An absolute dead give-away of a facility or organization that engages in brainwashing is one that describes the personality of the people they're trying to treat or recruit as in some way defective.
People may do things we don't like. People may be rude. People may not understand or follow the social rules of etiquette. People may say things we don't like. People may think things we strongly disagree with--even after we tell them what we think and why we think it, and even if we find what they think horribly unacceptable *to us* and *to some authority figure(s)*. People may not like us or may not like people we think they should like.
Some of those things we have a right to change, like bad things minor children do, or whether they're rude, or whether they know and show the rules of etiquette, or whether they interrupt or talk in class, or whether they use speech to lie to authority figures, or whether they use speech to libel or slander or harrass or threaten or make false alarms, or whether they use speech to insult people.
We *don't* have a right to make them change or claim to change whether they agree with us. We *don't* have a right to change their thoughts. We *don't* have a right to coerce their affection or their love--and neither do their families. We don't have the right to deprive them of enough free time to talk that they can express complaints and criticisms to each other or grievances to authority figures and we don't have a right to punish them for complaining, criticizing, or expressing a grievance to or about authority figures either in public or in private.
We *don't* have a right to ever prevent them from writing letters to government offices or attorneys, or fail to provide them with paper, pen, envelopes and stamps to write such letters, even if we feel such letters are false or defamatory towards their parents or our organization's employees or authority figures or a peer they allege has done something *to them*. We can defend ourselves from those allegations with what we say, but we don't have a right to prevent them from making them even if we believe and contend that they are false. Government offices and attorneys licensed to practice by a state bar association (or the appropriate licensing authority in the nation or territory where they practice) are *NOT* "bad influences" and there is *NO EXCUSE* for interfering with a child's right to write such letters unless they are threatening or defamatory to some third party totally unrelated to the authority organization or the parents or the allegations about the third party are *not* alleged by the child to have been done by the third party to them. Children have a *right* to make allegations to an attorney or any government office about anything they claim has been done to them, even if any or every authority figure in their life believe those allegations are false.
Any institution that offers to reform a child's personality or thoughts is an abusive brain-washing cult.
Gach!
Catharsis?! Okay, for someone to have a feeling of "catharsis" you have to make them feel really, really bad first---that's why "catharsis" is traditionally associated with watching a Greek Tragedy.
Otherwise known as the endorphin release you get from doing painful or humiliating things to people---in athletics, "runner's high"; in BDSM, the endorphin rush a Sub feels after being subjected to the (voluntary) power-games of his/her Dom.
So my first question is what horrible *involuntary* things are they going to do to the kid to induce this "catharsis"?
And the next buzzword that triggers my skepticism is "shine". This, to me, either is talking about genuine happy, happy, joy, joy feelings induced by the endorphin high of the "catharsis" OR fake happy, happy, joy, joy feelings to avoid punishment. And the reason I don't buy "real" for a minute is because we are talking about an *involuntary* pain/humiliation/degradation/power-game used at the outset of this experience to trigger the "catharsis."
As Ginger put talking about the happy songs in Straight and being punished for not smiling, Zippity-fucking-doo-dah.
Next set of buzzwords---"developed a feeling of awareness of"---okay, that's just jargon for good ol' fashioned *blame*. So the kids have learned to *blame* "their negative feelings"--yeah, those painful thingies induced by the staff and the program to trigger the "catharsis"---on the drugs----instead of on the staff and the program which *actually* induced those negative feelings.
Which, plain as day, after you sort out the jargon, means that before the kids are let off of "Phase I" the staff has to believe they have been successfully brainwashed into accepting the Program's worldview that bad things the Program people are doing to them are their own fault "because of the drugs" and are "necessary to save them from the drugs." And, that the "shine" they speak of is part of *this* program's false, cult personality that they implant on top of the real one.
Of course, they've already given a *huge* red flag that they intend to brainwash the kid and implant a cult personality on top of the kid's suppressed real personality when they speak of "inadequacies of personality" in the second paragraph.
Weeding out the jargon, which doesn't take that much in this case, they are saying that any kid that gets sent to their program has a personality they presume up front, a priori, is *defective* and therefore must be *replaced* with the idealized *cookie-cutter* personality defined by the cult as being NOT defective.
Ethical drug treatment doesn't seek a "catharsis" and leaves the patient's personality the fuck alone.
Ethical drug treatment *first* dries the patient out by stopping the patient's access to the drugs and treating any withdrawal symptoms, and then appeals to the patient's *rational mind* by providing factual information in a non-emotionally-loaded format, at a rate appropriate to conventional classroom learning, about the physiology and psychology of addiction and the biological effects of drugs on the patient's body.
*Ethical* drug treatment does NOT use coercive persuasion. *Ethical* drug treatment uses conventional persuasion that appeals openly to the conscious, rational mind, not the emotions and not the subconscious. *Ethical* drug treatment allows the patient the *choice* not to be persuaded by the arguments presented and provides neither consequence nor punishment within the treatment program tied to the intellectual and emotional choice not to be persuaded. *Ethical* drug treatment respects freedom of thought and does not apply "consequences"---even lack of "advancement" through the "phases" of the program---for differences of opinion or feeling or long-term intention.
It is not an ethical drug treatment program unless you can graduate from it dry but with the full, absolutely uncoerced personal intention to *either* use drugs or not use drugs after you walk out the door. You should be able to graduate an *ethical* drug treatment program even if you maintain through the entirety of the program until the day you leave that, for example, marijuana should be legalized, you like to use it, you don't mind the *inherent* negative effects of the drug, and you just plan not to get caught when you use it.
An Ethical Drug Treatment Program detoxes the drugs out of the patient's body, provides treatment on a strictly voluntary basis (by licensed therapists following professional ethics to the T) with zero consequences to advancement of any underlying things that may be bothering the patient emotionally, presents information to the rational mind of the patient regarding the effects of various drugs on his brain and body and the legal consequences of being caught using drugs, and applies *NO* consequence or lack of progress through the program for disagreement or whether they like a patient's personality or find it totally obnoxious.
The only thing that can change a person's personality is brainwashing.
It can only do it by implanting a replacement personality on top of the patient's natural one.
Normal people's personality, whether introverted or extroverted, whether oriented towards thinking or feeling, whether oriented towards intuiting or sensing, whether oriented towards judging or perceiving---Normal people have individual combinations of those traits that remain constant throughout their entire lives *unless* they are brainwashed.
The cult mantra applied by so many program cults of "you're in your head" is a direct assault on the personality trait of thinking versus feeling. The program judges an orientation towards thinking to be an undesirable personality trait and forces a replacement personality that has a "Feeling" oriented personality trait as a major component.
It's obvious why programs prefer Feeling personalities to Thinking ones. Other personality traits in a cult's idealized personality that they implant vary depending on the specific cult doctrine. Usually depending on the cult founder. Frequently the idealized personality used as a template to be imposed on all members over their genuine personality is the personality of the cult founder.
Any institution that offers to reform a child's personality or thoughts is an abusive brain-washing cult.
"Thought reform" does not become magically morally right if the victim is a child.
Some things that are legal are horribly morally wrong things that *nobody* has a right to do to another human being of whatever age.
People's *conduct* may be defective, but *nobody's* personality is defective. Nor is "conduct" like facial expressions, ideas, thoughts, feelings, absense of feelings we want them to have, or verbal expression of those thoughts and feelings during free time and in a manner that does not threaten violence to self or others, or lack of verbal expression of thoughts or feelings we want them to have or wish they had *ever* defective conduct.
Not *ever*.
KHK's service plan as displayed above in this thread constitutes a stated intention to do violence to the human mind. It may be legal, but it is horribly, obscenely immoral, and should be *MADE* illegal.
All statements in this post constitute my personal opinion of the "service plan" provided in this thread.
Timoclea
Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
--Isaac Asimov, Russian-born American author
[ This Message was edited by: Timoclea on 2005-04-21 13:05 ][ This Message was edited by: Timoclea on 2005-04-21 13:06 ]