Fornits

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

Gauld may order him to wear a sign saying I ACT LIKE A BABY, or tell him to dig a 6-ft. by 6-ft. trench and then fill it up. He has even conducted a public paddling ceremony at Hyde...

DAYTOP outpatient would do stuff like that too, make us wear signs, sit in The Chair all day, carry around baby bottles or wear pacifiers, make you bark like a dog, I never saw somebody made to dig a hole though, nothing quite so extreme; after all it was outpatient and we didn't have time for that...I remember they'd make kids walk around and pick up exactly 500 cigarette butts or exactly 500 blades of grass, some number like that, and label them all with tiny pieces of paper and tiny pieces of tape.  Lots of humiliation and degradation.  And then put you on the van and send you home.  And our parents let them do it.  DAYTOP had them thinking that this was all a good thing too, same as us kids.  Crazy, right?

The chair, I assume was a chair in the middle of a circle of chairs (the one in the center being the confronted one).. a hot seat technique. We had this in the program I was in. It was like a firing squad.

Yes, everything I am describing to you all took place at the outpatient level.

No, the Hot Seat technique was in the form of the encounter groups, which were done in a big circle with nobody in the middle and the all attention given to whoever was getting yelled at.  The encounter group usually consisted of, oh, 15-20 people, including at least one counselor, maybe two sometimes.  These encounter groups were conducted once a week if I remember correctly, twice sometimesand lasted an hour or two at the most, or until everybody felt properly ventilated, depending on whatever else we had to do that day.

Then there was another form of the hotseat, the more brutal  "haircut" sessions, in which you'd go into a small room and there would be three seats lined up on one side and one on the other.  The person receiving the "haircut" (a term borrowed from Synanon and going back to the early days of DAYTOP, also the term "splitee" for that matter, which was the DAYTOP word for somebody who'd run from or "split" the program) would face, from the single seat on the one side, the coordinators and/or counselors on the other and they'd take turns screaming at you and telling you what a fuckup  you were and all this, and it would go on for as long as they felt necessary.  

Also there were "dealtwiths" with were pretty tame, really.  You'd basically tell a person what he or she did wrong and not to do it again, maybe some light punishment, say, they have to do dishes for a week or something.  After somebody got two or three "dealtwiths" for this or that offense, they'd get a "haircut."  But, if it were a serious enough matter, they'd get a "haircut" right away.  

For example: say you catch somebody smoking out back.  No big deal, relatively speaking, give them a "dealtwith."  But if you catch them smoking out back on a regular basis, then it's time to give 'em a "haircut."

Now, The Chair was just that: some kid would be made to sit in a chair and face the wall in a corner like a child for a day or two, hands in their lap and both feet on the floor, not being allowed to speak and nobody allowed to speak with them.  They'd have to take their lunch in The Chair.  If some counselor deemed it necessary, sometimes the kid would be made to wear a paper sign taped to their back, with some message like "I am rebellious" or "Don't talk to me, I'm in The Chair."  Or sometimes, I remember now, they'd make a kid walk around with some sign all day but NOT make him sit in the Chair: "Ask me why I got a haircut today" or "I have issues" or "Ask me why I am so babyish" would read the humiliating message on the sign.

One time they made me wear a sign that read, "Ask me to bark like a dog" and all day long kids would come up to and ask me to bark like a dog, and I'd do it.

Another time Marcia made me dance around in Morning Meeting like a spazz, to "help" me "overcome my social hangups."  That stunt I recall to this day, and only added to my social hangups.

One time they made a kid walk around all week with a pacifier around his neck and whenever somebody asked him why he had the pacifier around his neck, he'd have to tell them "Because I am such a baby."

That particular kid is dead now.  He split from DAYTOP, stole a car, got drunk and high, coked up, went joyriding and ended up in...I think it was Oklahoma, and got he killed after running a red light.  Got broadsided by a truck and it decapitated the kid.  I still remember his name and went to the boy's funeral.  He was seventeen when he died.  That's a true story.

There are three kids who I was in DAYTOP with who are dead now.  I could tell you their names, too.

What do the people who come up with this stuff think they're going to accomplish (that is constructive) by making kids do this stuff?

More in a bit.

Some programs used the phrase "in your head" to describe a person who was thinking too much (as opposed to in your feelings). The general theme was: don't think, just do what we do and you'll be fine... follow our orders blindly.

Boy, that takes me back man.  They'd always tell me that I was "stuck in my own head" and that the solution was to get "out of my head."  

Wat kind of shit is that to teach a kid?

Another charming DAYTOPianism (not a "DAYTOP value", but one phrase that got bandied about a lot in the group environment) one that I never really understood, was "When you think you're looking bad you're looking good, and when you think you're looking good you're looking bad."  What on earth does that mean??  I always wondered.  Talk about confusion and lots of self-doubt.  Talk about impaired decision-making.  "I think I look good but I really look bad/I think I look bad but I really look good."  WTF?   That phrase threw my emotional balance WAY off.  If you incorporate that into your thinking, who knows where it might lead you?

Ursus, I myself am INFP/INFJ, with my bit of toggle being on the fourth Axis.  More P than J-dominant though.

Here’s some more thoughts, from notes I took today while doing some studying and work in the area of boundaries, my sense of which DAYTOP philosophy completely erased, while resulted in my becoming utterly emotionally and psychologically crippled.  It has taken be fifteen years or so to even begin to see the extent of the damage DAYTOP did to me.  I took that stuff in, it became part of my self-explanatory style, and I personalized it, it became systemic in my thinking, and pervaded all areas of my life and relationships with others.  In the long run, DAYTOPianism proved poisonous to my life and sense of well-being.

I’ll get this out here first, and then next focus on specifically answering psy’s questions from last night.

staff: you are a fuckup, a drug addict, and you need to admit that to yourself to get better.
inmate: but i'm not. Just because I smoked pot does not mean I am addicted to it.
staff: you wouldn't be here if you didn't have a problem. Your best stinking thinking got you here.
inmate: but that doesn't make sense. There was no due process or diagnosis. how do you know I have a problem.
staff: because you're here. Nobody is here that doesn't have a problem (mystical manipulation). We know. We are addicts just like you.
inmate: you don't know me. I just met you.
staff: an addict knows an addict.
inmate: that doesn't make any sense.
staff: that's because you're thinking too much. Remember. Your best thinking got you here. You are sick in the head. You are just in denial. It's not just a river in ejypt.
inmate: No i'm not in denial. you people are crazy!
staff: Your denial is just further evidence you are in denial.

I remember having exchanges just exactly like this one in there.  Just like it, almost word-for-word.  A phrase I heard, and began to use over and over once I began to “Act as if” was the old Bill-ism “it doesn’t work unless you work it.” Also I was repeatedly told to try not to think too much about what was going on in my mind and in the DAYTOP environment and just to “focus on working your program, one day at a time.”  I was told often that I had a tendency to “think too much” (what kind of a program is it that discourages people from thinking?  That’s supposed to be helpful?!) and that I was phony, a showoff, and full of myself.  

In DAYTOPian thinking, you are never who you think that you are, you are always who the group and the program tells you that you are.  To conform to the groups’ and the program’s expectations of one’s behavior is considered “progress”, “making a breakthrough” and to not conform to the group/program norms is called “phoniness” or “being plastic.”  Counselors would always be telling me how “phony” I was being and one of their favorite DAYTOPisms was always to mockingly shout at me, “Oooh, I can smell the plastic burning!  It’s coming out of your ears, the smoke from all your melting plastic!”  All I was doing, in my mind, was questioning the validity of what they were doing and what was going on, and again, they’d tell me not to think so damn much and just “take it one day at a time.”

So I started to “act as if” and eventually came to believe what they were telling me.  I let them tell me who I was; individuality of opinion was not tolerated in that environment.  

DAYTOP was most certainly, looking back on it, a mind-control environment in which we were subjected to a process that molded us, reoriented us from a bearing of being urban high school kids experimenting with grass and mushrooms to a bearing in which we came to believe we were hopeless junkies with a genetic predisposition for addictive behavior and ultimately self-destruction. Of course DAYTOP subjected us to mind control/coercive persuasion/though reform techniques. Of course we were rewarded for conforming and punished for not conforming, as parts of the “DAYTOP family.”  Of course the whole idea was to minimize our individuality and personal autonomy and teach us to think as a part of the group.  Of course it was all about manipulating and exploiting the power of the situation, in order to make us think and behave in certain ways.  Of course they controlled our behavior, our communications with family and old friends, told us how to sit and how to speak and how to think and all that.  The “counslors” would "smoke" us in encounter group, or in the “haircut” sessions, like cheap cigars sometimes, and we’d “smoke” each other until some kids broke down in tears. Of course we become desensitized to the others' pain and suffering and get to the point where you only see a “dope fiend”, not a suffering person.  For me the “haircut” sessions were much more brutal and traumatizing than the encounter groups, since they were more personalized and took place in a smaller confined setting.  You are dealing with a junkie, never a healthy person in the DAYTOP state of mind. That one might be hard for people who were not in to understand. You are never truly “recovered” or totally “healthy.”  Of course it was a dehumanizing and degrading and de-individualizing process for all of us. A lot of people abused their power in the DAYTOP outpatient facility where we were for sure and none seem to be held accountable at all.  But at the time we all redefined the abuse as “tough love” which was being applied to make us “better.”  After all, the Monsignor wouldn’t want to deliberately hurt us, would he?

I remember how “Marcia” would try and teach me the art of “how to win friends and influence people” by giving me such advice as “try not to use big words when speaking to people; you are annoying and a showoff when you do that.”  Then I later used what I had learned subconsciously against others
in my life, furthering the cycle of abuse.  You always tell people what you think they don't want to hear, and ty and get them to internalize it as "truth."  This eventually encouraged my abuse of alcohol and drugs.  

Most of the “counselors” there were not really completely sober, either.  I had one friend who was in the home of one of the Puerto Rican counselors for whatever reason on one occasion, and she told me that she saw the guy drinking beer with his friends out by the pool.  There was another guy, an ex-DAYTOPian who never did graduate, who swore up and down to me much later on that he and another DAYTOP kid smoked a joint with one of the counselors while on the DAYTOP property.  I do not know this for an absolute fact, but the kid swore up and down that they all got high together and then the counselor told them “Hey, no hard feelings but you know I’m going to have to UA you guys, right?”  I was told that they all laughed about it all together like it was all a big joke.  Funny how the kids had to take random UAs but the counselors did not.

Personally, at the time I adhered to the program 100% while in it and did not get high again until I’d been at out of the program for less than a year.   I started smoking grass again at the ’94 Rainbow Gathering in Wyoming.  Ahh, those were the days!

So the long and the short of the matter is, the “one size fits all” approach to this kind of “therapy” does not work, and most of us came out of DAYTOP much worse off in the long run than when we went in  the place.  I have recently told one of my old DAYTOP buddies about this board, emailed him the link to it, and I hope that he will join us soon.  He'll tell you.

How parents can send their kids into such environments never ceases to amaze me.

Psy, frankly, the fact that so many idiots turn out to be parents in the first place, just out of some sense of obligation, never ceases to amaze me, man.  You know, one has to have a license to get and carry a gun, drive a car, practice medicine, so many things that one has be trained, qualified, and licensed to do, but any old dumbass can pop out as many babies as they want without a license, and then outsource them to another bunch of dumbasses to try to train them in all the stuff that was the parents’ responsibility in the first place!  You know?  That blows my mind.  Any idiot can have a kid and then give them to somebody else to do the raising.  Easy for me to say, I guess; I have no children.  I just have a very hard time understanding how and why somebody would do that shit to another little human being.  It’s incredible and so sad IMO.

BTW: also, does anybody know anything much about the history, background character, personality, and etc. of the Monsignor?  There’s little about him out there on the web.  Is he some kind of narcissist/sociopath type, or misguided but good intentioned man, or what is his story?  Anybody know?
All for now.  I’m going to have another mug of yerba mate and will get more of this done later.

This is not easy for me to go through, and makes me sad to think about, but I consider this board part of my therapy.  

Thanks for your time and support.

It sounds like they incorporated a bunch of elements into that one philosophy (attack on the self, missionary work, group cohesiveness). I am guessing that by "helping" others you would be expected to harshly confront them in group? What did help entail? Would it be accurate to state that the group was seen as more important than the individual?

Did you ever have to write written reports on yourself or others (some programs call this a "dirt list" or "moral inventory")? How detailed did these reports get? Were people expected to rat on others for minor offenses? For doubting the program? Was there a sort of "thought crime" you could be accused of? Did objective criteria for advancement in the program really matter, or was it mostly based on the subjective evaluations of the staff into whether you had the "right" attitude (whether you were agreeing with the group philosophy and taking it to heart)?

We'll save these for tomorrow night, OK?  It's pretty late and I am going to go to sleep soon.  Until next time,

B

A couple more notes/thoughts:

I remember that there were a few kids in the DAYTOP facility where I was who had come out of Straight; remember, I was in DAYTOP from '92 to '94, about a year and a half, and Straight closed in '93 I believe.  One of these kids was involved in some kind of class-action suit against them, I think.  We "inherited" some kids from Straight.  These kids used to tell horror stories of what life in Straight was like.  I am talking physical assaults, forced druggings, use of physical restraints, sleep and food deprivation, really overtly coercive and abusive stuff.  Over-the-top bad things of a physical nature.

To be fair, I never saw or experienced anything like that at all in my experience with DAYTOP.  We were encouraged to yell and scream and verbally abuse one another, they'd use humiliation and shaming, the deadinsaneinjail phobia indoctrination, the memorized and daily-recited DAYTOP Philosophy prayer and DAYTOP Values mantras that warped my sense of personal boundaries and identity...

But even then, there were certain guidelines, standards of behavior that we, the kids and counselors alike were obligated to abide by.  For instance, in the encounter groups, we had to keep both feet on the ground at all times and (as we were kids, minors most of us) were not permitted to use profanity during the group session.  Any kind of physical assault or fighting was never permitted.  There was this one time, though, when I remember (this was in an encounter group) the counselor in charge allowed one kid to walk over and push another kid down, hitting the floor while still in his chair (in the course of a particularly heated exchange of words in which the kid that got pushed was being downright insulting) but he (the counselor) broke it up before it actually came to blows.

So I never witness or experienced any physical or sexual abuse of any kind there, nothing at all like what I heard from kids coming out of Straight.   It was mainly verbal and emotional abuse, degradation, humiliation, and groupthink indoctrination.

I would tend to disagree. The results from most of these facilities are temporary. Even if it worked, (which it doesn't, since the changes are reliant on a controlled milieu), it would still be a process without informed consent. Who would fully and knowingly consent to brainwashing (not that such a thing is even possible, since Singer's first condition is that a person must remain unaware of how he is being changed)?

Well, I did say, "maybe, perhaps" they could be useful to some degree if we are talking about a hard-core addict in genuine denial about the extent of his or her problem.  

staff: you are a fuckup, a drug addict, and you need to admit that to yourself to get better.
inmate: but i'm not. Just because I smoked pot does not mean I am addicted to it.
staff: you wouldn't be here if you didn't have a problem. Your best stinking thinking got you here.
inmate: but that doesn't make sense. There was no due process or diagnosis. how do you know I have a problem.
staff: because you're here. Nobody is here that doesn't have a problem (mystical manipulation). We know. We are addicts just like you.
inmate: you don't know me. I just met you.
staff: an addict knows an addict.
inmate: that doesn't make any sense.
staff: that's because you're thinking too much. Remember. Your best thinking got you here. You are sick in the head. You are just in denial. It's not just a river in ejypt.
inmate: No i'm not in denial. you people are crazy!
staff: Your denial is just further evidence you are in denial.

Hahahaahha!!!  I had exchanges with "counselors" JUST LIKE THIS in that place.  Almost verbatim.  

You are blowing my mind, man.  You understand, you really seem to understand.

Wow, yes, I did eventually start to "Act as if" and then started to believe in the illusion...they repeatedly taught us that deadinsaneinjail stuff.  Exactly, word for word.  

I never did turn into a street junkie or crack fiend or anything (DAYTOP scared me away from that stuff for the most part) but got to where I was the biggest potsmoker this side of Cheech.  I am not proud of my past using and drinking.

My friends and buddies from there, however...two of them are dead now (one of them was a serious heroin addict who got killed while trying to steal a car), one of them spent a good while hooked on Oxycontin and had to go into another rehab to kick that stuff, another was on crack for a while, some have been in jail or prison, and I cannot think of one who stayed "clean and sober" in the longer run.

Like I said yesterday, two of my best friends are ex-DAYTOPians and they are doing relatively fine now, as am I.  

DAYTOP, then the various cults I mingled with, researched, and the one I was in, and the Army collectively really fucked my head up.  And it started with them.  Damn.

But hell, fifty years ago they would have been giving kids like us electroshocks and lobotomies and shit.  At least now we have psychotherapy.

Yeah. Fornits can be a head trip of sorts, but I agree. It's healthy in the long run to think about and process these things. IMO, the longer you wait the more difficult it is anyway.

Head trips are a good thing, as far as I am concerned.  Fornits for me is a healthy head trip.  Thanks for your time.