Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > CEDU / Brown Schools and derivatives / clones
Loves CEDU
shanlea:
To the Anon Who Questions Responsibility:
I can't speak for anyone but myself. CEDU is not responsible for all the problems and challenges that I have had to face in my life; but it is responsible for unethical treatment, dishonesty, emotional abuse, lack of therapeutic expertise, and substandard academic provision. I also honestly feel that it promotes an insularity that does not begin to prepare you for the real world. I think parents need to be more aware of the facilities they send their children to and not just the pr spin and beautifully printed pamphlets.
bradensmith:
ok, some of my comments were a little over the top earlier but, some of it was true, I did have some good times at that school, i wont say the best, but I sure do miss a lot of it.
blownawaytheidahoway:
Ok. If you spend three years waking in a cell, getting meals, intereacting with your incarcerators, and getting out every once in a while some days may not look as bad as others. So under that thought process yeah; I was around kids about my age who were into some of the same things, yeah; sometimes I went whole days without something terrible happening that I had no control over, yeah; occasionally someone would even say something nice. But also, I WAS BRAINWASHED. I allowed it to happen when I realized I wasn't going to be allowed anything remotely similar to the freedom I learned as a runaway before RMA. When that happened it got a little easier. Acceptance. That I had no real choice but to "assimilate".
Then there are the people who really needed these places in a different kind of way. The people who love it I don't hate. Some people were going to wind up dead, od'd, getting gang banged in front of the camera for a coupla toots o' some ol' shit, some were so scared of people that they needed a crash course in how to communicate SOMETHING to the outside world. But in general: people who went there who didn't need the approaches they got (in my opinion) turned out for the worse getting along out in society later. Long lasting effects of programs' modus operandi cause PTSD, and a whole giant host of "survivor characteristics".
I think we know what I am talking about however I will open more diatribe on this particular aspect becuase it is important to me to see how other people view the Happiness quotient of the facility they were at.
mad:
Some of my best memories were made while I was at RMA -- several of my friendships, the Wilderness Challenge, and the I And Me to name a few.
My overall impression of my RMA years is a good one. I learned that I could have friends and that I could be a good friend, I learned to build a sense of family, I learned that I didn't need to count on my blood relatives to get my emotional needs met, I learned that other people had gone through some really tough shit too, and I learned that many people have moments when they feel utterly alone and cut off. The skills I learned there I credit with helping me to build the life that I have today, and life now is the best that it ever has been.
RMA was also a very harsh place to grow up and the way I learned to interact with others, and myself, particularly when emotionally vulnerable, was not kind. There was never any room to slip up or to take small steps in a direction. I also lost any sense of balance for several years -- things were either good or bad, right or wrong, life or death etc. While that way of looking at the world served me when I really was at moments of life or death, it failed to help me in continuing to develop as an adult. I couldn't be patient with myself or anyone else because everything felt like it had immediate consequences ? everything had equal importance and there was a constant push TO DO something. It was a terrible way to live in many ways and my work in recent years has been about learning to be comfortable with ambivalence and to practice patience.
Best, M
Antigen:
--- Quote ---On 2004-08-23 16:13:00, mad wrote:
I learned that I could have friends and that I could be a good friend,
--- End quote ---
Did it not bother you that your new friends were required, by institution protocol, to say they were your friends even if they felt quite differently?
Probably 1/4 of the reason why I quit fighting and went ahead and signed myself into the Program was that, at last, at least, I knew I would have an automatic sense of belonging--guaranteed 'friends'. Of the 3 or so I've run into in the past couple of years (2 decades+ after the fact) I only have even as much as email addresses for about 3 or 4 of them, and only count 1 or 2 among my friends.
Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in the history of the world.
-- Dave Barry
--- End quote ---
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