I was eager to get the "help" I needed to "get better", which all the adults in my life had been promising me was what was going to happen, and this was where. I still felt like a "kid", though, and most of the people I met still treated me like a kid (no doubt because of the way I looked and acted, insecure and still submissive to the "authority" of adulthood). It wasn't until I got to prison a few years later that I finally started accepting the other adults around me as my peers, and they were all prisoners and convicted criminals, of course.
The adults here at WSH were also convicted criminals, but preferred to call themselves "patients", or just "SPs". As soon as I arrived (directly from jail) and the police escort removed the cuffs I was paired up with two other SPs from the treatment group that I had been assigned to ("Aquarius Group"). There were two groups on the ward I was on (the "basement ward", which sat "in" the ground several feet but not quite beneath it), and then three more groups on a ward above us (the main "SP" ward), then two more in the "attic ward". Each group consisted of about 20 SPs (no women) and one "therapist". The therapist in my group was Gary "Mike" Shepherd, a hairy, fat man with thick-framed glasses, black hair, and beard. I met him on the first day, too, in his office, alone, where he presented himself in a very father "I'm-here-to-help-you-so-you-can-trust-me"-sort of way. I drank it all down eagerly, exactly as told, and believed it would all be "good for me". Why wouldn't I? I still had a lot of very hard lessons to learn, and "Mike" ended up being one of the hardest.
I was told that I had yet to be "accepted" for treatment. First, I had to undergo a three-month "OBS"-period. "OBS" was short for "observation". Everyone who came into the program began as an "OBS", and then progressed from step 1 to step 10, with each step granting more and more privileges (from being able to walk around the ward without being escorted - step 1 - to living and working back in the community - step 10), and denoted another "step" in treatment progress. And an SP could move forward and backwards in steps, as determined by group-votes and therapist-approval. It was even possible for a senior member (step 5 or above) to be denoted back to "OBS" status if they exhibited behavior that brought their "amenability to treatment" into question.
There were two questions that had to be affirmed before I could be "accepted for treatment": Was I a "Sexual Psychopath?" And: Was I "amenable to treatment?" The first question was a given, since everyone who came to the program was there for committing a sex crime that automatically made them a "sexual psychopath". But, for the court record, the program had a small set of criteria that it used to legally establish that a person was a "psychopath" and therefor subject to "treatment" rather than "punishment" (incarceration). The primary part of the criteria was the sex crime, but another important piece was an "established deviant sexual behavior pattern". So every OBS patient was required to write a detailed 50+ page autobiography that emphasized the sexual relationships/behavior in their life. The entire group (each member) was then required to read and comment on the "AB", and vote on whether or not it was an acceptable effort.
My AB was initially rejected because several members of the group felt that it did not talk enough about my sexual experiences. In essence, there was no clear "deviant sexual behavior pattern". My "crime" was not the culmination of a clearly evolving pattern of behavior that all "SPs" exhibited. Instead, it was a sporadic event, among other sporadic sexual events, that did not seem to relate to or derive from earlier events (see notes). In other words, they could not find a pattern to my sexual behavior, and therefor, according to program logic, I must be being dishonest and insincere about my desire to receive "treatment" for my problem.
This was the first time, and certainly not the last, that I experienced an intense fear of not being accepted by the program and consequently sent to prison where I would be repeatedly beaten and raped (as I was so often told would happen and in fact eventually DID happen 😕). So I re-wrote my AB with more sexual details, some of which I actually embellished (without being completely dishonest), according to what I was told would be "acceptable". I admitted, for example, that when I was six, and the older girls took me beneath the stairs and made me kiss their "pee-pees", that I got a "thrill" from the experience. And this the "beginning" of my "sexual deviancy" was made "clear" (for the official report to the court).
At the time, I was too naïve to even understand what a facade was, but if I had, then I would have realized that the entire "pleasant-and-friendly" demeanor of the program was just a viciously enforced front that concealed a kind of "quiet desperation" that made Henry David Thoreau's aphorism (~ "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and die with their song still inside them.") seem benign by comparison. Every member of the program feared going to prison, and that fear was compelled onto every other member through a formal system of "confrontations" that would have made the Nazis proud. Every SP was required to carry a pad and pencil on them at all times, so that if anyone (another SP, staff, or even a visitor) "confronted" them, they could - and were required to - write it down so it could be "addressed in group" at the next meeting. Every meeting we had as a group took time to address everyone's confrontations. OBS-members invariably had the most (several per day), whereas senior members commonly could go for months with none.
A typical "confrontation" might be for "manipulating" or "minimizing". For example, if I asked someone in the T.V. room (where we could take our smoke breaks during a typical meeting), "Can you spare a smoke?" - the response would most likely be, "I'm confronting you for manipulating." And then you were expected to write down what you did and who "confronted" you, in your notebook, and then tell the group about it the next chance you got. The group would then explain to you that by asking if they could "spare a smoke", instead of asking for what you really wanted directly (i.e. "Can I have one of your cigarettes="), you were attempting to manipulate them in order to get what you really wanted. This, accordingly, was dishonest and an early step in the process of manipulation that ultimately lead to "outlet" behavior (i.e. sex crimes). The idea of "treatment" was to learn to recognize such manipulations (of self and others) as "stop signs" that could then be used to circumvent the deviant behavior pattern (i.e. "control" it). And if you insisted that you were "just asking for a smoke!" or you had more than one confrontation for the same thing, then a "treatment program" would be dictated and voted on by the group.
These "treatment programs" could be literally anything the group thought would help you understand and "control" the problem-behavior. I once recommended that a man in our group carry a pillow with him at all times, and every time someone confronted him for "anger" (which happened for him several times a day), he was required to scream as loud as he could into the pillow. The group liked the suggestion and approved it (something that rarely happened for OBS members who made "treatment" suggestions). And it worked! The man told the group a few days later that he felt foolish for having to carry the pillow, the foolishness he felt by doing so made him realize just how foolish his anger was, and he rarely got confronted for his anger again after that. Usually, though, the "treatments" consisted of "sub-meetings" on the problem-behavior.
A "sub-meeting" was a group of three or four group members (or sometimes members from other groups) that would meet during precious "free time" (thus serving as a deterrent as well) to discuss the problem-behavior. Then the SP would report back to the group on what he learned. Most "Treatment Plans" involved one sub-group, but could entail as many sub-groups on as many subjects as the group felt was necessary.
Treatment plans voted on by the group could also entail losing steps, or privileges, and of course even being placed back on OBS-status, so the man would have to prove all over from the start that he was "amenable", and then work his way up through each step all over again. The only thing worse than getting put back on OBS-status again was getting found "not amenable" and hence voted out of the program. Less than half of the OBS' who came to be evaluated, were initially accepted (found "amenable"), and then less than half of those who were initially accepted actually made it all the way to step 10 ("out patient" status) and completed the program. So there was constant pressure on everyone to "behave correctly" and not get "confronted" because that was the only way to prove that you were exercising your knowledge of "stop signs" and "controls" and hence progress through the program. At least, that was the theory.
In reality, it all became a manipulative game of the sort that would make the Devil himself blush (with pride, I suppose). Since there was never any real way to NOT manipulate other people (even simply asking for a cigarette at all could be declared "manipulative") in just ordinary social interaction, it became a game where, if you wanted to advance (to the next step), then you had to earn what was currently considered "manipulation" by the group - and in particular the most "respected" members in the group, who were those favored by the therapist (for manipulative reasons all his own that I hope to be able to explain in a coming post for this blog) - and try to convince everyone that you were not "manipulative".
And I took this game very seriously. In fact, for me (and most other SPs in the program), it wasn't a game at all. I sincerely became convinced that certain things were "manipulative" while others weren't. In other words, I learned the "rules", even when they made absolutely no sense to me at all, and honestly believed that by doing so, I was "getting better" (i.e. "treatment"). A good example of how I helped them twist up my own mind so much that it took years for me to even realize how twisted it was (and I'm still trying to UN-twist it to this day!) was the time I got confronted in group (called "a line of concern") for "sniffing butane" from a lighter. The SP who called the "line" (for short) was the same one who confronted me some time later because I playfully kissed his hand (pretending to be a mermaid - see: "The Mermaid Sex Offender") in the hospital's swimming pool. He watched me constantly, and saw me holding the lighter to my nose and clicking the gas valve over and over. He thought I was trying to get high (which is impossible with butane), but all I was doing was absentmindedly "puffing" the butane onto the skin of my nose between the nostrils where the skin was sensitive enough to feel the small cool puff of gas each time I pressed the lever. I was amusing myself by the novelty of the fact that each time I pressed the lever, there was a burst of gas strong enough to actually feel on my skin. When the "line" got called on me, and the other SP (who was in the program for having sex with under-aged "twinks" like me) explained what the line of concern was for, I relaxed, because I thought, "No problem, I'll just explain what I was doing." But, when I tried to explain I TOLD that I was "romanticizing drugs", and fantasizing about getting high. At first I denied it, and insisted that I wasn't romanticizing anything (since I wasn't even "thinking about" what I was doing) and I wasn't fantasizing about getting high because I had never snorted or "huffed" drugs to get high before, so I wouldn't even know how to "fantasize" doing so. But the group insisted, and predictably implied that if I remained "in denial" (unable to accept their version of what was going on in my mind), then that would mean I was not amenable to treatment. And since I was still on OBS status at the time, this was a very serious threat. But I couldn't just lie and tell them what they wanted to hear either. I had to be able to regurgitate the garbage they wanted me to believe in a way that convinced them that that was what I really believed. And the only way a naïve 17-year-old could do that, in a room full of expert and seasoned manipulators, was to actually convince myself that they were "right", and I was "wrong". And so I learned how to manipulate myself into believing almost anything, no matter how badly it contradicted what I directly experienced. And the way I did that was by convincing myself - at the behest of the group itself - that there were "unconscious" realms in my mind where anything can be true. And so, indeed, I was "romanticizing drugs" and fantasizing about getting high (unconsciously); and later on I DID in fact try to "molest" that twinky-loving pedophile in the swimming pool (only pretending consciously to be a mermaid while, unconsciously, my mind was working furiously to manipulate that poor man into having sexual desires for me). And thus my "treatment" commenced.
I was found to be a "sexual psychopath", and "amenable to treatment" at the end of the initial three-month OBS-period. So, after a brief return to jail, to be formally "sentenced" to the program, I was accepted as a regular group member, all the while still relatively excited about finally getting the "help" I needed. I was actually pretty happy there, despite the strange games and intense pressure to remain "amenable". For the first time in my life, I had "friends" whom I could confide in about anything! So I had access to more information than I ever thought I would ever need. In fact, quite literally, it was too much information - WTMI! (Way Too Much Information!), which I will try to explain in the next post I write for this blog ("Confessions"):
--- Sexual Psychopath "Treatment": WTMI! ---
[J.D. May 21, 2017]
Notes:
(I) Many years later, I learned that juvenile "sex offenders" in fact do not exhibit the expected "pattern" of deviant sexual behavior found in all adult offenders. Their "offenses" are almost universally the result of poor judgement and misinformation. As a result, juvenile "sex offender" are far less likely to "re-offend" even with the most rudimentary "treatment", with the exception of juveniles that are incarcerated for their crime. Incarcerated juveniles show the same recidivism rates as adult "sex offenders". This is based on numerous studies, and to me it is a clear indication that far more "juveniles" commit "sex crimes" than our system currently assumes. But, the vast majority of these "offenders" never get "caught" and end up "adjusting" their behavior before they become "repeat offenders" and thus establishing the typical "adult deviant sexual behavior pattern" that most psych doctors like to ignorantly boast is the "identifying characteristic" of adult sex offenders. That's like saying that all strong men exhibit a pattern of weight lifting; it's just rhetorical nonsense.
