Surviving the Trauma of the Troubled Teen Industry
How I ended up associated with America’s most dangerous cult at age 13
Trauma is tricky. It can be easy to avoid but also painfully difficult to hide from.
It’s elusive. It’s also icky. It sticks to us like tar trapped to the bottoms of our feet, only visible when we choose to look but omnipresent just the same. It is a hot air balloon of confusion and shame that threatens to remove us from our current reality. Sometimes we are fooled into thinking we can outrun it, or perhaps outgrow it. I certainly convinced myself of that as a teenager.
Here’s the thing… there are a lot of us.
Tens of thousands, though I am not familiar with the firm statistics. The numbers aren’t what interest me. What I do know is that we are everywhere and that we are all likely suffering to some degree. Perhaps we buried it in pursuit of our adulthood and freedom. Or perhaps we faced it in years of therapy and nursed our old wounds. It never dawned on me that what I went through was uniquely horrific. It seemed as though I was destined to endure it, only to be spat out on the other end like a piece of half-chewed food.
When I was 13 I started getting into trouble. Not ordinary teenage trouble but the kind of trouble that leads to being arrested at school and overdosing on prescription pills. The kind of trouble that horrifies just about any parent. The kind of trouble that has few solutions and will most likely eventually lead to incarceration or accidental suicide. The kind of trouble that leads parents to believe the only solution is sending their child away.
Maia Szalavitz is the author of Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids. In 2006, she wrote an article for the Washington Post in which she confronts the question of the “tough love” method that so many of these facilities implement.
“A patchwork of lax and ineffective state regulations — no federal rules apply — is all that protects these young people from institutions that are regulated like ordinary boarding schools but that sometimes use more severe methods of restraint and isolation than psychiatric centers. There are no special qualifications required of the people who oversee such facilities. Nor is any diagnosis required before enrollment. If a parent thinks a child needs help and can pay the $3,000- to $5,000-a-month fees, any teenager can be held in a private program, with infrequent contact with the outside world, until he or she turns 18.”
“Restraint. Isolation. No qualifications.” These are all things that resonate with me deeply based on my personal experiences.
A self-proclaimed “emotional growth boarding school” was where I landed. Healing was something that was promised when my parents admitted me. There are myriad treatment centers much like the one I attended in the fall of 2004. Some of them are worse than others, though nearly all of them will cost upwards of $5,000 a month in tuition leaving a gaping vacancy in parent’s bank accounts.
My parents chose CEDU Running Springs because it was close to their Southern California residences. They found comfort in the thought of being only a few hours drive away. If only they knew that the distance, or lack thereof, would prove to be insignificant. The abuse I endured there could have been happening around the corner in their very own suburban neighborhood and they wouldn’t know.
Ironically, or maybe not so ironically, none of the staff at the school had credentials or training to be treating young people. Many of us were suffering in ways that required psychiatric care and attention from professionals. The people in charge of us were anything but that.
The school was nestled in the mountains of San Bernardino, up the winding mountain road that leads to the much sought after vacation spot of Big Bear. I often imagined families snuggled up in cabins just a few short miles up the mountain, entirely unaware of the disturbing and cult-like existence that existed just below it. No one knew what went on there except, of course, for those of us who lived it. Though I didn’t know it then, it came as little surprise to me that the school’s history was rooted in one of the most dangerous cults in America.
Synanon was a drug rehab treatment group gone wrong in the 1960s. This is where the “attack therapy” that so many of these programs use was first created. Young addicts fled to Charles E. Diedrich’s program seeking help and healing. What they found was something far from that, a distant and mutated mirage of belonging found in a group of broken people.
Essentially, it was a rehab turned cult over 1,000 people were prisoner to.
To cite the attorney Paul Morantz who began investigating Synanon after his wife fell victim to the group:
“Addicts’ behaviors and past lives were attacked viciously in games, members were told their lives depended on staying, contacts with family were prohibited, and a system of rewards and punishments was applied.”
He continues on to say,
“Dederich designed an efficient program of individual emotional breakdowns followed by a mass group euphoria all designed to re-educate individuals into the Synanon philosophy and lifestyle. It was first offered to the selected few as an honor, but the entire population was eventually targeted. Dederich called it an ‘insight producing’ experience.”
But when my parents made the drive up the mountain and pulled down the long gravel driveway there were no indicators of this. Instead, they saw a sprawling campus dotted with ski lodge style wooden buildings. They saw a swimming pool and tennis courts and kids playing soccer on a grassy lawn. They were, understandably, deceived by the quaintness of it all. I can’t say I blame them. Upon my arrival, I nearly fell for it too.
Though within a few hours of being there, after attending my first group therapy session which they referred to as Raps, the allure had quickly melted away. I was appalled and afraid of the ways in which students and staff spoke to each other. The room erupted with screaming and profanities. Kids were crying and screaming into the laps until they broke blood vessels in their eyes and their voices went hoarse. I would soon learn that this is how these therapy sessions went.
It was incredibly confrontational and aggressive. Students would pinball around the circle of plastic chairs as they got up to sit across from the person they wished to indict. It became clear to me on that very first day that something was incredibly eerie and unsettling about this place.
I spent my first week crying myself to sleep, uncertain of my fate, and convinced my parents had made a mistake. The school anticipates this kind of response. I wasn’t able to speak to them for my first two weeks so that I could “acclimate.” The list of rules was endless and mostly arbitrary, the main message of them being that we had no control. No music, no make-up, no black clothing, no keeping private journals. The list goes on.
Our group therapy sessions were three times a week and lasted hours. No one was safe in those rooms. I was aggressed, indicted, and shamed by staff and students alike. I was forced to disclose things that were sometimes not even entirely true or that I embellished to quell their persistent accusations and demands. I was subjected to forced emoting. I was screamed at and provoked into fits of crying in front of a room of my peers. I was forced to share intimate details about my young teenage sexual experiences in rooms with adult men present.
Each day I woke with a pit in my stomach weighing me down like a sinking bag of garbage in the ocean. I felt sick and filled with dread. We were humiliated, berated, and accused. We were made to believe that everything bad that had ever happened was our own fault. The idea of “accountability” was ripe and rotted like the flesh of decaying fruit.
The yelling was to be expected. We would enter the room quietly and take our seats in the circle of plastic folding chairs. The silence was short-lived as the room would soon erupt. Staff members would scream at you blue in the face until you broke down and admitted fault, collapsing into a puddle of tears. The only way to survive was to give in. It often seemed as though many of the staff got a sick kind of pleasure out of the relentless ridicule and degradation.
They were the grown-ups and we were the kids. Not just the kids, but the bad kids. We had no say, we had no voice.
According to the staff, our parents would never believe us because after all, why should they? Not to mention, our every word was scripted and surveilled. A staff member would hover a few feet away while I would sit on the phone with my father, attempting to somehow convey to him my state of emergency there through some kind of psychic subtext. The truth is, even if I had a moment alone with him, I wouldn’t have known how to articulate what I was being subjected to.
That’s the difficult thing about this kind of abuse. There weren’t bruises on my body to share as proof. Instead, it was a quiet eroding of my psyche and spirit that I didn’t know how to substantiate. Emotional abuse is beguiling like that. It’s difficult to define so we continued to endure it, feeling as though no one would listen to us anyway. And no one did.
The times where things did devolve into physical abuse, the staff always seemed rightly justified in doing so. Of course, they weren’t but again, we were children and we didn’t know. We were the bad kids.
We were accepting what was at face value because that’s what we are conditioned to do at that age. It isn’t until we emerge into the world as half-formed adults that we begin to compare and contrast our own experiences to make sense of what has happened to us.
Children were held down and restrained, oftentimes by two or three male staff members, many of them were ex-marines or firefighters, their bodies manufactured by muscle and misplaced rage. When we weren’t in therapy under verbal attack we were cleaning. We cleaned every building from top to bottom for hours on end. We scrubbed cracks in the floors with toothbrushes and shoveled the snowy pathways until our hands were raw and blistered. Manual labor became a part of daily life.
Students were encouraged to surveil each other and report to staff. You were rewarded for acting as an additional set of eyes and essentially outing other students for any missteps. If you wound up on what they referred to as a “restriction” then you weren’t allowed to talk to or even make eye contact with the majority of the students, sometimes anyone at all. You were completely isolated. You faced a wall for hours each day completing writing assignments.
We were 13. We were treated like felons or prisoners. We weren’t being cared for. We weren’t healing. But none of us knew how to identify what was happening. None of us knew how to stop it.
Uncertain of how to self soothe and without support, I sought out solutions. I gained 15 pounds as food became an unyielding source of comfort. Food consumption was one of the few things that wasn’t closely monitored. I took full advantage, helping myself to seconds, thirds, fourths in the dining hall each meal. I began sneaking a razor blade into the shower to slice deep wounds into my flesh.
I withdrew and grew deeply depressed. Some of the kids I met were sent there for playing too many video games or because their grades had dropped in school. Their backgrounds paled in comparison to my extensive drug use. Regardless, none of us deserved the verbal and psychological abuse we endured. But somehow, I thought if anyone did, it was me.
Each night we were encouraged to gather in the common area and participate in what they referred to as “smooshing.” Bodies were draped on top of one another, our limbs entangled. Physical boundaries were blurred between students and staff alike. Students would massage each other, sit on each other’s laps, staff would play with your hair and snuggle you. It was highly encouraged and normalized. You were forced to participate and called out if you did not.
I spent countless days in isolation where I sat in an empty room, sometimes receiving meals but only based on good behavior. Education was essentially non-existent. They preferred to focus on our “emotional growth.” Nothing I was meant to learn according to California Standards was taught. To this day I have admittedly still not read To Kill A Mockingbird. We only attended a few hours of “school” each day. Definitive classes based on what grade we were meant to be in were irrelevant. Instead, we were all lumped into one classroom, and then we were off to clean the buildings or suffer through Raps.
Certain therapy sessions, referred to as Propheets, lasted for entire days. We were forced out of bed before the sun rose and for the following 16–18 hours, we were in a room partaking in strange exercises, being told we were worthless, being forced to admit to things that may or may not have ever really happened. We were referred to as “dirty” if we hadn’t been following the rules. In these rooms, this word was exercised against us often.
It was all about taking accountability, though many of us were facing childhood traumas that we were not at fault for.
My perception of reality became warped. I started to believe the narrative they were force-feeding me. I started to believe that I wasn’t deserving of my parent’s love. I started to believe that the burden I had placed on my family with my behavior was too heavy. It was unbearable. I was left paralyzed in a glass snowglobe of shame, shivering and fragile, certain that if I made any sudden movements, my world would shatter.
Eventually, I realized my only way out would be to feign insanity. I devised a plan to get myself kicked out by improvising a psychotic break in which the police were called on me and I was sent to a psychiatric hospital on a 72-hour hold.
It was here, for the first time, that I was able to speak to my parents free from the watchful eyes and ears of the staff. By that point, I was so angry. I felt deceived by the people who I was meant to trust. I arrived at the school compliant, willing to make big changes. But the environment was not one that was conducive to any kind of emotional healing. I was a prisoner. I spent every day there feeling trapped and alone.
The scariest thing about CEDU was the seemingly subtle ways in which I was abused. When the nature of the abuse is psychological and emotional, it’s much harder to “prove.” My wounds were beneath the surface and their scars remain there to this day. I still suffer from what I endured there. I don’t trust people, I question my own sense of reality constantly, I am anxious, I am afraid of therapy, I doubt my instincts, I have a difficult time deciphering a dangerous situation. My barometer for safety is skewed seeing as I was in a dangerous situation for so long that no one seemed to be willing to acknowledge.
That’s the thing though… These places are dangerous. They are causing damage to young, impressionable, and often troubled people who need guidance. Not to mention, they are charging struggling parents exorbitant amounts of money.
In many ways, I am one of the lucky ones. Of the many abusive schools and treatment centers out there CEDU was not the worst of them, which says a lot considering the conditions. It’s time we stop running, aiming to escape this and instead contribute to the voices of those who have both survived and are currently still suffering.
These programs still exist, with little oversight or regulations from the government. The long term damaging effects of these programs are real. The trauma they cause can seep into the subconscious causing a lifetime of pain.
Life is so confusing when we’re young. Our sense of self is so fragile and the future feels so far away. We somehow believe that once we are “grown-up” all of the ugliness of our youth will fade away, that we will magically shed our skin to be born anew.
The past can haunt us. Our memories can become distorted and strange as we attempt to sift through the wreckage of past experiences. We blame, we deflect, we ignore, we run fast and tirelessly but never seem to get far.
We are only ever narrowly escaping what we aim to outrun, feeling the breath of the past thick and laborious just over our shoulder. Footsteps falling heavily behind us like the beating of a drum on a battleground. Eventually, we grow tired. Eventually, we must face the monster we have been trying to escape for years. Facing trauma isn’t easy but it has been necessary for me in order to heal from it.
I am a survivor. I am one of the statistics. I am one of the thousands, of the tens of thousands.
Many of the people I knew from CEDU never adjusted to the “real world.” They weren’t able to reintegrate and they now face a lifetime of suffering and trauma. Their voices were never fully exercised. And it’s for this reason, that I choose to exercise my own. Not just for my own sake, but also, for theirs.
