Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > News Items

Katies Story

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FemanonFatal2.0:
I'm honestly to the point of tears reading that. I'm surprised that your parents would react in such a way, if you were my child and i saw that, I would break down in tears and hold you and tell you how much I love you. what did they think this was just acting out? of course its serious, its a serious expression that you are miserable! I just can't believe that your parents would even consider a behavior modification program considering what a fragile state you much have been in. The more I hear about your life the more I resent your parents for giving you exactly opposite of what you truly needed at that point. I can understand the fact that something like this would be troubling to a parent but I don't understand what kind of person would respond in this way. I know I surely wouldn't.

ill let you go on before I decide to get too worked up. I just hope you realize that NONE of this was your fault, depression is a mental and medical disorder and needs to be treated with care, love and professional help. Considering that people with severe depression are mentally fragile, using judgmental comments and punishment to try to stop them from hurting themselves really makes no sense to me. You deserved better treatment, and if they were unable to give it to you they should have found much better help, namely professional help instead of a program that was designed for and promised (in their marketing materials) to change your behavior to serve them, instead of really help you with your condition.

Im sorry you had to go through this, I think that its about time you realize that you didn't deserve it, and that you needed something much different then what your parents were willing to give you.

maruska:
Katie, I am so sorry. I am full of emotion right now.
Just want to let you know, that my daughter reads this also - we talk about your experience very much. It helps me as a parent to learn about teenagers´s point of view - its really very helpfull.Thank you so much. I can only imagine how hard this must have been for you.

Oscar:
Reflection on part 2

I understand how parents can be scared when they discover a bloody arm. I am a parent myself.

However I am a product of the cold war. I live in a country which would have been one of the first the Russian would have taken if they wanted to conquer Western Europe.

When I read of youth, who during therapy has been forced to plan their own funeral, it is déjà-vu. Having been trained to stand in the way of the red army we are asked to prepare everything for those we leave behind, so we can fight for our cause without having to worry about anything, we missed saying. I worry for death and having to drive through the local warzone called Noerrebro every single day to reach my work, it is a real risk I take. But I take it well knowing that I have done my best to prepare my children and wife for the situation of me ending up dead.

However another lesson I learned in school, which is related to part 2, is that we all go through life picking up small pieces of pain, frustration. We have to contain anger and sorrow. There is no time to react on them in daily life. So we put them in our emotional backpack where they remain until we have time to process them. What happens if we don’t get this time and the backpack becomes too heavy to carry? My background as a Dane makes me able to choose a different option if/when my children choose to cut in order to unload their problems.

Katie: What you did at that time, when you started cutting, was healthy. You had insight to know that you needed to unload your backpack. It certainly wasn’t the smartest way of unloading your baggage, but you were not educated to know better. What’s worse your father and step-mom wasn’t either. That’s the real tragedy in this story.

As for the drinking and its part towards drugs - which in your culture is related because the alcohol drinking by teens opposite the situation in Denmark is not accepted – it follows as a consequence of the lack of motivation from your family to engage the problem rather than condemning it. I hope that the program has taught them the reason for cutting so they can take a wiser approach towards your siblings. Else their money is truly totally wasted.

When I meet social workers they are always on the look for places where teens drink, so they can out there and listen. Whenever the police spot such a place they are quick to start communicating and this summer they grilled sausages for the teens so they didn’t drink on an empty stomach. A lot of the problems can be stopped before they grow into disasters when someone will listen.

It is a sad story to read because there wasn’t really a problem which needed professional help until the adults stopped listening and started to condemn.
I wonder where Christy is today. You were not the only one and I will bet 100 dollars that in the local community there ware at least 10 more in the same situation. That’s why I support community programs. There are not reasons for every parent to pay 50-100,000 dollars on treatment if it can be done locally for 1/10 of the price.

Taking a person to the hospital, stabilizing them and then releasing them are no cure. It is a huge, huge red flag no to understand that once a person leaves the hospital the treatment starts. As some know the founder of Spft has some experience in this matter with family. With his permission I can reveal that 20 weeks on intense therapy 3 times per week combined with additional treatment for anxiety did work, but did not restore the individual to a level where a full time job is a possibility. There are – 2 years later – a long way to go.

It was a big mistake by your father not to remain in the situation and personally drive you to therapy - outpatient therapy – but intense therapy I have to point out.

Your parents are not educated in medicine. That’s why they should have been advised by the hospital that it could have cost you your life, if you did not remain in an out-patient program - a program, which could have addressed the problems. The cutting, alcohol and drugs are not the issues, they are only a symptom. I am so sorry that this chance was wasted.

The first two chapters don’t create basis for a mandatory stay in a program.

What is there to say? Did the program teach you how to handle problems or did they just as any cult point out a single answer to life? Based on what I have seen so far, I will recommend you to read some novels by the Danish author Soeren Aabye Kierkegaard. As he writes life hurts. There is no single answer to a problem. Life is supposed to be complicated.

Once again I have to state that you should not feel bad about yourself smoking and cutting today. Smoking is a skip action method. You shouldn’t feel guilt over it, but if you want to quit find some other activity to do so you can take some time off during the day to do instead. Is cycling possible in your area? I personally find that this activity to both gives me time to reflect and remove some of my aggressiveness at the same time.

As for the cutting my best advice would be to find a person you can trust. How is your extended family? Another Cross Creek survivor (from around 1990) found an aunt which helped her to go on in life and she has made it. I feel that you are a strong person who just now is looking for resources inside. You found the strength to take the exit plan because you knew that you were finished with the program. There was nothing left the program could give you and the insight to realize it and take the consequences based on that insight testifies about a strong personality, who just needs a place to dump the worries in order to succeed in life.

Find this person. Dump your weekly load of worries by this individual.

Yet another good piece; you are a good writer.

As sad as this story is, I cannot wait to read the next installment.

Che Gookin:
You sound like you are a lot tougher and stronger than most people are willing to give you credit for. Perhaps more than you are willing to give yourself. Take heart in this and be glad. Being mentally strong is a rare trait these days as people tend to associate mental toughness with loudmouth idiocy rather than anything deeper and more genuine.

As for Oscar:

Damn when I was young the fuzz made us pour our beer out and they laughed at us after threatening to call our parents if they caught us again. No one grilled wieners for us!

TheWho:
Femanon (and everyone), I would caution against trying to create good guys and bad guys here.  The fathers anger at seeing his daughter harmed was a natural response and he felt powerless to fix it because the person hurting his daughter was his daughter.  There are also many layers that need to be considered inwhich we don’t know about.  Adults don’t always just fall in love with someone elses children and then decide to marry the parent hoping someday they will love them too and be loved the same in return.  Most of the time it works the other way around, the adults fall in love with each other first and then hopfully learn to love the others children.  A preteen or teen having their biological mother out of the picture is hard enough but when you add a replacement it takes on a whole new set of dynamics and problems.  As you read thru the fathers blog you can see that he loves his daughter very much and would never want to see her hurt.  This is a family that has been harmed not just one individual.  If we have learned anything from reading here on fornits expending your energy on anger, spewing venom and blaming parents, staff and programs in general does not lead to recovery or healing.

The best we can hope for is that Katie can learn to understand what happened to her and her family so that she can define it, make it tangible, hold it in her hand and begin to make sense of it all and not until then can she be able to set it down and move forward.

I think we should encourage Katie to stay open minded and write her story without a predefined antagonist set upon her.

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