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- [00:01]
A
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 Cycle 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. Thank you to Survivor Haley for sharing with us today. At age 15, Haley was placed in a wilderness camp followed by a therapeutic boarding school. Dylan, a survivor who you'll hear from next week, was also placed in this Montana boarding school as a teen. Though we're not naming the now closed school in our episodes, we wanted to reach out to the founder of the institution to give them an opportunity to respond to a summary of allegations we compiled based on our interviews and research. In response to an email sent by our Associate producer, Amy B. Chesler, their attorneys responded with the following Ms. Chesler and Ms. Reese. We are the attorneys representing the founder in the school. We have reviewed your email from the afternoon of Friday, November 7, 2025, demanding a response from our client on or before today, Monday, Nov. 10, 2025. This is the first time you have contacted our clients regarding your podcast. The nature of your email and the short time for a response suggests that you are not interested in the truth, but want to sensationalize one side of this matter. For the purposes of your podcast, the founder and the school deny the allegations in your email. The school was a successful institution with real outcomes that changed multiple lives for the better. We suspect you intend to use this statement in your podcast. Please use the entire statement end quote. I'm Tiffany Reiss and this is Something was wrong.
- [02:52]
B
My name is Haley, I'm from Tucson, Arizona. Spent the first 15 years of my life there before I was sent away to first a wilderness program and then a therapeutic boarding school. I like to call it a correctional facility. I was born in 1985 in Tucson in a beautiful home that appeared gorgeous and well put together from the outside and was that inside as well as really tumultuous, painful and stricken with substance and alcohol abuse and everything else that goes into it. So a lot of love and a lot of pain growing up in a really whimsical home that everyone viewed from the outside as this really Special place where your parents owned a toy store. And your mother was beautiful and charismatic. She was tiny and full of fury. A lot of people would say difficult, really boisterous. Always gave her opinion about everything. Always is in your business. She was 4, 11, and I always loved her style and the way she dressed and the way she presented herself. She was also just really volatile. I think the things that made her interesting, that attracted people to her also were the things that drove people. People away.
- [04:07]
A
And what about your dad?
- [04:09]
B
My dad is in his 80s now and is still this bubbly kid. He always had this childlike wonder. He was playful. He took us hiking all the time. I spent my weekends in the garden with him. Really charming. A musician plays the mandolin. We had beautiful clothing and beautiful stylish things. But they'd have dog pee on them because the dogs were peeing in the house. And my mom wasn't doing the laundry consistently. The dining room table had local pottery on it, but there was no place to do your homework. You know, if you needed a band aid. It was hard to find a band aid, but there was great wine and rotisserie chicken and fresh flowers and interesting conversations. I think that they were doing their best on some level. I remember being read books and my parents being very much in love. And in the same night waking up and hearing, like, yelling and crashing outside my doorway and opening the door and seeing my father and my mother being violent. My mom was really violent. I know that my dad was too. He was reactively violent. My mom would back you into a corner. She did it a lot with me. She did it a lot with my father. They would have dinner parties and then everyone would go home and the night ended with violence and yelling and smashing things. And that was just a really regular occurrence. I really, from that point on, would make myself as big as possible and as loud as possible to break it up or to cause the attention to be more on me. I was a hyperactive kid. I was really imaginative. My mother called me being away with the fairies. I was a really loving child. I loved singing and dancing and musical theater and everything like that. And was very unashamed of being this wild kid. I made deals with the universe that if I treated my stuffed animals a certain way, they'd be safe. And I did that with my family too. These were signs that there was more going on there. Lots of anxiety from a young age, but there was a lot of reason to be anxious. When I was 10 years old, I had a best friend. His name was Jakey. And Our mothers were best friends. We spent so much time as a family together. Jakey lived a block away. He was my kindred spirit. We had the same level of energy. He passed away in his sleep when we were 10. My mom woke me up in the morning. She had been crying, and she said, jakey's gone. It felt to me that she really disappeared at that point. She was like, I need to be with Jakey's mother. I need to take care of her. We went to summer camp that summer. I was really excited when I got there. And then quickly turned south. The bullying, it was relentless. The loss of my friend, the withdrawal of my mother, and that trauma over the summer shook me. I came home and I started junior high that year. Everything's going great. Started to, like, smoke some pot. I skipped school with my friend and walked home from South Tucson all the way to Midtown, and it took us all day. My mother decided that I was out of control and pulled me from the Performing arts middle school and put me into this other school that was a bilingual ASL school. And that was kind of another defining moment of being removed from the outlet that I loved. I didn't adjust well there. Transitions were hard, and I always had a hard time with females in general. I have an amazing group of female friends now, but that really happened for me later in life. I always attribute it to my mother because my mother never touched us. My sister agrees. My dad was very, like, loving and physical, so I always felt like I gravitated towards, at this time, boys. Also realizing once puberty happened, I was getting different kinds of attention and, like, how great that felt. And so became so sexually active at 11 years old. I was pretty obsessed with the idea of being adult at a young age. My family life was so out of control, and I felt so out of control at this point in my life, I wanted control. I was sexually active with another boy my age. He had gone to school and told other students, and of course, it snowballed very quickly. It did happen at the end of sixth grade. The teacher found out and went to my mother. I didn't know that my mother knew, except that she said, hey, it is time for your checkup with your pediatrician. This female doctor that I'd been seeing since I was a little girl, we go to the pediatrician, and she comes into the room and says, you, mother has told me that you're sexually active and that you need a Pap smear and performed a Pap smear on me. And that was how I found out that My mother knew that I was sexually active and she was so disappointed in me in front of the doctor. I did not have another pap smear until I was pregnant with my child at 36. I was totally traumatized from the experience. I did better emotionally, I think 12, 13 years at least. In school I felt happier and I had groups of friends, but I had huge fits of rage. My parents wanted me to enjoy my bedroom. My dad painted it for me, tried to do anything to make me happy. At this point, I had gotten all this blow up furniture that was like all the rage at the time. And I remember having this big fight with my father and going into my bedroom and taking a knife to all of my blow up furniture and ripping down the meticulous wall posters that I had and absolutely destroying them. My father and I were very close. That all changed dramatically as I became a teenager. And when I started acting out, my father and I did not become close again until I was an adult. I was emotionally disturbed is what they thought. I found my mother's journals where she talks about them being in therapy and how the therapist is telling my mother how unhealthy our home is and that I'm acting out because of that. I think that I reacted a lot to my environment and what was going on. My parents would restrict me. My mom would hold me down on the ground and my dad would sit on my back. Somebody would be usually my mother yelling in my father's face or yelling in my face. And then there'd be like a big push and then there'd be a tornado of hitting and things like that. I feel the need to protect my dad and my mom and say that I was never like beaten, but there was physical violence in our home. I have a really clear memory of my parents fighting, me, being violent, the police being called, usually by the neighbors, and them showing up and me thinking, no, my mom's gonna tell them that was my father. And she's told them that it was me. I just remember feeling so betrayed by that because I was like, but this is, you guys. That it was all really going on in. In the early teen years. Dad moves out, and if we're home, mom is intoxicated in bed. There was little Jack Daniel bottles, glass bottles in her purse. Everything that came after escalated really quickly. My mother had left to go to school to get an MSW to work in child therapy and left my father to run the business. She had started a private practice in our home. One of the rooms she had turned into this beautiful office where she saw clients. I go to the private school. I'm playing soccer. I am doing terrible in school. I have always had learning disabilities. I have adhd, but nothing else was diagnosed in the private school. Because I tested so low. They put me in math for 10 year olds when I was like 15. I hated the girls there. I hated school and I got expelled for my terrible grades. I go to Tucson High. The high school is right off of a street called fourth Avenue, which is this really cool shopping area, very like hippie, close to downtown and also where all the transients hung out and where all the good drugs were. I was not doing at this point any hard drugs and then pretty quickly started taking a lot of acid. Acid for me was feeling completely out of my own body and mind. My parents didn't know this. What they did know about was I figured out that you could take coricidin and you could go to the pharmacy and steal, which is what we did. Quoracetin packets, cosmedicine ultimately. And then you could take like 8 to 10 of these coricidin packets and have a really intense tripping experience. I went to the weed store and found perfect little glass vials to put eight or nine pills in. And then I was selling them at my school and my mother listened to a phone call and heard that I was doing that. That was the last straw for them. I don't know if she had already been searching for me to go somewhere. My dad was adamant that I needed to be in military school. My cousin had gone to military boarding school for his teen years. And my dad was like, that is what she needs. She is out of control. My mom was like, I don't want to put her in that school. We need to get her help. And that is when education consultant came into play. And that is how a wilderness program came.
- [13:19]
A
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- [14:32]
B
My sister had come to visit and brought her now husband home for the first time. She was introducing him to our family. We'd gone to dinner. I had spent time with them that evening. I remember being 15, we're in a coffee shop. I wanted to show him my pocket knife. He's like, oh, that's really, really cool. You know, I didn't bring a knife with me. Can I keep this while I'm here? I was like, yeah, sure, of course. And it's because my mother had told my sister and him that she had arranged for transport to come and pick me up. So he didn't want me to have a knife on me. When that happened that evening I couldn't sleep. I had like gone into my mother's bedroom and told her that I was really unhappy and kind of had a little bit of an emotional breakdown. Gone back into my room. I'm in my room and all of a sudden I hear my father's voice in our house and he shouldn't have been there because he didn't live there. I was like, well, that's bizarre what's happening? I'm like, oh, I'm in trouble. So I was hiding my drug paraphernalia. I stood up and I turned around and there was just a huge man in my doorway. I think he said, you're going to be coming with us. And he stepped aside to show me a woman who was standing behind him. And I was like, the fuck I am. I don't want to go anywhere. I just started calling for my mother and asking what was happening. And I'm crying. And he said, you're going to a wilderness program. Your parents have arranged this and you're leaving. He said that my mother wasn't there, but I'm still screaming and crying for my mother. I think I was in a bra and underwear. When they came in the room, I demanded that I needed clothes. My jeans are in the bathroom. And the woman followed me in there and I like dove for my pants because I had my pocket knife in my jeans. In my mind, I was going to use that to defend myself. And it wasn't there because my now brother in law had taken it. They physically were holding on to me. I'm kicking, I'm yelling, I'm crying. They take me out through the living room and my mother is in the living room crying hysterically. She's like, you're just going to go away for a little while and you're going to come home. You're going to come home, don't worry. And I'm just crying. They put handcuffs on me outside of the house and in the vehicle. The woman sat in the back seat and held onto my legs because I was trying to kick. I said, I'm going to kick the window out, I'm going to kick you. And she's holding onto my legs while we drive to the airport. I had calmed down, but I'm just crying. I couldn't imagine the thought of not seeing my boyfriend, the boy I was very much in love with. I'm like, I'm never going to see him again and he's not going to know what happened to me. I insisted that I was pregnant in the airport and that I couldn't fly, that they couldn't put me on an airplane because I was pregnant. It wasn't true. At the gate, I saw that we were going to Utah. We got on the plane, they put me in the window seat. She sat in the middle and he sat on the outside. We landed in Utah. It's January, freezing. Drove forever to get to this building out in the middle of nowhere. We go into the building. They tell me that they need to make sure that I'm not hiding any drugs or any paraphernalia or any weapons. They strip searched me. They'd have me take all of my clothes off. They have me squat on the floor and cough. And then they gave me long underwear, military pants, a black T shirt and hiking boots. I took a urine test and then back in a van, I'm by myself and drive again what felt like forever, definitely longer than an hour into nowhere. And then I get out of the van and there's two women waiting there. They hand me off. She looks at me, she goes, you're on Earth phase. They're not going to talk to you and we're not going to talk to you. The group was over by a fire, maybe like a hundred feet away. They had made me a fire and they had taken a tarp and they had tied one corner to a tree. They said, you will sleep inside of this. Wrap this around you. You can gather wood if you want to keep your fire going. I was screaming and crying and physically it felt painful. I have a bone disease. At the time, it felt like all of my bones hurt also. I'm from Tucson, Arizona. I've never even been in snow. It just was freezing. I'm in shock. I'm like, this isn't military school. Where the fuck am I? My fire went out. Whether they told me what to do or how to do it, I don't remember. I didn't listen to them. I made my bundle and then fell asleep and rolled out of it and down like a small hill, maybe 20ft. I woke up in the snow, couldn't feel my fingers and toes and was totally in shock. And then the process began. I couldn't speak to anyone. They couldn't talk to me. I think there were six girls in my group. The process was that we would get up, we would pack our really heavy pack and we would hike all day. If anyone was hurt or injured, then we would drag them on a sled that was made from tarps and ropes. There was nothing that made us not hike. There was no knowing what time it was or where we were going, or how long we would walk for. When we would get where we were going, then we would make camp. Some girls would spend time kicking out rocks so that you had somewhere to lay on your little tiny paddle that didn't hurt and create our shelter. I would build myself A frames. I would take the time to find rocks and spread out an A frames so I would have a little more room. Doing that was like my escape in my mind. A moment of peace away from everything. If you wanted to have hot food, you had to be able to make a fire. You got a branch from a tree and you shaved a said branch into a bow when we attached string to it. There was a whole process of busting a fire. With my bone disease, I could never apply enough pressure to the spindle to be able to make a fire. So I couldn't have hot food. And that was really upsetting. So I lived on peanut butter and rehydrated beans that were just cold and crunchy. Sometimes they would have this roll of bacon. It was like wax paper that had had pre cooked bacon put on it. And sometimes the counselors would divvy out a piece of bacon. Ever so often. That was a huge treat. Maybe once a week there would be fresh fruit. An apple was a huge deal. But besides that, I just ate peanut butter beans and water and no hot food until maybe my last week or Two there when the one counselor I liked, college kid. If I carved the wood for the other girls, which I was good at, then they could bust a fire for me, and then I could have hot food. I had hot food the last week that I was there. I guess I had a disposable camera, which just seems like insane to me. Or they took pictures of us, I don't know. But I have, like, two photos from myself there. And it's just me standing there and a girl I was friends with. And we're caked in dirt because we had nothing to clean ourselves with. Once a week, they would ration out some wet wipes. You had to choose how you used them. And I liked keeping my face clean. No showers. I did not bathe a single time I was there. There was one instance where we had hiked to a place that looked like it had military tents, and we got to stay one night in this big tent. It was this huge deal. We were super excited. We took a coffee can and filled it full of snow and melted it, and that's what we bathed ourselves with. But I don't remember another time when we got to do that.
- [21:51]
A
How many staff would you usually see a week?
- [21:54]
B
There was two people with us. I saw a therapist three times. The first time I saw the therapist, he took me away from the group to sit, and he gave me my impact letter, which was the letter that told me everything. Every way I had hurt my family and the reason why I was there. We're sitting, like, on a little ledge, cliff, maybe, you know, 30, 40ft drop. He's like, this is a beautiful place to sit. And then he had me read the letter. And then he goes, you're not going home. Your parents don't want you home. You're going to be going to a facility after this. And I wanted to jump off of that cliff. I thought about it, and I told him that I remember the day that I, quote, unquote, graduated. He, like, joked about it. He's like, that day, I really thought I was in trouble. When I told you, you know, and you. You were going to jump. And I thought this was a really bad place to tell her this because you were so upset. I'm thinking, I love that my trauma is a joke to you. I read my impact letter out loud to my group. I can't remember if that was a mandatory thing or not, or if we chose to do that. The girls asked questions. I just don't remember really anything therapeutic about what we did there. I did two solos but only one big one. My big solo. I was out for a week. The snow was so high. And what I did the entire day was carve out mazes with my feet. I would start in a field where my solo camp was, and I would start to shuffle. I would create a channel the width of my body, a hedge face, ultimately in the snow. So I did that for like, the entire time that I was there. That's how I, like, passed the time. But then at night, I just laid in fear. I don't remember anything positive about that experience.
- [23:46]
A
What do you think was the hardest part about the wilderness?
- [23:49]
B
The physical aspect of it. The complete and utter lack of control. It's such a small thing, but, like, not knowing what time it is or what day it is or when anything's going to happen. I felt so much empathy for the other girls. I took to the outdoorsy part well because I grew up hiking with my dad. They would cry all night listening to girls wail and watching girls with much more severe mental problems than me have complete breakdowns, hit themselves and claw at their face. I came up on my month mark and a lot of girls had left at a four week mark. I was like, ooh, I'm gonna be going. And then I did not go. And I was like, what the fuck? And then I was there another two weeks. So I believe it was six weeks that I was there.
- [24:33]
A
When did you find out you were going to be leaving?
- [24:36]
B
I found out like the day before I left. Maybe it was two days. The therapist had come out and told me that I would be leaving. My mother came to pick me up. I got on an airplane with her and flew to Montana. We spent one night in the hotel together. And then a transport took me from the hotel to. The person who I rode in the back of this car with didn't speak to me. So it was just silence. I just sat in the backseat. They were listening to talk radio. At this point, I don't know that I'm going to be at this school for a long time. I'm thinking I'm just going to be a really good girl and I'm going to be at the school for like six months. I was never told I was going to be there for multiple years. After the day I arrived, I talked to other girls and then I started asking how long they had been there. Throughout the day, the realization just started to sit in. Nobody here has been here less than six months. The school presented to parents this extremely, like, wholesome environment where your children would sit around A fire and sing and they dressed us in L.L. bean. There was this shed, that's where they issued our clothing for and charged our parents. And it was long skirts and LL Bean blouses. It had a very cult y vibe to it. I was given a big sister. She was a very follow the rules kind of girl. Very like calm, very soft spoken. They knew who I was going into this, so they matched me with somebody very different than me. She just showed me how everything worked. Our cabins were four girls in each side, two bunk beds on either side, so eight girls. And then in the middle there was just the single bathroom that the eight of us shared. There was no bathroom break, so we went to the bathroom when they told us to go to the bathroom. You, like woke up, you got ready right away. It was really quick 2 minute showers. If we had time, we broke up. Who showered in the morning? Who showered at night? And then you went to your first job detail. Each cabin was on a certain chore. When I started there, we were on kitchen chore. So we would set up the kitchen and then we would break down the kitchen after each meal. So you'd go to chore before breakfast. On the first day it was breakfast. I got a plain bagel and I put peanut butter on it and I like sliced my bananas and I put them on it. And the girl next to me was like, don't do any weird food shit. And I was like, what? She was like, you're doing weird food shit, they're going to see you doing it. And I was like, what? And it was so absolutely true. Like the fact that I did that became an issue that needed to be pointed out. You would do chore after breakfast and then we would have class. I literally do not remember learning anything. I don't remember testing for anything or passing anything. There was no time to do homework, so there was no homework. Anytime I've talked to any of the survivors, they just go the non existent school. I don't remember learning anything. And I already went with learning problems in school and then came out like, I didn't learn anything in two years. Except for a lot of bizarre stuff. It's like going to prison. If I didn't know how to do a drug, I knew how to do it when I got out of there. If I didn't know anything about sex, I knew it all after I left because of the forced disclosures that they caused us all to do and give. Maybe there was some class during the day, but then it went right back into chores and then you went to lunch and then chores again. We did all of the labor and maintenance and took care of everything, shoveled all the shit. Supposedly we're supposed to be having equine therapy, but there's only like six girls, which are called the horse girls that were his favorite girls that got to have horse therapy. There was no equine therapy for us. We just shoveled the shit of these horses and there was 21 of them. A lot of horseshit. We had to build these horse fences and we had to drive posts into the ground. It caused me pain to do these things. But if you expressed that you were in pain when you were doing any activity, it was. It's not physical pain. It is repressed emotions that you're not dealing with. So we'll definitely be talking in therapy about that later. And therapy being attack therapy in a room with all of your peers. So much of what we did there physically hurt us. We were not laborers. We were not skilled at swinging axes and driving posts into the ground and all of these other things that we had to do. The headmaster's wife found out that I like to organize things. She had me come and organize her DVD collection. I just would alphabetize her thousands of movies that we didn't get to watch. We had no exposure to film and music. The theory was that they had to break us down like the horses that he was obsessed with breaking. This idea that your child would be so busy doing sports and being outside that she wouldn't have time for everything else. It was true, but in really horrific ways. And then we went into dinner and then therapy. So we would all go down to the big group room doing disclosures. When I was there, there were two therapists and then did the sports side of it. He was the guy that, because I couldn't properly hit the volleyball, decided it was because I was withholding something. In therapy, which became months long forced disclosures where I had to disclose what I wasn't telling the truth about. Whoever they thought was the most dysfunctional at the time, it was picking them apart and forcing disclosures of what they were going through. Girls disclosed things that should never have been said in front of any of us. We were not prepared to hear about or to be talking about with other girls about their sexual abuse, about drug use and everything else that none of us should have been exposed to. Also, just like none of our business, we had these histories that we had to write. You wrote a food history. You had to answer your questionnaire and write essays about your relationship with food There was sexual history, there was violence history, and there was relationship history. You just wrote in detail, had to pick apart who you were in relationship to those things. Then you worked with your therapist, you shared them with the group, and then they gave them to your parents without telling you that they were going to be giving them to your parents. One of the letters my mom wrote me said, I just received your history and how painful it was to read all that. They were things that I was disclosing because I felt like I had to, that I never would have wanted my mother to know about. That wasn't her business. Generally, groups had a theme for the night. We never knew what the theme would be until we were in it. I know that all of us were just always so terrified that it would be about us. Therapy for hours in a night to the point of exhaustion, let everyone talk to each other and attack each other. And a lot of us believed that it was working half the time. And then we know it's not. Now I think the majority of us understand what happened to us there. Most of the therapy was something called physical metaphors. Physical labor was used for that. It was used to turn over the massive manure piles, to dig out stumps, to pick rocks, and to beautify and improve his property the entire time we were there in the name of therapy. There was a girl when I first arrived there that I had no conversations with for the first six months because she wasn't allowed to talk. We all feared her work duty that she was on. She's one of the people that had to move the manure from one side of the school to the other. This giant pile, probably, like, 20ft high and maybe 10ft, 15ft wide. And you had to, like, shovel it into wheelbarrows. And then she had to move it to the other side of the school, turning it into fertilizer that they could use. But it was her physical metaphor to, like, unearth her shit pile. Another girl, she had to carry around all of her dysfunctions on her, and they were giant rocks in a backpack, and her back always had bruises. My physical metaphor that I was given because the headmaster hated the relationship I had with my mother and really disliked my mother as well. He believed that I was constantly acting within the victim triangle. He came in the group one night, he just sat there. Everyone's holding their breath, and he just rocked back and forth, looked at all of us, and he did this for maybe, like, 10 minutes. And then he just goes, haley, stand up. Go out to my truck. Pull the box out from my truck and he had gotten himself a new refrigerator. So he had me drag in this refrigerator box that was like 6ft tall. He said, put it in the middle of the room and all the girls are watching. He said, now cut a triangle the length of the box and cut a hole in the middle. And so I cut it all out, a six foot tall triangle. And he said, you're going to figure out a way to attach straps to that and you're going to wear that. And I don't want you to get any closer to anybody than the point of that triangle. And that's your victim triangle. That's your physical metaphor. Before I spoke to anybody, I had to state the victim triangle, the victim, the victimizer and the rescuer. And I had to say, I am all three roles. If you engage in a relationship with me, I don't have respect for relationships and I engage in all of these roles. So know that I am actively manipulating you to participate in my victim triangle. All my therapy at that point for that year was based around my victim triangle and turning this concept inside and out. And I wore it until it molded and like collapsed. It was held together with duct tape. I wore it for a year. The group therapy where he showed up again a year later and was like, you're graduating from your victim triangle was because we had a parent visit coming and he didn't want them to see me in this moldy, dilapidated, crazy triangle thing. I could see it in my journals. You're going to be good. You're not going to disagree with the therapy practices. You're going to be amazing when a parent comes to visit. You're going to get to see your mom and you're going to get to go home. Maybe they'll send you on a home visit or like, maybe you'll be able to see your parents. I would see in my journal where I'd be frustrated with somebody else because they weren't working the program. A month later, it'd be like, fuck all of them. They canceled my home visit. It was such manipulation. In my letters from my mother, I'd see where they'd tell us that we were going to see each other and then they'd rip it away. They take it away from our parents, too. It's such a mind fuck. And they're brainwashing us. I saw my mother twice in the two years that I was there. When she went there, she sat in a room with 20 girls that all had their long skirts on, holding their teddy bear with their hair. In Braids, in, like, a quaint cabin in Montana, talking about how this program had saved their life and how grateful they were to be there because we'd had to do that. I saw my father twice, one of those. We were all on intervention. It's the middle of winter, so it must have been, I think, January. And we'd wake up in the middle of the night with these flashlights in our face, and they're like, get out of bed. Put on your winter gear. And they, like, lined us up outside our cabin, didn't tell us what was happening. We walked around in the forest for an hour. I think it was to disorient us, so we didn't realize where we were on the property. They said, you have been so dysfunctional as a group that we had to go on this intervention. And what we did on this intervention was, first we had to dig a latrine as wide as our body that you could stand in it. And then it needed to be, like, 4ft to 5ft deep. That's what we went to the bathroom in. We lived outside in our tarp tents, and we earned warm food. I don't know if we ever went inside during this time. We then cleared the forest all day, went out and cut down limbs that were broken and anything that was on the ground cut down trees and. And brought it all. Then chopped wood and cut wood into ricks, which is like a square of wood. And then that was sold to their neighbors. People came and bought the wood. We never saw those people because we didn't get to see people. That's what we did all day. My dad visited during that time. He saw us there. He thought it was wild, but a really creative way to do therapy. There's no way in front of them that you would ever be like, get me out of here. Please help me. They had rewired our brains to constantly be watching each other, constantly be telling on one another, confronting one another. When you were 15, those two years felt like a decade. It felt like forever. I never would be free. I would never have a life. The way that I beat the system was by my bone condition. I knew if I could get an X ray, that they would see my bone spur chondromas that I have. And the doctor. It's such a rare disease that he would look at it, it would look like a tumor, and I would have to see a specialist. I started saying that I was in this horrible amount of pain when I ran and just kept bringing up the pain. I think I did this for like, six months. And I kept telling my mother that I was in this pain. She didn't tell me she knew what was going on, but she was like, she has to be seen. You need to go get her an X ray. So they did. I remember going into, like, a little tiny place and getting an X ray. And of course the doctor was like, she needs to see a specialist. My mother was like, she needs to see a specialist specifically for this disease. I remember her writing whole letter about it. This is negligent if you do not let her see this specific specialist who knows about it in Oklahoma. And so that is actually how I got out. I had to leave everything there. They wouldn't send my things that we left. I had packed my journals into my suitcase when I was there. My mother, like, packed up my room and moved to another state. I didn't get to go back to my old life. I flew to Oklahoma for the first time. I literally got off the plane. I look at my mother and I go, I am not going back there. And she goes, you are not going back there. And I didn't. I was back at the regular high school junior year, and my mother is like, everything's perfect. And I really was like, yeah, mom, this is my new life. This is my new beginning. We're going to have this amazing life together. When you sent me to that school, I was calling you a bitch and telling you to go fuck yourself. And now we're best friends because we've been writing love letters to each other ultimately for the two years that I've been gone, because it was my only form of connection with anybody. I didn't get diagnosed while I was there. I didn't get medicated properly while I was there. I wasn't medicated at all. I've been, at 40 years old, diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder and complex PTSD for what I went through there and anxiety disorder and all these things. We could have had real therapy and real help, but that didn't happen. I came back extremely ill, adjusted. I had no boundaries. I did not know how to speak to my peers. The only way we were allowed to speak to our peers when we were there was in attack therapy groups. I didn't know how to have relationships anymore. I didn't know how to trust anyone. I didn't know how to not share everything that I was going through emotionally. And I just was so afraid of going back and just needed to turn 18. I was 17 when I got out. I held on as hard as I Could to just be this good girl in our home. But my mom attempted suicide in my first year home. By the end of my junior year, I was already using drugs again. I was like, fuck the world. Nobody's going to tell me what to do or where to go. I abused every drug and I got kicked out of my high school for selling cocaine and then followed a boy to the alternative high school. He graduated. I didn't graduate and got kicked out of my mother's home and moved in with a boy because I was trauma bonded to him.
- [40:01]
A
Did you share with your parents what you experienced in the programs and try to express how you were hurt from them later?
- [40:11]
B
We would talk about it a little bit, but I really felt the need to, like, protect them. I don't think I told my dad much. I think that's come later when I would visit him in the past couple years. Told a couple stories about what happened there to my stepmom because I wanted her to know about it. I just remember my dad, he said, what should we have done? I could feel him being defensive. My mother was like, we were both victims of it. That's the way she felt about it. And I know that she felt terrible for what had happened there. She believed that I was abused there. Once I told her all the stories I've disclosed to very few people what happened to me there. When I met my husband, he said, have you seen the movie Cool Hand Luke? And I said, I have not. He's like, you need to watch it. And then, you know, obviously made the correlation between the movie or the book. Also, the movie went Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. That they're just like, no matter what you did, you never were going to win. You never were actually going to get out. They led you to believe that you were going to. That you could do this in a certain way. But there never was any end to it. My father lives in Washington. I love a road trip. And got on the road and drove through Montana. My husband actually suggested it. He said, do you think it would be, like, therapeutic to go look at it? I looked it up all the time. I looked it up on Google Maps. He's like, maybe it wouldn't seem so big and scary if you saw it in person. Or maybe it would, who knows? But do you want to see it? And I was like, yeah, I think I want to see it. I also just wanted context for what was around me at that time. We drove up the road in the RV and he pulled up to the front gate, parked the rv. He stayed inside and I went and sat on the ground cross legged outside the gate and looked around and looked at the horse fences I built and peered down the road up at the cabins and it looked small even though it's not small. But it was not this haunted mansion that it is in my memories. We drove around the perimeter of the school and I drove on the back roads, thought about where I was and got like a feeling for it spatially. It held this make believe place in my mind that it was very real. I went to a fancy restaurant on the lake by the school, watched planes land and thought about the life that got to have there and how he must go to that like one restaurant all of the time and sit and watch planes land with our parents, money and our trauma. Then we drove to the Cascades national park and we popped a tent and I took a lot of mushrooms and I wandered around in the woods crying a bunch. My hammocks started to kind of fail and my husband forced me out of it to fix it and I didn't want to get out of it. When I finally did, I just go, you forced me out of my home and my hammock just like they forced me out of my home. It was interesting. It just was this part of me that had locked away the abandonment feeling. My parents didn't realize that's what they were doing, but they gave me to these people that abused us and abused me. I went to go visit my father for my 40th birthday with my girlfriends and they had just gotten this new convection like oven flat top thing that they were so excited about. My girlfriends and I were cooking on it and one of them I thought had scratched it and I had like a nervous breakdown about it. I was so afraid of being in trouble. I feel like a bad kid, like I'm going to lose my father's love over this somehow. These relationships are so precarious and if I don't perform correctly and be a good girl, then I'm going to lose everything. And I've carried that into my marriage. I've carried that into being a parent at this point. You know, I'm now working on that in therapy. I turned 40 this year. I still feel 15. I still feel part of me is still there. Like so many of us that experience traumatic things, part of you is still there not even realizing that it works its way into every part of your life. It's bizarre to me that every girl I talked to, one of the first things they asked me was like, do you have an autoimmune disease. It's the first question. Everyone's just trying to figure out why we feel like we're being chased by lions and are sick all of the time. There's these ideas that the body keeps score. Right?
- [44:07]
A
What do you hope that listeners take away from this season?
- [44:12]
B
It's this disgusting hidden greed machine extorting children and families. How is this not completely exposed? When I describe what I went through there, I'm describing it to this psychiatrist who I just saw, and he's just like, I can't believe there's programs like this. I'm like, how do you not know that there's programs like this? I'm just so grateful that you were exposing all of this and that people are sharing what they've been through. Something so horrible and awful that this is happening to children and that it's all for greed and for money. And it's disgusting that it becomes common knowledge that this is happening and that parents aren't tricked into this, that children are treated like human beings. People, us as humans as a whole don't have to suffer the rest of our lives as adults because of the trauma we endured on this level in a place we should have been getting help.
- [45:04]
A
What do you hope for the future?
- [45:06]
B
I want to live peacefully, and that could look like so many different things for so many people, but for me, it'll look like learning the tools that I need to find peace, to be a peaceful parent, to shepherd this little girl through the world and send her out into it as whole as possible without taking too much or causing too much damage and go outside and sit in the woods and not have to think about chopping wood. I want peace. I want healing. And I think I'm on the right track now. And this is such a big part of that. I feel like I can hear it in the voices of the other people that have shared on this season. It's like we're all connected in this horrific way.
- [45:46]
A
Thank you so, so much for being willing to share so much of yourself and revisit all of these really painful memories and for being an awesome person to talk to.
- [45:58]
B
The fact that it just was by chance that we were able to speak means a lot to me. The girls that are in the survivor group are so thankful that it's getting out there. Thank you, Tiffany.
- [46:14]
A
Next time on something was wrong.
- [46:19]
C
There were no fences. There was no barbed wire. There was a stone wall that was very short. But you were literally on a tiny island in the middle of the south Pacific. Like, where are you going? On my 18th birthday, I demanded my passport from the person who was in charge of the campus. He was like, no, no. Your parents signed your rights away. You're actually a citizen of Samoa. You can't leave until you're 24. I was like, if you do not give me my passport today, I will sue you. And he did. And then he asked me to please not tell anybody that they would address it. So the first thing I did when I walked away from that meeting with him was I went up to where everybody was and I said, if you're 18, demand your passport. We're getting out of here.
- [47:06]
A
Something Was Wrong is a Broken Cycle Media Production created and produced by executive producer Tiffany Reese Associate producers Amy B. Chesler and Lily Rowe with audio editing and music design by Becca High. Thank you to our extended team, Lauren Barkman, our social media market marketing manager, Sarah Stewart, our graphic artist and Marissa and 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.