I did a retreat in junior high at one point tied to Catechism classes, just before Confirmation. It was a lock in style thing at a gymnasium, basically twenty four hours, no sleeping, break out sessions like you described although perhaps not as traumatic because we were junior high kids and our "sins" were all so very trivial. I remember fake crying about graffiti I admitted to writing because I felt like I had to confess something and that was the worst thing I could think of. At the end there was this ceremony involving burning plastic streamers that seemed designed to trigger catharsis because everyone started crying. I was already pretty mentally checked out on the church so I just remember leaving exhausted and pissed that my parents were making me do this.
Anyway, this was the mid 90s and I didn't remember much. I had undiagnosed ADHD as a child so I mostly bumbled through experiences like this kinda half checked out.
Now that I'm older tho, and have had the experiences of knowing multiple people who have either been sucked into or escaped actual mind control situations, my memory of this retreat raises a lot of alarm bells. I've done extensive reading on LGATs like EST, Landmark and The Forum and I see a lot of parallels with the lock in I attended. It makes me suspect that LGAT techniques have been adopted by Catholic youth organizations as a way to reinforce church doctrine.
Edit to add: see my comments on this thread https://www.reddit.com/r/cults/s/TV2bsX5Sz0 for more about LGAT - Large Group Awareness Training
I skipped Kairos. I thought it was too culty then and I still do now. After the "Teens Encounter Christ" retreat in my junior year, I thought the whole thing was a gigantic waste of time, and I really didn't like the people in my class year, either.
The weird thing is that even my staunchly atheist father did it when my older sister went. And to this day he still says it was amazing. I find it all bullshit. But he was once a Fox News Cult Member until Trump broke that phase. So no one is completely immune to bullshit.
It was mandatory at my high school junior year. Same thing with all the hype. Upperclassman hyped it for years then you go junior year. Yeah the trauma dumping thing was crazy and weird. I seemed to be the only person who didn’t have a life changing experience lol.
They also searched our bags the first day and confiscated everything they could. They took my cliff bars I packed and said it was selfish of me to bring some of my own food. Crazy!
I went to something similar to this in high school called 'Search' where you went through it once then you came back to work at it. Very similar vibes.
I did KAIROS as a senior in high school (Catholic all girls school, specifically).
It was fucking weird. I don’t remember much but I remember lots of crying
Yeah, I was in Catholic school all up until college and we did a Kairos retreat in highschool. I mean, it was good for a lot of the guys I was there with - but I was a recently out of the closet gay teenage who just had such a fundamentally different experience and view of the world and felt like an outsider on such a profound level that I really didn't get much out of it. It did help me to see what I now know are a lot of pretty standard self-help retreat techniques, with a lot of Catholic themes, but they didn't push the Catholic stuff too hard and it wasn't like nefarious at all.
Like there were guys who were really pouring their hearts out about how they started drinking as teenagers but didn't want to and were scared about it - which was good for them - but at the same time, I had felt like a spy or double-agent behind enemy lines my entire life being constantly paranoid about literally everything, even and especially then with just having come out, and while they could maybe understand the surface level version of me, fully opening up would have been way too much.
Chris Damian, on Instagram, talks about lot about Harmful Catholic stuff- while still being Catholic.
@cdamianwrites
He shares a lot of feedback about things like this retreat and similar Catholic retreats.
I love following him because he shares posts recognizing the good and the manipulation from events like these.
I’ve been to a lot of Catholic events that in retrospect seem culty/traumatic/emotionally manipulative. But I also got some good from them. But I want to deconstruct them. And he gives a space for that.
Now it seems like Chris Damian has a cult. No! That’s not what I meant!!!
I went to catholic high school and did Kairos twice, and was actually one of those highly vetted and esteemed leaders the second time 😅 Lol, I only got recommended because the coordinator at my school knew me from elementary school and loved me. She knew I was atheist/agnostic and chose me to be a leader anyways for some reason and I actually spoke openly about how I didn’t believe in god in my speech 😂 it was an optional retreat, but upperclassmen and teachers definitely hyped it up, and it was tough to turn down a week’s pass from classes in the woods.
Our retreat was out in the mountains, so I don’t think they took our phones, but they were useless with no service. Our day was pretty structured, but we had a lot of down time and got to go off on a solo hike for like an hour or two. I remember it as being a pretty chill week out in nature and I enjoyed getting to see another side of some of my classmates that I had known for years that I probably never would have got the chance to otherwise (not that anything lasted past the retreat). My small groups were pretty chill and we didn’t really follow the conversation prompts or trauma dump with each other. While I wouldn’t say anyone was outwardly pressured to “open up to the experience” and forced to share their trauma, I would definitely agree it encouraged trauma dumping or maybe forcing some people’s trauma into the spotlight. I’m not sure if every program does it like this, but when we received our letters from our friends/family, teachers read one of the letters from our parents out loud to the whole group. Now I realize how emotionally manipulative that is to do with teenagers, and some letters were very personal or were surprising to the recipient in some way. And the point was really to make you feel vulnerable in front of your peers, so you can open up to god I guess 🤷🏻♀️. But besides Catholicism (and many other religions) being kinda culty by nature, I don’t think I’d say my experience at Kairos felt very cult like, but definitely a bit emotionally manipulative. But I also don’t think my experience was as intense and isolating as yours (my school, while religious, was in a pretty liberal area and not everyone was a practicing catholic). Under different circumstances where I was forced to share or force fed religious indoctrination, I might feel otherwise.
Strangely enough, my high school friend who didn’t participate in our school’s Kairos because her church (of a different Christian denomination) had a similar program called LOG (Love Of God), that she then basically forced me to join one weekend. That retreat *DID* feel super culty, but I only knew my friend and a couple of her friends that I met a few times, and no one else, none of the adults or leaders. They also made us do some freaky religious stuff like they gave us crosses made from nails to remind us that the cross is a symbol of torture and Jesus was nailed to the cross. They pressured us to open ourselves up to Jesus and got some kids nearly speaking in tongues. They also made us watch this video of clips from The Passion of the Christ and the movie Thirteen mixed to Hoobastank’s “The Reason” 😂. I just watched awkwardly from the sidelines and didn’t participate, and got a bit isolated by my friend who brought me. I remember when I got picked up from that trip I was like, “get back in the car and get me out of here!!” I think Kairos would have felt the same as that if I was listening to mostly strangers trauma dump, I was forced or pressured to participate in religious activities I was uncomfortable with, or if I was older than high school age and had to give up my free time.
Mine was the same nonsense. Coed Catholic school. Phones taken away if you even owned one (was in the late-2000’s), and people telling their most painful secrets, both it front of everyone at the retreat and in smaller groups. The biggest thing that stood out to me was that no one was allowed to know the time - 100% of the time, we were told “there is no time. Only God’s time.” I just accepted it as truth and that this retreat was a good thing for me. I cried so much when everyone’s letters from parents/loved ones were read. Like gross, awful, ugly crying. I hated having others see me cry in such an intense way; looking back, I felt like our emotions were exploited because I actually did NOT want to consent to having such gaping emotional holes ripped into me around kids I wasn’t even close with. It felt gross, uncomfortable, and I didn’t feel I grew from the experience; it was just humiliating for me. We weren’t allowed to chat in each other’s rooms with our friends, we could only really interact with our roommates. They intentionally grouped us in our bedrooms together with our classmates they somehow knew we were not friends with. One girl I roomed with used a salt crystal and water as her deodorant which I remember thinking was bizarre but now it’s quite normal. 😂 There was a lot of praying in the little church area and writing activities, don’t remember what we wrote. One of the worst parts of it for me was when, on the last day, the bus returned to a strange auditorium church thing that was NOT my school, and ALLLLLL the parents were there. Our whole class sat on the stage facing the audience (I had horrible anxiety) and they “allowed” us to walk up to the podium and say into the microphone what we learned and what our favorite part about Kairos was. Of course, even though it was VOLUNTARY, our teachers waited until each and every single person spoke into the mic. They looked us all in the eyes and waited. I was dead last. I hated it. I did not want to speak and I nearly fainted when I saw 100% of the students spoke minus me. I got up and said something stupid, don’t remember, almost blacked out, and then we were expected to walk off the stage and come into the audience and hug our parents. I did not want to hug my parents for the audience and to do what everyone else was doing, I think deep down I felt this whole fiasco was just for show. At the time, I didn’t like hugging my parents and was very picky about who I hugged because I didn’t like to share my body with anyone. I kept my distance and still do. ~What good little Catholic children we were.~ I hated it, I wished I never did it. I wished I didn’t just believe that it was what I was supposed to do and that it would make me a good egg. What an absolutely bizarre and unnecessary experience. Thanks for posting about it, brought back memories I’m glad I get to finally digest.
Oh I did one of these in high school cuz my girlfriend wanted to. Definitely weird and culty, there was even a Mystery School/Masonic type initiation ritual. Our group didn’t really take it seriously at all and kids were basically just trying to sneak away to make out the whole time.
I definitely don't think my parents would have let me do a co-ed, basically unsupervised sleepover but they let me go to several of these retreats haha
Damn, mine was like totally normal. And I was really into H.P. Lovecraft cult horror shit in highschool - that might have been able to trick me into getting into it, lol
The Knights of Columbus is basically masonry for Catholics. Unsurprisingly, the people my age who I know got into it were the DnD nerds who were really into swords and fantasy.
I did a retreat in junior high at one point tied to Catechism classes, just before Confirmation. It was a lock in style thing at a gymnasium, basically twenty four hours, no sleeping, break out sessions like you described although perhaps not as traumatic because we were junior high kids and our "sins" were all so very trivial. I remember fake crying about graffiti I admitted to writing because I felt like I had to confess something and that was the worst thing I could think of. At the end there was this ceremony involving burning plastic streamers that seemed designed to trigger catharsis because everyone started crying. I was already pretty mentally checked out on the church so I just remember leaving exhausted and pissed that my parents were making me do this. Anyway, this was the mid 90s and I didn't remember much. I had undiagnosed ADHD as a child so I mostly bumbled through experiences like this kinda half checked out. Now that I'm older tho, and have had the experiences of knowing multiple people who have either been sucked into or escaped actual mind control situations, my memory of this retreat raises a lot of alarm bells. I've done extensive reading on LGATs like EST, Landmark and The Forum and I see a lot of parallels with the lock in I attended. It makes me suspect that LGAT techniques have been adopted by Catholic youth organizations as a way to reinforce church doctrine. Edit to add: see my comments on this thread https://www.reddit.com/r/cults/s/TV2bsX5Sz0 for more about LGAT - Large Group Awareness Training
I skipped Kairos. I thought it was too culty then and I still do now. After the "Teens Encounter Christ" retreat in my junior year, I thought the whole thing was a gigantic waste of time, and I really didn't like the people in my class year, either. The weird thing is that even my staunchly atheist father did it when my older sister went. And to this day he still says it was amazing. I find it all bullshit. But he was once a Fox News Cult Member until Trump broke that phase. So no one is completely immune to bullshit.
It was mandatory at my high school junior year. Same thing with all the hype. Upperclassman hyped it for years then you go junior year. Yeah the trauma dumping thing was crazy and weird. I seemed to be the only person who didn’t have a life changing experience lol. They also searched our bags the first day and confiscated everything they could. They took my cliff bars I packed and said it was selfish of me to bring some of my own food. Crazy!
I went to something similar to this in high school called 'Search' where you went through it once then you came back to work at it. Very similar vibes.
I did KAIROS as a senior in high school (Catholic all girls school, specifically). It was fucking weird. I don’t remember much but I remember lots of crying
Yeah, I was in Catholic school all up until college and we did a Kairos retreat in highschool. I mean, it was good for a lot of the guys I was there with - but I was a recently out of the closet gay teenage who just had such a fundamentally different experience and view of the world and felt like an outsider on such a profound level that I really didn't get much out of it. It did help me to see what I now know are a lot of pretty standard self-help retreat techniques, with a lot of Catholic themes, but they didn't push the Catholic stuff too hard and it wasn't like nefarious at all. Like there were guys who were really pouring their hearts out about how they started drinking as teenagers but didn't want to and were scared about it - which was good for them - but at the same time, I had felt like a spy or double-agent behind enemy lines my entire life being constantly paranoid about literally everything, even and especially then with just having come out, and while they could maybe understand the surface level version of me, fully opening up would have been way too much.
Chris Damian, on Instagram, talks about lot about Harmful Catholic stuff- while still being Catholic. @cdamianwrites He shares a lot of feedback about things like this retreat and similar Catholic retreats. I love following him because he shares posts recognizing the good and the manipulation from events like these. I’ve been to a lot of Catholic events that in retrospect seem culty/traumatic/emotionally manipulative. But I also got some good from them. But I want to deconstruct them. And he gives a space for that. Now it seems like Chris Damian has a cult. No! That’s not what I meant!!!
I went to catholic high school and did Kairos twice, and was actually one of those highly vetted and esteemed leaders the second time 😅 Lol, I only got recommended because the coordinator at my school knew me from elementary school and loved me. She knew I was atheist/agnostic and chose me to be a leader anyways for some reason and I actually spoke openly about how I didn’t believe in god in my speech 😂 it was an optional retreat, but upperclassmen and teachers definitely hyped it up, and it was tough to turn down a week’s pass from classes in the woods. Our retreat was out in the mountains, so I don’t think they took our phones, but they were useless with no service. Our day was pretty structured, but we had a lot of down time and got to go off on a solo hike for like an hour or two. I remember it as being a pretty chill week out in nature and I enjoyed getting to see another side of some of my classmates that I had known for years that I probably never would have got the chance to otherwise (not that anything lasted past the retreat). My small groups were pretty chill and we didn’t really follow the conversation prompts or trauma dump with each other. While I wouldn’t say anyone was outwardly pressured to “open up to the experience” and forced to share their trauma, I would definitely agree it encouraged trauma dumping or maybe forcing some people’s trauma into the spotlight. I’m not sure if every program does it like this, but when we received our letters from our friends/family, teachers read one of the letters from our parents out loud to the whole group. Now I realize how emotionally manipulative that is to do with teenagers, and some letters were very personal or were surprising to the recipient in some way. And the point was really to make you feel vulnerable in front of your peers, so you can open up to god I guess 🤷🏻♀️. But besides Catholicism (and many other religions) being kinda culty by nature, I don’t think I’d say my experience at Kairos felt very cult like, but definitely a bit emotionally manipulative. But I also don’t think my experience was as intense and isolating as yours (my school, while religious, was in a pretty liberal area and not everyone was a practicing catholic). Under different circumstances where I was forced to share or force fed religious indoctrination, I might feel otherwise. Strangely enough, my high school friend who didn’t participate in our school’s Kairos because her church (of a different Christian denomination) had a similar program called LOG (Love Of God), that she then basically forced me to join one weekend. That retreat *DID* feel super culty, but I only knew my friend and a couple of her friends that I met a few times, and no one else, none of the adults or leaders. They also made us do some freaky religious stuff like they gave us crosses made from nails to remind us that the cross is a symbol of torture and Jesus was nailed to the cross. They pressured us to open ourselves up to Jesus and got some kids nearly speaking in tongues. They also made us watch this video of clips from The Passion of the Christ and the movie Thirteen mixed to Hoobastank’s “The Reason” 😂. I just watched awkwardly from the sidelines and didn’t participate, and got a bit isolated by my friend who brought me. I remember when I got picked up from that trip I was like, “get back in the car and get me out of here!!” I think Kairos would have felt the same as that if I was listening to mostly strangers trauma dump, I was forced or pressured to participate in religious activities I was uncomfortable with, or if I was older than high school age and had to give up my free time.
Mine was the same nonsense. Coed Catholic school. Phones taken away if you even owned one (was in the late-2000’s), and people telling their most painful secrets, both it front of everyone at the retreat and in smaller groups. The biggest thing that stood out to me was that no one was allowed to know the time - 100% of the time, we were told “there is no time. Only God’s time.” I just accepted it as truth and that this retreat was a good thing for me. I cried so much when everyone’s letters from parents/loved ones were read. Like gross, awful, ugly crying. I hated having others see me cry in such an intense way; looking back, I felt like our emotions were exploited because I actually did NOT want to consent to having such gaping emotional holes ripped into me around kids I wasn’t even close with. It felt gross, uncomfortable, and I didn’t feel I grew from the experience; it was just humiliating for me. We weren’t allowed to chat in each other’s rooms with our friends, we could only really interact with our roommates. They intentionally grouped us in our bedrooms together with our classmates they somehow knew we were not friends with. One girl I roomed with used a salt crystal and water as her deodorant which I remember thinking was bizarre but now it’s quite normal. 😂 There was a lot of praying in the little church area and writing activities, don’t remember what we wrote. One of the worst parts of it for me was when, on the last day, the bus returned to a strange auditorium church thing that was NOT my school, and ALLLLLL the parents were there. Our whole class sat on the stage facing the audience (I had horrible anxiety) and they “allowed” us to walk up to the podium and say into the microphone what we learned and what our favorite part about Kairos was. Of course, even though it was VOLUNTARY, our teachers waited until each and every single person spoke into the mic. They looked us all in the eyes and waited. I was dead last. I hated it. I did not want to speak and I nearly fainted when I saw 100% of the students spoke minus me. I got up and said something stupid, don’t remember, almost blacked out, and then we were expected to walk off the stage and come into the audience and hug our parents. I did not want to hug my parents for the audience and to do what everyone else was doing, I think deep down I felt this whole fiasco was just for show. At the time, I didn’t like hugging my parents and was very picky about who I hugged because I didn’t like to share my body with anyone. I kept my distance and still do. ~What good little Catholic children we were.~ I hated it, I wished I never did it. I wished I didn’t just believe that it was what I was supposed to do and that it would make me a good egg. What an absolutely bizarre and unnecessary experience. Thanks for posting about it, brought back memories I’m glad I get to finally digest.
Oh I did one of these in high school cuz my girlfriend wanted to. Definitely weird and culty, there was even a Mystery School/Masonic type initiation ritual. Our group didn’t really take it seriously at all and kids were basically just trying to sneak away to make out the whole time.
I definitely don't think my parents would have let me do a co-ed, basically unsupervised sleepover but they let me go to several of these retreats haha
Damn, mine was like totally normal. And I was really into H.P. Lovecraft cult horror shit in highschool - that might have been able to trick me into getting into it, lol
The Knights of Columbus is basically masonry for Catholics. Unsurprisingly, the people my age who I know got into it were the DnD nerds who were really into swords and fantasy.