S24 Ep11: One More Thing To Be Scared Of

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This is Bethany Frankel from Just Be with Bethany Frankel.

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

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

There's this initiation phase and transition phase, and then once you get to the point where you're getting in less and less trouble, you have more consistent behavior, then you go on this backpacking trip called Course with staff.

We did that at Kirkwood Ranch, which is a stopping point within Hell's Canyon, which is a museum area that is dedicated to the western settlement, which was very educational.

It was very cool.

I walked 40 miles in Hell's Canyon in brand new hiking boots.

Damaged my feet for years.

I still have issues with my feet cramping up.

My ankles aren't aligned properly.

I had silver dollar size blisters in my feet.

I couldn't wear regular shoes for months because it was just wounds all over my feet.

We'd have writing assignments every night.

I had to write a letter to my future daughter about what my life would have been like without the program and with the program.

I had to write a letter.

to myself as an adult what my life would have been like without the program and with the program.

I had to write my own eulogy on what my life would have been like with or without the program.

They would read these assignments every day, and I had to come up with long-term goals and short-term goals.

When you're on course, you have to prepare for graduation.

You had to admit to all the issues that you were sent there for.

Eventually, I had to comply and admit that I was sexually promiscuous.

I went there for drugs, for disrespect,

for anger issues, lying, all of these things.

When in all reality, my actual situation at home was I had smoked pot.

I had snuck out of the house.

I'd never consumed alcohol.

I was being abused.

I didn't comply at home with the narrative that I was a bad kid and I fought back the entire time because I knew I wasn't a bad kid.

But eventually, in the middle of a canyon, and the only way I know I'm getting out of there is if I just say, Yes, I was a drug addict.

Yes, I did this.

Yes, I did that.

I had to write a paragraph about each of these issues.

The test was mental fortitude and the strength to keep going.

At 13 years old, I was surviving in the woods on my own with a small propane stove, a water purifier, a first aid kit, and a pocket knife.

I could see the other kids' tents, but it was like a speck.

We're so far away from each other that even if I tried to wave at them, they probably couldn't even see me.

We did that for three days.

After that, you get to see your parents again.

You get to go for a weekend visit with your family away from the facility.

And then you have to come back.

After that, you get a phone call once a week with your family and you work on transitioning back home.

Once you were in that graduate stage, they treated you like royalty, essentially.

They built a dirt bike track for one of the kids that was there before me because he rode dirt bikes before he got there.

And they let another kid build a skate ramp.

If you wanted to go camping on your own out on the property, you could.

How many kids do you think were there at max capacity?

Including me,

there were six.

By the time I left,

the program started rapidly expanding.

They started adding more beds, getting more funding.

The graduates, the trustworthy kids, went up and lived at a house right up the street that John Jr.

and his wife lived in.

They would go and live up at the other house and go to college classes or try and get a job.

By the time I left, it was eight in the house, including me, and then two up the street.

So about 10, quote, residents in addition to Big John's kids of his own?

Yeah, but they lived separately.

The more honest or compliant you became, the more they'd let you do without supervision.

You want to talk about Stockholm syndrome.

It was like this building trust over time to the point where they know that you're not going to run

because you are just compliant.

There was

daytime staff, then there's evening staff, then there's overnight staff.

When the nights watchmen, that's what they call them, nights watchmen, stayed overnight while you were asleep.

And that was always a man.

Their job was to check on you every 30 minutes with a flashlight to see if you were still in your beds.

And they logged nighttime behavior.

We were required to write in our journals every night.

The night staff would read those and make sure that we did them.

That's the way he started my abuser.

This was a really weird thing, but if we really liked a staff member, they would listen to us.

And so they promoted him essentially to daytime staff.

If there were red flags, because of my home life before then, there would have been no way for me to see what they were.

And I believe he also knew that.

He was probably upper 30s.

He was handsome.

He wore a leather jacket and he was blonde and he had this swagger, great sense of humor.

He taught us life skills, you know, like how to change a tire, how to change the oil in your car.

He would let us curse.

If one of us broke a rule, he'd be like, I'm not going to tell the higher-up people.

I'm not going to put it in the records.

Just don't do it again.

He made me feel calm.

He was like a brightness I attached to him, probably because of my issues with my own father and being in a completely isolated space, it was the first amount of real friendly relief I felt.

I have a really big dimple on my right cheek.

He called me dimples and he would write little notes in my journal.

Good job, dimples.

So proud of you.

Glad you had a good day, dimples.

And it made me feel so good.

Somebody believed in me.

Then over time, he just started letting us break more and more rules.

And that's when the heavier grooming and the abuse started.

I didn't even know what that term was until six years ago, because I didn't really talk to my therapist about the sexual abuse either.

I carried that myself.

After the grooming set in, then the verbal sexual abuse started.

It was, how many times a day do you masturbate, Molly?

How How many sexual partners have you had, Molly?

Have you ever kissed a girl?

There was a phase of that and a phase of him pressuring the residents to touch each other and kiss each other, allowing some of the residents to sleep together while he watched.

It was him bringing up the idea, him manipulating that situation and then being like, you guys could take a shower together.

But then he was opening the door and watching.

The sexual abuse from him came afterwards.

And he did those acts in isolation, away from everyone, so nobody else would see.

The first time he put his hands on me, I was going downstairs in the basement.

He stopped and started groping me.

I think I froze.

The boys started picking up on the fact that my abuser was starting to be more physical, so they wouldn't leave us alone with him.

But over time,

it started getting more severe.

We're all asleep and he's there alone.

He would wake us up.

And that's when he would isolate me specifically.

I do not have memory of him doing it to other girls in my room.

Two of the girls, after things started getting significantly worse, were placed on suicide watch.

And when you were on suicide watch, you actually have to sleep downstairs in a tent next to the desk where he would post up before the next staff would come in.

And that's right next to the boys' bedroom downstairs.

He was getting into the tents of the girls downstairs.

I am not going to speak on what I was told happened because that's not my story to tell.

But if it was anything like the sexual abuse that I encountered, it was brutal.

At this point in time, he had already started to threaten our lives if we told.

So none of us were really talking to each other about what was happening, and none of us were really talking to the staff.

He specifically singled me out in a lot of these threats because I was the loudest and most vocal one.

I was quote unquote a graduate and I had the most trust in the house.

In front of everybody one night, he just said, well, I'm most worried about you, Molly, telling anybody.

Because he was talking about getting us pot and cigarettes.

I said, I'm not going to tell anybody.

You don't need to worry about me.

And he said, we will have a blanket party if you tell.

I will put a sheet over your head and beat you with a baseball bat, and there are plenty of woods in Idaho to bury you in.

I remember thinking, he wouldn't really do that, would he?

And then he turned and looked at all of us and he said, I will hunt you down like a dog and kill you and bury you in the woods and no one will find you.

That's when I knew that I was in so much danger than I ever was before.

That's when I became so scared there was no way I was going to tell anybody.

And I believed that he was telling the truth.

That sort of threat continued on over time with the sexual assault.

It did get to the full extent of what you can imagine.

I was raped and tortured.

He always made sure to tell tell me that I did a good job.

And he would use my nickname.

Good job, Dimples.

I was in so much shock all over the place that it didn't even register to me that I was being sexually abused.

It just felt like one more thing to be scared of.

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One morning, it's winter and it's cold outside, there's snow.

We all wake up.

One of the brothers, he was direct care staff, he barged in the door, and there was another resident with him who was living up at the second house.

We didn't know what was happening, and we were in our rooms for a long

time.

And all of a sudden, he asked people to come out to the living room and he was like, my abuser has been turning off the cameras for every single one of his shifts.

There is no footage.

What has been going on here?

We all went back to our rooms for a minute and we agreed we would tell them somewhat of the extent, but we're not going to tell him everything.

They called the police and had him arrested.

We didn't tell the police everything.

They took statements individually.

There was a lot of timeline questioning,

and they were very sensitive.

I was very grateful to them.

There were two computers downstairs.

I remember walking by and seeing the letter open on the screen that basically said there were a few incidents at the facility where a staff member exhibited unsafe behavior.

We were made aware of it and removed the staff member immediately.

I do remember them not mentioning any sexual acts whatsoever.

I don't remember what Turning Winds told my mom exactly, but I think that they were just so vague that essentially I lied to them about something major that affected the rest of the residents.

And so they were stripping me of my graduation status, and I was going to have to start all over, which also means that they would get six more months of money out of my mother.

We did not have a lot of money.

My mom had to take out a loan to send me to this place.

It was tens of thousands of dollars.

So they were going to make me start over, which means another installment of money.

My mom

called

after that, and that was when she started picking up that something was really wrong.

She could hear it in my voice, and I just started to cry.

And she said, don't say another word.

I'm going to call an attorney.

She had the attorney call me.

I was downstairs with John Jr.'s wife.

She was essentially prepping me for this phone call.

And she was like, I want you to tell the truth.

I want you to be 100% honest.

But then when it came down to it, she was sitting in the room with me while I was on the phone with my attorney.

And the attorney said, is somebody in the room with you?

And I said, yes.

And she said, put me on speakerphone right now.

She said, I have attorney client privilege.

You need to leave the room.

I need to speak directly to my client.

And John Jr.'s wife looked at me.

and hesitated

and then she left the room.

And I just told her as much as I could because I felt like I was still being listened to outside of the door.

My attorney said, you've been traumatized.

We're going to get you home.

And two days later, I went home.

The initial police reports were in December.

And I believe it was shortly after New Year's.

I went home in January.

My mom flew me to Wichita, which is only like two hours from here.

And she picked me up in Wichita and drove me home.

I remember her hugging me and just saying, hi, baby.

She was just so relieved that I was home.

Overall, it was really positive.

I was so happy to be home.

The police department did call me after I got home to interview me about the facility and ask me direct questions like, what were the working conditions like?

What was your clothing situation like?

But they asked me questions without my mom there and me being that young.

I'm just like, sure, I'll answer whatever questions you have.

You're a police officer.

But my mom found out about that and she said, if they call again, do not answer any questions without me or an attorney present.

And that was the last time I talked to anybody about it.

Was he prosecuted?

They got him on charges for direct harm to a child.

Mine being under the age of 14, I think held extra weight.

There was a trial.

There was an actual hearing.

I was subpoenaed.

My mom did not allow me to participate in that.

She was like, you are not going anywhere near those people.

But other residents were also subpoenaed and I know that they testified.

I was told that he was going to prison.

He was actually sentenced to days in jail and then somehow got out earlier.

He was arrested and wanted on felony warrants.

He was arrested multiple times by the Sheriff's Department for probation violation in a case originally involving aggravated battery, battery, and counts of delivery of a controlled substance.

And he did serve prison for a few of those charges and then was on parole.

I have no idea where he is.

My mom took legal action to get the money back that she spent to put me there.

And I do believe that she was given that money back in settlement.

My mom and I never ever spoke in detail about what happened.

My mom is an avoider at all costs.

And I really don't want to talk about it with her because I know I'm just not going to get what I need to from her.

Coming home felt like I was looking at somebody else's life from the outside in.

There was a lot of time spent in those first few weeks adjusting to life

without the structure.

I was left alone for the first time in months.

And I just remember still being so regimented.

I was still getting up, making my bed, cleaning, organizing, sweeping.

I was making meals for everyone else.

I was inviting my mom's friends over at almost 14, making dinner for my parents and their friends to show them how much I had changed because we were really involved in our church.

And so everybody at the church knew I was a rough kid.

I was put into a really, really small Christian school for a couple of years, and that was miserable because all of these people were so sheltered that any conversation about my life and what had just happened to me made them scared of me.

Sans a couple of them.

I still got a couple of really good friends from that group.

But I was even more so perceived to be bad.

There was a constant state of trying to act like what had just happened to me never happened, but also trying to be transparent about it so I can at least get some of it off my chest.

Then I dove hard back into religion to get a sense of community, got re-baptized and God saved me and I'm washed clean and that lasted for a while.

I am not religious now.

But there was a lot of clinging to that same environment rooted in shame because it was the only thing my brain could function within for a long time.

There were still some quote-unquote behavioral issues, probably worse after I came back, like shoplifting.

I was hanging out with the rougher crowd, just being rebellious, but there was also still a level of extreme monitoring of me because they needed to see that I was trustworthy.

The punishment was twice as much because I should have been fixed.

It got worse after that with my mom, mom, where she completely withdrew.

She was dating, and then I became the reason that I drove all her boyfriends off because I didn't like any of them.

They were all terrible.

Once I hit 16, I dropped out of high school, and she just let me do whatever I wanted.

She never checked up on me.

Then she started dating somebody and she got married again.

And that only lasted nine months.

He was awful.

I had been dating my high school sweetheart, who was wonderful, and his family was wonderful.

They would let me stay the night over at their house with an air mattress next to his bed on the floor.

And they kind of took me under their wing.

I was 17, he was 18, going to college when I dropped out, applied to college, and moved to college in Oklahoma City and lived there on my own.

Pretty much the entire time.

Over the course of those years, I continued to choose abusers myself.

That's one of those things where I was like, Mom, you've got a pattern.

So do I.

It was because of the grooming stages.

I firmly believe that, because it desensitized my brain to what was okay and what was not.

My dad died my last year of college, Christmas 2010.

I finished the last semester and I was deeply depressed.

And I had had a lot of mental health issues with depression, not knowing that I had PTSD.

I graduated from college with my music degree.

That's when my autoimmune condition started kicking in.

So I moved back home to live with my mom and her new boyfriend.

This one I liked.

He was awesome.

They got engaged.

He was well off.

So financially, he took care of me, which was amazing.

I'd never had that before.

I moved back in with with them to get surgery, stayed that summer with them, and then I moved to Montana for a few years and came back and got pregnant and had my daughter.

My relationship now with food is so much healthier.

It took years to undo that.

There was a period of time where When I came home, I would binge and then I would be shamed for gaining weight.

Probably within the year after being home, I was able to walk to the freezer and get ice cream if I wanted it.

This is the most amount of freedom I feel like I've ever had in my life.

That was the time when I was growing and gaining weight.

Like every young girl eventually develops in some way.

I had stretch marks, just a few up and down both of my sides, and my mom came in and she goes, goes, Molly, stop eating right now.

You have stretch marks on your side.

You've gained so much weight.

And after that, I started dieting.

I was on Weight Watchers.

I struggled with my weight going up and down.

And looking back, I was 150, 160 pounds.

That's normal.

I

still struggle at times

with being able to eat enough, not because I want to be thin, but because eating and food has been such a huge point of trauma in my life that I get tired of it.

I do a really good job of making sure that I'm eating.

Some of my medication makes it difficult, and finding the right dose was important.

Also, I have PCOS and endometriosis, So it's all mixed together to where I get into analysis paralysis about what I should and should not eat.

And then I just say, fuck it, and shove a pizza down my throat.

It took so long to get to the point where I do not feel guilty about shoving that pizza down my throat.

And I do have a much healthier relationship.

with diet and exercise.

I proudly say I am not anorexic anymore.

There are still some lines of thinking that I catch myself thinking.

I don't think trauma like I have ever really goes away.

I just have to slow down, stop myself, and say, you're hungry, eat.

With this amount of trauma and with this amount of brainwashing, you don't trust your body anymore because you're forced to turn that off.

Outside of being fat-shamed my entire life,

I never was able to trust my body to tell me what it needed.

At 36 years old, I love to eat.

I love to drink wine.

I love to have sugar on my fucking cereal and I put extra butter in my oatmeal and I enjoy every bit of it.

I exercise in the morning because I want to, not because I'm telling myself I'm a piece of shit and I have to get up and do it.

It's because I love my body and I want it to be stronger.

It took somatic therapy and ketamine therapy to really figure out that I had no connection to what my body actually felt and what my mind was telling me to do.

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i've always been an artist of sorts I have always been a writer.

I had always been the person to take all the pictures and was able to capture those candid documentary style moments.

I had a second trimester miscarriage in February of 2020, right before the world shut down.

My husband and I were on a road trip when that happened and we got trapped in Wyoming in the middle of a blizzard.

I had to be rushed into emergency surgery because I was hemorrhaging.

I left the hospital and on the way home from

that trauma, I told my husband, I think I'm going to be a photographer and I'm never going to work for anybody else again.

I'm very much a believer of the butterfly effect.

You know, if this one thing hadn't happened, then the rest wouldn't have followed.

With PCOS and endometriosis, I would have been high risk.

I would have been alone.

I would have had to have had a C-section alone.

I was immunocompromised.

And so my experience with that pregnancy would have been extremely difficult.

While it is sad, the way that it worked out ended up being the best thing for my mental health.

Overall, it ended up being a catalyst for me to realize how can I make a life from this where I don't feel trapped by other people's rules.

What do you know about Turning Wind's current program?

What may or may not have changed?

The facility is bigger, nicer.

I feel like the residents, they don't have to cook their own meals anymore.

They have a staff to cook for them.

It's just a bigger, shinier package.

They have a main lodge now.

There are...

therapy rooms now and they have separate buildings.

It's like a full campus now.

I have no idea about the outdoor work conditions.

According to them, they also have an equine experience.

They told my mom that they did back then, but they did not.

They would take pictures of kids snowmobiling and it would just be their actual kids instead of it being residents.

So what is real and what is not, I'm not sure.

I do know that within the group, there are different levels of care now,

and they have a partial hospitalization program now.

So they've reached all aspects of infiltrating troubled teens, healthcare systems.

You had texted me the other day about Turning Winds actually having a podcast.

And I'm curious what your impression was.

It's interesting.

Some of them are like five minutes long.

So I listened to a couple of the shorter ones.

I'm not exactly sure who is running the podcast, but

I was listening to one of the main staff members on this podcast that was one of my direct contact staff.

His voice is older, and that shocked me because I can still remember the way his voice was then.

I am listening to him speak about parenthood.

And for a second, I found myself relating.

And then he said, my house is a benevolent dictatorship and I rule my house like a king.

When I heard that, it snapped me right back out of it.

And I was like, there he is.

It took me right back.

I had a hard time listening to more after that.

I am seeing a pattern in listening to these episodes and things that you have touched on.

every single one of us are neurodivergent.

I was just a young neurodivergent girl who didn't belong there.

But because I handled my feelings differently than your regular diagnosable male neurodivergent child,

I was a problem because I didn't fit a clinical outdated outlook or diagnoses on that.

It's an important thing to underscore.

And if we look at the history of our country and how disabled people have been institutionalized, it is a very profound and dark history that a lot of people are not familiar with.

But it's another example of discrimination and bigotry.

I think so many, especially women that we spoke to, were misdiagnosed, not diagnosed at all.

If you look at their student profile, and I'm reading this directly, we are a catalyst for positive change in the lives who spend time here and specialize in many of the most common mental health conditions, such as low self-worth, behavioral problems, poor academic performance, various teen disorders, which may include ADD, ADHD, depression, addiction, spectrum disorders, and attachment disorders.

All of these things are things that kids can't help.

These are parents that just want compliance and have no understanding for what it means to work through these issues with their children.

So they either feel like they need somebody who is firmer to do it or for somebody else to handle it for them because they don't want to handle it themselves.

The lack of understanding what it means to be a good parent.

There is a huge gap

that I

strive every day to fill with my own child, explaining to her why things happen,

why I'm feeling things, why she could be feeling something, and that if she is feeling something that she doesn't feel like she can talk to me about, that she has a therapist, she has that right to not speak to me about certain things.

She is the most wonderful child.

I was not given the voice or the understanding and the empathy.

I was made to feel obtuse like a black sheep.

I was told all the time that I was awful.

You should teach your child how to communicate needs and wants and boundaries.

All I was asking for was somebody to sit down and understand me, and nobody would.

My daughter doesn't owe me respect, but I have earned it.

And if she disrespects me now, I can say, I haven't earned that response, but I'm going to let you cool down for a second.

I'm going to let you think about why you might have said that.

It's a give and take.

That's all I was asking for.

And I was not allowed that, but it's made me a damn good mother and a wonderful wife and the best friend I could ever be.

And I know that about myself because I show up for people because I was never shown up for.

My mom has this pattern blowing up her life essentially because of her own trauma.

Like, I don't blame my mom for what happened to her.

I blame my mom for what happened to me, but she has taken responsibility for so much of it and done a lot of work.

There are certain things that we just will not talk about because I'm not going to get what I need from that conversation anyways.

As a grandparent to my daughter, that is is where a lot of the healing came from, too.

If you want to be in this baby's life, these are my rules.

And she has abided by all of them.

For the longest time, I shifted my story to be something terrible that I overcame, and it made me who I am.

And while that is true, I did not fully start to heal until I sought therapy.

I've always been in therapy, but I was honest finally with my therapist about

everything

and I was validated through that.

She had no idea that there was this other side to my family that wasn't being presented to her.

She apologized to me for playing whatever role in that abuse and being sent away.

My somatic therapist really had my biggest breakthrough and probably did my most amount of healing there.

She said, there have been people who have tried to study why in a family of trauma, one heals and breaks the cycle.

The studies could not find a reason for one kid to break the cycle other than grit.

I don't know why I was blessed to be that kid, but I am gritty and I take pride in that.

I finally got to a place where I'm not surviving in spite of.

I'm surviving because I choose to, and I choose happiness, and I love my life, and I love my beautiful daughter, who is only a year and a half away from the age that I was when I was sent away.

I will say there is not going to be a person that comes along that is going to validate your experience until you validate it for yourself.

I think because of the nature of these programs and the immense amount of verbal and mental and spiritual and physical abuse.

There's shame that comes in undoing the brainwashing.

It wasn't until I finally decided that my parents were wrong for making this decision.

It was the worst choice they could have made.

And the healing started for me there.

I knew that they were not good parents.

I knew that my decision to be strong in my voice was the only thing that was going to make me heal.

If there are other survivors out there that know exactly why I'm crying and can feel exactly what I'm talking about, you were never alone in it.

We were all abandoned.

We were all left.

to survive and whatever trauma was experienced and you were told it was okay it is not okay.

It is painful.

You do have a right to be angry and you do have a right to get answers and heal.

If there are parents that are out there that are considering sending their children away, do not do it.

These people that run these programs, they're manipulators, they're liars.

No amount of pressure on your child like that is going to make them change because they want to.

They will change their behavior because they are scared that if they don't, then something worse will happen.

And that is not respect.

That is not change.

That is fear.

If you are a parent and you are struggling with a child that you don't understand, your job as a parent is to make a safe space for them to be understood, to empathize.

All your child wants to know is that you've got their back, that you're going to love them no matter what, that you're going to be there for them.

I never got an apology, and even when I did, it was, I'm sorry, I was trying my best.

I was trying to save your life.

That's not an apology.

What I would hope people would understand is that, trauma aside, these facilities are abusing children.

They are killing children.

It's not a place of healing.

These programs need to be investigated and they need to be taken down.

There is no board that oversees these people that aren't already involved in the Troubled Teens programs themselves.

It's all within itself.

It's not regulated.

There is such similarity between every single one of these programs.

The attack therapy, the structure, it just has different labels depending on which program you were involved in.

It's validating, but it's terrifying.

And it doesn't matter if you were sleeping in a tent, in a bed, or on the ground.

Some version of all of our stories are all the same.

Every story that I have heard from this brought back so much.

I haven't had the opportunity to speak about it in full.

So these details fade.

It's strange to think that there are other people out there that feel the exact same way I do, because it is such an isolating experience.

The work you've done has made me feel like my story is less unique, which is exactly what survivors want.

We want to feel less unique.

We want a community.

I am incredibly inspired by your resilience.

Thank you so, so much.

Next time on something was wrong.

I was feeling lost and completely helpless because you speak up that you don't want to go, you're seen as defiant, and potentially you could be put somewhere worse or for longer.

The school part was kind of a joke because I was 18 years old and having to take the same math class as a 14-year-old.

Everyone got on the ground, laid on the couches, cuddling, giving massages, but it would be staff and students cuddling in piles on the floor.

If you don't participate, you stand out or you get in trouble.

Once I left these programs, trying to assimilate back in the real world, it's constant loneliness.

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.

In the episode notes, you'll always find episode-specific content warnings, sources, and resources.

Thank you so much for your support.

Until next time, stay safe, friends.

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