The purpose for hostility sessions was to vent in a controlled arena and the logic for having crew hostility sessions was simple. The people who have the most contact with each other on a daily basis would naturally be the people with whom problems would most likely develop. Since the majority of a resident’s time was spent working, the people who we spent the most time with were our fellow crew members. It was obvious when a crew needed to vent. Snide remarks would be tossed around and a lot of tit for tat petty pull-ups would be made. Nothing serious would happen, but tension would grow and it was obvious when it was time to blow off some steam.
Once a hostility session was planned, people were asked to go into the dining room, the largest room in the house where most meetings were held. The chairs were placed in a large circle and spaced far enough apart so no one was touching each other. The staff member conducting the hostility session would talk a few minutes and go over any pertinent issues. To officially open the session the staff member would go slowly around the circle by asking if anyone had any hostility for each person in the group. This process was done slowly enough to allow everyone to think about their dealings with each person as each of us took our turn on the hot seat. For example, if anyone had any hostility for me, they would have to wait for the staff member to ask, “Does anyone have any hostility for Karen?” At that moment, anyone who was angry at me had an opportunity to vent without having to worry about getting in trouble for anything they might say.
People were allowed to express their anger in any way they wanted to express it. They could swear. They could scream. They could threaten. They could make ugly faces, let a repertoire of sounds fill the room or just flip the person the finger if that’s how they felt comfortable expressing what they wanted to say. Anger was not censored during a hostility session, but it was governed with a certain protocol and strict guidelines forbidding anyone to leave their seat. Everyone was expected to remain glued to their chair during the hostility session regardless of how heated the session might become. The person receiving the hostility had to sit quietly and listen while people expressed their hostility without responding in anyway.
Remaining quiet and waiting to reciprocate wasn’t always easy, but seldom, did anyone break the rules and when they did a staff member would quickly intervene. The purpose was to give each person ample time to alleviate their bad feelings and anger that they had held inside until that moment and then come to a fair resolution without having an old-fashioned brawl break out as a result of having a highly spirited and often times, extremely heated discussion involving many people.
Actually, the most positive feature of these sessions was being allowed to finally vent. In theory, these hostility sessions were supposed to make crews run more smoothly and have people pull together as a team, but what I witnessed many times was a lot of petty grudges developing as a result of these hostility sessions. Some people felt humiliated and as a result held a grudge especially if that person felt they had been unfairly wolf-packed by several people. The people who had difficulty in letting things go and who had trouble in being able to forgive would do the dirty little tit-for-tat things back and forth after returning to work. Eventually, if the conflict went on long enough and became noticeable to staff because it effected the entire crew‘s job performance, the people involved would be disciplined separately and possibly put on a ban with each other. Morale and teamwork were difficult to boost especially if the team was divided by pettiness and constant bickering.
Another type "session" Kinsman Hall had was called a guilt session, but unlike hostility sessions, guilt sessions always involved the entire residential body. Being the imperfect beings we all are and being prone to making mistakes, each person therefore carried guilt or so they told us. Now, try to get a bunch of people who were branded with the code of the streets where a snitch was regarded as the scum of the earth to rat on each other. Yes, we were there to change, but some things the streets taught us were easier to change than others. Remember snitches get stitches!
We were told guilt formed as a result of secretly breaking rules or as a result of a negative contract being formed with a friend by either secretly breaking rules together or by conspiring to break rules together. According to Kinsman Hall, harboring guilt tended to impede a person’s progress, so the purpose of a guilt session was to cleanse everyone’s conscience and restore harmony and understanding amongst the residents. With a blank slate a person can function better and become a stronger individual. As with all the other concepts to which we were introduced, the purpose of guilt sessions was hammered into the new attitudes we were building. We were expected to accept that guilt weighs a person down and prevents any healing to occur.
Guilt sessions reminded me in many ways of the Catholic confession. As I would sit in the dining room pondering my guilt with the other guilt-infested misfits, I would always sarcastically think, "Forgive me Father for I have sinned..." After our “sins” were revealed to staff, forgiveness and penance were issued followed by time spent reflecting before moving on. The processes were similar, but instead of receiving forgiveness from some Divine source, our absolution was given by a group of saintly staff members in the Main Area!
Guilt sessions began when all residents were called into the dining room and were told to take a seat, but to spread out and not sit directly next to anyone. Talking, eye contact or any type of communication was not allowed. We were left in there for what seemed to be an eternity, but in reality, it probably was no longer than an hour before one by one each of us was called to the Main Area where we stood in front of several staff members. At that time we were expected to “give up our guilt”.
The truly deceptive thing about guilt sessions was that amnesty was offered as a way to entice people to cleanse themselves. What it did in reality was to divide and conquer. It pitted one person against the other. Any guilt a person revealed would not result in a punishment UNLESS it was guilt not revealed by all parties involved. Let's say two people had physical contact (there goes those raging hormones again). If neither person “copped to the guilt” then the chances of staff ever finding out what happened was slim to nil, but remember we're dealing with real people in these situations and these real people are in various stages of recovery. Staff members were once residents also, so they know first hand what residents do and what they want to do. Often times, staff would lie about what guilt had been given up about a person just to trap the person into telling the truth about what rules had been broken.
To add some drama to the scenario, let's say the two people liked each other at the time the physical contact took place, but these two people no longer are a hot item at the time of the guilt session (young people are such fickle creatures at times). The one who dumped the other person now likes someone new. The one who got dumped would most likely feel jealousy, rejection and anger and would plot some intricate revenge in their mind. (That sounds like a typical reaction, doesn’t it?) Wouldn't a guilt session be a golden opportunity to get even with the person who just dumped you? The one who got dumped most likely would decide to cop to the guilt, but the other person never mentions it when they have their turn in the Main Area because they think the other person would never admit to it, plus they don’t want to run the risk of having the new object of their affection find out about their fickle ways.
Of course, that type of logic always backfired and undoubtedly someone was always caught in the tangled web they wove. Plus, it was hard to hide anything in such close quarters. Romances came and went, but usually everyone knew who liked who. The outcome of the guilt session rewarded the person who squealed with no punishment and the other person who remained tight-lipped got severely disciplined with a shaved head or stocking cap and an 18-hour to 20-hour indefinite work contract. OUCH! The moral of that story was to pick your partners in crime carefully and always know who might give you up as guilt. Even when friends say that they’d never give you up, things happen over the course of time and sometimes those friends would renege on their promises made to each other. Some people actually bought into the reasons behind squealing and cleansed their guilty consciences often.
Many different scenarios can play themselves out in the dining room during a guilt session. The psychological maze a guilt session created is phenomenal. In the back of each resident's minds is that little voice, a conscience that hasn’t been alive and well in many in such a long time. That voice in some would scream loudly that having false loyalty is street behavior. The code of silence among druggies is strong and being a snitch is frowned upon anywhere, but in this setting, in the dining room while you are alone with your conscience and you have Dean Hepper’s all-seeing eye probing your mind, guilt creeps in the backdoor and leads you in directions that previously you would have never taken. Death before dishonor and to a dope fiend dishonor was being a snitch.
Pitting friend against friend in this situation is an excellent way of demonstrating how false loyalty leads nowhere. Most people might wonder why anyone would admit to doing anything and that’s a great question, but one that’s extremely difficult to rationally answer. As a person's defenses are torn apart, over time what takes their place are values that may be completely foreign to that person. In ways, we started becoming robots and lesser versions of our Creator, Dean Hepper and didn’t God create man in his own image?
See no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil just didn't seem to be a viable option when faced with standing in front of God and his archangels. Did any of us have any other option than to give up our festering guilt? Were each of us expected to sell out our friends in order to become whole or progress in the program? Or was that just old bad behavior speaking to keep a person from cleaning up their act? When confusion sets in, anything is possible. When confusion sets in, they think they have you and most of the time they did! It was a definite power struggle and one in which the odds were highly stacked against a lowly resident.