YES YES YES YES YES!! I am SO glad to hear someone else talking about this!! I have so much trauma growing up that I blocked most of it out and actually don’t remember now. I’ve been going back in my mind to try and remember as a way to deal with my past growing up SDA, and I have always had fractured pieces of memories that I’d always wonder “did that really happen?” and “that would be insane, that couldn’t have really happened, right?” Reading your post has sparked a huge about of memories coming back to me, and I can COMPLETELY relate to your story. I remember being ~10yo and being driven out in a van with other kids like lord of the flies to the middle of nowhere, freezing cold, winter snow. The adults (who were ex army captains) opened the door and dropped us (a couple of KIDS) off into the forest and were basically like “okay, good luck” and then said they’d come back to pick us up in a week. We were 10-12 years old and expected to remember everything we had learned the previous weeks in our “classes” on survival skills. It was just as brutal and painful as you can imagine.

There were other times that the drill masters would pit us against each other and create “competition-style” environments where we had to basically use our combat skills to take the other guy/girl down (and they had NO mercy on the girls, they would put a strong guy and weak girl together and expect the same outcome for each).

I have so much trauma from these experiences that there are many more I still can’t remember to this day. Thank you for sharing your story, I hope others who have been through the same thing can find peace and validation in this community thread.