Open your eyes CEDU !!

[Anonymous]

On 2004-07-07 16:47:00, Anonymous wrote:

"Yah,  kind of like using the name Mikehunt.  It takes the focus away from credibility.



It is the systemic anger, humiliation and abuse of the CEDU programs put there by Mel Wasserman and his Team Leaders that negates any useful life lessons that my be taught there. "

more like hiding behind that cloak of anonymity... i think that draws more attention than my name.  
i understand the downfalls of cedu as i think we all do.  i didn't discredit that.
thanks for your concern.

[mikehunt]

oh shit, i thought i was signed in...  ^^^^ that's my post.  yep.

[Anonymous]

wow, am I glad I found you guys. so, so, so glad I am not alone. RMA '90
p.s.
I've tried to have the freaky sex I learned about from my "Counselors" but I just don't feel that way about animals.

[Anonymous]

bryan,
 i remember you at cedu, in fact we lived in the same dorm. back then people called me rodney.  Having sat through many of the same raps you did, i can substantiate all of the claims you have made here about rudy, jill, etc.
I heard all these stories myself,coming from their mouths.  Besides all the sick sex stuff, I also remember rudy bentz talking about how he got drunk in the sixties, and ran a man over with his car.  The police found rudy, but never arrested or charged him because his victim was black.  Another staff member steve laird often told us about how he had molested a 13 year girl when he was in his 20's.  These guys were 2 of the biggest pricks to ever work at cedu.  Cedu staff placed so much emphasis on giving back to the school, being responsible for your actions, getting back into agreement; yet here we have 2 of cedu's most prominant staff members of the time, both of them guilty of terrible crimes,and neither of them ever spent a day in jail! kind of hypocritical don't you think?. I mean who here is really out of agreement?

[CEDU IS A CULT]

I remember you, too R. You're from Chicago area. Damn! You were like 14 or 15 there.
I.M. me if you want. It's good to here from you again. I remember that shit about Rudy and Steve Laird.  Fuck those bastards.  It's good of you to substantiate my claims. You remember that shit about Tim Brace, too?[ This Message was edited by: Bryan Felsher on 2004-07-20 21:06 ]

[Anonymous]

I remember Tim acknowledging that he had gay issues and that he used drugs in the past, but I never heard him get into specifics about what actually happened.  Anyways all of them were full of shit. To be honest, the few staff members I met who could actually think for themselves and seemed like decent people, got fired. Remember Luke Nemo...he actually cared about us and Tim Brace fired him for not being brainwashed like the rest of them.  There were a few others.  Ron Davis was pretty cool. Anyways is cedu being shut down? whats the story. (rod)

[CEDU IS A CULT]

Yeah I remember Luke Nemo.  He was a good guy.  I remember when they fired him.  Ron Davis as well was one of the best guys there.  

Is CEDU being shut down?  We're all working on it.

I'm currently working with Chuck Wyatt of the Twin Peaks Sheriff.

There are some major criminal allegations against CEDU far beyond what I had thought.

[Anonymous]

I have to say i had forgotten that. Brace ran my childrens. I have to admit though he may have had mo' tendencies, he is one of the people I didn't hate. The thing is that all of the sexual stuff was so wierd because we were so young. Richard Armstrong stripped searched me and had me bent over before my dad had finished abandoning me there. There was NO REASON for the "search".
I accurately remember many disclosures of staff members but am busy looking for the absolute best way to publish my account to the world. It hurts me to talk about this very much. But god I am so fucking glad I'm not alone. Y'know, I don't remember everything I need to about it all. I'm going to go straight into this problem, can't skirt my way around this. My future must be now. How I wish my parents could see how much harder life is for me now...after RMA. Because of RMA. I don't like to dwell in it...I just can't help it. I have to be honest though, that I don't know what would've happened if I had not gone there. Part of me must at least examine this.

[Anonymous]

You well expressed one of the dilemmas in the mind of the Cedu survivor. And you are not alone. The dilemma is that we hate Cedu and it's idea, and yet that hate is a source of conflict within us. It is a source of conflict because on one hand Cedu wronged us, but, on the other hand, did it shape our current lives? And if it shaped our current lives, then is it a part of who we are? So do we hate a part of who we are? Well, I can say for my self, that after I graduated Cedu, at the age of 16, within a week I was smoking weed, drinking, and getting laid. By age 19 I was shooting heroin.  I shot heroin for 8 fucking years.  It put me homeless sleeping on a cardboard box in San Francisco for 4 months.  It put me court ordered to a psych ward for 3 weeks deemed anti-social psychotic while kicking methadone.  Two overdoses.  One, a homeless man found me.  The second, they left me in the back of a car in a used car lot. The places, I've been since Cedu.  Maybe all the shit I put myself through after Cedu- maybe I was running from something there.  Maybe I was just trying to find myself again. I'll say this. If Cedu positively affected my life, and if by going there, I dodged a worse bullet in life- well, I doubt it.

[Anonymous]

What doesn't kill you will make you stronger.  That is the human condition and has nothing to do with CEDU.

CEDU is the lion's den that your parents threw you into to see if you have what it takes.  It doesn't change the fact that CEDU is abusive to kids.

[Anonymous]

What does not kill often makes stronger, but it can also cause damage to lifes. My wife worked for CEDU for two decades - the person I loved is gone and turned into a sceaming, passive aggressive maniac. CEDU harms too. I know cause It harmed me and my whole family.

[Anonymous]

I was at the high school in 2002 and i've got to tell you, things were not all that bad. Maybe you guys were in Idaho,or maybe you guys just had a really bad experience, all i know is, I never once had something like that happen to me. ::

[Anonymous]

To the 2002 pro-Cedu grad. Give yourself a few more years and perspective.

To Bryan, are the allegations currently top secret? Are there enough people who aren't afraid to prosecute?  What kind of abuses are they prosecuting? Only blatant ones like sexual etc. or are they going after their "therapeutic" practices?

[Anonymous]

To the 2002 grad: This interests me greatly because my son also graduated (from RMA) a few years ago, and had a very good experience that he continues to view as positive.

We really have no big complaints about the school(maybe a policy here, a staff member there that he or I could have done without),although he certainly hated the school a lot when he first went there.

I am becoming a psychologist, because, largely based on our RMA experience, I want to work with adolescents in trouble. For this reason, I am interested in techniques and approaches that help to bring about the possibility of change when a kid has gotten into a negative, intractible, self-destructive frame of mind.

Here at this site, I am getting a lot of info on what some posters found to be unhelpful and dangerous, and it seems as if some of the things that were important and life-changing to my son (and a number of others who I have kept up on) were sometimes the same things that some of these people found to be very bad (I am thinking, for example, of the Propheets).

So what worked for you?  If you come back to this site, I would like to hear more about your experience.

Do you find that your perspective has changed since you left?  What about your team members? What about others who graduated before you (if you know any), have their views on the experience changed over time?  (The kids I know have been out for between 4 and 6 years, and I don't know of anyone who came out positive on the program who has changed that point of view, but based on reports here, at least, that sometimes happens).

[Anonymous]

She thinks we are full of crap or seriously distorting our experinces. That is convenient, but wrong. it isquite normal for a new CEDU grad to put the experience in her back pocket along with some CRazy Summit dance and smily graduate faces.  CEDU bred such intense, insulating, challenging experiences it was hard to shake that off. It was like a secret society,...it takes alog time to free your mind. I left CEDU and imported it in my life and realized I had no tools to be intimate, to trust, or get close to anyone.  I GOT NO TOOLS AFTER CEDU. It was a holding tank. A break/down tank.