← Something Was Wrong
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- [00:01]
Tiffany Reiss
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 material should not be misconstrued as a substitution for legal or medical advice. Hey friends. In this episode, Cat A survivor of Two therapeutic boarding schools, Copper Canyon Academy and Aldrin Academy, shares their experiences with us. Copper Canyon Academy, or CCA, is a therapeutic boarding school for girls in Rimrock, Arizona, founded in 1998 by siblings Tammy Berman and Darren Prince, with multiple sources also naming Patty Bowman as a founder. In 2002, the school was acquired by Aspen Education Group, which later became a subsidiary of CRC Health Group, a U.S. company that focused on addiction and dual diagnosis treatment. In 2006, CRC was purchased by the private equity firm Bain Capital. As we've discussed already this season, Bain Capital was co founded by Mitt Romney, who also had connections to Robert Litchfield, the founder of the Worldwide association of Specialty Programs and Schools, otherwise known as the WASP Network. The WASP Network was an umbrella organization that connected various for profit companies including those involved with educational consulting, marketing, adolescent transportation, billing and parent orientation programs, among others. WASP is reportedly no longer in business, according to their officials President Ken K, who made this statement in December of 2010. However, despite the reported closure, WASP has not been formally dissolved due to ongoing litigation. While the original organization may have ceased operations. It's important to note that many of these programs that still exist today, although they're not outwardly affiliated with wasp, continue to use their same model. This suggests that the influence of WASP and its controversial methods are still present. Copper Canyon Academy officially closed in 2014. Shortly thereafter, an application for licensure was submitted for Sedona Sky Academy under Lake Montezuma RTC llc. Behrman and Prince led the reopening under this entity, according to public documents. Since opening April 2014, the location of Sedona Sky Academy has housed multiple entities that share the same physical address but have different leadership. Sedona Sky Academy, Inc. Lists Aaron Smith as Executive Director. Copper Canyon Academy lists Tracy Edwards as Executive Director. Woollake Montezuma RTC LLC lists Tammy Berman as its Executive Director. Throughout its history, the facility has faced allegations of abuse and neglect. Relatedly, former Copper Canyon Academy educator Randy Scott Young was arrested just over a year after his employment at Copper Canyon Academy ended. According to a statement by Yavapai county attorney's office. In 2012, Young was caught in a remote area with a student. As a result, he was terminated from his teaching position when the school obtained his work computer and searched it for lesson plans for his replacement. Image based child sex abuse material was found. A jury trial was scheduled, but Young failed to appear and fled to Ireland to avoid prosecution. Young was eventually apprehended and brought back to Yavapai County. In 2023, he was convicted on six counts of sexual exploitation of a minor and sentenced to 50 years in prison. While his offenses occurred after his employment at cca, they undoubtedly illustrate a pattern. Although Lake Montezuma RTC LLC and Sedona Sky Academy, Inc. Maintain active business statuses, according to the Arizona Corporation Commission, the program is listed online as temporarily closed. The former Sedona Sky Academy and Copper Canyon Academy property now operates as an Emoticare facility called Emoti home Rimrock. In 2024, Emoticare launched in Arizona led by Moesh Lobel as founder and CEO, offering residential, educational and therapeutic programs for youth. While the exact relationship with Emoticare and Sedona Sky's former operations remains unclear, we have reached out to Emoticare for comment and have not received a response at the time of this episode's release. I'm Tiffany Reiss and this is Something was Wrong.
- [06:22]
Cap
Hi, my name is Cap, I'm 35 years old, I live in Chicago. I am a musician in a ska band and I have two dogs. I wanted to share about my experience in the troubled teen industry because I think it's really important for people to know what really goes on that you don't see at eye level. And I think it's important for everyone to have a voice and have their experience shared. My mom was a stay at home mother. She was married to my father who was a captain in the Navy. He was deployed quite often when we were younger for six month deployments, then he would come back for maybe three months and then he would deploy again. So he was unfortunately absent a lot during my childhood until about 1996 when he started working at the Pentagon. I have a brother, he is older than me. He went through a lot of surgeries. With my dad being deployed that was really difficult. My mother was always in the hospital with my brother. We really never knew when he was Going to go to the hospital. So I did spend a lot of time at my grandparents house. Growing up it was a saving grace that my grandparents lived so close by because they were able to give her a break when she needed it. And I loved going to my grandparents house. It was so fun. My grandmother taught me how to cook. My grandfather would always be taking me places. It was right at the beach. So we go there a lot. I have fond memories of that. My brother, we were kind of close but at the same time there was kind of a huge rift because he, rightfully so, was getting all of the attention. As a kid who had later been diagnosed as ADHD and other issues, I definitely was acting out a lot cause I wanted attention. It made the relationship with my parents pretty difficult. They started putting me in therapy and evaluations starting in 1997 and that's when I was diagnosed as being ADHD. I was seven years old. When I was going through some paperwork I did find a lot of notes from teachers and they did say a lot of things about me being very hyper and at times behaving inappropriately. They also diagnosed me as having ptsd. They believed it was from seeing my brother have seizures all the time and having EMTs in our house constantly. I can't say I really had a true grasp on what was going on. It wasn't really explained to me. I was just going in to get these diagnostic tests done and then all of a sudden I'm on ADHD meds and I don't think that my brain was developed enough to articulate whether or not I felt they were working. And I didn't feel different from having a diagnosis. I really just didn't understand anything about it. I'm still on ADHD meds and they are insanely helpful, but I also don't know life without them. So I can't help but wonder if I was diagnosed too early. I am on the spectrum as well. That didn't get diagnosed till later though. I think as soon as I hit puberty it definitely made things a lot more difficult in terms of my family's relationship. My mom would call the cops on me. She called it running away. I would take my mountain bike and I would go to the 711 to read skateboarding magazines or I would go to my friend's house down the street and play Silent Hill. But that's the extent of that. I had detention once and I was suspended from eighth grade year for the last three days of school. I brought cigarettes to school and I brought spray paint. As the years have gone by, I've come to terms with the fact that it really is normal teenage behavior. I don't think that I was in a position where I was a genuine threat to myself or others. If I were, then maybe I would have a little more understanding about why they decided to send me where they did. But I was just exploring what it was to be a teenager. In June of 2004, we had gone on a family vacation. We would go every year to Dewey beach in Delaware. One night I could not sleep, so I just got out to walk around. There was this party going on up the street. A bunch of 30 year olds having a party at a beach condo. The door was open, so I just went in and I hung out a little bit. I didn't drink. I was trying to act older than I was as a 14 year old. @ a certain point during the night, a fight broke out between two of these guys. And at that point I decided I wanted to go. One of the guys, he offered to walk me back. He's walking me along the beach and I started feeling a little uneasy. He was getting a little too touchy with me. Unfortunately, that ended up leading into me getting sexually assaulted. It was my first sexual experience. He was 36 years old. I'm still not as old as the guy who sexually assaulted me when I was 14. That is wild to me. I walked back to the family condo we were staying at. I wasn't upset at that moment. I think I was just so confused and I had no idea how to process what had just happened to me. I took a shower. I desperately wanted to tell someone what happened. But I knew that my mom would have been really mad at me for leaving the house at night. So I just remember the rest of the vacation being really weird because I was holding in this really big secret of something that happened to me. It definitely ended up manifesting into some further behavioral issues the next couple months. A little bit of sexual promiscuity. I've read up on that. That's incredibly normal. But I didn't know that at the time. It had a really big impact on me. I ended up losing my virginity the next month to someone I knew. I started doing really poorly in school for my ninth grade year. This whole thing got brought to my parents attention because they had put on a video about sexual harassment. And I guess I was just visibly uncomfortable. The teacher had pulled me aside to ask me about it. I just broke down and told her what happened. She took me to the school counselor and I Begged her not to tell my parents, but they have to. The reaction from my mother went unfortunately, exactly as I thought it would. My parents talked to me about the potential of going to a school. They handed me the pamphlet. I didn't look at it. I didn't want to go. I was promising my parents I'd get better. So I had no idea that at three in the morning there was going to be two people that put me in handcuffs. There was one man and one woman. And my parents are there. I was then told that I am going to be taken to the school in Arizona. There's definitely confusion. The medication that I was on at the time really had me way too drowsy to protest or do anything about it. I went with it at that point. It doesn't mean that I was really happy or willing to, but I was on Seroquel when I'm telling you I was too drowsy to react. I could barely stay awake. It could have also been the fact that it was so early. I have these two people put me in handcuffs and they take me to the airport. They led me through the airport in handcuffs. Upon doing further research, that's totally fine for them to do this because they have the proper paperwork, which is just stunning to me. He owns the transport company. He was tall and he was built. His nickname was Big John. She was slender and she had blonde hair. They gave me a brief overview, but it was mostly, there will be people there who will fill you in more when you arrive. And I know that he had been transporting girls to that facility a lot because I saw him many times throughout the years. My parents did not tell people. People thought that I had committed suicide. You know how rumors go. It just gets crazier and crazier. No one knew where I was because I got sent away so quickly. I mean, the turnaround time with that was like three days from when my parents contacted an educational consultant to me going. So there was really no time. I'm sure that my parents had spoken to at least some of my friends parents to let them know.
- [16:04]
Tiffany Reiss
When you reflect on it now, why do you think your parents made this decision?
- [16:11]
Cap
Because they had the money to and they didn't have the emotional energy to put toward getting me the proper help I needed. It's as simple as that. And it's really unfortunate.
- [16:31]
Tiffany Reiss
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- [18:13]
Cap
The first thing I thought is that it's insanely cold. I always thought Arizona was hot and deserty. We get inside, it's this plantation looking house. The staff members go through my stuff. They gave me clothes to change into, which was a red T shirt and a pair of sweatpants and flip flops. I remember it being really hectic. They're going through all the different intake things to get me processed. I was beyond angry. I was in tears. I don't think there's any way I could have anticipated what I was walking into. Seeing everything for myself, realizing that this is real, there's no way out of this made me very emotional and very mad. They asked me if I wanted to hurt myself and I said yeah. They then exchanged my red level 1 shirt for what is called a staff buddy shirt. And a staff buddy shirt is fluorescent highlighter yellow. You know, it makes you easier to spot if you're on suicide watch or run risk or at risk for hurting yourself. I don't know if I truly wanted to hurt myself. I at that point I think I was just so fucking mad that I felt that way in a fleeting moment. It felt like a fever dream. Probably about like 30 girls, 40 girls sitting in this common area that just has two old dirty ass sectional couches. There's only enough room for maybe like 10 people on both of them. So everyone else is on the floor. And a lot of these people were sitting in a corner, isolated, looking at the floor. There's some people that looked happy. There was a lot of crocheting. There was a movie on. They were watching Kindergarten Cop. And then there's just a staff member observing. They had me go sit by staff. I wasn't really allowed to talk to anybody at that point. But my big sister, she's an upper level girl who is meant to help me get acclimated to the program. She was a level 4. She ended up being my first roommate. After the movie, we went down to the little cafeteria area and she was running me through the rules. The big rule that was really hard to follow was level ones can't talk to other level ones. You can't look at them and you cannot be involved in the same conversation as them. It didn't make sense to me to act like a person sitting in front of me doesn't exist. A lot of the rest of the day was a blur because everything was so much all at once. I also was on my period when I arrived there. I found that to be especially challenging because all they have is the shittiest pads. They did not work. And I got in trouble for being late to the morning roll call one morning because I realized I've got to clean this up. I'm being punished for my own bodily functions. When I first got there, I think it was like 40 people. But eventually it ended up being closer to 80. Everyone was from all different places and backgrounds. There were girls there that had used drugs and drank. So I ended up learning everything I learned about drugs and alcohol from these girls. You have all these girls who are in such a high stress situation, all living together under one roof. It could get a little tense at times. But I think our saving grace is the fact that we were all in it together and trying to get out. That's everybody's goal. If I remember correctly, There were like 11 or 12 rooms in this house, all upstairs. My first room, it had four people in it. So you have two wooden bunk beds. I was on the top bunk. You have a couple dressers for your uniforms. And there were the showers down the hall. There were a couple rooms that had private showers. Our showers were seven minutes long.
- [22:41]
Tiffany Reiss
What was your standard uniform for level one?
- [22:45]
Cap
It's the red T shirt or they have the polo version, blue sweatpants and Flip flops and a sports bra. For school, you had to have khaki pants or shorts. The upper levels, they got different things, like closed toe shoes, actual bras. Level 2 and up. They could wear jeans on the weekends.
- [23:07]
Tiffany Reiss
Can you talk about the level system at Copper Canyon Academy? You mentioned how each level has a name associated with some sort of, like, intention. Level one being referred to as seeing. What exactly were you supposed to be seeing?
- [23:23]
Cap
I think their intent behind the whole seeing thing is you're past this initial integration phase and now you're seeing why you need to be here. It was to definitely be like, okay, you've accepted that you're here and you're not going anywhere, so maybe you can start working on stuff. Two months or a month and a half is like the minimum time before you can be a level two. Then you go in front of a room that has the teachers, the therapists, the staff members, and you say why you think you deserve to be on level 2, 3, 4, whatever. After they've gone through all those evaluations, they would read it out loud, who went up a level, who's on probation, and who got dropped a level. I did get dropped a level once, and I don't even remember why.
- [24:20]
Tiffany Reiss
So you eventually make it to level two, Choosing.
- [24:24]
Cap
Yes. It was somewhere between, like, six to eight months that I was in level two. It was nice to wear shoes, use tampons. The little things that make it seem like a world of difference, when in reality it really isn't. There wasn't much more in the way of, like, responsibility or anything. Once I got to level two, I was able to live in what they called transitional housing, which is living with a staff member either on campus or off campus. I got to level two and they immediately put me in transitional housing with two staff members and her daughter. I can't imagine how strange that must have been for her. It was not a large enough space to accommodate all of us. There were four of us in a tiny bedroom. There was a bunk bed and there were two military style cots. So I slept on a cot every night. I lived in several transitional homes. This one was a double wide trailer in the absolute middle of nowhere. To get to this place, you had to go up a dirt road and then down. Nothing else around it and then a cliff drop off. The only cool thing about the transitional housing is we didn't have to go to the Copper Canyon campus on the weekends.
- [25:49]
Tiffany Reiss
What did you get to do on the weekends?
- [25:52]
Cap
There was a lot of cleaning. They would take us to Church. It's the LDS church sometimes going on grocery runs. There was one transitional house that I lived in where I was essentially helping babysit their children. I remember one transitional house. We got to sunbathe in the yard on the weekend and listen to whatever was on the radio. We started school at 9am I think it ended around two or three. There was a trailer that was divided into three rooms. That was our classrooms. The middle room was kind of like a computer lab of sorts. It had four desks in it or so. To the left there was the science teacher's room and to the right there was the history, economics. I didn't feel like I was learning that much. The educational system and setup they had there was not good. They even had people there who completed high school sitting there in that little study hall room doing coursework from Brigham Young University. They didn't have access to the Internet, so they're doing all of this on their own for like college credits. The only teachers I can remember is Mr. D and Mr. Miller. Mr. D was our science teacher. I can't say that he taught me a lot. We loved Mr. D, actually. He just told us about his dating life the whole time. He was really sad guy, but he was very sweet. Mr. Miller, the history teacher, I would say he was one of the better teachers. But when you've only got one decent teacher and the rest of your schooling is really not up to par, especially for someone like me who needed a special education program, it was really hard. I was reading through a lot of these emails that my dad had sent when I was putting together information for this podcast. I didn't remember my grades were so terrible. I wasn't learning anything and nothing was truly structured and there were no programs or tutoring to really help us out one on one. The parents were definitely promised that it was going to be a good educational program. And it was a far cry from that. I think you can go to the worst public school in the country and receive a better structured, informative school year. All my reading material, it had to be like pre approved. We had a library, it had a couple of good books, but most of them were old donated books. It was so limited. The only other book that was always there is the Book of Mormon because there's a heavy Mormon influence at that school. It was just part of the culture in the transitional living. One of the staff members I lived with was the bishop of his ward. We had to go to church with them. I was considering converting to Mormonism. I actually testified in front of the church once. It makes me almost, like, sick to my stomach to think back on. I'm not a religious person, but when you take away everything that makes you hopeful, that makes you happy, you absolutely can start believing in things you didn't believe in before. It seemed like they were almost indoctrinating me into that. They offered more churches than just the Mormon church to go to. They had synagogue, they had Christian church. But when every staff member that is there is Mormon and all part of the same family, it is going to absolutely reflect in the way that things are run. Mormons, they have this thing called choose the right. Pretty much choosing the right over wrong. It's kind of like the what would Jesus do? Thing. And I got a ring that said CTR on it, and my mom was asking about it. She got visibly uncomfortable when I was telling her about it. I think it's even weirder that she didn't really question further.
- [30:19]
Tiffany Reiss
How long between when you left home to when you got to talk to your parents?
- [30:24]
Cap
It was longer than a week. I remember the phone call being on speakerphone in my therapist's office with my therapist present. And it was very short. Somewhere between like 5 and 15 minutes wasn't frequent enough. It was mostly snail mail.
- [30:40]
Tiffany Reiss
Did you try to convince them to, like, let you come home?
- [30:45]
Cap
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.
- [47:46]
Tiffany Reiss
How long do you think you stay in level three?
- [47:49]
Cap
I think it was six months, eight months, something like that. We were then allowed to wear clear lip gloss and mascara. I always felt like if there's anything good happening, something's gonna go wrong. Not the most positive thinking, but it was is realistic. You don't know if a staff member is having a bad day and they're gonna just decide to give you a bunch of work hours. It's stressful on your body too. I had a hard time sleeping when I was there all the time.
- [48:21]
Tiffany Reiss
Would you say most of the students got along with each other?
- [48:25]
Cap
Yeah, for the most part. I have friends that I still talk to and have seen since. There was a couple of people who had very strong personalities and could be a little bit difficult to deal with. But when you're in all this shit together, you're absolutely going to bond and look out for one another in the best way that you can.
- [48:46]
Tiffany Reiss
Did it feel like these kids were to you any different than the kids back home?
- [48:51]
Cap
No, they're just normal teenagers. It wasn't much different. I think there might be a little bit of clickiness at times, but any social structure is going to have, have clickiness. There were a couple people who were snitches. They're trying to get ahead in their program, trying to get rewarded by staff. So I don't blame them for it. I especially felt lonely because starting out as a freshman in high school, back home with my friends, looking forward for things that come and now I'm at school with a bunch of people I don't know. I wasn't allowed to talk with my friends. I wasn't allowed to have pictures of them. I didn't know current events of the world. I wasn't reading magazines, I wasn't watching tv. I didn't know anything. Your life at that point is only Copper Canyon Academy. I remember we had a girl come in and she had experienced the horrible tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. And I was like, hurricane what? I didn't know what had happened because we weren't watching the news. I. I missed so much. You know, there's still songs that come on the radio and I'm like, I've never fucking heard this. Well, that's because it came out when I was sent away. There's things like that that happen all the time. They had a boombox and one of the staff members would play whatever mix CD during exercise time and it was like Ace of Bass. So it wasn't anything new.
- [50:32]
Tiffany Reiss
What was for you the biggest reward that you got?
- [50:35]
Cap
At level four, I was able to email my friends. It had to be like an approved list and only three friends. It had to be an email sent to my parents through my therapist. But I was just so happy to do that. When I was writing these emails it was a tough read because the way that I'm like speaking to my friends, it was like I've grown so much as a person and let me be accountable for this shit that happened to me. Oversharing information. Some of my friends have also told me later in life that it was a really weird time for them to be my friend because I was not myself. Additionally, with level four, that's the first time that you are able to go home on home visits, which means going back to your parents house for a certain period of time. There is still like a list of rules. I had to dress modestly, no shoulders exposed, no short skirts. I was allowed to talk to friends on the phone for 10 minutes in a public space with my parents listening. It was only my three approved friends. I got to see them on my last home visit for a couple hours. It's made with the intent of acclimating to home life. But when it's been so long. The last time you were home you were 14. Everybody's gone through puberty, Everybody grows up. I would see people in public on these visits. I remember my friend was a cashier at this restaurant that we picked up food from and I didn't even recognize them at first. It was really jarring and kind of upsetting to be honest with you. Because the world doesn't stop while I'm holed up in this place and I can't come home and expect it to be the same. I couldn't even tell you what we did on these home visits. I think it was routine of what life was like before. My parents were very routine type of people. We had dinner at five, then they would make coffee and then they would go watch the news and they'd watch the evening programs. So I'm pretty sure it was just like that. I do remember helping mow the lawn and I was oddly happy about it because I was home and being able to listen to music, little things like that. But it didn't feel normal. It felt very fake and odd. It's kind of like when you haven't seen somebody in years and you're just so happy to see them. You Got like a high from that. It's like a honeymoon phase. So everything seems okay, but it's not reality. School was pretty much year round. I didn't get ahead doing that. You would think I would be able to graduate early, but I did not. No one did. We had a little bit of time off and they would like schedule activities, hikes that they took us on, the couple of scenic places that we went. Arizona is a very gorgeous place to be. We went to that giant crater in Arizona. They took us to Lake Powell in Arizona by Utah for like a camping trip. And I mean that was pretty fun. Sometimes I like gaslight myself during these conversations because I'm like, oh, it wasn't that bad. No, it was fucking terrible. There were some fun times, but very little in comparison to the whole time I was there. Copper Canyon, it's not based on when you graduate high school, it's based on graduating the level program. I was there from November 2004 to July 2006. I had a combined graduation with another girl. Staff members give speeches. My dad made a speech talking about how he was scared about me leaving the house and going through some tough times and he was looking forward to having me come home and be a new person or whatever. But you know, it doesn't really work like that. It's very hopeful thinking. It seemed like they were pretty proud of me, but I was so confused and lost and had no idea who I was other than what was dictated to me. So I didn't really know what to be proud of other than being essentially robotic and trained to use therapeutic buzzwords and I feel statements. I went home for a couple weeks preparing to go to Aldern Academy that was in North Carolina. It was described as a quote unquote step down program. So less restrictive than Copper Canyon but also a college preparatory school.
- [55:45]
Tiffany Reiss
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 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.