I do remember Cookie coming in after me. I remember she was really sweet (until she made staff) and very pretty and felt bad for her. I thought it was right before my 14th birthday, but considering that until the past week remembered that I didn't smoke pot until after I left the seed, who knows. Could have been my 15th birthday, I will ask my one Aunt about the timeframe, she is one of the only ones in my family that believed me when I told her that the Seed was a really VERY bad time for me. I do know Cookie made staff while I was in the program. My mother to this day thinks she did the right thing. My little brother thinks it was good too, of course, this is the guy who has used so much cocaine that he doesn't even have a functioning nose!
I wasn't staff, probably because I was young and didn't have a dramatic enough story to tell or a family with big bucks or connections or was just mostly invisible to them. Everybody that came in after me graduated, and I mean everybody. There was a large gap in time that is still so fuzzy for me. I do remember after I was there a while we were asked to come up with a name for the new newsletter that they were going to write. I came up with the name Straight from the Seed, having no clue about the rivalry with Straight. I remember someone giving the Seed a truckload of broken marble that they laid in the "inner sanctum" upstairs. I think Libby was adopted by Art while I was there, but that is a little fuzzy too.
When I first found this forum some time ago, I was so pissed off, but after I moved and started reading it again, more things started coming back. It is so strange, I really don't know how I survived it at all.
I talked with my oldest daughter last night (who is a psych major at FAU) about the Seed, but even as close as we are, it is still hard to explain it to someone that wasn't there. She could in a way since she 2 years ago had to deal with a different type of cult from my ex's family. It was a so-called Christian cult in Tamarac area. Cults all have the same criteria, isolate your victims for the outside world, treat them like crap while in the next breath tell them you love them, and tell them that "they" are the only true way. Shit, they are buying up land in Alabama and food and water in special bins to survive the "last days." That is a story almost as bizarre as the Seed. Thank God, she has a mind of her own and knows better than to follow someone blindly.
Thanks to all for the kind words, it was therapeutic for me to even write what I did. It is amazing to me what the human mind will block for the sake of survival. Knowing I was not alone in my feeling about the Seed is....well..let's just say, you will never know what that means to me.