A Blog Break

This Friday my husband, Mark and I are leaving for five weeks in Rome and in Egypt. A couple of days ago I began to turn my attention to getting ready on a practical and mental level for this trip. I find that I cannot at the same time focus on the writing that I have been doing about Therafields. I plan to continue with it on our return in mid-January, however. There are still many areas that I want to explore. In the meantime, if anyone has comments or suggestions for this blog, I will be happy to see them. I will be writing a travel journal and blog while we are away. If interested you can link with that blog through www.italyandegypt.blogspot.com. Have a good holiday season. Brenda.

Families and Children: Part 2

Once Lea's children had returned, not to Toronto to live independent lives, but rather to her bosom, to the centre of the community in which she had developed her practice, her attention turned strongly toward them. Her practice, her business, became the family business, ultimately providing jobs and status for all those closest to her: Rob, Josie, Malcolm, and Visvaldis. Because she was unable to face honestly within herself or with others the true bases of her relationships with each of these people, dishonesty and manipulations by necessity multiplied. Her students and clients, still caught in the confusions of both positive and negative transference -- longing for her love and approval, and, fearing her wrath and rejection -- stumbled along with her, supporting the directions that she took.

A woman close to the situation at that time believes that when her kids came back, "Lea became terribly protective and spread a myth about the family. Rob hadn't been traumatized in the ways that Malcolm and Josie had. They seemed to carry pieces of the family troubles that she had to protect so that we wouldn't know something about them and her. Malcolm had abused Josie as a child. It was pretty terrible. The two of them left the family home for some time but then came back. They were the devourers that Lea became obsessed about saving herself from, interestingly enough. I think it was them that she feared...If you had terrible maternal failures, three kids and some really bad things happened, some really harming things, it would be very disturbing to you. Then you start something and you become the big resource and are look at in a certain way. But then the ghosts of your past begin to come home." This woman said further that when Josie was pregnant with her first child, Lea convened a Christmas project at the farm. "I think that Josie having a baby was scary for Lea. What kind of a mother would she be? All of her own experiences as a mother came crowding in on her."

Lea was living a double life. Inwardly she feared facing or being faced with the troubles between herself and her children. Outwardly she was assuming the mantle of the Great Mother, the ultimate source of knowledge and wisdom with respect to children and families. Over the 1970s her troubles grew into an obsession, not just with already formed families, but also with the question of whether or not various women ought to have children, or, having them, whether they ought to keep them. At a CAG marathon in Nov, 1973 Lea asked the question: "How many people in this room feel that they should not have children?" She asked for a show of hands. She would then nod to a particular person and say, "Absolutely right. Right." To another,"I'm not sure about you. You're a bit young yet." To another who said she wasn't certain, "I don't feel so badly about you." Some women not present were mentioned by her as clearly not being suitable though she said they made excellent helpers. She went on to say,"There are many women who would make very good mothers if they adopt a child. There are many women, who if they have a child, it's like they give something up. It's almost like they become husks. It's very sad." Deciding whether or not to have a family became more than a personal issue for a couple. It became an act of daring, especially for women, a high wire act with enormous potential for failure.

Over the next few years the sense emerged that few women were capable of being good mothers. A CAG woman recalls that, "There was a craziness in Lea and in Josie about anyone having babies except themselves. All this was huge and horrible for CAG women. Only one had had a baby and she had been vilified and not helped at all. We were in our thirties then. We were caught in an odd obedience position because of all the questioning of whether we thought we could be good mothers. It was mad. You cannot mess with a woman's odessey about whether or not to have children. It can take years. Even if someone concludes that she doesn't want to, there can be real grief and mourning about it." Some women were actively discouraged from having children, being told that they were too paranoid. Others were told that their body-type indicated a poor outcome from a pregnancy. When one of Josie's "friends" miscarried, Josie pronounced vehemently that anyone looking at that woman's body could see that she ought not have children. No concern or empathy for the heart-broken woman was in evidence. There gradually developed a feeling that only Lea's daughter, her daughter-in-law, and another woman close to the family could do well having children, and only then under Lea's close supervision. One member of CAG commented,"It was crazy. It was like a bee hive. One female is fed the royal jelly and all the others are workers."

In 1975-6 several children were born despite this confounding atmosphere. Lea resurrected a 1920s or 1930s British Mothercraft booklet for expectant mothers and more or less demanded that its prescriptions be followed. Bran was to be cooked in the oven and sewn into a pillow case for the ideal infant matress. Diapers must be of cloth; no plastic diaper covers were to be used, only knitted ones. There were to be nighties of a certain type, so many sweaters, blankets, and so on. Babies were to be placed in rooms with a particular kind of ventilation. Any woman having a baby during this period would hasten to subscribe to all and any measures suggested. An "inspection" of some nature could occur at any time. One woman's therapist (undoubtedly prompted by Lea) asked to come to see the arrangements for her coming child. While there the therapist pointed out to the expectant mother that there was a thin layer of dust on her furniture, not at all a good sign. The woman was careful to inspect her furniture closely after that reprimand but she resented the interference. It affected her formerly quite good feelings toward the therapist.

Somewhat later another woman was struggling to bond with her child in its early months. Though in Florida at the time Lea heard something of the woman's troubles and decided that she ought to give up her child to someone who really wanted a child. When a vistor arrived at the Florida beach house Lea grilled her about how the mother was doing. The visitor assured Lea that she was doing fine but Lea was not interested in hearing that. She continued to speculate about who would be the best person to take the child. Lea telephoned me from Florida saying that I had done alright with my first child and asking if I would be interested in taking on this one. I knew nothing about the situation. It was flattering to be given such a request by Lea but I knew right away that I didn't want to do it. I also thought that it was weird. I simply said that I'd have to talk it over with my husband. Lea didn't ask again though. There were at least two other women lobbying her for the child. Luckily for the mother one of the women in Toronto who was perceived as "acceptable maternal material" invited her to come to live at her house with the baby. She got other women to come and help out and before long things righted themselves between mother and child.

Lea's disturbance about mothers and babies came to a head when Rob's girl friend, Sheron became pregnant in 1978. Lea had tried to prevent their relationship though when Rob persisted in it, she was at least on the surface accepting. When Sheron told Lea about the pregnancy, "The first thing she said to me was to ask if I had considered an abortion. I couldn't believe it! Then there was a rush to get us married right away. She was so concerned about how things were seen and she feared some kind of scandal." Another woman in the seminar had become pregnant shortly before this. As the time came closer for the deliveries of these babies, Lea became more and more agitated. One of the women close to the family at that time said, "Lea had a fantasy of having another baby herself -- sort of like the old Abraham and Sarah thing. She was going a bit dotty then. She got on a huge bandwagon about Margaret's baby (not the woman's real name) because I think it was tied in some way to her fantasy of having the baby herself. She stormed over to Margaret's house one day demanding to see her clothes for the baby. Margaret was upstairs with all her little helpers. They were doing this and that and Lea would say, 'Bring down the nightgowns! Bring down the sweaters!' It was really crazy. Margaret was already insecure enough about what she was doing. She had been elevated by Lea early-on to a special person status and to becoming a therapist though she hadn't had much therapy herself. When the baby was born a caesarian section became necessary. That shattered Margaret. It wasn't part of the plan for the perfect baby and the perfect childbirth. Lea seized on the caesarian too as a way of discrediting her, saying things in the seminar like, 'She didn't want to give birth to the child.'"

When Sheron's baby was born fairly soon afterward Lea turned on her as well. Sheron recalled: "I took it for about four weeks because I didn't know any better. When the baby was born, Lea called and said, 'I'm sending (one of her companions) over to stay with you for six weeks because you have no instincts.' She said she was very concerned about the baby because I was his mother. There is never a time that you are more intuitive than when you give birth to a baby. She was into this whole thing about only feeding the kid every four hours. I had to sneak around to feed him when he needed it. She found me doing that one day and said, 'What are you, a cow?' After a few weeks I said to Rob that it was all crazy. The child was crying and Lea's companion was walking him up and down and he needed to be fed. If you didn't follow the Brit Mothercraft manual then you couldn't be the perfect mother. It was horrible for me. I hated her at that time and didn't want her in the house. I felt like she was insanely jealous of me, that I had stolen Rob from her. She couldn't join in and be a part of what was happening. She had to control it. That was the worst part of knowing her."

The examples I have given above and in the previous post give some sense of the atmosphere of fear and intimidation that families with children or women wanting children had to contend with, especially in the latter half of the 1970s. It was in this period that Lea was complicit in allowing Malcolm, as one parent put it, to create his own "Ministry of Fear" within the school. He continued,"Malcolm being very power-driven and insecure, basically managed to make the school impenetrable and opaque to the parents. Some parents were badly treated, bullied by their own therapists who had their own agendas -- not wanting to antagonize Lea or to rock the boats. Whoever questioned what was happening was in trouble. There was a fear of being ostracized. In the community there was a system of approbation and disapprobation that was as bad as in any cult you want to name." The question of whether Therafields was or was not a cult is a multi-faceted one but there were unquestionable cultic features that became more pervasive over the 1970s. From these clear damage was done to people, perhaps particularly in the arenas of procreation and of the care of children and their families.

Families and Children: Part 1

It's not hard to see that as the numbers of people asking for therapy accumulated, among them would be parents of children struggling with their family's problems. The answer to the needs of almost anyone coming along at that point seemed to be to put them into a house group, to surround them with others for support. Unfortunately there wasn't enough good judgement shown about who would and who would not be ready for such an experience, who would and who would not be able to handle it in a manner conducive to good outcomes for themselves and those with whom they lived. House group and milieu life was simply not a productive experience for some people. They tended either to act out in ways that could not then be boundaried, or, they were so overwhelmed by the emotional life of the group that they could not access their own thoughts or feelings. As this was true of individuals, so it was true with families. Some undoubtedly benefitted from the practical help and support of the members of their milieu or of those living with them. Others did not.

The impetus for the development of house groups formed around individual families would have come from Lea. No initiatives were developed without her spear-heading energy and interest. But the project was too broad, too ambitious given the level of understanding and therapeutic skills available. Lea considered herself to be a specialist in the area of children and families though this was not the reality. She had been unable to resolve her own disturbances with respect to her family of origin and with her own family. One of the women close to her through most of the 1960s said, "Earlier she was helping people but then her own disturbance came to the surface. In order to continue to help people she had to look into herself and do her own work. Instead she kept on taking on more and more distractions." Taking on the enormous job of working with and supervising the care and mental health of such a huge and complex situation was one more of the "distractions" that Lea embraced as she moved away from going deeper into her own troubles and those of her original clients.

Doing this work stirred even more of Lea's own troubles, making objectivity impossible. Another woman close to her recalled, "Pressure from her work with the families on Brunswick brought up a lot of her own personal difficulties, reminding her of bad times in her own early years. During a marathon in the city with the Brunswick groups Lea called me during a lunch break and asked me to come and give her a massage. When I saw her I was appalled because she was in no shape to be working with anyone. She was a woman in a large emotional pressure cooker and she had to deal with issues similar to her own with these families. I remember thinking that she was so personally involved in what was happening with them that she had entirely lost objectivity. I asked her to talk to me but she didn't really do so."

I have written earlier about the way that Lea presented her own family of origin and her relationships with her children in glowing terms. She had to maintain that fiction, even to herself. She believed that her instincts were right and were to be followed with respect to the needs of children and their parents. But in fact she acted in ways that sometimes had the effect of significantly damaging those whom she wished to help. Her certainty about decisions swayed others and brought them along with her in arrangements which in truth interfered with some of the families in harmful ways. There was a prototype. Lea would speak about how she had rescued a young boy from a terrible family. She would detail the visits that she made to the family and the arrangements that she made to take the child out of his situation. In fact over time that child lived in several family situations, suffering from these dislocations. Seeing this intervention as a success she was open to other situations presented to her that would indicate that, significantly, the mother was not up to the job of caring for and protecting her children. Lea's solution was cavalier. Give the child to another woman who could manage.

In early 1967 a young couple was visited by Lea's daughter. She noticed that their infant had an ear infection and suggested that they take her to the hospital for treatment. The father of the child recalls, "The next day in my group much was made of this. It was said that we had no idea how to care for her and that we could put her in danger without even knowing what we were doing. I had already been told many times that I hated women and that I was jealous because the baby interfered with my relationship with my wife. An older woman in the group offered to take the baby for awhile. When the child was about 10 months old she was brought to the Therafields farm to see if she and my wife could bond. This didn't happen and another woman eventually adopted her." The mother of the child was suffering from a profound depression which within the limits of therapy as practiced by Lea in those days, was not treatable. Another practicioner might have dealt quite differently with this situation, recommending forms of medication, then available, for the mother and getting supports for the father, who in fact had good nurturing skills, to be active in the care of the child. To Lea, however, it was all about the mother, the woman. This situation had very painful consequences for all concerned: for the child who had three different sets of parents within the first year of her life; for the parents of the child who drifted apart in their grief and unhappiness; and, for the adoptive mother, who struggled for years to help her troubled child.

During the life of the Brunswick milieu several children were removed from their mothers and placed in other situations. In one case the mother simply left the home and the father found other women within the group to help him with his children. Another father had left his wife and children around 1969 under the influence of talk about paranoid partners. A few years later his wife who was caring for their three children was judged a poor mother by her therapist. The children were taken from her and placed in a home in the milieu with the father and his new partner. Another boy whose troubled mother was similarly judged unfit was taken by a couple and raised as their own.

One young woman who moved over to the milieu in order to live with and support the children recalled, "In the house where I lived all of the people there were good with kids so I learned a lot. It was solid and wholesome. But I saw bad things happening with other families. I made myself a promise that I would never have a child in a house group setting. Families are pretty fragile in general unless you have a strong, loving, extended family. Living as we did right with the families their problems were readily apparant. If people were too quick to point these out, the parents could only be made to feel guilty. Anyone may not be the best parent or be doing the best job but the bottom line is that kids would rather have their own parents with them. Instead of supporting people with their problems, there was a lot of criticism, a looking for perfection where it couldn't exist."

A woman who moved into the Brunswick milieu in 1971 remembers that, "All of the action then was oriented to building the Willow so we didn't have many groups. The milieu focussed around the the families and the children who lived there and I was involved with them. The families lived in a fish bowl in that setting and were greatly interfered with. Some parents had problems but to my knowledge there was never any outright abuse. If it was judged that a mother, for example, was not sufficiently present to her child emotionally, that could be seen as sufficient cause to find another parent for him or her. It was said that that woman should not have had children." This happened to one family in the following manner. The relationship between the parents was coming apart and the mother was deeply shaken. Her therapist believed that she was not able to provide emotionally for her children because of that and other troubles. The woman was convinced to leave the family and to stay at the farm for a time, accompanied by her therapist.

Speaking of this situation in the seminar, Lea decided spontaneously that one of the learning therapists would be very good with children. A report had been circulated that another one of the fathers had hit his son, so she designated the learner as the new therapist in charge of that child. Saying that he ought to work with more than one child, she assigned him the younger of the two boys whose mother had just been taken away. The boys were separated, the older one moving in with another family who had a daughter of similar age. The younger boy was moved over to the house group where his new "therapist" lived and was cared for by a succession of well-meaning volunteers. This was originally intended as a temporary measure but it went on indefinitely. Later the boy lived for a number of years with a couple. The scars of his removal from his formerly intact family at such a young age remain with him to this day. A woman involved in the boy's life from that day (and remains an important friend to him) remembers that the learner who was assigned this role, "was a decent person but he had no training or experience with children, yet he was suddenly his therapist. People were brought in from all over the community to take care of the child. I went over a couple of nights a week to put him to bed. He was only four years old then and didn't know any of us. It was so destructive. His parents just vanished. His father was so angry with everyone that he disappeard from the boy's life at that point. Children were seen as disposable. It was all Lea's decision."

Looking back on this period this woman is appalled by the things that happened. She realizes that she went along with Lea's decisions, doing her best to be helpful in any situation despite an inner sense of discomfort with what she saw around her. "I don't ever remember having doubts about Lea. If I did I certainly buried them. I had lots of doubts about myself. I always thought there was something wrong with me, that I couldn't fit in though I tried harder and harder. I bought the whole myth but I felt terribly at odds with the world." Another woman who worked closely with Lea and who was called upon to implement or to defend decisions that Lea made says that if she had doubts about any decision, "I would feel that she was right and I was wrong. I had no confidence at all. That was the tragedy of my therapy with her. She was not able to give me any confidence in myself and I think that unconsciously she deliberately did that to keep people dependent on her. She brought me to a certain point but then wouldn't go any further. She wouldn't set a person free."

It was within the context of Lea's "work" and methods with families in the Brunswick milieu and elsewhere that the school developed. So many parents and their therapists and helpers were in various ways held in thrall to Lea's imprimatur, to the by-then infamous "Lea says!" that the gradual manoeuvring of Malcolm to seize total control over the children was but of a piece with directions long in motion.

In my next blog I will write of Lea's increasing obsession with the fates of mothers and children.

The School: Part 4

There are many things to consider when looking at what happened to the children who attended Malcolm's school in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The events that unfolded at the school are undoubtedly the most abusive and painful experiences that occured under the Therafields umbrella, precisely because they were experienced by children who had a right to protection and proper care. In examining the legacy of Therafields this chapter must be faced squarely as its most heinous and shameful. We cannot simply say, "Many good things happened in Therafields and many gained from being a part of it." This is true and those things need also to be documented and acclaimed. But like most "family" histories there are other threads that are ignored at one's peril. What went on at the school cannot be seen as something that happened 'over there.' Rather it was a central facet of the dynamics put in place well before its formation when Lea's focus shifted from the provision of psychotherapy to the care and fostering of her family and her lover, Visvaldis. So many distortions of original ideals and purposes had to be swallowed and acquiesced in by so many of us to allow what came to be. Issues of individual and collective responsibility need to be faced, not in order to focus blame, but in order to more deeply understand our own fallability.

The full horror of what had been happening at the school only emerged into general consciousness in 1984 when Malcolm was arrested and convicted of being sexually involved with two of the under-aged girls. Malcolm cleverly had engaged a woman lawyer to defend himself, giving the appearance of shock and innocence. His claim was that the accusations were fabricated by people from his mother's cult, determined to destroy him. A further plank of his defense was, through his lawyer, to claim that girls like to fantasize about romantic and sexual adventures and that their statements were a simple reflection of this tendency. The judge found against him, however, stating that the young women were very trustworthy witnesses. He stated, moreover, that Malcolm had clearly alienated the children from their families, perversely taking control of their lives. Malcolm was sentenced to four years in prison but served only a portion of that amount in a medium security facility. Those brave young women who spoke out, stopping his reign of terror must live all of their lives with the memories of what was done to them. Others, like the other girl whose experience I detailed in the previous blog suffered in other ways. There are many stories from the school cannot be told out of concern for the privacy of the (former) children themselves. The following exerpt is from my interview with a second girl who was with the school from the time that it moved to the farm in 1975 until the summer of 1980. She reinforces some of the statements made by other student, and adds further commentary of her own.

"A lot of the structure of the school collapsed or at least changed after Sharon left. She had groups of kids for different things. Then it became stupid school stuff -- the blue group, the peach group, and so on, but really based around the good kids and the bad kids. It was totally judgemental. There were only five of us older kids so it was more fluid with us. After Sharon left we didn't really have classes. Some kids would show up at certain times at 59 but it became less and less like that. The weird thing is that after a while Malcolm was never there. He would be in the coach house. The five of us had different responsibilities but
it was mainly one other girl and me. She and I ran the school.

"There were three women who came to be with us. I made up the schedule for them. When one would arrive I'd sit with her for a bit, then send her to the kitchen to make tea. These three were the only parents that Malcolm allowed to be around. None of them was very secure about her position there or about how Malcolm felt about her. I'd sometimes have them crying on my shoulder. Malcolm didn't want anyone there who was more certain of herself.

I'd bring the kids in and get them settled. I collected all the fees and paid all the bills. Malcolm would come in every now and then and ask how things were going. He was obsessed with cleanliness. The place was beautiful and immaculate but he insisted on ridiculous cleaning schedules. There were cleaning shifts that all the children had to participate in. I don't remember learning anything, at least in any formal way. There was no instruction. We had these lady bug books. We'd get everyone to chart their progress through them. Malcolm would come in sometimes and say -- what's going on in here? Other times he'd be in a different mood and say, 'Let's play this fun game.' He would then talk to the kids about Einstein or something, but in the day to day running of the school, he had nothing to do with it.

"Malcolm didn't want any of the other parents involved and he was very good at manipulating things to ensure that that is how it was. His big thing was to say that kids are weird when their parents are around. He would say that it was disruptive to the learning process. I can't imagine what all the parents were thinking about that. It wasn't cheap to send your kid there. I was responsible for the finances so I know. There were 3 or 4 terms a year and it was about $3000/term. I would go to the bank with all the cheques. I had signing authority. The bank clerks were very nice but they were curious. Here I was about 13 then and going to the bank in the middle of the day when I should have been in school. They had no idea what was going on.

"I was intimidated by Malcolm in those days; all of us were. He could come in in any kind of mood and he could be irrational. He would totally freak out about things, for example, if there was dust on the bannister. When I look back on it now I can see that he was just losing it. It's hard to lay blame on anyone for the things that went on then, but people's ability to blindly follow is staggering. It's clear to me and I'm sure it was to others that he was falling apart in some way. I don't know what he would have had to do for people to admit it. It was the mythology about the Hindley-Smiths that made him. People just would not see what was there. It's doubly ironic because he hated his mother and what she stood for and he hated the fact that people considered him a part of her group. It's so weird that anyone would entrust kids to him. I don't know how Lea Hindley Smith and her son became so venerated. In some ways Malcolm had a clear view of what was happening in Therafields but he wasn't able to escape it and he lived off the fruits of it. He did see all of the hypocrisy, all the syncophantic behaviour, the cultic personality, and how damaging all of it was.

"My understanding is that in the beginning Lea and the others were fundamentally kind and good and well-meaning, pretty much like with any religion. But then the cultic stuff happens and absolute power does corrupt absolutely. And there's the lemming thing as well. I think that Malcolm was just falling apart, especially after he started living at the coach house. It's unfortunate that he isolated himself because if he had been around other adults, he might have gotten help. But the problem was that everyone was so easily led and intimidated by him. For years he had no contact with adults and he lost it. He had very weird mood swings. I don't know what was going on in his head. Definitely he either thought you were the best thing in the world or else he lost it with you. There seemed to be no external reasons for his reactions. It was completely arbitrary. The sad thing is that he could be so great with the kids, so brilliant and so able to inspire.

"But there clearly was abuse in a lot of areas. He was messed up and he was abusive in many ways. When you have someone that messed up and they have absolute power over a bunch of kids, it's not good. I still wonder what people were thinking. Aside from the possibility that he might come on to young girls, did it not occur to people that it wasn't a good thing for adolescent girls to be out of touch with women from whom they could learn? Malcolm did do horrible things. Quite a few people though made him the focus for their hatred without examining their own stupidity and blindness. It was abdicating their own responsibilities. I don't mean by this to absolve Malcolm of guilt. He did what he did and he has to live with that.

"I left the school in 1980 but went back the next year for a bit. They had moved by then to Davenport Road. I would go over and help with the Montessori stuff with the younger kids. I would arrive, do my thing, and leave. I also helped with teaching swimming but I didn't have much to do with Malcolm then. He seemed worse to me by then, more out of it. I think that he kept away from me because I had a different life then and his moods were no longer the be-all and end-all of my life. The kids were still into the heavy cleaning schedule. He was still obsessed by it and would freak out over uncleanliness as before. After awhile I stopped going all together, not because of Malcolm, but because of the other kids. I think that they resented the fact that I wasn't any longer in their enslaved position.

"I think that some of the kids were really damaged by the way that they were treated. But it wasn't just Malcolm who was hard on us. Certain children were isolated, consistently singled out as bad. That definitely came from Malcolm but also from other people. I'm thinking about things that went on in the Kendal back yard. Things would be said, like: 'Watch out for that kid or that group of kids. They're bad.' Other kids were seen as perfect. It was bad for all of the kids. I hope that the ones who were given those labels have been able to shake them."

It's clear that children who passed through the school under those conditions of oppression: taught little other than to be wary of their parents and of Malcolm, utterly dependent upon Malcolm's whims and moods, and made to feel that they were inherently bad or found wanting in some profound manner, could not escape unscathed. In the microcosm of the school there are threads and outcomes of directions that Lea was taking as early as the late 1960s in her obsession with the evils in society at large and the necessity of intervening in the lives of families and of children in ways that ultimately brought suffering to many.


I want to invite readers to leave comments about this or any of the other posts. I would appreciate feedback, whether or not it is in agreement with the ideas and information I am putting forth, or whether it introduces other pieces that I have ommitted or been unaware of. Thank you for your interest.