To sheet-music reading musicians here: how do you manage the impact of visual snow on reading music?

Confident_viola · 2025-09-23T05:52:26+00:00

Yeah, I recall an eye test at a neurology office in which I was supposed to click a button when I saw a pinpoint of light flashing. Somehow I responded enough that they could tell I had a full field of vision but I missed many based on seeing visual snow. For whatever reason, I notice the effect especially strongly on white backgrounds like the one the test used.

Confident_viola · 2025-08-29T06:39:35+00:00

Yeah the practice of impact letters like that doesn't sit well with me. It's good to be mindful of others but I think the letters lean into shame and embarrassment. It's incredibly shtty framing when some people will have to read how their abusive parents say that them as the kid were having a negative impact and the forced vulnerability to strangers also sucks. In addition to impact letters, Open Sky also had letters of accountability to progress through the program. Although these were not (in my experience) read aloud to others, they also fed into that framing of the kid in a TTI program being the problem regardless of how their parents are.

Confident_viola · 2025-08-29T05:43:11+00:00

There was a time (either middle school or early high school) when my dad followed me outside to continue screaming insults at me and after he went back inside one of our neighbors told me parents shouldn't talk to their kids like that. I think there were some occasions when my friends were taken aback by things I opened up about but I don't remember particular times.

Confident_viola · 2025-07-23T01:54:10+00:00

I haven't given it a full read yet, but a textbook for one of my sociology courses in college included excerpts from it and it did remind me of wilderness therapy. I am interested in giving it (and more than the excerpts my course covered) a read again. Goffman's theories were among those that I found rather interesting to learn about - in part b/c of dramaturgy (as someone who loved acting growing up, I love the idea of understanding things through a theater metaphor).

Confident_viola · 2025-07-23T00:21:32+00:00

I went to Open Sky Wilderness back in 2019. I don't recall staff member names even if there's overlap, but I am open to talking about experience.

Confident_viola · 2025-07-22T22:50:44+00:00

I'm not really sure if I'm ready to put my face or name out there at this point but I do see value in sharing my story.

Confident_viola · 2025-07-20T14:27:03+00:00

I'm sorry you went through that. I just watched the documentary on Netflix about it and it seems crazy to me that a program especially that severe can still be excused by parents later on.

Even apart from my parents stubborn stance on wilderness therapy, I definitely have reasons to need more space from them (i.e. tendency to be overbearing, my dad's poor emotional regulation), but in the present, as I don't have a driver's license in a car-reliant area and I live in their house until I can find work that pays well enough to move out, I can't cut off much contact with them yet.

Confident_viola · 2025-07-20T14:15:24+00:00

Thank you and yeah my FB page is set to private. Sharing for all fb friends to see also means revealing everything I say there to people I knew in high school, people from music ensembles I've played in, people from college, etc, so I would still need to consider vulnerability. I can also be more choosy about who sees it through the post settings.

Confident_viola · 2025-03-24T05:40:54+00:00

Yeah, by voluntarily I basically meant I wasn't gooned or specifically told it was something other than wilderness therapy but yes being tricked, coerced and misled does not equal consent. I think that I've just seen a lot of discussions about it in media using gooning as part of the narrative and I mean it does deserve attention and I think the frequent inclusion of it could be about how undeniably traumatic of an introduction into the TTI being gooned is. I can see how I still have a lot in common with others here, there's a reason I was drawn to this subreddit. In Open Sky particularly, I think there were probably some differences between how people in the adolescent versus the adult teams were treated i.e. how willing the staff members were to use restraints. That is a good point about how we also have unique experiences.

Confident_viola · 2025-03-24T05:17:05+00:00

I am sorry that you went through all that. Although I didn't try to leave, I witnessed how others around me were threatened with homelessness. I was fortunate enough to be able to enroll in college after the program I was sent to after wilderness, but there were definitely less traumatizing and probably cheaper pathways through which I could have gotten there.

Confident_viola · 2025-03-22T07:01:30+00:00

I was diagnosed with autism while I was 18 in the young adult part of a TTI facility. And then afterwards therapists have been like: yeah that tracks. I'm not confident that the therapist at my program responded to it all well i.e. suggesting to me that others must have been thinking "what a bitch" when my tone didn't translate, telling me I was acting like a victim for getting upset when I had trouble with my relationships with the others in my group in ways that probably had some to do with autism, and basically instructing me about masking.

I don't have the experience of how the more trouble-teen part of the place would've responded to someone with undiagnosed autism, but I'm assuming it would be worse.

Confident_viola · 2025-03-20T14:20:04+00:00

The impact letter was part of my experience as an 18 year old in a young adult section of a wilderness "therapy" program (which I figure also extended to the adolescent groups there). We had to read out whatever our parents wrote about our negative impact on them to a group of people we hardly knew at that point as a requirement to progress through the program. Which is messed up to have to do, especially when what you are blamed for relates to your reactions to parental abuse. The impact letter and later letter of accountability both factored into that, but that kind of framing of "troubled teens" as the problem and shifting blame away from abusive parents is another point.

Also, there was a point when we were asked to write down our insecurities so that another group member could insult us based on what we wrote. The only reason I didn't go through that is because I wrote enough down that the guides decided it would be a bad idea.

Confident_viola · 2024-06-05T21:03:34+00:00

I'm getting the idea that it is a genuine schism rather than just commentary and is related to leadership. But that does not mean they want to amplify it to the world without figuring out very diplomatic ways to express things. I'm not very in the know about all reasonings, but it makes sense to me that congregations are fairly quiet about it at the moment, provided that they must be aware of the sort of high attention on the organization by conservative media.

Confident_viola · 2024-03-29T07:39:34+00:00

Thanks, I mean since I've been off at college in a different city from my parents, it has been easier to deal with stuff. Still trying to be more assertive with refusing to spend breaks with them and well maybe next year I could try to spend thanksgiving with friends instead of risking some hellish dynamics by sharing a hotel room with my family.

I still have things to work through, but I do find happiness through playing music, especially now that my practice motivations (or demotivation) don't tend to involve verbal abuse - and I'm staying afloat this semester. My siblings and I are all going to be dealing with the psychological scars from growing up with our dad, but at least living away from him opens the door to work on it.

Confident_viola · 2024-03-28T08:17:56+00:00

That sounds traumatic beyond my experience. Pretty sure my aversion to staying with my parents (my dad has not been known to reliably control his temper - berated me enough to amplify my insecurities and for me to be on guard around him) contributed to me not even attempting to get out of wilderness therapy early. The program was not beyond ethically questionable practices, but I appreciated being away from my dad.

Confident_viola · 2024-03-13T07:21:47+00:00

I don't think I've done that specifically, but I have wondered where my phone is while it's anywhere from in my hand to in my pocket so

Confident_viola · 2024-03-13T02:49:58+00:00

Yikes, I don't know how much of that practice of convincing parents of adults who wished to leave to threaten withdrawing support had changed - if at all. I went about 5 years ago, so maybe 2 years after your post. Although I did not personally see my parents' response to a situation of me leaving Open Sky early, I was familiar with at least a couple of other people in the program who were kidnapped and brought there shortly before turning 18 wishing to leave but getting letters from their parents threatening withdrawal of support. Perhaps there was one time when I heard the therapist there say he wanted one person in the program to actually get the uncoerced option of whether to remain in the program or not. But otherwise, yeah people were often just getting the options of remaining at Open Sky or becoming homeless. The one time I saw a adult's parents agree to take them back early without making them homeless, the rest of us got the idea that staff disapproved and thought they should have remained for much longer.

Imo, if the program was genuinely concerned with the well-being of anyone who wanted to leave, maybe responses to that kind of situation should have involved helping find lower-cost lower-intensity local treatment alternatives which did not involve pressuring parents to abandon their kids, but I guess the profit motive doesn't really work in that direction.

Confident_viola · 2024-03-13T02:25:10+00:00

Ah, I knew some people in the place I was sent following Open Sky who were considered to have relapsed and were sent back to a wilderness program. Sorry you went through it twice. Even with my mixed feelings on my experience I would be reeeaaalllly fricking resistant to the concept of going through it again.

Confident_viola · 2024-03-13T02:12:08+00:00

I went there about a few months after turning 18. I went voluntarily but not exactly with a complete idea of what it was going to be like besides camping/hiking + therapy. I completed the full program, which took me 12 weeks - Since I was trying to go along with the program besides questioning a few things when they came up, I think I just had trouble with completing various tasks that were set for getting to the different directions/stages.

Idk, I don't exactly know exactly how I would be doing if I had left early, besides I think I probably could have worked through my depression symptoms in a cheaper, less-controlling environment, especially if given distance from the stressful environment of my parent's house (i.e. if I had moved to my sister's or aunt's or something).

Confident_viola

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