21 Comments

1. 

   RyanR September 27, 2011 Reply

   As a good friend of mine always asks, "Why kill something when you can overkill it? Good grief . . . you'd at least think the supervisor would have had enough sense to start on the top step and work your way down!

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     Tammy September 27, 2011 Reply

     You'd have thought!! That, I guess, would have made it too easy for her.

2. 

   BeverlyB September 27, 2011 Reply

   Absolutely astounding! Was your supervisor running a boot camp or a ministry? Not only is it a bad idea to sweep the stairs that way, but it's a bad use of time, and a very bad use of the personnel entrusted to you. There were always tons of things that could be done at the MTC, and she kept you sweeping stairs for an entire day???!! Unbelievable. And yet so believable after my stay at the MTC. So frustrating!

3. 

   Kaarina September 27, 2011 Reply

   While "busy work" was very commonly assigned at the MTC (especially to people who had been targeted for one reason or another) this is one of the more extreme examples that I have heard. The other one that comes to mind was a friend who had to move a pile of dirt from one place to another, and then later move it all back to it's original spot.
   
   I always felt extra sorry for those who had to work under this particular supervisor. What an insane system where it was ok, and even somehow seen as spiritual, to treat volunteers like this! We were paying to be there and all worked very hard and yet they still felt like they had to keep us broken down.

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     ladycopper September 28, 2011 Reply

     Ugh, pointless busy work like moving dirt from one place to another and back was used in concentration camps in Germany and Russia to make people go insane. It's a form of torture.
     
     The stair thing is the same deal. Makes me so mad to read about things like this.

4. 

   MatthewS September 27, 2011 Reply

   I saw some silly examples of young people letting authority over their peers go to their head but I never saw anything demeaning like this. That's incredible.

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     "Hannah" September 27, 2011 Reply

     fwiw, Matthew, this supervisor was not even one of the young people; was not a student.

5. 

   Holly Peterson September 29, 2011 Reply

   That is horrible. Absolutely horrible.

6. 

   Anonymous October 2, 2011 Reply

   This kind of thing happened to me almost every single day at Eagle Springs Training Center. I was given this very same thing as punishment several times. Other examples include:
   
   1. Using a brush-mower (something that would mow not only grass but shrubs and small trees) to mow a random stretch of land strategically placed in front of the main staff house where everyone would see you. If you had a watch, it was taken from you before the exercise in shame - and you were told simply, "You're going to mow, and you will stop when we tell you. Do not ask how long it will be. It ends when we say it ends." Row after row after row, sometimes from afternoon until sunset.
   
   2. Jumping jacks. Now this may sound like a simple thing - but it was used to an extreme at Eagle Springs (formerly known as Elms). The details varied depending on your particular leader, but you were told either to do jumping jacks until they told you to stop; do a certain number of jumping jacks (for me, it was once 480 for not doing the dishes quickly and spotlessly enough); or do jumping jacks for a stated number of minutes which of course you could not measure as again, you have no watch and couldn't look anyway. Many almost fainted (including myself) - and when I collapsed from my 480 jumping jacks onto a bed to rest and cry, my leader said "I didn't tell you you could lay down!"
   
   3. Blasting music or videotapes, usually coupled with isolation. I was put into isolation once for over two weeks, and during this time one single song was blasted repeatedly by my room - a song that still sends chills down my spine today. "Give thanks to the lord, though your suffering seems long - in darkness he giveth a song - Oh rejoice in the lord, he makes no mistakes, he knoweth the end of each path that I take, for when I am TRIED, AND PURIFIED, I SHALL COME FORTH AS GOLD" - emphasis added of course. It was a song to mock me and break me down while I sat upstairs in isolation and worked on my many assignments. I was told not to make a single sound - not a word, not a whisper, not a hum - and locked out of the bathroom, only to be let in when I asked (the only words I was allowed to speak - and I was punished three times for asking even questions like this). As for videos, they used carefully-selected sections from seminars, usually having to do with the violation in question, and blasted them either right next to you or in a place where you couldn't escape - or sat you down in front of the TV to watch it and fill out a long report basically about how you sinned and how you must correct it.
   
   4. Push-ups. This was not implemented much by my leaders, but I know it happened a lot. For us, it was a punishment for every time we misplaced an object. If we were in a hurry to get somewhere and accidentally left something out of place, we were given push-ups.
   
   5. Meticulous cleaning jobs. These include the one mentioned above, but extend to such jobs as dusting, cleaning windows, vacuuming, scrubbing a floor on hands and knees, cleaning bathrooms - anything you can name, it was used. Whether or not you were told to meticulously re-do the entire job in some creative way honestly came down to whether your leader saw fit that day, or whether she was in a good mood. If she was distracted with something else, you were more likely to be told, "It's fine" and hastily ushered off to something else. The one I remember most for its uniqueness was stacking the woodpile. We lived in log cabins with tiny wood-burning stoves for heat in the winter. This meant that outside we had a pile of logs (or at least we hoped to; one winter they let it run out and we spent weeks without any heat whatsoever) up to 5-6 feet in height depending on how lucky you were that year. One of the staffers was really proud of herself when she came up with the punishment of being told to stack the wood pile - and then having to watch your leaders knock it down in front of you and tell you to stack it again. And again. And again. The number of times depended on their whim.
   
   6. Scripture memorization and assignments - this one was usually more varied in its execution, and depended more heavily on your leader's whim. You might have to write a single sentence for pages and pages and pages. You might have to write a long and meticulous assignment that boiled down to simply, "How I sinned, how terrible a sinner I am, and how I must repent for my sin lest the devil take root in my heart". You might have to memorize an entire chapter in an amount of time that was so short nobody could possibly memorize it - and spend the entire time waiting and dreading the next punishment. Similar in practice to the wood pile thing above - it was designed to fail, and to bring you to the next punishment to break you further.
   
   The list could go on and on and on. Leaving these students in the hands of bored leaders who were given complete power over them meant that punishments were wildly varied and happened on a daily basis many times. You could be punished for literally anything - usually things you did not do or certainly did not mean to do, but if you argued you would only be punished more. You could be punished for an errant word in your required assignments or daily journals one day - the next day, for a "rebellious spirit", and the next day because you didn't complete a task in the unrealistic time increments they allotted (aka, do a large load of dishes spotlessly and flawlessly in ten minutes - one of those designed-to-fail tasks), and the next you might be given a whole list of tasks designed to fail just because, and the day after that you might be told that you were hopeless and beyond redemption and that was why your leader was moving out and being replaced with another.
   
   Eagle Springs Training Center was a two year program designed to torture and brainwash girls. There is no way around that explanation. I spent two years there being held against my will with no way to escape (with it being strategically placed in 700 acres of wooded land) and no way to call for help (only one phone that was very heavily guarded, and no trips into town for at least four months - ensuring you were first thoroughly broken before you ever emerged into the outside world, heavily guarded at both sides by your leaders - and so on), told by my mother the sparse times I was allowed to see her that I was "not ready" to be her child again. All I can say is that there are no words for how broken an individual can be; you can't get much more broken than that.

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     BeverlyB October 2, 2011 Reply

     That's horrific. I'm so sorry you had to endure that. There are no words to justify that kind of mental/emotional/physical abuse.

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     "Hannah" October 2, 2011 Reply

     Wow, I am very sorry you had to go through all of that. I am a bit surprised you had to sweep stairs the exact same way; all these years, I thought it must have been a peculiarity of that particular supervisor.

     • 

       Anonymous October 2, 2011 Reply

       Yeah, to be honest I'm surprised this was used all the way in Russia too! It makes me wonder how the same methods of humiliation and will-breaking managed to be repeated in places so far apart! For me it could be any task, but the stairs thing I'm very familiar with - it was so annoying to deal with. Windows became a nightmare, I gotta tell ya - I learned very quickly that when you clean an already-clean window, the cleaning solution just streaks really bad. I learned to wait until no one was looking and use a dry cloth instead to be sure the streaks didn't show up - and then of course I always felt guilty. Stairs too, a lot of times when you do it in that way you end up with specks of dust that get on the bottom steps from the top ones or whatever...I think it's just another thing designed to make you fail and humiliate you. You realize quickly as you're stuck for hours on your knees smelling cleaner, that this was NEVER about cleaning, you know?

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     Tammy October 2, 2011 Reply

     Like others have just commented. This is horrific and I'm so sorry you were put through all that. Absolutely no way to justify this kind of treatment.

     • 

       Anonymous October 2, 2011 Reply

       My story is far from the worst.
       
       Eagle Springs Training Center was one of at least several I've known about that did the same thing. Eagle Springs was formerly Elms Plantation located in Altheimer, AR - they abandoned the old property and moved just outside of Skiatook, OK when neighboring residents began to suspect "a cult full of girls", to stay under the radar. They changed their name and registered with the State of Oklahoma as a "residential childcare facility"; they were required to have a counselor and other things for us, and they found people to do these required jobs who were affiliated with the cult, such as our "counselor" who was just another member of ATI covering for them (whether knowingly or not). When state inspectors came, we were threatened or coached on what to say before we were interviewed - and interviews were conducted in a room that was "closed" but had sheer curtains and thin walls. We knew we were watched, and we were all too terrified to say anything. But all of this is not at all the worst ATI had to offer.
       
       Indianapolis Training Center had a program all but hidden in its building, also a Log Cabin program; what in Eagle Srpings were "students", to them were "LIT's" or "Leaders In Training" - they were signed over by judges to be "rehabilitated", and suffered far worse abuse than we at Eagle Springs did, because whereas in Oklahoma we had to carefully stay beneath the notice of state officials - in Indianapolis Training Center, the program was left largely unchecked and with the overall approval of city officials (there was some controversy briefly raised, but that's about it if I recall). My leader for about three quarters of my time at E.S. was from ITC, and wistfully told me about how they could use handcuffs there if they 'saw fit', and how the prayer room was used all the time.
       
       For those who do not know what the Prayer Room was at ITC - it was a place where many LIT's (and at times, I believe, many who were at the training center for other reasons like conferences or apprenticeship stuff) were put into isolation for varied lengths of time; the difference was that the length of time could stretch on for weeks, even months of time, and whereas at E.S. I at least saw a human face when they brought up a plate of food - there, they would basically hand it in the door and lock you up again. My leader laughed uproarously as she told me stories of students who climbed out the window in a desperate attempt to escape, crawled onto the roof, and tried to jump to their deaths, slowly losing their minds from the horrors of isolation - she told me further how funny it was to the staff, and how they won in the end when they put the students back in the Prayer Room and closed off the ways they had escaped before. This was a game to the leaders; it was amusing to them, and the most they would say was basically "wow, crazy kid, he did what again? Haha!"
       
       At E.S. we had at least one director who thought they were doing this out of the kindness of their heart, desperate to "help" us. That person may have been one of the most emotionally damaged and brainwashed people I have ever known, but they did try at times to lessen our torture. The rest of the staffers worked around this person at every turn, so the person could not do much to help - but in my case, it was that person who ensured my two weeks did not continue to stretch on unchecked, and told them I was to be taken outside and 'walked', and I believe came down on them for not reporting the situation sooner (though of course the main director knew in full and also failed to report the situation). In Indianapolis Training Center, there was no hope, no help. I do not know how those LIT's ever managed...
       
       There were other training centers, such as one in Australia. I do not know what became of the Log Cabin Program - but I know that a full investigation into the ITC Log Cabin program vanished completely, swept under the rug - and we're talking media involvement and lawsuits for the abuse of a ten year old boy. It all vanished as if nothing had ever happened, and the boy was labeled a rebellious liar and a "committed fool" and all kinds of other shameful things. I don't even want to know what happened to him. The programs I knew when I was in them, are gone as well. But I know ATI - they rename, recycle, and move programs which essentially perform the same function. Just as they moved Elms when reports began to circulate of a "cult of girls" in the area, changing their name and relocating to where no one would know they existed - I firmly believe programs like this are highly unlikely to be dead.

       • 

         Heather June 25, 2012

         How horrible! Awful! I have no words! I LOATHE and DESPISE ATI, IBLP, and if it weren't a sin, I'd hate Gothard too, for not stopping all of this! Evil, evil man! May God have mercy on his soul!

7. 

   Chri1 December 18, 2011 Reply

   Reminds me of the movie "Cool Hand Luke."

8. PTSD for Christmas | Recovering Grace December 20, 2011 Reply

   [...] first arrived at the MTC as a single student, so I spent my days cleaning, cooking or running errands, with an occasional coveted interaction with the darlings of the MTC, [...]

9. 

   Jane Smith March 27, 2012 Reply

   I am shocked. And to think how the ATI newsletters portrayed these "training centers" as such wonderful places that I wanted my children to enjoy such opportunities. Only one of our children spent a long period of time at one ATI ministry, and he was ready to come home after half his time was finished. I am sorry to say that we didn't understand and encouraged him to keep his commitment. His complaint was that the pay he was receiving was very low, the work load heavy, and he was lonely. He was employed at the printing press at the headquarters, and never experienced any such abuse that I'm aware of.
   I am really sorry that such abuse was happening, and that we were supporting it with our enrollment fees every year. We really need to be discerning in what we choose to join and support. Thank you for opening our eyes with your story. God bless you, "Hannah"
   But I am thankful for a friend who discouraged me from pursuing any more of my children going to one of the ATI "Opportunities".

10. 

    Esbee July 7, 2012 Reply

    with all these horror stories I am wondering why one or more of the victims have not come forward to tell their stories to some sort of investigative reporter...is this abuse still going on at any of Mr. Bill's "resorts"?

    • 

      Anonymous November 10, 2012 Reply

      I highly suspect it is still going on, yes. (Like I said in my previous comments - there's a pattern of behavior here: When reports come in, change the name of the program, maybe a couple of minor things about how it works, relocate it, and keep it going. They've done it time and time again. It is a blatantly obvious effort to stay hidden.) As for why people do not come forward, I can tell you the most likely reason in my experience, and it's the same reason I prefer to speak anonymously - it's because we get confronted directly by Bill Gothard himself who has an inexplicable ability to find these reports when they go public. I spent a long time trying to find others like myself who'd seen the darkest underbelly of ATI, the true horrors - and each and every one has either: vanished, totally out of contact for anyone online as if they dropped off the face of the earth without warning; refused to come forward, too afraid to rock the boat; tried to forget it all because it is too traumatic to speak about for them; and so on and so forth. How do you report it when nobody, even other ex-ATI members, seems to believe you? How do you bring the law against an organization that has its own law school, police force (Little Rock, Arkansas: They host an entire police station and made some kind of shifty deals with city officials. I helped prepare the building and still hold the evidence in the hopes that someday they are caught red handed), and paramilitary training; one that has shown clearly that they can inexplicably make lawsuit and police cases seem to disappear? I had an author of a well-known book exposing ATI tell me directly: "You can't do anything. They're just too big. Just do what I do. Just talk. That's all you can do." How do you talk about the abuse that most ATI members didn't even really know about? I will never forget the number of times I got a clueless look and a, "Eagle Springs? What's that?" for the first few years I tried to talk about it. Even now I still get it sometimes. A lot of them just did not know what was going on at all or just didn't really know much about the programs involved other than the sugar-coated descriptions they were given, you know, "It's for counseling youth" or the like. I don't blame them, but it's information that needed to be brought forth. After seeing what happened to those who spoke up, personally I stopped and went Anonymous. Maybe that's cowardly of me, but I don't need any (more) trouble in my life. I'll speak about it because it needs to be heard, but for now I just don't feel safe to sign my name to that. And from what I've seen and from talking to a lot of others, that seems to be a common problem among those of us who went through the very worst. We keep to ourselves, we try to heal and "forget about it". What I really hope is that, over time, enough of us band together, enough people speak out, and enough of a foothold is gained that we don't have to feel afraid anymore. Because I'll be right there when it happens, ready to offer every shred of evidence I've kept locked away all these years for that day when I could testify. Until then it just seems hopeless sometimes.

11. Parents in a Potemkin Village: Six Weeks in the Moscow Training Center | Recovering Grace January 14, 2013 Reply

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