just saying that, unconsciously, I DID blame myself, and I despised myself for what I had participated in. So, at age 28, I needed to look at the fourteen year old kid I had been in 1972, and understand the pressures he was under, and have compassion for the choices he made, and accept that I wasn't perfect, or maybe just not as heroic and invulnerable as I would have like to have been. I'm not saying the Seed didn't suck; it did. And I wish there was something I could do so other kids wouldn't have to go through that kind of thing today. It's one kind of hellish experience in a world of many different kinds of suffering.
 My email is marcwordsmith@sfo.com if anyone wants share their thoughts with in a setting that's not a forum. Forgive the expression, but tonight I feel like I love you.

Antigen:
Hey there Marc,

  Glad you found the forum. My family was involved in Ft. Laud. Seed from sometime in the early `70's till whenever they officially shut down (went underground?) around `80 or so. I have only one thing to add publicly, then I'll write you privately and see if we know any of the same people.



  I haven't been able to put this behind me either, and for one good reason that I know of; constant daily reminders. The people who brought us The Seed have also been responsible, in varying degrees, for the following:




* DARE


* Safe and Drugfree Workplace/Schools/Communities (urin testing)


* Multijurisdictional Counterdrug Taskforce (upon which the new, popular FX series "The Shield" is based.http://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/originals/the_shield/)


* Partnership for a Drug Free America (you know, those silly commercials, the most recent of which cost us a few million for prime Super Bowl ad spots?)


* Legislation mandating forced treatment through the courts


* Legislation denying public education funding for kids with posession convictions


* Massive public/private lobbying efforts to maintain bans on industrial hemp and medical/recreational marijuana


* Two Bush presidencies


* TOUGHLOVE hategroups established here, in Canada and Australia


* $19,000,000,000 in domestic Federal spending on the failed drug war


* Untold sums and resources on the local level in nearly every community


* Who knows the cost of our escalating involvement in Colombia's civil war, the militarization of Bolivia, etc.


And that's just what an amateur researcher/housewife like me has been able to dig up.




Before I started seriously researching just what manner of beast had chewed up my family and spit us out, I just wrote off to leftover paranoia all of these subtle, and not so subtle, reminders. I figured the Seed was now just a weird little cult in Ft. Lauderdale; no longer a force to be reckoned with in local politics, far less out of area. I heard that Straight closed up, and figured that was the end of that story. I knew there were other weird little cults scattered here and there, just as it's been in human culture since time out of mind. And I can accept that that's the way it will probably always be.



But I can't accept that my tax money is being used to support, promote and expand these whack jobs' authority and influence on myself, my kids and the communities that we live in. I'll give this over for something more fun, less stressful as soon as these sadistic lunatics learn to keep their slimy mitts off of my public policy and $$$$$.



 

"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself."

--Thomas Jefferson

[ This Message was edited by: Antigen on 2002-05-08 11:46 ]

GregFL:
Welcome Debi and Marc..

When I first found the straight survivors group several years ago, it was 5 or six people that shared a bad experience in straight. They kind of thought that the seed was a kinder better place, but I educated them on the truth. I told them about the beatings, the kids thrown to concrete floors, and how the straight was directly lifted from the seed, and how we were sleep and food derived and subjected to sexual humiliation,etc. They knew the parents of the seed st pete had started the straight, (including my father) but the didn't know that the exact formula was taken from the seed. Did you know the first staff members of the straight were graduates of the seed from Lakewood High? email me if you want to know their names. Anyway, I am available on this forum or at rocky93@gate.net,and I am excited to meet my fellow survivors.

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