S24 Ep23: Your Money or Your Child's Life

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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 psychopedia. 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.

In our final two episodes this season, Survivor Max and their dad join us to share their experiences navigating institutions in the so-called troubled teen industry.

MAX was transported to the wilderness therapy program Sagewalk Wilderness School in 2007 at the age of 14.

Sagewalk Wilderness School began operation in Oregon in the late 1990s and served adolescents between the ages of 13 and 17 with behavioral, emotional, or academic challenges.

In December 2005, it was acquired by Aspen Education Group, a large provider of programs.

While Sagewalk allegedly promoted a model that combined wilderness challenge, therapy, and skills development, the program came under great scrutiny.

In August 2009, a 16-year-old student died of heat stroke after being required to carry an 80-pound backpack during a hike in high-temperature conditions.

After the child's death, SageWalk faced heightened scrutiny, investigations, and a wrongful death lawsuit.

Additional allegations surfaced over the years describing neglectful supervision and pressure placed on students to comply under physically and emotionally taxing circumstances.

Although not all allegations resulted in formal findings, they contributed to the program's loss of credibility, declining enrollments, and its eventual closure in 2011.

After spending nearly two months in the wilderness, Max was then sent to Mount Bachelor Academy, a private therapeutic boarding school for adolescents located in Prineville, Oregon.

Mount Bachelor, as it's often called, operated from 1987 until its closure in 2009.

Originally founded by College Health Enterprises and later also owned by Aspen Education Group, the program served teens typically ages 14 to 18 with behavioral, emotional, academic, or substance use issues.

However, during its years of operation, it also faced serious allegations of abusive practices.

In 1998, for example, former employees and parents accused MBA of depriving students of sleep, subjecting them to screaming tirades, cold weather punishment, and other harmful treatment.

In 2009, the Oregon Department of Human Services concluded a seven-month investigation, finding multiple instances of abuse and neglect, including sexualized role-playing, forced isolation, punitive labor, and other degrading acts.

As a result, MBA's license was suspended and the school announced its closure in November 2009.

In subsequent lawsuits after its closure, former students alleged physical, emotional, and sexual abuse while residing at the school.

One complaint said, quote, this case involves institutionalized physical and psychological child abuse. Students were subjected to sleep deprivation, denial of restroom use, and rotted food.

At one Life Steps session, A female student was forced to spread her legs in front of each of the 15 male participants and their adult male counselor, end quote.

In a 2010 settlement, MBA acknowledged that DHS had a reasonable basis to investigate the allegations, and the school remained closed.

I'm Tiffany Reese, and this is something was wrong.

Hi, my name is Max, and I went through Sagewalk Wilderness Therapy as well as Mount Bachelor Academy in the year 2007 to 2008.

You grew up in Davis, which is not far from where I grew up, which is awesome. And we're recording together in person.
How would you describe Davis growing up there?

At the time in Davis, everything was so cookie cutter. There was a really big agriculture component that interacted with the university.

So essentially you end up having working class families, students, and then children. If you're a little outside the norm, a lot of people take notice.

It's very, very suburban and very high achieving. Around elementary age, my mom was running a daycare out of our house and my dad worked for PG ⁇ E.

One of my first memories is me waking up and hearing them arguing and yelling at them to stop fighting. They were unaware of how it impacted us.

I have two older brothers who are eight and 10 years older. They would kind of take over the role of parenting in a lot of cases.
And I have a younger sister.

She and I would basically run around with my brothers. Not a lot of supervision generally.
I think that was very common around that time, so very much felt like latchkey kids.

Between the ages of eight and 10 was when my parents divorced from each other and then remarried each other. I remember like going to their wedding.
It was at the local Catholic parish.

It was a big ordeal. I'm sure there's pictures floating around somewhere of me and my sister being like the flower girls.
They would have pretty explosive back and forth arguments.

One week my dad would be living in the house and then the next month he would be out and he'd be gone for like two months as a result of the conflict in the house, not feeling like there was enough parental supervision.

Even though my brothers were very good about taking care of us, they were like 17 year old boys living in the late 1990s.

So they had a lot of really problematic traits that kind of got passed down to my sister and I in some ways. That's when the behavioral problems started up was probably around 10 years old.

When I say I was having behavioral problems, it was like, if I was told no at a store, I would have a three hour meltdown.

I think a lot of where that stemmed from was my parents not knowing that I'm very likely neurodivergent. It would sometimes be like if a sensory experience was too overwhelming.

That was also interacting with having to go to like a private school and wear uniforms and the kids there were particularly mean compared to the ones in the public school system.

So I was just very unhappy there. And as a result, was in a lot of therapy.
I saw a psychiatrist. I was medicated on like three different meds by the time I was 10.

Unfortunately, it made me have larger outbursts, made me a lot angrier. They also were like, my child has problems.
Let me just try to fix it.

That's what you're supposed to do as a parent, but it's a little misguided because if you look at the environment at the time, it would make a lot of sense why I was having behavioral

Here's Max's dad. I was a child of a functional alcoholic, but definitely not emotionally functional.

My father, he went to work every day and he tried, but he just didn't have the capacity sometimes to be a loving father. When I grew up, I said, I will never be like that.
I got sober when I was 27.

I met Max's mom when I was 30.

We got married after about dating a year. I thought I was really all together with my sobriety.
I had no capacity to express myself. I couldn't be okay in my own shoes.
I couldn't be myself.

If things were going good, it made me uncomfortable and I would literally create a problem that would turn into a disaster so I could be comfortable. I was often depressed.

I never relapsed, relapsed, but there was lots and lots of yelling in the house.

Mac saw a lot of angry parents, a lot of slamming of doors, people stomping out, people leaving, people saying, I'm not coming back. It was super, super chaotic, especially for somebody that young.

I know it was really hard for.

I just did not have the capacity to do anything differently. I did best when I was at work, but my job was really stressful too.
I worked in a gas department.

You work with a commodity that's inherently dangerous and you get used to it and you make jokes about it just because it is scary. As a construction worker, you're not supposed to be scared.

So I developed a whole different persona. I decided, well, I'm just going to work super hard and I'll provide for my family and I'll be a 1950s working dad.
I'm going to come home, play with my kids.

When she was a toddler, she would vary between being upset and very happy. And a lot of times she seemed like she was uncomfortable in her own skin, but she was really fun.

She liked to explore. She was very much into nature and bugs and animals and very compassionate.
I'm the type of person that I'll go all through the house chasing a spider so I can put it outside.

And she was the same way. She liked to play.
Her big brothers would rough house with her. Ages three, four, five, six, she was kind of like a daddy's girl.
And it was just really nice.

And then as she got older, there was just so many things going on in her house. She, like myself, sort of became the disruptor.

Instead of saying, I don't think things are going well and I'd like to discuss them. As a child, you do other things.
You act different ways to like say, I need some help.

But unfortunately, I wasn't in a place to really offer the kind of help or pay attention to her. And so when she got older, it got a little more strained and a little harder.
Here's Max.

They started the process of divorcing for the second time when I was 13. And I don't think it ended until I was 15 or 16.
It was a really tumultuous custody battle.

That definitely bled over into like our day-to-day life. My mom pitted us against my dad and vice versa.
My mom would tell us really nasty things about him trying to turn us.

And then my dad did the same thing with my mom. So we were like squarely in the middle of that divorce.
I was actually really close to my dad up until that time.

That time period also was right around the time where my mom decided that since my two brothers were out of the house, she was going to take my sister and I and move up up to the Tahoe area.

We were extremely fortunate to be living out there as kids. Unfortunately, there was a lot of stuff, I think, working in the background that my sister and I weren't seeing at the time.

My mom was working graveyard shifts in Truckee, so she was having to do that and then come home and try to be a parent.

While my dad was working full-time staying in Davis, and we would drive the two and a half hours every other weekend to spend a weekend with my dad because that was part of the custody agreement that they had reached.

So, a lot of like split holidays, a lot of split summertime. And at that time, I had come off of the medication that I had been prescribed.
That's around the time that my mom started relapsing.

She struggled with substance abuse her whole life. She's been sober for a long time now.
As much as her stuff impacted me, I also just want to acknowledge her experience and where she's coming from.

We then moved from Tahoe to an even smaller town that had 250 people in it. The only things that were there were a post office, a park, and a bar.

I've now been moved twice within two or three years, responding to an environment that is not at all responding to me.

These behaviors were being modeled for me also where I'm like, okay, well, I guess that drinking is a reasonable coping skill. The behavioral problems were increasing.

I would steal alcohol from a nearby liquor store, steal her cigarettes, convince people who were older than me to like get these things for me because I knew that that was something that I could do.

I had started cutting at that time. I was tholemic.
So it was all ramping up really intensely. My dad was watching this happen from the background and being like, this is getting really bad.

What ended up happening was that the judge ruled that my dad would get full custody. I don't know how soon after that ruling was made.

He literally drove the two and a half hours up, came to the door and was like, get your things, we're leaving now, and took us that day.

I was homeschooled for maybe half of the year when I was living in the mountains.

And that was also something that my dad really didn't like because he was like, if you are already naturally socially isolating, you need to be in school so that you can be around other people.

He enrolled me in Holmes Junior High.

What's funny is that the school counselor there paired me up with the other alternative kid. She thought she was doing me a favor.
She was like, oh, you two are kind of weirdos.

You guys will be perfect for each other. That was probably one of the worst decisions they ever could have made because we were both very rebellious and very strong-willed individuals.

And what's funny is that this person's dad also happened to be one of my dad's very close friends. We were quite a pair.
She ended up introducing me to my friend group.

I I had the innate understanding that like I could essentially extract what I wanted from older men by being nice to them. So it was very easy for me to get things and then bring them to my friends.

Eventually I started skipping school. My dad would travel for work.
So he'd be gone like five days out of the week sometimes. So there's nobody to tell you what to do or to watch out for you.

So of course I'm going to go run off and do whatever I want. My sister had someone who would take her to all of her appointments.
So we had like a quasi-babysitter who would come check check on us.

And then my dad's best friend lived down the street and he would sometimes come and check on us. We had free reign a lot of the time.

And even when my dad was there, he and I would get in so many arguments that I almost don't even remember him being there. In my mind, it was like he either wasn't there or we were fighting.

What would you fight about? Anything, but especially my appearance and my behavior. Because I was dressed pretty alternatively at that point.

I'm like a barely 14 year old running around in a schoolgirl mini skirt, combat boots, a teeny tiny little tight shirt, and like cat ears. The makeup was a really big thing.

The hair, for some reason, he just really harped on that. It was hard for me to take him seriously because he had told me so many stories about what he had done in his youth.

At that point was when I started running away, also spend time out of the home for multiple days at a time.

There were a few times where my dad had to call the police to like get me home because he didn't know where I was and I wouldn't respond to him.

He was able to find me pretty quickly the couple times I had run away, but he also notes that you learn from your mistakes, quote unquote.

He's seeing all of this happening and assuming that the absolute worst outcome is going to come for me because he saw what it did to his life and he's also watching what's happening to my mom's life.

He's looking at a kid who is struggling and he didn't even know how to get himself help.

How in the world is he supposed to help me in that situation?

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Here's Max's dad.

As she got older, she was drinking, staying out too late. She wasn't telling me where she was.

They didn't want to go to school. The stuff that started scaring me is when they would come home, passed out drunk.
She was doing the same kind of behavior I did as a kid. I I know the feeling.

I know what I did. I know the only way I quit drinking is I drove myself into the ground and became suicidal and a complete wreck.
I just didn't know where her bottom was.

Is somebody going to kill them? Are they going to have a car crash? Are they going to get involved with the wrong people and get in trouble?

At that time, we were divorced and I had sole custody of her. You want to talk about somebody that's not prepared? I have a teen and a pre-teen daughter.

I'm working 12-hour days and I'm going home and I never know what's going to happen when I get home. It's pretty hard to get somebody to go see a therapist if they don't want to go.

I would try to get some outside help. My friends were like, oh, I saw Max with some bad people downtown.
Or I saw Max walking super late at night. You need to get your kid some help.

Lots of people telling me, you have a problem on your hand and you better do something. I was also seeing a therapist at the time.

I would describe what was going on and they go, you need to do something. I went to parent groups, all sorts of different groups.

There was a program that the police had for how do you deal with a troubled teen? What do you do with your teen if they're drinking?

How did you hear about SageWalk the Wilderness program? At the time, wilderness, it was like in the paper all the time. It was viewed positively.

My therapist didn't mention that one specifically, but mentioned other programs. And then I was talking to somebody and they said, my child went to Sagewalk.
It was wonderful.

Only they didn't tell me the whole story. So that's how I heard about it.
And then I researched it on the internet and I'm like, okay, great. It's 28 days in the wilderness, self-discovery.

It sounded very positive. It sounded like a good option to me.
I was basically referred to it by people I trusted. Having your therapist co-sign it in a way, I'm sure, also gave it more credibility.

Oh, yeah. So we emailed back and forth.
They sent me brochures.

It looks like you're going off to go on a vacation. We have highly trained staff where we will individually work with your child to help them through their issues and trauma.

And then I talked on the phone and they would really stress how important this was to do. The thing on the phone is it was like the sales pitch.

The sales pitch is when you balk at the, it's going to be 25,000 plus this and that. And they can tell in your voice.
They go, well, what's more important, your money, or your child's life?

Because that's what's at stake. They really push the, are you going to to let your child die, basically.

And then the other part is they kick you with, if you were able to do it at home, they wouldn't be here, would they?

They also are telling you that you're obviously incapable of raising your own child because you're a mess. And my therapist is going, I know it's hard, but you need to do this.

It was on the TV all the time. And I knew people at work that had their kids going somewhere.
There wasn't any voice saying no. The only person that ever said this is a bad idea was her mom.

Her mom's like, I don't want her going there. It wasn't like an easy decision.
I never cry. And I was crying every night, just torn up.
Like, what do I do? It'll get them out of the environment.

It'll provide some structure that I can't provide. It'll be different people telling them different ways to handle situations.
It didn't sound like a horrible thing. I was at my wit's end.

I can't think straight. I don't know what's going to happen to my child.

What was the outcome that you were ultimately hoping for Max? They would get away from the madness of myself and her mom's interactions that were still going on.

They would realize there's a different way to deal with their problems, that they would get emotional help. I was really hoping they'd get a lot of psychiatric treatment.

And I was like, this is a therapeutic environment. They have psychologists on staff and she's going to get the best care.

And I wish someone had done this for me because I think everybody wants help when they're that bad off. They just won't say it maybe.
And I thought, I'm helping her.

How quickly did it happen, like from when you spoke with them on the phone to when Max went to wilderness? I think it was about a month. There were a couple more incidences.

that happened where I'm just like, okay, I don't have a choice. And did they suggest the transport service? Oh, yeah.
They go, oh, you can't trust your child because they're going to run away.

This is the only safe way to do it. I know it sounds bad, but it's much better for your child.
That's so much bullshit. Now that I look back, it pisses me off because they take advantage of you.

They know you're screwed and they're throwing you a lifeline, telling you they're professionals. and they've done this for many years and this is the safest way.

If you try to take her in her car, she'll get out when you stop for gas and run away, and you'll never see her. Would you mind sharing your perspective of what that was like?

It's like paying people to come in your house and kidnap your child. It was the worst thing I've ever done in my life by far.
It was the worst feeling I've ever had.

You're supposed to protect your kid no matter what. There's some stuff you block out of your mind, and that's one of them.
Here's Max again.

I was up late one night on Yahoo Instant Messenger talking to my ex. I heard my dad get up and I thought that he was going to work.
Our computer at the time was in the living room.

So I told my ex, be right back, turned off the computer and like dipped into my room waiting for my dad to leave.

But I was noticing instead of him leaving around five, it was a little closer to like 2.33 in the morning. That was my only indication where I was like, that's strange.

So I just pretended to be asleep. And then it got weirder when he came and opened my door and was calling my name.
So I pretended to wake up.

I don't remember if they were like right behind him or if they were in the room already, but I just remember my dad telling me, like, hey, there's two people here who are going to take you somewhere.

You need to listen to them and go with them.

He left.

My thought about it was always, you had the audacity to come into my room, tell me to go with these people, and then you flee. That to me was very insulting.

So now knowing that he wasn't even supposed to say that really changes how I view that entire situation. The people who transported me was one man, one woman.

I don't remember really anything about them at all, other than that there was some significant height difference between the two of them.

They basically told me bring a pair of clothes because I was in like my pajamas. I think they told me the only thing I could bring was a notebook and a pen.
And I was like, well, what about my phone?

And they're like, oh, you won't need that. I just had to like get in the car and go.
I was scared. I had no idea where I was going.
I didn't know why I couldn't talk to people.

I'm just going to do what these adults tell me to do. You know, it's one thing for me to rebel against my own parents, but then once it gets into like strangers, there's too much unpredictability.

I'm also the type of person, or I was at least at that point, where I was like, maybe if I put my head down and get through it, it'll be over and it will be easier for me.

I was at least able to put together, this is happening probably as a result of my behavior previously.

So if I show that I can be like this quote unquote good, well-behaved kid, then maybe I will receive.

a lesser version of whatever I'm about to experience or like that behavior will essentially prove that I'm quote good enough to stay home. It's such a sharp interruption to your life.

Your life is never the same after that one singular moment. It really changes everything, or at least it did for me.

The level of trauma and like PTSD I have around kidnapping and home invasions is not irrational because it's based in something, but it is an unreasonable level of fear that I have around a need for security in my own home.

I have weapons by my bed because if that ever happens to me again, there is someone coming into my home with ill intent and I am going to be like as ready as I can for that.

We drove all the way from Davis, California up to Redmond, Oregon, basically straight shot. Probably with taking the break that we did, it's got to be at least 10 hours.

We made one stop in Klamath Falls at a stationery shop and they told me, don't try anything. Don't try to run away.

Don't try to tell people that you've been kidnapped because we have paper showing that we're allowed to do this.

Put it in my mind before I even got out of the car that they had total control of the situation and that anything that I could or would do would not make a difference. And did you believe them?

Absolutely. Because my dad had given me to them, essentially.
What do you remember about arriving to Sagewalk? We pulled up. It was in the middle of nowhere.

It was just a tiny highway, this weird building with a bunch of cars parked in front of it. And then everything else was desolate, very flat, had a lot of sage and a lot of juniper.

Those were like the only two things that really grew out there. It was end of August, beginning of September, if I'm not mistaken.

That was probably the perfect time to be out there because it was after it was super hot and right before it was super cold. the transporters took me into the building, which was their intake office.

I don't even know if this office was used for anything other than doing like the handoff between the transporters and the staff members and then doing this precursory probably just cover your ass type of medical check so that they don't get sued for something later.

There were

four other adults, maybe three. One of them was supposedly a physician who gave me like a very brief physical height, weight, blood pressure, check the joints, reflexes kind of thing.

The only thing that they made me do that felt weird to me even at the time was that the doctor actually made me like bend over in front of him so that he could put his finger on my spine.

And then as I stood up, he traced it for like scoliosis. I was like, bro, can you not touch me like that? He said to me, oh, you have a slight case of scoliosis, but nothing worth mentioning.

And it made me really irritated because then why would you bother saying that? What does that then mean for like the experience that I'm about to have?

That statement thematically defined my experience with adults in the program where I was just like, you are ragingly incompetent. And I can't even tell you that to your face or I'll get in trouble.

They made me take off any extra makeup that I had. They made me brush all the product out of my hair.
They did not give me a shower. They're like, use these wet wipes to take off your makeup.

After that, they put me in the back of one of those big SUV type cars.

They blindfolded me and drove me, I don't know how long down dirt roads until we got where we were going, which was literally the middle of nowhere.

Blindfolding us was to like make sure that we didn't know the route out because they were so scared of us running away when I initially stepped out of the van.

I think I was teetering on delirious because all my sleep had been in the car.

You get out of the car. You're in the middle of nowhere.
There's nobody else in sight besides the people that you're going to be with for the next however long of your life.

There was kind of a fire pit in the middle of the camp, off to one side. They segregated by sex.
All the girls were together in one area and then all the boys were together in another area.

And if the boys walked past the girls' camp or vice versa, the staff members would instruct everyone to stand up, get in a line and turn and face away from the opposite sex so that you couldn't even see them walking past you.

I remember the staff being a lot more involved than the students were in terms of introducing us to what we were having to do because they didn't want the students to like whisper too much in my ear about stuff.

We had uniforms. It was a neon orange short sleeve shirt, neon orange, yellow and green camo pants.

I remember very specifically being told, if you try to run away, you will die out here because nobody's going to be able to find you.

If you take off your orange clothing, all that we had were our longjohns underneath and that blended in perfectly. I keep thinking of this teenage girl.

I remember seeing her on Runaway Watch and being like, I definitely don't want to do that because they had taken a lot of her clothes and they took her shoes and she was only allowed to sit in her sleeping bag.

That was all she was allowed to do and like use the restroom. We would get brand new hiking boots when we would arrive.
We didn't ever have a chance to break them in.

In the process of breaking mine in, my left pinky toe got completely mangled to the point where it's permanently disfigured now. And they were telling me like, oh, it's just a blister.

Don't worry about it. We'll like wrap it up.
And then they wrapped it up. It didn't do anything.
It kept popping, re-blistering, and there was no medical care at all.

Every time I look at my feet, I'm like, there's the wilderness.

Everything that you needed, you would carry with you. So you carried all of your water, all of your food.
You carried all of the group supplies.

By the time you loaded your pack up, you're looking at between like 60 and 80 pounds. We got the once a week shower where we got the gallon of cold water and like super watered down brawners.

All we had was the gallon. That was it.
So it was like you either washed your hair or your body. I do not remember how we brushed our hair or our teeth.

I hadn't thought about it until I talked to somebody who went to another program and said that they had to brush their teeth using like a mixture of water and dirt because at least the dirt was abrasive and it would get the plaque off your teeth.

We had food drops. A van would come out weekly and give you your allotted food for the week.
And if you didn't ration that correctly, you basically just had to wait until the next food drop.

And there weren't any instructions about how to ration your food either. In addition to the food drops, a lot of stuff around our food was controlled.
We were only able to use three spices per meal.

So we had to choose which little spice baggie we wanted to pull from. And that was very heavily monitored.
It was very strange.

If we couldn't bow drill fire, not only did we not get fire, we didn't get hot food. Also, you had to finish what you made.
They wouldn't let you waste food.

I don't remember what would happen if you did, but it was made to be like a very big deal. So if you made something that you didn't like, you were forced to eat it.

There was one time where I tried to make something that they called breakfast farina. It was usually made sweet and I was thinking like maybe I'll try it savory.

I think I put onion and something else in there and it was absolutely disgusting because the onion wasn't cooked all the way.

I could not even finish it and I remember having to like pull the onions out and like smush them into the dirt as I was eating so that I could get through my food so that I wouldn't be punished for not finishing it.

There was definitely a scarcity mindset that was impinged upon you throughout these experiences. I'm not really sure what the purpose of that was other than establishing further control.

Something that I've realized is very ironic about this whole process is increasing the scarcity around food is the opposite of what you're supposed to do when someone has an eating disorder, which was one of the reasons I was sent there.

So it actually exacerbated that food scarcity issue. What was awful to see was that the staff always got hot food.
The staff could make fire anytime they wanted.

In terms of setting everything up, we had one four by six tarp per person. That tarp is what we use to essentially create a A-frame off of a tree.

And we would have to learn all these different knots to like secure everything.

And we had to like run drills in the morning where we had to put all of our stuff in a very certain way, do all these things, and then get into a specific position standing order.

The staff would literally have a stopwatch and time us.

And so if we didn't get it within the time, we had to undo it, wall timed, redo it, wall timed, and the process would repeat as many times as it took for us to get it right.

Even when we were doing it, I was like, this is just wasting our time. It was very clear to me that it did not have a purpose other than like a system of power and control over us.

It was definitely based off of a military drill of some sort. We would leave right after sunup for our big long hikes, no less than 10 miles a day.
I think we netted about 30 to 35 miles in a weekend.

Some of the things we ended up doing the most of was we had some workbooks we would work out of. We were only allowed to work up to a certain point in the workbook.

We weren't allowed to have more advanced skills. Building a sundial or like learning how to tell direction from shadows.
I was like, why can't we learn this?

And he was like, well, we don't want you to use that to run away. And this guy who was is our teacher, his name was Owl, presumably because he's the wise one coming out with knowledge.

There were a lot of little infractions that we could get in trouble for and the consequences ended up eating up a lot of time. So I think that they were looking for things that we would do wrong.

One of their big things was, water is life. We can't waste water, which I absolutely agree with that sentiment.
But what it would end up presenting as was if

so much as like spilled a little bit of water, you had to come up with a song and interpretive dance that was apologizing to the water for wasting it.

There was one girl, I don't remember what she and I did, but we got in a lot of trouble one time. The staff got really upset with us and they were like, you guys need to perform an entire song.

So like whatever song you happen to know, you have to go from beginning to end with interpretive dance. We ended up doing a Taking Back Sunday song.
There is that line about Gun to My Head.

They were like, well, that's awfully violent. The perception was that I'm depressed because I'm listening to this music.

And because I'm listening to this music, then I'm going to go ahead and kill myself. I cannot even tell you how many different iterations of that I was told throughout the programs.

The music was blamed for my problems.

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how much older were these staff members than you guys i think they were in their early 20s there was maybe one who was in her 30s was there any sort of counseling group therapy that's a funny question to me i would not be surprised if they sold it as the land will heal your child type of shit where it was like these mentors will will guide through and the experience of being outdoors, your love for life will be rejuvenated.

A lot of the stuff at Sagewalk was heavily culturally appropriated from Native American culture.

I don't think that they had a lot of target goals or promises that they made parents outside of these big sweeping claims. Your child will be recognizable again after this because blah, blah, blah.

I never saw anyone who would have been a licensed therapist as far as i know i never was put on any type of plan

max is in wilderness and they're at a point where you're finally able to communicate with them was it phone at all during wilderness or was it just letters it was letters were you able to like really tell that anything was wrong based off of the letters coming home They were kind of like scripty.

Mike doesn't talk like that. It was kind of like when you write a composition in English, you have your opening and then you have a couple points and then you have your closing.

She describes something that happened that wasn't good. And so I called Sagewalk about it.
And they're like, that's just them trying to get home. Don't believe anything they say that's negative.

Before I even got any sort of negative feedback from Max, they already told me it's very common. for your child to make up stories and say things that aren't true about wilderness.

So you'll come get them

for you what do you think was the hardest part honestly it was dealing with that staff member monsoon she was one of the staff leads she was a little bit older than the other folks who worked there and she definitely had more of like a iron grip type of approach to things

my recollection is that she made my life really difficult for no reason She was looking through one of my journals that I was writing and I was wondering what it would be like to fall off the edge of a cliff, looking down the edge of a cliff, being like, hmm, wonder about that.

She read this and took it as me wanting to kill myself. So she put me on suicide watch for like 10 days.
She monitored anything that I wrote. She like listened really closely to anything that I said.

And we have this really stupid check-in system where she would be like, on a scale of one to 10, how much do you want to kill yourself right now?

She would ask me that multiple times throughout the day in front of everybody else.

And I'm like, I never wanted to kill kill myself in the first place but now i'm at a 10 monsoon but you can't say that that was 10 days of that and then we had a phrase you always want to start a hike when you're a little bit cold because if you start when you're warm by the time you're actually moving you're going to be really hot i was really cold one morning and i was like i don't want to start cold so i'm going to like keep my little long johns on under my pants I started getting really, really hot where I knew for me that it was not safe.

I've always overheated. I get heat stroke really easily.
We're like halfway through our hike in the middle of nowhere. There's literally no roads around us, not even dirt roads.

We're on hiking trails. I was like, I need to stop and take these off.
And she told me, we're not stopping. And we're like actively walking as we're having this argument.

She said, you should have started cold like I told you. And I was like, nope.
And then I literally just stopped.

I went wandering out into the woods because the other two staff members were male staff members. I didn't want to like take my clothes off in front of them.
I think she gave up on that one.

Thankfully they didn't restrain me or anything like that.

Later on, each person would go on what they called a solo where you were separated from the camp. I think I was on mine for seven days.
It was always towards the end of when you were staying.

So I think at that point, they knew that through this whole process, you were like worn down enough to not want to run away.

You were told go far enough away from the camp so that you guys can't see each other, but if you needed help, you could access it. You could go a long, long way off and still be able to see people.

I think I spent the first four days of it just crying.

And when I came back, everybody noted how loudly I was wailing. while I was gone.
But nobody comes out to like check on you.

They just let you experience that because they think that it's you're processing whatever and you need to be on your own while you're dealing with that, which is a really wonderful way to like destroy someone's attachment style or ability to like trust that adults will take care of you emotionally in any way.

So you're starting to develop this pattern of chronic emotional abuse and neglect that then is persistent.

at least for me throughout the next like 13 to 15 months when I'm in the rest of the programs.

That's pushing close to a year and a half of this chronic issue, in addition to everything that had happened in the past before that.

So if there was any chance of rectifying the problems that had started to occur in childhood through early adolescence, that ability was essentially destroyed.

They did like a modified traditional ceremony of some sort when you came back from your solo because you were supposed to transform in that time period.

You'd make this massive bonfire and there'd be like smoke signals. There was all this chanting that people would do and you were like presented with your new name.

And your new name was based out of a typical native naming process. I don't remember what mine was.
The staff would assign it to you.

You didn't get to pick, but that was also how you knew who had been in the program for a certain amount of time.

If they weren't going by their legal name, you knew that they had been through their solo. And then it was like you also were a little bit closer to like staff in that way.

You didn't know staff's names because they had these weird monikers. And then you also had those weird monikers.

So it also kind of served to like separate you from the rest of the group in preparation for you then leaving the program because very shortly after you would do your solo, you would usually leave.

Which was how many weeks did you end up? I lived in the fucking middle of the woods for 58 days of my life.

I remember getting a letter from my dad telling me that I was going to another program. And that was very upsetting for me because I thought I was going home.

It was a rumor amongst the kids that if you stayed past a certain time period, you were usually going to be going home.

The maximum amount of time you usually spent there was 60 days unless something strange happened. I was getting very close to hitting 60 days.
I just assumed that I was going to get to go home.

What I learned later is that 45 days would be like a check-in with the parents. What do you want to do with your kid, essentially?

From what my dad has told me, they would try to use fear tactics to manipulate the parents into sending them to another program.

And to be fair, looking at my teenage self, I would have been very concerned as well.

He didn't have the knowledge and he didn't have the social support to be able to deal with everything that was going on in like his life, my life, my sister's life at the time.

You had mentioned initially they had sold it to you as like 28 days. And I believe Max ultimately ended up staying around 58.

Can you explain to the listeners how they were able to essentially manipulate you into paying for more days? Oh, because she's not ready. That's what they would say.

Your daughter's, if she's not quite there, we really highly recommend she stay longer because we don't want to call it a waste of money, but she's not going to get the full benefit.

And you don't want your daughter back unless she's ready to come back and functioning, right? If they do come home, all the hard work that they've done is essentially wasted.

You're going to be in the same spot you were a month ago. They've made tremendous strides, but there's so much more to be done.

It's the worst kind of scam because they use people that are desperate for a solution and they know you're desperate. They're fucking smart.
They got it down. Absolutely.

How did they convince you to transfer Max to Mount Bachelor? Sagewalk told me they did wonderful. They grew so much, but they're still not ready to go home.

There's an excellent program called Mount Bachelor. It basically funneled them to that program and told me that this is what I needed to do if I really wanted to help my child.

And it was the same stuff like, money isn't an issue when it's your child's life. We have people that have second-mortgaged their homes.
How can you even say that this is going to be too expensive?

They know exactly what works. They're like con artists, except for they're using your children, which is so scummy.

I didn't know that Sagewalk was connected to the corporation scheme of things to Mount back for i dug into it like a year ago on my own and the amounts of different corporations name changes board member they're so confusing what was it like for max's siblings to be dealing with this on their end not good her older brothers it didn't affect them the same way because They were like, yeah, she needs to get some help.

And they weren't in the house. But her younger sister was, I had just gotten custody

maybe six months earlier. So she was still reeling from not seeing her mom or having to move from where she was, having to leave all of her friends behind and start over.

That was already upsetting. And then her sister disappears.
The way her little sister dealt with it is she just kind of threw herself into school and she became like a learning machine.

Luckily, she wanted to go to therapy and she had an excellent therapist. If it wasn't for the therapist, I think it would have been a lot worse.

It sounds like an extremely hard time for your whole family. Yeah, very dark.

You find out that you're going to Mount Bachelor via letter. How long after that do you think it is before they actually took you and who took you? I think it was a couple days.

I remember being very distraught, but for a short period of time, they did not let me shower. I must have been so filthy when my dad picked me up.

My dad actually took me from the Sagewalk office and drove me from Redmond to Prineville, probably about an hour and a half or so.

They encourage you to take them the same day because if you stop at a hotel, the kid might run away. He brought my younger sister with him, who would have been 12,

maybe 13 at the time. I do remember the drive pretty well.
I'm sure I was mad at my dad. I was also happy to see them though, because I was separated from them for a long time.

We stopped at a grocery store.

And I remember there was always a huge conversation before someone leaves wilderness of like, since you've been out here so long and you haven't had XYZ, make sure that you eat in a very specific way so that you're not getting sick after.

I remember picking everything at the grocery store like super carefully. That was really exciting for me.

I think at that time I was trying to formulate how I was going to convince my dad not to keep me in the program and bring me home.

I was on my best behavior, telling him all of the things that I learned like through this process.

If he sees that I'm good enough now, maybe I can go home. Then he pulled into the program, into the driveway.

There was this little like intake office on the lower part of campus and I just refused to get out of the car.

He went and got the staff from the intake office.

They came out and told me that I needed to get out of the car and they were very nice and very convincing because there were two authority figures who were strangers to me.

It's when the strangers in authority come in where I get really like compliant. And so I got out of the car.
And I remember my sister was sitting in the back seat behind me the whole time.

So she like witnessed this entire exchange. And then the staff took me into the intake office.

When I got there, it was fully daytime. And by the time the staff had assigned me to two students to show me around campus and take me to like the dorm that I was staying in, it was dinner time.

Next time on the season finale of something was wrong.

As you're moving through these life steps, you also move from one phase to a next.

Number four was called Venture.

Venture had these archetypes that they would use. I was Cinderella because I was always cleaning up everybody's messes.
So obviously I'm dirty.

My task as Cinderella was to find an outfit with all white clothing, and I had to run around the campus and make myself as filthy as possible.

Mud on my clothes, face, and my hair, my skin caked in mud. Then you would go back up to the life step room, and you would be in that role for the rest of the life step.

I had to clean up everything in the life step room. I was not allowed to sit in the circle.
I had to have a broom in hand at all times, and I could not speak.

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.

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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