part four-------------------------
BACK HOMEOn my 32nd day, a Monday, I was allowed to go home. I walked out the gate that night with one arm around each parent. When we got home I told them how wrong I had been to them, how happy I was they had brought me to the Seed and, many times, how much I loved them. There were smiles all around and I was fed all my favorite foods to my heart's content. (My parents had been stockpiling them for my return.) And I could walk around, take my dog out, play my records, use the toilet...all by myself. The freedom I experienced was heavenly and I cannot say I was unhappy on this night. But underneath all the jubilance there was, deep down, a sick feeling. I had said to my parents all the things I knew I was supposed to say, and which would make them happy. But as much as I tried to believe them, I knew in my heart that I did not feel these things. And the brand new son that my folks were so pleased with was not who I really was.
A day or two after coming home I wrote a letter to my sister. She was now living in Miami in a drug rehabilitation/psychotherapy center called Genesis House. In this letter I told her all about the new person I was. I wrote eloquently about how wrong we had been to our parents and how fortunate I was to have stayed in the Seed. I disparaged my previous relationship with her. Months later I was to learn how deeply and harshly this letter had affected her. But at the time I wrote it, I only felt that it must at some point be intercepted and read by the Seed, and that would be good for me since it would amount to proof of my loyalty.
I don't think it was really ever intercepted but at the time I had a very fuzzy concept of the Seed's relationship to the U.S. mail. I felt they could somehow get a hold of anything. This was because of a few incidents which had taken place in the group while I was living away from home, when a rap leader had mentioned, or even read aloud to the group, intercepted letters.
One story sticks vividly in my mind (though not all of it took place when I was a newcomer):
Two Seedlings, Donna, an oldcomer, and Leo, a newcomer living at home, had run away together. When they were caught and brought back to the Seed they were made to stand in front of the group for a verbal lashing. He was a twerp, a pussy. And she, where could she hope to be in a few years? Standing on a street corner waiting for the next trick to come along! (When girls were stood up, they were almost invariably told that they were destined to become prostitutes if they didn't shape up.)
After the group finished with these two unspeakable ingrates, they were made to take their seats in the front row and start their programs over again. A few weeks later Leo escaped again and was heard from no more. But Donna stayed on her program and was well into her three months when the following event occurred:
One of the female staffers, Gloria, came out to lead the evening rap. Instead of announcing a familiar topic she said, "I'd like to talk about some of those mushy things we used to do and say with our old druggie boyfriends and girlfriends, to make ourselves think we were really in love."
No one knew exactly what to say at first since this was so unusual. It was not a familiar rap topic. But people offered statements such as, "Well, my old boyfriend and I used to exchange little love notes. It made us feel like we were Romeo and Juliet or something."
After ten minutes or so of this Gloria said, "Donna Stratton, stand up."
From her seat in the group, Donna stood.
The Gloria produced a sheaf of letters that Donna had written over the months to Leo (who was now either in jail or reform school). The essence of what Donna wrote was that they were still in love, she was saving money, and when Donna got out of the Seed they could be together again. The group laughed uproariously at each sentimental word or phrase, and assorted snickers punctuated the rest. Then, after a brief come-down session, Donna was led up to the front row and started over yet again.
***
The funny thing about staff members like Gloria was that they could be quite kind and sympathetic to those whom they liked, and yet they were positively vicious to those whom they disliked. Most of the staffers fell into this category, which is why it was advantageous to be liked by them. Of course some were just generally vicious and some generally kind. Some, if you caught their eye during a rap, would give you a terrible hard look as if to say, "What are you looking at me for? Pay attention!" Some would ignore you. And there were one or two who would smile at you.
***
A week after arriving home I was allowed to go back to school, and two days after that I was on my three months.
There were about 35 Seedlings in my high school. They had all seen my face in the group and I was recognized immediately. I was instantly a member of their society. There were other Seedlings in two of my classes and they both came right up and introduced themselves to me, my very first day back in school. One of them later showed me where the "Seed lunch table" was in the cafeteria, so I could sit with the other Seedlings. There was even a spot where the Seedlings gathered at the end of the school day, to chat or arrange rides to the Seed.
Everyone was extremely friendly and I felt welcomed. At the end of the day, one or two of them would ask me if I'd had any "hassles." This was one way they had of showing concern and interest to the newcomer back in school Hassles were one of two things: come-ons from your old druggie friends who were trying to make you talk to them, or simply people harassing you because you were a Seedling. It was easy to see that you were a Seedling if you had been absent from class for an extended period of time, had a haircut, hung out with the other Seedlings, and refused to talk to anyone else. Many students enjoyed hassling Seedlings. The proper response was to say "I love you" and ignore them.
As far as my old druggie friends were concerned, I had only one in school and he, like me, had done very little to earn the title "druggie," at least as far as drugs were concerned.
George was in my first period class and I sat immediately behind him. My first day back in school, when he looked up and saw me, I said nothing but simply took my seat. He turned around, looked at me and asked, "Same as you were?"
I smiled an arrogant Seed smile. "A little different," I said.
"I liked the way you were."
"Turn around. I can't talk to you."
I was already afraid that, if another Seedling was in the class, I had already said too much by answering his first question.
Of course I learned that day just which of my classes did have other Seedlings, and it did not take more than a day or two before I decided that George was really straight after all and it would be okay for me to talk to him.
But George "looked like a druggie" and when another Seedling spotted me talking to him one day he pointed this out and asked if George was an old friend. Yes, I replied. But he was straight.
No he was not straight. He was "dry" perhaps but just by looking at him you could tell he was a druggie.
***
There was a category known as "dry druggies," people who had gotten high before but were currently not using any drugs. Part of the Seed catechism was that there was absolutely no way to "get straight on your own." These attempts were always doomed to failure. Even such drastic measures as the "geographical cure," moving away from the area where your druggie friends lived, could not succeed because you were still "into acceptance."
In school, someone had to look very straight for it to be all right to talk to them. George, with hair pronouncedly over his ears, did not meet this standard.
So within a week of being back in school, I was in trouble. At the lunch table I was the sole object of discussion that day. I must say, however, it was not a come-down session. There was no name calling or threats (although the threats were implicit). Everyone seemed genuinely concerned with showing me, by argument, that talking to George was "dangerous." (Druggies in general were "dangerous" to talk to because they could lead you back into your old ways. Old friends and ex-Seedlings, those who had been "pulled off" the program by their parents and were no longer straight, were the most dangerous because they knew how to "push buttons in your head.") Hadn't George once been a part of the life I led before the Seed? He was a dry druggie at best and how did I know he wasn't using drugs now? He could be lying to me.
Fortunately for me, and to the credit of the Seedlings at my high school, I don't think this incident was ever reported back to the Seed. I certainly would have heard about it if it had been. Other Seedlings had been put on refreshers or even started over for less serious offenses. "Talking to old druggie friends" was a cardinal sin.
I told George the next day that I could not talk to him. When I reported this to a fellow Seedling he good naturedly corrected me: "You should say you don't want to talk to him. Not you can't." So that is what I said the next time George tried to talk to me.
***
Seedlings were supposed to keep an eye on each other in school (although some followed this directive much more enthusiastically than others). If someone was even missing from the Seedlings' lunch table it was cause for deep suspicion. School officials and teachers were in no way part of this arrangement, although now and then the school did cooperate with the Seed in small ways (such as the way my sister and I were called to the dean's office to go to the Seed). Many teachers, however, expressed open disapproval of the Seed.
Seedlings were forbidden to talk to reporters about the Seed and once, when a group of teachers in a couple of schools suggested open after-school discussion sessions about the Seed with Seedlings, ex-Seedlings, and former friends of Seedlings, this was also strictly forbidden. These were offenses punishable by as much as starting over, or so it seemed from the dire warnings we all received at the Seed. The rationale was that all these people merely had a "con" they wanted to perpetrate.
***
I eventually worked out an arrangement with George whereby I talked to him only one period a day, in gym class. The reason I gave George for this was that although I was still committed to the Seed, I did not think it would harm me to talk to him just one period per day.
The real reason was that I felt safe because gym class was held outside and there was no chance of another Seedling walking by, as in a classroom. Of course I did not admit to myself that this was the reason. I dared not admit to myself that I felt anything but fierce loyalty to the Seed.
Of course, my relationship with George was never quite the same.
***
I spent a total of exactly three months, two weeks and four days on my "three months." I graduated from the Seed nine days after my fifteenth birthday. For a few weeks it was still mandatory for me to come to the "oldtimers' raps" on Tuesday and Saturday nights. But when I started missing them here and there, and no one said anything, I gradually got the idea that I could come or not come as I pleased. Over the months I attended them less and less, as did most Seedlings.
A year or so after completing my program I was excommunicated from the Seed community at school for talking to druggies, growing my hair long, and showing various other signs of attitude disintegration. I was not the first. About half the Seedlings I had been on my program with had already gone back to drugs and their old friends. Within a year I was to see all but one or two of the other half do the same.
***
I would like to insert a point here about the apparent loyalty all Seedlings have to the Seed:
When I was still a newcomer living at Stan's, the Seed was trying to obtain a license to open up in Dade County (Miami). During this period of time, a song was introduced and sung frequently in the group. It was called "When the Seed Comes Into Dade" and it was sung to the tune of "When the Saints Go Marching In." During renditions of this song, we would all wave our hands above our heads in a hallelujah-type gesture, and sing more and more exuberantly with each repetition of the verse. (There was only one.)
And there was one time when, in the group, the rap leader asked who would like to go down to the courthouse (or wherever it was the whole matter was to be decided) to support the Seed, and everyone eagerly raised their hands. They lucky ones who were permitted to go got to spend the day sitting around the courthouse singing songs.
And finally, when in the middle of an open meeting one night, Art Barker strode into the room and announced that the Seed had won its license, I was among the three-minute standing ovation that ensued. And despite my adversarial relationship with Stan, despite the fact that I was there unwillingly, despite my general misery, I somehow felt part of the victory.
THE AFTERMATH AND MY INTERNAL PROCESSShortly after my experience in the Seed, I did use drugs again, many more drugs, in fact, than I had used prior to the Seed. My relationship with my parents deteriorated severely; it became far more fraught with hostility than it had ever been before the Seed. My school grades went down and I failed classes for the first time in my life.
I knew and spoke with many ex-Seedlings during the first couple of years after I graduated the program. Some, like me, were deeply bitter about the experience. But most were indifferent; they seemed to have gotten over it very quickly, and they wondered aloud why I couldn't do the same. One or two even contended that it had been good for them to have received a little shaking up at the right time. They felt that, although they were basically back to the lives they had led before the Seed, they were now somewhat more in control.
I have no explanation for these differing perspectives, and I do not know what these individuals might say today. I have long lost contact with all of them. There is a website for Seed survivors, where the great majority of participants feel that the Seed did them terrible, traumatic harm. But of the thousands of children who were forced into the Seed and who went through the program, only a hundred or so have posted to this website.
It took me well over a decade to understand what had happened to me, what the Seed had done to my psyche, and what I'd done to myself while I was in the Seed. I strongly suspect that my internal process was very similar to that of many other Seedlings, though I cannot speak for others.
In a nutshell, the Seed forced me to "mean things that were not true." Under the combined pressures of sleep deprivation, lack of privacy, and constant haranguing both at the Seed and in Stan's charge, I eventually, with my words, betrayed everything that was sacred to me at that time in my life. I felt that if my friends on the outside still had any good feelings for me, then I no longer deserved them.
The obvious question, though, is why did I have to mean it? Why couldn't I simply say what I was being forced to say, but hold the words more lightly? Why couldn't I, or anyone else for that matter, simply "con" the Seed?
I think many kids actually did con the Seed. But I couldn't, and I imagine most other kids couldn't either. The strategy I believe most Seedlings adopted (including me) was to try and persuade themselves that the Seed had to be right. Maintaining a consistent lie, a conscious subterfuge, under such stressful conditions was a tall order for an unsophisticated young teenager. Also, I saw other Seedlings getting "busted" for conning right and left in the group. (I have no idea how many of those accused of conning were actually deliberately conning, any more or less than the rest of us.)
I remember a moment of horror, on the evening of my seventh or eighth day, when I realized that I was unable to "think" any longer. I had lost the ability to retreat into the sanctuary of my own mind and think things through, because I had grown so accustomed to being intruded upon without a moment's notice. It was as if I'd had a sealed off room in my head that had previously been accessible only to myself, and now even I could not enter. (I think I may known even then, in my heart of hearts, that I would regain access to this room at some point in my life, but it would be a long time, much longer than I could accept at age 14.)
During my time with Stan, I put a great deal of energy into resisting him. I set up a psychic force field, as it were, between us. To keep from being devoured, I had to maintain a certain tension, a precarious balance between overt resistance and total surrender. So I emerged at last from his dominion with a certain meager sense of myself intact. But still, I felt horribly guilty and empty, as if I had been pillaged and broken.
At some point shortly after being allowed to go home, I was sitting in the large warehouse room, in the group, at the Seed, pondering how I still believed myself to be "different" from everyone else there, and wondering what good it did me to feel this way. I could see how it was causing me pain. I could not see how it would ever serve me. My fate, as far ahead as I could see, was locked. There was nothing for me but to be a Seedling. I might as well be one then, and wholeheartedly embrace whatever attendant rewards there were. There were some: I could feel a part of something larger than myself. I could be part of an (albeit self-proclaimed) elite. I could have friends, a community, an identity. Why hold out for some other ambiguous set of rewards that I had already sold myself out of anyway?
And here is where I made a strange decision. I decided to make myself a true Seedling. All the energy I had put into resisting Stan, I now directed at my own resistance. I now became my own primary oppressor, working to deny and even to change my genuine feelings. After all, I already felt that I had betrayed myself (and all of my friends), I was already lost; one step further would not make a difference. I could not see the light at the end of the tunnel.
In one sense this "strategy" worked brilliantly. I moved through the rest of the program very quickly. Perhaps it was only an extension, really, of what I'd been doing in the Seed all along up until then, nothing fundamentally different in kind. Whenever the tension between what I really thought and felt and what I was "supposed to" think and feel became too apparent and unbearable to me, I had to deny the conflict and push it out of mind. I was unable to "ride out" the discomfort of being divided. My choices were either to consciously live a lie, or start working internally against my own emotions. I didn't see myself as capable of the former.
The ultimate consequence of this process for me was a profound loss of self-respect, a sickening self-disgust that lingered for years, and piercing emotional pain.
As a result of my experience in the Seed, everything seemed a mockery of itself. I fundamentally doubted the authenticity of any conviction, any emotion, my own or anyone else's. The Seed, in my psyche, had crapped all over everything. Nothing stood apart, unsullied by the shadow of the Seed's judgment. I had acquiesced in adopting that judgment as my own for a time, and I could not easily disown it. It had sunk in deeper than my rational mind.
The process of putting things back into their proper perspective vis-à-vis the Seed, that is, learning to see and feel the Seed as just one tiny, narrow-minded, self-aggrandizing pocket of fear in the world, as opposed to a fundamental frame of reference, corresponded to the process of learning to forgive myself for what I had done, for the part I had played in my own undoing.
First, I had to realize that, rightly or not, I did hold myself accountable; I did blame myself. From there, 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 hadn't been perfect, or maybe just not as heroic and invulnerable as I would have liked to have been. These insights crystallized in my mind just about fourteen years after the Seed, when I was 28. I think of this as the time when my emotional healing really began to take hold.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS AND OBSERVATIONSI was younger than most Seedlings, and had had less experience with drugs than most Seedlings. Still, the vast majority of Seedlings, over 95%--were not addicts. They were teens experimenting with drugs, who had been forced into the Seed against their will.
The Seed was a highly publicized and controversial program. Everyone talked about it. There were news reports and articles about it. The Seed thrust itself into the public eye; Art Barker was an incorrigible grandstander, and there were even Seed license plates proclaiming, "The Seed Loves You." But too much attention proved to be unhealthy for the Seed. In 1974, the United States Senate published a study that accused The Seed of using methods similar to North Korean communist brainwashing techniques. The Senate stated that the Seed's teenage clients were "subjected to experimental and potentially harmful treatments." This type of bad press, in conjunction with a few lawsuits, forced the Seed out of Dade County and caused the Seed to scale back its operations.
Successor programs to the Seed, including the notorious Straight, Inc. which was started by zealous Seed parents, have been, by all accounts, much more savvy and meaner than the Seed. These programs have shunned and avoided publicity; they have flown under the public radar. They are also far more tightly controlled, and their teenaged "clients" are subjected to levels of physical and emotional stress that make the Seed seem gentle by comparison.
The fact that certain elements in the Seed were uncontrolled, such as what took place between oldcomers and newcomers in the oldcomers' homes, represented a risk for unmonitored abuse, but also an opportunity for breaths of fresh air. For example, when my fellow Seedlings at school did not turn me in for talking to George, this was an occasion on which the redemptive and unpredictable human element quietly expressed itself. Even at Stan's house, there was often an unstructured, genuine conviviality around mealtimes. These uncontrolled moments and unsupervised dynamics were important threads of sanity. The Seed, in some ways, was loosely structured, and I believe this was a saving grace for some of us.
By contrast, in the dozens, possibly hundreds of "residential teen treatment centers" in operation today, children are imprisoned at the facility itself 24 hours a day, for months at a time. In these programs, ongoing psychological and verbal abuse is accompanied by the threat and administration of severe physical abuse. There are many documented accounts of these horrors on the Internet and elsewhere.
Based on what I have read in the testimony of program survivors, it remains the case that the vast majority of the THOUSANDS of teens who are currently incarcerated in these cruel and abusive programs are not drug addicts. These teens did not pose an imminent danger to themselves or others before being committed and locked up. They were merely doing what millions of other teens do; namely, experimenting with drugs and sex.
I call on parents to weigh the possible consequences of committing their child to a "therapeutic facility" whose day-to-day operations are mysterious. If you are worried that your child is in danger, there are many licensed, reputable alternatives to coercive behavior modification.
I am very dubious about the value of coercive persuasion. There are program graduates who will testify that such treatment "saved their lives." I am not in a position to dispute anyone else's personal testimony. However, it is hard to imagine that such treatment can have long-term benefits for any but the most desperately troubled and self-destructive drug users and addicts. Such treatment certainly does NOT improve long-term relations between children and parents. On the contrary, an ordeal of this kind can sever the parent-child bond permanently.
I call on parents to consider that what they are purchasing, when they turn their children over to such institutions, is a "product," not a "process." What I mean is that parents are not buying a course of therapeutic treatment for their children; they are buying the "end product" that the program promises: a well-behaved, well-groomed, drug-free, grateful, and obedient child.
The Seed was a harmful and traumatic episode in my life, and it took me years to heal from it. Given that I've had a lot of luck and a lot of help, and also given that the Seed was a mild program compared to most of those in existence today, I am extremely concerned for the well-being of teenagers in today's behavior modification/coercive thought reform "treatment centers." Were the Seed still in existence, I would advocate that it be closed. I feel that much more strongly about the unregulated "teen help" industry that now exists in frightening proportions.
I offer this testimony in hopes that it may contribute to larger organized efforts to curtail the reprehensible activities of those who profit from inflicting systematic abuse and misery on vulnerable children.
* Contact information for Marc Polonsky: Biography: Marc Polonsky Email:
http://www.insidersview.info/theseed.htmhttp://www.marcwordsmith.com/