Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > CEDU / Brown Schools and derivatives / clones
My intentions
Anonymous:
You are still putting the onus of CEDU's abusiveness on us. It is the way we react instead of how CEDU acted. I will not go on another long diatribe about its specific abuses as I already have and you don't give a rat's ass. ::argue::
Shan
ottawa5:
To the recent Anon poster: You know, when I first came to this site, I would have tried to reason with you, to convince you that I am an independent person looking for answers.
I don't feel that way anymore. People who make these kinds of comments don't want answers, they just want to fit everything they see in to their "Spy vs. Spy" view of the world.
Belive what you what to believe--if you can't see what is real, I can't help you. [ This Message was edited by: ottawa5 on 2004-07-29 19:32 ]
shanlea:
That was me posting Ottawa, and I think I can delineate what is real. I never thought you were a "spy." Basically because I generally believe what people tell me unless proven otherwise. You said you were a parent who had a good experience.
My problem with you is that you seem to be totally desensitized to the very real, integral problems that existed at CEDU and the pain it caused. Your letter to Tiffany was the first post to show any measure of compassion. Yet, you still view her experience as an isolated incident rather than a systemic one. It was rampant.
This is our safe haven to vent and be proactive about our experience. For you to deny it is not only insensitive but actually, cruel. It would be different if you listed your positive reasons and then moved on. But to continually discount what happened to us and to the people around us is wrong. Remember this didn't happen to Joe schmo we don't know, this happened to US. I really hope you don't treat your future clients this way.
Before you start to cast doubt on my ability to grasp reality, maybe you should enlarge the scope of yours. I haven't made a single comment about whether or not your son's experience was positive. I have never met nor spoken to him.
But I do know that CEDU was not only the wrong placement for me, but that they manipulated my parents and myself in an unethical manner, that they used emotional and verbal abuse in the raps and propheets, that their school (at that time) was embarassingly sub standard, that the staff had inadequate training and expertise, and that the school inculcated an atmosphere of fear, anxiety, and bullying.
Also, from my own experience, I know that my past was purposely misconstrued and exaggerated by the staff. I know that they often didn't resolve the real issue but fabricated or honed in on a lot of trivial miscellany. I know that medical issues were often mismanaged. It happened to me and it happened to others.
If it makes you feel better to think we don't know what is "real" than perhaps that is an issue that you need to explore.
ottawa5:
Shanlea--
One thing that we can be sure of is: we cannot change the past. I think that this is something that both you and I can agree upon.
What we can change is the future.
Perhaps you are right, perhaps you ended up at a bad school or one that did not meet your needs, perhaps, for whatever reason, you never saw the gains that my son and I saw in his program.
I will not deny my own experience, but I am perfectly willing to accept that you are the best expert on your own.
So what are you going to do about it? I guess that you can troll around on a site like this one, looking for things to be mad about.
Or you can focus on the fact that you have parents who cared enough to try to find a program to help you in whatever difficulty you were having. OK, maybe they picked a program that did not match your needs, but they tried, they cared enough to pay a whole lot of money to help you.
Do you know how many people would love to have parents who cared that much?
I see what you're saying: there have been procedures and approaches used in some schools, at some times, that were not good. Believe me, if I am ever involved in such a program, this will not stand, where it has, indeed, occur.
But you can't go back and do the whole thing over again--is it not possible that there were things that you did learn from your program in spite of its clumsy approach and misdirected interventions?
The question remains: So what are you going to do about it? Now? Where you are today?
Anonymous:
We all have to deal with our past, and I am dealing with my real thoughts about CEDU now. Again, your post trivializes what I saw and experienced. What will you tell a rape victim: try to get the best out of that experience?
Talk about trolling around these posts and talk about yourself. I'm not looking at stuff to be mad about. I am being honest and exploring what CEDU meant to me for the first time. I don't know what the heck you are here for but the pleasure of telling us that we don't know what real is.
For now, this site is a good place for me to talk about my experiences with others who have been through it. This is the first time since leaving CEDU that I have been able to do this.
Also, I see it as a proactive forum to get people thinking about these schools and questioning their decisions to send their children there. And guess what? Some parents have decided NOT to send their child there and others have pulled them out.
You don't know my parents, so don't make any inferences there. But let me tell you this. In many cases that I saw, spending tens of thousands of dollars was easier for parents than actually parenting their children. So don't tell me that money = love. For my parents, raising a child was too mundane for their adventurous tastes. Years of parental neglect and other issues you have no business knowing culminated in me being placed at CEDU. I will say this, I was not a liar, a druggie, or a danger to anyone. I never even shoplifted. But I did need help and attention, and also went through some pretty traumatic experiences that affected my wellbeing.
When my parents placed me there, they did so at the advice of a counselor who thought it was a real school that provided therapy. She did not know anything about it except that it had a lovely brochure. People need to be educated about the exact nature of these schools, both in terms of philosophy and practice.
No shit my parents cared about me. They were lousy parents but they were good people and I am very close to them now. In a way, I was even close to them then because we enjoyed eachother's company and had some common interests. Having children of my own now, I can appreciate how difficult it is to be a parent. So I'm not into bashing my parents when they didn't have the personal resources to help me at the time. I can't tell you how unbelievably supportive they have been in my life since then.
I think its interesting that you you keep saying you won't deny your experiences when I, for one, have not denied YOUR experience. But I sure as hell am not going to have you deny mine.
--Shanlea
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