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?
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.