Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > Straight, Inc. and Derivatives

Something About Straight...

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starry-eyed pirate:
...makes it hard to relate.  The way they confuse you and attach you to the wrong notions.  When you go in you have no idea what your in for.  You're not prepared to defend yourself and you've never experienced anything like it.  The shock of your first day.  I, myself wanta say, that I knew the place was fucked from the minute I got there.  I already knew everything was a lie.  The cold intake.  The removal of all your personal affects.  Strip search.  Introduction to group and there you are on front row.  Bein made to sit up and be quiet and pay attention to the person talkin.  I was pretty well taken by surprise and wasnt  at all prepared for their tenacity.  What a subject for an oil painting! ... "The Newcomer On Front Row"... I remember one of the other new kids on front row spoke directly to me and asked me if I wanted to make a run for that door with him.  I didnt even respond.  I looked at him for a second and then played it cool.  I didnt motivate but I sat up and paid attention.

I ran from the host home on my first morning.  They wouldnt let me read the paper or use the telephone or watch any tv or even over-hear the radio.  All connection to the outside world was cut off.  That first night, they took my clothes and the host parents alarmed me into a dark furnitureless room with 4 other strange boys whom Id never met before.  We sat there in our underwear.  In the dark.  I listened as the others confessed their powerlessness and talked about their past.  The one kid talked about shoving the handle of a screwdriver up his ass.  I was a virgin, had never heard of such things.  It was a sleepless night for me.  

In the morning, after some breakfast, I was given my shoes to put on.  The oldcomer worked his hand through my back beltloop and twisted his hand securely around the waistband of my jeans and we were escorted out through the kicthen door, into the attached 2 car garage, but the station wagon was in the driveway.  We walked out through the open garage door and I bolted.  I guess I got a pretty good jump cause I turned around long enough to see my oldcomer on the ground holding out his arm after me and gripping my ripped sleeve in his hand.

...Anyway, I ran for the woods, but made the mistake of running across a freshly plowed field, which was like runnin on beach sand.  My oldcomer ran around the field and thereby made  time on me.  I made it into the woods but it was about noon on a Sunday.  I was trying to get to Burke Lake, where I knew I could find some friends or a ride somewhere.  But I couldnt believe the way this kid chased me.  I was a good runner too.  He was tenacious.  I regret to this day that I didnt just push on through those woods ahead of him that day, but I gave up with a pounding headache and no air left to suck and he caught up to me and threatened to beat the shit out of me and I told him to go 'head.  He put me in a head lock and started draggin me back through the woods, then his dad showed up and he got me in a head lock too, but from the other side and they both dragged me back to the station wagon and I got confronted all the way inot the building that day.  And when I arrived at the building I was thrown into an intake room, where I was made to sit straight up in a plastic chair, while bein violently confronted and spit on for about a half a day by 5th phasers and senior and executive staff.  After that I was re-introduced to group with full cop-out honors and heavily confronted and made fun of and degraded and humilliated again, this time by the group.  Who remembers starry-eyed pirate ??!!!!  

I was put back on front row and that night in dismissal line they gave me a different host home.  One way out in the MD countryside about 2 hours from the building, so I wouldnt try to run again.  That was my first 30 hours in the program.  The next day, I put in a withdraw and requested a conference with my parents, but they refused to meet with me.  I remember that other kid who came in right around the same time as me but his folks took him out after about 6 days.  By my 3rd day I had begun to fake it, even though you cant really fake it, because once you've compromised your values you've taken the fatal sip.

If you dont know from personal experience you can imagine the effect that such treatment would have on a keen and already troubled lad.  I tell you this story in order to demonstrate the way they attack the social coping mechanisms.  They way they open your psyche up to the knife, roll you back on your heels and take advantage of your inability to cope.  You are psychologically shocked out of your sense of self.  There is nothing to hold onto.  You dont exist, and you wont exist until you embrace the ideology of the program.

At this point in my life I am realizing the devastating effect that this treatment has had on me.  Specifically how the lack of any normal, organically manifested social coping mechanisms and a Straight instilled conscience, predisposed to guilt and shame have made me a slave.

Even when you can understand the dynamic it is very difficult to change such entrenched behavior patterns.  The cult expert Janja Lalich states that survivors of cults may experience many years of guilt confusion.

Remember how if you weren't completely honest about every little detail of your thoughts and/or emotions the guilt would surface and you would be revealed as FOS.  People were constantly confessing their dishonesties to the group.  Sometimes when this dynamic was taken to the extreme people would experience what were called "head-games".  These were the manifestations of neurotic guilt and those suffering from this effect would have to stand up in group and confess their doubts about their own honesty and even self-honesty, etc.

I'm just sayin this attack on the social coping skills combined with the establishment of the guilty conscience and the confusion that results will result in endless unnecessary suffering if it isnt recognized for what it is.  The chains of the slaver thrown over the youth.

Fuck Straight.  Fuck Authority.  People are not commodities.

 :poison:  O0  :poison:

Froderik:

--- Quote from: "starry-eyed pirate" ---If you dont know from personal experience you can imagine the effect that such treatment would have on a keen and already troubled lad. I tell you this story in order to demonstrate the way they attack the social coping mechanisms. They way they open your psyche up to the knife, roll you back on your heels and take advantage of your inability to cope. You are psychologically shocked out of your sense of self. There is nothing to hold onto. You dont exist, and you wont exist until you embrace the ideology of the program.

At this point in my life I am realizing the devastating effect that this treatment has had on me. Specifically how the lack of any normal, organically manifested social coping mechanisms and a Straight instilled conscience, predisposed to guilt and shame have made me a slave.

Even when you can understand the dynamic it is very difficult to change such entrenched behavior patterns. The cult expert Janja Lalich states that survivors of cults may experience many years of guilt confusion.

Remember how if you weren't completely honest about every little detail of your thoughts and/or emotions the guilt would surface and you would be revealed as FOS. People were constantly confessing their dishonesties to the group. Sometimes when this dynamic was taken to the extreme people would experience what were called "head-games". These were the manifestations of neurotic guilt and those suffering from this effect would have to stand up in group and confess their doubts about their own honesty and even self-honesty, etc.

I'm just sayin this attack on the social coping skills combined with the establishment of the guilty conscience and the confusion that results will result in endless unnecessary suffering if it isnt recognized for what it is. The chains of the slaver thrown over the youth.

Fuck Straight. Fuck Authority. People are not commodities.
--- End quote ---

Well said. It was a goddamn peckin' party! Straight Inc. insisted you thought and felt certain ways about what they wanted you to believe about yourself and the world around you. Their process required you to adopt and assimilate Straight's version of 'you' into to your life and consciousness (or at least appear to). The key propaganda was right there in the lingo: You were to believe (and profess openly) that you were in fact "powerless over drugs," and "make a decision to turn your will over to your higher power," which in this case was "the group." If you didn't agree on this, you were considered to be "in denial of your drug problem." This was one of the essential things they pushed on you, and for some it was the most damaging when they got out...

Oh yes, how can anyone really depict the relentless and intensive peer pressure to "get honest" with the "group." You had to talk about everything; if you didn't, that automatically meant to them that you were "going against your program," which was not something you wanted to be accused of doing in there. Better tell them everything! You saw time and again how people would get blasted in group when it was revealed (or falsely determined) that they didn't disclose EVERYTHING about themselves. You knew it might show on your face; you knew they would detect that there was "something going on with you." (If you fell asleep in group it was because you were "holding something back," and had NOTHING to do with the amount of sleep you weren't getting and how tediously boring group could be.) STRAIGHT INC. intended to have you reveal everything about or related to your "drug problem" and your sex life too, because according to them your sex life was part of your "chemical dependency."

You had to "get in touch with your feelings" in front of the group, or you probably weren't getting out of there. I had certain "incidents" that I thought about and thought to myself, "Ok, I think I can muster up some convincing 'scared feelings' about this one... or some 'disappointment' or 'guilt' and 'shame' about  that one... " Hell, there were a couple things that I really ~did feel bad about that happened in my "past," so I would use those whenever it "related to the rap." I got sat down plenty of time before I 'got anywhere.'

So after putting up with the shit you had to put up with in Straight, having to deal with 'similar things' in the real world, in present daily life, can be a lot to take. It can be enough to make you want to get away, or lash out, depending on the situation (fight or flight). Straight supplanted our entire lives. When I got out, I to some extent built a wall between myself and the rest of the world so that I could live in a constant, alienated equilibrium free from life's emotional troubles. At times I will have a tendency to do this now, in effort to protect my sanity.......I know the feeling of wanting to recede from society, or just from people who demonstrate a lack of respect for personal boundaries...fight or flight...I can be cagey, don't like people checking up on me, or commenting on stuff i do so i keep to myself......but it gets better if you can find ways to cope...think solutions, not problems...domestic tranquility.. etc.

none-ya:
And if it was anything like the seed, they preached honesty over and over again. And the only way to get out was to become better at lying and deceiving.

starry-eyed pirate:

--- Quote from: "none-ya" ---And if it was anything like the seed, they preached honesty over and over again. And the only way to get out was to become better at lying and deceiving.
--- End quote ---

Copy that.  Even lying to and deceiving yourself, until you even believe your own lies, that you tell yourself, cause you know you have to convince yourself before anyone else is gonna believe it.

I remember bein copped out from the program for the 3rd time.  I'd made 3rd phase and bolted the second I got back to school.  I was out for a month that time.  It was November.  I dyed my hair the darkest black and I lived in the woods between the subdivisions within earshot of Old Keene Mill rd., one of the main arteries from the rich suburbs of Fairfax county,VA into the beltway around DC.   I tore down some kids tree fort and dragged the boards away to make myself a rectangular shelter on the ground, near a storm drain in the woods, below the road, and so I spent a lot of time there, just sitting there invisibly.  Quiet, eating little, hungry and hiding and not doing much.  I could hear the traffic goin by all the time.  I hid out there during the day completely alone and broke and hungry and I was just glad to be out of group and have my privacy.  I took some LSD on that cop-out trip.  Man, you talk about stillin the mind.  After bein in Straight for a year and runnin 4 times and then coppin out and sittin in the woods like that, while the world went by.

none-ya:
Man I can't imagine tripping while homeless. Although I did do it in jail once. Tell me after all that you didn't go back to the program.

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