When teenagers run ... what do they run from

Being a parent I know that the most difficult decision you can make doing this job is when you realize that you cannot handle illness that your child has at home.

When the local treatment system fail, when the local school accepts bullying, when your complaints about bullying are met with angry false accusations to the local department of social services then you know that it is time to move your child out of your home. It is not that you try to avoid the responsibility as parent. But you are not a trained 24/7 nurse. You are not a doctor.

When your child need residential treatment, then you have to step aside as a parent with your need to have your relative near to save the child.

Of course the next question as a responsible parent should be: How to I make sure that my child is treated for the illness and for the illness only. I have my level of ethics and morale. I have my customs as an old-school Dane. I know that my children will grow up being an adult in a different world. When I was child there were no Internet, no computer games and Disney show were on one show Christmas Eve. It was OK to be a loner and odd by hanging out in isolation fishing in the nearby river.

Today the society is all about being social, work in groups and drinking a lot of alcohol in short time instead of spreading it out over the week. What equals 21 beers was the recommended quantity per week for a grown man when I was young. Today it is only 14 and to keep the party going the teenagers drinks them one on night staying sober the rest of the week. The teenagers are hammered and it takes days for them to recover which make me think that they lose quality of life. But that is the modern life. Instead of drinking a beer with your co-workers Friday after work learning about what went down with customers and suppliers, communication is emails with initials. Sometime you even don’t learn the name of co-workers before they move on.

So when a child gets lonely and tend to have enough quality in life doing art and just be alone enjoying nature a lot of well-meaning doctors and teachers will help this child to become more mainstream and a social person. Before you know it they suggest residential treatment.

Residential treatment programs are often located far from home. They tend to place themselves in the same area where other kind of businesses can’t function so they can get cheap and low-paid workers. How can you learn what it going on in these remote communities?

I found it difficult but established a network by going there every 14 day. People suddenly knew who I was. More importantly the employees knew that they couldn’t keep anything secret because any suggestion to limit my visitation with my child was met with protest and the possibility of me pulling my child from the treatment facility.

So when I see cases like the one with Gregory Mayer who ran from Discovery Ranch, I ask myself: How did the parents communicate with their son and was the son able to talk to the parents without employees present? I know there are some programs where there no communications with parents for months just after the child is enrolled in the facility.

That is dangerous. Every facility needs rules and guidelines. The parents have to learn and accept anyone of them. They need to know why they exist and why they need to be enforced. If the parents question the rules they must demand a good reason. If they cannot accept the rules, they shouldn’t enroll their child.

I had many talks with the employees at the facility where my child lives. My child has made no attempt to run. My child travels with trains and busses unattended. My child attends a public school near the treatment facility every day. My child has accepted the situation. This is the result of me acting as a responsible parent speaking about issues openly. It is not about demands made by me but open talks where my child has rules applying only to my child on an individual basis based on the illness which is treated.

There are some privileges other children at the facility have which my child doesn’t have. I don’t care. More importantly my child doesn’t care. We both know that it is a question about getting the most out of a situation where the illness has the potential to ruin my child’s life and the treatment plan is more important than any privilege.
I hope that Gregory Mayer makes it home alive. It cannot be fun being on the run and live like a homeless. But once he and his parents are united they should try and find a more local treatment facility where the facility has an open-door policy. Only then the treatment can be a success where both parents, employees and not least the child support a common goal.

I searched the Internet for testimonies which are clearly not false marketing. It doesn’t sound like a nice place I will send my child to. I know what suffering it has for a parent to make such a decision in the first place. I just don’t understand how they can be in business. Just the slightest research should have warned every family not to use this facility.

I send my prayers to Gregory Mayer and his parents. They need it.


Sources:

• DRruinedmylife at Discovery Ranch (Student testimony about Discovery Ranch)
• Trail of Basking Ridge teen still missing from Utah has 'grown cold,' father says (NJ.com)
• Factsheet about the program (Fornits Wiki)

9/11 is still creating victims

9/11 was a tragedy. Of course a lot of people died as result of the attack. Then we had to risk a lot of lives in order to bring the terrorists to justice. The economy took a hit. At my work where we printed tickets to a lot of airlines, jobs were cut. Families lost their income and became homeless or put on welfare.

But there are those victims who were children at the time of the attack. I googled the internet to find stories about the behavior modification industry the other night and found an obituary of a Adam Gibbon.

13 years old and a young teenager heading through the rite of passage towards adulthood, he lost his mother who was at work at the World Trade Center at the time of the attack.

Having lost an important guide in his life and having a father properly having to deal with his own grief too he made some wrong choices.

His family decided to sent him to Second Nature Wilderness program. A couple of goons where hired to drag him out of bed and transport him to the program.

His family did state that the traumatic experience improved his life but was that the truth. Did it just not made him hide the grief in silent making it harder for his family to know how much emotional suffering he had to deal with? We do know that alcohol were a factor in a traffic accident a short time before his death. We do know that both alcohol and drugs where found in his system when he died.

9/11 claimed two victims who weren't at the scene when the attack happended. Christopher Grieves, who was passenger in his car died while he was driving it. He died as result from an illness which properly could have been cured if he had dared to trust a professional instead of trying to self-medicate. But how can you blame him when he was forced to confess all about his past in public by professionals during the wilderness program?

This sad case shows how important it is for the entire family to support those among us who suffers the loss of a relative. Involve local therapy and talks in the home. Otherwise the help ends up being an invasion of privacy and will damage more than it will help.


Sources:

• Young life ends in Washington Township after criminal acquittal (New Jersey Hills)
• Long Valley's Gibbon Went Through Life-Changing Journey as a Tee (LongValley Patch)
• Victims (Fornits Wiki)

The world is still dealing with leftovers from the abusive Synanon/CEDU-cult

December 2013 The Daily Mail published a story about an English mother who sent her daughter to a boarding school using CEDU methods. This prove that there still are boarding schools out there which use the methods invented at the Synanon-church and later used at the CEDU schools. The CEDU School closed around 2005 due to a number of lawsuits which would have cleaned the owners out if they hadn't closed the schools before the trials.

However former employees and a number of students who had learned to bully their fellow students during the marathon group therapy sessions formed new boarding schools. Officially they have modernized the methods used at CEDU, but testimonies from a number of students’ show that they still end up hurt emotionally and to some extend a number of them suffer from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.

In the article the mother and daughter speaks of starting similar places in Europe. It had been tried and the authorities did shut the schools for good reason. In Europe our treatment methods are more developed. We do know that it is of no use to confront drinkers and even drug users before they are ready. We know that every person who suffers from some kind of abuse will reach a point in their life where they want to change.

I want to challenge that her daughter ever had a problem. We all lose people in our life. We lose parents, we lose friends, we lose co-workers, we lose children, and we have stillborn children. Farewell is a part of life. We learn to live with them when we gather as a family.

I believe that this mother had a problem she should have solved. Because she was a superwoman there was no family who could stand at the side of her daughter. So why then sent the daughter away? BECAUSE THE MOTHER WAS IN DENIAL!!! She neglected her position as a mother.

Teenagers drink. In Denmark where I live the law allows teenager to drink alcohol with the percentage below the safe limit of 16.5 Teenagers who drink are not the problem. Teenagers who don't and chose to stay away from their peer groups in school at the Friday bars in our high schools are the problem. They create alternative groups with alternative rules about morale and law. Before they realize it they have a criminal record.

She shouldn't have sent her daughter to the United States. She should have quit her job and found a local therapist for both her and her daughter so she could learn to parent again.

Normally I don't give a crap for therapist and social workers who speak of us as parents with a need for counseling and therapy. We are not only a result of our upbringing but also by culture, social heritage and our life experience. When you are aged above 30 you don’t need to learn new tricks.

But once in a while you find adults who are so focused on their career that they tend to avoid noticing what life tries to teach them and Nicola Horlick is one such woman. She put her daughter through hell and all she allowed herself to take in was a short list how to command her daughter around life a dog. A blog run by another human rights organization speaks of informing the social services about parents who exile their children abroad. Horlicks children are in need of protection from the social services so they don’t end up being outsourced to boarding school and wilderness boot camps whenever they try to live like normal teenagers do in England.

The school Horlick did choose was Carlbrook. It is one of the remaining schools using the CEDU system. I have made a link below where some of the former Carlbrook students provide testimonies. It is not fun reading and a reason while persons like me should continue to put a stop to such schools.


Sources:

• Multi-millionaire superwoman Nicola Horlick: The agonising day I let a 'Child Whisperer' into my home... to take my daughter to a US boot camp (and why her teenager Antonia says she was right to do it) (The Daily Mail)
• Factsheet about Wild2Learn (A CEDU alike program shut down in England)
• Testimonies from Carlbrook Students (Tales from the black school blog)
• Exiled and unwanted children (A blog about children exiled abroad by their parents)