Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > Daytop Village
DAYTOP Did Me Great Harm in the Long Run
SEKTO:
--- Quote ---Did you ever have to write written reports on yourself or others (some programs call this a "dirt list" or "moral inventory")? How detailed did these reports get?
--- End quote ---
Tonight I remembered something that I had not thought about in YEARS; it was buried waaay back in my memory.
There was one time, just one occurrence of this thing I am about to describe to you in all my time in DAYTOP. There was this one time where the coordinators (there were just two of them at the time; I'll call them Jeff and Nathan) with the blessings and help of the counselors, made us all gather and do a mass spill-your-guts confession session together. Just that one time in all my days at DAYTOP. Usually there were four coordinators in the DAYTOP structure, one for each department, but in this instance there were just two, with two departments each.
When I made coordinator, however, was the only one in the whole house for awhile and they gave me the responsibility of carrying all four departments until they got some other kids with enough "personal growth" to take some of my load.
I was a real asshole sometimes back then, running the whole house myself. The power trip got to me, I'll admit. I'd pull kids out of lunch to do haircuts on them, and learned how to give those haircuts like a pro. I remember telling Mike that he was just a big baby (he was overweight and wore real thick glasses) and he told me "Suck my balls" and then we just screamed louder until he started to cry. Then we'd lighten up on him. I feel bad about that, really bad.
My memory of that "Tell It All Brother" day with Jeff and Nathan is pretty hazy; after all, it was over fifteen years ago and I hadn't thought of it in a looong time. They even had a special DAYTOPian name for this cult-of-confession ritual we did that day, but it it escapes me. I can't remember what the DAYTOP term for this thing was. I want to say it was called "The Gut Check" but that's probably not right. But we were always being told, " you need to check your gut."
Jeff and Nathan stood before the assembled group with notebooks and we had to stand up one at a time and go through this interrogation thing where we'd have to confess all of our hangups, fears, tell of people we'd offended, bad things we'd done, bad attitudes we had, issues that still bound us, all that. Nathan would press us for more and more, and I remember distinctly now he told me, "You're only throwing me bones, but I am looking for the meat" doing this Grand Inquisitor thing. "I know you're hiding something, I know you're holding back." I don't remember how much or what exactly I confessed to, but do remember exaggerating things and making some stuff up just so they'd leave me alone.
But this was not a regular thing; we did two Marathon Groups and just one of these mass confession sessions in the whole time I was there.
The Marathon Groups were in this dim room, with soft muzak playing, kind of an eerie atmosphere, everybody in a circle, and was basically just like an intense encounter group that was five or six hours long where things got more personal. More tomorrow on that.
DAYTOP in TX closed down in oh I'd say, around '95, '96, a few years after we were out of there, in circumstances involving some kind of financial scandal, embezzlement and such.
Ursus:
--- Quote from: "SEKTO" ---We were kids; we didn't know what was going on.
It's as if DAYTOP opened up the top of our skulls, scraped our brains and minds away, and replaced that with a bunch of "DAYTOP values" and "confront yourself in the eyes and hearts of others" shit, and then sent us out into the world again. It'd be like being opened up, cut into during surgery, and then improperly sutured back together before being sent home. Then you start bleeding all over the place, the would gets infected, bacteria gets into your blood, and then before you know it you have a systemic blood infection because of the botched surgery and the fact that the surgical team didn't close you up properly or give you any antibiotics or follow-up.
That's what happened to us, but at a psychic level. We weren't sutured back together properly individually, we got sutured together by DAYTOP and what started out as close friendships got warped into these purulent and toxic relationships and nasty patterns of behavior that continued for years.
That stuff totally stunted my emotional growth.
It's like I walked around with this big festering open wound for YEARS after the experience and am only just now seeing how badly the "doctors" botched the "surgery," you know?
--- End quote ---
Well, that was the point, to remake the human psyche, eh? It came from a criminologist viewpoint, to curb and control the wanton element, and it came from a psychological viewpoint, the picking apart of how the human soul ticks...under pressure. Some haunted hell that is, when the guideposts of an ordinary existence are stripped away clean.
"We were kids; we didn't know what was going on."
Somewhere along the way, that world assumed that adolescents were something akin to smaller and less corpulent adults. There was no recognition nor appreciation that there was still a good bit of developmental progress being made in the forming of who said being was in the process of becoming. It was brain salad surgery in the hands of horse traders.
dishdutyfugitive:
--- Quote ---It was brain salad surgery in the hands of horse traders.
--- End quote ---
That my friends is the best close I've heard in a long time.
Ursus buy yourself a few rounds and put it on my tab.
SEKTO:
My therapists are actually out of town this week, taking a much-deserved vacation. So this board IS my therapy right now. I sincerely hope that nobody minds.
Here's a couple more things that I'll add while I am thinking about it:
The director of the place I'll call her "Marylin",the one who I was told is/was HIV positive? I never did tell of how I found out about her. To make a long story short (and I'll spare you the details; they're probably not important) I was told of this by my friend Billy, who was told by his mother. Billy's mom was a genuine heroin addict and was originally told of it by "Marylin" herself during a private counseling session. Billy's mom (she's gone now too, BTW) had Hep C and they were discussing blood-borne illnesses that are transmitted through shooting up. That's when Marylin, so the story goes, shared her status. I do not know if Marylin was legally obligated under state law to tell any of us of her supposed HIV-positive status at the time or not, but she didn't, and I did not know of it until after I'd graduated. If it's indeed true (and it might not be, for all I know) that she was HIV-positive , she was working in close proximity with minors, for God's sake. But Marylin never told me or anybody of the other kids at the time, and I do not even know this for an absolute fact, in any case. I take it on very good authority though; I take Billy's word for it.
Also the Marathon Groups...we did two of them while I was there. This was long so ago...I do not remember them being all that intense or traumatic, really; they were just, like, extended encounter groups that into more personal and detailed stuff, and we not supposed to yell. Another type of group confession thing, basically a different version of the "Gut Check" exercise that we had to go through that one time with Jeff and Nathan. The Marathon Group was set in a room in which the lights were dimmed, there was soft music on, and it was smaller, ten or fifteen of us I'd say. They were six or so hours in duration. Basically, we were told to confess and reveal all of the most personal details of our lives, how it made us feel, and we were supposed to confront one another one hangups, suppressed emotions, "Tell us how that made you feel" stuff, and the like. They really tried to get into your business during those sessions. But again, the haircuts and encounter groups were much more brutal, and in retrospect much more traumatizing to me, than the Marathon Groups. They were still not pleasant, but the Encounter Groups and haircuts were much more "in your face" and the Marathons were sort of subtle and laid-back.
We were a bunch of kids that they were subjecting to this shit; we were all between 14-18 years old. There were a couple of kids who were as young as 12-13. During one group session, this 12- year old girl (she was really young to be there) started talking about horrific sexual abuse that had been inflicted upon her; this girl had no boundaries, and I do not know what the counselors ever did about her situation. She'd come out of something called the Letot Center, that particular girl. There were a few girls that had come from Letot. I myself was 19 when I graduated from the program; I was one of the oldest, if not THE oldest. Looking back I can see now just how wildly inappropriate that place was for a bunch of teenagers, especially a casual high-school potsmoker like me. There was one "staff psychologist" but I do not know what she did all day or what her background was; she worked in the offices in the back and was the one that they'd always bring the parents to. As far as I know, she was the one trained or degreed person in the place (other than the teachers in the school, which I never went to since I had my GED) and I really do not know what exactly she did for them; she never ran any groups or anything, and was always in the back. And there was one social worker, I remember now, one actual social worker with a degree that did intake stuff, and that's it.
Anonymous:
If there was little/no risk of bodily fluids interchange, I don't think there was any reason to require "Marylin" to divulge her HIV status, minors or not.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version