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
Alexandra’s Experience at Growing Together
On February 28, 2004, I was involuntarily entered into a controversial drug-treatment center for teens, and my life was changed forever. But first, a little bit of what led me to the program called “Growing Together” in Palm Beach County, Florida. The label of ‘troubled teen’ was assigned to me sometime in 2002, when I was thirteen years old and in sixth grade. I was shamed and labeled a slut as well by the mothers and religious leaders at the Christian school I attended because my body had developed sooner than most of the other girls my age. There were also rumors about my parents separating and it seemed like the whole school knew about it. With all of this going on the faculty at the school decided I needed to be ‘saved.’ They forced me to get on my knees and recite their prayers, they forced their religious beliefs and Bible verses down my throat every chance they got. In response, I grew angry at God because of the way it was all being relentlessly pushed on me. Eventually I got so sick of it all, I just went along and did what they wanted so they would leave me alone. A few months later though, my school year ‘ended early’ (I was not technically expelled, but forced to leave early) because I wrote, “Just smoke weed, that’s all you will ever need,” in a classmate’s yearbook. The following school year was a huge transition for me. I entered eighth grade in public school, and it was difficult to find a place to fit in since I was coming from a private school. I barely knew anyone there since I hadn’t attended this school the previous year in seventh grade like almost everyone else. While trying to find a new set of friends, I was being silly and teasing a boy by taking his hat in one class, but after class he punched me a few times in front of a group of kids and no one did anything to stop it. Later that same month I got expelled for deciding to sell a girl a Xanax pill I had found to try to make some money since I was not legally able to have a job, but I had no idea the pill I sold her would cause her to have an allergic reaction. So now, it was off to an alternative school that was an hour and a half away from home. This is where I learned what it was like to be around people who don’t like you because of your skin color. Being the only white girl in the school quickly taught me to just do my work, stay out of everyone’s way and bring nothing of value from home to school. The girls wanted to fight me all the time just because my grades were going up and I had a release date to go back into the regular school system. This was one of the most terrifying times I ever had in the education system and I was glad I survived it. Meanwhile, I grew up watching my parents physically abuse each other after my brother was born, separate from each other, renew their vows and separate again until my mother decided to file divorce papers on Valentine’s Day of 2003, when I was fourteen years old. Little did I know this was just the beginning of even more turmoil to come. My mother moved my brother and I five times within the year and we were both confused and repeatedly struggling to make a new circle of friends. My mother was going out to bars every weekend and leaving me home alone with my seven-year-old brother. The relationship with my father was non-existent because my mother told me the divorce was all of his fault, which I would later learn was untrue. When I was able to go out with friends, mom allowed me to hang out with people who were much older than I was, and I began experimenting with drugs. It was that spring when I lost my virginity and became sexually active. I was also taken advantage of by multiple people in 2003. During this time, my mother was always hustling to make some side money, doing things from renting a room out of her house to breeding dogs. One time my mother rented out a room to a ‘friend’ of mine who was a twenty-three-year-old man. He also worked for my mother doing handy-man tasks around the house and barn. This supposed friend of mine on the night of his birthday which was a school night. He came home drunk at 4:30am, entered my room with a condom on, put a pillow over my head and raped me. I was frozen with fear. I was screaming inside of my mind but I couldn’t move. The next day, not knowing what else to do, I told my mother what happened. I was shocked when she didn’t believe me. This was the worst day in my life. So I talked to my friends about it and they didn’t believe me either. NO ONE BELIEVED ME. My anger took root and grew more and more each day until I decided I had to take drastic measures to get him out of the house. I decided to try to commit suicide on a Friday night by walking in the road late at night with my arms wide open, hoping a truck would hit me. When a SUV drove by, instead of hitting me, he stopped and asked me if I was ok. I told him no, that I wanted to die. I was already dead inside and felt all alone with no one to turn to for help. When I went back home that night my fight or flight response kicked in. The moment my assailant arrived back at the house, I started throwing everything I could at him. Hair dryer, an