Thirty years of trying to suppress my memories of being there and the fallout to my health and my family just, in the past few weeks, exploded to the surface when I found several other testimonials that reframed and recontextualized the story for me. I am so grateful to this group and others it makes me almost breathless. I feel like a part of me is waking up. I didn’t realize how much of that rhetoric had been internalized: That I was bad in some essential and absolutely way, that I was responsible for all the bad in my life, which is what their “therapy” taught us, over and over. Now, after reaching out to a few of my cohort there, I see just how bespoke the hell they put us through was… how my worst fear was exploited over and over, and how effectively that made me compliant. I’m so grateful that people are doing this. If there is any way I can help or any support group I can be a part of, I am interested.
Sleep deprivation, isolation, induced vomiting, forced confessions; sexual impropriety that never QUITE went over the line in my case but was definitely not legal or appropriate, and was probably more an exercise of power than sexuality (but isn’t all coercion?); the holding of my confessions over my head, random reward and punishment systems; the way we all competed for the attention and favor of sadists, whew. The way that place cultivated insecure attachments in us was downright cultish.
I think the apotheosis of my experience there was that lifeboat exercise in the Summit workshop. Already feeling abandoned and forgotten by my family (and a few friends, since they were all encouraged to write me angry letters), I think that exercise–the significance or lesson of which was never explicated or addressed by staff–was the worst moment of my life. Many other worse things happened in my life subsequently, but I always felt I had agency in them, and I have never, at any other time, considered suicide. In many ways I still live within that paranoia, staving off another full-scale rejection from people I thought cared about me.
And I will never, ever forgive myself for participating in the savagery. I knew then and know now that my moral compass does NOT allow me to join a vicious verbal dog-pile on a vulnerable person until they break. But I only held out for about two or three months before I was doing it too. I will freely and openly apologize to anyone I abused while there.
