Cap (30:44)
I wanted to so badly, but I knew that I would get in trouble because staff would sometimes read your letters, and if they thought it was considered manipulation, asking them to take you home or telling you how bad this place is, you would get in trouble for that. I started writing it in my first letter, and then a staff member read it and was like, you can't write that. So took it away. And then they read my next letter. It was more or less pointing out, I'm here and this is going on. This is my schedule, lovey, bye. There was definitely an uptick in the frequency that I could talk to them. It was still monitored by the therapist. I think that extended to, like, a half hour phone call. We were also allowed to email them, but it was by proxy. So you're typing up this email, putting it on a flash drive, and you're giving it to your therapist, and then they're reading that email and then they're sending it. When I was putting together the files for this, I found a few letters that I had written my parents. It made me uncomfortable to read because the way I'm talking is very much not me. It sounds very brainwashed. I specifically remember me talking about questioning a staff member. The staff members had Asked that some level threes and fours stay behind at the dorms. Cause they were short staffed and they wanted some help watching the lower levels. I had said, don't you have enough upper levels here? There's like eight level fours and 10 level threes. And then in my letter, I wrote that the staff said, are you arguing with me? And then I talk about how I was just catastrophizing about that and I was wrong. How would I react now in a situation like that? But you're so afraid of getting in trouble that you absolutely will bend any which way because you just want to get the fuck out of there. You would have new staff members that would come in and they would be really great. But you could see the change over time. They would be harsher on us, get stricter on us, yell at us more, punish us for silly things. These people who were so wonderful when they came in ended up molding into these horrible people on a power trip. It was really difficult because sometimes that's a little ray of hope. You feel like maybe there's someone who can be in my corner. But after reading staff testimonies about Copper Canyon, it sounds like they would also get punished if they weren't hard on us. So maybe it was forced at a certain point for them to act this way. But I think after doing it for X amount of time, it becomes a part of you. One of my big triggers is yelling. My mom would unfortunately yell at me a lot. And I saw it in the staff members at times. I'm sure it was an incredibly hard job and they probably didn't get paid enough to do what they did, even if they weren't doing it well. But you have no business yelling at children. It is in no way, shape or form a helpful mechanism to progress any sort of treatment whatsoever. It was additionally disturbing to me that the only requirement for these staff members was to have your high school diploma or GED equivalent. No background in dealing with girls who have potential issues. Some of the staff members are like 23 years old. I did witness a physical restraint one time. It was on the front lawn. It was just an argument that like escalated. She physically got tackled by a male staff member. Then the police got called. The police came in, they restrained her. She's kicking and screaming on the ground and she definitely had an injury. There was a little bit of blood. Police took her away. Then all of a sudden we're ushered inside as if nothing happened. We didn't have a high turnover rate. Surprisingly, I think most of the same Staff was retained for my entire stay, but the one staff member that I really, really cared for got fired. She was actually someone who gave us hope and do nice things for us. She took us, me and another girl to go play tennis one day off campus and she got in a shitload of trouble. There were also certainly people who would be on certain staff members radars getting picked on. These staff members are putting together evaluations for these kids weekly. They were sending it to our parents. I don't really know what their criteria was, but they're paying attention to our every move. If you breathe wrong, they're gonna know doing that on a day to day basis. Of course they're gonna formulate their own opinions about who they like and who they don't. But it was wildly apparent, which can also fuck with your head even more because those are adults that you have no choice but to trust because you're in their custody. My therapist was actually licensed. I got an evaluation when I first got there by the therapist and they said I had oppositional defiance disorder. They said I was bipolar and that diagnosis has since been overturned. They also said I was borderline personality disorder. So they give me literature to read about people with these diagnoses. And I remember digging through these books and trying so hard to relate to something, but I never felt that. If anything, it ended up with me getting more heavily medicated on a slew of meds that I didn't need to be on. It caused so much confusion with me internally because I'm also kind of like gaslighting myself, being like, am I pretending that these things aren't happening to me? They didn't even talk about autism there. I. I can't even tell you how many of these girls I was with that are on the spectrum later diagnosed. I'm not a sole case of that. It is a blessing finding out later because things make a lot more sense. One time my therapist was out of town or something and I, for that week of therapy, had to go see another therapist and I found out that she was not licensed. We had what was called a caseload. Everybody was divided up by who their therapist was. And then we would have our group that would meet and we would discuss things. And sometimes it would be what went on in the week with everybody. Sometimes there would be a topic, sometimes there was some pretty deep stuff that was shared, but it felt if you didn't share or you didn't display any, what could be considered emotion, that you weren't making any progress. I'm heavily medicated I was so numb, and it became a hindrance. You're not making any progress because you aren't on par with these people sharing all this deep stuff. And it feels very, very forced. They had this auxiliary building, just like a big warehousey building used mostly for storage. And the other half was just like a carpeted room that we would use occasionally. They used that for seminars. They were ran by a man by the name of Mike. You were made to think this was, like, a very cool thing and a privilege to go through. They weren't really allowed to talk about it. So when you go into the seminar, you don't know what you're walking into. I started seminars at level two. My first seminar was awful. I think it was two days long. And I didn't get any sleep the whole time because I had to stay up and I had to do an extra assignment because apparently I wasn't opening up enough or displaying emotion. I can feel things, but I'm not physically manifesting tears on my face. To get through these things and show that you really had to be there. You had to do these things called do or dies. You had to write it 5,000 times. I stayed up all night, and I didn't even finish it until maybe the last 30 minutes before the seminar began. I think it's very intentional sleep deprivation. You're gonna get really emotional because you're just tired. And they succeeded in that. I definitely cried, but it wasn't for reasons that were deeper. I think the second one was two or three days. I had to dress up as a goddess. It was literally someone's old ass curtain, pinned it like a fucking toga and someone's old shoes that have been cycled through however many seminars. And then they have, like, a box of old makeup that's moldy and used by everybody. You kind of are like, ooh, exciting. You get to dress up, but you end up crying it all off at the end of the day. There's other themes, like trash, where you're wearing a trash bag, and tape trash to you. They had a whole track listing that they would use. Going through certain parts of these seminars. You start associating these songs with what you're going through. They start the seminar with this piano piece called Christophori's Dream. Then they play to watch the slow minor key progression to try to get you to open up. In the third seminar, they give you these masks, and you wear them and do this weird dance. And then you take off your masks like you're showing your true self. They played it to Natasha Benningfield Unwritten, and it broke my heart because I loved that song. And random songs they had Movin on by Rascal Fletz. They even had a Blink 182 song in there. Girls Just Want to have Fun by Cyndi Laupert. It seems very intentional with the music, at least for me. Music is something that I often associate with memories and feelings. So you can still play songs that I heard in this seminar and I will literally tell you to turn it off because it just evokes so much emotion. They mess with your head to the point that years later, I still can't listen to certain songs. You start with the attack therapy and then toward the end saying positive things, but certainly things that are more negative are going to stick around with me a lot longer than the one positive thing you said after all of that bullshit you told me. It is the same shit they do in the military When I was in basic training. They literally break you down and then they build you up. Seminars is another tool to break you down and control you. Those things had a lasting effect too, because when I got out of the first program, I really had no individual sense of self. It kind of felt like how it felt when I was in the military and everyone is in the same uniform and they want you to be the same person. That makes it a lot easier to suppress and control you. I had a couple of girls in the seminar that I was really close with. I remember thinking, this is my friend. They're gonna be easy on me. No, not at all. I felt like my heart was ripped out of my chest. I'm a scared, sad young girl. I am at a vulnerable place. It's almost like turning all of us against each other. It really was hurtful. Even if you build each other back up after, because a lot of the things they're saying, it's their perception of you. If you are in a program where you're constantly analyzing yourself and trying to make yourself in a way that shows staff members, I'm doing well, I deserve to go home. And you're getting this from your peers. It makes you sit there and think, do I need to change everything about myself? Do I really come across this way? The really hard part of it was the fact that we had to share a lot of vulnerable information that I didn't really feel comfortable sharing with everybody and especially with Mike. I had bad things happen to me with men. I don't want to share about being raped as a 14 year old with a man. The fact that your trauma was being weaponized against you. It was very hurtful and it was very counterproductive. Pile that with the sleep deprivation. It was really unusual. Very high stress. There is no aftercare. So then you just go to school the next day after this long ass seminar. How are you going to be normal for a few days after that? I completed all three seminars after that. There was this class. It was also taught by Mike. It was almost like Seminar Light Continuation of Therapeutic Approaches. Mike was just the seminar guy then. He took a more prominent position at Copper Canyon. So we were seeing him every day. I think he was the director there. Our parents had seminars too. My parents went through a seminar with Mike as well. They had to fly from Virginia to Arizona. They did theirs when I was on level three. They were not on campus. This was done in a hotel that was nearby. They used their conference room for it. I think it was like three days or something for them. There was one portion of the seminar where they brought us kids in whose parents were there. I don't know the extent of what they were doing for their seminars, but it was bizarre. I felt uncomfortable bringing up my issues in front of a group of parents that I don't know. I'm sharing information about myself because I'm asked to in this seminar to work through stuff by the guidance of Mike. I feel like I'm being judged by other parents. It's forced. You can't just be like, oh, I don't really want to talk about this right now. It was maybe more uncomfortable than our seminars because you're trying to put on a certain personality and like mask for your parents. You're doing all this quote unquote therapeutic work, but there's no real breakthroughs. It was very counterproductive. I think the only good part about that is we got to go off campus with our parents for a few hours and it had to be pre approved. It could be overnight too. When my parents came to visit me on campus, they can see there's rules and structure, but the focus of visits, it's more of just wanting to spend time and catch up with my family. They'll unfortunately never know the depth of how strict and awful these places are. I know that there are parents who have recognized that they made the wrong decision by sending their kids to places like this. I do have a family member who sent her child to wilderness and she has expressed a very deep regret for that. She wishes that she could have not done that and take it back. But what's done is done. Sometimes it's just nice to know that some parents do realize that these places are really just for profit. Money grabbing bullshit places.
