Synanon

After the synanon speaker came to my classroom, it made me even more interested in the “cult”. It was very surreal listening to someone who grew up in the synanon religion. To her that was a normal childhood, she did not know any thing else. All the different aspects that I had while growing up that seemed like an everyday lifestyle was so foreign. For example, playing sports, going to school everyday and not living in a home with siblings and parents. The speaker mentions that at about six months they were taken from both parents and place in a communal raising. Where other people on certain days took care of you and you lived with all the other children away from your parents. “Children inside the Synanon cult were raised communally. This was a common practice romanticized by utopian communities of the 19th and 20th century (including in Upton Sinclair's failed Helicon Home Colony), though Synanon took it a step further than most. Parents had highly restricted access to their children after they reached the age of about 6-9 months. By the end of the 1960s, adult members might only see their kids once a week, even if they wanted to see them more often. The policies dictating how often a given member could see their children became more and more restrictive throughout the 1960s, and by 1972 Dederich had proposed that the children from every California branch be moved to a single site in Marin County.” Many members did not like the rules of communal raiding and between 200 to 300 people left the organization once these policies got more and more strict. Along with being apart of a communally upbringing they did not attend school often but were very knowledgeable. The speaker in class mentioned that school was something that she enjoyed and “craved”. They were not like normal children who went to school seven hours a day five days a week. They would have 14 hour days and then go months without a single day in the classroom. One year they were able to go to a public school outside of synanon but after one year they were not allowed that privilege anymore.

Another major thing that stood out to me in while she was speaking was the fact that children had to play the game. In an article, it mentions the game and how it was a worthy opponent in a brutal form of therapy created by the leader himself. “The Game was the most important method of treatment at Synanon. When it came to getting addicts clean, the program rejected any form of pharmaceuticals or tapering of drugs. Everyone went cold turkey, and junkies were left on a couch to writhe and vomit for a few days while they went through withdrawal. The Game was the medicine administered later, a kind of group therapy invented by Dederich where people sat in a circle to express (and often shout) their frustrations at each other. The confrontational approach was a way to hash out everything that bothered you about others in your group. It was supposed to help you learn about yourself as well.” Although, I understood the point of the game for recovering drug addicts. I was shocked when the children had to play, especially since they did not have a choice of being there, they were stuck. She mentioned that the game for children “was horrible, awful”. Since they were so young, the point of the game did not work well. Anything that was said during the game was not forgotten outside of the game. Children were not able to forget about it, which caused more and more issues throughout the community.  After the speaker came, it gave me a lot more insight about synanon then I would have ever found in books and research.