Re: Nervous insight.

I have definitely experienced the emotional detachment that you are describing after my experience with Mount Bachelor Academy. Poker face to the max, I realized after the first few days that I couldn’t trust a single person I talked to in there. I saw people who were really good friends betraying each other right off the bat. That’s the kind of rifts that attack therapy creates in people in a residential setting. There was always an unspoken understanding that we may be friends now, but in group it’s another story. You’re on your fucking own. I primarily watched my own back. I had a huge advantage going into it however, and that is my acting experience. I am as a result of my acting experience a good public speaker and fast on my feet.

After a few months it got to the point where I understood the the dynamics of how group worked so well that I was able to avoid trouble, mostly. It’s really a very simple system. Someone is going to have the barrel of the attack gun pointed at them. If no one brings any requests to group, they can usually just harass someone on a self-study or who has bans or who is new. When that person gets defensive, yell at him until he or she agrees with the group. It’s preferable if they start crying. If they are crying, inform them of their punishment and then when they get angry, yell at them some more. When emotions are running high, shift the target to someone else who will with the help of a few cues from the facilitator become the new object of all of the group malice that has been artificially created by this process. A good way to connect the two is by turning to the next victim and saying something like “And you! Aren’t you his friend? Why haven’t you been holding him accountable? You’re supposed to be your brother’s keeper. I think you’re negative and underground.” That would do it for just about anyone.

The Black Hole

Phil and Olly / UK / 2008 A sleep-deprived office worker accidentally discovers a black hole – and then greed gets the better of him…

Nervous insight (by Appalachian freight rider)

Remember in $tr8 how you had to learn to anticipate your own emotional reactions to staff and the group or be submitted to their will ?? You had to be just that much quicker in order to strike pre-emptively, you know, talk about it in group and be able to demonstrate some measurable change or something, like you were struggeling with something but you were workin your program. And you had to play a poker face so hard that you lost your ability to be spontaneously emotional. You know like when everyone around you throws their head back in laughter but you, because you’ve become so objective or something, so concerned with monitoring your spontaneity in order to protect yourself from the mind-rapists. Every subtle psychological reaction had to be self monitored and controlled so as not to reveal any secret hidden places within the mind, sanctuaries of sanity, which were fiercely defended…the assault was so relentless and brutal, it was pretty much a psychological serial rape.

I Met The Walrus

In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview. This was in the midst of Lennon’s “bed-in” phase, during which John and Yoko were staying in hotel beds in an effort to promote peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon’s every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries traditional pen sketches by James Braithwaite with digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit, and timeless message.