Treatment methods

[Anne Bonney]

Diane, does any of this concern you?  

I beat up someone and had to deal with Mark Keith... There is no excuse for "worthless little fucker" and "Why my parents should have thrown me away" and Why he should "rip off my head and shit down my throat"

Does the kid you described belong at HLA?
"Locks in socks" is a little more than ODD and low self-esteem. That isn't even hazing, it's assault with a deadly weapon.
They called those "sock parties" at my older son's military school- the one sued for abuse and lack of adequate adult supervision. And those hoodlums only used bar soap.

Are "sternum rubs" part of the non-traditional 'therapy' he provides? Or a new massage technique?
Now, that's an idea, nothing like a massage to melt tensions and frustration, to build closeness and trust. Perhaps they should add that to their 'therapeutic' techniques. I imagine that the majority of the kids there are touch deprived. If not before, certainly after they arrive. They could start by putting Keith in charge of the (((hug and rub))) team- every kid gets a minimum of 3 hugs a day, and a good firm foot rub while Keith spins Mt Ranger war tales, just like grandpa.

I disagree that the only way to reach an angry, hopeless kid is through physical and verbal assault. That's barbaric and antiquated thinking. Love and reasonable limits. Institutions can't provide the former, or the latter for that matter. It's like everyday is crisis management cause they're dealing with a bunch of anger kids warehoused and none of them getting their 'real' needs met.

I was never on  an intervention, but I was on a few challenges, and was sent to another wilderness program twice, before ridge creek was operational. I can tell you that when you are on a challenge, your isolated from the rest of gen pop. I was with a couple others on mine. Here's what I can tell you from my expieriances with it.

I along with a few others ran away and were caught. Here was the punishment.

We obviously did not get any sleep the night we ran, but after we were caught we were not allowed to sleep. They didn't give up breakfast that morning, and then took us down to "lower left" and were told to make "big sticks, little sticks" from this big pile of wood. This isn't your average fire wood pile, this pile was about 6 ft high and about 40 meters long. We obviously weren't able to do it all, but but we were at it a for a few days, about 8 hours a day. Now HLA did provide us meals, but since the people who were supervising us are the same people who's shift we ran away on and who got in trouble for it, they didn't let us eat what we were supposed to get. I watched a bunch of my cheese sandwiches and soup get dumped into the creek that day, along with my one fucking apple. We also were made to drink out of the stream. There advice was to "drink were the water is bubbly" My buddy went delerous during this time. He started talking some crazy shit. They love fucking with your food, as you can tell from the diet they fed you when on restriction.
If they weren't throwing your food away they were fucking with the way you could eat it. During this same time this was another way we had to eat our food. They would lay our sandwiches down on the tennis court right on the pavement, then we had to run sprints down the court, then back up for one bite of sandwich. Our soup was dumped on the court aswell and we had to lick it up in push up position. Yes it was our choice to eat it like that I suppose, but with  the amount of food we were getting we would take it how we could get it.
Another thing during this same "challenge" that we had to do was try to empty out a stream. I know that sounds wierd and I guess it was supposed to be. It was the beggining of January (right after xmas) and it was freezing cold and we were soaked trying to this. We worked at if for hours, with our meal depending on doing this virtually impossible task. Halfway through it,  when it got dark, the staff members said we were a "run risk" and told us to take off our shoes.  I was already soaked in my shoes and my feet were cold anyhow, but having my feet in the freezing water was bad. My buddy who was a good deal skinnier than me was so cold he could barely talk right. Greg lyndsee or howerever you spell his name came down and told them to make us put our shoes back on. We did, but we had to tie our shoe laces together, which is when I found that I had cuts on the bottom of my feet that I had gotton from standing on some rocks in the stream that I didn't really feel when I was standing there because my feet were mostly numb. They wouldn't let me have any first aid treatment, or any dry socks and shoes at least. Then they threw most of our meal into the fire pit and told us to wave good bye to it and gave us one cheese sandwich each. There's a lot more that happend to me and my friends on this challenge and a lot of other stuff that happend to me and my friends in general, but I've already wrote enough. If you want to know more you can email me at my secondary email address that I will be checking for the next week. It's [email protected]. Maybe I'll write more on this topic at some later date, but I feel kinda shitty about these rehashed memorys, and I want to go to the bar with my friends. I've had more realizations drinking with my friends than I ever did at HLA. I'm not a sorry loser like HLA said I would be if I didn't complete their stupid program.  I'm about to open a small internet based buisness for
extra income when I start college. I also hold down a full time job for the time bieng. HLA is the place parents send their children when normal growing pains are to much for a parent to handle.