Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > The Troubled Teen Industry

My cousin

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Anonymous:

--- Quote ---On 2003-05-23 19:05:00, Anonymous wrote:

" it blows my mind that parents would actually keep their child in a WWASP program after they have heard the truth. "

--- End quote ---


They don't believe it. They have been very skillfully conditioned to think every negitive thing said about wwasp is all lies and manipulation.
I'm thinking, maybe, when these parents actually get to see and speak with their kids (coming out of Dundee)they might wake up.

Antigen:

--- Quote ---On 2003-05-24 06:28:00, Anonymous wrote:


They don't believe it. They have been very skillfully conditioned to think every negitive thing said about wwasp is all lies and manipulation.


I'm thinking, maybe, when these parents actually get to see and speak with their kids (coming out of Dundee)they might wake up. "

--- End quote ---


Well, that's probably less likely than you might think. It's a frequent topic of conversation among Program survivors. In fact, just in the last couple of days it came up again on the alumni list on yahoo.

Even years after the Program, even in cases where the now adult child is obviously successful by any measure; good career, long and happy marraige, kids graduated HS with honors and headed off to college, etc. the parents STILL insist that the kids are failures and mourn the loss of what might have been if only they'd finished the Program. Or, conversely, if the kid did graduate, they insist that that's the ONLY reason they're not skidrow junkies today or that they're even alive.

I think that's why so many of us tend to stay in touch. Think about it. It's not that our common experience and memories are happy ones that we want to keep alive. We haven't got a whole lot in common outside of the Programs and, sometimes, hauntingly similar disfuncional families. I think we hang together BECAUSE our natural families, for the most part, never do come to understand wtf happened to us or their part in it.

Some are a lot more lucky than that. But I suspect those are the ones who we hardly ever hear from. More power to them, too! I'd give my right arm, but not a single other aspect of my life, to trade places.


It is the old practice of despots to use a part of the people to keep
the rest  in order; and those who have once got an ascendency and possessed themselves of  all the resources of the nation, their revenues and offices, have immense means  for retaining their advantages.
--Thomas Jefferson to John  Taylor, 1798
--- End quote ---

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