Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > Daytop Village
DAYTOP Did Me Great Harm in the Long Run
Inculcated:
“I can’t feel you feeling it” inside out…still can’t find the words for it, which is weird because so many come to mind. It’s hard to make sense of what I might be trying to say when all of the words I have to communicate collide. Anyway, If we were to imagine some conceptual hell of non-linear time we could look back and see that the extended group never ended, part of me is still sitting there, and there I am in the next room on a different day on chair, while elsewhere trapped there unblinkingly clock watching the interminable nightmare of the never ending sessions, and just a blink away we’re transitioning to our “circle of trust” from what others call “dissipations” and we’ve all been in this ring of the circus before and everyone knows how it goes and the show must go on so you know here we go and we all watch the shadow on the wall made by H. screaming at any empty chair and we hear that boy from the day room wind up again (it’s all the same place when these places get under your skin) and we look at the scars on his hands and try to draw upon the compassion drained of us in the fighting ring encounters and to draw a breath, and over there we’re in the round and …oh, the Robin sings like a canary and she screams and I can’t help but think that if this group were gathered in the other ring I’d be picking little yellow feathers of hers from my teeth, but for right now (the eternal now, as someone once put it) I want her to shut up so I don’t have to feel her feeling and I want the drone of her tearful moans to go on and drown out the sounds of my hurting for her and of my own fears, so I’m not called upon to have them affronted here in the eyes and hearts of … Feedback emanates from me in my stead, and I play the that was a brave share song for her, an empty offering falling from my tied tongue. In a game theory way we are bound in this common ground, not to each other but by one another in the rules of the roles we're made to play.By turns the shadows on the wall shift in our dimly lighted room where our circle is interned. In turn the shapes change their span and shade. The shadows cast themselves from where they stand over us and over again their punch drunk screaming incantations are eliciting cultivated keening. All the while others are dispelling themselves with disappearing magic into the patterned fabric… And I can’t speak a word of this though my lips move making sounds without meaning drowned out of something else meant for keeping and lost in the midst. Now close your eyes & make a wish, when opened again, my pupils constrict.
SEKTO:
Tonight, friends, I am so depressed that I just do not know what to do. I've been on a studying jag all day long (since about 9:30 this morning) and have stopped only to make tea, eat a sandwich, and go to the bathroom. The weather outside is cold, the rain is pouring down, and it's really windy too. Foggy. Because of the shitty weather, I cannot leave my apartment to go out and try and have some fun, and none of my friends are available to speak in the phone right now. So it's just me and the TV and the four walls and my computer. I do not feel like reading a book, and am exhausted from studying all day. My anxieties are getting the better of me and I just wish that I could cry it all out, but the tears will not come. Can't sleep either. Actually, I feel like I am suffocating. I just need some support right now, as I am in a very bad frame of mind. Please help; I do not know what to do.
Inculcated:
your phone is ringing.
Ursus:
--- Quote from: "SEKTO" ---Tonight, friends, I am so depressed that I just do not know what to do. I've been on a studying jag all day long (since about 9:30 this morning) and have stopped only to make tea, eat a sandwich, and go to the bathroom. The weather outside is cold, the rain is pouring down, and it's really windy too. Foggy. Because of the shitty weather, I cannot leave my apartment to go out and try and have some fun, and none of my friends are available to speak in the phone right now. So it's just me and the TV and the four walls and my computer. I do not feel like reading a book, and am exhausted from studying all day. My anxieties are getting the better of me and I just wish that I could cry it all out, but the tears will not come. Can't sleep either. Actually, I feel like I am suffocating. I just need some support right now, as I am in a very bad frame of mind. Please help; I do not know what to do.
--- End quote ---
You are burnt out from studying, your blood sugar is low, no surprise that a low might come at this time.
Keep in mind, this too ... shall pass. :D
SEKTO:
--- Quote ---You are burnt out from studying, your blood sugar is low, no surprise that a low might come at this time.
Keep in mind, this too ... shall pass. :D
--- End quote ---
Too much Ritalin and Adderall, too little food, the stress of finals. At least I get plenty of sleep, though, and my grades are excellent, all A's and B's. Add to all that some tension in my personal life and you've got the recipe for a real depressive episode. I sure do hope that it will pass. The semester is over in a couple of weeks, anyway. Then a month off. I'm going to relax and read a lot in that time, try and get out more, weather permiting.
Really, if there were some kind of autism pill or some such that I could take to make me NT overnight, then I'd take it. I'd rather not be this way, I'd rather not have this PDD. Actually, I hate being like this. Imagine being a traumatized 22-year old who is trapped in the body of a 36-year old, but who also has the intellect of a 50 year old. It's very uncomfortable, kind of what I imagine that literal blindness would be like, but it's a social blindness. Imagine being really smart, yet really stupid at the same time. People have always thought me eccentric and even weird, but I do not know how else to be. I don't know how NOT to be like this.
That's what has me depressed. I feel a great sense of loss and grief. It'll never really go away, either. All the therapy and medication in the world won't make me NT. Coming to terms with all of this makes me very emotional. My social, emotional, chronological, and intellectual ages will never match. I am as insecure inside as a nerdy little kid with no friends; I am still in many respects that nerdy and bullied little kid with no friends that I was when I was 12. It pains me very much, and I do not like it at all. It's a very isolating feeling; it's as if I do not belong to this world, never have, and never will.
My emotions are very childlike, though I do not necessarily think of myself as childish. My friends, those who really know me well, know this to be the case. In a lot of ways, I'm still a kid.
Keep in mind as well, I was only assessed as being on the spectrum a little over a year ago, when I was 34. Well, AS was not added to the DSM until 1994 (the year I left DAYTOP) anyway. Before that, nobody outside of certain medical specialists knew about ASD. Next year, I'll undergo the neuro-psychological testing necessary in order for an official diagnosis to be made.
And DAYTOP surely did not help me one bit. I only started to unpack the DAYTOP stuff a year or so ago, too. All they did for me was compound my insecurities. All that constant humiliation, the degrading LEs and all the screaming, (not to mention the abuse and neglect that I lived with at home) led me to have a deeply internalized sense of shame and perpetual self-doubt.
And so my parents stick me in this fucked up cult in order to make me "better." Years later over dinner, just last summer actually while I was at MH, my father (who had come to visit me there) told me that he never could see how all that stuff that DAYTOP did was really supposed to help anybody. I told him that DAYTOP is a cult and that they screwed my mind up. He told me that he always thought it to be a cult too, but that he didn't know of any better options as far as what to do with me. I told him that DAYTOP did me great harm in the long run, but that I forgive him. He didn't know any better, and he thought that it was helping me. For that matter, I thought so too.
Those people did not know what the hell they were doing, and for some kid like me, it was the worst place I could have been. The only thing is, that it took me fifteen years to see that fact. Well, the second-to-worst place; they would have killed me in residential. No wonder Mike Gomez split right before they would have sent him to Athens. They would have eaten him alive there.
The other day I was telling this woman, after my Personality Theory class and over coffee in the library, about my experience in DAYTOP. She told me about being manipulated and used by her therapist, while in Jungian therapy many years ago. So I opened up told her about the chair, the encounter groups, Mike and the pacifier, and the time I was made to wear a sign that said, "Ask me to bark like a dog." She looked at me incredulously, as if she thought that I was making it all up. I assured her that I was not. She told me those were some of the worst and most abusive "therapeutic" B-Mod practices that she'd ever heard. I told her that that was only the beginning, the tip of the iceberg in terms of the abuses of the Troubled Teen Industry. She told me that she'd never heard anything like that before, that she had no idea. I just smiled. What to say?
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