I am an exsafe counselor

[Antigen]

On 2003-11-25 15:05:00, exsafecounselor wrote:

You did mention something else worth noting. SAFE was a kindler, gentler version of what you experienced. There was confronation, but not spitting or abuse or deprivation. There is nothing wrong with the model, when it is applied correctly.

Well, either I misspoke or you misunderstood. SAFE was an attempt at a kinder, gentler Straight. Just as Straight had been an attempt at a kinder, gentler Seed, which followed Synanon and possibly Daytop.

No deprivation? Of freedom to communicate? Freedom of association? Right to privacy? Basic human dignity? Did it ever occure to you that most of the confessions you coerced out of these kids were never any other client's business, and often enough no business of staff, even if they had actually been qualified to handle heroic intervention.

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If today he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him,--"I see no probability of the British invading us"; but he will say to you, "Be silent: I see it, if you don't."
--Abraham Lincoln

[jnloar]

another thought on Ginger's post about "confessions" of a clients FOS/confessions...I, and a good 3/4 of the people I have reconnected with, are now free to say that our "FOS" lists were what were really FOS.  I know that on day 52 after endless confrontations about my 'druggie past' that I began piecing together bits of stories I heard in group so I would have a "past" to share about.  I know that is true for quite a few of people so I agree with Ginger about coerced confessions but also want to add that many of those confessions were absolute bullshit so the client could get the hell off first phase.   ***The First Stage of the Brainwashing Process***
they have started to give up their hope of ever being believed for their truth and begin to lie, exagerate, whatever it takes to just FREAKING SURVIVE!

[Antigen]

I didn't realize it at the time. I suppose I was already well beyond the first phase by virtue of my exposure to The Seed starting from a very young age. I didn't really believe all the bullshit I heard coming out of these kids' mouths. But I did believe that they, the real druggies of lore, were tougher and more clever and devious than I was. I thought everybody else "got it" better than I did. But I've found I was wrong.

I never told anybody much of anything very important to me. I knew better. I confessed to true facts that weren't all that private and just built on those. I never let out anything that really bothered me. Some people did. Some people fell for it and entrusted to Group their real most shameful secrets. If I had understood that, I don't think I would ever have gone along to the degree I did.

Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.
--James Madison

[Carmel]

Ginger -

Want to commend you on that last post.I often look back and wish i had had enough sense to see as you did, now that I think back, I recognize those who did.  My host ister was that way i think, and although I hold resentment to her about having to be the brunt of her manipulations sometimes....she still knew alot more than I did I think about how to survive in that place.  I just swallowed it hook line and sinker that the only way to get through was to be honest just like they said and I tore myself to bits when it wasnt good enough.

[Antigen]

Well thanks, Carmel. I don't think it was my good sense or anything. I think it was just that I was already a veteran at the game going in. I knew how to turn things around from years of doing it at home. I knew they fucked up, for example, insisting on my name being a druggietie. Instead of breaking me away from reality, that was a constant reminder that it was all just theatre. When they stood me up and told me never to mention The Seed, I knew that was an ace in the hole too.

Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.
--Rep. Robert L. Henry, TX December 22, 1914 (quoting Lincoln)

[exsafecounselor]

"The model is, essentially to strip a kid of every right, DIGNITY and sembelance of humanness, to surrender to the group mentality. If a kid is non-compliant, they are ridiculed, forced to withstand extreme mental confrontations and at times, physical restraint and even abuse."

Again, in your case this is how the model was applied, rather than how it shoule be applied.  I had no idea what SAFE was about when I first started working there.  I had never even heard of Straight.  I started out in the mental health field because I am fascinated by the human condition and wanted to help people when given the oppotunity.  Everything at SAFE was designed to help the child learn what they needed to learn and move throught the phases, hopefully to never return.  Recognizing that relapse is part of the disease, a relapse prevention program called REPEAT was started, for those that did relapse.  They were not shunned or rejected.

I can not explain the drastic differences between your experience and mine.  I do know that some parents who pulled their child said a variety of negative things about SAFE.  It is not a program for everyone.  I would love to take a look at the paperwork you have from SAFE.  I may have actually written it.

[Antigen]

I think you're right, jnloar. Exstaff is a former exec; one of the clueless variety usually hired for their title and generally given the mushroom treatment.

Probably doesn't even know that we were instructed to tone down the language and, sometimes, even the motivating when they were in the room.
 

The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0451524934/circlofmiamithem' target='_new'>O'Brien, the apparatchik

[exsafecounselor]

Your bitterness, resentment, and total lack of rational thinking has caused me to leave you and your kind to be forever trapped within yourselves.  I wish you luck in the future and hope that in time the sting of the past will subside and you will know peace. :wave:

[Antigen]

Oh no! We're doomed! Please, please don't go and leave us to our missery!  
:rofl:  :rofl:  :rofl:  :rofl:  :rofl:  :rofl:

Fucking intentional moron!

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike.
-- John Muir

_________________
Ginger Warbis ~ Antigen
American drug war P.O.W.
   10/80 - 10/82
Straight South (Sarasota, FL)
Anonymity Anonymous

[Antigen]

Art, if you look over in the Straight Survivors' forum, there's a post titled something like "Was Straight a government experiment?"

It's a long, like 13 part, investigative series. It relates somewhat to the Program because it mentions closed juvenile rehabs (but no detail) and because it identifies LEAA as a funding agency for Federal thought reform experiments. LEAA also granted Straight some hundreds of thousands per year.

There's another interesting detail somewhere in there. Some agency or other, I think it was either Russian or German, wanted to figure out how to get somebody who was not predisposed to violence or murder to assasinate a target on command. They found that if they could get the subject convinced that the target was a very bad guy, even if it were his best friend in reality, the subject could be conditioned to kill the target without hesitation or remorse.

I don't know about this guy. He might well be a fraud of some kind. But it's also very possible that he was one of those titled professionals who they'd hire to meet marketing or regulatory requirements. In Straight, Sarasota, that would be Dr. Hugh Burns. I talked to him just a couple of years ago. He truely and honestly did not see innocent victims getting unwarranted abuse. What he saw were dangerous, angry, deceitful drug addicts receiving heroic intervention to save their lives.

There are two parts to the deception. One is convincing the stoodge that the abuse that they're allowed to see is warranted. The other is keeping them in the dark about some of the worst of it. We had rules about how to act around parents and execs. The apologia was that they deserved special respect, so they shouldn't have to hear us say fuck or yell or see a marathon or anything.

So the stoodge goes out recruiting with the belief that anyone who says these things happen is lying cause he's there regularly and never sees it.

Everything that people say to you is personal. Whether it is constructive criticism or not will determine whether it cam from and asshole or not.

----Bill Warbis

[pepper53190]

I have just finished reading some of these posts (some got redundant after a while)  Being as I respect both sides, I am not going to shun either opinion.  I think the coolest thing for me was to confront some of the people on my program face to face after getting out.  I made a point to search some of them out.  If I couldn't talk to them I would here that they were not doing so well so I reached the conclusion that they were sick not me.  And I was able to tell some of those people what I needed to so that I could heal from the experiances I had.  Because to this day I stand on the fact that it wasn't the system that screwed up it was the people and their disfunctions who screwed it up.  I choose to only think of the good that came out of my experiance.  Frankly I could care less how anyone else deals with it, I'm not them, I wasn't there when they were. We are all different and there isn't any medical jargon that can fix that either.  Peoples pain are their own, unforunately some feel the need to push it on others but whatever.  Well with that I suppose I'll leave it. :wave:

[Antigen]

Hard as it may be for you to grasp, this is not about you. This is much more about Brother JEB!'s forced treatment policies in Florida and similar "Program for the masses" policies accross the country. If the whole problem were just these few individuals you happened to run into in Orlando, then why do we hear the same complaints from all over the country, spanning several decades?

BUT, none of that has anything to do with your personal emotional state. So it's none of your concern, right? Dear GOD, but I hope you don't vote!

Being a street cop, witnessing the tragedy firsthand, I've become
convinced that drug prohibition -- not drugs themselves -- are driving the HIV epidemic and the systemic crime that has swamped our criminal justice systems.
--Vancouver Police Const. Gil Puder

[exsafecounselor]

Ginger,

One of your own shared her opinion with you about her experience and instead of looking at it from her perspective you condemned her for not looking at it like you.   Do you know how many policitians sponsor programs of all sorts, not because they believe they are affective, but they do so because they think it will help them with voter approval.  Instead of being condascending towards Pepper's opinion, why not encourage free and diverse speech.  You sound like "the program" in the fact that a person has to either suport you blindly or be shunned.  



[ This Message was edited by: exsafecounselor on 2003-12-19 14:00 ]

[Antigen]

Pepper and I go way back. So it's understandable that you would miss the subtlety of the exchange here. It's yet another rendition of "Oh, you're just bitter and angry, get over it". She and I have been over and over this. How insulting it is for her to pretend (or maybe not) to think we're all just venting.

Yes, I know how politicians work. That's why I work so hard to make forced behavior mod a politically dangerous issue for them.

Hear me people: We now have to deal with another race - small and feeble when our fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possessions is a disease with them. These people have made many rules which the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule.
http://www.powersource.com/gallery/people/sittbull.html' target='_new'>Chief Sitting Bull, speaking at the Powder River Conference, 1877

[pepper53190]

Yes, Ginger and I go way back.  I have learned that she is very passionate about what she believes in and that she will NEVER change her views no matter what. And as crude and unrespectful of other peoples opinions as she is, you kinda learn to scroll past her posts with a smile.