Transcript
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Tiffany Reiss (0:30)
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. I'm Tiffany Reiss and this is Something Was Wrong.
Max (Survivor) (1:43)
When I got to Mount Bachelor, it was fully daytime and by the time the staff had assigned me to two students to show me around campus, it would take me to like the dorm that I was staying in. It was dinner time. The way that the campus was set up is that there's a lower level and an upper level because it's built into a hillside. The program itself is literally in the middle of the Ochako National Forest. When you go from the intake office, there's three sets of like very large stairs. You go up the stairs and then if you go to the right there's like a gym facility. And then when you go to the left, there's the dining hall, the lodge. That's where you did all your meetings every day. Then there was the atrium, a bathroom, and what we called the old gym, all in that same building. And that building had like a huge deck that overlooked the forest. It was very pretty there. They had a swimming pool that they would fill in in the summer and like drain in the winter. Also in a different area there were like classrooms in that lower level area. They had a large lake on campus. You could not swim in it. It was disgusting. The dorms were split by the lake, so you would walk probably a good quarter or half mile until you hit your dorms. The Boys dorms and the girls dorms were separate and there would be four to five people per dorm. The two people who were in charge of showing me around took me through all that. And then they took me to the dorm that I was staying in to let me shower. That was one of the first things they let me do. I remember from the first shower vividly. Even now, watching all of the dirt come off me. The water was dark, murky brown. I think I washed my hair like two or three times and I think I scrubbed my body four or five. And even then I was still dirty. The dirt really gets into your skin and it packs in there. If I remember correctly, they gave me like sheets with information on it. I remember reading all these rules about what you could and couldn't do in terms of personal appearance. You weren't allowed to have anything branded. I was very, very upset with the lack of individuality. And it was very obvious to me, even at that point that those rules weren't about safety. They were about stripping you of your identity and control. The kids were sorted out into groups by time of arrival and you would be in different, what were called peer groups. I was in Peer Group 68. Each peer group had a pre assigned graduation date. I came in and my graduation date was going to be in December of the next year. What's wild is that the staff members, both mentors and teachers would be bussed in every day. The closest town, I think was 40 miles away. There were night stuff. There was only maybe three people who were on campus overnight. But they had us so controlled that nobody would have ever tried anything. There was a school nurse who was on site and I think that she would be the one who would divvy out the meds. But there were students who did not have access to their meds, sometimes for weeks. I remember being really disappointed with the level of education because it was stuff that I had learned in fourth, fifth, sixth grade being repeated. Because the schooling felt very simple for me, they started to let me do independent studies, which is how I accumulated a higher number of high school credits than I would have normally. There was one man who was a psychiatrist able to actually diagnose kids. I met with him, I think within the first week or so of me being there. He diagnosed me with anxiety and depression. I remember having to write this thing called a cleanup list. And that was something that was used throughout the program. The cleanup list went over any possible indiscretions you could have ever had in your life. Lying, stealing, cheating, sex. They made you Disclose rape and sexual assault also. That wasn't something that had happened to me at that time. So it didn't really register to me how disgusting that is to make somebody do or disclose. Especially if there were like issues with incest or anything like that. They made you say who, what, when and where these things occurred. Everything but the why, because that did not matter. You did it and that was wrong. They made you read this list to your parents. With your mentor there, you would have a cleanup phone call. And the reason that they said that they did this was that so all of your indiscretions had been laid bare. You now had a honest foundation to continue your work from. I had to tell my parents that I had had sex at 13. Raised Catholic, lots of shame around sex. It's very uncomfortable. Your parents also had to make a list of what they thought that you did and then they would compare the two. It really made me realize there was no point in this other than to like humiliate shame and force these kids into self disclosure that was non consensual. About every three months, each peer group would go through these different processes together called life steps, which were shrouded in secrecy. And you weren't supposed to tell anyone about anything that you experienced. And you had to do all these predetermined assignments. These were done in a place called the lifestep room, which was completely isolated from campus. There were no windows, no clocks. You just had to be in there for whatever period of time this lifestep was going to run. It was very rare that you would go outside. There would usually be two to three staff facilitators and like two student facilitators. You were encouraged as a student to like participate and facilitate as a student facilitator in the lifesteps. I don't know that that was a requirement of the program, but it was very heavily encouraged. It would really show that you have accepted what the program is teaching you. The way that it would be set up for all of these life steps is that you would either be in a circle facing each other or you would be in a horseshoe. And whoever was being evaluated would be at the front. Even to this day, like those configurations I can't really sit in because this is where the attack therapy really started to come in was in these life steps. That's a perfect place to do that because the only people who are witnessing it are the students who are experiencing it. The staff members were referred to as mentors. You had a pre assigned mentor and if that mentor decided that you had more work to do in a specific life step, you had to what they called re audit it so you would have to do it again. They could also do that if they decided that the work that you put into it wasn't satisfactory for them. If you decided that you didn't want to do that, they called it refusing. If you refused to participate, you would be quote unquote dropped to the peer group below you, meaning that you would graduate three to four months later. If you kept refusing to a certain amount, you would be punished with something called a self study where your mentor would make writing assignments that you had to do that correlated with whatever the infraction was. Self study is a program designed just for you. It's a time for you to look closely within yourself to feel whatever feelings you need to feel, ask yourself questions and seek answers. If you want to make constructive changes in your life, it will take time and determination. During this self time, you will be guided, but it's your decision to go for broke. You are to take your self study journal with you everywhere you go. Meetings, work projects, group class, and all meals. Your journal must be with you. Without your journal, you may not move forward on your self study. Do not forget your journal. Rule number one. When you get on a self study, you lose all privileges. No singing, smiling, laughing or other distractions at all. Number two. You will work on work projects, which is physical labor, until your mentor tells you otherwise. While working on projects, you are to work as hard as physically Abel and you are on bands with all other students during your work project. On weekdays you are to meet at the tool shed at 9am and on Sundays you are to meet there at 8am you may not leave your work project site except to use the restroom or get water. What were you doing at the work site? Whatever they decided. One kid had to do a relay race with boulders so he would have to carry a boulder up a hill, drop that one, pick up another one, go down the hill, drop that one, pick up another one, go up the hill in circles until they told you you're done. Sometimes you would shovel for hours. It was like whatever work they needed done around the campus that they didn't want somebody to pay for you to do. And if they didn't have any work for you to do, they make up some asinine bullshit and sometimes would also give you physical punishments. You basically were isolated away from the rest of the kids when there was any free time. What's an example of something that someone would have done to Go on one of those. I got on two. One of them was for kissing this guy. And I wrote about it and I reread it, and it was like, that was the first time I've ever experienced a bad kisser. It wasn't even worth it. And then the other one was for cutting my own hair because there was this woman who was a alleged cosmetologist in school who would jack up everybody's hair. And I was like, I'm not letting that bitch touch my hair. So I cut my own hair. Some staff member was like, your hair looks shorter. Did you cut it? There's no plausible deniability here. So I was just like, yeah. And then this staff member snitched and told my mentor, who was like, this is the most bullshit thing I've ever heard. This person should not get in trouble for cutting their hair. She gave me the gentlest assignments for, like, three days.