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In Reply to: Thanks for reposting this! posted by exmember on November 21, 2002 at 19:14:46:
It is a very good post, but, I will always say that FGAs, SGs, SGAs, were all horribly abused to varying degrees. We were all victims. I understand sexual abuse. Apparently many exers that were FGAs have that in their backgrounds. Within the group, some victims were more blatantly obvious ones (i.e. SGAs, SGs) and others more subtley, but to not realize that all were victims, and all that are alive and out are survivors, or can be, of that group is every bit as important. This includes that the road to recovery for FGAs can be every bit as complicated and traumatic, with some different issues to deal with. So here I go, signing in and signing out again with equal opportunity healing as a deserved thing for all who have known the family. I don't think it is helpful, and some psychologists I know or have communicated with agree, to make one group of peoples suffering more "valid" than anothers. I think this will keep the anger fueled between the generations rather than at the perpetrators, the LEADERS at the TOP (Berg, now Maria and Peter)where it is more rightly so directed. Now there are, granted, individuals within the family that may have been attracted to pedophilia and physical violence to name a few areas of abuse, or already were pedophiles when they joined. And certainly any person that has been sexually abused has the right to decide how they will approach the subject of their abuse to their direct perpetrators. But sex and beatings were just a few of the blatant control and abuses of the group. This repeated topic reminds me of when I went to some sexual abuse survivor groups before ever dealing with the family. So many people were entrenched in that identity as uniquely damaged, and they stayed that way for YEARS and YEARS, in and out of psych wards where greedy therapists diagnosed them with whatever would keep them hospitalized and disabled the longest. I don't know how Canadian psychiatry works, but I know how private American psychiatry does. And I know that Canada used to send patients (often adolescents) to America for treatment (long term). Boy, that alone is another deep subject. Anyhow. I just hope for the healing of all, whether we were slowly boiled frogs or as eggs before hatching.
