General Interest > Thought Reform
Does Thought Reform Still Happen in the TTI?
Whooter:
--- Quote from: "Awake" ---
--- Quote from: "Whooter" ---
--- Quote from: "Awake" ---Huge disagreement with you there Whooter. Only its not just that the kid loses contact with their primary environment, they manipulate contact with their primary environment to manipulate the kid. Control over that communication and contact is a tool of coercion.
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I understand that you disagree with me, Samara, and that is okay considering your experience and perspective. I dont knock you for that. But once you open up the communication and allow kids to speak with their parents openly without any staff around and they are able to send out letters unscreened like we have seen in todays programs, and engage the surrounding community the chance of a successful thought reform or brainwashing falls away. There is no way to sustain enough control to be successful.
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I’m sorry but I think you are opining. These programs have a history of intercepting interpersonal communication and manipulating communication between the child and their family and there is no proof it has changed. Your conjecture that i am Samara is also wrong.
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Wow, I apologize awake. I just came off a post with Samara and thought she had responded.
I have copies of parental agreements which ask parents to sign over consent (to staff) to open the kids incoming and outgoing mail while they are in programs so I understand this to be happening. These programs are mostly WWASP based and are slowly being closed down. The newer generation of programs I am familiar with allow much more communication with the outside world via therapists, phone calls, letters, engaging with local community and other students etc.
My opinion is that the industry is changing for the better, but it is fact that some of the newer programs allow a greater degree of communication outside the program walls which would prohibit any successful thought control or brainwashing process to occur.
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psy:
--- Quote from: "Whooter" ---I have copies of parental agreements which ask parents to sign over consent (to staff) to open the kids incoming and outgoing mail while they are in programs so I understand this to be happening. These programs are mostly WWASP based and are slowly being closed down. The newer generation of programs I am familiar with allow much more communication with the outside world via therapists, phone calls, letters, engaging with local community and other students etc.
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You're always praising Aspen programs, above all else. What about Mount Batchelors Academy, an Aspen Program in Oregon, which got in trouble with the authorities for Aspen's LifeSteps (something that was used, and probably still is under another name, at most if not all of their programs)? Maybe you can explain how the very same exact skit that was described at MBA I witnessed at Benchmark, another CEDU clone. If programs have changed so much, why is it that so many destructive things are still the same and the only thing that ever seems to change is the names? "Bans" becomes "non-com" and so on and so forth. I've heard programs swear countless times that "we've changed"... and then I look closer and in reality little of all of value has been modified at all.
Even with Benchmark. They claimed that they changed. Then I went down in november of 07 to take a look and behold... nothing had really changed at all. Are we supposed to take your word for it? Why is it that when I talk to kids today who just got out of these "new and improved" "safe" programs, they're telling the same stories the last generation of kids did. Come on now. You can't accuse them all of lying. Liars stories are inconsistent.
The fact remains that the general structure of these programs, the core elements of the thought reform process, have not changed. In order for programs to change they would first have to acknowledge they have been using thought reform, somethign i'm sure that very few understand, even many program directors. They're just doign what they were told and from their perspective, it works. There is no incentive to change. The physical abuse and some of the harsher confrontations might stop, but that's superficial and irrelevant to the real core abuse: stripping a person of their identity, ethics, and perceptions of their past without their knowledge or consent.
Awake:
Does it?
viewtopic.php?f=81&t=31447
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Inculcated:
The fact is that older programs are still in operation today and many of the newer ones adhere to concepts and methods of their predecessors (Daytop and Phoenix House being the first that come to mind) and while certain blatantly harsh aspects of their programs have been curtailed (like literal head shaving), others have not.
There are still encounter groups, hostile verbal confrontation rants that still bear the title “haircut” and closed communications and patently humiliating “Learning Experiences”. And yes, they do intercept letters and listen in on phone calls. These are considered privileges that can be revoked mid sentence and therefore communication with the family is not viewed as an aspect of treatment.
Granting a kid a letter from home and a monitored phone call will not prevent the damage incurred within many of these programs.
Even newer programs that package themselves as being different from the others have inherently divisive and derisive overtones in the manner in which they present their perception of the kids they’re dealing with.
In fact another example of such undermining can be seen in the mentality of program that insists on imposing a presumption of manipulation on the part of its charges into the parent or guardian’s minds, by calling a hypothetical child on their website “Mr. Manipulation”This serves to preemptively discredit what the child has to report about the program.
--- Quote ---• The parent is pressured by the child into coming home for a visit without the treatment team's approval and recommendation.
• A parent is persuaded by Mr. Manipulation to come home for good as soon as he achieves the ‘Impact’ status without consultation with the treatment team.
• You can readily see the pattern. A parent, feeling guilty for the ‘pain’ the child has to go through as part of the treatment process, feels compelled to “throw the child a bone.’
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Anne Bonney:
Yup.....it's like what The Seed/Straight/KIDS/Pathways etc. did. Each one opened up after the previous one had shut down either for abuse charges or amidst multiple allegations and horrible publicity. Each one that opened up promised to "take what was good" from the previous and "leave out the abuse". Each one ended up shutting down for abuse. They always promise the "kinder, gentler" version but it's all the same, basic LGAT-type bullshit thought reform. ::puke::
Same shit, different wrapper.
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