What seems like a long, long time ago I once had a job at a private, non-profit, very large mental health agency treating minors with SED (Seriously Emotionally Dysfunctional) conditions.
Most of the kids lived in cottages on our grounds. As normal and smart or un-smart as any other kid. Went to school on our grounds. Their family lived elsewhere in town. But the kids all had one thing in common - they’d been assessed as being SED.
We had a cottage of only middle-teen girls (tends to be mainly girls, I’m told) who were “cutters.” These are people who when they feel like their life is out of control that they take a knife… ANYthing sharp… and run it down their skin – usually somewhere that is covered by street clothing – in a sad effort to get it under control.
By the way, I met an adult woman a few years ago who trusted me enough to disclose to me that she was a “cutter.” One day, she phoned me after she’d done it and I rushed over to bandage her up and be with her through her emotional pain. This stuff IS real… and you’ll never know it unless someone tells you about it.
mhsanctuary.com/borderline/self_injury/whatis.htm
Please understand me… I’m NOT saying that people who self-injure are under demonic possssion, or anything like that at all!!
For some reason I felt a nudge to post that self-injury/cutting information here. If you who are reading this right now need to relate to others or get help around it, PLEASE visit:
mhsanctuary.com/borderline/self_injury/whatis.htm
The reasons a kid could be SED would be that they were a victim of some kind of abuse or suffered from other conditions that led to SED. Most likely, though… it was sexual abuse (sometimes from a family member)… or verbal abuse… or being locked in a closet… or any of a number of things that imbalanced adults do to kids.
We gave them therapy 24/7 in the sense that it included that they had milieu activity therapists (B.A’s in Psych) who did shifts in the cottages so that there was always an MAT at the cottage (which housed between 4 and 8 kids at a time) to deal with issues that came up AND to give environmental therapy, too.
We’d train MAT’s on how to put together activities such that a group of kids playing basketball were all playing basketball for a purpose that would help that kid choose to avoid acting out behavior that had been the trigger to get him there, in the first place. These kids were so SED that they each were one step away from either Juvie (lock them up until they turn 18 as a result from malperforming in the world ) or the state’s mental hospital (which was NOT the preferred solution because these kids just plain were NOT mentally imbalanced – they were emotionally dysfunctional).
Getting to the point… among the things that I did there was to make sure that the videocamera, videotape, and sound system in one therapy room reliably transmitted sound and visual to the neighboring room in which a Master therapist was stationed with a headset/mike around her head. The Master therapist was in the side room (which had a one-way mirror between the side room and the therapy room) in order to give live coaching instructions to a MSW in training giving therapy to a family in the therapy room for how to address topics/conditions that occurred during therapy for one or more people in the family who were receiving therapy together.
There was also a lead from those paired rooms downstairs to a huge living room that sometimes seated 100 therapists, watching the live therapy going on that was simultaneously showing on the TV monitor in that living room.
The family’s adults all signed permission for this therapy to be recorded so that other MSW’s in training could view the therapy at another time. The parents signed for the kid’s permission, too.
Where am I going with this? I’m going here →
It was not unknown that in a group/family therapy session like this that a kid would go into a corner in the therapy room (of course, it HAD to be the corner where the sound quality was least likely to transmit through the system!!
) and disclose, in a halting, low-volune voice about things that had been done to him, over and over, that he didn’t want to have done to him.
It broke my heart even especially when what the kid wound up disclosing WAS Satanic cult abuse. It’s freaky stuff.
What we were able to tape could and HAD to be used in a court of law when the law required that.
And the law DOES require that Satanic cult abuse be disclosed to the courts.
Gotta give credit to the therapists, though… they’ve been trained and have seen this disclosure before. It’s NEVER easy to get out of a cult… much less a Satanic one.
