I’m surprised by how violent it all is. Not just the violence against Phil and the other splittees, not just Chuck’s paranoid words, but the violence of dropping out of society completely, the violence of cutting off contact with family members outside, of taking children from parents, husbands from wives. This is what it means to join a cult.
The Game is affectionately known in this literature as “attack therapy.” But I’ve never heard it described that way. Dad always said it was just a way to get through the hardened defenses of drug addicts because it was like AA in that there was a share, but unlike AA the rest of the group then picked the share apart, pointed out the lies, criticized, screamed and yelled, and made accusations—all to get the addict to admit to his problem. Except over many years, the Game transformed and became a form of brainwashing. Games lasted days, sometimes entire weekends. And eventually even the Old Man admitted it was a tool used to enforce the will of the leadership: for people to get forced vasectomies, to give up their kids, to split up marriages, abort babies and commit violence.
The School is hardly mentioned and when it is, it’s glossed over, as if the children are accessories, as if the story of the commune that went rotten like bad milk did not affect them at all, as if it only happened to their parents, as if they were secure, safe from it within the walls of the orphanage where they were placed. I scour the articles and books for pictures of them, those skinny kids in thrift-store clothes, straining with toothy grins and shaved heads. I wonder about them. I wonder where they are and what they’re doing and if they’re having the same problems as I am, if they feel just as bewildered about their place in the world, their loneliness, their desire to flee.
The articles reference a “school” in which children are raised “communally,” like a kibbutz. It doesn’t mention that unlike on a kibbutz the children don’t live with their parents; they don’t even have interaction with their parents. They aren’t even allowed to call them their parents. “Every adult in Synanon is your parent,” is what they used to say. There’s something powerful about the Orwellian turn of phrase in which everyone calls it a “school,” as if with the use of this word the separation, the isolation, the abuse, the loneliness and the neglect of orphans can simply be swept under the rug like it never happened.
* * *
SINCE THE LETTER, Mom has left me alone but on my twenty-first birthday I receive a ten-page single-spaced letter explaining to me the circumstances around my birth: that she lost friends, lost prestige, that she was ostracized from her social circles, all because the Old Man had decided that there would be no more children born into Synanon and any new pregnancies must be aborted, and she refused to abort me.
She said she was “gamed” about it, which means she withstood all that “attack therapy,” people screaming at her, calling her disloyal and ungrateful and arrogant, all because she wouldn’t abort me. She says she felt that she was guarding a special life and it was her job to bring it into the world. It’s a difficult thing to understand because I’m grateful she did this for me; I even admire her grit in the face of all that pressure. But it also feels like an incredible weight, like she is trying to explain, in exacting detail, why I owe her so much.
By the time we escaped, they were kidnapping children of splittees, bringing them back against their will. They were beating the Punk Squad kids, the court-appointed juvenile delinquents sent to Synanon to straighten out. Strangest of all, Chuck was drinking again. When he was arrested in 1978 for assault and conspiracy to commit murder, he was hammered-out-of-his-mind drunk.
The letter is her birthday present to me. I have a sickening feeling in my stomach and I wish she could be like other parents, simply glad for my existence without placing so much of a feeling like a balance is owed. So it seems like one of those protective illusions she carries, a story she tells that absolves her from being a parent. I never respond to the letter.
When I write a term paper on Synanon, trying to weave together the psychology of mind control and my family history with it, my TA, a kindly woman named Anne, tells me she wants to submit my paper to a psychology publication. I’m flattered but I tell her that I don’t feel comfortable. I don’t want everyone knowing my secrets. She has straight black hair and creamy white skin. We are sitting in her tiny office in the psych department at the front of the Romanesque quad.
“You know this stuff isn’t your fault, right? Mikel, these aren’t your secrets.” I don’t know how to tell her about the shame I feel, the sense of being marked and cursed.
Anne is gentle, her voice soft and warm. “It’s nothing you could control. It was a cult. And where you lived was not good for children. Are you familiar with the theory of attachment? The idea that we base all of our relationships on the attachments we form with our parents early in life, especially in the first three years? I wouldn’t be surprised if every child of Synanon has an attachment disorder. Do you know what that is?”
She shows me an article she’s clipped for me. The risk of developing attachment disorders is higher in children who live in orphanages, or have been separated from their parents for long periods of time, or have a mother with depression. The fear of abandonment causes them to feel isolated, to create private worlds where they live alone. Some choose anger and become sullen and withdrawn in the presence of adults. Others are extremely outgoing, unable to distinguish between adults whom they are supposed to trust and those they cannot. For them, their lives are a performance, a kind of frenzied dance in which they feel like they must impress, as if that impression is the only way they can receive love. Children with attachment disorders grow up to have difficulty in relationships, which they seek out of need and then destroy out of fear, resulting in a lack of self-worth and a sense of isolation.
It’s too much. I feel a sense like a dam about to break. She puts a hand on my shoulder. I keep thinking, Is this me? Me and Tony? I hardly know this woman but maybe that makes it easier and I start to cry right there in that tiny office in the psychology department in the Romanesque quad at the precipice of the Dream. I hide my face and wipe my eyes. I feel so embarrassed, so weak, so fragile. Goddamn it, this is not supposed to be me. I was supposed to get out. The castle, the high walls, the quiet room with all those ghosts. I never imagined it would lead me here.
“Children experience loneliness like shame.” I repeat the line I’ve read under my breath. I write it in my notebook.
Children experience loneliness like shame. They imagine the reason they are alone is that there is something wrong with them, that they have done something bad, something that makes them too gross to touch.
I think back to the School, to all my questions about who raised us, who was with us, who picked us up when we cried, when we were sick, when we were upset. My brother sitting alone on that playground until he was nearly seven. The shaved heads, the toothy grins. Those boys and girls. What becomes of us? What role do we play in our fate? Are we just destined to be ashamed and alone? Marked for failure or insanity or, more prosaically, to feel imprisoned in our minds, longing for the very connections we are too broken to make?
I’m grateful for the information but I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it. I’m not given a counselor to call, nor does the paper on Synanon or any of the psychology projects lead me to any kind of lasting change. It’s only a description. It’s like a disembodied voice telling you in great detail that you are currently falling off a cliff: “You seem to be falling. You will soon hit the ground at approximately one hundred miles per hour. Your brain will splatter on the rocks below. This is because of the force of gravity from the mass of the earth acting upon your body at the rate of 9.8 meters per second per second. You were abandoned and abused and you have an attachment disorder.”