S24 Ep3: A Carcass

This Labor Day, gear up, save big, and ride harder with cycle gear.

From August 22nd to September 1st, score up to 60% off motorcycle gear from your favorite brands.

RPM members get 50% off tire mount and balance with any new tire purchase.

Need to hit the road now?

Fast Lane Financing lets you ride now and pay later with 0% interest for three months.

And here's the big one: August 29th through September 1st only.

Buy any helmet $319 or more and get a free Cardo Spirit Bluetooth.

Supplies are limited.

Don't wait.

Cycle gear.

Get there.

Start here.

Take your fantasy football draft to the next level.

With 957 the game and splash at Thrive City in San Francisco.

You and 14 friends could score your own private view lounge.

The best seat in the house for game day energy.

Two full hours of draft time with complimentary Wi-Fi power for your laptops.

A loaded draft day food station with non-alcoholic drinks plus a dedicated server.

All of $1,500 value.

And here's the kicker.

Willard and Dibs will be broadcasting live that night, then hanging out with you and your guests after the show.

Listen this week for your chance to win.

And join us Tuesday, August 26th.

Get details at 957thegame.com.

Something Was Wrong is intended for mature audiences and discusses upsetting topics.

Season 24 survivors discuss violence that they endured as children, which may be triggering for some listeners.

As always, please consume with care.

For a full content warning, sources, and resources for each episode, please visit the episode notes.

Opinions shared by the guests of the show are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of broken psycho media.

All persons are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

Responses to allegations from individual institutions are included within the season.

Something was wrong and any linked materials should not be misconstrued as a substitution for legal or medical advice.

Today you'll be hearing from Malia, a survivor of a so-called wilderness therapy program called Second Nature Intrada, which opened in 2004 in Santa Clara, Utah.

Second Nature in Trada was part of the broader Second Nature organization, which first launched its wilderness program, Second Nature Unitas, in 1998 as a behavior modification and expedition-based therapy option for adolescents.

to offer a structured, quote, nature-based therapy, end quote, approach using a level system, self-reliance, and clinical interventions for teens struggling with alleged behavioral, emotional, or substance-related issues.

Malia will be sharing her experiences from her time at Second Nature Entrada, where she lived from April 13th to June 11th of 2009.

In 2015, The institution Malia attended, Second Nature Entrada, was rebranded as as Evoke Entrada under Evoke Therapy Programs, which continued operating until the Utah location closed August 2024.

While Evoke Entrada has closed, the broader Second Nature organization still runs wilderness programs in Utah.

We reached out for comment to Brad Reedy, a former co-owner of Second Nature, former co-founder and clinical director at Evoke Therapy Programs, and now an owner of Finding You Therapy Programs.

And he shared the following statement.

Quote, to clarify, I was one of three owners at Evoke Intrada.

Second Nature, the one I was brought out of, still runs a wilderness program.

Actually, two programs, but they split after I left.

I am one of four owners at Finding You.

None of the other Finding You partners had any ownership at Intrada.

Finding You is not a rebrand of Second Nature or Evoke.

We offer different therapy services, specifically trauma-informed, attachment-based treatment for adults.

That was the reason for the change in my direction.

Specifically, the change from Second Nature to Evoke was not due to reports or allegations, but was about ownership changes.

I was brought out of Second Nature and I bought my partners out of Evoque Intrada.

I was a part owner of the wilderness programs and am an owner at Finding You.

We run three to five therapeutic intensives for adults, families, and couples.

We do not see teens unless they come with their parents.

I encourage anyone who experienced abuse from anyone, including wilderness programs, to report these complaints to the proper authorities, state licensing, child protective services, law enforcement, or to to the courts.

End quote.

So while Evoke Entrada, where Malia was placed, has closed, Second Nature, as an organization still operates wilderness therapy programs.

And though Finding You Therapy programs is connected to one former co-owner of Entrada, it is a separate organization with a different mission and population focus.

I'm Tiffany Rees, and this is Something Was Wrong.

You think you know me, you don't know me well

at all,

at all.

My name is Malia.

I was born and raised in Southern California, and I was sent to Second Nature Wilderness Program when I was 14 in the early spring of 2009.

As a kid, I was extremely withdrawn and for lack of a better word, mostly nonverbal and expressed myself more often than not just through writing.

I was always very drawn to the character of Disney's Tarzan

because he was silent and yet he was still able to connect.

My behavior as a kid and further into my adolescence was very confusing to my parents and those around me because I was unable to verbally respond.

I was almost silent unless I was making a joke, but it had to be on my terms.

I wasn't super loud and goofy.

It was just random comments here and there.

But if somebody asked me a question about something serious or about something going on in my head, I would literally just say, I don't know, and I would look at the ground.

On the other hand, I would open up my notebook and I would write extremely articulate paragraphs and pages about what was going on in my head and how I was feeling.

I would email with my therapist when I was younger.

She realized that I couldn't really talk, but then she had me email her and it was like another world opened up.

These kinds of miscommunications and my ability to write down what was going on in my head was seen more often than not as a manipulation and as weaving a masterful web.

My parents often thought there was way more going on behind the scenes in my brain.

Now being in my 30s and diagnosed with autism, I was not diagnosed back then, but it was that communication difference where I felt like I was screaming, I'm not okay, please help me.

It's just on a piece of paper and that's not good enough.

There was nothing wrong wrong with that communication difference, but that's what villainized me.

My relationship with my parents was always

very tense.

I was emotionally an absolute disaster my entire life and they just couldn't understand why.

My relationship with my siblings, I think all four of us were very diverse.

individuals and we definitely butted heads.

Everybody in my family except for myself and my dad, has Tourette syndrome.

So there were a lot of noises, a lot of things that nobody could help.

For me, that was unbelievably dysregulating.

I do have mesophonia and for my mesophonia to be triggered almost every second of every single day, but to not be able to escape it and to be consistently told, they can't help it.

This is your problem.

It was like the just married car and it's got the metal cans attached to the back, and it's driving away.

And I feel like I was the metal can just like clinking in the wind.

I was forced to absorb all of that turmoil and dysregulation, and it had to stay inside me.

I was a pressure cooker for my entire life.

I have a twin brother.

My parents always told us this story that in preschool, I would hide behind my twin brother and hold on to the back of his shirt collar.

And he was very outgoing.

So as soon as he would socialize with other people, I would pull him and yank him back to me by his collar and would continue to hide behind him.

I stopped grabbing his shirt collar, thankfully.

That feeling inside of me that I was different and I didn't know how to communicate that never went away.

It just got worse.

I went to school and maybe it was one full year where my twin brother was was at a different school than myself.

And that was a breath of fresh air because I did have that time and separation.

I only wanted to be at school.

I did not want to be at home, but I do not like school.

It was really hard speaking in class.

I never raised my hand.

I would literally fail a speech.

Even though I had written it, I would not get up in front of the class to present it.

Socially, I really struggled.

I did not understand how to communicate and interact with my peers.

I felt like I was on the outside and looking at them.

There was a back and forth that I didn't understand.

And my attempts to have successful interactions, I felt like didn't exist.

Someone else would get a laugh and a hug and then they'd run around and play on the playground.

And I...

had no formula for that.

It weighed heavily on me, the fact that I could not achieve those results.

I had maybe one or two friends, and at the same time, I didn't feel like any of that was real.

No

connection for me ever really felt genuine.

I thought that I was so different from everybody else.

I ended up receiving services, but I don't think that they were the right services for me because we didn't have the right information and I didn't have the right diagnoses.

If I needed to leave class, I would put a sticky note on the desk and then leave.

But I took that a little too far because I didn't want to be there at all in the first place.

I definitely had a 504 and I think that began in eighth grade.

That was the first official service that I got.

And in high school, I had an IEP.

I think at some point in high school, I was labeled ED, emotionally disturbed, and I had to meet with a school psychologist a couple times.

Could you speak to where things were at for you emotionally leading up to the Second Nature Wilderness program?

I was extremely depressed and so dysregulated.

At home, it was horrible.

My twin brother was going through a lot of his own issues and challenges.

And I was often the collateral damage of that because we had a lot of classes together and our peers were the same.

He

was extremely verbally abusive at the time.

My entire life, I was always told, he can't help it.

Stop feeling this way about it.

So I started writing.

I was giving my writing, which was pretty disturbing to teachers and people that were mandated reporters.

And that writing would make it back to my parents.

We were just in this cycle of, why is she doing this?

How does she feel this way?

She never told us.

My parents were extremely concerned and confused.

They didn't know what to do with me.

I began to self-harm.

I was punching brick walls outside of my classes.

There were cuts all over my knuckles, the backs of my hands.

I definitely did a lot of damage to my tendons.

At one point, I became suicidal.

And I told one of my friends I was texting with her.

It was late at night and I felt better, but then my parents took my phone away for some unrelated reason and I didn't respond to that friend.

And she got very, very scared.

So she called my parents and gave them that information.

And then they were beside themselves.

Another huge moment was when I was texting with another kid my age that I had met at a sleepaway camp and he was not okay.

And he asked me if I wanted to make a suicide pact with him.

In my head, I knew I'm not doing that, but socially, I didn't really know how to say no.

So I entered into the pact and my parents found out and they were even more terrified than they were before.

All of that came to a head.

And my mom realized we have to do something.

We have to keep her alive.

All of that.

was the trigger for going away to Second Nature.

My mom is a mental health provider, so she's in the industry and knew of this consulting firm.

She met an educational consultant named Jennifer, who worked very closely with Second Nature and other programs to quote unquote place students with the right therapist and program.

They told my parents that this was a very targeted, proven and safe way for me to escape the triggers that was causing that turmoil.

The reasons you can send your child to second nature is like bad grades, depression, social anxiety, inability to connect, getting arrested, doing heroin.

What they really, really emphasize and focus on, especially when selling this to parents, is your child is going to die if you don't interfere.

For my parents, they felt like they had no other options but to save my life and spend an unreal amount of money on a torture program.

I actually met with Jen twice.

She was a very tough, no-nonsense person, but I think looking back in a way that kind of made her a bully, you can't shit a shitter.

She said that to me multiple times.

I was supposed to take that to mean I can't lie to Jen.

She's gonna know what's going on in my head regardless.

And it's too late.

I didn't have a choice.

They They just gave me the information about what was about to happen so that I wasn't woken up by a transport service and taken in the middle of the night.

It was presented as more of a camp, a therapeutic backpacking trip camp.

It was very structured, very safe, but I'd be in the outdoors where I love to be.

That's why Second Nature was chosen for me.

She said, you're going to be outside under the stars and you'll hike, you're camping, you're with other girls your age, and you're going to meet with your therapist twice a week.

They're going to help you get your life back on track.

She made it sound tolerable, like I would come out of this program a stronger and healthier, productive kid and move on with my life to be very successful.

She sold me on a lie.

I didn't know that until I got there though.

If you're part of the 50% of people who attempt to quit vaping each year and you need to equip yourself with the right tools for the job, there's no better way to break up with your bad habit than this episode's sponsor, Fume, the award-winning flavored air device loved by over half a million customers.

Here's why.

Fume is twice as effective as solutions you've tried and it's backed with lab science tested studies.

So both doctors and customers agree.

Fume is the good habit.

There's a satisfying weight and subtle click to fume, perfect for keeping your hands busy and your mind at ease during stressful moments.

My favorite flavor is the vanilla orange.

It's a great pick-me-up anytime I need a quick burst of freshness, or you can use it without any flavor.

Start your guilt-free journey with the good habit and use code sww to get a free gift with purchase and begin your overdue breakup.

Just head to tryfume.com/slash sww.

That's tryfu tryfum.com slash sww.

And use code sww to start the good habit today.

Thank you so much.

This Labor Day, gear up, save big, and ride harder with cycle gear.

From August 22nd to September 1st, score up to 60% off motorcycle gear from your favorite brands.

RPM members get 50% off tire mount and balance with any new tire purchase.

Need to hit the road now?

Fast Lane Financing lets you ride now and pay later with 0% interest for three months.

And here's the big one.

August 29th through September 1st only.

Buy any helmet $319 or more and get a free Cardo Spirit Bluetooth.

Supplies are limited.

Don't wait.

Cycle gear.

Get there.

Start here.

You're juggling a lot.

Full-time job, side hustle, maybe a family.

And now you're thinking about grad school?

That's not crazy.

That's ambitious.

At American Public University, we respect the hustle and we're built for it.

Our flexible online master's programs are made for real life because big dreams deserve a real path.

At APU, the bigger your ambition, the better we fit.

Learn more about our 40-plus career-relevant master's degrees and certificates at apu.apus.edu.

This is Larry Flick, owner of the Floor Store.

Labor Day is the last sale of the summer, but this one is our biggest sale of the year.

Now through September 2nd, get up to 50% off store-wide on carpet, hardwood, laminate, waterproof flooring, and much more.

Plus two years interest-free financing, and we pay your sales tax.

The Floor Stores Labor Day sale.

Don't let the sun set on this one.

Go to floorstores.com to find the nearest of our 10 showrooms from Santa Rosa to San Jose.

The Floor Store, your area flooring authority.

Looking to transform your business through Better HR and Payroll?

Meet Paycor, a paychecks company, the powerhouse solution that empowers leaders to drive results.

From recruiting and development to payroll and analytics, PAYCOR connects you with the people, data, and expertise you need to succeed.

Their innovative platform helps you make smarter decisions about your most valuable asset, your people.

Ready to become a better leader?

Visit paycorp.com slash leaders to learn more.

That's paycor.com/slash leaders.

This is Larry Flick, owner of the Floor Store.

Labor Day is the last sale of the summer, but this one is our biggest sale of the year.

Now through September 2nd, get up to 50% off store-wide on carpet, hardwood, laminate, waterproof flooring, and much more.

Plus two years interest-free financing, and we pay your sales tax.

The Floor stores Labor Day sale.

Don't let the sun set on this one.

Go to floorstores.com to find the nearest of our 10 showrooms from Santa Rosa to San Jose.

The floor store, your area flooring authority.

I was sent away April 13th.

I had just turned 14 and I was in eighth grade.

I

woke up early.

My parents drove me to the airport.

I got on a plane by myself and I arrived in Vegas.

I didn't know who was coming to pick me up.

Thankfully, I saw two people with a sign with my name on it and they were absolutely floored that I just showed up alone because that is almost unheard of in the TTI.

Most kids get woken up in the middle of the night by a transport service.

They drove me to Utah.

We stopped for a Jimmy John sandwich.

That was my last meal.

I had a physical at some suburban house, and that was its own terrifying experience.

My record of that physical is very, very sparse, but I do remember an internal exam.

So after the physical, they took me to

the Second Nature HQ

where they took everything from me.

They strip searched me.

I had to do a coffin squat in case I put anything up up there.

During that first physical where the cavity search occurred, I knew this is not right.

Either my parents have lied to me and they just said these things to get me to go willingly, or they have no idea that this is happening.

But I knew that everything that I did or said was now going to be controlled and that nothing was private.

So I tried to stay calm.

They gave me all of my backpack equipment.

Then they blindfolded me and they drove me out into the wilderness.

I think it was about an hour and I arrived at that camp where they had set up for the day.

It was the last snow of spring.

They made me sit on an inch thick Walmart yoga mat that they cut into squares.

It was tattered.

And they had put a tiny tarp over me.

And I just sat there in the snow in my zip-off hiking pants and a t-shirt and a fleece jacket.

And they said, you have to write your life story now.

And so I just sat shivering, starting to write.

It was terrifying.

And I'm looking over and there's a huge tarp and all the girls are sitting under it with staff.

They're around a fire and they're laughing and eating and cooking dinner.

They told me that nobody was allowed to talk to me until I finished my life story.

That initial period is called earth phase.

You can't join the group or you can't move forward in the program until you've written your life story and then you read it aloud to the rest of the group.

And how long are you typically in this earth phase where you can't talk to anybody?

I think about 72 hours.

Another thing, the first night that I spent there, it's called a burrito.

where they wrap you in a tarp inside your sleeping bag, and then you have to sleep in between two staff members so that you can't run away.

You're just like in the dirt, in the snow, unable to move.

I was forced to sleep between the two staff members and gender did not matter.

There were a lot of male staff members.

I had no rights and no ability to communicate what I was comfortable and not comfortable with.

It was terrifying.

I think the most sinister thing about the program is they make every effort to dehumanize you from the second that you're in their custody.

Every step of the way of these programs is to strip you of all humanity.

So by the time I got to the group, I didn't even have a name anymore.

I had a number.

The group I was in was for girls 15 to 17.

But my parents and Jen, the educational consultant, believed that because I was so intelligent and manipulative and conniving that if I went to the younger girls group for age 13 to 14, 15, that I would manipulate the therapist.

So I went to the older girls group.

At first, staff were explaining protocols and then I was assigned a mentor.

We are also assigned numbers and when one person leaves, you move up in the count.

So my mentor was number one and she was the only person that was allowed to talk to me, but it could not be out of earshot.

And that's what they call having a conversation with somebody that cannot be heard by staff.

And if you do so, that is a huge rule violation.

My mentor explained the bulk of the behavior rules to me and like the daily life.

I think the emphasis was mostly on the fact that I wasn't allowed to talk to anybody until I finished writing my life story.

They really control the amount of information that you have at first too, because if I had known the rules moving forward or more information about the phase system and what life was about to be like, then I would have probably taken more drastic measures to escape.

The fire phase begins when you have read your life story.

And then comes the impact letter.

The impact letter is essentially a letter that your parents or whomever sent you away writes to you, and it details why you got sent away and what you need to do to come home and how you are the problem.

Their guidelines for the impact letter is also terrifying because they say, do not give your child any hope.

We call this future information FI.

Do not tell them that they're coming home after wilderness.

Do not tell them that you believe any amount of their story.

Be as devastating and sharp as you can be and hurtful because this is your opportunity to force them to do the work.

The structure of second nature is that we are the issue.

Nothing that has happened outside of ourselves is anybody else's fault.

So when you look at dysfunctional or abusive family systems, it's not the person that's molesting you's fault.

It's your fault.

My parents wrote me an impact letter, two of them.

The first time that you see and read that letter is in front of the group, and it is devastating.

The impact letter is designed to destroy any and all hope that you had that your parents will help you, that you can leave.

It was pages and pages of gut punch after gut punch, and they're all watching you.

hearing your deepest, darkest secrets that may or may not even be true.

After you have read those letters, then comes the attack therapy, and the group just starts picking you apart and they tear you to pieces too.

Essentially, you are a carcass by the end of it.

You have been killed by the predators that are your parents, or that letter.

And then the group is like, ooh, there's still flesh left.

And they eat the rest of you.

And then you are nothing.

I remember after reading my impact letters, I was nothing.

and they said, you can go now and feel some feelings.

And so I went behind a huge juniper tree.

I was maybe 10 feet away from everybody else and I just cried.

I realized, this is it, this moment, I will never be the same.

I'm broken.

Can you explain a little bit more about the number system and how that was used throughout your time in the program?

It's called the count

and it is used to make sure that we are where we need to be, that we are not running away and we're not talking to each other.

Essentially, it is to control us and our dynamic.

They'd wake us up in the morning and they would yell, good morning, group four.

And as we packed up our stuff, we would have to do the count off.

So we'd yell one, two, three, and then so on.

Every night they would take our shoes from our shelter so that we couldn't run away in the night.

We would yell, one pickup, and that means that you're ready for a staff member to come and take your shoes because you are in your sleeping bag ready to sleep.

We also got stuck in a horrible storm.

I truly did not know if I was going to survive that storm.

We had to yell into the screaming wilderness, our number.

So I guess from their perspective, it's safety, but it's not.

And then when we use the restroom, we are told to take a direction.

And that means you just walk in a direction.

And while you're walking, trying to find a place to go to the bathroom, you're yelling your number very, very loudly so that people know where you are and what you're doing.

When you move up a phase, they do a ceremony.

And it's this weird cult-like thing where the other girls will create this circle or whatever with rocks.

And then they'll like be really ceremonial and super deep, like, this marks your transition to this.

And it's a reward-based system, but the rewards are basic necessities.

So fire phase doesn't really have rewards, but as soon as you get to the next phase, which is water phase, what you get is a crazy creek.

And that is a fucking chair that folds.

It's like a cradle almost.

There are no legs.

so you're still on the ground.

That's what everybody is working towards, the right to not sit on a two by two scrap of foam.

And that's how they get you.

And I still have my crazy creek.

To this day, I still use it.

Can you talk about the basics of Second Nature?

What gear, hygiene access, and other sort of supplies were you given?

We get a backpacking backpack.

And you get a sleeping bag.

I arrived during the last snow, so they gave me a summer sleeping bag.

So I was freezing and had almost no ability to keep warm.

They give you two to three pairs of underwear, I think.

A couple pairs of socks, some boxers, two t-shirts of different colors, two bright orange, two red.

You've got notebooks as well and pens.

Hygiene was a huge thing, and I think that was one of their main sources of humiliation and dehumanization because we were out for so long and we bathed so little.

They told us that wearing deodorant would cause mold to grow on our armpits.

So we didn't have deodorant.

They call it a billy bath and it's an empty number 10 tin can.

And that's what we use to cook over the fire as well.

They would fill it with water and sometimes put it over the fire.

In their sexy brochure, they say, we heat up the water on a fire for you guys to bathe, but they don't.

You have to walk, take a direction, and just pour this water over your head while screaming your name repeatedly.

We weren't clean.

It was humiliating.

You're in the snow.

You have no towel.

You're exhausted.

You're filthy.

And you're just pouring this can of water over your head in some weird, perverse way of cleaning yourself.

You don't know who's watching you, or you don't know if they can see you.

So for all we know, we're yelling yelling our names and identifying our location for them and some random person is watching us.

It was so nauseating smelling myself.

I would just cry constantly because I could smell myself and the smell of my sleeping bag was horrible.

They were not happy that my hair was getting so tangled.

All of the inhumane things that they were doing to us, they could be washed away.

My hands are caked and my face face is filthy, but you can wash that away.

It's very much like an abuser only hitting you underneath your clothing.

And I think that's a very telling metaphor for wilderness.

We did have toilet paper, but not very much.

We had to pack everything out.

So if you use toilet paper, you have to carry it with you once it's used.

And if you have your period, they gave us cardboard tampons.

All of your waste, you have to take with you.

It's extremely humiliating.

I was getting sick every single day because the food did not agree with me.

I'd wake up every single morning and this is disgusting, but this is true.

At one point, we were in a valley and there were a lot of cows around us.

And so cows would shit and they'd make a cow patty and it literally looked like a frisbee.

I was so sick that every single morning I'd make a cow patty.

It was before everyone woke up and I have no shoes.

So I'm like walking barefoot behind my shelter, making a cow patty and using pine needles as toilet paper.

What was your food allowance?

They called it a bear bag.

It's just a drawstring bag that we would hang over trees.

For breakfast, every single day, we ate granola and oats with powdered milk and water.

That was one of the most terrible for me.

Lunch was usually a tortilla with we had peanut butter and tuna fish.

I hate peanut butter.

So I ate a tortilla with a packet of tuna and a little bit of soy sauce drizzled on it every single day for lunch.

And then for dinner, we had beans and rice.

And sometimes we'd have broccoli.

We were usually given a black of cheese for the entire week and we would carry it with us.

And there was no refrigeration.

It was in our pack.

So sweaty cheese.

We had some snacks.

They call it gorp, good old raisins and peanuts.

I think about twice a week, we would get water and fresh fruit delivered by staff, and they drive a truck to our campsite and leave some food and water for us.

No silverware.

If you want to eat with a spoon, you have to carve a spoon out of wood.

And if you don't, you eat with a stick.

The entire time I was there, I was working on a spoon, but it was not going well.

So I ate with the same stick.

Every Friday, they called it Freestyle Friday, and we would have the privilege of earning some protein.

Usually it was like a bratwurst or Dollar Tree hot dogs, but we would have to perform for the meat to earn it.

I have our field jargon dictionary, and this was printed in 2009.

So there's a definition here.

It's called losing or earning sugars.

And they say, because extraneous sugar and spices adds no nutritious benefit, but provides tremendous external motivation, the program uses brown sugar, cocoa, spices, availability as a behavioral negotiation.

And that's verbatim.

And sugar does provide nutritional benefit because we're in the middle of the wilderness walking miles a day with 60 plus pound packs.

One time they gave us, I think they called it our drug of choice, and they let us choose what candy bar we wanted.

And this was supposed to be some sort of metaphor for life.

I got a candy bar and I didn't eat it for like two weeks.

I still had it because I was trying to hold on to some sort of motivation or sweetness.

And it turned into a huge issue where it was supposed to be like this attack therapy learning opportunity for me.

And so at one point, I was forced in front of everybody to eat the candy bar and it was humiliating.

So everything is a learning moment to traumatize a child.

They didn't want you to have any semblance of control over the situation, even when you received the reward or chose to eat it.

Correct.

We didn't have lighters.

The only way that we could start a fire was if we busted it ourselves with a bow drill.

So you've got your curved piece of wood string attached to that and then you wrap something called a spindle.

It's usually a piece of sage that you've carved into a round stick.

We had to make that ourselves.

So we'd have to go out and find the curved piece of wood and then cut it.

Part of a busting set is called a top rock.

It's the rock that you apply the pressure to the spindle to create the ember on a sage base.

And the top rock has to have a hole or like a dent and a divot in the top of it to keep the spindle in place.

If we did not bust a flame as a group, then our consequence was to cold hydrate ramen for that meal.

We had ramen packets and you'd crush it all up, pour your cold water in it, and you would let it sit for at least 30 minutes, possibly longer.

It would soften enough that you could eat it.

So that was definitely one of the worst consequences.

I went into the program and I had two casts.

They were removable, but because of my self-harm and hitting the the brick walls, I had fractured and torn almost all of the tendons in my hands and my knuckles.

I had a lot of nerve damage, but in order to do basic tasks and literally do anything in the program, I couldn't wear the casts.

So I was trying to make fire with fractured hands and torn tendons in both hands.

Shortly before that, I had dislocated my shoulder.

So I was also recovering from that.

The toll that it took to even try to bust a flame was excruciating.

Also, we were not allowed to have flashlights.

We had to earn them by busting a certain amount of flames.

So I didn't get a flashlight because I couldn't physically do it.

Did your parents know they were going to force you to remove your cast in order to participate in the program?

I honestly don't know.

I know that in the photos, I'm not wearing wearing my cast.

So they had to have known.

They knew at Second Nature as well that I was supposed to be wearing them, but they didn't actually care.

And the staff definitely took a lot of joy in watching us suffer.

We're in the middle of the wilderness.

We're teenage girls and we're surrounded by mandated reporters, but those mandated reporters are the ones doing the abusing.

The field staff are not licensed more often than not.

They're in college.

Some of them are psychology students.

Often they were going to the same colleges.

They're paid very poorly, and there is really not much clinical supervision.

And they work a week on and a week off.

They're the ones in charge and in control of our lives.

We had this melting pot of staff members that were all living and working and existing together.

And they all loved the outdoors.

So it was a very tightly knit community of field staff.

I think that made it worse for the clients, like us at the end of the day, because they very much protected their own.

And so if somebody was being abusive, they, for the most part, covered it up and said nothing.

A rule about reading your impact letter and about a lot of these groups is that you don't bring this stuff up outside of a controlled environment like that.

And you do not use it against people.

But this staff member did and she would mock me all the time she was terrible to me i don't know where she ended up in life but i really hope that life has not been kind to her honestly there were a lot of these people that were just human beings i know that they weren't all bad and i think that's kind of the tough part about these programs there were some good people in there However, they had to enforce rules and perpetuate the cycle of abuse abuse because there was no other way to exist in that space.

So they were complicit.

However, there were probably two to three that really were kind people and made a huge difference in my life.

We were supposed to make a fire bag, like a busting bag out of leather, but I didn't want to do that.

So I instead made a football and then some juggling balls.

And one of the other staff members, I gave her mine and she mailed them to me when I got out.

After the fact, I think I must have been a junior or senior in high school.

One of them asked me to write a small aside for an article she was writing about how wilderness had changed my life.

And at the time, I was terrified of going back and saying anything bad about Second Nature.

So I wrote a very nice piece for her article, which is hilarious to me now.

If you're interested in teaching your kids about financial literacy, you don't have to go about it alone.

Acorns Early helps kids learn the smart way to earn, save, and spend.

Acorns Early makes it easy to teach kids lifelong money skills that they can actually use in the real world.

It's a smart debit card and money app that grows kids' money skills as they grow up.

Start with the in-app chore tracker and teach your kids the value of a dollar.

Then, let your kids set their own savings goals and start building healthy money habits early.

Kids can spend what they've earned on their very own customizable debit card, giving them the extra sense of independence.

Plus, with Acorns Early spending limits and real-time spend notifications, parents always stay looped in.

Ready to teach your kids the smart way to earn, save, and spend?

Get your first month on us when you head to acornsearly.com/slash sww or download the Acorns Early app.

That's one month free when you sign up at acornsearly.com/slash sww.

Acorns AcornsEarly card is issued by Community Federal Savings Bank, member FDIC, pursuant to license by MasterCard International.

Free trial for new subscribers only.

Subscription fee starting from $5 per month unless canceled.

Terms apply at acorns.com slash early terms.

Thank you so much.

As a founder, you're moving fast toward product market fit, your next round, or your first big enterprise deal.

But with AI accelerating how quickly startups build and ship, security expectations are higher earlier than ever.

Getting security and compliance right can unlock growth or stall it if you wait too long.

With deep integrations and automated workflows built for fast-moving teams, Vanta gets you audit ready fast and keeps you secure with continuous monitoring as your models, infra, and customers evolve.

Fast-growing startups like Langchain, Writer, and Cursor trusted Vanta to build a scalable foundation from the start.

Go to Vanta.com to save $1,000 today through the Vanta for Startups program and join over 10,000 ambitious companies already scaling with Vanta.

That's Vanta.com to save $1,000 for a limited time.

Looking to transform your business through Better HR and payroll?

Meet Paycor, a paychecks company, the powerhouse solution that empowers leaders to drive results.

From recruiting and development to payroll and analytics, Paycor connects you with the people, data, and expertise you need to succeed.

Their innovative platform helps you make smarter decisions about your most most valuable asset, your people.

Ready to become a better leader?

Visit paycorp.com slash leaders to learn more.

That's paycorp.com slash leaders.

This Labor Day, gear up, save big, and ride harder with cycle gear.

From August 22nd to September 1st, score up to 60% off motorcycle gear from your favorite brands.

RPM members get 50% off tire mount and balance with any new tire purchase.

Need to hit the road now?

Fast Lane Financing lets you ride now and pay later with 0% interest for three months.

And here's the big one.

August 29th through September 1st only.

Buy any helmet $319 or more and get a free Cardo Spirit Bluetooth.

Supplies are limited.

Don't wait.

Cycle gear.

Get there.

Start here.

This is Larry Flick, owner of the Floor Store.

Labor Day is the last sale of the summer, but this one is our biggest sale of the year.

Now through September 2nd, get up to 50% off store-wide on carpet, hardwood, laminate, waterproof flooring, and much more.

Plus two years interest-free financing, and we pay your sales tax.

The Floor Stores Labor Day sale.

Don't let the sun set on this one.

Go to floorstores.com to find the nearest of our 10 showrooms from Santa Rosa to San Jose.

The Floor Store, your area flooring authority.

Looking to buy your first car or home?

Understanding your FICO score is key to achieving your life goals.

Knowing your FICO scores helps you apply for loans with confidence and avoid surprises.

With My FICO, you get access to your FICO score, credit reports, 24-7 monitoring, and alerts on the go.

Take the mystery out of your score and get your FICO score for free today.

Visit myfico.com/slash free.

That's myfico.com slash free and discover the score lenders use most.

What do you recall about the day-to-day at Second Nature?

We would wake up in the morning and they'd give us maybe 12 minutes to pack up all our shit.

And then we would eat breakfast and then walk and walk and walk.

And we didn't know how far we we were going we just had to follow we hiked almost every day and throughout the day they had something called a standing group if you're feeling any emotion whatsoever and you just want to talk about it because that's how you move through the program is by demonstrating that you understand what they want you to do you just out of nowhere call a standing group And then everybody stops what they're doing and you all gather.

And then there is a structure, a formula for how you communicate that.

It goes like this.

I am feeling blank, and I'm feeling this way when blank happens.

My hope inside my control is blank, and my hope outside my control is blank.

Everybody gives you feedback at that point.

It's just more attack therapy.

This is the only way you're allowed to communicate with people.

Each day is structured, but yet it is not because they decide when and where and what they want to attack you for.

Almost every day, either a staff member or one of us would run a group.

Often we would have to present an assignment.

One of them is called the letter of accountability, where you take accountability for everything you've ever done for any reason to anybody in your family.

It is also disgusting.

One of the girls had to take accountability for the uncle that molested her.

One of them was kidnapped and used for sex trafficking for months, and they forced her to tell all of us about being gang raped and the STDs and the pregnancies that occurred.

We had a lot of groups where you share all of that with everybody.

And then they come back and they attack you for it and they critique whether or not you were accepting all of that responsibility that you need to be.

There was a girl that showed up.

She's like 15, 16 years old.

And she was.

taken by a transport service and put on a plane with them and handcuffed.

And she did heroin on the plane in the bathroom.

So she came to Second Nature.

And when she arrived in the group, that's when she started coming down.

And she was going through withdrawals in the snow.

That was the first time I ever saw a naked body was this girl stripping naked and throwing herself into the snow, trying to throw her head into a rock so that she would have to go to the hospital.

And that didn't work because male staff members tackled her and then immobilized her.

But her next step then was to attack one of us because if she was a danger to the rest of us, then they would have to take her out of there.

So she's trying to find the smallest person in the group, which was me.

And another girl, I didn't know what drugs were.

Someone with social anxiety doesn't need to be in a group with someone on heroin in the snow.

But that's how they make their money.

They just throw you all in a melting pot and pretend like you deserve it.

At first, the girls really didn't like me.

They felt like I was putting up walls and I wasn't being honest with them because I told them that I'd never had sex or done any drugs.

So for the first two weeks, it was just horrible.

They kept attacking me for that.

But at one point, they had a walls group and they stacked these, they call them blueies, and they are these massive like five or seven gallon containers that are blue plastic.

And they fill that with water, and that's the water they supply us with.

Sometimes as a punishment, you have to carry it on a hike.

And they're at least 50 pounds and huge.

Like you can't get your arms around it as a child.

But they stacked, I think like 10 of them around me in this weird ceremony.

And they said, these are all your walls.

You have to break them down.

And they wanted me to disclose something every time they removed a bluey from this wall.

That was just staff's idea because they wanted to encourage growth.

So at one point, I had to confess to doing drugs and having sex, even though I had never done so.

But if you deny that, then you are lying.

That's also part of the abuse of the program.

They don't even care what's real and what isn't.

All they care about is the disclosure itself.

To get out of the program, you have to tell them what they want to hear.

They want you to tell them what they want everybody to tell them so that their program maintains that structure.

Like we got her to confess.

She was not being truthful this whole time and we finally broke her.

In speaking with other survivors, I'm not alone in that, that forced false confession.

It's just this ridiculously manufactured progress.

The growth I exhibited, it was not real.

It took me two weeks to figure out the me that they needed from me.

And then I did my assignments in record time.

And then I got in trouble for that too, because I was doing it too fast.

If you don't act like them, then you're not going to get out.

You don't have a choice.

And I think that's been a common thread in a lot of the TTI programs where you have to abuse others in order to survive, essentially.

I was reading through one of my notebooks last night and I saw that that I was a mentor to another girl when she arrived as an Earthphaser.

I said she had a really hard day today.

She was feeling all of the things that I was feeling when I arrived.

And so I told her that it was okay because I felt that way.

But then I gave her the much needed kick in the butt because she has to get her shit together.

What they did to me was so beyond cruel.

And it totally normalized what I was about to go through and the abuse that I was was enduring, then they made me turn around and do it right back to this other young girl that didn't deserve it either.

And the only way to get through the program is become a mentor.

You have to help them get to the place that you're at so that you can leave.

Going to bed was what I looked forward to the most.

I was desperate to be away from all of it.

I was sleeping on top of a yoga mat in a summer sleeping bag in the snow, and we didn't have a tent.

My tent was a tarp that I just had to tie to things.

So it was sort of hovering above me.

No pillow, no pajamas, no nothing.

So you're just on the ground, wet and dirty, and there are rocks.

My hips were killing me, my back.

You wake up in the morning and you have to pull that pack onto your back and your hips and walk six, seven miles aimlessly.

The stress on my body was unreal.

I was just cold and in pain and so grateful to be cold and in pain because I wasn't going about the day.

I had a break.

In wilderness, I learned how to lucid dream.

I just remember flying over everything and leaving and going home.

In those dreams, I was with my family because I just want to be back and I want to show them that I really love them.

Sleeping in those inhumane conditions was my favorite part.

When did you first speak to your parents?

We never spoke on the phone.

We didn't have access to any technology, even a watch.

We weren't allowed to know the time.

We wrote letters.

I would handwrite my letters and then give them to staff and they would scan them and send them to my parents.

And then my parents would type letters and send them to the office.

They would print them out and give them to me.

So it was very primitive communication.

Also, staff was reading everything.

I had to operate under the assumption that nothing was private, which really affected and controlled what I reported to my parents.

Throughout the week, they would take photos of us and then send them to our parents.

There was a series of, I think, three photos that they had taken of me right when I arrived, and I'm sitting in the group.

The first photo, I look absolutely miserable.

The second picture, I have a smirk on my face.

And my dad, in a letter, he said, I got your first letter saying that this was not for you and everything in me was ready to just fly out to Utah, take you home and get you out of this because I believed you.

And then I saw the second photo.

And then I realized you're just manipulating us again.

You just want to leave because you want the easy way out and you haven't changed at all.

I'm not going to let you manipulate me anymore.

So you're staying.

That was another moment where I was obliterated.

You can smile and be devastated and be abused.

On their website, they're literally saying that your child is going to say that we're abusing them and that they're not okay and they're lying.

They just want to leave.

My parents came for a visit for two days.

They stayed with me in the way that I stayed, but they had little cots, I think.

They did see kind of where I was, but it was a preview.

When parents come to visit the program, what they see and what they experience is very tightly controlled.

I couldn't tell them really the details.

I was too terrified to tell them until I was well beyond adulthood that they were going to send me back somehow to the adult group.

There's an adult group there too, but that is technically voluntary.

Paul was my therapist.

He is a massive man.

He's towering.

He talks very gently and quietly, but it is menacing and it is bone-chillingly cold.

I remember my first session with him.

He was very quiet.

I just remember him letting me talk and asking me basic questions and then letting me go.

And that was the end of my session.

But after my impact letter, everything changed.

At first, he was humoring me.

I was saying, I'm not supposed to be here.

This isn't okay.

I'm not okay.

He was just letting me believe that he believed me.

I would meet with him, I think, once a week.

The only involvement that Paul really had with our group was on the days that he did come out, he would be there two days in a row.

I think he would run a group or two each day and sit sit with us and talk with all of us together, but then he would do his individual sessions with us.

Or if there was a parent visit, that would only happen when Paul was there because you would do family sessions.

This shocks me even to this day, but there was another staff member in our sessions.

They had unprecedented access to therapeutic sessions with children unregulated.

In any other situation, you cannot sit in someone's session.

I had an adult in those sessions, and she was horrible to me.

I think that's also really important to say that there were people that had access to information about us that absolutely should not have had access.

And that was because Paul allowed them to have that access in the middle of the wilderness where there are no cameras.

I can recall almost everything, but my sessions with Paul are like this weird black mist, and I can't see much beyond it.

What I remember of Paul is that very calm, menacing presence.

And it really surfaced in groups when someone would be saying something or he would think that they were stuck or lying and it would get really serious, really fast.

He had so much control and he knew it.

When you would say something, he'd just stop and he would look at you.

He would be very quiet and you'd just feel this weight like, did I say something wrong?

What consequences is going to have?

Did I just tack on three weeks to my stay?

So he was really scary to me, but I knew that if I acted as such, I wouldn't leave.

He was hand-selected for me by Jen.

She picked him because I was a shitter and he would call me on it.

And so I also knew that in the back of my mind that if this doesn't work out with him, I'm fucked because this is who I'm supposed to be here with.

I remember it was very physical.

He very much encouraged hugs.

He wanted us to hug him.

The girls told me that they always call him Santa because, like, he's so big and so round.

But to me, he was Ed Kemper.

The whole point was to force me to talk.

So I went somewhere and was literally tortured for months, forced to scream my name, forced to be a number, to talk in groups.

They programmed me out of me and i had no other options looking back now as a diagnosed autistic person that was torture i never should have been there and paul was so on board with it he was so happy that i talked in group a huge part of this abuse and what paul his main focus was to take my voice away from me and make it his and make it theirs using their vocabulary.

Would he communicate information between you and your parents, like as a middle person?

They gave my parents progress notes.

I'm not really sure how exactly they communicated with him, but I think that he did just write notes to them.

And there's a chance that they had a phone call or two with him while I was there.

He gave my parents assignments as well baked into the program.

They're sending me letters with photos of me as a child.

Like, look at this girl.

We want her back.

We want you to be happy again.

And that's kind of, I think, the narrative that Paul was spinning for them: she's getting so much better.

She's participating.

She's happy now.

And I'm like, I was never fucking happy.

Nobody listened to me.

This is attachment-based trauma.

And she's also undiagnosed Autistic.

Shockingly, Paul made me read the most inappropriate, traumatizing book that you could ever assign a child like that in the wilderness.

The first one is called One Day in the Life of Ivan Donisevich, and it is a book about one day in the life of a man at a Russian labor camp.

And this whole book is about dehumanization and the struggle to persevere through that.

One of the lines is: a man who is warm can never understand a man who is cold.

I have never been cold like that.

You feel numb because you are freezing.

That magnified every emotion, every feeling tenfold, if not more.

That changes everything about you.

It changed me because I don't like to feel wind on my skin and I don't like being cold.

I'm 30 years old now.

This was 16 years ago.

And feeling the wind on my skin brings me right back to Second Nature.

Was there educational programming at Second Nature?

There was, but it wasn't real.

I looked through my assignments and it was a whole lot of absolutely fucking nothing.

This Labor Day, gear up, save big, and ride harder with cycle gear.

From August 22nd to September 1st, score up to 60% off motorcycle gear from your favorite brands.

RPM members get 50% off tire mount and balance with any new tire purchase.

Need to hit the road now?

Fast Lane Financing lets you ride now and pay later with 0% interest for three months.

And here's the big one: August 29th through September 1st only.

Buy any helmet $319 or more and get a free Cardo Spirit Bluetooth.

Supplies are limited.

Don't wait.

Cycle gear.

Get there.

Start here.

Take advantage of the EV lease incentive and leave the ordinary behind with an epic lineup of electric and hybrid vehicles at the ready.

And right now, qualified lessees of Dodge Charger Daytona, Jeep Grand Cherokee 4xE, and Wrangler 4xE may be eligible for a 7,500 EV lease incentive through Stellantis Financial Services to be factored into their lease calculation.

When leased through Stellantis Financial Services, not all lessees will qualify.

This incentive is offered by a third party as a cap cost reduction and is subject to change without notice.

Lessee cannot claim EV incentive on personal tax return.

Consult a tax professional for details and eligibility requirements.

Restrictions apply.

Contact your dealer for details.

Offer ends 930.

Looking for a mortgage, credit card, or auto loan?

Then you should know your FICO score.

Did you know 90% of top lenders use FICO scores?

Visit myFICO.com slash free today to get your FICO score for free.

MyFICO makes it easy to understand your credit with FICO scores, credit reports, and alerts.

Visit myfICO.com slash free.

That's myfico.com slash free.

Or download the MyFICO app and discover the score lenders use most.

That's myfico.com slash free.

This is Larry Flick, owner of the Floor Store.

Labor Day is the last sale of the summer, but this one is our biggest sale of the year.

Now through September 2nd, get up to 50% off store-wide on carpet, hardwood, laminate, waterproof flooring, and much more.

Plus two years interest-free financing, and we pay your sales tax.

The Floor Stores Labor Day sale.

Don't let the sun set on this one.

Go to floorstores.com to find the nearest of our 10 showrooms from Santa Rosa to San Jose.

The Floor Store, your area flooring authority.

As a founder, you're moving fast toward product market fit, your next round, or your first big enterprise deal.

But with AI accelerating how quickly startups build and ship, security expectations are higher earlier than ever.

Getting security and compliance right can unlock growth.

or stall it if you wait too long.

With deep integrations and automated workflows built for fast-moving teams, Vanta gets you audit-ready fast and keeps you secure with continuous monitoring as your models, infra, and customers evolve.

Fast-growing startups like Langchain, Writer, and Cursor trust Advanta to build a scalable foundation from the start.

Go to Vanta.com to save $1,000 today through the Vanta for Startups program and join over 10,000 ambitious companies already scaling with Vanta.

That's vanta.com to save 1,000 for a limited time.

So you're technically in school and everything's independent study.

I would say the only thing that was real was my independent study PE because we were in the wilderness walking aimlessly for months.

I think I had to do a book report.

An essential required reading for everyone is Man's Search for Meaning by Victor E.

Frankl.

He was a Holocaust survivor and he developed logotherapy.

The concept is anyone can take everything from you, but you still have you, and that is all that matters.

We read Man's Search for Meaning because he almost died and he had nothing and they took his manuscript away from him, his life's work, right when he arrived.

So he wrote it in his head and then when he survived, he published it and he became famous.

But they manufactured that adversity and that trauma that he went through.

And they just gave it to us.

He talked about how some of the Jewish prisoners, when they were given responsibility, they were told to police their own.

They abused their fellow Jews and it made them feel like they had to be more cruel.

Otherwise they'd lose that position and that safety.

And I think that's really telling and it's really sad that.

we're reading that as our required information.

And then they're making us do it to each other.

The books, especially, I mean, One Day in the Life and Man's Search for Meaning are about imprisonment, dehumanization, and survival at all costs.

And it's very interesting that that whole concept is what they did to us.

It was supposed to be information that we learned to be more resilient.

Like you can suffer and it's okay.

You don't know that you're going to be funneled into another program because they don't tell you that.

I was not funneled, but that became a huge conflict as well within my my experience.

Towards the end, I think I had told staff, I'm not going to a school next.

I'm going home after this.

And they thought that was hilarious.

They mocked me and they consistently said, you're not going home after this.

You're going somewhere else.

Jen told me, and so did my parents, that I would be graduating eighth grade with my peers.

So that's what I believed.

But when I got there, and I kept saying like, they're going to come.

I'm going to get out of here.

I'm going to have my family visit soon.

Staff consistently said, Do not hope for that.

You're setting yourself up for a huge disappointment because they're not coming to get you.

They literally taught us not to hope anymore.

That was also another form of brainwashing and conditioning.

To this day, I often find myself thinking, I cannot get excited about this until it's happening because they told me not to hope.

When you force somebody who has a communication difference to fit into this weird little mold, it's like foot binding.

You're breaking this person's feet to make them smaller, to make them fit into progressively smaller spaces.

And that is the reward.

You fit into the mold.

You are happy now.

You are ready to be successful in life.

And you're welcome.

We did this.

And please shut the door on your way out.

A lot of these people didn't go to college because their parents in a panic trying to save their lives were convinced to give all of this money tens of thousands of dollars to these programs and there goes their future the point is to save our lives so we have one but in that process they took it my parents thought i came back and i was me again and i was dead

i don't know if they do this to everybody but i thought i was graduating they were hinting at it paul had been there for two days already and sat down with me for like like maybe 15, 20 minutes and said, so you're graduating tomorrow.

And I just collapsed.

My parents showed up the next day and I also collapsed.

I think there's a moment in one of the documentaries, the program, where a survivor is talking about when he saw his parents, he just dropped to his knees and started sobbing like he couldn't walk.

It was such.

a powerful moment for him.

And I did the same.

I just could not use my muscles.

I I couldn't believe that this was ending.

And then it's this stupid graduation ceremony again, where they just gather some rocks and they make it into a really nice pile.

Everyone's like, we did it.

And they hold hands.

Then you pack up, you say goodbye to everyone and you leave.

That's kind of it.

You go back to HQ and they give you your belongings.

And I got a t-shirt.

that says, home is where the tarp is.

They gave my parents and myself a nice glossy photo book, and it has photos of me in the program, and it has some random photos of the surrounding area, like nature shots.

It's a photo book of what I went through.

It's really disturbing.

I went home directly after Wilderness, and the girls did not think that was okay.

They were really mad at me and resentful.

The staff were pissed.

that I wasn't going to a boarding school after that.

And I think it's only because my mom was in the industry and was able to convince Paul that I did have help and will have continued care when I leave.

You were there total nine and a half weeks.

Yeah.

My parents came to pick me up and we drove home to San Diego.

We stopped in Vegas for the night and I walked through Vegas with my pack on, smelling like an animal.

I was nauseating.

I had to take three showers and I was still filthy.

My parents parents didn't even want to bring my pack home in the car because it was a biohazard.

Then I went home and was kind of in shock.

It was really hard for me to talk to people.

I was terrified that I was out of earshot all the time.

I had a really hard time with eye contact and speaking in general, but I was also so afraid that not speaking and quote unquote falling back would get me sent back there because that was always a looming threat.

I think a month after I got back, my parents, they said, we're taking you somewhere.

It's a surprise.

I was so weak, I couldn't eat.

I felt like I couldn't use my body for days because my parents, they wouldn't tell us where we were going.

We got on a plane.

It turns out we were going on a cruise to Alaska.

I was horrified.

to go on a cruise ship.

I was just nauseous that I did something wrong.

I just constantly was like, I love you guys.

I'm so happy and I'm so sorry for everything that I did.

It was all my fault and I'll never do it again.

And I just want to be your daughter and I just want to be your sibling.

That's where I was.

And after the cruise, we started high school.

I got out of wilderness in June and I started high school in August.

If I felt like there was a disconnect in middle school, when I showed up in high school, it was a chasm.

They were all worried about tests and friends and, you know, all that stuff.

And I'm remembering someone else's flashback and how my therapist in wilderness made her walk through her PTSD flashback in real time in front of all of us.

I didn't know how to talk about a math test with someone my age, do group assignments and participate actively in class.

So instead, I was leaving class for seemingly no reason.

and I would literally just go climb a tree on campus and sit in a tree.

As a founder, you're moving fast toward product market fit, your next round, or your first big enterprise deal.

But with AI accelerating how quickly startups build and ship, security expectations are higher earlier than ever.

Getting security and compliance right can unlock growth or stall it if you wait too long.

With deep integrations and automated workflows built for fast-moving teams, Vanta gets you audit ready fast and keeps you secure with continuous monitoring as your models, infra, and customers evolve.

Fast-growing startups like Langchain, Writer, and Cursor trust Advanta to build a scalable foundation from the start.

Go to Vanta.com to save $1,000 today through the Vanta for Startups program and join over 10,000 ambitious companies already scaling with Vanta.

That's vanta.com to save 1,000 for a limited time.

This Labor Day, gear up, save big, and ride harder with cycle gear.

From August 22nd to September 1st, score up to 60% off motorcycle gear from your favorite brands.

RPM members get 50% off tire mount and balance with any new tire purchase.

Need to hit the road now?

Fast Lane Financing lets you ride now and pay later with 0% interest for three months.

And here's the big one: August 29th through September 1st only.

Buy any helmet $319 or more and get a free Cardo Spirit Bluetooth.

Supplies are limited.

Don't wait.

Cycle gear.

Get there.

Start here.

Home emergencies.

Homely, moly.

Wait for no one.

And you shouldn't either.

Whether it's plumbing, electrical, heating, or cooling, we got you.

Get a plan from HomeServe for peace of mind starting at five bucks a month at homeeserve.com.

Find out how to save on repairs at home serve.com.

HomeServe, a subscription for peace of mind.

Not available everywhere.

Most plans range between $3.99 to $11.99 a month.

Your first year terms apply on covered repairs.

This is Larry Flick, owner of the floor store.

Labor Day is the last sale of the summer, but this one is our biggest sale of the year.

Now through September 2nd, get up to 50% off store-wide on carpet, hardwood, laminate, waterproof flooring, and much more.

Plus two years interest-free financing, and we pay your sales tax.

The Floor Stores Labor Day sale.

Don't let the sun set on this one.

Go to floorstores.com to find the nearest of our 10 showrooms from Santa Rosa to San Jose.

The Floor Store, your area flooring authority.

It's time to head back to school and forward to your future with Carrington College.

For over 55 years, we've helped train the next generation of healthcare professionals.

Apply now to get hands-on training from teachers with real-world experience.

And as few as nine months, you could start making a difference in healthcare.

Classes start soon in Pleasant Hill, San Leandro, and San Jose.

Visit Carrington.edu to see what's next for you.

Visit carrington.edu/slash SCI for information on program outcomes.

I was like, this is a joke.

None of these people understand what life is.

This is a really insulated bubble, and I'm not a part of it anymore.

And I cannot pretend to be.

You can't tell people the realities of it.

When you leave, I was told to say I was at a camp.

It was very strongly suggested that I just don't talk about it at all because it's not appropriate.

They don't need to know where I was.

When I left middle school, I sort of disappeared.

And the storyline was that I was going to New York to spend some time with my aunt and my cousins.

I can't talk about it, but I did.

And it leaked out in my writing.

I was so disturbed.

It was very obvious.

Looking back, I'm now disturbed at how nobody said a thing.

Nobody did anything really to help me.

I'm writing in my dream journal in creative writing that I have a dream where I'm drowning, I'm underwater and I'm looking up through the water and I'm screaming and all of the people in my life are looking at me and they're laughing and I'm trying to reach out to get out of this water and then I black out and I die.

I'm like 15, 16 years old.

I turned that in to my teacher.

I turned in so many assignments.

I wrote about the storm we were in.

and how I thought I was going to die.

And they told us to strip naked after because we were wet and I was wet for two weeks.

My entire wilderness experience, a lot of the rhetoric, I was told I was an addict.

I'm addicted to teachers.

I'm addicted to writing to them.

I won't talk to my parents because I'm seeking comfort inappropriately when in reality, I didn't have any support.

I just wanted help and caring and understanding in a way that my parents could not give me.

I communicated that through my writing, but where else was I?

I was nowhere.

I didn't have coworkers or friends.

I had teachers, but it was turned into this perverse addiction that I was so ashamed of for years.

Still to this day, I'm really trying to unpack that and forgive myself and understand that I was just not okay.

I was really disturbed and I needed help.

I never went to a school dance.

I...

didn't go to prom.

I went bowling with three of my teachers and we all wore dresses and they bought me a corsage.

That was senior prom and even senior week when we did senior night, the overnight on campus.

And it's supposed to be like this huge culminating moment and event.

And I ended up finding this corner.

I hid because it became so apparent to me in that moment that I literally have nobody.

I lied and said I didn't take my medication.

I had to leave and my mom backed me up.

I really didn't have a high school experience to this day.

It makes me really sad because I may have had a chance to connect with people and to have a semi-okay childhood if I hadn't gone to wilderness, but they took all of that from me.

When I left Second Nature, I saw Paul again when I was in high school.

He was going to a conference somewhere in Southern California.

I went with my mom and I was with him in the hotel restaurant and bar for a couple of hours.

But all of that is also a blur.

I really don't know what happened or what we talked about.

He added me as a friend on Facebook, maybe six months to a year after I left Second Nature.

So I was underage still.

I think I had at that point made a group on Facebook for the girls I was with, the few of them that we could find and like connect with.

And Paul joined the group.

And then Paul started adding other teenage girls, ones that I wasn't in wilderness with.

He also made another group for his group in Second Nature.

And there are a ton of members in that.

And they are all girls and now most of them women that were in the program with him.

It's really disturbing.

To this day, I believe he posts on my Facebook happy birthday every year.

I don't use Facebook anymore, but he would continue to comment on photos like of my first boyfriend and myself.

Paul, he has been unfortunately inextricable from my own life from the moment that he got his claws in me.

He has been a huge looming dark cloud in my life.

I graduated high school and then I completed kind of a year of college and then some community college scattered throughout.

My pursuit of education was all but lost.

I ended up in the service industry and was bartending because of the way that I look.

I am queer and I cut my hair off.

I cut my boobs off.

For my entire adult life, I have always felt like I was forced into silence.

And essentially, they took away so many of my opportunities to succeed in life to the point where I'm serving them.

I think a lot of us are stuck at a certain point in life and at a certain income level because it totally changed my self-concept and my self-esteem.

I just want to emphasize the fact that a lot of survivors, we're not in a great place in life, even though it's been decades.

A lot of the people that survived this are neurodivergent.

They come from very specific backgrounds and we're stuck in it.

A lot of the people that I know are now working in the industry.

They're converting us and then sucking us in.

It's very, very cult-like.

At what age were you diagnosed with autism?

I think I was 27 years old.

And that was after I was working security at a bar and I was assaulted and incurred a brain injury.

I hadn't been in contact with my parents in like three years at that point.

So I had, after the assault, ended up back in contact.

I had been diagnosed as bipolar.

in my early 20s, I believe, and I was medicated.

But the whole time, I did not believe that I was.

I had a conversation with my parents.

I just mentioned, I think that I might be autistic.

And my mom's jaw dropped to the floor.

And suddenly everything in my life seemed to make sense.

I was tested for autism a couple of months later, diagnosed, and everything changed because I think they realized that what I was saying or doing and the way I behaved my entire life totally made sense.

That one piece of information, it was really, truly a magic pill.

It just makes me sad though, that sometimes we as human beings need that information in order to believe people or see their intentions truly.

So often in these stories, survivors' neurodivergency was just seen as them being defiant or troubled.

And really, they just needed support and resources and were trying to do their best in a world that's not really made for them.

I'm curious what it's like for you today with your relationship with your parents.

It's really hard for me to process it and talk to my parents about it.

They don't really want to know in the sense that there's so much guilt.

And the less that they know about what I really went through, the better for them emotionally.

I know my trauma isn't just my trauma.

That makes me really angry and sad because I can't talk about it with them without them feeling like I did this to her.

And then it becomes not about me anymore.

So it's really hard to try to communicate that with them, especially as all of these documentaries and things are coming to the forefront.

Paris Hilton, the second that she started talking about her experience, all of us started coming out of the woodwork saying, wait, we're allowed to talk about this now.

We're adults and this was not okay.

I don't think they're able to watch the documentaries.

And that's caused a rift.

Because it wasn't specifically the program I was sent to, I don't think that they're able to believe that that could have happened to me.

And none of these documentaries are about second nature specifically.

In their minds, how could that be true?

I was painted as an unreliable narrator.

That's still my life.

And that never changed.

No matter how I move forward in life or try to communicate, the water is already dirty.

I've been unable to drain it because I'm not the one who can pull that plug and then refill the water.

It's been a really huge challenge.

I've had to accept that this is my experience and my experience alone.

And I need to move forward in life.

and not get so attached to talking about this with my parents.

Unfortunately, I'm a lot stronger than they are because of what they did to me.

As much as I love them, it's not about them.

So it's definitely caused a rift and I know they feel it.

Perhaps in the future, we'll be able to talk about it and we'll be able to address the very real abuse that I endured.

The Reddit community has been huge and it has changed my life.

I have been able to speak with survivors about these things.

We have a lot of commonalities and a lot of memories and experiences that are very real and extremely concerning.

But these people like Jen, the educational consultant, and all of the people that did this to me, more than likely, they will not face criminal charges.

They've been buying houses off of our blood and sweat and trauma.

My gut feeling is that as we pursue it, most of them are going to slip through the cracks.

To me, They deserve to go out into the wilderness.

The punishment should be the crime.

I would love to see them in the middle of the snow in a t-shirt, filthy.

I would love to see them take a billy bath with a fucking tomato soup can in the snow and scream their name.

That's my deepest fantasy.

This is a huge issue and it is systemic.

And I think the emphasis should be on the survivors.

We should be getting help.

We should be getting resources and media attention so that we can bring to light what they're doing is not okay.

But instead, after months of being in the wilderness, having to scream my name, something in me broke.

That has seriously affected my life because I'm moving forward into music production and I'm afraid of the sound of my own voice.

It directly conflicts with music.

I think in that way, they paralyzed me and they destroyed my life and my sense of self.

and my future because I'm still there.

I catch myself so many times a week.

I think I was not supposed to say that to somebody, and I'm a grown fucking adult, and I'm not in the wilderness anymore.

My parents often asked me after I got out of wilderness if it was positive or you know, how it changed my life.

I always said, Yeah, wilderness taught me that I cannot depend on anybody else for anything, that no matter what happens, I will get myself out of it.

I think they create a world in which our experience doesn't matter.

It is you move forward and you graduate, you became what they wanted you to become, much like a soldier.

And it did work because I never went back.

As I have processed this, I realized just how detrimental this has been.

As my body is deteriorating over the years, it all stems right back to wilderness.

After leaving wilderness, I remember bending down to shave my legs and I I felt excruciating pain in my back.

All of my joints that were connected to wherever that backpack touched, my body, my shoulders, my neck, my hips, my back, all of that became so compressed.

Carrying that pack that's more than three quarters of my body weight for months sleeping on the ground destroyed my joints.

My left shoulder dislocates in my sleep.

I've been doing a lot of physical therapy for that.

My hands are not okay.

I now have a lot of scarring.

I used to rock climb for a decade and I cannot because my joints are failing.

My feet have been through the ringer because my feet were so compressed.

My shoes were too tight, the boots that they gave me.

And they didn't get me a new pair of boots that were a little bit bigger for over a month.

It's really hard for me to walk and stand for long periods of time.

I've had four surgeries on my big toe.

I no longer have a joint.

The tendon had to be repinned to my foot.

That didn't work.

So they put a screw in it and bone grew through the screw and then they took it out.

So I can't bend my toe.

My balance is really bad.

At a certain point, I kind of hit a threshold where my body just couldn't hold up to day-to-day life.

So I took a really sharp downhill turn.

To this day, my physical therapists are trying to get the ball of my shoulder to roll back to where it needs to be because that backpack on it made my shoulders and my neck just slump.

And all of that gravity pulled my neck down as well.

It's not uncommon.

I think there are a lot of survivors like myself whose main issues are neck, back, shoulders, feet, and hands.

What do you hope that listeners will take away from hearing these stories?

I really want people to understand that there is no such thing as a troubled teen.

That is just a lie.

That's been a blanket term that's been manufactured by an industry that's making billions of dollars off of that concept.

I think the responsibility lies with the community and within the family system.

We need to stop sending children away.

They are dying in these programs.

Even if just their soul is dying, that's changing everything.

I also think that we have to start talking about it more.

This isn't something that should be trending momentarily.

While Paris Hilton is fighting for our rights, this is the stepping off point.

She was able to use her horrible life experiences and that trauma to start this conversation and it needs to continue.

Paul is still working in this industry.

He has been doing this for decades.

He has a PhD.

but he has been hopping from program to program.

These are the people that we need to start asking questions of and talking about why are they moving from program to program?

What's going on at these programs?

We need to know the specifics.

Recognize that they are very, very good at covering this up.

But what they do is they shut down their program and they just take on a new name.

People need to understand that just because one shuts down does not mean that it's gone.

In the last couple of years, a lot of these programs have shut down.

A lot of these lawsuits that have started, unfortunately, because children have died in their care.

We have to continue with this.

And it's going to be a really long process, but people are starting to wise up and listen to what the survivors are saying, which is that your child is not troubled.

There's something going on beyond this and behind it.

We have to figure out how to approach that in a way that does not completely damage and destroy them.

I cannot thank you enough for all of your time and energy.

Next time on something was wrong.

I have conversations with my dad now too where he's like, I never would have thought to ask if you were going to get three meals a day, if you were going to be able to shower, if you were going to get medical attention, because these are all assumptions that parents would make.

We had timeframes every single moment of every single day.

And the lesson to be learned there was that there are always positive and negative consequences to life of to everything that you do.

If you have anxiety, if you've skipped a class, gotten in a fight with your parents, this could have been you.

Something Was Wrong is a broken cycle media production.

Created and produced by executive producer Tiffany Reese, associate producers Amy B.

Chesler and Lily Rowe.

with audio editing and music design by Becca High.

Thank you to our extended team, Lauren Barkman, our social media marketing manager, Sarah Stewart, our graphic artist, and Marissen Travis from WME.

Thank you endlessly to every survivor who has ever trusted us with their stories.

And thank you, each and every listener, for making our show possible with your support and listenership.

The theme song this season is You Think You by Gladrags from their album Wonder Under.

To hear more music from them, follow the link in our episode notes or search for them on your favorite music streaming app.

Speaking of episode notes, there you'll always find episode-specific content warnings, sources, and resources.

Thank you so much for your support.

Until next time, stay safe, friends.

Mm-mm.

Oh, what's eating?

The new banana split cookie from AMPM, all freshly baked with real butter with banana chocolate and strawberry flavor.

Wow, that sounds amazing.

Can I have a bite?

I'm sorry, but no.

But you can't split the banana split.

Not even a little?

Not even a crumb.

What if?

No.

Please?

Mine.

When it's too legit to split, that's cravenience.

Get a three-pack for 99 cents with our app, AMPM.

Too much good stuff.

Plus, tax where applicable prices of participation may vary in terms of conditions apply.

What do you think makes the perfect snack?

Hmm.

It's gotta be when I'm really craving it and it's convenient.

Could you be more specific?

When it's cravenient.

Okay.

Like a freshly baked cookie made with real butter, available right now in the street at AM P.M., or a savory breakfast sandwich I can grab in just a second at AM P.M.

I'm seeing a pattern here.

Well, yeah, we're talking about what I crave.

Which is anything from AM P.M.

What more could you want?

Stop by AMPM, where where the snacks and drinks are perfectly cravable and convenient.

That's cravenience.

AMPM, too much good stuff.

Looking to transform your business through better HR and payroll?

Meet Paycor, a paychecks company, the powerhouse solution that empowers leaders to drive results.

From recruiting and development to payroll and analytics, Paycor connects you with the people, data, and expertise you need to succeed.

Their innovative platform helps you make smarter decisions about your most valuable asset, your people.

Ready to become a better leader?

Visit paycorp.com/slash leaders to learn more.

That's paycorp.com/slash leaders.