Day 401. Survivors found: 8
#1
I swear, I didn’t know that they did this to anyone else besides me. This brand of abuse happens behind closed doors in a therapist’s offifce, an area often shielded from the eyes of the law. You’re very young, alone and terrified. They purposefully isolate you to a such an extent that your experiences take on their own twisted “reality” independent of anything that could be conceived as normal. It’s a “velvet box,” just like Boeding said.
#2
Had I been the only victim of Attachment Therapy, or if the entire rotten operation were to stop on a dime today, then I wouldn’t speak of it again. I have no shame and no need of “catharsis” as most people conceive it. The thing that keeps me up at night is not the weight of my own experience, and what drives me to do this has little to do with my own life. Rather, it’s the unacceptable reality that this “therapy” brutalizes countless innocent children, has done so for over three decades, and shows little signs of stopping.
I don’t need to wring meaning out of this mass suffering. I just need this suffering to end.
#3
When I first learned how many children had been killed from this, I cried.
#4
It sounds incredible, but I was so busy extricating myself out of a backwater, broken home and into a school where classmates didn’t vandalize my artwork and hurl racial slurs, then onto college (a damned good one at that) and a world where people only say bad things about foster kids in whispers behind cupped palms — that I didn’t have time to even think about those years in Colorado. I never forgot about them, I just didn’t have enough space where I could begin to turn them over in my mind.
#5
That doesn’t mean that I didn’t have nightmares throughout my teen years, but we all get nightmares sometimes, right?
#6
I know that it’s impossible to stop child abuse as a whole, and I’m not out to try. But I’d like to think that I might be able to help throw some sort of wrench into a system that formally prescribes the suffocation, torture, brainwashing and degradation of children. Surely that’s not too much to ask?
#7
After learning of the true extent of this systemic torture and how it came to be, I went online fully expecting to find some sort of survivors community, a messageboard or website, anything–just some place I could vent to people who know what it’s like and can understand.
There is none. Nothing, not even any sign of the survivors themselves, save for some brief, anonymous recounts that I can number with one hand. Feels like I’m screaming in the vacuum of space.
#8
I don’t want to do this, and not just because it’s unpleasant, heartbreaking and mind-numbing.
I know that in order to successfully fashion and throw aforementioned “wrench” into such a sprawling, corrupt system, you’d need the eloquence of Demosthenes and the fury of Achilles, the patience of a saint and the cunning of a serpent. And while I’m proud enough to state that I’m blessed with a good sight more than some sad bastards, I’m self-aware enough to admit that I’m not cut out for something of this magnitude.
So, in my search for survivors, my greatest hope is finding my successor, someone who’s that much better than me. Shouldn’t be too hard, right?
Any day now.
Comments 11
I think you’re an amazing person. It’s damned hard to be the person to get the ball rolling to try and stop something as big and insidious as this “therapy”. I’m not really a religious person, but I like to believe we’re not given any more to deal with than we can handle. Great people have great challenges. I, for one, believe in you.
Posted 03 Apr 2009 at 18:54 ¶Better than you? You are goood at this Wayward.
Posted 03 Apr 2009 at 21:13 ¶Sometimes the weight is too much to bear. The responsibility to make right can be overwhelming. I know the feeling of treading water and the tide keeps taking you further out and all you are trying to do is keep your head above water. And #8 – the powers that one must go up against to get people to hear, obtain justice is the toughest to deal with. The site speaks for you, other victims and for itself. You make a difference. And perhaps you are doing more than you think you are. And will do more in the future than you expect you will.
Posted 03 Apr 2009 at 22:15 ¶@Fainites: Not as good as need be.
Posted 03 Apr 2009 at 22:53 ¶Some lowlife is trying to hijack your pseudonym and your goodwill.
http://thewaywardradish.wordpress.com and http://groups.google.ca/groups/profile?enc_user=WUZvNRwAAABHbae1gPZQAwWlWn1u53QWgINmpHwTsIrQ5mRykND0ew
Posted 04 Apr 2009 at 18:15 ¶Cheers for the tip.
That “lowlife” would be Ronald Federici and his co-conspirator Arthur Becker-Weidman.
LOL at these idiot quacks and their ham-handed smear campaign.
Posted 04 Apr 2009 at 19:45 ¶how do these people have this much time…?
oh, that is right, they don’t work, the steal money off the government to abuse kids… appear on TV shows as experts (because they say they are) and travel the world to educate people about how to abuse foster kids
wayward stick with it PLEASE!!!!!
We had an interesting night last night… my brother thought he had done a good thing, donated money to a child abuse prevent org. that supports UCANTBEATACHILD…. here locally out of Norfolk, Va…. I pointed out they support their own child abusing ATer… he threw away the stuff they gave him…. if only more people really knew..
please wayward keep it up…
Posted 04 Apr 2009 at 20:25 ¶Why do Ron and Dr. Art think calling us Scientologist will make things worse for us? I don’t follow this at all…
Posted 04 Apr 2009 at 21:01 ¶Scientology is a cult, so they’re trying to paint child advocates who oppose torture and quackery as the irrational ones. Being shortsighted bullies themselves, they don’t see how utterly laughable that allegation is.
Heh, I’d say that this is a clichéd case of projection. Like I said earlier, “given their use of cult-like maxims and antipathy to free speech, one would expect both AT and the Church of Scientology to get along swimmingly!”
Posted 04 Apr 2009 at 21:06 ¶When some of us saw the videos of Candace Newmaker being tortured and murdered, we thought it would be a snap to rid the world of Attachment Therapy/Parenting. Just lift up the AT/P rock and show what was crawling around underneath. Little did we know how much AT/P there was in the world, how entrenched it was, how much support it received from government agencies, and how well defended it was by sadists parading as therapists. We learned how many areas of society and academia thoughtlessly support AT/P and were part of the problem, e.g. everything from child welfare services to research review boards to continuing education accreditation.
Then a year ago, Wayward came on the scene and breathed a new life and energy into everyone’s work. No one could be better than you. I think your heroic efforts will snowball into something that can’t be ignored.
This ignoring problem has a parallel with the Holocaust, which was so awful that it took almost a decade after WWII before the reality of it really sank into the American psyche. While AT/P is not outright murderous, it is similarly monstrous, too horrible for many to comprehend. I’ve seen it again and again, how hard it is to believe therapists and adoptive parents could tolerate such abuse, much less engage in it.
I think all us opposing AT/P wish some rich foundation would write us and ask to take over the good fight. Until that day, it’s waking up each morning and not even daring to imagine what thousands of so-called “Attachment Disordered” children will face that day that keeps us going.
Posted 05 Apr 2009 at 01:00 ¶Glad to see you are still fighting on. I have not been on your site for a while and am appalled what so called ‘therapists’ are doing to you.
But some things have changed thanks to your efforts.
Thank You.
And many children who will not have to go through this and will never know you or what could have happened to them I am sure would thank you if they were aware of all of this.
Posted 19 Sep 2009 at 07:35 ¶Post a Comment