Jessica Woodville | Memoir & Musings

(Chapter Two of Smoking in Garages in hopes that my story will help bring these places to justice and show parents the reality of some of these schools)

I saw a quote the other day that said something along the lines of “As your child I forgive you, but as a parent, I will never understand.” It hit me like a ton of bricks. These schools, or at least Cross Creek Manor, painted a picture of a “safe haven for teens”. 

They listed off amenities and activities galore making it sound like summer camp but with “loving but intensive” weekly one-on-one therapy and daily group sessions. Horseback riding and a pool, adventures into the canyons, all with a top-notch BYU (Brigham Young University) led education. What wasn’t in the brochures was the actual state of the lockdown facilities, the temperament of 99% of the staff, or the extremely manipulative bordering sociopathic therapy techniques that would be used at-will by the schools’ facilitators. 

Teens aged 12-17 still are being taken from their homes by strangers, who escort them to these lockdown facilities where they are stripped of their rights and their identities, all with the permission of their parents who haven’t even seen the facility in person, something that Paris Hilton’s documentary, “This is Paris” finally shed some light on and now also “the Program” on Netflix.

I very clearly remember the day I was taken. It was supposed to be the first day of my very first job. My best friend and her mother were on their way to pick me up, since we worked together. I had gotten the job against my father’s wishes. At the time, I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t want me to be more independent. 

I had just turned 16 while visiting my mom for the first real-time since the hotel incident, where yet another incident, this time at least with her boyfriend, happened. 

My father was at Disney World with his girlfriend when I called bawling, begging him to let me come home, unable to tell him why. 

“It’s just 3 more days, you’ll be fine.” Yeah, fine is a relative term.

When I got back home I was determined to stay far away from my father and chose to stay with my best friend’s family as much as possible, after her mother put my father in his place for pretty much all his wrongdoings. 

It felt amazing to finally have an adult stand up for the way I was being treated. They helped me get the job in the hopes that when I turned 18, I would be able to leave, but what is it they say about “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men?”

“Sorry, she can’t today.” My best friend had come to the door and my father was turning her away.

“Dad, I work.”

“I told you we were going to see a movie. You have plans. You aren’t going to work.” His voice cracked.

I had no clue what was going on and why on earth my father was being so emotional. He wasn’t one to shy away from his feelings so it shouldn’t have been shocking but something felt different, something WAS wrong. 

“I’m so sorry, I’ll have to call in sick”

“On your first day?” Jen was starting to look uneasy too. We both knew something wasn’t right. 

My father closed the door and I outburst something in anger. I couldn’t understand why he was so against me getting a job and why on earth he, of all people, would want me to call in on my first day. His work ethic was everything to him. I stomped upstairs in tears. Some time had passed and the doorbell rang again. 

“Jessica, can you come downstairs please?” What was Jen thinking about coming back so soon? My dad was going to be pissed.

I came around the corner and started walking down the stairs, standing in the front entryway was a large balding man and a much smaller woman both modestly dressed. 

“Uh…yeah Dad, what’s up?” I asked hesitantly as I noticed him avoiding eye contact.

“You’re going to go with…” he choked up, “these people are here to take you someplace to…” but I cut him off.

“What? No. Wha.. why? What did I do? Why? Don’t do this Dad. Why? What?” my words all became a mush of discombobulated noise. 

I thought, at that moment, that he was putting me up for adoption.

What was actually happening was the furthest thing from my mind. I started to run back up the stairs when the strange man spoke, pulling handcuffs from his pocket.

“We could do this the easy way, or the hard way.”

“Jess, you have to go with them.” My father beckoned for me to come back down.

I slowly made my way back down the stairs and over to the woman who now held her hand out to me. 

“I suggest you head on upstairs.” The man said, addressing my father, who hung his head and obeyed.

“DAD! Noooo. Why? I thought you loved me. Why are you doing this?? I’m sorry!”

As I desperately tried to run after him, baseball mitt-like hands grabbed me by the shoulders and held me firmly in place.

“Don’t make him use the cuffs, dear.” the tiny woman said as I imagined how easy it would be to plow her over and run right out the door. The moose must have heard my thoughts.

“You can’t run. You’ve got nowhere to go. Make it easy on yourself, girl.” He said with such disgust my skin crawled.

“I will never forgive you for this.” The last words out of my mouth, towards my father’s closed bedroom door.

I can’t remember much after that, a 15 minute drive to my hometown airport was gone in the blink of an eye. 

Stumbling through the lines of people at the airport with tear-stained clothing, silently pleading for anyone to notice me, notice I was in distress, ask who these people were and why I was with them. Questions I wanted to know myself. Who? Where? What? How? My stomach turned, I felt like I was going to be sick. 

“Don’t try anything funny.” The moose said to me, then looked at the tiny woman and whispered, “an obvious ploy to run, watch her.”

And so she did. She watched me as I walked into the restroom. She watched me as I ran into the stall to vomit. She came in and locked the stall behind us even as I asked for privacy so I could use the restroom and clean up. 

“There’s only one exit. Can I please have some privacy?” Silence from the tiny woman.

A 3-4 hour plane ride later, all just another blur of silent sobs and wondering why no one noticed the girl being held against her will, against my will, I was being put in yet another rental car in the bright shining town of Las Vegas, Nevada. 

The lights, the sounds, the chaos overwhelmed every last bit of nerve I may have had, the steady hum of the rental was almost a moment of reprieve.

I’m not sure if any of you have ever driven through the desert during the day, it’s almost maddening in itself, just miles and miles of endless nothing. Well at night, the only companions I had were the impossibly bright stars above shining far too beautifully for such the despondent darkness I felt. 

For the first hour of the drive I tortured myself with thoughts of all the missed opportunities to run, followed closely by the horrors I would have faced homeless and on the lam in Las Vegas at only 16 years old. Through waves of nausea from the McDonald’s I tempted to eat before our trip, I tried to will myself to sleep. I was so far beyond exhausted, every time I closed my eyes I could see my father’s face, and almost hear him.

“You have to go with them.”

The large white building stood stark against the darkness of the surrounding desert as I was woken in the back of the car. Each of the “kidnapping” strangers grabbed one side of me and led me up to an unmarked door with a buzzer/intercom system. A loud “bzzzzzzzz” and we were let into a small intake room with a few chairs and another locked door. I still had no idea where I was or what was going on. 

All I could think about was the fact that my father had finally given up. After worrying about it my whole life, dying alone, that is, here I was completely alone in the middle of the desert with strangers stripping me down and checking for drugs, weapons, or articles for self-harm. 

“Do you understand why you are here?” the facility staff member said as she came to sit across from me at the intake table.

I could barely shake my head no, “I just want to go home.” I managed.

“Well, that choice is up to you.” 

I perked up for only a moment before she went on to explain that I was enrolled in a program designed for troubled teens, or “delinquents.”

Youths that seem to have lost their way and decided to “rebel against their parents and society”. Teens that are now a “danger to themselves, their families and/or society.” 

I would be placed in my “home group” in the next few days and would meet with my new therapist in the morning. For now, I was supposed to sleep. So, dressed in my new “school uniform” I was led to a cot in a hallway where I proceeded to quietly sob myself to sleep. 

I was in a school in LaVerkin, Utah, called Cross Creek Manor. A quick Google search will show you it wasn’t exactly what you thought when I said school. Nope, in fact, it was one of those “reform schools for troubled youth”. And the trolls that took me away came in the form of a married Mormon couple, the husband of which was at least twice my 16-year-old size. 

To clarify, these reform schools involved therapy, both individual and group, sadly in the case of these types of schools, many don’t actually have licensed therapists performing the therapy. 

Parents in a certain tax bracket were given those pamphlets I mentioned of a haven as they signed away their children’s rights to their own bodies, with the promise of a well-behaved conformed child once they completed the program. 

These “schools”, while some have underlying good lessons they could be using to actually teach these teens useful tools, are presenting them in such torturous, abusive and manipulative ways that it causes more harm than good. 

Did I learn what being accountable for my actions meant while I was there? Yup! Do I have a crippling fear of doing absolutely anything wrong because I could be publicly humiliated because of it? Also yup.

During one of our mandatory “seminars”, a set of seminars designed to help you “work the program” and where the only way to graduate was to comply, I was singled out in front of a room of maybe 50 peers and made to stand on a chair. 

I had written a note to a friend in my “home group” that was deemed “run plans” (we were not allowed to write notes to each other at all). 

While I was being berated and embarrassed I began to sob and all I could muster the courage to say was “I’m sorry”.

The woman running the seminar grabbed the microphone, “No you’re not” she said clearly. 

Almost stunned I choked back another sob and said “I am. I am sorry.”

“You’re not sorry,” she said louder.

“But I am. S-Sorry. I am sorry.”

She yelled this time, “Stop saying you’re sorry. You’re not pathetic. Own what you did.”

“I know, I’m sorry.” Absolute silence.

“Maybe you are.”

I was escorted out of the room and stripped of my phase (how they marked our program progress) and then put on staff buddy, meaning I had to follow staff members around in silence (since I was considered a run risk) and was only allowed to speak about food, water, or waste.

I’ve brought up the fear of my past to my current therapist because I realized there’s a lot of my story I couldn’t talk about as candidly as I would like to. 

In even trying to talk about the last decade of my life and the incredible struggles in the last 10 of it in particular,  I have to be so careful not to poke multiple bears in my life. 

It feels though, that I’m also still holding onto the shame of what my environment has caused. It wasn’t until this year that I went public about the “troubled teen industry.” I know it’s something that one of my parents very much doesn’t want me to talk about. 

Yet, I’m the one who, when trying to meet new people, and they ask, 

“So, where’d you go to school?” 

I’ll freeze up, and my brain instantly goes… 

“Trauma. Red alert–say anything but the truth.” 

What do I say when meeting people and they ask where I went to school? What do I say when people ask me about my parents? How will I ever meet anyone who doesn’t look at me like I’m the world’s biggest load of baggage? But then I remember I’m not what I went through. 

I feel like it’s important to note that I would go on to see that some of my peers in this “program” were in fact in some sort of danger and/or posed a threat to themselves or others, something these schools were not properly dealing with.  

It reminds me a little of the Alan Watts quote about overthinking; 

“I’m not saying that thinking is bad. Like everything else, it’s useful in moderation. A good servant but a bad master.” 

I mentioned before that some of the core principles outlined were the “good servant” while the facilitators of such knowledge and skills were the “bad master.” 

The program was set up much like a 12 step program but with different phases/levels you had to earn through good behavior, therapy, and seminars. These seminars had a striking resemblance to the practices of Lifespring, a self-help company founded by John Hanley Sr. back in the 70s and then coming under fire in the 80s after many attendees of the Lifespring seminars began to sue due to a litany of reasons ranging from psychotic breaks to death. 

A Washington Post article from 1987 called ‘I Cried Enough To Fill a Glass‘ by Marc Fisher outlined just one man’s account of the cult-like programming. 

It was that article that led me down the rabbit hole where I discovered that the seminars I attended in fact were based on the seminars of Lifespring. Isn’t history fun?

The WWASP (World Wide Association of Specialty Programs) phases were broken up into 4 to coincide with the seminars, Discovery (phase 1), Focus (phase 2), Accountability (phase 3), and Keys to Success (phase 4). These seminars were supposed to guide each student through learning the fundamental skills to being a functioning individual in society. 

Graduating onto the next phase meant being completely compliant with the rules, being an active member of your home group, participating in both group and individual therapy, and staying on track with school. Being demoted from your phase could happen as easily as looking at the wrong staff at the wrong time on the wrong day. 

I would love to find a demerit list to be able to list some of the offending things, but I do remember that burping and farting (even if a total accident) could lead you to Cat1. You see, each offense was numbered with a certain amount of demerit points that, when totalled, kept you there longer. Skin picking, like pulling off some dead skin, was considered a “self-inflict” and could result in a Cat3 or Cat4 depending on the severity. Hugging longer than 3 seconds (and hugging was only allowed in group therapy or seminars) was considered sexual misconduct and held the same results. Every single move, breath, heartbeat…was scrutinized. 

Every time you dropped a phase, you were there at least a few months longer due to the seminar rotation and requirements. So it seems rather suspicious when I would see “high phase” girls about to graduate get absolutely humiliated by Ron Garrett, an owner of the facility whose pockets were being lined by their parents’ income. 

One day I saw her about to head off to the final seminars that you attend with your parents on the final stretch home, the next she was in isolation for a month and returned to phase 1 after already being there for 11 months. 

It was clear, you could work the program as fast as possible and they’d still find a way to keep you. 

If you submitted to the insane barrage of rules and outlines, it seemed you’d get the least of the wrath from the staff. You see, a majority of them, in these particular programs, weren’t/aren’t idiots. They knew exactly what they were doing, and they knew they’d get praise for getting a rise out of the students, but it needed to at least look somewhat justified. 

Then, on the flip side, I remember the faces of the staff that had no idea what giant pile they stepped in when accepting the job to work with “troubled youth.” They never lasted long and who could blame them? 

Though I do often wonder if they ever told anyone what they saw, or if like us, they were afraid, too.

 Once after being demoted from a “high phase” for being complacent in an inappropriate relationship between two of my friends (apparently, they had crushes on each other and I had to have known), I was placed into the SH group, a group the staff so lovingly called the “Sh-t Heads Group); a group for the trouble makers among the troublemakers. I was being taught a lesson about leadership or awareness or accountability or something when I was made the “teaching assistant” of the group. 

I was told to sit at the teacher’s desk and observe and report whatever happened in the group. I was effectively the staff’s narc. They would test the girls and me by leaving the room for little bursts of time to see what may happen without direct staff/security. 

Ron Garrett would come in and start hazing any of the newest members who hadn’t gotten their Ron G. lecture yet, until one particular day, he pissed off the wrong girl. 

I can see her face clear as day and the anarchy symbol she had branded on her upper arm as she stood up and flung the desk towards me, just barely missing my chair, as I dove away. 

My palms hit the ground as I heard a sickening wail of pain as Ron Garrett and another staff twice the girl’s size landed on top of her and began yanking her arms behind her. 

“Who’s the boss, little girl? Who’s the boss?” 

I had to look away as Ron Garrett ran his hands through his hair and straightened his shirt. It never got any easier being exposed to seeing young girls taken down; it’s one of the reasons I chose to try to keep my head down, be invisible, especially after the seminar where I was accused of “run plans” for passing handwritten notes to a friend of mine. 

This wasn’t a place where just keeping your head down could keep you safe from the tortures though, nor the creepy cult-like mentality of these programs. 

I mentioned the seminars a few times, and I admit to feeling apprehensive to even speak of them now, because it was drilled into us that what happened in the seminar was never to be discussed with ANYONE who had not attended the seminar, and even then they were discussed, to only ever discuss our experiences and never another’s, 

including anything staff did or said, or risk being dropped a phase and having to re-do the seminar. 

This code of silence was especially creepy when us new girls first heard the soul-wrenching screams and blood-curdling wails that came from the “old gym”; a carpeted room with a set of stairs that very much felt they were leading you to be an offering to some cult leader. 

Then to see the same girls turn up at breakfast, seemingly unscathed but unable to speak since they were on “seminar silence.” 

I say seemingly unscathed because if you looked close enough, you’d see a few, more than a few even, with blood scuffs on their knuckles. 

This turned out to be the first of 7 seminars to be attended and completed to graduate the program. Aptly named, Discovery, it would be the first rude awakening to what “the program” would have in store for you. Designed as a way to rip apart and away all that you were BEFORE entering the program, it involved a “therapeutic process” in which we were given duct tape towels to use as bludgeoning devices to “beat away our identities.” 

I’ve seen similar processes where one will beat away negative thoughts, and conquer their demons, what have you. 

This was different. It was the words of the facilitator that made this feel…wrong. 

“Now remember everything they did for you…they (the kids’ parents) brought you into this world and what did you do about it? Wasted it. Because you’re nothing.” I can almost still hear Jan’s voice booming throughout that room.

The fear of being kicked out of these seminars would force us to participate in a multitude of humiliating and exhausting processes leading to deprivation of sleep, food, and bathroom breaks due to the hours of being in the seminar, a tactic used to keep us more likely to crack under the pressure of their attack therapy. 

One in particular, in Focus, the second of the seminars, started off like any other day where we were led through a meditative visualization exercise, all laid out on the hard carpeted concrete floor an appropriate distance apart from each other, but in smaller groups. 

Right when we were lulled into a sense of peace guided by this meditation to be floating relaxingly at sea…BOOM, BANG, rattling from the staff members banging on tables and yelling at the top of their lungs as the seminar facilitator’s tone changed from soothing to abrupt shouting and dismay. Our visualization had gone from sailing to sinking in a moment’s notice. 

We were then told that amongst our small groups, we had to decide who was going to live or die, after all, there was only a limited amount of room on the lifeboats. We then had to turn face to face with each person, look them in the eye, and we were only allowed to say, “Live or die.” 

If that wasn’t cruel enough, for a martyr like me, I gave away my spot. I gave away all my lives to my group making me yet another target for public ridicule. I went from being told I wasn’t pathetic in the first seminar, to being told I was pathetic for not saving myself a seat in the second. The mind games were unmatched in that place.

After Ron Garrett burst into one of my group therapy sessions accusing me of being a ghost in the program because I wasn’t dealing with any real issues, I “broke down” and admitted I had been making up stories about drug use and partying as a way to “show up” in the program. It was a way to bond with more of my fellow cellmates for a lack of a better term. 

Sat in our group therapy room surrounded by my fellow sisters and my therapist, he was on the hunt like a hound after a coon. 

I’m not sure which staff had reported what, but he knew something was up with me. Perhaps it was the fact that I had flipped a full 180 after being put on blast in that first seminar where I was accused of run plans. I started to blend in a little too well, maybe. 

I’ll probably never remember the exact words that made me finally crack, but I did. Before I knew what I was doing, I was proving him right. I had become a pathological liar and manipulator, because instead of holding firm to the fact that before entering the program I had smoked cannabis a handful of times and maybe had alcohol without my father’s expressed permission the same amount;

I was forced, out of self-preservation, to create the persona they wanted so badly to break so that I could progress in the program. 

Had I continued to tell the truth from the moment they asked me to write my confession letter home to my father that included every last thing I thought I could have possibly done to deserve being sent away, I would have continued to been labeled a liar anyway and they would use that to keep me there for as long as my father could afford. Had I acted out before the program? Absolutely. Was I a danger to myself or society? Absolutely not. I was a scared little girl just desperately searching for love and family.

The pressure of those lies and trying to fly under the radar just made me a bigger target. I had pointed out a weakness, the need to be liked. I was then put through a therapy process in which I was forced to carry my therapist’s office garbage around with me for an undetermined amount of time. Office garbage that included the leftovers of her lunch from that day.

Needless to say, over the next two weeks of carrying that bag around, it got rather ripe, until I finally had it and confronted my therapist at our next session. Turns out, I was supposed to stand up for myself. I had “passed the test.” 

These tests, these manipulative therapy “techniques” left all of us on edge constantly. Staff reported all our interactions directly to our therapists. Any infractions would be dissected and then used against us. I felt like a rat in a cage, being experimented on with no remorse. 

Those of us who were too afraid to step out of line and not easily roused by staff’s attempts to break us were then also continually threatened with being sent to one of the wilderness programs. In particular, High Impact in Tecate, Mexico where US laws didn’t apply. 

It seemed at first an empty threat, as did being put in isolation the first time, but then the day would come when you would hear the soft cries of one of your roommates being packed up in the middle of the night, to be gone in the morning. 

Many of us didn’t find out until years after leaving the program what our friends had to endure in that place.

One thing I know for certain, none of us will forget the look on their faces when they were “brought safely home to Utah” when that horrific place closed suddenly and a bus full of our sisters came back to us. 

If any of us had even a glimmer of hope that whatever torture they had gone through would no longer be a threat with High Impact being closed, it was squashed loudly by the Ron Garrett meeting in which he reminded us that many other wilderness programs existed and they were well within their means to send us there. 

We had transfers from other, worse programs, like one of the girls that hadn’t spoken to another person in 3 months at one of those other schools. The World Wide Associated Programs truly was world- wide, reaching all the way to programs in Jamaica. 

Many of us felt that, if we were to be sent there, we would never see our families again, so any “freedoms” or rewards Utah had to offer, we would accept. 

The “high-phase facility” was dangled in front of our faces like the holy mecca. North Campus was a separate building further down the road from the main building.

A two story dorm-like campus with slightly less security and many more “freedoms,” including being able to go into town to the gym, volunteer at convalescent homes and daycares, and accompany lower phases on their doctor runs.  The problem I see now is that by the time I made it to the higher phases, I was no longer trying to manipulate my way through the program; the program was starting to manipulate me. 

As a high-phase student, it was required to progress in the program with junior staff 1 of each of the lower phase seminars. That meant participating in the bullying techniques I mentioned earlier. 

We were instructed to break the participants down so that “they can build themselves back up.” Remember what I said about a good lesson in the wrong hands? If it wasn’t bad enough that it was already us vs them, the students vs the staff, but when is it ever that simple? 

Even in normal schools, students vs students is the norm.

We had a school full of girls living on top of each other every single day, driven to mental and physical exhaustion by the adults that by society’s standards should have been keeping us safe, so fights and personality clashes are bound to happen. Seminars were different because of the “code silence” of it all. 

We were sworn to absolute secrecy about what happens in seminars, which even meant that whatever cruel nasty things were said to you by junior staff, your peers, could not be held against them outside of seminar. To speak of it would be a demerit. To even speak ill of how you were treated in a seminar, was a demerit. 

To report a staff member’s maltreatment, even outside of the seminar, was a demerit…one for lying and one for breaking code if it happened during the seminar.

The code of silence went so deep that even medical emergencies went unreported. I know this due to a police call log obtained during the lawsuit against Cross Creek Academy.

Reading through the list made me sick for a multitude of obvious reasons. I could see the lies that staff were telling the outside world. I could see how they were making these girls out to be, when we were just scared and alone. 

I saw multiple calls that I could instantly pinpoint to one of my best friends in that school and it made me sick. Did they call her parents? Did anyone outside of that facility know what was happening? 

Searching further into the log, what surprised me the most was what I didn’t see. I didn’t see a 911 call the day I woke up covered head to toe in hives. 

Our medical care wasn’t exactly top-notch at that facility. There was a nurse on-site during the “business day” and then on nights, it was a skeleton crew of regular staff. For most things, a doctor from the nearby town would come out to the facility if it was something the nurse couldn’t handle and then if it was more serious, we’d be transported to St. George which had an actual medical facility. 

This means that, when I hyperventilated and fainted during gym class one day, I was haphazardly diagnosed with asthma and given an inhaler.

The next two days I had multiple episodes of not feeling like I could breathe and having to take the rescue inhaler. I complained that it felt worse, and made my lungs feel itchy, so then I was put on an allergy pill. 

Day 3 of the meds, I remember waking up, and my whole body hurt. I was on “staff buddy” at the time, meaning I had been demoted enough that I was on constant watch, either as a punishment or a therapy process; I can’t be sure which time this was. 

Regardless, when you’re on “staff buddy”, you slept on a palette on the floor in the hall, so the staff can keep an eye on you at all times. 

At first, I figured I was just sore from sleeping on the floor, but then I realized I couldn’t fully open my eyes, when the sound of gasps started happening around me. My hands flew to my face and I could feel the swell. I couldn’t even ball my fists; my fingers felt swollen but I couldn’t quite make out why. 

The staff ordered me to get to my feet swiftly, and in doing so, I was overwhelmed by excruciating pain from what felt like blisters covering my feet. Each step felt like shards of glass on open flesh, all the way to the nurse’s station. 

I don’t even know how long it took for the town doctor to get there, but when he stepped into the room and audibly gasped, I thought I was going to die.

“Oh…I’m sorry…I’ve only ever seen this on a cadaver in med school. I need to make a phone call.” he managed to cough out as he hurried back out of the room. 

I’d insert a Patient Zero joke here, but… considering the state of the world 19 years later (2020) it doesn’t feel right. 

Unfortunately, it was my first thought with how quickly that man left, though. At this point my entire body felt like it had both been run over and set on fire. I could just barely see the strange hives covering my arms through my swollen eyelids. 

I hadn’t even had a chance to look in a mirror at this point. I was rushed from waking up right before “First Call” to wake all the rooms, to the nurse’s station without the mental willpower to even want to know why so many were exclaiming around me. 

By the time the doctor made his way back into the tiny room with the nurse, I had become apathetic to whatever my fate was. Honestly, how could it get any worse? 

“It appears you’ve had a severe allergic reaction called Steven Johnson syndrome. It…uh was to one of the meds you were put on.” 

“We’re stopping all of those and putting you on a high dose of steroids and antibiotics. You’ll be given something to help you sleep while the nurse,” he paused and very uncomfortably cleared his throat, “dresses your…uh…wounds.” 

There was a slight, almost gag noise, and I heard the door open and close.

So sleep I did, for almost 12 hours, I believe, only waking long enough to take meds and have my wounds redressed. I still have a pretty vivid memory of finally being able to see my own face and body in the mirror, luckily after the steroids started working because, to me, it was something straight out of a horror movie. 

Thoughts of the original Exorcist movie came to mind, and all I could do was silently weep myself back to sleep alone in the “sick room,” with each tear stinging my disfigured face while I tried to convince myself that this would surely make my dad see this place for what it was.  

Sadly, no call from my father came. No child protective services to look into how a student might have been left covered in scars, or at the very worst, died in their care. The same student that would months later be throwing up blood after her tonsillectomy aftercare was ignored by staff as well. 

I was losing track of the amount of times some higher power had to have stepped in to save me while in that place.

I was losing track of the amount of miracles I had left in some proverbial goodwill soul jar we get dealt when born into whatever western themed religion one might subscribe to. I was losing faith, even through surviving what I had virtually unscathed. 

After everything I had already survived in only 16 years of life, how could anyone be made to have to survive so much?

Time and trauma are not the best of friends, so I couldn’t tell you exactly how long it was until I saw my Dad while still in the program. 

I had seen it happen for other girls in my group: They’d get to a certain phase and we’d all be in group therapy when someone would notice a strange adult peering through the rectangular shatter proof glass windows when one girl would shriek with the realization that their loved one was actually there. 

The one singular glimmer of hope some of us had, and sadly others didn’t. I do however remember the day my father visited for the first time. Sitting there in group like it was any other day, but knowing in my gut that something was off. 

Our therapist always had a little mischievous smirk on her face when a parent was coming, I just honestly never imagined it would be mine. 

Not until I heard one of my close friends squeal “Omg Jess” as the door opened. 

I looked up from the cheap gray carpet and there was my dad, seemingly unchanged from when he walked back up the stairs that day, now so far from my thoughts I could barely breathe. 

“Dad??” Both my father and I burst into tears as I popped up from my chair and was in his arms in one fluid motion. 

When I was finally able to look around, we weren’t the only ones crying. Parent day was hard on us all. We all hoped the day would come. 

We were always  happy for our friends when their day came but it also broke your heart seeing it happen when it was the one thing keeping you sane, keeping you working a program designed to break you. That hope to see your family, or even, the hope to be a family, have a family…I think that’s one of the reasons they withheld letters from us.

They used them as bait. I saw it happen, a month’s worth of mail dumped out in front of a girl during one of Ron Garret’s meetings. She was accused of sending messages to her parents through her mail. 

Who knows if that’s the real reason because one of the very first things they tell you when you enter the program is that all correspondence will be finely combed for any demerit offenses. 

We also weren’t privy to the fact that the parents actively working their side of the program and being involved in their child’s progress, were reminded that “these troubled teens will say or do anything to resist being held accountable for their actions and getting to the root of the problem. Don’t believe their lies.” 

In my first few months I was at Cross Creek, I realized that our library had a copy of “Les Miserables.” I thought I could be clever and send my father little clues in French from words I picked up from the book. The staff was either too clever, or my father didn’t take the time to play “Harriet the Spy” with me, because those messages never seemed to go anywhere. 

I’m sure it’s the latter. It didn’t matter because as I mentioned, the program was designed to break you, there was no escaping it, far worse fates seemed to lie behind the locked gates.

Working the program, gaining higher phases meant more privileges, things like being trusted to use a crochet hook and even use an electric razor to shave your legs. It meant being able to see your parents for that first visit. 

Even working in the kitchen became a luxury to work towards because it meant being able to eat as much of whatever was on the menu for your shift. The food was such poor quality that, whenever I worked in the kitchen, I filled up on whatever item was least likely going to make me feel violently ill later. Breakfast shifts were the best: yogurt, granola, and bagels; the only tolerable meal to be honest. 

It also meant eventually being able to move to the North Campus I mentioned and “feel normal.” The “High Phase” girls always looked so happy and like normal teens. 

You could wear makeup and use curling irons and do your own supervised shopping in town for foods you liked, so you were no longer subjected to the “Bucket O’Eggs” and weird slimy looking meats I was fortunate to avoid by my father’s one saving grace (lying to say I was a vegetarian, which also meant I couldn’t eat the rare twinkies we would get on the weekends, but you win some, you lose some) 

With each new phase, new rewards un- locked, it felt like a piece of me was truly being metaphorically ripped away.

If it takes 30 days to make a habit and 30 days to break a habit, imagine what 608 days of manipulation and gaslighting will do…

608 days, it’s still so crazy to me to think I was there for that long. I was away from everything and everyone I knew for over a year and a half. I had the first day pass visit with my father, then once parent and child both complete a certain amount of seminars you get a home pass. An experience all in itself for me. 

Most of my friends were going back to the homes and families they had left. For mine, I would not be returning to Minnesota. My father had moved and “started” a new family in California with a woman who was divorced with two kids of her own, which I found out via letter. 

My home pass meant going home to meet my new family. 

Between learning how to “fake it til you make it” in cheerleading and the programs well, program- ming, I knew that only my best acting skills would get me through the final 3-6 months of my “sentence.”

But looking back on it now, it was the sisterhood that saved us, well, it was the sisterhood that saved me, that saved that last shred of my uniqueness, my last bit of light. For my graduation, our graduating class took a road trip to San Diego from Utah for the final seminar PCII (Parent/Child II, how original, right?). 

That road trip, as hinged as it was considering we were “reformed troubled teens” is one of the only good memories I have of that place. I feel that’s when the bond I have with my friends there was finally forged in the toughest material there is. We were on our way home. We did it. We survived. 

We got to stay at a fun resort with a swimming pool, somewhere in the outskirts of Arizona, on the way having the first amount of “unbridled” fun any of us had really seen in the time we had been locked down. To be honest, it was one of the first and last days of freedom I would feel for a long time.

Leaving the program, I was thrust out into a society I no longer knew. Even going on a doctor’s runs while still in the program were sometimes panic inducing. 

Simply approaching a crosswalk for the first time sent adrenaline through my veins. Did I really forget how to cross a public street? 

Not only was the world strange after being confined to the desert for so long, but as I mentioned before, my father had started a whole new family in a completely different state. 

I had met his fiance and her family on my one home pass, they were nice enough. Her son was also “troubled” but sent to live with family instead of a program. I’m guessing that’s what bonded my father and her. 

Part of me was excited to have a “family” of sorts to go home to, I had just spent the last 20 months living day in and day out with my own family of sorts…to go back to my father traveling all the time and me alone in an empty house surely wasn’t good for any “progress” I had made.

Besides, I had done this song and dance before when my father found a new family while fighting for custody of me from my mother. There was no disillusion that this family was going to be my or his (my fathers) forever. 

Sure enough, within a few weeks we were moving out of her house and into an apartment of our own closer to where my father worked and to be honest, I loved it. 

I was apprehensive at first, but all the colleges I had wanted to apply to were in California and here we were, able to register me as a resident so I would get reduced tuition, a fresh start away from all the “bad influences” of my past and a chance to finally live. 

“Actually I think we’re going to have to go back to Minnesota for a little while.” my father told me when I started asking about applying to schools. I recognized his tone. We were moving again, just two months after I got “home.” 

You can spend months learning another language for a trip and then get there and realize you don’t actually know how to speak the language. 

You know phrases for sure, but to communicate is something entirely different.

The expectation that it’s going to be smooth sailing because you spent months listening to some app most likely will cause resentment towards said app instead of just adjusting your expectations to include the unexpected.

Sure that’s not true in every case but even as far as getting angry at someone who cut you off in traffic, you have zero clue what’s going on in their life. Could they just in fact be an asshole? Absolutely. 

Or, maybe, just maybe, they just shat themselves. *There’s a story about a guy who cut me off, but I will get much too distracted* 

My point is, we never truly know what someone is going through or the struggles they’ve overcome, just like with those stereotypical rich kids with “rich kid syndrome,” maybe we don’t see the insane pressure their parents are putting on them to get into certain colleges, or the suffocating responsibility of being “the face of a household” while also trying to figure out what the hell your body is doing and your brain is still developing with every last ounce of hormones trying to f**k you up. 

We are putting too much pressure on kids, in general, to act and even think a certain way. In certain cases, we’re forcing them to grow up too quickly.

Have I mentioned arrested development yet? No, not the show. 

It seems the general public doesn’t understand that arrested development is a real thing. A more easily understood example might be to liken it to child actors. 

They start work at such a young age, miss out on so many of the age-appropriate life experiences that define us, are typically forced into grueling schedules, exposed to very grown-up things and then society expects them just to KNOW how to adult the moment they turn 18, the exact moment their shackles are released from whatever contract their parents signed however many years before.

It’s easy to look at the rich kids, the usually popular kids with all the perfect hair and clothes and accessories; then think to yourself, “god, they are so privileged” because in the aspect of material things, they are. 

Sadly, what most don’t see is that many of these kids were just accessories to their parents’ ideal life, and when we started to tarnish from the lack of proper care, a certain 1% decided to ship us off to be someone else’s problem. 

Whether shipped off or not, many are then thrust out into society without the tools, knowledge, or even resilience to face the world for what it’s like. 

Then as a society we’re labeling these now adults as failures when in fact, their “support” systems growing up are the ones who failed them. 

Society is abandoning them, as they were abandoned as children. 

We label adults who can’t “perform” to society standards as “weak” or “lazy” when in fact, not everyone is dealt the same cards. We (society) seem to expect a “royal flush” when some are dealt absolute shite hands. 

When looking at “program kids” specifically, parents who send their children to these places, expect a perfectly reformed happy healthy kid; instead they get a teen, sometimes almost legal adult who now more than likely has post-incarceration syndrome. 

An article for BMC Psychology states when regarding stereotypical prison environments that they are damaging to mental health due to “disconnection from family, society, and social support, loss of autonomy, diminished meaning and purpose of life, fear of victimization, increased boredom…” the list went on. 

If you look at what I personally experienced at Cross Creek, I could put a check next to everyone including the witnessing of violence and poor health care. Did we have therapy? Sure. 

However, it turns out most of the “therapists” were maybe social workers at best. I have done my due diligence in trying to find any record of a license for either of the therapists I saw while I was there and have yet to find anything. 

I had been taken from my home and the only somewhat support system I thought I had, then stripped of all rights. Instead of my care being turned over to the state, it was turned over to a “boarding school” bordering a cult in Utah.  

The same article goes on to explain, “Incarceration can also lead to post-incarceration syndrome, a syndrome like posttraumatic stress dis- order (PTSD); even after serving the prison sentence, many individuals continue to suffer its mental effects. Some effects may include institutionalized personality traits, such as distrusting others or difficulty maintaining relationships, social-sensory disorien- tation, and social-temporal alienation.”

When speaking to a few of my friends now, decades after our freedom from our “prison,” one thing we all started to notice was how long it took for some of the “program-isms” to fade.

I remember being in the bathroom at my father’s house in California, when his fiance’s daughter walked in to grab a hair brush. I shrieked and lept in one motion to outside the “threshold” of the bathroom. My heart felt like it was going to burst out of my chest, I could barely breathe. 

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know you needed the bathroom.” I managed to get out, before running into my temporary bedroom where I burst into tears. 

That would have been considered a “sexual misconduct” at Cross Creek Manor: simply being in the same single bathroom with another student, door open. 

I was no longer the huggy, bubbly squirrel I once was. Now, I was a shell of my former self. Every single move I made I was terrified I would be sent back. 

Even the lights and sounds of being in a city were overwhelming for months and as I mentioned earlier, entering the “real world” again after almost 2 years of lockdown in the desert was enough to overstimulate anyone, but add on the layer of no one knowing what I went through, therefore not even beginning to be able to understand. 

There weren’t support groups, I mean, I guess there kind of were those that were monitored by the programs as a way to “keep us accountable.” Forget trying to find a therapist that would a) believe us and b) know how to help a teen through something like that. It still was “suburbia’s dirty little secret,” and I don’t think most of us were ready to trust any therapist in the outside world. I can only speak for myself, I was just biding my time until I was 18. Putting a fake smile on, keeping my head down, and looking at any possible way to leave the past behind. 

While some might liken this to “Boarding School Syndrome,” some of the symptoms may overlap, but the prevalence at which many of these students are leaving, having been witness to violence upon their peers, is at a much higher rate based on survivor testimonies. 

The main difference to point out here is that a lot of the danger was coming from adults. 

While regular boarding schools may have courtyard disagreements spill over into the dorms, which can be traumatic in itself, youth have adults they can turn to, to report whatever violence occurred. 

In the “Programs”, the authorities were either the ones doing the harm or at least complacent in it. 

We were told by our “warden” that if we tried to escape, the cops would just bring us right back there. Turns out, since they had custody of us, the cops would. Do you think they would have believed anything we had to say anyway, already deemed “threats to ourselves and/or others?” 

Both situations, boarding schools and these institutionalized schools are secluding children from the families they need to bond with to create those lasting relationships later on in life. I’m not saying anyone sent to boarding school won’t build a significant support system. I’m not even saying that about kids that are sent away to the programs. 

I’m no expert and, with as much research as I have done, every person is different and a lot of these (program) experiences are just now coming to light. I can say with pretty darn good confidence though, that it makes it more difficult to maybe assimilate into a society where those things (boarding schools and/or programs) are not the norm.

Even the title of a book I came across about Boarding School Syndrome drives the point home with its subtitle wording; “Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the ‘privileged’ Child.” 

Remember when I mentioned those rich kids and how they seem so privileged. The author, Joy Schaverien, brought up some good points about how we need to acknowledge the psychological trauma which many in boarding schools have suffered. 

While a collection of essays, “The Psycholog- ical Impact of Boarding School: The Trunk In The Hall” edited by Penny Cavenagh, Susan McPherson, and Jane Ogden brings up that we need to also be looking at the parental and familial relationships with the children. 

Are they one of those “privileged kids” that gets dropped off, not to be talked to again until holiday which is spent faking a smile for the sake of a parent’s image? Same can be said about the programs, because when some of the parents felt something was off, they came and got their children and found them the help they needed.

Not all programs are bad, not all boarding schools are bad. The common ground here, it seems, is wanting to acknowledge the trauma element, another adverse childhood experience.

I personally believe there’s a larger systemic problem behind the troubled teen industry.

Putting the teens-for-profits part aside, it seems one of the reasons parents are so easily fed the magical snake oil that these residential treatment or wilderness programs are selling, is the fact that resources are too hard to find. 

Being in the middle of a mental health crisis is confusing, overwhelming, and sometimes down right scary, and to be a caregiver though that is seemingly impossible at times. Being a parent is hard, I mean, just being alive can be hard right? My favorite analogy basically compares parenting to gardening, but at least with actual gardening, you can buy a manual. 

The analogy imagines a child’s brain as a young tree in a garden. A healthy, loving environment is like sunshine, water, and rich soil, helping the tree grow strong and upright. Adverse childhood experiences, however, are like tying the tree with tight ropes and dumping toxins into its soil. 

You end up with twisted growth, a weak foun- dation, and scar tissue. For a kid, this means their brain’s development is interrupted. Trauma and toxic stress teaches them to prioritize survival over thriving, twisting the way they see themselves and the world. 

This undermines their sense of safety and self-worth. Their brain learns to be hyper-alert for danger instead of focusing on growth, play, or learning. The brain adapts to survive abuse, but the scars can remain, showing up as anxiety, difficulty trusting others, depression, and/or self doubt even later into life. Without the right care, these experiences can delay emotional, social, and cognitive growth, making it harder for one to handle challenges or relationships later in life. If a plant can’t thrive in toxic soil, how can any of us thrive in toxic environments?

– additional note – this is copyrighted as of date of publication in memoir