Fornits

Fornits Home for Wayward Web Fora
An open discussion about the troubled parent industry

Earlier I wrote,
In my individual circumstance, I was unconsciously recreating the group atmosphere that I experienced in DAYTOP through my involvement in various religious communities, communes, and cults. It was my form of isolating and removing my self from "the world."

Specifically, I became addicted to living and moving among groups, particularly religious groups, and thought that I could not function as a fully psychologically autonomous individual; I have been involved in everything from Rainbow Gatherings to the Army, from Pentecostal Holiness churches to Hare Krsnas and everything in between. Believe me; I have made the rounds of various communal groups. I learned a lot along the way and these experiences were not without their edifying elements too, though a lot of it was to my detriment as well.

Such are the consequences of my religious addiction. That's why I am here at Meadow Haven.

Now I’d like to take the opportunity to expand on these statements a bit.

What I am trying to say is that for many years post-program, I was trapped in a sort of depressive fugue state and would, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, put myself into various group situations in order to re-create the therapeutic group context that I have been immersed in as a part of DAYTOP. To help you understand how this came to be, I shall now give some background, the “back story” as it were, to put things in context and help explain how it came to be that I was put into DAYTOP in the first place.

For me to say that I never felt like I fit in as a part of this world would be an understatement. I always felt like an alien being among the earthlings, as if I looked like a human, and understood the language, but was totally ignorant of the culture and customs of the society in which I lived and was born into.
All of my teachers would always remark about what a bright child I was, genius level in fact according to the standardized tests, but how I was a chronic underachiever, never got on well with my peers, was a kind of loner, and wasn’t living up to my potential in general.

In all honesty, I as a kid was always the nerdy one in school, had few friends, was not at all popular, nor was I much of a participant in the social scene. Not a hit with the ladies. I was terribly insecure and got beat up at home by my father and in school by my classmates, and felt utterly alienated from others, both intellectually and socially.
I was always fundamentally different from everybody else, heard my own drummer, marched to it, and was never one to “colour between the lines” so to speak. Way outside of the box.

Now I know it was Asperger’s all along, but in my youth all I knew was that I was “different.” I was often depressed and uncomfortable in my own skin.

So as a means of escape from the pain of feeling so out of place among others, and not finding acceptance anywhere I went, I in elementary and middle school lost myself in fantasy stories, comic books, and certain role-playing games. I immersed myself in an imaginary world in which I felt like I did fit in, a world I could create and control, and in which I could take on some heroic persona, an imaginary alter-ego.

Spider-man was my favourite, as a kid. Peter Parker was a sort of hero of mine, the nerdy, bookish guy with special powers that he had to keep secret from everybody, who believed that with his great power came great responsibility. I wanted to be Spider-Man, with his super-hero alter ego. I was always as a kid fantasizing about transcending myself; I wanted to be somebody else and take on another persona, hence the D&D and the comic books.

Later on in high school, when I outgrew the comics and fantasy war gaming, I got into psychedelic drugs, particularly grass and LSD. This was my new means of escape, my new means of seeking transcendence, of introspecting and trying to discover myself.

I rebelled, tried to destroy the nerd image, sought acceptance among a more rebellious crowd, started wearing combat boots and Army-surplus jackets and hanging out with the misfit kids who would hang out across the street from the school and smoke cigarettes before class. I was desperate for acceptance.

DAYTOP was the place in which I was forced for the first time in my life to take a close look at myself and try and make some real changes. This is where I learned to identify and articulate my emotions and practice my interpersonal skills and means of relating to others of my peer group. This is where I came to realize that the direction in which I was going in life.

Over time I developed into a true-believing DAYTOPian.

So it wasn’t all bad and there were certain elements of the experience that proved edifying toward the development of my self-awareness and social skills. I made friends for life through DAYTOP and learned how to identify and in a more constructive fashion deal with my feelings.

In DAYTOP, I experienced a cohesive peer group in which I was accepted and valued for the first time in my life. Two of my best friends are guys who I graduated with. We formed and maintained a close bond for years and were roommates off and on for three years or so after graduating.

But as I’ve also written of in the past, there were definite negative and destructive elements at work through all of this as well.
We’d all become very emotionally dependent on one another, as if DAYTOP sewed up apart as individuals and sewed us back together as a group. We’d learned to reproduce the group, outside of the group. We never learned to be individuals in the larger sense.
 We had no boundaries between ourselves, or with anybody else.
 I came home more depressed, resentful, and isolated than ever, and began my time as a serious suicidal-ideation having religious addict and compulsive seeker of religious communities in which to deliberately place myself.

This is the scarier stuff for me to face, the naked truth, and I want to make myself very clear.

For a time up until about a year ago, I was quite consciously seeking to lose/escape from my individuality into a collective identity as a form of soul suicide without having to “pull the trigger."
In other words, I was seeking to lose myself in a group as a means of killing myself without having to leave my body.

I was trying to "kill" my old self and somehow find and cultivate my New Self, to become in some contrived sense fully Self-Realized.

I engaged in attempt after attempt to attain Transcendence, but in the religious realm. Higher than the comics and RPGs, higher than the LSD sessions, higher than the DAYTOP group therapy, higher than them all, seeking God is the Ultimate Trip, and mingling with various cults is the ultimate role-playing exercise.

 I was overcome with grief and was out to find a pre-arranged world of my own.

I got started in DAYTOP, AA, NA, and the Roommate Cult Support Group.

Then I graduated to the hard stuff. I have experimented with Hare Krsnas, the Twelve Tribes, a small group in Dallas you never heard of, JPUSA, various Pentecostal communities, Hutterites and Anabaptists, and others. I even dabbled in groups that I never really intended to join just to try them on, so to say. I have tried on different religions and communities in the way that somebody might go to the department store and try on clothes.

Yes, I was trying to find a cult to join so that I would no longer have to be myself, so that I could deliberately move into a world of suspended reality, and have that reality dictated to me. To try and assume a different persona and obliterate my old one, with which I was not satisfied and which I wanted to escape and leave behind.

This was my way of seeking to kill myself without having to leave my body, you see.

God is the Ultimate goal in the pursuit of transcendence, and cults are the ultimate in committing cognitive, emotional, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual suicide.

It was all, as I see it now, illusory in nature. There are no Utopias.

It was all my way of isolating, while still being around others but only those of a like mind and a common path.

The whole of my experience with the groups can be summed up as one long repeating cycle of going from group to group in an effort to improve and fix myself somehow, and as the ultimate in escapism, a form of suicide, actually, but cognitive suicide.

I learned the hard way that looking outside of oneself for some group or other to externally impose a vision of reality and transcendence on an individual is bound in the long run for futility. It’s just not real.

Jesus said (Luke 17:20-21) "The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, 'Here it is,' or 'There it is,' because the kingdom of God is within you."

Please understand that I do not quote from the Bible in order to be preachy, for that is not my style; you have to understand that my spiritual/religious consciousness is the overarching framework in which I was operating, the context in which all the motivation for my previous behaviour must be explained.  I was trying to reproduce the therapeutic community environment in a different context. The ultimate context, in fact, for I set about injecting God into the equation. This takes the quest for the perfect TC to the highest degree.
 It also takes the damage done to a deeper level of evisceration too, because this all ultimately damaged me at the deepest possible level, that is, the level of my soul, in the very essence of my being.

And then last August, I came to start to understand that even all of that community-hopping wasn’t going to help. I’d been seeking out new highs and spiritual peak experiences for years and had reached terminal burnout.

What does this have to do with DAYTOP, you may ask? In short, DAYTOP set me up for my compulsive religious addiction later on in life. DAYTOP was the gateway to it all. I was unconsciously trying to recreate the therapeutic community atmosphere. My being hooked on groups in order to maintain my sense of safety and security I can trace back to my formative years, in which the groundwork was laid and my identity and individuality were undermined through what happened to us there. And I can trace it all back to DAYTOP.
 
To put it in a nutshell, the program's return to sender function kept executing itself.

Do you still keep in touch with other DAYTOPians from back then?  I know of a few, and we are still friends..

In fact, I know one fellow from the old days that has no complaints at all about it, thinks back fondly of his time in DAYTOP and is grateful for them..

The guy ought to be taken out back and beaten within an inch of his life. Given two weeks to recover, and beaten down again.

You are missing my point :  compared to the level of personal destruction involved in brutal, socially condoned thought reform, consensual sex with, or even rape, by a captor is a lesser and comparatively irrelevant assault. Yet the authorities are NOT paying attention to those high-level, institutional, socio-political, high volume assaults. Why?

Well, they are paying attention only to a certain kind of individual-actioned sexual assault because, one must assume, of their bigoted notions of minors as property-- a guard having sex with a minor is a breach of those property rights. If not, why are the authorities not paying attention to the fact that minors are kidnapped by, held against their will in these institutions, subjected to forms of "parent condoned" sexual abuse (strip searches, being watched while bathing, etc), slaved, and psychologically tortured(according to statutes in the Geneva Conventions)?

The "sort of considerations examined in the mind of someone who would make such calculations” are comparing the “level of evil” involved in violations of an individual by a govt and society to the violations of an individual by a marginalized member of that society,(I,e, which is worse? The holocaust or OJ Simpson), and the extent of damages to the individual.(which is worse, having a lobotomy or being raped)? These sorts of considerations are taken into account anytime you create a judicial and legal structure and there is no reason why I shouldn’t raise them on an internet message board.

Having dealt with both the issues raised here I know what I am talking about, so no self-righteous indignation, please that these concerns could even be uttered. We are a little beyond that.