Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS)

MyCross Creek Programs Testim. (Includes Descrp. of Seminar)

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psy:
I was going to comment on that, che.  I originally read it double spaced in word format.  It's very well written and the formatting here just doesn't do it justice. Without spacing between the paragraphs as reference points it's easy for they eye to get lost.

Content wise...  There's so much that I can relate to.


--- Quote from: "anythinganyone" ---I was then told that I would need to start a “confession letter”, which he and my parents would read. I would have to write two pages a day until it was finished, or it was a cat 4 refusal, and I was not allowed to omit anything. When I did not finish two pages for one day, my HOPE buddy was given permission by my therapist to read my handwriting in order to determine if my confession letter was honest, in-depth, and satisfactory for the day.
--- End quote ---

That's the real essence of disclosures in program.  They aren't really looking for the truth.  They're looking for trumped up confessions they can use against you.  Use against you with your parents, with your peers, to shame you and beat you down, to cut you off, to give you only one way out (the program)... to make you think that maybe you do have a problem when you don't... to pressure until you agree...  to pressure you until you believe.  It's just class A mindfucking from beginning to end.  It's not about helping a person to get better from any legitimate ailment, it's about convincing people they have problems they don't have in order to make money off a lengthy and costly snake oil "cure"...  It's about turning a person into a billboard parroting "the program saved my life" without any real thought going on behind it.

What really hurts me about all this shit is that half these kids come away so deeply scarred that even when they *know* there was nothing wrong there's this little phobia... irrational fear... doubt constantly whispering in your ear "you'll fail without us" like a curse.  Everything you're told rattles off again and again listening to the radio or watching I.  I hear "fake it til you make it" on some song lyric and I can't help thinking about being forced to act like I believed in the bullshit and then slowly starting to believe it and become somebody else transparently.  Sure there was a definite breaking point where I really lost it and swallowed the whole program hook line and sinker, but what's far more insidious is the influence I didn't notice until later.  The subtle ways they changed kids, distracted by the larger stresses.  Incremental compromises.

I suppose out of all of it I've learned to never give an inch of your values under pressure or you'll lose yourself.  It's not so much what they take as much as what you don't realize you give until it's too late.  I suppose hindsight is 20/20.  Grow at your own pace and of your own free will, sure, but not to satisfy others, even if it makes your life easier.

Che Gookin:
This reminds me of what we made the kids do at Three Springs. In order for them to get to the first step of the stage system the had to come clean with the reasons for why they needed to be in the program. Same shit, different wrapper.

psy:
And of course somebody else who has no first hand knowlege is checking your "honesty"; the implication being that a perfect stranger knows you better than you know yourself, eroding your concept of self and replacing it with a group's perception of who you are.  It's subtle and transparent but it's powerful.

Straight out of Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism


--- Quote from: "Robert J. Lifton" ---Closely related to the demand for absolute purity is an obsession with personal confession. Confession is carried beyond its ordinary religious, legal, and therapeutic expressions to the point of becoming a cult in itself. There is the demand that one confess to crimes one has not committed, to sinfulness that is artificially induced, in the name of a cure that is arbitrarily imposed. Such demands are made possible not only by the ubiquitous human tendencies toward guilt and shame but also by the need to give expression to these tendencies. In totalist hands, confession becomes a means of exploiting, rather than offering solace for, these vulnerabilities.

The totalist confession takes on a number of special meanings. It is first a vehicle for the kind of personal purification which we have just discussed, a means of maintaining a perpetual inner emptying or psychological purge of impurity; this purging milieu enhances the totalists' hold upon existential guilt. Second, it is an act of symbolic self-surrender, the expression of the merging of individual and environment. Third, it is a means of maintaining an ethos of total exposure - a policy of making public (or at least known to the Organization) everything possible about the life experiences, thoughts, and passions of each individual, and especially those elements which might be regarded as derogatory.

The assumption underlying total exposure (besides those which relate to the demand for purity) is the environment's claim to total ownership of each individual self within it. Private ownership of the mind and its products - of imagination or of memory - becomes highly immoral. The accompanying rationale (or rationalization) is familiar, the milieu has attained such a perfect state of enlightenment that any individual retention of ideas or emotions has become anachronistic.

The cult of confession can offer the individual person meaningful psychological satisfactions in the continuing opportunity for emotional catharsis and for relief of suppressed guilt feelings, especially insofar as these are associated with self-punitive tendencies to get pleasure from personal degradation. More than this, the sharing of confession enthusiasms can create an orgiastic sense of "oneness," of the most intense intimacy with fellow confessors and of the dissolution of self into the great flow of the Movement. And there is also, at least initially, the possibility of genuine self-revelation and of self-betterment through the recognition that "the thing that has been exposed is what I am."

But as totalist pressures turn confession into recurrent command performances, the element of histrionic public display takes precedence over genuine inner experience. Each man becomes concerned with the effectiveness of his personal performance, and this performance sometimes comes to serve the function of evading the very emotions and ideas about which one feels most guilty - confirming the statement by one of Camus' characters that "authors of confessions write especially to avoid confessing, to tell nothing of what they know." The difficulty, of course, lies in the inevitable confusion which takes place between the actor's method and his separate personal reality, between the performer and the "real me."

In this sense, the cult of confession has effects quite the reverse of its ideal of total exposure: rather than eliminating personal secrets, it increases and intensifies them. In any situation the personal secret has two important elements: first, guilty and shameful ideas which one wishes to suppress in order to prevent their becoming known by others or their becoming too prominent in one's own awareness; and second, representations of parts of oneself too precious to be expressed except when alone or when involved in special loving relationships formed around this shared secret world. Personal secrets are always maintained in opposition to inner pressures toward self-exposure. The totalist milieu makes contact with these inner pressures through its own obsession with the expose and the unmasking process. As a result old secrets are revived and new ones proliferate; the latter frequently consist of resentments toward or doubts about the Movement, or else are related to aspects of identity still existing outside of the prescribed ideological sphere. Each person becomes caught up in a continuous conflict over which secrets to preserve and which to surrender, over ways to reveal lesser secrets in order to protect more important ones; his own boundaries between the secret and the known, between the public and the private, become blurred. And around one secret, or a complex of secrets, there may revolve an ultimate inner struggle between resistance and self-surrender.

Finally, the cult of confession makes it virtually impossible to attain a reasonable balance between worth and humility. The enthusiastic and aggressive confessor becomes like Camus' character whose perpetual confession is his means of judging others: "…practice the profession of penitent to be able to end up as a judge…the more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you." The identity of the "judge-penitent" thus becomes a vehicle for taking on some of the environment's arrogance and sense of omnipotence. Yet even this shared omnipotence cannot protect him from the opposite (but not unrelated) feelings of humiliation and weakness, feelings especially prevalent among those who remain more the enforced penitent than the all-powerful judge.
--- End quote ---

anythinganyone:
Okay, I put it in CODE format, and I spaced out the paragraphs.  Does that help any?

Inculcated:
Thank you Anythinganyone,
I don’t have adequate words to describe how moved I am by this. I’m sorry this was done to you and everyone else this has been done to.
I’m impressed by how much it must have required of you to revisit this, and to have told it so resoundingly.

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