By Jeff Brain

Really?  I had not thought of it that way before.  It’s no secret that The Family Foundation School and the principles for which we stand are “under attack”.  In part by a youth rights advocacy group and in part by a handful of angry, resentful alumni – a minute percentage of the 3,000 young people we have served over the past 30 years.  They do not know how to engage in a civil discourse but rather use slanderous and subversive tactics to intimidate.  Yet, in the way that a bully gets noticed, these few alumni and their minions spread lies, and slander us on the internet.  And in this way, represent a modern age organizational bully.

This was revealed to me this week by a wise, experienced and supportive colleague.  She suggested that I reframe in my mind those who attack us as a bully.  She reasoned that they are engaging in all of the same behaviors as a bully.  In fact, it is likely that if we researched the history, we might find bullying as part of their childhood history.

In this new age of being heard on the internet, bullies have a new tool to try to hurt their victims.  They sound convincing, hiding behind the anonymity of the internet – unable to see their faces, hear them speak and thus see them for who they are.    Our children are at risk in the same way.  There are news reports of kids spreading gossip and rumors about one another on-line.  A recent workshop announcement titled “Cyberbullying” seeks to educate parents and educators on the dangers that lurk on line for their children and students – and how bullies are using the internet.  “Bullying isn’t just in the hallways anymore — it occurs on cell phones, in chat rooms, and on the ‘Net”.

Dealing with bullies remains difficult.  We do not consider ourselves victims.  We believe in who we are and what we do.  We are proud of that – and will stand up for our students and our parents – and they are standing up for us.  We are also not afraid – we trust that as we are guided by God, and by our principles and best practices in the field, we remain an important therapeutic option for families.  We are listening to our students, alumni and parents – who continue to support our mission.

It was helpful however for this colleague to reframe this in terms of bullying.  We help our students learn how to deal with bullies – how to be confident in themselves and their abilities and how to find strength in positive relationships.  My colleague said the following:

“They are not going to impact our programs if we truly are doing what comes from our heart.  They can target anyone they want, and as long as they get attention, they will continue to do so. You do not need to fight for a good reputation when you already have one.  Fighting takes a lot of negative energy and time and wastes your mission at FFS.  However, this is exactly what they want you to do. Most parents I have encountered who have found these negative websites have called and asked about it.  When they trust in the person who is assisting them, that is more powerful that some radical negative comment on a website. It is not difficult to represent your client when you stand in integrity. So, what can be done? you ask. Every time you go to their site, they know, and every time you mention them, someone will go to their site, even if out of curiosity, and that gives them more of what they want.  Not every student in every program is going to leave happy.  There is just too much tied to each child, family, situation, that you have no control over, and is not your responsibility. So the unhappy people twist their beliefs to feel better.  Again, human nature.  Jeff, you cannot fight human nature.  What to do?  Nothing.  I have a much more important aspect to my life and practice than to give these people any attention at all.”

My colleague is correct – let’s re-focus our energy on our mission of helping teens and their families.  Let’s not give the bully the fight he craves – for his motives are only to harm and come from a place of pain and hurt within himself.  For this reason however, I will continue to pray for our bullies.

Brian Lombrowski, president of CAFETY, revealed the duplicitous nature of his organization when he mailed a letter to thousands of residents in our area last fall. Agree or disagree with the mission to expand youth rights, we will always recognize the validity of organizations to champion causes.  This action of waging a smear campaign against those who do not completely agree with them is wrong and outside the activities permissible under the non-profit laws.

The smear letter CAFETY sent claimed The Family Foundation School is under federal investigation. This is untrue. This intentional attempt to create a negative image of FFS within our community based on a fabrication is an act that each member of the board of directors of CAFETY is personally accountable for based on their non-profit status and the laws that govern CAFETY’s activities.

The letter then crafted snippets of “testimonies” Lombrowski has collected that highlighted FFS staff members by name in an unfavorable light. The effect of such actions is notable and more than a little bit ironic. Staff members received death threats citing the letter.  The actions of an organization committed to the ethical treatment of youth also led to the children of these staff members becoming targets of ridicule in their own public school classrooms.

Another tangential question gets raised and this relates to CAFETY’s active pursuit of gathering testimonies from program participants. Does such an activity further the mission of the organization or is it driven by the need to find more ammunition for the smear campaign? True to their mission they have been supporting legislation in Washington.  While CAFETY is clearly becoming impatient with politics in Washington, we are noticing CAFETY’s mission creep.  They are now taking it upon themselves to declare war on programs that they have publicly listed.  This is more than questionable from a non-profit governance angle.  The government does not allow for tax deductible donations to be used to incite death threats, to republish slanderous accusations, or to commit acts of defamation.

Brian Lombrowski closed his letter, a duplicate of the ad he ran the year before in our local newspaper, asking people to contact him. Notably, some four months later, while still celebrating on Wikipedia their action of mailing these letters, CAFETY has not been able to share the results of generating any public feedback they supposedly were seeking. The silence on their part regarding lack of evidence is telling, but to admit to that does not fit their agenda.

Non-profit organizations are granted the ability to solicit tax-deductible donations for the furthering of their stated missions. The legal counsel guiding CAFETY will recognize the legitimacy of the concerns raised here and well as the vulnerability of the board members and their personal assets as the result of such actions. The concern extends also to Mr. Lombrowski’s actions contacting professionals in our field and making the claim that The Family Foundation School is beyond help. An amazing claim from someone who has never visited, indeed declined the invitation to visit, the very program he is condemning.

It was an interesting thing to have been the first organization to call out CAFETY on their questionable activities. While visiting with colleagues last week at a conference we received overwhelming support.  Even more notable we received grateful feedback from the other programs that are being treated in similar ways by CAFETY.

Dear Rita,

Thanks for addressing the many lies and distortions being propagated by the alleged Truth campaign.

It is common knowledge that the campaign was started by a family member of mine who disagreed with my parental decision to enroll my daughters at the Family School. This family member has no children of her own, and maintained at best a superficial relationship with my children. She is estranged from her siblings and parents, who are all supportive of my decision to provide my daughters with the best help I could find. I can only describe my sibling’s behavior in pursuing and funding this campaign as disturbed and out of touch with reality. It is indeed unfortunate, both for the sibling and the apparently troubled individuals who choose to follow her lead.

The Family School helped my daughters turn their lives around and rebuild relationships between them and with me. They successfully transitioned from the school in June 2009 – one to a top-notch college and other to a top-notch prep school.

With my parents, friends, and partner, I spent perhaps hundreds of hours at the Family School during the 18 month period my daughters were enrolled there. I attended countless table topics, many sports events, choral performances, picnics -in short, with two daughters at the school and the many opportunities for parental involvement, I felt Family School was my second home for those 18 months. Every visit left me feeling that my daughters we receiving the best possible support, care, love and guidance available anywhere. On top of that, they received an excellent high school education.

My gratitude for the Family School is immense. I am an attorney and dedicated mom who left no stone unturned in trying to find the best therapeutic program anywhere to help my daughters. I searched from Vermont to Hawaii, making personal visits to several schools. No where did I find the unique opportunities offered at the Family School.

The Family School was undoubtedly the best thing I could have done for my daughters, and indeed my family. I thank you all from the bottom of my heart, and know that the truth will prevail – it always does. I pray that the troubled individuals relentlessly pursuing the anti-Family School campaign will find peace and move on with their lives, rather than remain stuck in their torrent of anger, denial, and confusion.

Peace to all.
Meg Sheehan

By Kurt Hock

Spectrum analysis really states that all things are possible. This does not have much to do with a right and positive decision, nor a wrong and negative decision at any particular moment in our lives. However, a particularly bad moral decision and a particularly good moral decision have as profound an affect on our lives as an accumulative weigh-in on a person’s good or bad merits. Simply put: our actions dictate where we land on the spectrum between notions and behaviors acquainted with evil and ideas which are divine and as God would have it: loving.

In comes distortion. We are all free to align ourselves with any type of persuasion we want. At this point we have entered the world of malleability. Our culture of capitalism is keenly aware of this state of neediness and is the very reason for media manipulation and the cause for its reprehensibly early start on the collective minds of our nation’s youth.  Advertising agents, lobbyists, and politicians are very aware of the powerful force of persuasion. It’s a force prone to distortion.  It appeals to our most dangerous vices:  vanity, greed, distrust, false righteousness, warped sexuality and false love.  Mixed and confused messages are the goal.  Distortion creates oceans of space for misguided judgment and, of course, misconstrued truths. The goal is simple: create insecurity and uncertainty.

Keeping our serenity demands we steer clear of these dangerous shoals and to seek in all our affairs the greater “good” and to understand clearly how distortion seeks to consume us.

I have worked at this job, which has transformed into a vocation, for 9 years. I am witness to the miracle of positive change each hour I’m at work.  The direction our school has moved since I’ve been here has focused on safety. And daily we assist in the difficult yet extremely rewarding work of helping young people to fulfill their potential while being mindful and very in tune to the raw feelings and stressed emotions of each student. I now work in a very different school then the one I began to work in 9 years ago. And I expect the school nine years from now to be very different from what it is today, because we are always testing and changing.

The distortion is this: The Family Foundation School just is not the place that its detractors say it is. The school runs on a deep level of accountability. The school has and continues to transform itself and to operate at the highest level of professional care for it students and for the community.  This school is bound to honesty and carries on, in search of truth, today and everyday.

I definitely do not condone the serious extortion which paints a different picture on the internet. Again, distortion is a tool to create doubt and confusion. God asks that each of us rise above it.

Recently someone called our admissions office posing as a parent with a child in distress. They asked for a list of parents they might contact who would discuss their experiences with the school. We have quite an extensive list of references and we sent it thinking that we were helping a distressed family. We are shocked and outraged to find this list appearing on the family truth website (with phone numbers)!

By duplicitous methods CAFETY members obtained this list and used it for their purposes. Our agreement with parents was to share this list only with families seriously interested in the school. Whatever our detractors motives were, this was a naked attempt at intimidation. This action says “support The Family Foundation School and we will publicly post your name and phone number over the Internet.”  Our parents  agreed to help distressed families through private communication, not to publicly advertise their contact information or personal affiliation with the school.

These are the fraudulent and deceptive tactics of the smear campaign — distortions, intimidation, and lies. While each of the parents offered to help others, none volunteered to have the fact of their child’s attendance at a therapeutic boarding school published on the Internet. For all their concern for “the ethical treatment of youth,” it does not seem to concern them that by exposing the parents, they have exposed the children.

(A response to a comment from Jen J.)

By Rita Argiros, Ph.D.

Thanks for expressing what I am sure many alumni are feeling and allowing me the opportunity to say that I 100% stand behind my earlier apologies for all outdated past practices and the harm that they caused. I also know that as we move forward, we will continue to change and grow and that there may be things that are common practice today that are seen as wrong in the future.  I am willing to talk personally to alumni looking for clarification, closure, an apology or want to point out other ways we could be better. I want to extend a loving hand of acceptance to any alumni who thinks we will judge them harshly because they are being true to their own values–which should be unique to them,
not a carbon copy of ours.

Jen, thanks for pointing out so clearly that many alumni, even in their resentments are looking for something from us, acknowledgment, approval, respect. To everyone who identifies with that portion of Jen’s comment: We presented you with what works for us. If you got the message that you are bad or you are a failure if you deviate from our values–I am truly sorry. I can see how we communicated that and it was wrong. You need to be living up to your own values. If any of us went overboard dogmatically impressing our values and beliefs on you that was wrong.

Today, I think we do a much better job. At FFS our values are fundamentally the same: the 12 steps and 4 absolutes. They are life saving and transformative. We want all our students to try them, to experiment with them. But if they decide to leave them behind as they move through life, that is fine. Who are we to judge?

We will do what we can to make sure future generations of Family
Foundation School students are as prepared as possible to make the transition from borrowing our values and ethics to living by their own. I think that is part of what you mean when you talk about even our critics needed our approval and acceptance.  But I don’t think we will ever be able to make that process painless. It’s part of the human condition.

As for memories and feelings about memories. It is because we do accept them as real, that we have refrained from commenting for as long as we have.  Accepting them real and agreeing that they are all 100% objectively true are two different things. Memory is fallible. We remember things that didn’t happen. We don’t remember things that did happen. We get our facts mixed up. Feelings from one event can spill over and color the memories of other events and the feelings you are having when you recall an event can permanently alter the way you feel about that event in the future. That is the reality we are in. It’s true for everyone involved.

I wish with my whole heart that people were not so polarized.  I listen to what is being said by both those who think everything we did was wrong and those who admire and respect us for doing the exact same things. I have done what I can to see things from the point of view of the alienated alumni and I will continue to do so. I wish I could have just left it there. But much that is being written about us is distorted at best, lies at worst. I would not be true to myself, my staff, my family, and the alumni and their families who benefited from FFS if I continued to be publicly silent. I regret that my post made some people who it was not aimed at feel angry and defensive. I will not go through each testimony and, line-by-line, explain what I believe and what I doubt, what I don’t understand, what I think is a partial truth, what sounds like hyperbole to me, what rings true to me, what I know from my own memory of events to be a lie–not in a public forum and not in the current litigious climate.

Regardless of the good intentions of many members of CAFETY and regardless what Jon Martin Crawford’s initial intentions were when they first wentup, recent posts, the mailing from CAFETY to 1000s of people in our community that was full of lies, the harassing phone calls, are part of an orchestrated smear campaign designed to, as you put it, “burn us to the ground.” I am not going to lay down and take it. I hope that alumni like yourself hear me when I say, I am not attacking everyone who has posted their personal story. I know that some of my favorite students and old friends have posted criticisms there and I respect that, even if I might see things differently.

By Rita Argiros, Ph. D.

I’ve decided to use blogging as a way to track my thinking and my feelings over the next several months. I already blog about dog training and I contribute to other Family Foundation School blogs and sometimes those blogs may be informed by my reaction to the smear campaign against the school. But this series is meant to be different. Here I will be publicly sharing my reactions to the smear campaign.

The leadership at the Family Foundation School reached a decision a few days ago. We need to be more assertive on the Internet. In the past and for a variety of reasons, we have not directly defended ourselves against the smear campaign on the Family School Truth site and CAFETY. I don’t know where the new approach will take us. But it’s clear that we need to do something different.

Our school has been here in Hancock, in one form or another, for over 30 years. Thousands of teenagers and young adults have come and gone. I was here at the beginning. I left for more than a decade. And now it’s been 10 years since my return. I came back here full of hope. There were so many good things about the school but also so many things I thought we could improve. I am a reformer, not a revolutionary. If you knew me and my history you’d know that that is a very important statement. Most of my graduate school education took place in a sociology department that valued revolutionaries and disparaged liberal reformers. My family was always politically conservative. So, whether I came out somewhere in the middle by blending the best of my family and my graduate education, or whether I figured out a way to rebel against both my parents and my professors, I believe I ended up being able to see both sides, their strengths and their weaknesses. But the middle is a very difficult position to maintain. When former students of the Family Foundation School began to use the Internet and all the new social media tools as part of a political campaign to promote youth rights, we, the leadership of the school, were caught unprepared.

We certainly underestimated the power of social media. I just read an article in this week’s New Yorker about President Obama(get link). The White House is an organization that, by all accounts, uses social media very well. Yet, even they have been slow to appreciate how much it has undermined the power of truth and reason.  Recently when Sarah Palin mentioned the so-called “death panels” for the first time,  the Obama administration let the matter go. Apparently, they believed that no reasonable person in the media would give the remark any credit and it would just die. They were wrong. Palen’s remarks viraled out of control on the Internet. It was picked up and bandied about on cable and main stream news media and the administration were forced to respond.  The lie was relentlessly repeated until it became a significant weapon in our dysfunctional national politics. The Death Panel lie joined the ranks of all the other lies that have been told about President Obama.  My favorite lies being that Obama is not a US citizen and that he was raised a Muslim. Nobody I know believes those things and yet every national poll shows that many people do believe them or at-least think that they might be true.

Like the Obama administration in the death-panel case, the administration of The Family Foundation School failed to appreciate the power of emotions and the impotence of reason. Theoretically I understand that emotions influence decisions. I’m trained as a sociologist and I’m familiar with psychological and neurological research on emotions and decision making. As an academic, I find it distasteful to use emotions to sway people’s decisions. That’s my bias. And it’s proving to be a significant handicap.  Facebook and the Family School Truth website have allowed a core group of radical student rights activists to collect and organize 30 years worth of complaints and grievances against us.

And that brings up the second thing working to our disadvantage. We have consistently embraced criticism. As our detractors relentlessly point out,  the program of the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous clearly says that we shall admit when we are wrong and it charges us to make amends wherever possible. We do that. In 2006, at my parents’ 50th wedding reunion party, to which we had invited every alumni we could possibly contact, I publicly acknowledged that the techniques and methods used in the past, although accepted practices at the time, were wrong. We understood that many of our alumni carried pain and anger from some of the things that happened to them. And we offered each of them the opportunity to speak with members of the Argiros family and other staff they were close to. We wanted to give ourselves and them the opportunity to hear and acknowledge what had happened.  We listened. We offered our apologies as best as we were able. We considered carefully each comment and, when appropriate made changes based on the feedback.

I am grateful for all the alumni who have met with us. But it must be understood that these meetings and the smear campaign are not what caused us to change.  We change and grow  because that is who we are. It is our commitment to the students that we live and work with that eliminated outdated tactics from the old TC model, that implemented the Therapeutic Crisis Intervention model, that is always looking for ways to balance necessary controls against students need to practice healthy choices, that implemented ever more family counseling, that increased the amount and quality of parent-child communication and worked to make the amount of time students spent here less. All of these changes were well under-way long before the smear campaign was launched.

I would never have made that speech at my parents’ anniversary if we weren’t already transforming ourselves. In fact, the one thing that has always characterized the Family Foundation School is our willingness to embrace change and best practices. We will continue to meet with former alumni, and alumni parents. And whenever we hear a valid criticism or complaint we will address it. Unfortunately, openness to criticism has weakened our ability to defend ourselves against the lies, distortions, and exaggerations you can read about on the Family School Truth site.  Four years after my public address, caring parents making the most difficult decisions of their lives are struggling to trust what may be the best alternative for their child by the same fear tactics the smear campaign erroneously claims we use.

In the past, whenever I have discussed the smear campaign, I have always taken great pains to resist using the word “lie.” Reserving that for those stories that I knew from my personal experience were complete fabrications. If there was any truth at all in anything that an alumni said I would focus on that. And I would ignore, for the sake of reconciliation, everything else.

We can’t afford to do that any longer. The current generation of teens and their families are suffering. And The Family Foundation School has an answer. It has been effective in most cases. We have anecdotal evidence. We have statistical evidence. We have our word, and we have testimonies of countless students and their parents available to anyone who asks.  We are open to inspection and we have accreditation. We have the most open admissions process of any therapeutic school, wilderness program, or residential treatment center you will ever come in contact with.  I’m not willing to have even one parent driven away by what I will, from now on, call by their right name, lies.

Until this started happening to us, I often wondered if we really needed two commandments: one against lying, and the other against bearing false witness.  False witness seemed to me to be another form of lying.  But that’s like saying that murder is another form of assault. False Witness is lying taken to the point where it murders another’s good-standing in the community. That is what is happening to us. So here in this blog I will express my feelings as well as my reason. I will be emotional. I am deeply upset, angry and grief-stricken by what the adults who organize and maintain the smear campaign are getting away with on the Internet–the new wild West–where rules about slander and libel do not apply. There is no way to know if students and their families are suffering today because parents in crisis are turned away by the clever emotional appeals made against us.  My candor may backfire.  We’ll see.