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Offline 001010

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Thanks for the Memories...
« on: April 20, 2005, 06:41:00 PM »
http://www.bushflash.com/thanks <--- Good music for the background. Good link anyway.

OUT OF THE SIXTIES
By: Lon Woodbury


Those of us old enough to remember the 1960s will recall a decade of tremendous change, creativity and turmoil. It was a turning point decade, a time when many of the old attitudes were cast off and new directions taken. At least one national social critic has asserted that when you look at the things going wrong in this country today, they all came out of the 1960s. On the other hand, many of our most respected contemporary values were products of the 1960s.

In education and personal growth, a tremendous amount of creativity and new thinking began during the 1960s. Traditional public and private education thinking was widely challenged. The traditional interventions for emotional and behavioral problems of juvenile detention or hospitalization were criticized as harmful all too often.

Storefront schools and other experimental and experiential forms of education flourished, as they tried to break away from the traditional model of education founded on the concept of the factory in the early years of the 20th century. In personal growth, we saw est, lifespring, synanon, a variety of eastern mystic ideas brought to this country, and a host of other movements with new visions of how to increase human potential. In addition, the concept of individual therapy provided by credentialed therapists, rooted in at least the trappings of science and credentials, finally became accepted legally and culturally. This was marked by the legal acceptance of alcoholism as a disease in 1962, rather than the old view of it being only a moral problem. The 1960s was a cornucopia of new ideas and experimentation, starting a process of developing, interacting, and evolving to find better ways to educate and help young people.

The network of emotional growth/therapeutic schools and programs this newsletter focuses on evolved directly out of the experimentation going on in the 1960s. Part of this experimentation was to establish schools for at-risk adolescents as private alternatives, with parental choice driving enrollment decisions. These influences are still evident, it is these roots in the experimentation of the sixties that make this network unique from other education and mental health associations and networks. Many of the people and schools who started working with struggling teens during the creativity of the 1960s, are still around.

Larry Dean Olson, founder of Anasazi Foundation, discovered that students at Brigham Young University did better academically after going on one of his wilderness experiences in the late sixties, and Larry Wells, Founder of Wilderness Quest, found that taking young Idaho prisoners into the wilderness in the early 1970s reduced recidivism rates drastically. In addition, many of the programs in Montana were founded by people who had worked at, or been inspired by, Spring Creek Community School, a backwoods alternative school founded by Steve Cawdry in the late sixties or early 70s. Cawdry closed the school down several years ago, but its influence remains.

The late Mel Wasserman founded the CEDU School in 1967, and CEDU probably had the most widespread influence on this network. Originally, Wasserman saw how many of the young people he met around his hometown of Palm Springs, California in the mid-sixties were living in total chaos. They had real problems with drugs, relationships and parents, and from the standard institutions and interventions of the time, there was nothing available to effectively help them. He decided to go into the school business. He founded CEDU specifically as an alternative school, designed to provide what these confused young people desperately needed. His genius was in selecting from the currents of experimentation floating around the sixties, those elements that created a whole child education system by addressing their physical, mental and emotional growth. The term Emotional Growth education came out of the CEDU approach. CEDU became extremely successful in helping young people as an alternative to therapeutic institutions. CEDU expanded to establish several north Idaho schools by the 1990s and added the two schools currently in California. More importantly, many people who worked at CEDU left to establish their own schools, or took key positions in other schools, adding their own personal ideas to what they had learned at CEDU. A significant number of the schools in the Emotional Growth/Therapeutic schools and programs network were developed or strongly influenced by people who were originally inspired by their CEDU experience.

Another early school was Elan, in Poland Springs, Maine. Established in 1970, Elan was strongly influenced by the behavioral concepts prevalent at the time, developing into an extremely tightly structured behavioral modification school. Although Elan itself has not grown to beyond the one school, I have met several people elsewhere in the Northeast who had once worked at Elan. It seems Elan?s approach differed from the norm, and it opened people up to the idea that there were ways beyond the traditional to construct a school or program for struggling teens, and they proceeded to act on that insight.

Provo Canyon School, in Provo Utah, was founded in 1971. Although a secure treatment center, they employed several new ideas, including thinking of themselves as a school, and referring to their residents as students instead of patients. Today, there are many schools and programs in Utah that were either founded by people who had once worked for Provo Canyon School, or learned the business from an ex-employee of Provo Canyon School.

Other important influences were Campbell Loughmiller, and his book Wilderness Road, published 1965, from his work with the Salesmanship Club near Dallas. This book, and the Salesmanship Club, found a kid?s behavior gets better after camping out. Primarily influential in the Southeast, this concept of long term camping inspired the Three Springs programs and the Eckerd Programs, along with a number of other smaller programs.

So, what's my point? First, if you start tracing the history of influences on many of the schools in the network of Emotional Growth/ Therapeutic schools and programs, you usually wind up back to just a handful of early founders. Also, much of what is most successful and creative in the schools and programs in this network came directly out of the creative thinking and experimenting that occurred in the 1960s.


http://www.strugglingteens.com/archives ... s0404.html

So, let's see... I've been through EST training, The Salemanship Club, and Straight Inc. No wonder at the age of 18 when I did regression 'therapy' at a 12 step lock down facility after Straight, I went temporarily completely self-detached. I literally had a (not fun) outer body experience. I utterly disconnected, but I still remember it, I just didn't recognize my own reflection in the mirror, and it scared the hell out of me. It took them an hour or so to snap me out of it.
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »
[size=79]EST (Landmark/Lifespring/Discovery) \'83
Salesmanship Club \'84-\'86
Straight, Inc. \'86-\'88[/size]

Offline PerfectStraightling

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« Reply #1 on: April 21, 2005, 02:24:00 PM »
Here's an excerpt from a 3 part article on Synanon that I found very interesting (at http://morrock.com/synanon.htm.) I think that it shows some of how and why people buy into this insane confrontational-style "therapy" and also makes some sense of why Synanon turned into a full blown cult and eventually self destructed. This is a group of people that wasn't even capable of the slightest bit of introspection, unless it involved intense screaming and humiliation (out of "love"). Talk about not taking responsibility.
................................

The prime engine of Synanon was "The Game". It as officially forbidden to call it group therapy for, I suspect, legal reasons) but in fact it as, if you can imagine a therapy group that included mostly clones of Atilla the Hun.

Visualize this. A hotel room, bare of furniture except for 20 to 30 directors chairs arranged round the wall. There was a leader of sorts, I have forgotten the title, normally a resident. There were conventions: no threats of violence, supporting the indictment, pulling covers, and no contracts.

Supporting the indictment meant that if someone accused you of anything, including the most highly improbable, everyone else in the group piled on and added the nasty bits, even if they had to make them up.

Pulling covers was unveiling secrets, fears, and destructive behaviors, either toward the self or others.

No contracts meant that there were to be no explicit or secret alliances between players. No "I won't show you mine and you don't have to show me yours."

New members were treated rather gently. My first three games were a hoot. Other members probed and gently questioned and I ad-libbed. "A regular Johnny Carson," one old timer remarked.

During game four a woman looked directly into my eyes and raged, "You're a total shit, you know that"? More than her words, her body language and tone told me that this woman hated me and that I was within a hand's span of being destroyed by her anger. I can only describe the physical effect as having the very real impression that a 50 pound block of ice had replaced my lungs and heart. I was terrified. I left the game that evening swearing that I'd never return. Who needed this?

But during the days that followed, awaiting the next Wednesday game, I realized that for most of my childhood and much of my adult life, I had been afraid, not of pain or real danger, but of others' anger, for I somehow validated it. If anyone was angry with me, the fault was with me. If my father shouted at and demeaned me, it was because I had committed some wrong.. If in military school other cadets hazed and tormented me, I had accepted that it was for a reason.
But this woman, who I later learned was a well known "rage rat" (someone who played the game to vent almost uncontrollable anger in a controlled environment) didn't know me; I had done nothing to her and I somehow saw the internal dynamics of my emotional reactions. Not that that made it any easier. I was still scared shitless. (But being scared shitless doesn't have to mean you're a coward.)

So every week I requested to be put in the same game with my persecutor. If she didn't vent on me spontaneously; I'd insult her then sit in the stream of her hate and invective.

Eventually, one of us broke. She asked to be put in another game. My ability to absorb her hate had exceeded her ability to produce it. We both profited by the painful experience; emotional surgery without anesthetic. I learned that anger wouldn't destroy me; she learned that anger was an unprofitable currency in dealing with the world.
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »

Offline PerfectStraightling

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« Reply #2 on: April 21, 2005, 06:14:00 PM »
This is from http://freedomofmind.com/resourcecenter ... walker.htm
Scroll down to Synanon.

Apparently, drug addict + AA + LSD + thought control literature = cult leader. It's a long road home, isn't it?

....................

Born in 1913, Charles Dederich?s alcoholism took him through failed marriages and lost jobs to the doorsteps of AA, where he became a fanatical believer. The insights he believed he gained during a 1956 UCLA experiment on the effects of LSD on alcoholics transformed his AA sermons into intricate psychological and philosophical analyses.

He developed his own following and started a storefront club in seedy Ocean Park. When drug users started joining the ex-drinkers departed and Synanon--the first self-help drug rehab--was born in 1958. Through rough and tough group sessions?ultimately called the ?game??past behavior was attacked and modified. Newcomers were taught to ?Act as If? everything demanded of them was right and cruel punishments were dished out for negative behavior. Early books made comparisons to Lifton?s work on thought reform and Dederich did not deny the accusation, instead proclaiming that addicts? minds were dirty and needed ?washing.?
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »

Offline 001010

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« Reply #3 on: April 21, 2005, 10:45:00 PM »
Good additional reading, thanks.  :tup:
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »
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Offline PerfectStraightling

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« Reply #4 on: April 22, 2005, 04:57:00 PM »
Just thinking that synanon is where straight came from is weird when you read about the stuff that went on there.

And what was up with the '60s? Maybe it was just the availability of drugs or the culture, or maybe it was the freedom that people were beginning to experience that we didn't have before. Maybe it all brought out a little crazy in people. Whatever it was, it was messed up.
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Offline 001010

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« Reply #5 on: April 22, 2005, 05:52:00 PM »
Perhaps people were just searching for answers and comfort but then became seekers of 'fast-food' style enlightenment (like a drug) or became guru-seminar-brainwashing money-grubbers?

Besides, Synanon was for heroin addicts! There is not a drug in the world that is as comparatively difficult to kick as heroin. I think that's where the positive peer culture/behavior modification came into play in the only good way it could. They were consenting-adults, not defenseless children. But then, they saw if they expanded, and developed a ?one-size-fits-all? pitch, they'd be able to market their ?miracle cure for the spiritually unenlightened? in a bottle and sell it, and they did. And oh how the program-marketing wolves love the credulous of society.


Human greed is a repulsive thing.

Forgive, O Lord, my little joke on Thee and I'll  forgive Thy great big one on me.
--Robert Frost, American poet



_________________
EST 1983
Salesmanship Club '84-'86
Straight, Inc. '86-'88

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. ~ Edmund Burke
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »
[size=79]EST (Landmark/Lifespring/Discovery) \'83
Salesmanship Club \'84-\'86
Straight, Inc. \'86-\'88[/size]

Offline PerfectStraightling

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« Reply #6 on: April 25, 2005, 02:37:00 PM »
Quote
On 2005-04-22 14:52:00, 001010 wrote:

"They were consenting-adults, not defenseless children. "


That is so true.

They start out with hard core heroin addicts off of the street and end up using it on some kids with black eyeliner and a bad attitude. And somehow this appears normal. It's like that analogy about the frog in the boiling hot water, who won't jump out because it can't tell it's getting hotter (didn't I hear that in AA)?
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Offline 001010

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« Reply #7 on: April 26, 2005, 11:25:00 AM »
Behavior modification has been the "one size fits all" or the "cookie cutter" solution to the common problems teenagers struggle with for way too long now.

According to their "professional opinions" all of my teenager?s friends and my teen qualify for this type of "teen help."

What a money scam for the gullible and the desperate, is there a greedier form of business out there?

What?s worse is that most of the people working in these places, not only have no college degree, but think that by using excessive force, humiliation tactics, demeaning, and degrading confrontation and corporal punishment on children on a daily basis, they?re showing help and love.  
 

In war, the stronger overcomes the weaker. In business, the stronger imparts strength to the weaker.
--Frederic Bastiat



_________________
EST 1983
Salesmanship Club '84-'86
Straight, Inc. '86-'88

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. ~ Edmund Burke
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »
[size=79]EST (Landmark/Lifespring/Discovery) \'83
Salesmanship Club \'84-\'86
Straight, Inc. \'86-\'88[/size]

Offline PerfectStraightling

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« Reply #8 on: April 26, 2005, 03:09:00 PM »
Quote
On 2005-04-26 08:25:00, 001010 wrote:

"According to their "professional opinions" all of my teenager?s friends and my teen qualify for this type of "teen help."

That is so disturbing.

Quote
"What?s worse is that most of the people working in these places, not only have no college degree, but think that by using excessive force, humiliation tactics, demeaning, and degrading confrontation and corporal punishment on children on a daily basis, they?re showing help and love."


So is that.

 :scared:  :scared:

I'm sending you a PM
« Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 07:00:00 PM by Guest »