Meaning and the Reflective Voice

Choose an experience that will be a part of your memoir. Don’t just tell us what you saw, who you are with and what happened. Help us also understand what you were thinking and feeling along the way. Record your emotions and tell us why you felt the way you did…

I was almost caught up in a cult. In the spring of 1971, while my daughter still fit below the age limit for free airline travel, I took both children back east to visit friends and family. I wanted to see my sister and her family in Washington DC, and my parents in Chicago, or perhaps I wanted to show off my beautiful children – I’m not sure which was most important. I also wanted to see my friend Sharon, my had last seen in Boston in 1966. She was living in a huge historic home in Rhode Island and invited me to visit there also.

But I was also scared. My budding autonomy, fostered by learning transactional analysis, was at risk. My friend and fellow TA student, Marilyn, gave me a 1 inch wooden you with a tiny handle screwed into labeled Laurie’s Adult, on, off. This talisman was to remind me that I had the capability to decide how to respond instead of reacting the way I had done in the past.

My sister and I both wanted to be right about our different opinions and life choices. This division was not as obvious as it would later become. My mother, course was always right! A trap for me and set up to be good if there ever was one.

On the other hand, Jacqui Schiff, the star of the 1970 Summer conference, had issued an open invitation to visit her program in Fredericksburg, Virginia to learn how she was re-parenting schizophrenics. To me, this was a haven of sanity in the normally regimented world I was both visiting and where I was wary of drowning. After several days with my sister, the vision of that refuge gave me the courage to load my 21-month-old daughter and a folded playpen into a rented car and drive into the unknown.

We were warmly welcomed, perhaps because my husband had passed his clinical member exams the previous year and we had created a TA outpost in Colorado. I was invited to observe the community of people who were identified as schizophrenic but looked pretty ordinary to me. I was also warned that violence sometimes erupted, and we would be protected if it did.

Along with other clearly explained activities of regressed adults acting as children, I witnessed a recalcitrant patient being spanked, hard, for not doing some task. I later wondered if he was even capable of doing the task. At the time I accepted that, and all other explanations as logical. I felt safe and protected.

Upon learning they were all soon caravanning, across the country to their new home in Walnut Hills, California, I invited them to stop and camp in my backyard in Colorado. It seemed like a perfectly logical thing to do. After all, a few years before I was a senior Girl Scout on a cross-country trip and had been invited to stop and camp in other people’s backyards.

Several months later they arrived and unexpectedly opened a whole new professional direction for us. Part brilliant therapist and part hypnotic narcissist, Jacqui Schiff became an important figure in our lives for the next eight years.

Jacqui was intent on teaching members of ITAA her methods. We participated in her training programs and visited the community in Walnut Hills, CA. She also offered marathon therapy sessions at some conferences where she offered “Reparenting” to members of the community. Jon participated in those, I did not. I felt that my parents had been quite adequate and I did not want to discard most of their influence on my life—just grow beyond it.

That may have been what saved me from completely accepting what she was doing. When the ethics committee found her guilty of ethical violations, and she appealed to the ITAA board of trustees, on which we were serving, we needed to read over a thousand pages of various documents during the conference in Toronto.

We, the board, agreed with the charges and suggested remedies. She refused to accept them and was eventually expelled from the ITAA. The entire process stretched me in ways that I could not have imagined. I emerged as an exhausted but ethically significantly more mature professional.

Later, I served on the organization ethics committee for over 10 years.