In a sense I can see why he wanted you to put that to bed, that cleansing ritual can be really good for you, but obviously in your case it hasn't worked....my concern here is why do you wish you could read back on them? It's almost like you've been taught that you are to blame, you are bad (in raps perhaps?) and you still have the need to look back and clarify that - please correct me if I'm barking up the wrong tree here.
I tore up my journals, and I wish I hadn't, as they were more candid than the notebooks, since the journals weren't read by staff. Probably did a better job of giving an accurate representation of my true feelings for the place while I was there.
I wondered for a while why I kept my notebooks, and my answer was always "evidence." I brought up in another thread that sometimes some of us belittled our struggles there, or remembered them another way. The notebooks helped to put things in perspective. I just recently pulled them out, since some stuff came up. It was the first time since graduation. In a lot of ways, it assisted in validating my experience.
Even when some of us realize how traumatic our placement was, there is that small part in our brain that is "crazy making", i.e. we were making it up, remembered it wrong, deserved it, were stupid to buy into it. When your brain is fucked with like that, you question your reality and perception to some extent, even decades later.
Some people are able to destroy the evidence, shut it out, and move on. Some of us need to read and say "Oh, ok, I was right, it was crazy."
When someone goes through therapy to make sense of what happened, there often needs to be some understanding of how they were broken. When was the moment when they moved from being autonomous to programmed? It's not sufficient for everyone to simply say they were brainwashed, for some, there needs to be an understanding of how, from a personal perspective, as opposed to a clinical one. Who first confronted you? When did fear turn to euphoria? When did you start to want it? When did you start to crave affection from staff who abused you? When did you first start to abuse others?
I recently began going back through my "full-time" notebook. (See
CEDU lingo thread for definition.) What I read within those pages was the depiction of the remaining shreds of a teenager's resistance being broken over a period of 14 days. The writing assignments began with the breaking down and humiliation, and finished with the reprogramming. By the time I was released from my booth and isolation at the end, I was one of them, and I loved it. Room 101.
I needed to read this, because I was still not clear on how it had happened for me specifically. I know how it happens for everyone, but the guilt and shame are hard to exorcise until you come to an understanding of what was done to you, how it wasn't your fault, and how your eventual compliance did not entail consent.
I agree, that it is not helpful to overly obsess. Trust me, I know what it's like to be consumed by something. Obsession exists because the person obsessing gets something out of it. I've found that it's helpful a lot of times to talk in therapy about the obsession itself, rather than what specifically I am obsessing about, in order to work out what I am getting out of it, i.e. what need I am trying to fulfill through the obsession, and to try to resolve that issue.
