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An open discussion about the troubled parent industry

i have been being told for years that i dont have boundaries and could never figure it out.  i think this is probably why.

i can't verbalize it really....  but i feel like an internal alarm goes off if i try to express a boundary, an alarm that screams "YOU DONT HAVE THE RIGHT TO REJECT ANYONE!!!!!!!!  IF YOU REJECT, YOU WILL BE REJECTED!!!!!!!!  YOU MUST ACCEPT ANYTHING THAT CROSSES YOUR PATH AS YOUR DUTY IN LIFE TO ACCEPT, OTHERWISE YOU WILL SPEND YOUR WHOLE LIFE ALONE!!!!!!!!!!!"

something like that.....

you see why i only use small case now....  cause i hate caps, they mean yelling to me, so i dont use them. 

there is some good to being unjudgemental, but as you can see this is a real exhaggeration.  but you are lucky that i am going thru this stuff now, cause i would not have been able to verbalize these things a year ago, and a year from now, i probably won't want to.

best to you, i am glad you are doing what you are doing.
alia

update!  she wrote me back, and then i wrote her back:

Alia,

 

Is there anything specific that you would like me to know about Martin Wiens?

 

Christopher Dock Mennonite High School is a faith based Christian high school with theological roots in the Anabaptist tradition of pacifism and non-resistance to violence.  We work towards peace and justice locally and globally.

 

Martin Wiens has done a stellar job of relating compassionately to students here.  Reference checks were very affirmative of his positive professionalism.  However – a student view from that time was certainly not sought!

 

Mr. Wiens and I have talked about the CEDU schools 24/7 format.  I would not know of the deep pain that you indicate.

 

May the God of grace and healing give you hope for today.

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Reply
   
   
Thank you for your prompt response.  I have just recently begun my journey of healing after that terrible experience when I was a 14 year old girl.  I have written briefly to Martin Wiens, and to Bill Valentine.  I have not attempted to contact any other staff at this time.

I personally do not recall any specific instances where I saw Martin do anything abusive outside of the accepted abusive techniques of the program itself.  I also do not know if Martin has 'seen the light' or 'repented' from his ignorant and cruel treatment of children, or even if he has realized that the treatment itself was cruel.

The tragic part about these programs (in my recent research I have found that many similar programs exist, though many of the original ones have been closed down or altered) is that they hire uneducated people who earnestly want to help children and then inject them into the same toxic, abusive process as the children, a process that when described to a liscenced therapist or PHD is easily identified as either brainwashing, torture, or both.

The philosophy the program Martin worked at was based on shame and humiliation, where young children where identified with their 'bad' behavior (such as taking drugs or having sex as minors) and then made to see themselves as the worst possible result of that behavior, i.e. a whore or a junikie or a slut or a liar or any other littany of cruel and hurtful identifications.  These children were trained to go through their memory and find anything they could attach shame to in regards to these bad behaviors and meditate on how shameful they were by nature while screaming at the floor and crying, as well as screaming at other students about how alike and disformed emotionally they are.

These techniques were entirely experimental.  These were also only the base of the program, I have not begun to discuss with you the nature of the all night 'emotional growth experiences' or 'propheets' which were much more clearly brainwashing techniques.  We were forced to stay up all night while doing not so subtle activities which were supposed to shape how we saw the world.  These included such techniques as envisioning our parents and our own faces on pillows while pounding them, or writing our own epitaphs, lying down in a dark room with nothing but candles and being read them outloud.

The greatest and most harmful betrayal about all of the aspects of the program is that they were then kept 100% secret from all the parents; not only the parents but from anyone who was not in the program.  I have lived all this time since I 'graduated' thinking that my parents intended for me to suffer like that in this program, only to find out this year that they in fact had no idea what went on there, and were told an entirely different story about the nature of the program.

The damage to my relationship to my family is now irreparable as my father now has a brain tumor and less than a year to live, along with an almost complete loss of coherency.  I have suffered immense damage from the program I attended, and now see a therapist twice a week to try and unravel my issues with rage and intimacy, having believed since my attendance there that I had no worth, and that unless I berated myself constantly and abandoned all of my own interests that I would endanger the ones I loved.  Many more people out there feel that the program saved their lives, and that without it they would truly be the emotionally dysfunctional monsters these programs systematically convinced us that we were.

I pray every day that they awaken and see who the true betrayers are, not themselves or their parents as we were all taught, but the people who designed and carried out this caustic program.  I continue to be deeply disappointed that while, for example, Bill Valentine claims to have seen the error of his ways and identifies the techniques he himself used as abusive and cruel, no one has stepped up in any kind of public forum to expose the techniques, tried to bring families back together, or tried to protect other teens from being subjected to this kind of abuse.

So maybe Martin has not told you all there was to tell you about his CEDU employment.  Perhaps he still feels that any girl who had sex at 14 is a whore and should be told so regularly and reflect on it with intense emotion for sustained periods of time.  Or perhaps he still likes to "smoosh" (a common practice at CEDU, forced physical contact and cuddling etc.) with various underage boys between his legs while he fondles their chests.  This I witnessed very often specifically with Mr. Wiens.

I am an angry 30 year old woman and these things all happened a long time ago, but they did happen.  Thank you for writing me back, this encourages me that at least there is a chance that you are not mimicking the techniques that took place at CEDU.  I am available to you for any further questions you may have, and can provide you with websites where other survivors of CEDU specifically and other similar programs have started post boards so they can talk about their horrific and often isolating experiences.

Thank you,
Alia Weiner

ooo i just can't seem to help myself!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Hello,

I see that, according to your website, you employ Martin Wiens. He was also employed by CEDU school, where I attended for almost two and a half years.  I am currently undergoing extensive therapy to try and reclaim my mind after the torture that endured at this program, a program that while being endorsed by the Reagan administration, had no qualified staff, no staff that were educated with even a BA in psychology, let alone PHDs, and the methods used there were developed as part of a rogue religious organization and next as an experimental heroine rehabilitation.

Countless teens were subjected to the also experimental techniques of CEDU and no one has been held accountable for the abuse that took place there even though many of the top staff, such as Rudy Bentz, were accused of rape and battery.  Recently Russ Decker, another former CEDU staff at the same time as Martin Wiens and Rudy Bentz, was arrested for putting his 14 year old step son in the hospital when Russ attacked the boy on Christmas morning with a baseball bat when he could not find his gun.

I don't know if Martin Wiens has disclosed the nature of the 'treatment' that took place at CEDU, or even if your organization uses similar techniques.  I am very interested to know the answer to both those questions.

Thank you,
Alia Weiner
Los Angeles, CA

sent to Martin's current employer, on the other side of the US:

[email protected]

i got 97%  but that wasn't thanks to cedu, god knows....

auntie em, 

i am so there for you.  i have not been online cause my boyfriend and i just moved into a new home, but we are getting settled now.  just let me know what i can do and i am there.  it would be my pleasure to assist in exposing anyone who is still doing this to kids, or adults for that matter. 

Quote

well i think it would have helped me a lot if ANYONE in my family, as soon as i got out, really sat me down and told me 'look, i am so sorry i could not get you out of there, but i know it was wrong what they did, and if you ever want to talk about what they did to you, what they made you do, you can talk to me about it."

i think that would have helped me a lot, cause i knew it was wrong, but i thought everyone in the universe agreed with them, cause thats how they made it out

I've been thinking about this Alia, like Auntie, who's niece is in a program, I have a child in a treatment center RIGHT NOW. Many months since I've  spoken to my child.

What you said above is exactly what I intended to say, however I am worried that my child will disagree, that I'M the one who will appear wrong, after so much convincing the program's ideals are the correct ones.

The graduates of the programs are PRETTY convinced the program is great, saved their life etc., seems anything contradictory is strongly opposed by the graduates.

Would I be seen as anything but the enemy?

hi   i dont really know your situation, but if this is your child, why dont you just take her out of the program immediately??

the people who say it is worse to leave in the middle than to see it thru are dead wrong.  no no no no no.  no need to 'stick it out' or 'see it thru'  its like any other sort of abuse, the less the better.
so why is your child still in the program?

and Doug kim Brown runs that school?

hey  this sounds to me, based on what i am going thru now, that you were probably wrong.  that what you sensed as denial and jealousy, was probably just people feeling hurt over what seemed to you to be very insightful observations.  but were trained to see things wrong.  your friend and you were both trained to see the same wrong thing, that makes it feel right to both of you, but it doesn't really make it true...

what i've learned is that when i think i see something in someone, and they tell me i'm wrong, i take them at face value.  it requires trust, and it requires the painful realization that my instincts can be so wrong, and the further pain of betrayal in knowing why my instincts can be so wrong (cedu), and all that can be very hard and humiliating.  it can be much easier to 'stick to my guns' and follow the arguement through, demonstrating how cleverly i worked it all out, but at the end of the day if it's wrong, its wrong, and all my explaination doesnt change anything.  

but thats only when i'm wrong.  sometimes people say, yeah, that makes sense, but when they say no that's not me, i try to be extra careful to respect that.