Fornits

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

Seven steps were totally different then the steps to graduation.  

As I remember them in 1976 they were

1 newcomer living away from home with an oldcomer

2 newcomer living at come but coming to the seed all day everyday with no contact with outside world

3 Going back to school or work (I think you became an oldcomer about then.) Still coming to the seed at all times you were not at work or school with no outside contacts, stops on the way to or from the seed, no phone calls etc.  This was an odd step for me since I was only twelve when I was told I could go back to work(it was July)school wasn't an option.  Believe me I found a job.

4 Three nights when you only had to go to the seed three nights a week and one full weekend day.  At this point you could talk on the phone and go out and do things with other seedlings or family.  Permission for outings had to be requested at least three days ahead in writing.  Staff said yes or no,for their own quirky reasons I could never quite understand.  Of course we all knew, that the trully straight didn't want to be out of the raps three nights so most people went more often--or had good excuses ready like I had to make dinner for my family cause my mothers has been working so hard.

Last stage graduation, when you didn't have to come in anymore but after a long time of being told that if you were  really strait you would be there all the time regardless many went on to try for staff.  Not me, on the night I  graduated I swore to everyone it would change nothing.  I would still be there helping out the newcomers all the time.
I never went back!

The staff decided when we moved forward and finally graduated.  There was no time frame applied to everyone.
pigeon

You know what I liked about Art?  When he came up to Cleveland to visit-- raps suspended! It was the Art show for as many hours as he wanted to stand in front of us.  Also no one ever graduated when he wasn't at the open meeting so once I was on my three nights every visit was another chance for a get out of jail free card.
amy(pigeon)

I plugged double think into google and found all these listings popped up about George Orwell.  I hadn't remembered it as a phrase he coined I thought I made it up to explain how I both thougth I was happy at the seed( because I had to) but also knew on some level that I hated it.  How I learned to hold two thought two feelings at all times one displayed and one submerged.  

Double think was a term used by Orwell in 1984.
"It doesn't matter what you think but what you double think."  It was basicly a method to control people by preventing clear self knowledge and therefore action.
wierd huh?

Did anyone else believe the seed line that the staff and truly straight, best seedlings, could see your wrong thoughts and feelings. Or did most of you figure out the whole place was bullshit, while you were in the program and consciously faked it to get by-to get out.

I guess we had different songs in Cleveland, mostly familiar songs rewritten to be seed songs;
An Army Made Of Seedlings comes to mind.  Christmas was the worst, all those carols meant to feature god changed to feature the seed.
"The seed of hope the weary world rejoices
for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn
FALL ON YOUR KNEES" oh puke.
Did you sing jingle bells everyday cause everyday your straight is like christmas?  Were you required  to bounce with ridiculus enthusiasm for the honor of saying why we sing jingle bells?  Really you'd think we were begging for each  days get out of the seed free card.
Lots of songs have been ruined for me but jingle bells has no effect.  Probably because it was the last thing we did each day so eventhough the seed took it, it signaled freedom each day.  Sing jiggle bells  and go the fuck home.

Yeah, groups really make me contrary, argumenative.  I think it's the flight or fight response.  I couldn't fight before, so I fight now.
When I was in group therapy I was always "the truth teller," which was fine but it's sort of isolating to always be confrontational.
When I first realized what I had really gone thru in the seed I had this fantasy that I would go back(graduates always welcomed, right?)put up my hand and tell them off.  Never actually tried to do it, way to scarey.

Just read this entire subject heading for the first time.  Amazed by the postings about the seed as something positive.  I do not think of the seed as a positive experience in my life! They
stole my mind, seperated me from my family and kept me living in constant fear long after I had graduated.  I was twelve when my parents put me in there so when the staff and my oldcomers said they could read my mind--see right through me-- I believed it.  Unlike some other people, who  said they eventually hit a point where they realized they were just faking it I never cam to that realization.  I wish I had. Instead I struggled to control my mind, secretly fearing that I would be discovered and put back on the front row for nothing worse then then thinking some guy was cute or not making my bed.  I've always said it was brainwashing I've always said it was more like a cult then a treatment center.  This site has helped me pinpoint more clearly why that is true.
I have chronic muscle pain and a therapist once suggested to me it may have been caused by the constant stress and tension I experienced at the seed.  
I was in group therapy for survivors of sexual abuse and kept wondering why everyone else said they felt safer together talking about those things  but I did not.  Finally I realized that because of the seed a group is not a safe place for me, I was abused by a group.

Now to my mixed feelings.  Unlike many of you I do not think of my pre-seed friends fondly either.  They were mostly high school boys who molested me,  girls who regularly turned on me, boys my age, who I once saw dislocated a girl's hip while trying to gang rape her in a boy scout fun house at a school fair(yes, they were boy scouts.) I remember when I went back to school I was happy that I couldn't talk to them.  I remember that it was suddenly easy to have no friends where previosly it had been so important that I ended up with the worst friends imaginable. In my less guarded moments, I wished I had just done it myself and avoided the seed but I am pretty sure I wouldn't have been able to.  I feared the seed more than I feared my old friends and because of that I learned that my old gang couldn't hurt me if I didn't have anything to do with them.   Sometimes it feels like six of one half dozen of another abuse by my friends or abuse in the seed.  The seed at least had an end although I realize the damage is endless.  It took me about five years to admit to myself that I hated it there and about ten to admit that it was an abusive cult.  
Does anyone else have these sort of mixed feelings?

I was put in the cleveland seed in 1976. I think it was pretty big at the time.  Like maybe 100 people.  It was in an old orphanage.  It was huge with all these spaces we never saw.  The open meetings were in the old gym.  By the time I came back for my first anniversary (I graduated in about nine months and came up with lots of reasons I couldn't go in after that) the open meeting was in the rap room(much smaller) and there seemed to be only about twenty five seedlings.  They closed and left suddenly over night taking some kids with them and graduating some over the phone.  I think that was in 1979.  That morning there was an article questioning their validity in the local paper, The Plain Dealer, and they were long gone.