The people working at these camps should be named and shamed.
How about we ban camps like that and let the judicial system deal with it instead starting an angry mob with pitchforks and torches?
Troubled teens left traumatised by tough love camps
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Re: Troubled teens left traumatised by tough love camps
#32"the world is hard so lemme hit you really hard so you learn fast what reality looks like and can fight back"
this, is one or another form, goes around A LOT still.
Re: Troubled teens left traumatised by tough love camps
#33Re: Troubled teens left traumatised by tough love camps
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks. I understand why my parents did what they did. I was addicted to meth and probably would’ve wound up dead without a serious intervention. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. (Clean and sober now.)
Sounds like the kind of thing that sounds like it would "help" on the surface but maybe create more suffering down the line.. do you think there were any benefits to your life for having gone or was it a purely negative experience?
I’ve gone back and forth on that question a thousand times. I’m almost pathologically agreeable so it’s easy for me to minimize and slip into a place of, “oh, it’s ok, I was off my rocker and extreme measures were necessary.” But just because I needed help doesn’t mean I needed what that school was doing. So, while it introduced me to a way to stay clean, and kept me clean for long enough to clear my head, those aren’t, like, super unique things that one can only find in these horrible programs. For me it was a net negative, and I could’ve gotten the positives from any number of other places.
Re: Troubled teens left traumatised by tough love camps
#35If anyone's interested in a first hand account of this type of thing there's good webcomic: https://elan.school/ I haven't checked in a bit but I think he's still releasing new chapters.
Came here to link this exact comic. It's heartbreaking to imagine the pain he went through, and he's only one person among many in similar situations.
He's still releasing chapters, almost at the end of his stay in Elan.
Re: Troubled teens left traumatised by tough love camps
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about we ban camps like that and let the judicial system deal with it instead starting an angry mob with pitchforks and torches?
Isn't it already abuse?
Great, then we just need enforcement which is much simpler than new laws and also doesn't require lynch mobs.
Re: Troubled teens left traumatised by tough love camps
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks. I understand why my parents did what they did. I was addicted to meth and probably would’ve wound up dead without a serious intervention. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. (Clean and sober now.)
Amazing work. From an internet stranger that's been around others who have been down a similar path. I acknowledge how hard that must be and continues to be. Keep up the good fight.
*fist bump*
Re: Troubled teens left traumatised by tough love camps
#38Parents whose choices and behaviors have resulted in having raised a troubled teen make really poor choices in how they deal with their troubled teen. That’s not surprising.
A child's peer group is often at least as important as whatever their parents do. Parent have little influence on that.
Is that really true? At my school your peer group was heavily influenced by your interests. Kids who played sports hung out together, kids into band hung out, kids in honors classes hung out. And kids with no other interests hung out too. By and large this last group had parents who weren’t involved in their kids’ lives.
It’s just one data point, and there were many non-troubled kids who had non-involved parents. But I can’t think of many cases of the converse, troubled kids with parents who actively were invested in their kids’ success.
Re: Troubled teens left traumatised by tough love camps
#39"When I was your age I got whooped all the time and I came out alright" says the parent who did not come out alright, left with an internalized belief that abusing children is totally fine.
Re: Troubled teens left traumatised by tough love camps
#40I went to one of these places when I was 13. Same thing, picked up in the middle of the night, and sent to a wilderness program that turned into 18 months of boarding school.
The school was burnt down by the students a few years after I left and I got a couple thousand dollars in a class action lawsuit when it came out that they were hiring unlicensed therapists and admitting students who should have been in intensive psychiatric care and were an immediate danger to others around them.
I look back on it as one of the most valuable experiences in my life, not because there was any validity to the program but because it just confronted me with a lot of intense challenges at a young age that really developed my critical thinking and mindset at a young age.