Speaking My Truth

My last word on HBO's The Synanon Fix

Sometimes when you speak your truth, you lose friends. When I wrote about my reactions to HBO’s The Synanon Fix several months ago, I received kudos from some ex-Synanon members, and a definite chill from others. That silenced me. For a while.

My Synanon memoir examines the cult side of Synanon. I won’t deny I loved the place—why else would I have stayed for eight years? As it became more and more cultish, I stayed, hoping it would go back to the idealistic community I thought I moved into.

Synanon was a lot of things, but let’s be honest: It morphed into a cult.

I’ve pondered my reaction to HBO’s documentary The Synanon Fix for several months. I was so angry, not at Rory Kennedy, the producer, but at how a few powerful people had the last word. A few weeks after the airing, the Los Angeles Times published an article where Rory said each interview took eight or nine hours, and that she felt like they were playing the Synanon Game with her.

She was right. They were.

There was more to the Game than shouting at each other. There was more to the Game than breaking through emotional barriers. I often hear ex-Synanites extol how we pushed past egos and reached genuine emotional truths. Maybe so. But there was a sinister aspect to the Game, too.

The expert Game players knew how to manipulate us and our feelings. Their voices were louder; they were quicker on their feet. They proclaimed they were right; it was our feelings that were wrong.

What do you call it when a friend worries out loud about moving her six-month-old daughter into our live-away school and is then condemned for those feelings? When she feels she must leave because she isn’t a true enough believer?

What do you call it when another friend speaks up against forced vasectomies and then is not allowed back on the premises, not allowed to see his infant daughter?

I know, I know—we weren’t forced to do anything. We could always leave. We weren’t in jail.

Except, perhaps, psychologically.

What about this same friend who was beaten nearly to death for trying to visit his baby? What is that excuse? He had already left.

Many of my friends still sing the praises of Synanon. That’s how big-hearted they are. They can celebrate the good we did. We helped so many people.

But we hurt so many people. Kids separated from their parents, neglected and, as they recall, abused. Mothers, like me, separated from their babies.

Rory gave the kids—now grown children—a voice in Episode Three, with their chilling tales of abuse and neglect. She exposed a corporal punishment log that demonstrators (those whose job it was to raise the children) kept, a log that the demonstrators now don’t remember writing in. I never want to see that log—I don’t want to know if someone hit my two-year-old son.

Dederich was a master manipulator, somehow able to bend people to his will. Maybe it was pure charisma. But he mixed his charisma with coercion, always dangling the carrot and the stick.

In the last episode, I was hoping someone would speak up. I wanted someone to say: I’m sorry. I’m sorry I hurt people. I’m sorry I went against my moral code. I bought the snake oil. Dederich’s daughter Jady said as much. But only her. Maybe they said these things to Rory and Rory left them on the cutting room floor.

“I didn’t leave Synanon. Synanon left me,” Rod said in the documentary. I’ve heard the exact words from others.

Bullshit!

Rory gave Rod a platform. He could have called attention to the horrors of cults, to admit how even he who became a leader in therapeutic communities after he left was coerced and manipulated to act against his moral code. But no, he simply claimed Synanon left him.

That is my disappointment in the documentary. That is my anger.

I feel for all the people to whom Dederich was a father figure, for all the people who are grateful to him for saving them from a life of substance misuse. What I don’t understand is how they are still under Dederich’s spell. I don’t understand how they excuse him because maybe he had OCD all along. I don’t understand how they not only watched him fall off the wagon to become a pathetic drunk, but they drank with him! And they celebrate it!

If only they had intervened with this man they cared about so deeply and moved him into a rehab facility. Oh, wait! They lived in a rehab facility.

I wanted those interviewed to admit they did terrible things while under Dederich’s spell. But that would take a master player of the Synanon Game to break through their egos. Rory didn’t know how to play the Game. She was played.