Over the Edge Overcoming Obstacles

Gaudenzia


Presents

Over the Edge Overcoming Obstacles

***Rappelling Fundraiser***

September 22, 2012


Fulton Bank Building

3rd & Locust St., Harrisburg, PA



Rappel 18 floors! Raise funds for addiction treatment and recovery services.

Register online, sign your waiver and customize your page with a photo and testimonial.

Fundraising minimum is required.



The use of the building for this event has been graciously contributed by:

Select Capital Commercial Properties, Inc.




ATTENTION MEDIA:
TO REQUEST A MEDIA RELEASE OR INTERVIEW AT OVER THE EDGE


CONTACT JULIE GIRSCH, GAUDENZIA, (717) 579-3636 OR jgirsch@gaudenzia.org

PARENTS LEARN ABOUT MEDICINE ABUSE

Learn More » Follow Us On Twitter Friend Us On Facebook Forward To A Friend This School Year, Make a Commitment to End Medicine AbuseWhile helping your teens get ready to return to the classroom this month, it’s important to understand the pressures they may deal with in the coming year. Talking to them now about what they may face will help them be ready to make the right decisions. Perhaps over-the-counter cough medicine abuse has not come up in your child’s life yet, but since one in three teens say they know someone who has abused cough medicine, chances are this issue may surface at some point in your teen’s life. And while you are in “back-to-school” mode, this is the perfect time to introduce yourself to the school nurse in your child’s school and let them know about the Home to Homeroom toolkit. This toolkit was created by Stop Medicine Abuse and the National Association of School Nurses and includes materials that the school nurse in your child’s school can use to create awareness about medicine abuse. Get the Home to Homeroom Tool Kit Here. Get to Know Peggy McKibbin, Our Newest Five Mom! Peggy is a mother of two and a school nurse with nearly 15 years’ experience of working with teens, pre-teens, and their families. She has partnered with the National Association of School Nurses to educate her community about the dangers of medicine abuse, and she is passionate about the “teachable moments” that parents can use to talk to their kids. Get to know Peggy in her first blog post for Five Moms. Make the Time to TalkIt’s important for parents to be hands-on when it comes to their children’s schools. Teachers and school administrators have a great sense of what students are talking about, and it’s important to know what your school’s policy is on drugs and alcohol abuse. Ask your children’s school about prevention programs, substance abuse screening, and more. Get ideas for questions to ask your child’s school here.

Facebook in Sobriety

By Taylor Ellsworth

06/05/12   The Fix

When I was 16, it seemed like the whole world was making the transition from MySpace to Facebook. Facebook was much cooler and the fact that it had originally been exclusive to college students appealed to my desire to be someone other than myself—namely, a grown-up. My friends and I started using it essentially as a means of publicity: we documented every party and dance with hundreds of photos, all posted on Facebook within a day of the event. Never once did I think that I might regret being photographed with eyelids that wouldn’t stay open or a bottle in hand; we were keeping track of the glamorous nights we—well, really, I—wouldn’t remember. If no post-party pictures of me appeared on Facebook within a few days, I would feel anxious and left out. If others looked at the pictures that were posted and noticed that I wasn’t in them, I was sure they would know my secret: deep down, I was terrified that nobody liked me.

One of the most unshakable elements of my alcoholism has been the struggle to recognize objective reality versus the reality I make up based on my constant fear of what other people think of me. I can’t, for instance, handle AA meetings that include several minutes of silent meditation because, as soon as the room goes silent, I can hear the blood rushing through my veins and my breathing gets so loud that I am convinced everybody else can hear it too and they are wondering why the fuck I am breathing so loud and I am probably the only one with my eyes closed. I’ve learned over time that I have no control over this sort of thought process and that the only thing I can do is try to adjust my reaction to it. It was this perpetual fear that made me loathe my blackouts: the notion that, once I was past the drunken point of no return, I lost complete control over my image. I would say and do things that would make sick when I heard about them, and I couldn’t clean up the mess the next day because I would have no recollection of my missteps. And of course I harbored constant worry that everybody I knew actually hated me.


In the early days of recovery, I would troll my Facebook newsfeed, comparing my Saturday night routine of hitting a meeting and late-night diner to the always cooler experiences everyone else seemed to be having.

Facebook served as a tool by which to measure my likeability and popularity. If there were lots of pictures posted of me from the last party, I was cool. If someone mentioned an inside joke on my wall, I was interesting. Conversely, if a group of my friends posted pictures of some event that I hadn’t been invited to, I was devastated. In sobriety, I have often heard the phrase, “Don’t measure your insides by another person’s outsides.” This method of comparison, however, was the exact function that Facebook served for me. If I found anything social involving my friends that didn’t include me on Facebook—invitations, pictures, anything really—I would be overwhelmed by a sense of despair. Even if I had gone out both nights of the same weekend, it meant nothing about my relationships unless what appeared on Facebook was aligned with how I wanted to be perceived.

When I look back at those pictures—I am still tagged in almost all of them—it seems like all I did was hang out at parties. The truth is that I spent many nights alone, wallowing in my bedroom, drinking Nyquil and hating myself, but there is no evidence of that on Facebook. In the photos, I look like any other shallow teenage party girl. However, more often than not, I felt like the biggest loser on the planet. And my skewed self-image followed me into sobriety as well.

In the early days of recovery, I would troll my Facebook newsfeed, comparing my Saturday night routine of hitting a meeting and late-night diner to the always cooler experiences everyone else seemed to be having. Most of my friends were off at college for the first time, experiencing the wonders of themed frat parties and day drinking.

Of course, since getting sober, I have learned how to take pride in more than the attractiveness of my public pictures and every once in a while I accomplish something I deem actually Facebook-worthy, like finishing an 18-mile run or getting a raise. In these moments, I perfunctorily write a status update to inform the masses, despite the fact that I’ve already told my real friends. The successive flood of likes and positive comments provides an artificial rush that allows me, for a handful of seconds, to feel superior. However, when I don’t have anything spectacular and like-worthy to tell my “friends,” Facebook only aids me in beating my self-esteem with a two-by-four. For me, there is no space on Facebook in between being the best and the worst.

When I hear alcoholics share in meetings about the newfound confidence and self-worth they got from working the steps, I often don’t relate. I have certainly grown from working the steps as well: I don’t hate myself and want to die today; I don’t have to get a drink in me immediately upon entering a social situation; I never wake up next to anyone besides my boyfriend or my cat; I don’t tear my friends down behind their backs to feel prettier or smarter or more interesting; but despite the drastic turn my life has taken, I still struggle to like myself most days. Maybe my insecurity is the demented child of my alcoholism and bulimia, or maybe it really is an eternal alcoholic affliction that nobody wants to admit.

If I know that my self-esteem is so fragile that a superficial status update can change it dramatically, why, one might wonder, is Facebook still the home page on my browser? Well, partially, anyway, because I’m wiser now. I know that timelines don’t serve as an avatar of the person whose name flanks the top of the page because most people share only their successes and that what I see is a collection of my friends’ and barely-acquaintances wittiest status updates, cutest Instagrammed pictures, and most glamorous check-ins. I get that Facebook simply doesn’t provide an accurate portrayal of anyone’s life. This knowledge is the difference between my relationship with Facebook at a coked-out 17 years old and now. Sometimes, I can recognize that the thought, “Fuck, I should be living in Barcelona right now, with her legs, her hair, opening graduate school acceptance letters, baking organic gluten-free muffins, running eight-minute miles and building houses in Guatemala” is unreasonable and slightly insane. This sort of thought used to be my reality. When it does feel real, I know to call another sober woman because usually just starting a sentence with the words “I saw on Facebook” reminds me of the triviality of my imagined deficiencies.

My sponsor doesn’t have a Facebook page so she can’t understand why I continue to abuse myself by checking mine every day. And I can’t bring myself to delete it. I say it’s because I want to stay connected with friends from afar, or I don’t want to be forgotten from invite lists because of my non-presence on the social network. But it’s also about control. It terrifies me that the world will keep spinning without me. As long as I have a Facebook page, I can monitor everyone else, competing with their broadcasted accomplishments, showing them how far I’ve come since passing out on their bathroom floors. It’s the same delusion of control that I maintained while drinking—that refusal to let go in spite of obvious evidence that it was only hurting me because I was convinced that if I did, I would be destroyed by my feelings. What happened to me after getting sober, however, wasn’t destruction. With sobriety came freedom from the awful bondage of the bottle and baggie. Maybe someday I’ll be willing to find out if deleting Facebook brings similar relief. But I’d like it even more if I could learn to like myself enough that I don’t have to know.

Taylor Ellsworth writes from Portland, Oregon. She also wrote about getting fired by a sponsee and managing her eating disorder, among many other topics, for The Fix. Follow her on Twitter here.

Parents Helpline

DearJoseph,

As a supporter of The Partnership at Drugfree.org, you have contributed to the profound impact we have on families and friends coping with a loved one’s drug or alcohol abuse.

I am proud to share with you our new, online annual report, found exclusively at drugfree.org. In it, you’ll see the collaborative efforts of our staff, partners, sponsors and those who share their voice on this critical health issue.

Among 2011’s many successful initiatives:
We launched the bilingual Parents Toll-Free Helpline, where licensed social workers skilled in addiction counseling offer confidential, comforting guidance for concerned callers.
The Parents360 Plus prevention program was evaluated and scientifically proven to better educate parents on discussing substance abuse with their children, by providing them with the tools and resources necessary to have those conversations.
We enhanced our educational efforts with Join Together, our collaboration with the Boston University School of Public Health, to deliver you the most up-to-date substance abuse and addiction news that impacts your work, life and community.
Our documentary, “I Thought I Knew: Real Stories of Addiction and Recovery,” was developed to highlight the true stories of people who have faced addiction. It received top honors from the Association of Independent Commercial Producers Awards, was selected as the daily doGooder Video of the Day and featured as part of the Join Meeting on Adolescent Treatment Effectiveness conference.

These are just a few of our noteworthy successes from the past year. It’s because of you and your support that we have made strides toward our vision of a world where all young people will be able to live their lives free of drug and alcohol abuse.

Please make a donation today to continue supporting our work in 2012.




Thank you,

Steve Pasierb
President and CEO
The Partnership at Drugfree.org


P.S.Text DRUGNEWS to 50555 and reply YES to receive the latest news and updates from The Partnership at Drugfree.org.

Cult Culture and the 12 Steps

A small but significant rate of 12-step programs—from AA to rehabs—turn into dangerous cults. What makes working the program go so wrong?


By Maia Szalavitz

08/27/12

12-step programs—with their clichéd language, frequent meetings and religious mien—are cults. So say many critics. But in fact, the traditions of AA, NA and the other As are intentionally structured to prevent their members from crossing that line. Nonetheless, there is a reliable way to use the steps to create a full-fledged destructive cult.

Cults are not simply weird or dangerous religious groups, according to those who study groups that have had disastrous outcomes, like Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, which ended in mass member suicide, and the Branch Davidians, which ended in a fiery siege by federal agents. Instead, cults are self-enclosed organizations that use a well-defined set of coercive persuasion tactics.

These typically include isolating people physically and emotionally from friends and family, breaking them down emotionally and taking total control over their environment, movement and finances. Because these procedures can also characterize rehab, residential treatment itself without proper oversight carries a risk for creating cultlike behavior.

However, since 12-step programs in the community aren’t residential, can’t physically isolate people or take their life savings—and because they are formally leaderless—they have little risk of becoming the next Jonestown, Guyana, or Waco, Texas.

But the repeated development of cults or near-cults—from Synanon toStraight Inc. to today’s Washington, DC, Midtown Group—based on the steps is not coincidental. The reason is a toxic compound created when AA’s voluntary steps are twisted so that they can be imposed by force, especially in settings where people cannot escape. Chuck Dederich, the founder of Synanon, was the first to recognize the power of this recipe for subjugating people and creating followers. Indeed, Synanon was the model for every “therapeutic community” (TC) in the US, including mainstream leaders like Phoenix House and Daytop.

Originally hailed in the 1950s as a tough, peer-pressure-based cure for heroin addiction, by the late 1970s it was stockpiling weapons, forcing couples to get sterilized and swap partners and, perhaps most notoriously, had placed a de-rattled rattlesnake in the mailbox of a lawyer who had begun winning cases against it on behalf of former members who had been abducted and abused. When Dederich was arrested for conspiracy to commit murder in the snake incident in 1980, the charismatic leader was dead drunk.


A toxic compound is created when AA’s voluntary steps are imposed by force.

By then, however, the Synanon model had already spread across America and around the world. In addition to Phoenix House and Daytop, the best known include Delancey Street, Walden House, Gaudenzia, Gateway House, Marathon House, Odyssey House, Samaritan Village, Amity, CEDU, the Seed and Straight Inc.

Following Synanon, these TC programs are or were residential, typically lasting from 90 days to 18 months. Originally, the idea was to break initiates through strict rules and daily humiliation and confrontation, and then rebuild them as they work their way up a structured hierarchy.

To rise through the levels toward graduation, participants have to demonstrate compliance by imposing the rules on others and emotionally attacking their fellows to help break them. These days, many TCs have abandoned the marathon attack therapy sessions and tried to reduce or eliminate the use of humiliation—but they retain the strict rules and hierarchical systems.

So how do the use of attack therapy and forcing the steps on people inspire cult formation?

Step 1: It starts with the first step. Voluntarily admitting you are powerless is relatively harmless (although there’s some evidence that this belief as part of the disease model of addiction is linked with worsening relapse). By contrast, however, being forced into a position of absolute powerlessness is what defines a traumatic experience, and so it can cause post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and related psychological problems, like depression. And traumatizing people is an excellent way to break their will and turn them into compliant followers.

Research into PTSD repeatedly confirms that at the heart of all trauma is the feeling of being completely vulnerable and out-of-control in a frightening situation, in a word, powerless. Whether well-intentioned or not, any program with the capacity to disempower participants by blocking their contact with the outside world and controlling their access to food, sleep and social support is potentially dangerous. This dynamic—in connection with the way power itself corrupts staff—explains why institutions ranging from orphanages to hospitals to prisons, where vulnerable people are subject to total control by others, constantly have abuse scandals and why they need to be subject to intense oversight.

Steps 2 and 3: When imposed coercively, these principles make matters worse. Again, voluntarily surrendering to a “higher power” can feel healing for many—but being forced to submit to human beings who make themselves and their program into your higher power is far less benign. Believing that surrendering your will and even your life to the leadership is the only path to recovery results in overwhelming vulnerability.

Not only is this dangerous for the victims, but it is also risky for leaders who are convinced that they “know best” and their program is so effective that they are justified in using any means necessary to “help” people. Once staff embrace the belief that breaking people to fix them is acceptable, once they “know” that they are absolutely righteous even when being emotionally cruel, the corrupting nature of this total power is intensified.

This elevation of staff and dehumanization of patients is the opposite of treating people with dignity and respect: the word of the “healers” is law and those in need of healing are powerless.

At rehabs, for example, when staff believe that they have all the answers, including which patients are “in denial” or “faking” or lying or, for that matter, telling the truth, there is a great potential for serious health and psychiatric complaints to be ignored. This can have—and has had, in dozens of cases—fatal consequences for those who are physically detained in programs. It also allows power to run amuck.

Steps 4, 5 and 10: Now, add in the demands for the confession of sins and for an ongoing moral inventory and you have an additional method of controlling people. Most religious cults focus on confession because knowing members’ darkest desires and most shameful secrets increases the power of the leaders. Not only can frequent confessions enable the blackmail dissenters, but they can also train participants to focus so relentlessly on their own failings that they have no energy left for criticism or resistance of the group itself.

Romney's Big Drug Problem

What drug policy would Romney issue from the Oval Office? He's not saying. But his financial ties to the owners of teen rehabs infamous for abuse speak volumes of trouble.


Romney, Sembler and Adelson photo

By Jed Bickman

08/07/12
Mitt Romney's Great American Rehab Rollup


With the future of America’s response to drug use and addiction at stake in this presidential election, many are wondering how a Mitt Romney administration would take up the mantle of the War on Drugs. Beyond his opposition to medical marijuana and his occasional hawkishness on foreign drug-war interventions, the candidate himself has, characteristically, kept his positions strategically nonspecific. This week's Republican National Convention in Tampa, at which the Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan ticket will be officially ratified, is unlikely to clarify the matter, as it is being scripted entirely around the goal of portraying a kinder, gentler Romney, a common man devoted to family, faith and country. Drugs are assuredly not part of that picture. However, the records of those around hims speak loudly.

Taking a page from Nancy “Just say no” Reagan, Ann Romney has said that as first lady, her pet issue (Michelle Obama has obesity) would be to work with “at risk” teens, code for drug-using teens. (The wife of Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan, Janna, has a different potential drug problem: she was a lobbyist for PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry's trade group.)

This is not surprising, given that Romney has a long history of being involved with in “rehab” schools [OK?] for teens—not just any institutions but “tough love” ones with disturbing reputations for abuse. And not just one or two tangential connections, either. Mitt Romney’s entanglements with abusive schools for troubled teens are anything but tenuous.

First of all, as The Fix reported in April, he still makes money off of them. In 2006, after Romney’s tenure as CEO, Bain Capital bought CRC Health, which owns Aspen Education Group, a large chain that includes boarding schools for “troubled teens” that use “behavior modification” techniques. Although Romney left Bain before they bought CRC Health, he still shares in Bain’s profits.

Moreover, of the three Bain managing partners that sit on the CRC board, two gave the Romney super PAC, Restoring our Future, a half million dollars, on top of the maximum $2,500 dollars they each gave directly to the Romney campaign.

As a recent Salon investigation revealed, Aspen Education has an impressive rap sheet of wrongful deaths and abuse at its institutions. Children have died of neglect under their care as the pressure that Bain exerts on the company to make a profit filters down to their patients. Among the most serious abusers is Mount Bachelor Academy in Oregon, where staff members forced residents to wear provocative clothing and do lap dances. At a clinic called Turn-About Ranch in Utah, a girl was duct-taped to a chair after filing a complaint about the sexual abuse she had suffered at the hands of CRC staff. In addition, the quest for larger profit margins routinely leads to people being kept in these institutions longer than is therapeutic so that the institution can reap the revenue.


Bain Capital's Aspen Education has an impressive rap sheet of wrongful deaths and abuse at its rehabs.

Mitt Romney has even closer—and more explosive—ties to other abusive rehabs. One of the chief fundraisers for his 2008 presidential campaign, Robert Lichfield, who raised $300,000 at one Romney fundraiser, was the founder and a board member of the World Wide Association for Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASPS). This network of 20 schools nationwide and in Costa Rica, Jamaica, Mexico, Samoa and the Czech Republic has faced charges of fraud and other crimes in several states and numerous federal civil suits alleging child abuse, including one by 350 former students. Many have been raided by officials and closed. Staff routinely locked teens in dog cages, sexually and physically abused them, starved them, and emotionally brutalized them.

Like Romney, Lichfield is a Mormon, and some ex-students have reported being sent to the schools by their parents after questioning or rejecting Mormonism in order to be “re-educated” in Mormonism—to the exclusion of other (or no) religions. The WWASPS scandal got so hot that the Romney camp had to break its lucrative ties to Lichfield when the indicted Utah millionaire “resigned” as one of six co-chairmen of Romney’s Utah finance committee.

But the real icon of drug policy in Romney’s campaign, deeply involved to this day, is Melvin Sembler, a Florida strip-mall magnate who was a national fundraising chair for Romney in 2008 and is again a Florida State Co-Chair for Romney’s finance committee. Sembler, whose office is across Tampa Bay from where the Republican National Convention is taking place, held the first GOP fundraiser for Paul Ryan after Romney tapped him as his VP. (Florida, of course, is one of three crucial swing states in presidential elections.)

He gained the post as a reward for his financial loyalty to George W. Bush. But Sembler has raised money for and, in turn, won favors from Republican Party leaders going for decades. He served on President Reagan's White House Conference for a Drug-Free America. More recently, he was a drug-policy advisor to both President Bush and Bob Martinez, Florida's former governor, according to a 2005 in-depth investigation by John Gorenfeld on Alternet.com.

Sembler is militant in his support not only of the drug war but of foreign wars in general, cofounding, along with Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino owner and Romney backer to the tune of $100 million, “Freedom’s Watch,” a group that spent millions to advocate intensifying the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both Sembler and Adelson accompanied Romney on his July trip to Israel. Adelson's extravagant bankrolling of Romney's campaign will be rewarded at the Convention with the naming of its "Woman Up!" pavilion after his wife, Dr. Miriam Adelson, who runs the Adelson Clinic, which treats patients with opiate addiction, specializing—curiously enough—in teens on oxy, in Las Vegas and Tel Aviv. (The Fix found no record of charges of abuse at the Adelson Clinic.)

But Mel Sembler’s name is most likely to strike fear into the hearts of anyone involved in teen drug rehabs. Sembler and his wife, Betty, founded a chain of such institutions under the name Straight, Inc., which at its peak in the ‘80s had 12 clinics in nine states and a track record of extreme abuse. Straight’s “rehabilitation” approach was adopted from an earlier program called The Seed, which was suspended by the US Senate for practices similar to Communist POW camps. As in the Scientology’s Narconon rehabs, Straight developed the cultlike feature of turning former students into counselors who embraced and enforced the institution’s brutal regime.


A student at Straight, Inc.—one of Bush's "thousand points of light"—was beaten, raped and locked in a janitor’s closet.

In one of many stories from Straight that have been exposed, a teenage girl testified to being compelled into the program after being caught with an airline bottle of liquor given to her by a friend, and then beaten, raped, locked in a janitor’s closet in pants soiled by urine, feces, and menstrual blood, forced into a false and bizarre confession to being a “druggie whore” who went down on truckers for a fix. Monroe’s story is extreme but in no way unique. Similar accounts from Straight survivors have been collected en masse online atTheStraights.com.

In one Pennsylvania death row case of a homophobic hate-murder, evidence of the perpetrator’s abuse at the hands of Straight counselors—which included beating boys while calling them “faggots” and spitting on them—was an admissible mitigating factor.

“My best guess is that at least half of the kids were abused,” Dr. Arnold Trebach, a professor emeritus at American University and founder of the Drug Policy Foundation (now the Drug Policy Alliance), which supports ending the drug war, told Gorenfeld.