S24 Ep22: Hold Up a Mirror

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Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 As always, please consume with care. For a full content warning, sources, and resources for each episode, please visit the episode notes.

Speaker 21 Opinions shared by the guests of the show are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of broken cycle media. All persons are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

Speaker 21 Responses to allegations from individual institutions are included within the season.

Speaker 21 Something was wrong, and any linked materials should not be misconstrued as a substitution for legal or medical advice. I'm Tiffany Reese, and this is Something Was Wrong.

Speaker 22 Hi, I'm Dylan. I am a survivor of the troubled teen industry and I am 44 years old.
To this day, out of my experience, I have been changed completely.

Speaker 22 From who I used to be, the way that I operate and the way that I interact in my relationships.

Speaker 22 I wanted to share my story because I think that's really important for survivors to find solace in each other.

Speaker 22 What I really like to get out of this is being a strength for anybody who has been through this and heeding some warning to anybody that is looking to send their kids to these programs.

Speaker 21 I'm so thankful that I was able to connect with you through Haley, who listeners heard from last week. How did you two meet?

Speaker 22 I am a moderator or admin for a Facebook group. It's just a bunch of us who experience that program over the course of different years.

Speaker 22 There's some of us are in, you know, our mid-40s, some of us are in our late 30s.

Speaker 22 It's a place where we can connect with each other, continue to foster the relationships that we once had back in the 90s and 2000s. That is where I found Haley.
Haley is a member of our group.

Speaker 22 Haley and I did not attend at the same time. She arrived shortly after I left.
She reached out to me and wanted to know if I wanted to share my experience, and I absolutely did.

Speaker 22 I was adopted when I was four days old, but I like to say that I was bought and paid for in utero. My parents went through a private adoption with a lawyer.
I was born in South Carolina.

Speaker 22 My parents were from New York City, so they came to South Carolina when I was four days old to pick me up. That was my first plane ride, and I was taken back to New York City.

Speaker 22 New York City is amazing. I would not change my childhood for the world.

Speaker 22 As somebody who is such a people person and really like enjoys adventure and urban exploration, I'm sure I've got that from there. It was just the most amazing and magical place to be.

Speaker 22 I never met a stranger. I had great friends.
I was inquisitive. Smart, adventurous.
I'm not going to say that my childhood was always easy. I was bullied and felt excluded from things.

Speaker 22 But my parents were very affluent. I grew up on the Upper East side of New York City.
I went to one of the top private schools. Excelling at school was always an expectation.

Speaker 22 It was never an option not to succeed, not to excel. So there was always a lot of pressure.
My mom was wound really tightly. She was very neurotic.

Speaker 22 That manifested for her in micromanaging me because she did not have to work. My dad was the vice president of a jewelry manufacturing company and was making a ridiculous amount of money.

Speaker 22 Being able to quit her job and raise me full time was probably a dream for her. I have always been super independent, really, really wanted to just do my thing.
For years, I was able to do that.

Speaker 22 But as school started getting more rigorous, my mom nagged me constantly to do things. If she had given me a moment to breathe, I would have done my homework, but everything was a timeline.

Speaker 22 It had to be on her time. My life was really scheduled to the minute.
And I rebelled against that. It caused tension between us.
I was in about seventh grade when it really, really started badly.

Speaker 22 I love her, and it's hard to speak ill of her because she passed away from cancer. We never actually repaired our relationship.
But I have to be honest about all of this because both both can be true.

Speaker 22 I loved her. She was a wonderful mom, but she was not perfect.
I had always been really active, not only just walking around New York City, but doing sports.

Speaker 22 When puberty hits, like most kids do, I started to gain some weight. I would grow out and then I would grow up.
I got that expression from my mom because she would say, oh, you're growing out again.

Speaker 22 When are you going to grow up? My first real memory of this was standing on the scale, as I had been doing every morning for probably a good while at that point.

Speaker 22 My mom reached over and she picked up my shirt to look at my belly. That made me feel horrible because she had always talked so horribly about people who were overweight.

Speaker 22 I was so afraid to become the person that my mom hated. her only child, her adopted child.

Speaker 22 That, I think, was probably the trigger that started a lot of my behaviors that actually ended me up in the programs. As I started to gain weight, she started weighing me.

Speaker 22 I wasn't allowed to have sugar cereals. I only could drink diet sodas, if sodas at all.
She actually gave me food issues, gave me body image issues.

Speaker 22 She was chipping away at something that I couldn't control or change really. I mean, I know you can lose weight, but I was a growing preteen going through puberty.

Speaker 21 With people like that, sometimes there's never skinny enough.

Speaker 22 That unfortunately is the case. My mom was anorexic.
She basically starved herself. Her relationship with food was insane.
She would skip meals all day and then eat just a giant salad for dinner.

Speaker 22 She would always make sure that when we went out to restaurants, which we did every weekend, she would get dry chicken, not made with oil or butter.

Speaker 22 She was very explicit with how she wanted her food prepared. She would always want her vegetables steamed.
That is healthy eating.

Speaker 22 But to take it to this extreme of eating one meal a day and then kind of binging during that meal, that was a problem. I am so scared to do the same thing to my kids.

Speaker 21 It's such a big responsibility, especially when you've experienced the harm yourself. You know what it costs.

Speaker 22 Exactly. And the last thing I ever want to do is, because to this day, I look in the mirror and I am cruel to myself.

Speaker 22 These These are things that no person should look at themselves and say that I know are a direct result of a culmination between my mom and the programs that I attended.

Speaker 21 And the harmful irony is that also a lot of these programs were advertised as being an option for children who are struggling with disordered eating.

Speaker 21 I've learned from survivors and their parents thus far this season, even if kids didn't necessarily have, quote, food issues before, they often left with them.

Speaker 21 When did you initially hear that your parents were thinking about placing you in a program and what were the circumstances that led to that?

Speaker 22 As it would turn out from the years later that I did meet and spend some time with my biological mother, that I inherited her rage problem. And that started to show up when puberty started around 12.

Speaker 22 My mom and I were alone together a lot. My anger started growing.
One day I just snapped and I physically attacked her.

Speaker 22 That physical abuse continued, I would say, up until probably right before I got sent away. Through about age 14, I would feel this energy coursing through my fingertips and up my arm.

Speaker 22 And I would warn her, I would say, mom, I need you to leave me alone. I am going to lose it.
Please get out of my room. I would black out.
And when I would black out, that's when it would happen.

Speaker 22 I have been told that I have chased her through the apartment, that I threw her on a bed, that I choked her, that I slapped her, that I punched her. I don't remember most of this at all.

Speaker 22 I'm not trying to make excuses here. What I did is absolutely unacceptable and seemingly unforgivable.
I don't think I was ever forgiven.

Speaker 22 Despite that I never raised a hand to my mom or even spoke harshly at her since 1995.

Speaker 22 I started skipping school. I would actually call out as a parent.
I would just be like, he's sick and not coming to school today. As long as you called from home, it was a different world.

Speaker 22 So you could fake those things. You could sign your parents' signature.
There was never any kind of intervention.

Speaker 22 I started smoking weed. I was hanging out in Washington Square Park.
I wanted to stay away from home as much as possible. I am a pacifist.
I am nonviolent.

Speaker 22 I didn't want to hurt her, but I also just didn't want to be around her.

Speaker 22 I finished up my eighth grade year in school. My grades were probably slipping a little bit, but they would never slip below a B.
That was unacceptable and I knew that.

Speaker 22 And I was also very competitive with other people. I wanted to have the highest test scores and get done first.
I got through my eighth grade year and I was at home.

Speaker 22 with my parents and I was standing at the edge of the kitchen counter and I could see out the window. I remember them saying, you know, we have to talk about something pretty important.

Speaker 22 And I'm like, okay, what's going on? I'm thinking, who died?

Speaker 22 But they told me that my school had asked that I not return the next year, which to this day, I really have a hard time believing that that was true.

Speaker 22 I've been to two reunions as an adult and I am invited. So I do think that they leaned on that.

Speaker 22 as a way to deliver the news and make it seem like they were not the bad guys and that this was not their choice per se. So they told me that I would be going to boarding school starting that summer.

Speaker 22 The summer before I was going into ninth grade, I went to the Hyde School in Bath, Maine. It was more of a traditional boarding school with a underlying therapy angle.

Speaker 22 I would meet with my counselor who was qualified to be a counselor, and we would have one-on-one sessions. They did not enforce crazy rules or crazy dress codes.

Speaker 22 You went to class, you walked around, you could earn privileges to go off campus. I'm I'm pretty sure that you started with some off-campus privileges.
It was not hard to move up.

Speaker 22 But for me, I saw it as a jail. When I went for the summer, I had an off-campus apartment.
It was a house that they had renovated for students in the school.

Speaker 22 It was very easy to hop on a Greyhound bus back to New York. In hindsight, if I had stayed at Hyde, things probably would have been a little better for me.

Speaker 22 But I ran away and then the summer program ended. I know I ended up back there and I probably lost privileges, got in trouble.
And then I did start my ninth grade year at Hyde.

Speaker 22 I just felt like my whole world was stripped away from me and I didn't want to be there. There were a couple times that things happened.

Speaker 22 There was a kid that did sexually assault me. There was an attempted rape.
I told my parents they didn't believe me. That was really hard.

Speaker 22 They really thought that it was just another ploy for me to go home. I wasn't saying I wanted to go home.
I just wanted this kid held accountable and expelled for trying to rape me. I was done.

Speaker 22 I ran away again. After that, I was asked not to come back.
I did get expelled from there. And that would bring us to my summer in New York and the removal from my home.

Speaker 21 What did that summer look like?

Speaker 22 Because my parents were trying to scramble to find someplace to send me, not to my knowledge. I spent it partying and doing drugs that I had never done before.

Speaker 22 I had made some friends at the boarding school. We had met up in New York.
When I started boarding school, I had smoked cigarettes, I had smoked pot, I had drank, but wasn't really a fan of it.

Speaker 22 Being at boarding school introduced me to a whole new world. Pills, cocaine, acid.

Speaker 22 One night, I went to bed as normal and around 3, 3.30 in the morning, I remember the light coming on, blinking my eyes open and seeing two strangers standing right in front of me. They had handcuffs.

Speaker 22 They were all dressed in all black. They looked like they were wearing tactical gear.
I thought I was being arrested. My shoes were taken from me.
My dad was in the hallway.

Speaker 22 I remember my mom standing there, kneading her hands together. She used to do that for anxiety.
It was two transport officers, a man and a woman.

Speaker 22 They told me to get up and get get dressed because I was leaving with them. We could either do this the easy way or the hard way.

Speaker 22 I would do it on my own accord and walk out with them, not in handcuffs, or I could fight my way through it and be physically restrained and escorted out of my apartment.

Speaker 22 But they made it clear that either way, I was leaving with them. I went willingly.
I didn't want to be embarrassed, kicking, and screaming through my apartment.

Speaker 22 I didn't even think about how my parents would feel about it. I thought about myself.

Speaker 22 I think that being raised in the affluent Jewish community that I was raised in, saving face was something that we didn't really talk about, but you knew was something that was important.

Speaker 22 So that's what I did.

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Speaker 22 I left with them and got in their car. We went to the airport.
We flew to Las Vegas because they lived in Vegas and just the timing of escorting me there, it didn't line up.

Speaker 22 So I stayed the night with them at their house. I must have gone to sleep that night and went willingly with them.

Speaker 22 where we were going the next day and that was to Catherine Freer Wilderness Therapy Expeditions in Oregon. We were hiking 23, 24 miles a day with packs that almost weighed our entire body weight.

Speaker 22 You had to usually hike to get the water or go get some water from a nearby water source if you didn't have it in your water bottle.

Speaker 21 How much of the day do you think you were hiking?

Speaker 22 I would say 8 to 10. From like 6 p.m.
on, we probably had arrived at our place. And then you had to build your fire.
We had a flint and steel and that was at the bottom of the sagebrush plant.

Speaker 22 You would find small twigs and get incrementally larger pieces.

Speaker 22 Once you did all that, you then had to really hope that you got enough of that really fine nesting material because you had to take your flint and steel and you had to shave the steel onto it and then use that flint to create a spark and then you had to nurture that spark so it built your fire.

Speaker 22 We were fortunate if there happened to be free-roaming cattle in the area because you could grab grab one of those cow pies, a literal pile of cow poop that had been out there drying in the heat, and you could actually save your fire for the morning.

Speaker 22 So you wouldn't have to go through the process of gathering your supplies again. And then you had to cook your food.

Speaker 22 It was a big calorie deficit, and the options were disgusting, like oleomarge and government cheese and lentils. I lived on lentils and miso soup for five weeks.

Speaker 22 I was so afraid that I would not have enough to eat that it kicked that instinctual basic human mammal experience. You have to save food.
You're not going to have enough.

Speaker 22 Because I felt like I was starving on that wilderness program. And we never could be near somebody or not be close enough to interact.
It wasn't like we could find safety in numbers overnight.

Speaker 22 All they give you is two tarps, one for the bottom for the ground. and one to rig above you so you don't get wet.
There was no bug protection. We were in the desert in Oregon.

Speaker 22 There are some real creepy things out there. There are some scary, dangerous animals, the roaches, the spiders, the ticks, the scorpions.
I did learn how to push through it. I had a goal every day.

Speaker 22 I knew there was no getting out of it. So might as well, for the first time in my life, comply.
I complied. I did very well.
I was not one of the people that slowed everybody down.

Speaker 22 I was able to really handle it a lot better than some of the other people in my group.

Speaker 21 What do you remember about the staff?

Speaker 22 I do remember they were hard asses.

Speaker 22 When people really felt like they needed to take a break, they just kept pushing and pushing.

Speaker 24 And how long were you in wilderness for?

Speaker 22 I was there for five weeks, and it would have been three had I not been scared of the dark and broken solo out of fear.

Speaker 21 How long were they trying to get you to go on solo for?

Speaker 22 I believe that it was three days and two nights. I've always been scared of the dark.

Speaker 22 So to be out in the middle of Oregon where there was absolutely no light pollution whatsoever, it was terrifying to me. Solo was definitely the hardest part of the wilderness experience for me.

Speaker 22 The first night I had discovered two ticks crawling up the inside of my thigh towards my genitals. It was when I found the second one.
I was done. I was like, I'm just going to blame it on the ticks.

Speaker 22 And I refused to go back to my solo site. I was not doing it.
I was going to stay with the counselors. And that was when I got rolled into the next session that had already been going for a week.

Speaker 21 Do you recall how you found out that you were going to another program after wilderness?

Speaker 22 My parents came and picked me up after Wilderness, and they told me I was not going home. They told me I was going to Montana.
They brought me to school.

Speaker 22 It's one of those little cities in the middle of nowhere. It was a two-year program.
That was what I knew. And so I knew that my teenage life at that point was essentially over.

Speaker 22 I remember driving up the road, seeing the lounge building come up over the hill of the driveway. I remember it was an all-dirt driveway.

Speaker 22 I remember seeing some girls walking in modest long skirts and t-shirts. I remember thinking, what in the holy cult have I just stepped into? Nobody had on makeup.

Speaker 22 And the staff didn't help that impression either. They were dressed the same.
I just remember being like, where did they send me? They wanted to micromanage and control every aspect of our lives.

Speaker 22 There were four physical cabins. Each of those cabins were split into sides.
So you had like one A, one B, two A, two B, et cetera. In those cabins, there were eight total people.

Speaker 22 So on one side, there were four, on the other side, there were four. But what made it really difficult is that we had one bathroom to share.
Privacy was completely off the table.

Speaker 22 I don't remember there even being closed doors when students were using the bathroom.

Speaker 22 To not have that kind of privacy and to be forced into sharing the most gross parts of a human life is just absolutely disgusting. It really is potential abuse.

Speaker 22 We got up, we ate breakfast, we had morning exercise, which was not easy. We had to log, weigh, and measure our food every single meal.

Speaker 22 We were forced to drink an entire Nalogene bottle of water before we left the table. After you have eaten a whole bunch of food, it was really filling.

Speaker 22 They gave us like a halfway decent amount of food because they knew we were going to be burning calories.

Speaker 22 But you know, you're very full and then having to chug this four quarts of water at the end of your meal, I didn't drink it throughout the meal. They would not let us pee if we had to pee really bad.

Speaker 22 So to this day, I have bladder damage. I didn't know that could be a thing.
And I have trauma surrounding water. The bathroom was a huge control, and they would not allow us to go for so long.

Speaker 22 I've never experienced pain like that. I am so fortunate that I did not pee my pants, but others did.
If you didn't, I guess, strengthen your bladder muscle enough.

Speaker 22 There was one girl who had to wear diapers. How humiliating is that? A teenager and you don't have a medical condition.

Speaker 22 You are being forced to wear diapers and everybody knows you're wearing a diaper because it's a very small school and there was probably, if I remember correctly, a group on it shaming this poor girl.

Speaker 22 To this day, I will make sure that I schedule in bathroom stops. If I'm traveling somewhere, I always make sure I use the bathroom before I leave my house.

Speaker 22 It's something that stayed with me for a really long time. We would have to clean our cabins every day, white glove type inspections.
Everybody had a chore and they rotated.

Speaker 22 Cleaning toilets, cleaning showers, vacuuming, dusting. Of course, you had to make your own bed.
Part of our chores were pretty normal.

Speaker 22 There was some tending to the horses, carrying buckets of water during the winter to release the ice from the spigots so we could actually carry the water to the horses, scoop the poop, bring the poop down to the horse miniware pile.

Speaker 22 That in and of itself was fairly normal.

Speaker 22 Where it got to be not normal was anytime they wanted to do something to the school, they wanted to expand, they wanted to build, they wanted to do maintenance, they would find a reason to put us on intervention.

Speaker 22 They would find one thing that somebody had done. The amount of clear cutting that generations of survivors have done, acres and acres and acres,

Speaker 22 we would have to clear cut, made burn piles. I have dug stumps.
I have built an entire corral by myself. It was cold outside, and I remember having to haul

Speaker 22 really big posts and I would have to dig these post holes in this ground that was partially frozen. I had never done any of this before in my life.
I just had to figure it out.

Speaker 22 carry these heavy posts by myself. They had to be eight to 10 feet long and probably six inches in diameter.

Speaker 22 I would have to haul them on my shoulder one at a time and bring them to the area where I was building this corral.

Speaker 22 I was on solitary intervention for at least three months, feeling like I had been rejected by my birth parents. And that was obviously a deep core trauma.

Speaker 22 And then being rejected again by my adopted parents, the people who were supposed to want me so much. To then be isolated for three months.

Speaker 22 It was so lonely and heartbreaking and really assured me that I was a worthless human being. And that took years to get over.

Speaker 22 At one point, I was tied to another student because we had engaged in sexual behavior.

Speaker 22 When we woke up every morning, we had to get tied together, do everything together, bathroom breaks together, all of it for a week before we ended up getting tied to buckets.

Speaker 22 I assume that the reason was because we weren't fighting tooth and nail. And that's what they wanted.
They wanted us to get so sick of each other that we turned on each other.

Speaker 22 I was not able to speak to a single person in the group. I was off talk during that experience being tied to somebody.
Try being tied to somebody and not being able to speak to them.

Speaker 22 Not being able to communicate them when you're trying to do manual labor together, like peeling logs with really sharp tools or carrying incredibly heavy logs together.

Speaker 22 There's teamwork that's involved in that. You have to communicate with that person and we weren't able to.
And that resulted in these heavy things being dropped.

Speaker 22 I don't remember any staff member actually being around while we were doing this stuff. We were working with saws, razor sharp edges to peel the bark off of these trees.

Speaker 22 It's so incredibly irresponsible and dangerous. We had a three-seater outhouse.
I was part of the digging crew. We ran into a multitude of rocks and stumps that had to be removed.

Speaker 22 And of course, we had to dig this hole like six feet down. Kind of like a grave, but for your poop.
After we did that, they constructed a three-seater outhouse.

Speaker 22 If you had to use the bathroom on intervention and somebody else had to go at the same time, you had to sit basically right next to them or with one toilet apart. There were no dividers.

Speaker 22 There was nothing like that. You just had to poop and pee right in front of your classmates.
That is absolutely mortifying. It does feel very prison.
I've been to jail before.

Speaker 22 At least there was a half wall between the toilet area and where the other inmates were. Even in jail, there was more privacy.

Speaker 22 I remember them normalizing this labor when there were parents visiting by having the parents participate. So there are pictures somewhere of my dad and I holding paintbrushes painting the log cabins.

Speaker 22 at this school. We used to have to Murphy's oil the log cabin walls for the ones that were like the natural ones, which is the lounge, which is where we had our groups.

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Speaker 23 Okay, so

Speaker 27 for the final trivia question, what is the largest mammal in the world?

Speaker 28 Reminder, no phones allowed.

Speaker 29 Sir in the orange, phone away, please?

Speaker 30 Um, my Kennedysmart smoke alarm sent an alert through the Ring app.

Speaker 23 Okay, sure.

Speaker 32 No, there's smoke in my house.

Speaker 23 Yeah, right.

Speaker 27 A smoke alarm texting you.

Speaker 22 That's a new one.

Speaker 33 See? The train monitoring agent is calling now.

Speaker 23 Hello?

Speaker 34 The Kidda Smart Smoke Alarm sends real-time mobile alerts in the Ring app.

Speaker 35 And with a subscription, emergency help can be requested even when you're not home.

Speaker 23 Well,

Speaker 36 okay.

Speaker 36 Back to trivia.

Speaker 37 Oh, seriously.

Speaker 29 You in the green, why are you on your phone?

Speaker 37 Blender texting you about a smoothie recipe?

Speaker 38 Visit KIDDA at kidde.com to learn more.

Speaker 40 A compatible ring subscription is required for 24-7 smoke and carbon monoxide monitoring, sold separately.

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Speaker 15 The work may cost less than you think and can often be done in just a few days.

Speaker 17 Strengthen your home and help protect your family.

Speaker 18 Get prepared today and worry less tomorrow.

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Speaker 22 We did our groups every single night, in the lounge, sitting on the carpet. Oftentimes, there would be one focus of each group.

Speaker 22 More often than not, it was meant to be on a specific person and their issues. If there was not anything that was happening now, they would just dig into their story and their life.

Speaker 22 We were encouraged to, what they called it was, hold up a mirror to shame them by quote unquote, holding them accountable.

Speaker 22 That's what we were told we were doing, but what we were really doing was cutting them down and shaming them.

Speaker 22 To have every single peer in that room attacking you and telling you what a horrible person you are, you're broken and that you're damaged.

Speaker 22 And then at the end of it, and this is the cringiest thing, there would be a group hug.

Speaker 22 They had absolutely no qualifications and no business running these groups, asking us to write lengthy sexual histories and drug histories and family histories, telling us that we weren't worth anything.

Speaker 22 that nobody really loved us, that we had nothing to contribute to society. You get told that enough times, your peers jump on that bandwagon because they didn't wanna get in trouble.

Speaker 22 You start to believe it. We would have these weird processing groups when they would make us all lay on the floor and cry.

Speaker 22 Lay there, think about what you've done and this horrible person that you have become, and then process your emotions about that. And some would be screaming and sobbing.

Speaker 22 It was just the weirdest thing to just group cry. I never was able to do it.

Speaker 22 One time we went on this three-day biking and camping trip in the Rocky Mountain front. I remember us all piling into vans and loading up the trailer with all the bicycles and all of our camping gear.

Speaker 22 It was supposed to be a fun thing. Granted, riding 28, 30 miles a day is not really super fun, especially when a lot of times you're summiting a mountain.

Speaker 22 But it was something that we actually got excited about because it was a change from the norm.

Speaker 22 So on the first day, we definitely rode for over 30 miles and it was direct heat. It was nice weather, but they don't call it big sky for nothing.
So lots of direct sun.

Speaker 22 Once we got to our campsite, I started feeling really sick.

Speaker 42 I had a horrible sunburn.

Speaker 22 I had blisters. I had a headache.
I was nauseous. I was vomiting.
There were still two days left in our trip. And we were sleeping in tents with only our sleeping bags.

Speaker 22 Instead of receiving any medical attention, I was told to just go lay down in my tent for the rest of the night.

Speaker 22 I have no doubt in my mind that I had some poisoning and I had to finish the trip in this condition.

Speaker 21 Did you ever know of anybody to receive medical attention?

Speaker 22 Not to my knowledge, no. Most times we were given some ibuprofen and sent on our way.

Speaker 22 It was very rare that anybody was taken to the doctor for anything that I can really remember, except for required monitoring of certain medications.

Speaker 21 Do you recall speaking with your parents if you ever tried to tell them about the place?

Speaker 22 We were allowed to write letters and receive letters, but those communications were monitored going out and coming in.

Speaker 22 I want to say that we were supposed to have weekly phone calls, but I don't really remember it being more than once a month. Those were monitored calls too with your assigned therapist.

Speaker 22 I do remember one time being on the phone with my parents trying to tell them there was abuse going on and

Speaker 22 hung up the phone immediately. I don't know if he said there was a technical problem or that I was lying.
I'm sure it was made to be my fault. You could not say anything honest to your parents.

Speaker 22 The friends that I had that I still talk to, when they would go on home visits, a lot of them didn't come back because they did get that time with their parents to tell them what was really going on.

Speaker 22 Some were not as fortunate. Some were made to come back.
And I was one of the least fortunate because I never did get a a home visit nor did I ever even get my own therapy group.

Speaker 22 I was never allowed to talk about why I was there or have any focus be on me because perceived me as arrogant and a know-it-all.

Speaker 22 I would put my hand up as wanting to talk because I wanted to try to make progress. I wanted to go home.
I wasn't allowed to. I never had the opportunity to quote unquote do the work.

Speaker 22 And because I couldn't do the work, then I didn't earn a home visit. But it wasn't for lack of desire.
It was that I wasn't allowed to.

Speaker 22 The new kids would come in and they would get a group, and I'd be like, hello? I've been here for like over a year now. We still haven't talked about any of my life.
Oh, we just ran out of time.

Speaker 22 Sorry. One of the things that really sticks with me was that at this school, I was forced to say, I'm often wrong, but before I spoke.

Speaker 22 But the truth is, although I can admit being wrong, I don't really like it. So I always went to kind of great lengths to make sure that I'm always fully informed or well-researched.

Speaker 22 So to have to say this was a huge attempted hit to devastate my ego. And my ego is not involved in that at all.
We all were highly intelligent.

Speaker 22 But another issue with that was that the ones that he felt threatened by were the ones who just didn't buy into the BS, challenged him in any way, shape, or form.

Speaker 22 And why I probably never had a group that was focused on me. He just didn't want to hear or give me the opportunity to speak anything that was going against his programming.

Speaker 21 I imagine it felt like rejection over and over.

Speaker 22 100%.

Speaker 22 I think that a lot of adopted kids actually ended up in these programs. And when I was in these programs, they were so hyper-focused on you're adopted, so you have this fear of abandonment.

Speaker 22 And I'm like, well, I don't really feel that way. I love my parents.
I never had an issue with being adopted, you know, at least I didn't think I did.

Speaker 21 What do you remember about plotting to escape?

Speaker 22 I was able to get off campus periodically with a group that had to go to a psychiatrist and get blood draws because of the medication that I was on.

Speaker 22 So I would get off campus and I would pay attention to what direction we would go down the road.

Speaker 22 I was kind of thinking about doing this for a long time, but never was really set in stone until I was on that solo intervention.

Speaker 22 I spent about a week keeping track of staff movements and then putting that together with my knowledge of where we were generally located based on the drives that we would take off campus.

Speaker 22 I even was paying attention to weather as much as I could. This is pre-cell phone.
We didn't have access to radio or to TV. We did not have any interaction with the real world.

Speaker 22 So I just had to kind of make some assumptions and go off of the things that I had learned and put it into action. I remember going to the kitchen.

Speaker 22 I had gotten them to agree to allow me to have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in between breakfast and lunch and lunch and dinner because I was out there busting my butt.

Speaker 22 I went to the kitchen for my normal scheduled peanut butter and jelly and I was alone in there and I knew I would be. I packed a bunch of food.
I had already packed my bag with all of my stuff.

Speaker 22 It was the time and it was the day and I was going.

Speaker 22 I remember.

Speaker 22 running as hard as I could for as long as I could till I thought that I was probably off of their property. I was able to take a break.

Speaker 22 It was absolutely beautiful there, but it was really hard to see that beauty when you feel like a caged animal. I felt free in that moment.
I came across a dirt road.

Speaker 22 By this point, I had been gone for a few hours. I didn't really know where I was.
I just had a general direction that I was walking in. I didn't have a compass even.

Speaker 22 I had no business doing what I was doing. I remember hearing people calling my name.

Speaker 22 As it gets closer, I dive into a ditch on the side of the road and I covered myself with leaves and I waited until the van had driven by and I knew it would be coming back.

Speaker 22 So I got up quickly and I ran as fast as I could and as hard as I could and I tried to stay away from the road until I lost that road and didn't hear them anymore and didn't see them.

Speaker 22 And that was when I came across just a random camper. in the middle of nowhere.
I don't know what I told this guy, but I'm sure I lied about my age. He felt bad for me.

Speaker 22 He knew that I was off on my own wandering through the woods, but I got really scared. Some kind of instinct in me kicked in.
I was in the woods with a stranger and nobody would hear me if I screamed.

Speaker 22 So I was like, if you wouldn't mind giving me a ride, that'd be great. So he did.

Speaker 22 I called my parents and I was like, yeah, so I am going to choose to go back because it's getting dark and I'm afraid I've made a mistake. My parents then then called the school.

Speaker 22 They had someone from the school pick me up and take me back. I jumped back into everything as normal, but then I got called to the office like a day or two later and that's when I was expelled.

Speaker 22 And I was happy about it. I wanted to get the hell out of there.
It was a two-year program. I had already been there just about two years.
I had never had a group, never gone home.

Speaker 28 So I'm like, I have to get kicked out of here.

Speaker 22 And I did.

Speaker 21 What was your parents' response to that?

Speaker 22 I don't think they were really surprised, but they were disappointed that yet another program, the one that they thought was going to stick, had failed, and I'm pretty sure they had no idea what to do with me at that point.

Speaker 22 To my knowledge, this school unexpectedly closed quite some time ago. Luckily, that means that no more young people will be subjected to its abusive programming.

Speaker 22 However, given the response of the former school head and his legal team, Even decades later, we have to live in fear of legal repercussions by simply speaking the truth.

Speaker 22 This person is still using fear tactic to silence us.

Speaker 22 It's incredibly egotistical and textbook narcissistic for this person to continue to control the narrative and use the money that he made forcing abusive situations on teenagers to shield and protect him from any liability or admission of wrongdoing.

Speaker 22 It's truly sad that this person's ego is still so fragile that he has, is, and will continue to hide behind his legal team to avoid taking any responsibility for his actions, both directly and indirectly.

Speaker 22 This time, they sent me back to the farm, one of the holding farms, and then they hired a board-certified psychologist to come do a full evaluation on me.

Speaker 22 That probably upset them because the only thing that really came out of that was that I'm not crazy. I'm just really smart and really independent.

Speaker 22 I had expressed to him how all I wanted was to go to not such an abusive program. I said, ultimately, I want to go back home, but I guess that's really not an option.

Speaker 22 So I just want to go to someplace more like Hyde. He accomplished that for me.
I got sent to John Dewey Academy. They did manual labor too, but it was more lax.
It was a level system.

Speaker 22 I didn't have any privileges to go off campus really or anything, not alone. And I wanted those privileges.
I actually wanted to move up.

Speaker 22 I wanted to get through the last years of my high school years and maybe go back home. So I was going to work the program.
I had every intention.

Speaker 22 On the night that we were supposed to have my group at that school, something happened. All I know is that we did not get to me during group that night.

Speaker 22 And I promptly ran away the next day because it triggered that two years that I never was allowed to talk about what was going on with me. I got on a greyhound bus and I went back to New York.

Speaker 22 I ended up going back to John Dewey for a little bit, maybe a day or two. But because I had run away, they put me on isolation and they forced me to sleep on the stage.

Speaker 22 The school was in a castle, I shit you not, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. There is absolutely no way that this castle wasn't haunted.

Speaker 22 I would hear things, I would see things, and I would sense things. I sat up all night.

Speaker 22 I didn't sleep a wink, waiting for the Greyhound station to open so I could pack my shit and get on that bus and go back to New York. And this time, I was not going to get found.

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Speaker 25 4imprint for certain.

Speaker 23 Okay, so

Speaker 27 for the final trivia question, what is the largest mammal in the world?

Speaker 28 Reminder, no phones allowed.

Speaker 29 Sir in the orange, phone away, please?

Speaker 30 Um, my Kidd of Smart Smoke Alarm sent an alert through the Ring app.

Speaker 31 Okay, sure.

Speaker 32 No, there's smoke in my house.

Speaker 23 Yeah, right.

Speaker 27 A smoke alarm texting you.

Speaker 22 That's a new one.

Speaker 33 See? The train monitoring agent is calling now.

Speaker 23 Hello?

Speaker 34 The Kidd of Smart Smoke Alarm sends real-time mobile alerts in the Ring app.

Speaker 35 And with a subscription, emergency help can be requested even when you're not home.

Speaker 23 Well,

Speaker 36 okay, back to trivia.

Speaker 29 Now, seriously, you in the green, why are you on your phone?

Speaker 37 Blender texting you about a smoothie recipe?

Speaker 38 Visit KIDDA at kidde.com to learn more.

Speaker 40 A compatible Ring subscription is required for 24-7 smoke and carbon monoxide monitoring, sold separately.

Speaker 5 California has millions of homes that could be damaged in a strong earthquake.

Speaker 7 Older homes are especially vulnerable to quake damage, so you may need to take steps to strengthen yours.

Speaker 12 Visit strengthenyourhouse.com to learn how to strengthen your home and help protect it from damage.

Speaker 15 The work may cost less than you think and can often be done in just a few days.

Speaker 17 Strengthen your home and help protect your family.

Speaker 18 Get prepared today and worry less tomorrow.

Speaker 3 Visit strengthenyourhouse.com.

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Speaker 21 You've been in these programs for how long at this point?

Speaker 22 Since 14, so three years. I took the bus back to New York City and I connected with my friend whose parents owned a brownstone in the Noho East Village area.
They owned all the floors of it.

Speaker 22 And the fourth floor was her dad's office, but he only had the office in the front of the unit. So they did allow me to live there in the back.
I had my own room, my own bathroom. I had a kitchen.

Speaker 22 I had everything I needed. I got a job.
I met a girl and we started dating. And then I started staying with her in her dorm room.
She had to leave the dorm.

Speaker 22 I realized I have nowhere to live. My job doesn't pay me nearly enough money to get my own place.
And I am 17 years old. So I did what I never wanted to do.

Speaker 22 And I called my parents and I said, okay, let's find me another place to go.

Speaker 22 But as it would turn out, no school in the United States at this point would take me because I was labeled a high run risk and rightly so.

Speaker 22 And that was what landed me in a PO Western Samoa, where I went to the last program.

Speaker 21 What was the program in Western Samoa like? Was it considered a lockdown facility?

Speaker 22 I would definitely put that in air quotes, lockdown, because we were on a compound.

Speaker 22 They had two campuses in Western Samoa, and I ended up on the co-ed campus. There were no fences, there was no barbed wire, there was a stone wall that was very short, but it was a lockdown.

Speaker 22 You were literally on a tiny island in the middle of the South Pacific. Like, where are you going? It was a level system.
There was a lot of physical abuse. There was a lot of sexual abuse.

Speaker 22 We didn't really have groups. It wasn't like the therapy angle.
It was just, these are a bunch of bad kids. Let's stick them on an island type situation.
I went there the summer of my 17th year.

Speaker 22 So I wasn't there for that long, about six months. On my 18th birthday, I demanded my passport from the person who was in charge of the campus.
She was so mean.

Speaker 22 She called one of the owners and one of the owners came out to talk to me. He was like, no, no, your parents signed your rights away.
You're actually a citizen of Samoa.

Speaker 22 You can't leave until you're 24. I was like, I am a U.S.
citizen. There is no way that I am a citizen of Samoa.
If you do not give me my passport today, I will sue you. And he did.

Speaker 22 And then he asked me to please not tell anybody that they would address it.

Speaker 22 So the first thing I did when I walked away from that meeting with him was I went up to where everybody was and I said, if you're 18, demand your passport. We're getting out of here.

Speaker 22 He was unhappy with me, to say the least.

Speaker 21 How many kids were there over 18?

Speaker 22 I want to say there were at least four of us and we all left together. There was a counselor there who was half Samoan and half American.

Speaker 22 Most of the other counselors that were in charge, they were Americans that were living there because this was their job. She really felt for us kids.

Speaker 22 She really saw that there was stuff that wasn't right. When we all demanded our passports, we knew we didn't have anywhere to go.

Speaker 22 And she actually brought us all to her house and we stayed the night there. I had talked to my parents.
They said that they would fly me to Hawaii and that was it.

Speaker 22 And I'm like, so you're going to still strand me on an island, but it's the United States.

Speaker 38 They refused to fly me past Hawaii.

Speaker 22 And And I was like, well, that's not going to work. So I went to the American embassy and I spoke to the ambassador.
I told him my whole story. I told him everything that had happened to me.

Speaker 22 He sat with me for a long time and just listened. And at the end of it, he was like, let's get you back on the mainland at least.
He said, I can fly you as far as the West Coast.

Speaker 22 Do you know anybody out there? Do you have anywhere to go?

Speaker 22 The girl I was dating when I was 17, the one that was going to the summer program at NYU, she actually, during the year went to Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Speaker 22 I got in touch with her and told her what was going on, told her I had been in Samoa and that I was still there and asked if I could stay with her.

Speaker 22 She was living in the dorm and she was like, yeah, come on. So I got on a plane.
I actually was with two journalists. They were there to do a story on Samoa.
They happened to be on my flight.

Speaker 22 They took me under their wing and we had a layover in Hawaii. So I like spent time with them at a hotel bar and walked around Hawaii a little bit.
At one point, I had no shoes on.

Speaker 22 I don't know why, but I was free. I went to a mall and I got hair dye and then got back on the plane, flew in to Phoenix.

Speaker 22 I got on a bus from Phoenix to Flagstaff and met up with the girl that I had been dating in New York. She saved my life twice, basically.
She was kind enough to let me crash with her.

Speaker 22 Then I met somebody else and then I was in a dorm with her. And then I did eventually get my own place, got a couple jobs, got some subsidized housing, got on food stamps.
You know, I was 18.

Speaker 22 I had nothing. Ended up taking my GED

Speaker 22 and started communicating with my parents. They eventually actually allowed me to enroll in school and I started in community college, got a 4.0 and I transferred over to the university.

Speaker 22 I did what I was supposed to be doing that whole time. And I remember saying to them, I was like, I told you I I could do it.
I just needed you to let me do it on my own.

Speaker 22 It took me until I was 32 years old to get my life together. And that right there is the real impact of these programs.
You make bad decisions because no healing has been done.

Speaker 22 It was a very conscious goal. I wanted to forget.
I wanted to not think about this anymore. I felt like such a worthless human being.
I felt like a failure. I felt like I had failed my family.

Speaker 22 And it wasn't that I wasn't trying to better myself. I was just never provided the opportunity.
Of course, when I left, I threw things away. I threw away opportunities.

Speaker 22 It took me years to get off methamphetamines. And the only reason I did it was because I just needed to escape from all of the pain, all of the trauma.

Speaker 22 and all of the self-hatred talk that was so ingrained in me now because because of being told for years that I was really nothing.

Speaker 21 Well, you really are something.

Speaker 22 Thank you.

Speaker 21 And every single survivor I've spoken with this season, they've all been incredible human beings.

Speaker 21 And the fact that these adults tried so hard to break so many kids' spirits that ultimately rose above it is extremely impressive because it's a miracle that people just survive these institutions, honestly.

Speaker 21 And it's not surprising given what everybody's gone through that the rates of suicide or addiction are so high in survivors of these programs.

Speaker 21 How could you not need to numb after something like this, on top of whatever else you were going through before you even got there?

Speaker 21 I'm curious if you were ever able to really share with your parents and get support from them in regards to what you went through in the programs.

Speaker 22 Yes and no. My dad was a lot more apologetic than my mom.

Speaker 22 And I think that's because I really ruined that relationship with her with the physical abuse and the continual disappointment and not doing the programs, not doing the work.

Speaker 22 As a parent, she probably saw things from a much different perspective. I remember sitting down with both of them one night because I finally made it home.

Speaker 22 I wasn't there to live, but I was there to visit. I sat down with them at dinner and I said, when I told you that tried to rape me, that was was true.

Speaker 22 You guys didn't believe me. And they were both like, oh my God, we are so sorry.

Speaker 22 I told them all of the hard labor that we were forced to do, all of the emotional abuse and attack therapy and then the weird hugging and the crying groups. My dad cried when I told him all of this.

Speaker 22 My mom was very stoic, but my dad did apologize. And I think that the guilt of that experience for him was what caused him to support me financially for way longer than he should have.

Speaker 22 I think he was trying to kind of make up for it in the way that he could and he had money and I needed bills paid.

Speaker 21 I know your parents are now past. I'm so sorry for your losses.
What has being involved in the support groups with the other survivors meant to you?

Speaker 22 It's so validating, especially because we didn't have technology back then and we all lost touch for so, so long.

Speaker 22 To be able to reconnect as fully fully functioning adults now, there's nobody telling us there's anything wrong with us. There's nobody beating us down.
We survived.

Speaker 22 To be able to connect with them and share stories, it's not only like sentimental and nostalgic to a degree, because I did forge really good relationships, but to be able to connect and have the trauma validated.

Speaker 22 It is unlikely that you would just run into somebody who has been in the TTI and understands any of what you're talking about. Incredibly validating, incredibly supportive.

Speaker 22 It means everything to me that we have this shared experience and to not feel alone.

Speaker 21 Thank you so much for being willing to share with us. I just really appreciate your honesty about your journey.

Speaker 21 I also really appreciate all of the support that you've offered to others by being a part of the group and continuing to show up for survivors the way that you can.

Speaker 22 It's hard, but it's really valuable because not everybody did make it. So we really have to stick together.

Speaker 21 Next time on something was wrong,

Speaker 1 they would basically try to use fear tactics to manipulate the parents into sending them to another program.

Speaker 22 The sales pitch is, okay, it's going to be 25,000.

Speaker 28 plus this and that.

Speaker 22 And you're like, whoa. And they can tell in your voice.
And they they go well what's more important your money are your child's life because that's what's at stake

Speaker 21 something was wrong is a broken cycle media production created and produced by executive producer Tiffany Reese associate producers Amy B Chessler and Lily Rowe with audio editing and music design by Becca High.

Speaker 21 Thank you to our extended team, Lauren Barkman, our social social media marketing manager, Sarah Stewart, our graphic artist, and Marissen Travis from WME.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 1 When you send a business gift, you're doing more than saying thanks. You're delivering a message, one of appreciation, recognition, and connection.
With 4Imprint, that message lands with certainty.

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