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Author Topic: CEDU should make amends  (Read 6853 times)

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Offline AuntieEm

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CEDU should make amends
« Reply #30 on: November 07, 2007, 12:06:51 PM »
To Castle, Alia, Shanlea, et al,

I'm about to rant, so just take what you want and leave the rest.

You were not miniature adults. You were children. Teenagers. None of the decisions that were made about what happened to you were your fault. These were not kid decisions. These were adult decisions. Adults can make bad decisions.

Many of you were placed in these programs without your participation in the decision, against your will, and with the use of bodily force. These were adult decisions. It was not your fault.

If you were angry, you had good reason to be. If you were compliant while at the program, you had good reason to choose compliance. If you found some part of the program helpful, or found people there whom you valued, it is good that you found some comfort in a bad situation. If you were harmed, it was not your fault.

From what I've read--from you and many others here--many of you came from complex family situations. That is not your fault. You were not the boss.

Unfortunately, in complicated family environments, it often happens that one person gets singled out to be the "problem," aka the scapegoat.  I don't know you all, but I believe that is what happened to my niece, and perhaps it happened to you. It was easier to send her away than to deal with the harder, more complicated problems at home. I believe my niece's parents were in over their heads, but made a bad decision when they sent her away--they could have asked for help from our family.

It breaks my heart to know that at a time when you--you as children--needed competant, caring support, and education and mentoring, you instead were abandoned (knowingly or unknowingly) to incompetant and often malicious caretakers.

I repeat: These were not kid decisions. These were adult decisions. Adults can make bad decisions. It is not your fault.


AuntieEm
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Offline dishdutyfugitive

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CEDU should make amends
« Reply #31 on: November 07, 2007, 01:20:34 PM »
Thanks. That's good to hear that from someone with limited exposure to the place has the common sense to see it for what it is.
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Offline blownawaytheidahoway

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Smells like CEDU still
« Reply #32 on: November 07, 2007, 01:27:16 PM »
i've been wondering why there is not more support from our friends, spouses, parents, teachers, shrinks, etc at this site.
i've tried to get the people I care about to look here and it's like prying teeth sometimes. But I think some of those times are changing. The word is finally getting out, and people are more curious about the thing that is still CEDU.
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Life is a very wonderful thing.\' said Dr. Branom... \'The processes of life, the make- up of the human organism, who can fully understand these miracles?... What is happening to you now is what should happen to any normal healthy human organism...You are being made sane, you are being made healthy.
     \'That I will not have, \' I said, \'nor can understand at all. What you\'ve been doing is to make me feel very very ill.\'
                         -Anthony Burgess
                      A Clockwork Orange

Offline AuntieEm

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CEDU should make amends
« Reply #33 on: November 07, 2007, 02:59:26 PM »
Blownaway,

By "support" do you mean posting here?

For me, I am aware that I am an outsider. I did not experience what former students experienced. I don't even know for sure what my niece is experiencing, and I may never know. So sometimes I hesitate to comment. (And woe be to an outsider who posts something whiney or ignorant late at night on a weekend...)

Don't know why they wouldn't be willing to read, except that there are so many pages. For family members, etc., I will often send a link to a specific post or thread.


AuntieEm
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Offline Anonymous

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« Reply #34 on: November 07, 2007, 03:09:39 PM »
Well, Blown. My folks are pretty cool. (Now.) I can tell 'em almost anything. But we don't talk CEDU.  They believe me, because I don't tend toward histrionics, but its 20 years later, my Dad is 80, and a lot of things have happened in the past 5 years with health etc. I know my Mom already feels she and my father have failed me miserably, and to delve into the abuse that occurred at CEDU at this point would be overkill. It's enough that she doesn't deny my experience or gives me one of those bullshit "We were trying to save your life" type excuses. As a parent, it hurts to know that you fucked up in the first place and then compounded when you were trying to seek help for your parental ineptitude.

I'm not really an apologist for my folks, but I understand how they were desperate and duped in the pre-Internet era.  (If they denied my experience, I'd be livid.)  They were straight out lied to and manipulated, and fear and isolation rendered me helpless.  I can only thank my Dad for refusing to send me back when I split the last time.   (He had a harder time drinking the KoolAid.)

I have a harder time understanding parents of  Straight where the program happened right under the parent's noses--in their homes!  But even then, the desperation, the societal demand for conformity,  the deft manipulation of program staff, as well as the criminalization of youth all formed a confluence of factors against us. Youths labeled "troubled teens" are automatically denied credibility no matter how much personal integrity the individual may possess.

When I first found this site, I was more interested in sharing with my folks, but now, not so much. I have shared with a few close friends, and they were wonderful, but it is a little too Twilight Zone to expect full understanding. Some wonder how this could even happen in our country.
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Offline dishdutyfugitive

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CEDU should make amends
« Reply #35 on: November 07, 2007, 04:14:53 PM »
Auntie Em

Don't hesitate to post. Your contributions are valuable

Shanlea

I hear you. I'm really starting to feel that way. I am thinking of speaking with my father and telling him about it in a professional mature way.  I will tell him that I don't hold a grudge against him and that all is forgiven.  I think it'll bring some much needed family healing and it will lead to a bigger discussion. It'll definitely help my peace of mind and since he's not a good communicator (he doesn't initiate) it'll provide him a chance to share his thoughts which in the end will bring us closer together and lighten the load of the turbulent past.
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Offline AuntieEm

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CEDU should make amends
« Reply #36 on: November 07, 2007, 05:40:13 PM »
Shanlea wrote:
Quote
Youths labeled "troubled teens" are automatically denied credibility no matter how much personal integrity the individual may possess.

Bingo. And the corallary to that is that "parents of a troubled teen" are assumed to be credible.

I have been watching how our family history is getting rewritten in my niece's absence. These days the narrative goes that my niece "was always a handful," and "has a disease." Some family members seem almost scared of her now, wary. I find myself saying repeatedly, "That's not the girl I know. I've known her all her life. I never saw this behavior. She never did that around us."

Auntie Em

P.S. Thanks, Dishdutyfugitive.
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Offline dishdutyfugitive

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CEDU should make amends
« Reply #37 on: November 07, 2007, 05:57:35 PM »
Auntie Em

You're welcome. Keep on scrubbin' - and never forget the benefits of a 'heated dry' at the end of the wash cycle.
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Offline Hated Cedu

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CEDU should make amends
« Reply #38 on: November 07, 2007, 06:39:27 PM »
No, I don't blame my parents at all.  Those brochures were very well-done.  Smiling teen faces, photos of horses, and a beautiful log mansion were very luring.

My mother is 80, as well, and I have no interest in throwing this back at her.  It's been 28 years anyways, and her husband of 25 years died up there during a visit with me.  

However, I have sent her links to CEDU support groups, such as this one, and she understands.  She's also expressed how sorry she is.

I hold Allgood and his cronies to blame, and always will.  Happily the worse offends are starting to die off. :rofl:
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IP Danielle Allgood, Carmen Earl, John Padgett......enjoy your rot in hell!  :flame:

Offline stina

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CEDU should make amends
« Reply #39 on: November 08, 2007, 03:24:03 AM »
I know this is completely (sort of) off topic, but have any of you heard of the Stanford prison experiment from the 70's? You can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment (or just google it) and there's also some video on you tube. I'd write more about it but I'm sleepy and going to bed. More tomorrow.
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Offline Anonymous

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synanon
« Reply #40 on: November 08, 2007, 06:16:31 AM »
Quote from: ""stina""
I know this is completely (sort of) off topic, but have any of you heard of the Stanford prison experiment from the 70's? You can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment (or just google it) and there's also some video on you tube. I'd write more about it but I'm sleepy and going to bed. More tomorrow.


Stina check this out. it's a long informative help.
http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:kp ... d=12&gl=us
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Offline AuntieEm

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CEDU should make amends
« Reply #41 on: November 08, 2007, 10:32:00 AM »
Stina,

I am familiar with the Standford prison experiment. Absolutely chilling. Philip Zimbardo, who constructed the experiment was so horrified by how quickly student volunteers became either sadistic guards or traumatized inmates that he ended the experiment. He now says he deeply regrets that his experiment caused harm. He also stresses that all the volunteers were "good apples": the participating students, Standford undergrads, were screened for psychological problems before the experiment.

He has a new book out called The Lucifer Effect:
From Amazon.com
Quote
Psychologist Zimbardo masterminded the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, in which college students randomly assigned to be guards or inmates found themselves enacting sadistic abuse or abject submissiveness. In this penetrating investigation, he revisits—at great length and with much hand-wringing—the SPE study and applies it to historical examples of injustice and atrocity, especially the Abu Ghraib outrages by the U.S. military. His troubling finding is that almost anyone, given the right "situational" influences, can be made to abandon moral scruples and cooperate in violence and oppression. (He tacks on a feel-good chapter about "the banality of heroism," with tips on how to resist malign situational pressures.) The author, who was an expert defense witness at the court-martial of an Abu Ghraib guard, argues against focusing on the dispositions of perpetrators of abuse; he insists that we blame the situation and the "system" that constructed it, and mounts an extended indictment of the architects of the Abu Ghraib system, including President Bush. Combining a dense but readable and often engrossing exposition of social psychology research with an impassioned moral seriousness, Zimbardo challenges readers to look beyond glib denunciations of evil-doers and ponder our collective responsibility for the world's ills.

Zimbardo has received both praise and criticism for defending an Abu Ghraib guard. I haven't read the book. I saw an interview with him, and when asked whether people are inherently good or evil, he quoted Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of The Gulag Archipeligo: "The line between good and evil cuts through the center of every human heart."

Auntie Em
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