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Messages - Clymerchick

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Mission Mountain School / Didn't we all used to be friends?
« on: May 13, 2005, 02:17:00 PM »
Thanks for your clear explanation. It's good to see someone who doesn't agree with the school's practices, but isn't set on deeming everything abusive. Like I said before, I myself disagree with things that the school did, but don't consider any of it abusive. I like the way you put it:

"It's what didn't happen that should have happened, or what did, but shouldn't of. It's truths verses false. It's laws, or broken laws. It's the entire principle of things..."

The school has a lot of potential, has helped many girls, hindered others. I don't think that John and Colleen would mind shoveling their own horses shit, doubt it matters to them that much. While I as there we thought it as like we were giving back to him for what he was giving to us, at least I kind of saw it that way. I also liked doing work in general. I was one of those people that had fun loads of fun mauling wood with Doug, or always wanted to be a mower. You know what I mean.

Anyway, it seems like some people are upset about a lot of petty things about the school, but they add up to something greatly upsetting to some of you. I don't know what to say about it other  than I hope you find what really matters to you most: getting past the troubles it caused you, solving the problems for future girls, or somehow finding satisfaction in a lawsuit. Good luck.

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Mission Mountain School / Didn't we all used to be friends?
« on: May 13, 2005, 01:16:00 AM »
I think that what you had to say about your experience was well articulated and I am appreciative of your level headed honesty. I'm sorry that MMS wasn't the right place for you and I do agree that they are very bad at humbling themselves and just admitting that they are not the right institute for someone. While you are there you are made to believe that MMS should work for you and there is something wrong with you if you have to leave on bad terms. Sometimes terms really were bad, other times it just wasn't the right place and they had go but made it seem as though they were bad. Remember the "lockdown talk"? The other thing along those lines is that there is no possible way to ever raise a serious complaint or concern about the school while you are there. If you ask your parents then you are being manipulative and self serving, if you did it while you are there you could be slapped with any sort of psycho babble lable for it. That is something that should be changed. Those two things are the only two real issues that I have with MMS, but neither of them consitute being called abuse. They were just the way it was, both not a big deal then, and not a big deal now.

I guess if it's regulations you are after with the lawsuit then that may fix these two issues, but the money thing... I don't know how I feel about that yet. Although I am rather anti materialistic and so lagre amounts of money make me want to vomit, I don't know if money is really the issue. Basically, if money is the primary motive I don't think your hearts are in the right place.

Jessamine

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Mission Mountain School / Google
« on: May 12, 2005, 04:30:00 AM »
Who cares?

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Mission Mountain School / Didn't we all used to be friends?
« on: May 12, 2005, 04:29:00 AM »
To the anon who can't reveal herself,

You are the first person that I have seen who is involved in the lawsuit to actually have level headed response to what I said. Thank you for reading what I had to say and I hope that you may find some resolution through your actions. I truly am sorry that you had the experience you did... but like the girl above just said, what is it that you are trying to acheive from the lawsuit?

I do also agree that all th anonymous people should either reveal themselves or always sign with a nickname. I had the balls to put my name out there. Anyone who reads this can have my name.

My name is Jessamine McLellan and I'm not afraid to say what I think whether you agree with me or disagree is regardless. What are you guys afraid of?

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Mission Mountain School / MMS Employees
« on: May 11, 2005, 10:51:00 PM »
Paul was so chill. He was great. There is a staff there currently called Russell Parks who it amazing. He is a lot like Paul.

Carla Green (now Carla Cook I believe) got married and left. She didn't say why (obviously wouldn't admit to leaving because of the school to the girls) I don't really know what her intention was behind it.

Erin was a teacher that was there and then left after I had been there a month. She was a history teacher and I don't know much about her but I know a lot of the girls liked her.

There was another Erin that was there for a little bit while we were on intervention (the winter of 2002) who was amazing. She was there for maybe a couple months and then left after we went on intervention. I think she may have left because of what was going on with us and sleeping in tents and stuff.

Two staff Jen and Jim quit and ran off with each other after Jim was having an affair with her. I don't know the details because I wasn't there for that but Aileen would. Don't think them leaving was abuse related.

Can't think of anyone else but if I do I'll tell you.

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Mission Mountain School / Didn't we all used to be friends?
« on: May 11, 2005, 10:40:00 PM »
Ok to clear up the confusion on where I stand on MMS the reality is that I think there are good and bad things about MMS.
Pro... made good friends
Con... had to be "friends" with people whom you didn't particularly like.
Pro... we were forced to work hard to estabish good work ethics.
Con... it sucked, we got hungry, and we were sometimes cold.
Pro... we got help for specific issues that plagued us
Con... we had to bear extra issues (like addictions) for the greater good of the group.
Pro... honesty within friendships
Con... sometimes you had to rat them out
Now I could go on like this forever, but that would be a little excessive and boring to read I'm sure.

Basically some stuff sucked there, maybe it can be changed, but they run the risk of lowering their productivity of helping the girls. I don't agree with all the phase stuff that was implamented to make you like an MMS robot, but I do agree with the intention of the program. Picking on silly things that may have happened once while I was there just seems like another one of those stupid american things. No offense, but political correctness is incedibly important here, and anything that sets someone off their rocker creates a whole revolution. Anyway, I'm having a hard time articulating what I really mean by that, but regardless, it doesn't all seem like that big of a deal to me.

If you think the program was abusive, it is clear it wasn't the right place for you. In all honesty and sincerity if you are claiming that MMS has scarred you for life and you have been permanently traumantized by it, you definatly needed a place that could help you more emotionally. I'm not saying that to be mean or spiteful or anything to the same likeness, it is the truth. The stuff that went on at MMS was hard at times, and maybe there were times when innapropriate things occured, but they were few and far between. It is hard to walk the thin line between abuse and athority when dealing with emotionally troubled teens. If you really feel that hurt by MMS that it has ruined your life, you must have many current issues still controling your life and you should have gone to a more intensley theraputic program with less emphasis on self discovery and spirituality. Perhaps this isn't the case though, and you are fighting because you are angry and don't want other girls to go through what you did. Totally valid.

a·buse     P   Pronunciation Key  (-byz)
tr.v. a·bused, a·bus·ing, a·bus·es
To use wrongly or improperly; misuse: abuse alcohol; abuse a privilege.
To hurt or injure by maltreatment; ill-use.
To force sexual activity on; rape or molest.
To assail with contemptuous, coarse, or insulting words; revile.
Obsolete. To deceive or trick.

Just thought I might throw that in there. People were never hit or molested at MMS. Food was never taken away as punishment (it may have changed because of the environment). Holding our pee was an issue of respect, taken too far sometimes, but not constituting a lawsuit. Girls were yelled at, but only with the hopes of helping them, or out of anger that any human would feel if they were upset by something we did. My ed consultant yelled at me and told me I was a three year old, am I going to sue him for abuse?

Yes, we did lead most of our time there in fear of getting in trouble, and I DON'T THINK THAT'S RIGHT, but it's NOT abuse. Yes, John was late a lot and made us wait for silly amounts of time but that's not abuse.

Look, MMS has tons of flaws. Where there is a good point, there is a bad point to combat it and that's just the way it is. There were quite a few things that really sucked about the school, but we got to play soccer and ski and learn and make friends. Emotionally MMS helped me grow up, learn how to deal with difficult people, have patience, and most of all, be understanding. I had to be an addict at the same time, say stuff about my friends that I didn't want to, but at the time I thought would help them. I had to eat fucking tomatoes and I hated that the most of all. When you look at it like that it all seems to slide into perspective. HOWEVER, this was my experience and I speak for the people that were there while I was (on a factual level of what I witnessed). I have heard "horror" stories from when people had to go on personal interventions and things like that. I'm sorry to the poeple that had to do that, but the school doesn't do things like that anymore (at least during my time there).

On a side note to Anon: I did come during the end of that intervention but (lucky me!) I got to stay through two other interventions while I was there. One was a "retreat" of sorts when we remodeled or refurnished the campus. We took everything out of the rooms and repainted the cabins inside, re wall papered them. It was about cleaning up our lives. Each night we slept down in the group house together. It wasn't for fun, it was a punishment because a bunch of people were depressed and being stupid by bringing other people down but John brought us all flowers and each a single rose afterwards to "bring the color and life back to the campus" because we had worked so hard. It was quite sweet. Anyway, the other intervention was the shittiest thing in the world and could be the only thing that we did while I was there that even comes close to abuse. We went on intervention in the winter (-13 degrees at some points), slept in tents, cleared brush and made gigantic burn piles all day. Then we would move the burn pile somewehere else etc. We got really hungry so we got extra food. It was no longer a ladel of ravioli, but like a ladel and a half. We got two rolls and salad. It wasn't so bad. I did have freezing feet at some points and lost the feeling in my toes a lot. Thank god it was a huge motivator for people to get back on track. Anyway, we almost didn't get to go on our home visits, but then people pulled through in time for us to go and I was so happy I got to go home and get away from that intervention. When I came back three weeks later they were back on campus. That whole thing was the absolute worst experience that I had while I was there, but in all reality some of the girls really deserved it because they were being entitled, bratty, pieces of crap that needed a wake up call. It worked though. Anyway... I HAVE experienced a very shitty intervention. Still doesn't mean I think it was abuse, but I do think it could have been done an alternate way. Who Knows maybe it couldn't have.

So I can't think of anything else to say other than we all need to stop generalizing. I had a curfew when I came back from MMS and I had to be home by ten thirty. I came home really late once because I was having a really bad day and I popped a tire etc. etc. My mom always brought that up when she would talk to me about being late. I was barely ever late but she would always say "You are always late!" I hated that because it wasn't true that I was always late. One thing can come back and bite you in the ass, but it doesn't actually mean it happens all the time. Maybe MMS has made a few mistakes and made a few girl's lives crappy, but don't say that everything is bad just because one thing was. I was genuinly happy while I was there. It's so immature and pointless to pick on this stuff. Where do you guys think you're going to go with this all anyway? The lawsuit? Is that really going to make you happy?

Think about it....

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Mission Mountain School / Didn't we all used to be friends?
« on: May 11, 2005, 04:20:00 AM »
Food was never a privaledge. It was always a right while I was there. I admit there were flaws and on intervention we worked really hard and got hungry because we were burning more calories, but we still got food. When I went on intervention in the winter we got extra food after we complained of being hungry. I admit it would be abuse to take away food since it is biologically necessary, however, that never happened.

As for the other stuff... you don't like camping very much do you?

Take a step back and think about third world countries for a sec. Are showers a right? No. Education? You'd be lucky.
I think you are blowing things a little out of proportion.

The changes that happened at MMS were very drastic. Since no one has explained it yet I guess I will:

John decided to implament phase work at MMS. Now we were all familiar with the four phases that we had at MMS tht never really meant anything other than that you were done with your histories or that you had gone on your off campus. Well (this may be desputed because I have heard several different stories) Deb and Mike Finn left the school because they did not agree ith where John was taking the school. Basically MMS was turning into a formal procedure. You had to write phase transtion summaries which were very extensive and explained to the most intricate detail, the work that you had done in the phase. You had to petition to get out of the phase and move on to the next one. Just because you had your parent visit no longer meant you were in phase two. These phase summaries included a seperate summary for each program area and a petition to transition. In the summary you had to answer six questions, the last having about five parts to it on each issue you had. I wish I had a coer sheet for it still because yu would be quite disturbed. So all in all these summaries would be very long and very detailed. Might I add that you could only turn them in on Mondays which meant that I sat u in the cabin five bathroom numerous sunday nights, typing on my computer when I wasn't supposed to just to get them in on time. My phase three transition summary was about 140 pages. You thought the sexual history was bad.... this is whole different story. After they are turned in each program area reads the respective summary and wither approves or disapproves it. Then it is read by John and he has to approve all the program areas and the petition until you can move to the next phase. Needless to say John takes forever to do things (but he got better at it because we needed to graduate) and so it could be weeks before you got it back. In addition to these summaries there was a long list of tasks that you had to complete for each program area and each phase befroe you could transition. There were things like creating a project to give back to the community, how are academics important to you, what does group functionality mean to you and how do you demonstrate that. Depending on the phase there were lots of things on community, leadership, environment, etc. Anyway, for each project that you had to do you had to run it through the proposal procedure which was the same as the summaries procedure (each program area needed to approve and then John).

Since I was actually the second "cohort" of people to do the phase work we had a much different ecperience than probably the girls do now. We had a quite a few tasks taken off our list because we just wouldn't have time to do them before we graduated. We also had to suffer the technica difficulties of trying a new system. In addition to writing a complete aftercare  plan, we also had to write a defense, this was where we needed to explain we thought that we were ready to graduate. On the day of graduation we went through an oral defense proceure where we read out our reasons to graduate and where everyone (including parents) had the opportunity to take a crack at why they thought we werent ready and we had to basically defend ourselves. It was really quite intense.

Anyway, I'll explain more about phase tasks and stuff later, but you can see how the school has changed yeah?

By the way when I was there our letters weren't screened, we just had limitations on who could send us mail and who we could send it to that had to be approved by the parents and the therapist. And I'm really sorry if I made a million typos in this because I am a horrible typer and I don't want to read it over for mistakes cause it's one in the morning and I have a chem test tomorrow. :sad:

Oh yeah and I was informed that all of my histories would be given to my family before they were and I think that it is a god idea to share them with your parents. I never felt compelled to make up things that I did priory to going to MMS. My experience with them and the other peopel I witnessed was that people lied about their histories (minimizing) and were caught, thus being forced into sharing them with the whole group. Wrong or not it doesn't hurt to be hnest the first time. If you did feel complelled to make stuff up I'm really sorry because that would create very awkward conditions and assumptions between everyone.

Anyway... bed. Must go to bed.

Jessamine

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Mission Mountain School / Where would you be without MMS?
« on: May 10, 2005, 04:06:00 AM »
When I was there at least the freshmen and sophmore classes were decent. But looking at the junior and senior classes I have no idea quite how they managed to make it seem so great. Taking those classes now and how hard they are at a private school baffles me to the comparison of MMS... I liked how on tours for parents they would say that the classes are taught at honors levels without the credability! Hahahah... oh man... parent tours. What a bunch of plastic smiles and bullshit lines that was. I was really genuine about it at the time but geeeeez. Why was I rooting for them so much? It wasn't THAT great. Ohhhh yeah, Brain washed. That was why.

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Mission Mountain School / So back to the original question I guess...
« on: May 09, 2005, 10:36:00 PM »
So somewhere, someone on the forum wanted to know everyone's experiences at MMS whether good or bad. Since then there has been a lot of experience sharing and bickering as it seems to me. The conclusion that I have made is that there are a lot of people very angry about their experiences at MMS, then there are people who are defending the program, which I understand. Something that I haven't seen talked about a whole lot is the changes that the school went through in the two years I was there. I attended from June of 2001 to August of 2003.

Some of the issues arising are due to informational discrepancies between people who went there a long time ago as opposed to some of the more recent graduates. Things at MMS changed a whole lot while I was there.

When I arrived at MMS I arrived during intervention (like Kerry I think) and I quickly came to learn how important the group is and group functionality. Whether I agreed or not I respected that that was how they kept thirtyfive girls in line. My big sister got kicked out my second week there which again taught me what not to do. Pouting in a cabin and refusing to come to group didn't look like much fun to me, neither did the consequences. That was motivation enough for me. I managed to get through MMS without a single physical metaphor, workcrew, or consequence for doing something stupid on an individual account. (ok I DID get in trouble for nakee time!) Of course I had to do group punisments, which might I add, would have been much more effective had they been used sparingly. I found that keeping a low profile was most effective. I respected the girls that were there even if one of them was the most annoying thing in the world. I did this not only because I think in a small environment like that it is necessary to have decency, but also because if I didn't I would be labled as exlusive. MMS likes labels A LOT. It wasn't that hard to just be nice, VERY trying at times, but not that hard. I basically did whatever I was told because I didn't want to get hit in the face with an issue I didn't have, or get someone else in trouble. For those of you who knew me while I was there (at least more of the latter protion) my best friend was someone who was notorious for being a bit of a trouble maker. Regardless for her actions I still love her and although she's a complete moron at times (even now!) I still support her and try to help. Because I didn't want to tell her how wrong she was every day for being the way that she is, I got in trouble frequently for not "calling her out" when perhaps it wasn't my job to do so? Ahem, personal accountability... or perhaps that was the therapists job? What were they there for anyway if it was our job to tell each other how messed up we were? Anyway... found that most of the people that I was friends with at MMS have been people that I still love and talk to. If not I look back at them with fond memories. For those of you all who thought Ron? was a great staff, I know what you mean. Jen, my therapist after phase three was the most amazing person for me there. Zoe too. They were examples of women who were stong and knew how to live life. I thank Zoe because she was a great role model, and Jen becase she was so kind and gentle about her methods of help that it was an amazing respite from what we have aptly named "attack therapy" I believe. She made you feel comfortable and you really felt guilty if you held something back. I don't mean guilty in a fear way like it was most of the time, but a guilty that you feel if you're dealing with a friend. The bad stuff, well, it sucked to be honest. I agree a lot with the people who say that getting them out of their home environment was the key element in their recovery. MMS was a wonderful community of girls who came together to help each other heal and learn how to live with the world. However, the guidlines and principles set down there made it so black and white that you either had to take a side and deal with it or spend your time in constant battle that is totally endless. It's like the addiction thing there. You HAVE to claim that you are and addict or else you will spend your entire stay there fighting of claims that you are in denial and don't see the reality of your addictions. "OH MY GOD Jess! (they all say) If you don't admit you're an addict, you'll die" Oh dear I think to myself... this is going nowhere. "Hi, I'm jess and I'm an addict..." Inside I'm going: this is really quite rediculous to suggest that  am an alcoholic considering that the only reason I ever drank was for social attention and recognition. Guess I blew that one huh? But whatever...because the reality is this:

Does anone remember how fast trends ran through MMS. It wasn't because we were all psycho, it was because we were stimulus deprived. What else did we have to do other than pick up on stupid trends like pakistani accents. I also remember when everyone came back from a home visit and we all started to say hella if you from California (I think we got in trouble for it too). The reality of the situation was that if one person claimed not be an addict who had used a substance or had sex or whatever, everygirl (even if they did have a major addiction) would have jumped on the band wagon and tried to claim it too. I figured that out while I was there. So a lot of this stuff that some people are trying to say is abuse (which I think is very relative) was necessary to keep us all under control. I mean control not in a nazi sense, but in a sense that we needed some structure to keep the school together.

I'm trying to look at this from a neutral perspective, because I really am quite neutral. I'm not ready to sue the school for anything but I'm not going to say it was right for everyone or that it was completly right for me even. I don't think you can have a boarding school and have it be the generic fit for a troubled girl. We are all different. I guess I'm not angry at the school because I can accept that the shit that sucked about my stay there was just because someone else needed it. Maybe some of it wasn't... but whatever. I'm not there anymore, it was only two years, and la de fuckin da I have my own life now and I think I'm mature enough to get past it. If some of you guys are gung ho ready to sue the school to pieces, RIGHT ON! For those of you who want to defend it with your life becsause that's what it has given you RIGHT ON TOO!

Anyway I have to eat dinner so I'll get back to you on those changes that I was talking about earlier that I never actually touched on Hehe.

Jessamine

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Mission Mountain School / WELCOME ALL MISSION MOUNTAIN SCHOOL ALUMNI!
« on: May 09, 2005, 09:48:00 PM »
[email protected]

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Mission Mountain School / WELCOME ALL MISSION MOUNTAIN SCHOOL ALUMNI!
« on: May 09, 2005, 04:43:00 PM »
Audrey! Hit me up sometime... You can probably guess who I am from my name.

On another note... Did anyone else find that they became increasingly anal about their food because we had to measure everything? I never had any problems with food and them at MMS I had weird food stuff, but it would go away on home visits. Freakin weird!

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