Fornits

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

Boston has been a very good place for me to finish growing up. I moved here from Los Angeles when I was 21 and had yet another falling out with my family.  I'm from LA, and somewhat strangely to me, I am rapidly approaching being in Boston for as long as I lived in LA.  I can't belive that I am old enough for that to be true! Boston is a very nice "small city.  Lots of culture, people tend to be over educated and politically involved, two things I have come to value, and I do also like the seasons.

Best, M

Craig and I were in the same peer group and I knew him well.  I am sorry to hear that he has died and I am deeply sorry to hear of your loss.

Feel free to contact me privately.

Best, M

It is nice to read that the staff at some of the Cedu schools got their acts together where queer folk were concerned.  That was one area where the schools always seemed totally fucked up to me.  I don?t think that the program was organically homophobic but good Lord, most of the staff was.  Being gay, or even having same-sex sexual fantasies, were disclosures when I was there in the early 1990s.

Best, M

To the woman who graduated from Carlbrook:  Hi, I graduated from RMA in 1993.  Our experiences at our respective schools sounds in many ways similar and I too went to college shortly after being graduated from RMA.  My college experience remains one of the high points of my life.  However, I suggest that you contemplate finding a good psychotherapist within the next year.  My first year out of RMA was, in nearly all respects, great.  Beginning my second year though was tough.  I had made some good friends in college and was certainly having fun and involved in campus life, but there was a big part of me that missed the intimacy I had shared with people in my RMA peer group and with some staff.  There was emotional closeness with others on which I had come to rely and that feeling was simply lacking for me after graduation.  Added to that was that my peer group members were scattered across the Country and staff members were focused on new students.  It had been very painful and I had felt abandoned -- more aptly, a piece of me felt as if it were missing.  It was existential in its intensity.  After about 18 months I started therapy (I went to the college counseling center).  At the time I had felt like a failure.  I mean I had had a ton of therapy for nearly 3 years while at RMA, how much more did I need?  The pain I felt though was just too big to live with and was certainly greater than any shame I felt about seeking out therapy.  In retrospect it was a good decision.  I spent a little over two years in therapy integrating my RMA experience into my life outside the school.  I had to find a way to use what I had learned in a way that was tenable ? not overwhelming ? to my new friends. It seemed to work.  My experience was contrary to the those that some on here have shared, I found that people were drawn to me, in part because of the qualities I learned at RMA (trust, forgiveness, honesty etc.).  However, the context of college was very different from the residential treatment of RMA and had to be adapted to the new environment.  If you would like to talk/write further about this let me know (send a private message).  Best, M

Hey DLF.  Why so defensive?

I too am sad to see the schools close.  I was at RMA from 1990-1993 and like you attribute the work that I did there with saving my life. Going to RMA got me out of my house and away from my parents, taught me how to be a friend, how to take care of myself emotionally and physically, and how to build a sense of family with others.  What I learned there I continue to use in my life today.

I have also come to terms with the fact that many many people who were recipients of the Cedu education did not have a positive experience.  I was vaguely aware of that when I was a student, after all, only about 50% of the folks who came though the door when I was there finished.  What happened to the others?  What I didn?t really get back then though was that the program, and the way it was delivered, just wasn?t well suited for everyone.  Not only that, as someone who is now in the mental health field, I can easily see how the confrontational and sometimes verbally abusive nature of the program could be terribly detrimental for some folks.  For me though, I don?t think that anything else would have reached me.

I don?t let myself read fronits too frequently because I find it upsetting.  There are so many people out there who are enraged, seemingly vindictive and deeply hurt by their experiences at the various Cedu schools.  On one hand I feel defensive and on the other I feel badly for them.  And, from the number of lawsuits pending as well as stories I?ve heard from people who graduated years after me, it sounds like the program changed for the worse over the years.

Bottom line for me is that I?m sad that the school and program I graduated from doesn?t exist anymore.  I guess it really hasn?t for years, but still, I think that somewhere in my mind I thought of the school as being a place that would always be there. It seems to me though that this is about evolution.  The schools were no longer helping people as they should have, and now they are gone.

Best, Mark

Alex, is that you?  This is Mark, we were there at the same time.  Drop me a line at mad at mit dot edu.

I don?t know what their reasons for leaving were.  I had asked each of them but I didn?t think that that they were terribly candid, which in retrospect, I appreciate for the most part.  I began to sense that members of the staff were fearful about a year before I graduated.  I started talking about this sense in raps and people encouraged me to take care of my feelings.  I ran indictments against staff who really seemed to be covering things up; likely how they were feeling.  My indictments fell on deaf ears.  I had some relatively good conversations with one of my friends who were on the staff and she found a pretty good balance between telling me that I was sensing a growing notion among the staff but that it wasn?t appropriate for me to be involved in what was going on.  I had talked with my parents about leaving then; it had been so hard to see a place that I loved and had a sense of ownership in be changed programmatically without any process or explanation. Even worse, I experienced staff as either denying what was happening or sweeping it under the carpet and minimizing the growing changes.  My parents were supportive of whatever I decided to do, stay or leave.  One of my staff supports didn't try and reason with me emotionally as I might have expected.  He instead pointed out the obvious, that I was almost done and only had my Summit to finish.  Why not do it?  I decided to stay and continued to express my discomfort with the changes.

Lisa and Brett Carry, Rae and Sharon Kreider, Doug and Mona Kim-Brown, Mary and Gary Weber-Quinn, and Randy (who had been married to Caroline Wolf) all left within two months of one another.  Brett, Rae, and Randy had been ?Team Heads? and Doug had been headmaster of the school.  The various ?Families? had been dissolved and Teams had been created in their place when I was in Challenge.  Medication came to the school shortly thereafter and it confused the hell out of us because it had been so clear before that ?medication=bad? and now people were taking it (sometimes against their will).  Think for a moment how surreal it would have been for a staff to run an indictment at someone who was refusing to take medication!  It was crazy-making and many of us would cautiously flip the indictments on the staff ? they would usually relent pretty quickly, their hearts didn?t seem to be in what they were saying.  Our world was no longer simple and black and white and those who had seemed to know what to do and when now seemed all too human.  It was awful.

The Psychiatrist (Doug Ratelle sp.?) started after my I and Me.  He seemed to be one of the few staff who knew about medication but also understood our discomfort with what was happening.  He was comfortable with being indicted and was able to hold the very strong feelings that were fired at him by many of us who were displacing our anger at the school and our confusion over the changing program onto him.  He was a good guy in my memory.

There was also a Psychologist (David Masseli) who came on staff who was offering individual therapy to people for whom raps seemed to have little utility.  He also provided educational and personality testing to some, including me.  I had sought out his services in preparation for college.  I had always had some sense that I had trouble learning certain things and wanted some confirmation of it and to have some direction for what I might do about it.  He was GREAT!  I went through nearly a week of testing and then went over the results with him.  He was able to help me make sense of parts of myself that had always seemed mysterious.  My mom though was not into it (she didn't see the use) and when it came time for the second half of the work ? figuring out what I could do to compensate for a pretty clear learning disability, she stopped paying.  It had been a ton of money and in her mind she had spent enough on me for the time being and this testing was a budget item she crossed off.

This is by no means a complete story.  Even if I took more time I don?t really know what exactly was going on, what staff had been told, and why so many seemed to flee.  It also was more than a decade ago and I can?t trust my memory to recall what I might once have known, but well, here are the highlights.

Best, M[ This Message was edited by: mad on 2004-09-20 05:11 ]

Some of my best memories were made while I was at RMA -- several of my friendships, the Wilderness Challenge, and the I And Me to name a few.

My overall impression of my RMA years is a good one.  I learned that I could have friends and that I could be a good friend, I learned to build a sense of family, I learned that I didn't need to count on my blood relatives to get my emotional needs met, I learned that other people had gone through some really tough shit too, and I learned that many people have moments when they feel utterly alone and cut off.  The skills I learned there I credit with helping me to build the life that I have today, and life now is the best that it ever has been.

RMA was also a very harsh place to grow up and the way I learned to interact with others, and myself, particularly when emotionally vulnerable, was not kind.  There was never any room to slip up or to take small steps in a direction.  I also lost any sense of balance for several years -- things were either good or bad, right or wrong, life or death etc.  While that way of looking at the world served me when I really was at moments of life or death, it failed to help me in continuing to develop as an adult.  I couldn't be patient with myself or anyone else because everything felt like it had immediate consequences ? everything had equal importance and there was a constant push TO DO something.  It was a terrible way to live in many ways and my work in recent years has been about learning to be comfortable with ambivalence and to practice patience.

Best, M