Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > Daytop Village

DAYTOP Did Me Great Harm in the Long Run

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SEKTO:

--- Quote from: "psy" ---It makes a lot of sense, but I've come to a different place, philosophically.  It's very hard to put to words the place I'm at now.  I'm not sure where to start.

Drugs as an escape?  Not sure how I feel about that.  Drugs are a tool.  They can be used as an escape, or a means of self discovery and healing.  I don't believe anymore that compulsive behavior is unchangeable.  Bad habits can be broken, and are broken every day.  It's just a matter of knowing yourself and self discipline.

I don't think it's wrong to want to transcend and become who you are.  I feel that I am what I do, and what I do is defined by my choices.  Things outside me are outside of my control, yes, but I'm in control and responsible for myself.  I can change myself and choose to become something else.  This is how I felt before the program and how I feel now.  In the program, however, I was convinced that there was some "true self" i had lost and somehow had to discovery...  which was silly.  I already knew who I am.  I am who I choose to be.  Rather than "who am I", I ask myself "who do I want to be"...  I do what I feel is right and that defines me.

I do remember, though, wanting to lose that ability to choose.  After being pressured to a point in the program I was so low I just wanted it to stop.  I felt that if I gave myself to the program, maybe things would end...  maybe I would be allowed to progress.  So I sacrificed myself.  I consciously gave in... under duress, sure, but I made the choice.  Once I stopped resisting, I felt myself slip away, and I fell into the alluring trap of believing that they could tell me who I was.  They told me I didn't know who I really was, which, in a sense, was both true and false since I had never really thought about it.  I had always just felt "i am who I am".  Suddenly they were challenging this and attacking my self concept.  With everybody around me cheering me on and saying how fantastic it is to find their true selves...  well you know how it goes...  the whole "you're not being real/authentic" deal until you behave in a way they perceive as "real/authentic" (what the fuck do they know anyway).  I'm just glad I've since sorted all that out.

In any case.  Scars teach us something too.  I doubt I would have the same viewpoints on everything I do now had I not experienced what I did.  In that sense, it was a learning experience.  Would I have gone through it again if given the choice...  if it meant giving up all this knowledge i've learned?  A year ago I might have said yes.  Now, i'm not so sure.  I certainly wouldn't wish it on anybody else, especially without full knowledge and consent, but for me, in the end it turned out all right.  Who knows whether things would be better or worse had I never gone to the program.  I can't say either way.  All I can say is that I wouldn't be who I am today had i not had the same experiences I did.  Like I said.  Scars teach us something too.  It doesn't mean that program was a good experience.  It just means that you can learn from bad experiences.

Thanks for giving me something to think about.
--- End quote ---

This is all very painful for me to unpack and sort through, psy.  But very therapeutic as well.  Thanks for providing this space in which to think it all out and write of it.

SEKTO:
To put it in a nutshell, the program's return to sender function kept executing itself.  So for years after the fact, in times of stress and emotional upset, I set about looking for DAYTOP again.  I was trying to return to DAYTOP, but in a more refined way, as I involved God in the quest.  That's the ultimate TC, a religious community or cult.  I never thought of it in those terms until just today, the ultimate TC.  Wow.

Inculcated:

--- Quote from: "SEKTO" ---Earlier I wrote,
In my individual circumstance, I was unconsciously recreating the group atmosphere that I experienced in DAYTOP through my involvement in various religious communities, communes, and cults. It was my form of isolating and removing my self from "the world."

Specifically, I became addicted to living and moving among groups, particularly religious groups, and thought that I could not function as a fully psychologically autonomous individual; I have been involved in everything from Rainbow Gatherings to the Army, from Pentecostal Holiness churches to Hare Krsnas and everything in between. Believe me; I have made the rounds of various communal groups. I learned a lot along the way and these experiences were not without their edifying elements too, though a lot of it was to my detriment as well.

Such are the consequences of my religious addiction. That's why I am here at Meadow Haven.

Now I’d like to take the opportunity to expand on these statements a bit.

What I am trying to say is that for many years post-program, I was trapped in a sort of depressive fugue state and would, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, put myself into various group situations in order to re-create the therapeutic group context that I have been immersed in as a part of DAYTOP. To help you understand how this came to be, I shall now give some background, the “back story” as it were, to put things in context and help explain how it came to be that I was put into DAYTOP in the first place.

For me to say that I never felt like I fit in as a part of this world would be an understatement. I always felt like an alien being among the earthlings, as if I looked like a human, and understood the language, but was totally ignorant of the culture and customs of the society in which I lived and was born into.
All of my teachers would always remark about what a bright child I was, genius level in fact according to the standardized tests, but how I was a chronic underachiever, never got on well with my peers, was a kind of loner, and wasn’t living up to my potential in general.

In all honesty, I as a kid was always the nerdy one in school, had few friends, was not at all popular, nor was I much of a participant in the social scene. Not a hit with the ladies. I was terribly insecure and got beat up at home by my father and in school by my classmates, and felt utterly alienated from others, both intellectually and socially.
I was always fundamentally different from everybody else, heard my own drummer, marched to it, and was never one to “colour between the lines” so to speak. Way outside of the box.

Now I know it was Asperger’s all along, but in my youth all I knew was that I was “different.” I was often depressed and uncomfortable in my own skin.

So as a means of escape from the pain of feeling so out of place among others, and not finding acceptance anywhere I went, I in elementary and middle school lost myself in fantasy stories, comic books, and certain role-playing games. I immersed myself in an imaginary world in which I felt like I did fit in, a world I could create and control, and in which I could take on some heroic persona, an imaginary alter-ego.

Spider-man was my favourite, as a kid. Peter Parker was a sort of hero of mine, the nerdy, bookish guy with special powers that he had to keep secret from everybody, who believed that with his great power came great responsibility. I wanted to be Spider-Man, with his super-hero alter ego. I was always as a kid fantasizing about transcending myself; I wanted to be somebody else and take on another persona, hence the D&D and the comic books.

Later on in high school, when I outgrew the comics and fantasy war gaming, I got into psychedelic drugs, particularly grass and LSD. This was my new means of escape, my new means of seeking transcendence, of introspecting and trying to discover myself.

I rebelled, tried to destroy the nerd image, sought acceptance among a more rebellious crowd, started wearing combat boots and Army-surplus jackets and hanging out with the misfit kids who would hang out across the street from the school and smoke cigarettes before class. I was desperate for acceptance.

DAYTOP was the place in which I was forced for the first time in my life to take a close look at myself and try and make some real changes. This is where I learned to identify and articulate my emotions and practice my interpersonal skills and means of relating to others of my peer group. This is where I came to realize that the direction in which I was going in life.

Over time I developed into a true-believing DAYTOPian.

So it wasn’t all bad and there were certain elements of the experience that proved edifying toward the development of my self-awareness and social skills. I made friends for life through DAYTOP and learned how to identify and in a more constructive fashion deal with my feelings.

In DAYTOP, I experienced a cohesive peer group in which I was accepted and valued for the first time in my life. Two of my best friends are guys who I graduated with. We formed and maintained a close bond for years and were roommates off and on for three years or so after graduating.

But as I’ve also written of in the past, there were definite negative and destructive elements at work through all of this as well.
We’d all become very emotionally dependent on one another, as if DAYTOP sewed up apart as individuals and sewed us back together as a group. We’d learned to reproduce the group, outside of the group. We never learned to be individuals in the larger sense.
 We had no boundaries between ourselves, or with anybody else.
 I came home more depressed, resentful, and isolated than ever, and began my time as a serious suicidal-ideation having religious addict and compulsive seeker of religious communities in which to deliberately place myself.

This is the scarier stuff for me to face, the naked truth, and I want to make myself very clear.

For a time up until about a year ago, I was quite consciously seeking to lose/escape from my individuality into a collective identity as a form of soul suicide without having to “pull the trigger."
In other words, I was seeking to lose myself in a group as a means of killing myself without having to leave my body.

I was trying to "kill" my old self and somehow find and cultivate my New Self, to become in some contrived sense fully Self-Realized.

I engaged in attempt after attempt to attain Transcendence, but in the religious realm. Higher than the comics and RPGs, higher than the LSD sessions, higher than the DAYTOP group therapy, higher than them all, seeking God is the Ultimate Trip, and mingling with various cults is the ultimate role-playing exercise.

 I was overcome with grief and was out to find a pre-arranged world of my own.

I got started in DAYTOP, AA, NA, and the Roommate Cult Support Group.

Then I graduated to the hard stuff. I have experimented with Hare Krsnas, the Twelve Tribes, a small group in Dallas you never heard of, JPUSA, various Pentecostal communities, Hutterites and Anabaptists, and others. I even dabbled in groups that I never really intended to join just to try them on, so to say. I have tried on different religions and communities in the way that somebody might go to the department store and try on clothes.

Yes, I was trying to find a cult to join so that I would no longer have to be myself, so that I could deliberately move into a world of suspended reality, and have that reality dictated to me. To try and assume a different persona and obliterate my old one, with which I was not satisfied and which I wanted to escape and leave behind.

This was my way of seeking to kill myself without having to leave my body, you see.

God is the Ultimate goal in the pursuit of transcendence, and cults are the ultimate in committing cognitive, emotional, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual suicide.

It was all, as I see it now, illusory in nature. There are no Utopias.

It was all my way of isolating, while still being around others but only those of a like mind and a common path.

The whole of my experience with the groups can be summed up as one long repeating cycle of going from group to group in an effort to improve and fix myself somehow, and as the ultimate in escapism, a form of suicide, actually, but cognitive suicide.

I learned the hard way that looking outside of oneself for some group or other to externally impose a vision of reality and transcendence on an individual is bound in the long run for futility. It’s just not real.

Jesus said (Luke 17:20-21) "The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, 'Here it is,' or 'There it is,' because the kingdom of God is within you."

Please understand that I do not quote from the Bible in order to be preachy, for that is not my style; you have to understand that my spiritual/religious consciousness is the overarching framework in which I was operating, the context in which all the motivation for my previous behaviour must be explained.  I was trying to reproduce the therapeutic community environment in a different context. The ultimate context, in fact, for I set about injecting God into the equation. This takes the quest for the perfect TC to the highest degree.
 It also takes the damage done to a deeper level of evisceration too, because this all ultimately damaged me at the deepest possible level, that is, the level of my soul, in the very essence of my being.

And then last August, I came to start to understand that even all of that community-hopping wasn’t going to help. I’d been seeking out new highs and spiritual peak experiences for years and had reached terminal burnout.

What does this have to do with DAYTOP, you may ask? In short, DAYTOP set me up for my compulsive religious addiction later on in life. DAYTOP was the gateway to it all. I was unconsciously trying to recreate the therapeutic community atmosphere. My being hooked on groups in order to maintain my sense of safety and security I can trace back to my formative years, in which the groundwork was laid and my identity and individuality were undermined through what happened to us there. And I can trace it all back to DAYTOP.
 
To put it in a nutshell, the program's return to sender function kept executing itself.
--- End quote ---

It’s often very difficult for anyone to relate such self reflective honesty and really convey their insights of their experiences to others. Reading this was very illuminating.
It seems as if the world you could not connect with were some barren land in which you trailed the idea of some Utopian oasis as an elusive mirage. Such a goal can never be reached. As we know mirages fade the nearer we get to them.
Such willingness to surrender your individuality in pursuit of a self destructive desire to nullify your uniqueness had you conforming to a chameleon like identity you would wear to blend in.
I am glad that you have survived this rough passage with your uniqueness in tact.

Anonymous:
http://www.atlantavampirealliance.com/e ... lines.html
B.I.T.E.   :-*

SEKTO:
:-*

It is my contention that DAYTOP is a cult, and must be understood as such.  Further, I contend that the DAYTOP "treatment program", whether at the inpatient or outpatient level, is essentially a thought-reform regimen.

The tactics of a thought-reform program like DAYTOP are organized to destabilize a person's sense of self, get the person to drastically reinterpret his or her life's history and radically alter his or her worldview and accept a new version of reality and causality, and then develop in the person a dependence on the organization, thereby turning the person into a deployable agent of the organization.
 
Think of the DAYTOP conditioning process in the light of Hassan's BITE model of explaining thought reform environments.  Do you think it fits like a hand in a glove?  I do.  

http://www.freedomofmind.com/resourcece ... s/BITE.htm

The thought-reform process begins with isolation of the individual (whether in a physical or psychological sense), then proceeds to a gradual manipulation of the physyical environment in which that person is isolated.  Then gradual control is exerted over the individual's behavior, the flow of information into and out of the envirnment restricts the individual's thinking, those very thoughts are retrained and controlled, and emotional range and repsonses are controlled as well.
 
Basically, what is commonly called "brainwashing" is a process that is mainly physically coercive in nature, and the conditioning usually reverses itself on itys own once one exits the physically coercive situation or environment.  "Thought reform," "mind control," or "coercive persuation" is more subtle a process, it is psychologically coercive in nature, and the psychological conditioning is more lasting after the individual leaves the thought-reform environment.

I used to think that DAYTOP "wasn't all that bad" and that in my mind I was somehow exaggerating its coercive nature, as well as the conditioning's effects on my mentality.   I used to think of DAYTOP, "Well, at least it's not Straight."  But now I see that DAYTOPian coercion is n my opinion in many ways even more damaging to the individual than the blunt force applied in Straight, which is the most egregious and prominent example of an overtly abusive TC for youths in our times.  The DAYTOP mind control is more subtly applied and more rigidly reinforced.  Very sophisticated B-Mod stuff going down in DAYTOP.  Very effective and very subtle mind-manipulation and encouragement of "right thinking" in DAYTOP.  It's a thought-reform environment.  You know?  

If you're being forced to the ground and bound up in restraints, or if you are being subjected to food and sleep deprivation, then you KNOW that that's wrong; nobody has to tell you that it's abusive.  But if you're getting screamed at during encounter group or a haircut as a part of a body of people that you are supposed to think of as "the family," and there's this groupthink going on, then there's this element of "it's for your own good" to it, and it's not so readily seen as abusive and coercive in or out of the immediate context in which it's taking place.  Therefore, the conditioning is more lasting, more pervasive in a person's psyche, more personalized.

Here's a genius video on cults and thought reform/mind control.  Check this out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnNSe5XYp6E

What follows is a pertinent extract (pp. 20-21) from a book entitled Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults, by Janja Lalich. I recommend Bounded Choice for anyone seriously interested in understanding the psychological dynamics of the cult phenomenon.

http://books.google.com/books?id=p2Udi3 ... +choice%22

Individuals in a cult context are constrained not only by a bounded reality-one product of the self-sealing system-but also by bounded choice. This occurs when the individual reaches what Lifton described as a state of personal closure. ("Closure" in this sense does not mean completion, as it is sometimes used, but a turning inward and refusal to look at other ideas, belifs, or options.) I suggest that a state of person closure should be considered the individualized version of the larger self-sealing system. Thus, as a person identifies and unites with the bounded reality of the group and its belief system, becoming a devotee by making that charismatic commitment to the self-sealing worldview, another process begins to take place. That is, individual perspective and personal decision making become limited and constrained, and that restritction comes as much from within as from without. In the context of closure and constraint, choices may exist, but they are severely limited. In such situations, the person can be described as being in a state of bounded choice

http://www.icsahome.com/infoserv_bookre ... choice.htm

The interaction between the individual and the charismatic system is the key to understanding bounded choice theory. The believer responds to the intellectual and emotional pull of the group with commitment that is renewed through ongoing interaction, and in the process develops a new self. The leader’s vision of the path to salvation has transformational power.

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