Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > Facility Question and Answers
The Carlbrook thread
Anne Bonney:
--- Quote from: ""Charly"" ---Carlbrook doesn't have absolute power. A parent can remove their child at any time. You did not pay in advance (paid per month). A kid could refuse to comply with anything. Yes, there would be consequences, but there was no force used. To me ,this is not absolute power. As a spiritual person, I choose to believe that no one can have absolute power over another individual. An institution can not have absolute power.
--- End quote ---
I don't give a shit what you "choose to believe". These places have an inordinate amount of control over the kid and family. Ain't no getting around that.
psy:
--- Quote from: ""Charly"" ---Carlbrook doesn't have absolute power. A parent can remove their child at any time. You did not pay in advance (paid per month). A kid could refuse to comply with anything. Yes, there would be consequences, but there was no force used. To me ,this is not absolute power. As a spiritual person, I choose to believe that no one can have absolute power over another individual. An institution can not have absolute power.
--- End quote ---
From the point of view of a kid who is placed there by a parent, and has no other option... yes. Carlbrook has absolute power.
Non compliance meant consequences yes. But this is the same in any state of "absolute power".
I can hold a gun to your head and say "don't do that or i will kill you"... And you can still do that. In that sense... anybody can always refuse to comply with anything... the consequences?
Becuase of the consequences... a person chooses to give power over himself to another... chooses to give him/herself over to the system. Little by little, level by level...
This is normally not such a big deal, becuase by and large in society, there are few instances where consequences conflict with conscience... In Carlbrook/CEDU/Bmark... Consequences more often than not, are handed out for kids following their consciences... Your son refused to rat on people for silly reasons.. He got consequences for it. He was right. Why? Because he refused to compromise what he felt was right.
Why do they do this? Becuase they know the further a kid strays from his own conscience, the less he/she is attached to who he/she is...
Charly:
I spoke to him briefly a little while ago.
He said there were three group therapy sessions a week. There was rarely a specific topic. Someone would begin by saying, "There's something I would like to take about." It would go from there.
The more senior levels did have power over the lower levels. I asked if there were abuses of this power and he said, "Of course." He said there was some ordering around of other kids to do certain things or criticizing and meanness.
hanzomon4:
--- Quote from: ""Charly"" ---Carlbrook doesn't have absolute power. A parent can remove their child at any time. You did not pay in advance (paid per month). A kid could refuse to comply with anything. Yes, there would be consequences, but there was no force used. To me ,this is not absolute power. As a spiritual person, I choose to believe that no one can have absolute power over another individual. An institution can not have absolute power.
--- End quote ---
Therein lies the problem charly, you simply don't believe that a person or institution can have absolute power over another. Adults who get caught up in cults have the free will to leave but they don't, the cult has absolute power over them. Kids who are sexually abused can tell someone abut the don't because the predator has control of them.
There's so many examples of people or institutions having absolute power over others, if you can't understand that it's even possible you will never get it on this issue. Read up on thought reform I've posted the tactic types on here before but you should go and read up on it. The tactic types of thought reform reads like program 101 and they enable people to have absolute control over others. It's shocking but true.
psy:
--- Quote from: ""Ofshe, PHD"" ---Coercive persuasion and thought reform are alternate names for programs of social influence capable of producing substantial behavior and attitude change through the use of coercive tactics, persuasion, and/or interpersonal and group-based influence manipulations (Schein 1961; Lifton 1961). Such programs have also been labeled "brainwashing" (Hunter 1951), a term more often used in the media than in scientific literature. However identified, these programs are distinguishable from other elaborate attempts to influence behavior and attitudes, to socialize, and to accomplish social control. Their distinguishing features are their totalistic qualities (Lifton 1961), the types of influence procedures they employ, and the organization of these procedures into three distinctive subphases of the overall process (Schein 1961; Ofshe and Singer 1986). The key factors that distinguish coercive persuasion from other training and socialization schemes are:
1. The reliance on intense interpersonal and psychological attack to destabilize an individual's sense of self to promote compliance
2. The use of an organized peer group
3. Applying interpersonal pressure to promote conformity
4. The manipulation of the totality of the person's social environment to stabilize behavior once modified
...
Robert Lifton labeled the extraordinarily high degree of social control characteristic of organizations that operate reform programs as their totalistic quality (Lifton 1961). This concept refers to the mobilization of the entirety of the person's social, and often physical, environment in support of the manipulative effort. Lifton identified eight themes or properties of reform environments that contribute to their totalistic quality:
1. Control of communication
bans, monitored phone calls
2. Emotional and behavioral manipulation
confrontation, propheets (LGAT techniques), countless examples
3. Demands for absolute conformity to behavior prescriptions derived from the ideology
the silly rules... to quote a staff member at benchmark "the point is not the rules themselves, but whether you will obey them". If you obey rules that make no rational sense... you abandon your will to resist the unreasonable... which becomes reasonable... the kid, given enough time, ends up believing in the "wisdom of the program"
4. Obsessive demands for confession
propheets, groups, ratting out others...
5. Agreement that the ideology is faultless
see number 3
6. Manipulation of language in which cliches substitute for analytic thought
ask your son if they did this
7. Reinterpretation of human experience and emotion in terms of doctrine
ask your son if this was the case. if a "life story" was requested to be written for instanced... and then criticized/re-interpreted. He should have many examples of this
8. Classification of those not sharing the ideology as inferior and not worthy of respect
higher levels... how well do they treat the lower levels... are those who do not aggree with the program's ideology respected?
--- End quote ---
Why kids who graduate often "blow up":
--- Quote ---The surprising aspect of the situationally adaptive response is that the attitudes that develop are unstable. They tend to change dramatically once the person is removed from an environment that has totalistic properties and is organized to support the adaptive attitudes. Once removed from such an environment, the person is able to interact with others who permit and encourage the expression of criticisms and doubts, which were previously stifled because of the normative rules of the reform environment (Schein 1961, p. 163; Lifton 1961, pp. 87-116, 399-415; Ofshe and Singer 1986). This pattern of change, first in one direction and then the other, dramatically highlights the profound importance of social support in the explanation of attitude change and stability. This relationship has for decades been one of the principal interests in the field of social psychology.
--- End quote ---
(source article)
From:
Coercive Persuasion and Attitude Change
Encyclopedia of Sociology Volume 1, Macmillan Publishing Company, New York
By Richard J. Ofshe, Ph.D.
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