Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > Aspen Education Group
My son at Aspen Ranch
Troll Control:
Hang in there, Niles. Your son will be home soon enough. When he gets home just take him out of the pine box and tell him how proud you are of him for not quitting the program. Good luck!
Anonymous:
http://www.heal-online.org/aspenranch.htm
ASPEN RANCH
IN LOA, UT
SURVIVOR REPORTS
SURVIVOR REPORT #1 BY ANONYMOUS
I wish I knew where to begin. I will try to focus on the most disturbing experiences i can
remember but, like many other survivors of such programs i find myself having a hard time remembering everything that went on.
For the first two weeks you arrive at Aspen Ranch you are placed on a level known as round-up. During this period of time you are either silent in a basement, or outside doing manual labor (changing watering pipes, building fences etc).
You can not have any contact with your parents and get to talk to a therapist maybe once or twice.
One July morning when I refused to go outside, the sheets were ripped out from under me and I was carried and thrown onto a staircase where two men put my shoes on picked me up and dragged me to the field where I was to work. Afraid of any other forms of punishment,
I did. Being physically threatened is a major way they get you to follow the rules.
Every week you got to speak with your parents, on speakerphone, with your therapist present for 20 minutes. If you ever tried to tell your parents about the torture you were suffering through the conversation would be immediately terminated. All letters were read before sent,
all incoming mail opened read and inspected before given to you. The only contact allowed was to your parents and had to be positive.
On top of whatever work project your team was assigned to each day you also had to participate in an hour long physical, no matter how physically drained you were. People would sometimes pass out or break down begging to stop but, for the most part the physical went on for as long as the supervisor saw fit.
The psychological abuse was never ending, if you were suspected of doing something wrong you would be forced to go into the basement and sit at a desk until you admitted what you were accused of. We were often threatened to be sent to an out of country program where we were told there was no child labor laws, I still don't know if this program exists but, the mere threat was enough to keep most of us "in line".
I could go on forever with stories of this sort. My main point though, please do not put your child through
this, two years later I am still suffering from the lies I was fed.
Please protect my identity. I know this is not a complete story but I think it gets the point across. If you need my full name and dates I attended the program for your own records I can let you know, thanks so much for raising awareness about such horrible programs.
SURVIVOR REPORT #2 BY ANON
These are all factual events that take place at aspen ranch everyday, these are events that have taken place and will continue to unless someone takes action soon. Everything in my statement is true and I give HEAL permission to use my
statement.
I am a survivor of the aspen ranch school, located in Loa, UT. A Theraputic Boarding school/ rehabilitation center.....my ass. Aspen Ranch uses a physical restraint system called PCS (positive control system) which is actually FAR from positive. PCS includes a barrage or various pressure points and bent wrists, locked joints, and strained tendons.
Once put into PCS submission you are held here by a minimum of 3 staff, you're pulse regularly checked to indicate your level of anger. You are normally on the ground (also known as "Carpet Time" for a norm of 45 minutes to an hour) They use any method of getting you down, whether it be calmly asking you to cooperate with them or tackling you through a crowd of
people onto concrete (which seems to be a staff favorite). I have seen many of my friends at Aspen Ranch end up with broken wrists from PCS. I have myself lost the feeling in the tips of my fingers for days as a result of being held in PCS submission for over 3 hours.
Once you are PCSed (on top of everything) you have to go to R&R (redirection and recovery)
more commonly known as the room where you where red sweat pants and sweat shirts even in the dead of the summer (in the Desert) to no avail.
The "on campus" psychiatrist's prescribe you medications based on staff behavioral reports, without even consulting you to see how you feel about putting a new foreign substance into your body or checking past medical records (could be detrimental to your well being). For example I myself was a bit ADHD according to staff, and the staff apparently thought that they were doing me a favor recommending that i be prescribed to Ritalin (methylphindate), which
actually led to a number of seizures...to bad they didn't bother to check to see if my family had a history of amphetamine
related seizures. thanks aspen ranch!!
TheWho:
Hang in there Nigel. Dont let all the negative propaganda get to you. One thing I did was compare what was written here to what my kid told me and I found the negative information posted here to have very little credibility.
Keep the communication with your sons therapist and with your son "open" and keep asking questions and you will eventually feel at ease with your decision and the safety of your son.
NIGEL:
I have read those survivor reports. As I have said before, I am keeping my eyes and ears open. I asked my son about any physical abuse, and he told me that he hadn't seen any (in 2.5 months) but he had heard stories about kids that wouldn't do what they were told, so they were first warned and then physically held. As for the phone calls, I do know that the therapist is there with him, but I was also with him for 4 hours by ourselves and he didn't tell me that he was being forced to be cooperative and say only positive things. As for the letters, he is very honest and open. I have never got the feeling that he hasn't told me everything. My son will be the first to report anything he feels is abuse (I am positive about this). I am not writing here to advocate for The Aspen Ranch, only to ask for everyones advice and to let you know how my son is doing. If I feel things are not good there, I will let you know, and if I feel it has been good for my son, I will also report that.
Anonymous:
--- Quote from: NIGEL ---Hi again,
My faults as a parent were that I would always get on him for all that he did wrong, and I didn't find the time to tell him that I was proud of him and that I loved him. I am doing my best to make sure he knows that I see him working on things and that I am very proud of him.
While it is good to see you taking responsibility for your "troubled parent" behavior, did you really need to abandon your son to an abusive program to learn this? You finally learned that people respond to love and encouragement and rebel against being criticized, nagged and being constantly told what they are doing wrong while anything they do right is ignored? He can't "work on things" at home? With the family and in the world he will return to and have to function in? Your son wants and needs your love; it should be unconditional, not meted out as a reward for submitting to a program that is going to do in spades to him what you recognized you yourself did wrong with him. You didn't find the time to tell him you were proud of him and love him while he was at home? But you have certainly found the time to send him away...time you will never, ever get back, precious time with your child squandered in the service of a profit-making business run by people who will never ever appreciate the value of that time.
You sound like you really love your son and want to do the best for him. You should figure out how much money you are willing to give these people then take that money, take a leave of absence from your job, take your son, sail around the world, backpack through Europe, visit Alaska or take a road trip, hang out and get to know each other, build some trust. No matter how much you love your son unless you can communicate that to him in a way he will understand it is really just words. That means you need to get to know who he really is and right now you don't. know him. A program will only widen that gulf.
While he may survive and even forgive you, you will lose something precious you will never get back:the chance to forge the kind of bond that will have a momumentally better affect on your son and his behavior that any program will ever be able to conjure up.
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