Being hit as a child

[dragoncar]

I got a good spanking once when I flooded the elementary school bathroom with my friend.

For some reason, I still think it's funny when someone decides to do this to a public bathroom. 

I have no idea why.

Too much fiber

[MediumTex]

I was sort of a mix of my two sons when I was a kid.  I was very sensitive, but I also fought a lot and got in trouble frequently. 

All of the spanking my dad could administer didn't do that much except make me afraid of him for much of my childhood and make me very hesitant to be honest with him if I thought it would piss him off.

My dad and I got along a lot better when I grew up.  I know everything he did when I was a kid was because he loved me, but the home he grew up in simply didn't give him any tools to be a good parent himself.

The thing that happened in my childhood that really pissed me off was when I was 14 my parents decided that I had become too defiant for them to handle (I was probably just depressed and needed to be treated for that), and this piece of shit psychiatrist convinced them that I was a drug addict (I wasn't taking any drugs of any kind) and I was being defiant because drug addicts have trouble maintaining healthy relationships.

This was back in the days that insurance companies provided far more generous mental health-related hospitalization benefits than they do today (and I learned much later that psychiatrists, like many health professionals, become very skilled in treating their patients right up to the amount that their insurance will pay), and so rather than being treated on an outpatient basis or maybe having a short in-patient period of mental health treatment, I was sent to a mental hospital for three months.

While in the mental hospital I initially resisted the program because I felt like I had been kidnapped and was being asked to sign "confessions" like U.S. POWs in Vietnam and other conflicts were made to do.  I felt it was my duty as an independent human being to resist such gratuitous thuggery in the hope that I would find a way out before they were able to break my mind.

This resistance eventually led to me being locked in a poorly lit room for a week to think about why I wasn't following instructions (the last straw was when I refused to write in my daily journal).  The room had nothing in it but a bed in the middle of the room with leather straps on it for fully restraining uncooperative patients.  There was a really sadistic quality to being made to sleep in that bed without being strapped down, but knowing that the slightest infraction would result in being restrained for hours.  While I was in that room I thought about a lot of things, and I realized that simply being right and strong-willed wasn't enough to survive in the environment I was in.  I knew that I wasn't up for hours or even days of being strapped down and forcibly drugged.  I realized (like all imprisoned people probably do) that I would have to become a much better liar and manipulator to get out of solitary confinement and eventually get my freedom back. 

I decided to adopt a similar disposition to Winston Smith in 1984 after his mind had been completely destroyed by the state, and once it appeared that all of the fight had been bled out of me, I was released from solitary confinement and after that I strived to make myself into a model mindless prisoner.  I said all of the right things and acted immensely grateful for the privilege of being locked up with a bunch of delinquents and drug addicts.  I was told that I was making excellent progress.  After about 6 weeks of this act (and when the limits of my in-patient insurance coverage had been reached) I was pronounced "cured" and sent home to my parents (who had not been permitted to have any contact with me during my hospitalization--don't ask me why they went along with such a moronic condition). 

As I left the hospital and tried to shake the Winston Smith facade I had so carefully cultivated, I noted the intense hatred I felt for most of the people who worked in the hospital.  I felt they had all been co-conspirators in what was essentially a combination child abuse ring/insurance scam.  I felt a special kind of loathing for my psychiatrist, and ever since it has made it very hard for me to get anything useful from mental health professionals because I assume that most of them are manipulative liars who are pretty lazy when it comes to offering real insights to their patients. 

Ironically, the thing from my childhood that probably triggered the need for the most adult mental health therapy was that involuntary stay at a mental hospital when I was 14.  It did, however, teach me about the damage that the abuse of power can cause and the degree to which many people mindlessly submit to authority figures.  That one experience has probably contributed a lot to who I am today, and in some ways it probably strengthened me psychologically (pretending to be Winston Smith takes a lot of mental discipline) and in other ways it probably messed me up quite a bit.

Every life has suffering of one kind or another, and mine isn't special, but as I have looked back on that experience as an adult it is probably the most rage inducing memory I have of my childhood, and while it didn't involve being physically hit, it gave me a taste of the underlying philosophy of the entire prison system, which is to carefully avoid harming individuals physically, while inflicting as much psychological damage as possible on them.

While my experience was nothing like years in a modern penitentiary, when you go from living at home with your middle class parents at 14 years old to being locked in a dark room for days (you totally lose track of how much time has passed in a situation like that), it's an experience that really stays with you.  Ironically, I didn't really reflect on the experience that much until I was well into adulthood.  Maybe I just blocked it out, but what finally caused me to really think about it was a tendency I began to notice in myself toward manipulation and dishonesty when faced with extremely stressful situations, and these are obviously not healthy ways of dealing with stress, so to address those things I had to think through the mental hospital experience as well.  I did all of this on my own, though.  I wasn't about to trust another psychiatrist to help me with a mental health issue as important as that one.   

[MediumTex]

Holy crap.

Sorry you had to go through that.

As Jason Dean (Christian Slater) said in Heathers: "Everybody's life has static."

[notsheigetz]

I was sent to a mental hospital for three months.

I worked in a place like that once - back in the early 70's. It was called "The United Methodist Children's Home". That sounds like an orphanage but it was really a place where "troubled youths" were sent for the kind of "therapy" you described. There was an "isolation ward" in the upper floor of one of the buildings complete with three cells with only mattresses on the floor and I had the watch duty on many occasions. The primary reason that young boys and girls ended up in isolation was running away.

That was actually the place I met my first wife. I was a live-in counselor and she came along later as a house parent in the same dormitory. We tried to inject some life into the dead institution. One time we arranged for a one week camping trip that got miraculously approved for some reason and we treated the boys to a whole week away from the concentration camp. I'm betting that did them more good than anything that happened to them in a long time.

[dualstow]

I was spanked a few times, but I approve because I deserved it. Apparently when I was three, I used to use a broom to smash all the pottery collected from overseas which had been carefully placed on high shelves out of my reach. That's what they tell me.

I remember a few spankings. Not too bad.

I vaguely half-remember my dad catching me flushing various items down the toilet because I thought it was fun to watch objects disappear. I have to use the word apparently again, because I'm going from my parents' memory: dad gave me something akin to a swirlie. Except that he was yelling instead of laughing. Although I don't quite remember it, I do remember running out my bedroom after flushing for fear of the noise. This lasted months or perhaps a year.  Must be a connection.

After my brother and I destroyed a piece of furniture, my dad jumped up and down on a plastic toy of ours, shattering it. We held each other, shivering.

But that's about it. We had a healthy respect for our dad and his military-cultivated yell. There was no belt and no beatings, and mostly good times. Now my older sister, that's another story for another thread & time.  Sibling abuse, I'd call it.

MT, your story is fascinating. I don't know what else to say except that I'm glad you turned out the way you did.

[MediumTex]

MT, your story is fascinating. I don't know what else to say except that I'm glad you turned out the way you did.

I appreciate having a place to tell it.

In many ways it was a fascinating experience, just not at the time.

The ways in which you adapt to something like that are really interesting to see as they unfold.  You develop a laser like focus on getting out.  I would love to have such focus about anything today, but it's the kind of focus that is very hard to be on the other side of, simply because most people aren't interested in thinking that hard.  This is probably the reason that it's so hard to make prisons totally secure.  Even a group with an average to low IQ like a prison population can come up with some absolutely ingenious methods of escape.

Of course, not all prisoners have low IQs.  Consider the case of Steven Jay Russell, whose level of intelligence, cunning and bravado is simply amazing.  Russell was the con artist on whom the movie I Love You Phillip Morris was based.

If you aren't familiar with Russell, please take a second to read the wiki entry linked to above.  His story has so many bizarre twists and turns (including faking his own death as part of one especially bold and successful prison escape) that it's hard to summarize any of it because it's all so wacky and imaginative.  If someone wrote a character like him, no one would believe it.