A month after my 13th birthday, I was sent to Mount Bachelor Academy (“MBA”). I was in the midst of depression when I arrived there; several life-altering experiences happened to me in 1989 that would send any pre-pubescent girl into depression.  My family moved several times before I was 12.  It was very difficult to make friends and keep them, constantly being the “new girl” and I was frequently bullied.  In February, 1989, my family moved from Southern California to the Bay Area, forcing me to change schools in the middle of the year and quit competitive figure skating, which had become very important to me.  I am adopted and had dreams of meeting my birth mother.  Also in 1989, I found out that she died at the age of 24 from cancer.  I was having a very hard time going through puberty, including having severe hemorrhaging menstrual periods.  It became too much for me and in September 1989 I refused to go to school. My parents hired an educational consultant, who suggested they send me to MBA, claiming that the school had “stellar academic opportunities” and had “summer camp-like activities year-round.” Nothing could have been further from the truth. There was not one day that went by at MBA that I wasn’t told that I was “worthless”.  I still have a difficult time feeling worthy of happiness, 30 years later. Groups were confrontational exchanges of which all students were pushed to “work on our issues” by being confronted by staff and students and encouraged to cry and scream until blood vessels popped (it became a competition between a few of my peers to see who had more blue and red dots in and around our eyes from “group”).  A staff member would choose a student to confront, and he/she would get up and walk across the room to directly face said student, with a ritual of changing seats to do so.  Routine group was every other day for 3 hours. It was well known that if you did not have any pressing issues at the time, you would need to have 1 or 2 in your head, or create one, because if they confronted you about not “having anything to work on,” you would be yelled and screamed at for that and they would end up creating issues for you that may have not even been real. When an “all school group” was called, it was usually to address someone breaking the rules and to use that student as an example by humiliating them in front of the school and encouraging students to join in, screaming at them for prolonged periods of time, anywhere from 6-36 hours. “Lifesteps” were the pillars of the emotional growth curriculum; 9 “workshops” that lasted anywhere from 24 hours to 7 days. They were torture. Peer groups entered the Great Hall, a small, stand-alone building with one large, multi-purpose room, one bathroom and a large closet. The windows were covered in heavy cardboard and duct tape to keep us from knowing what time of day it was once inside. They were shrouded in secrecy, each one themed. Lifesteps were intense sessions of trauma therapy, bioenergetics, confrontation and humiliation techniques. None of the staff administering these therapies were licensed therapists. The length varied from 24 hours to 2 weeks.  The emotional themes varied from friendship, to the child within, to your dark side and more.  There were 9 and these were what the school was centered upon.  Usually a peer group of 6-15 students entered each Lifestep at a time.  The staff insisted that we could tell no one outside of the peer group what happened in these lifesteps.  If the staff found out that someone told another of what happened in their Lifestep, they were made an example of by either calling an all school group, self study or work project. In the Lifestep named “Forever Young,” the theme was to get back in touch with our “innocent, childlike” self, our “inner child.” One of the bioenergetic exercises was to lay down on a mattress on the floor as they played the song “Mother” by John Lennon extremely loud and peers were told to sit around the mattress yelling hurtful obscenities to make each student throw a more “intense tantrum” and “get out” the bad things we had piled on top of our “inner child”, our “innocence”.  When each student was finished, they crawled onto another mattress in the corner and were left alone for about 5-10 minutes to “cry and beg for forgiveness” to their inner child.  Alex Bitz ran my Forever Young Lifestep.  I lay down on my back as “Mother” began to play,  Alex sat on the side on the mattress next to my head and put his head about half a foot above mine.  He looked me in the eyes and told me that I was so worthless that my birth mother did not want me, and my second parents did not want me, that he and the staff did not want me there and began to yell and ask me how that felt.  I remember every detail of this, down to the spit coming out of his mouth onto my face, the way his goatee patch moved with every word.  I threw my “tantrum,” crawled to the next mattress and begged for water, which was not given to me; instead Alex told me that I was once again manipulating for special treatment.  To this day I cannot hear the song “Mother” without feeling nauseous. The Lifestep “The Castle” was about our “dark side”.  The bioenergetics were done to Neil Diamond songs (who happened to be my parents’ favorite singer and played frequently in my home.)  After a very long session of bioenergetics, we laid face down on a mattress in the middle of the floor, one at a time, with the students and staff surrounding.  I was then completely covered by a large, heavy grey sheet and told to