Shock Therapy
The Night I Got Kidnapped
On January 1, 1990 - the newly-free Polish government began the painful process of liberalizing its post-soviet economy, and shifting to a free market capitalist model in a radically transformative process that is often referred to as “Shock Therapy”.
These economic reforms shook the country to its core, and bore an enormous human cost for the already-poor people of Poland - perhaps more than communism had immediately before - but they worked.
The hard times passed. Economic growth and national optimism soared to a degree still unseen in most other post-soviet states.
Poland is now on track to be wealthier than The United Kingdom on a per-capita GDP basis in the next decade - thanks in large part to their willingness to endure short term pain and uncertainty - and just do the things that needed to be done.
It’s been a few months since the last time I really thought about the night my parents had me kidnapped, or about my time in wilderness therapy & residential treatment.
Worrying less about those days is probably a good thing, all things considered. I spent years, for contrast, waking up, night after night, in a cold sweat - sometimes even screaming at the nightmares from that fateful evening & the years that followed.
The troubled teen industry was a challenging time of my life - of course it was! Everything and everyone I knew was ripped away in the course of six hours, and my entire world went from discontent and sedated comfort to something painful, terrifying, and entirely new.
Now, I’m no psychologist, but I’ve got a hunch as to why I’ve mostly gotten over the pain, fear, and rage I once associated so deeply with those years of my life.
I’ve made peace with those dark days because I decided to be honest with myself about why they happened. I realized that I wasn’t really a victim of circumstance or malice. I was a perpetrator - the perpetrator - of my own teenaged misery.
Was my original school set up well for someone with my quirks and proclivities? No, not even a little bit. Was I ever going to be socially suave or even particularly well-liked in high school? No. But life didn’t have to be nearly as horrible as it was back then.
The circumstances couldn’t scream at my dad nearly every day. My teachers - even the worst ones - never kicked my sister’s bedroom door off its hinges in rage. Even the video games I played just to numb my pain didn’t put a gun to my head and force me to a keyboard to waste my best years on their nonsense.
These are regrettable, unfortunate, shameful things that happened. They didn’t just happen, though - they’re things that I did - choices that I made.
And while yes, teenagers always have and always will be somewhat stupid, I was grown up enough that I was complicit - and responsible - to a very real degree.
So when my parents had exhausted every other option at their disposal to help me, they reached deep into their pockets and steeled their hearts to take a step they had desperately hoped they wouldn’t have to - one they weren’t sure would even work.
Their courage and their love to make a radical change they knew I’d hate them for saved my life & helped me find meaning, peace, and happiness in my life.
The crazy thing? My life wasn’t actually that much worse in wilderness therapy - and it might’ve actually been better once I was in a residential / boarding school environment. I was angry - frustrated - depressed, that the world I once knew was gone - but my life was a living hell beforehand, too.
My healing - my peace - around this awful time of my life came after I finally allowed myself to ask a simple question I’d been ignoring and avoiding for far too long.
What did I actually have to lose?
The answer? “Almost nothing”.
If you’re contemplating a big, scary change of some sort in your own life, gentle reader, I hope you think hard about this yourself.
If the risk of taking a chance & making a change in your life is misery and failure - and you’re already miserable and failing… What do you have to lose?
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