Episode 9: My Little Secret

Getting out and going home. Survivors recount what it was like to go home and whether getting "back to normal" will be possible.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The following episode contains disturbing and graphic accounts of survivor experiences.
It may not be suitable for younger audiences. Please listen
with care. Turning eighteen. For almost every person alive, this
birthday is a milestone, a graduation of sorts. You are
finally an adult. For students they age out of PCs,

(00:23):
it's the moment they finally escape their present. But freedom
has a price, and getting back to normal is much
harder than it seems. The day of my therapist said
what would you like to do? When I said, get
the lot and they let me go, and I'll never
forget the day one of the counselors droning in the

(00:43):
Salt Lake City Airport and put me on that plane. Um,
it was like I won the lottery. I mean, I
I uh wow, I can I can't even tell you
the feelings I can when you know you're getting away
from it, you know you're finally getting away from it.
And then for the rest of my life it was

(01:04):
with me. I couldn't ever get rid of it. Stress
is normal for humans, and we need a certain amount
of it to function, but extreme, prolonged stress is extremely
bad for any possible mental health and physical out. And
so when you've taken a person and put them into
a stressful setting where they have no social support and

(01:26):
taken away their social support at home um and then
you take them out of that setting, you are creating
a recipe for trouble. From I Heart Radio, London Audio
and executive producer Paris Hilton, this is Trapped in Treatment

(01:49):
where your hosts Rebecca Mellinger in Caroline Cole, one troubled
teen industry survivor and one investigator on a mission to
expose the truth of an industry plague by controversy and
to make sure that no child has to experience the
hell that is team treatment. From the moment you enter

(02:27):
pro Volcanian School, you're accounting the days, minutes, and hours
until your release. Many dream for months about the day
they would finally go home, the day that they could
go for a walk, lay in bed for an extra hour,
or pick up the phone and call a friend. For me,
dreaming was the only way that I got by. Maybe

(02:48):
it was because of the facility that I went to.
We weren't allowed to talk, but all I did was
daydream of those final moments when I would walk out
the front doors and never look back. Parish shared a
really similar experience. I was there for eleven months, so
it was just, uh, it was like I never knew
what I was gonna be able to have, you know,

(03:10):
freedom again, or to like go outside or see light
or anything. So the only thing that kept me saying
was just thinking about, you know, I'm gonna work so hard,
I'm gonna become so successful that you know, no one
will ever control me again. No one's going to tell
me what to do, my parents, anyone, no one will
ever be able to control me ever again. And that

(03:31):
was just what I would think about and dream about.
What a lot of people don't realize is that when
you go into a facility like this, everything is put
on hold. Your relationships, your hopes, your dreams, your goals,
everything is absolutely stopped in its tracks. So frequently what
many people do is they end up just falling into

(03:53):
this dream state where you just imagine doing normal things,
having a normal life, taking out the trash, petty your dog. Right.
And so I had journals in journals and journals that
were absolutely full of these elaborate fantasies of how I
would live my life when I got out. There's so

(04:14):
much build up on going home, but for many survivors,
including myself, it often turns out nothing like what we
had spend our time dreaming about. We talked to Jack

(04:35):
about what it was like to be home and how
it felt. Explained to me what was it like finally
leaving Provo and what happened after man leading there was
one of the biggest release of my life. Um. It
was scary because I was feeling like how they were
going to put me into another facility like that. I

(04:57):
didn't know what was going to happen, but I knew
getting out of there it was going to be probably
with the best killings of my life. It was. Um,
I mean, it's right up there with my daughter being
more and me getting there. M you know, like I mean,
you can't really describe the feeling, you know. I mean,
you know, I've been in and out of the jail situation,
you know whatever. I mean, that felt good, you know,

(05:18):
just because you know, my freedom is statement going and whatnot.
But when it comes down to, you know, being under
that kind of trauma and everything and not being told
to do there in five seconds, you know, and your
full aspect of every life being controlled literated. It's a strange,
but like huge weights lifted off your shoulders, feeling you know,

(05:41):
it's it's pretty underscreadable. For Courtney Kina Pastic, everything was
different when she got home. I was so excited, but
I also didn't think it was real because I had
like eight days. I got told like my family is
pulling you um, and so I didn't believe it at first,

(06:02):
but my parents finally came and picked me up. Still
wasn't sure if they were going to take me with them. Um.
But then I got home. I remember writing in my
journal like I'm I'm back in Illinois, like I must
be leaving. Um. It was very weird because the places

(06:23):
I went to encourage my parents to change everything, like
leave nothing the same. So my entire room was different
when I got there, like I didn't have like my
safe place. When I got there, I felt really weird.
So I never really felt like I came home, if
that makes sense. And I was just afraid of everything,

(06:46):
like they made me fear the staff members at the
school of Mamma, my parents per se um. I feared
my friends. I feared doing anything wrong. I was terrified
that I was just going to go right back there
because there were a lot of kids that it was
their second time around when they were there, like they

(07:08):
got home, and then because they don't prepare us for
literally anything, UM went right back there. The fear of
being sent back is a really common one, and being
in the program, you would see kids get sent back
and it was just pure devastation. The program that I

(07:29):
had attended had a policy that would allow three free
months if a parent felt that they needed to send
the child back. And so at this point after I
had been released, my mom and I were not seeing
eye to eye. We were getting into arguments over little things.
And I at the time was working at a small
ice cream shop and my mom had picked me up

(07:49):
and she had a duffle bag in the back seat
that already had my belongings in it, with my initials
written on everything, and she told me that she was
sending me back to the program. At that time, I
fell apart. I started hysterically crying. I told her that
I was going to throw myself out of the car,
I was going to run, I was going to do
anything possible to not be sent back. That was literally

(08:11):
a nightmare come true. I am so utterly shocked by
the fact that the facility actually had an incentive to
parents to send kids back by offering them three months.
That is crazy. Well, and it was considered somewhat of
like a warranty, Right, we guarantee our program works and
if it doesn't, then you get so many months free.

(08:32):
But they knew that once they got you back in
that program, they would always make recommendations for you to
stay longer, so ultimately they would be making money back. Yeah,
I mean it makes sense because after months in that strange,
strictly controlled environment, getting out can cause such a serious shock,
because these kids better understand living in an institution than
living at home. I mean, what was dreamed about at

(08:55):
the day of freedom is such an awkward, uncomfortable and
overwhelming feeling. Now so basic behaviors in the real world
are so unfamiliar. And for those that age out at eighteen,
I mean they're now officially adults, they are emotionally and
mentally unprepared for the realities of what the real world
is getting out of Like the hostel they put me
up for that month, and um, I was eighteen years old.

(09:18):
I had an idea because my parents had the foreside
of asking PCs to go get me like an actual
state idea in Utah. So that was Katie Mack, otherwise
known as Katherine. You guys have heard from her before.
For her, the freedom was like a drug in itself.
After months without choice, she found herself inundated with options,
and I remember just being like, oh my god, like

(09:40):
nobody is around to tell me what to do, or
to tell me what to say, or to punish me.
Like it was like it was like that Shawshank redemption
moment where he gets out and he's just like in
the rain. It was kind of like that. I remember
I had no so I've never smoked before at that
point or anything like that, and I remember being like,
I'm eighteen years old. I'm just gonna go I have

(10:01):
no interest in smoking, but I'm gonna go and buy
a pack of cigarettes and just try them, just to
try them. And I did, and they're horrible and I
don't smoke. But I remember doing that just to be like,
you know, like I was thinking myself. PCs would be
so aggry right now, like if they saw this, they
would think that I was a complete failure because I
smoke one cigarette. But I'm just doing it to say

(10:22):
I do it um, And I did um. I did
make it through that month there. Like that month it
was I was so like getting out of Provocanic school
second time. I had like no sense of like self
like understanding like street smarts and stuff. I just remember
being like having a little bit of a panic attack
being inside too much, preferring to sleep outside under the stars.

(10:44):
She found any sort of constraint unbearable, so I slept
on the beach most of the time for that month,
Like I literally said, it was a August in Santa
Monica was warm. I just slept on the beach and
just was like, oh my god, this is freedom with
like I've never had this before. The freedom was great,
but there were lingering effects from the program, specifically when
it came to being controlled in any way, like I

(11:07):
noticed like right away, like after PCs, like like the
idea of being restrained or like having you know, the
control taken away from my life because I like, right away,
like it's I started having like a physical effect on me.
And whenever I felt like that. So I remember going
in a job corps for the first time and they
were like, you won't be able to leave for the
first two weeks this is your room with other people

(11:28):
and that dada and it felt like almost like probo
canyon schoolish. So I ended up like running out of
there like my first day and didn't even spend the
first night there. And you know, I I struggle. I
would say that I struggled a lot um like I
had all this like trauma and stuff like I like unprocessed,
and I just didn't know how to handle and like, I, yeah,
this is probably where like when I see celebrities or

(11:51):
other survivors that like struggled through their twenties, like I
totally feel it because like I didn't know how to
keep a job or stay responsible or like I act
it out like in ways that I never did as
my teenage years, because I like in my early twenties,
because like I didn't know how to handle it. I
was like I was, I had all this unresolved stuff
in my head and like like trauma that I just

(12:12):
I did not know how to how to cope with.
Many don't know how to handle it. They end up
suppressing their experience at Provo just to get by, and
quite frankly, I want to forget that it even happened
to them. We asked my asalive. It's why that is
one of the ways that he would be in dealing
with trauma is just to put it out of your

(12:34):
mind and try to forget about it and never think
about it again. And people do that when they survived
you know, Holocaust or you know, any kind of extreme
sort of situation. They're just like, Okay, that happened, it
was terrible. I'm never going to think about it. I'm
going to move on. And for some people that's actually healthy.
Um for others it's not. The other thing is if

(12:56):
you just haven't been able to process what happened, and
you just want to get out on with your life
and and you know, do well in school and and
you know, get ready for a career and do whatever
you you know, wanting to do on you're just kind
of discombobulated, you don't, you know, it's it's very hard
for you to you know, think about what's happening. The

(13:19):
reality waiting outside is harsh on youth who have spent
a lot of time without basic human interaction. On top
of that, an environment of constraint, manipulation, and abuse, heightened
anti authoritarian attitudes and leave many on a worse path
than before they enrolled at the school. For Natalie Krim,
whose story we heard an episode two, it meant watching

(13:39):
her brother Michael begin to exhibit signs of extreme aggression.
I think it was he came home and you know,
it was hard for him to adjust, and he immediately
started getting into you know, selling drugs and having this

(14:03):
you know, anti authority attitude. He was had such a
high threshold I think for violence at that point, and
such a high threshold for trauma that he was in
situations that, UM, you know, we're we're just unsafe and
he um. When he came home, he started selling drugs

(14:27):
and then he ended up in jail a year and
a half later. Wow. So he went to l A
County a year and a half later after he got
home from Provo. So it, if anything, I feel like
it made a situation, UM a million times worse. At
that point, Michael had never shared what he went through

(14:49):
with his sister. It wasn't until seven or eight years
later that he broached the topic with her. He didn't
start telling me until I had um moved out of
the house. Um. Pretty much at the first opportunity that
I could, and I moved back east. And it wasn't

(15:10):
until maybe, let's see, probably eight or seven years later,
when we really just had to sit down. And remember
we were at a restaurant in Brooklyn and we sat
down and he just started telling me, um, you know,
some of the details. And even up until this point,

(15:30):
you know, he's still I can tell that there's still
a lot more that that he's just opening up about.
Michael Krim went into PROVO at sixteen and left when
he turned eighteen. Many survivors share a similar experience, with
the bulk of their adolescent in teen years spent behind

(15:51):
the walls of a program. They're ill prepared, and instead
of being fixed like the program had promised, they often
spiral into a compounded pattern of trauma coping, sometimes resulting
in addictions, homelessness, isolation, additional diagnoses, abusive relationships, and inability

(16:12):
to enjoy life. And in the midst of all that,
the one place these young people should be able to
turn to is their family, but POVO took that away
from them too. So I kind of knew I was
going home, but I wasn't going home. I definitely had
complete detachment with for my parents at that point. I mean,

(16:33):
I think, which is completely normal for a child who
has been separated from their parents for three years, all
of a sudden you start to realize maybe that attachment
is not necessary. And even now talking to my husband
about all of this, and he brought up when we argue,

(16:53):
I'm like, I'm just gonna leave anytime I you know,
we argue or have problems. We've been together for seven years, Aaron,
but I think it's from then. From then, I've always
been like, oh, I'm just gonna leave. I'm just gonna leave.
I'm just gonna leave that because I've always felt it
that it I can just pick up and go, because
we were gonna learn those skills kind of just to

(17:16):
survive with what little you have and it'll be okay.
I guess if you just keep going. It wasn't easy.
I mean, I had problems when I came home. I
attempted suicide once, I went to a mental hospital when
my I got in a fight with my mother and
she told me she was going to send me back

(17:37):
and I took an entire bottle of wristper it all
and um. But that was because she told me she
was going to send me back, and I was so scared.
I didn't want to go back. So you end up leaving,
going to southern California. What is your relationship with your

(18:00):
parents like now? Um? For a number of years, I've
never really been able to contact with my mother. She's
very hot and cold. M H. I've always been UM.
Maybe just the way I was raised, with the values
I have when something happens, I believe very strongly in family. UM.

(18:22):
My father and my stepfather passed away a few number
a few years ago, and my mom called me and
told me that she needed help. We hadn't we'd barely
spoken in years, UM, and but I helped. I dropped everything.
I went there and I helped, and I helped him,
and I helped her, and I just did that and
I helped them. But then you know, she kind of
flips super easy. Mother UM is an alcoholic. She always

(18:46):
has been. So it's real, UM, hot and cold. My father,
UM has been sober for twenty years and found God
and found forgiveness and real life experiences, and he and
I can talk openly and it's nice. We went and
saw Elton John together two years ago. Most religious experience

(19:06):
I've ever had just full of Gucci and my dad
and it was like we were like right up center.
It was so beautiful. And you know, he's great and
I get my work ethic from him and just little
things like that. But my mother still thinks I'm insane.
But my brother thinks I'm also insane. We have a
horrible relationship. Yeah, but but other than that, it's just

(19:31):
I know I'm not crazy, and that's okay with me. Well,
I think it's so common with people who have been
to facilities like this that you see these very tense
and estranged family dynamics. To say the least, this is
like me being very euphemistic about some of these family dynamics,

(19:55):
but it's true. And so I think as an adult,
a lot of us can look back and say, like, ah,
that's why, that's why that happened. It wasn't me. It
wasn't because there was necessarily anything wrong with me, or
because I even really needed any kind of treatment. If
we want to call that treatment. You know, you can
look at the family dynamics and see what let up

(20:18):
to that. I really feel like whoever came up with
those ridiculous campaigns in the late eighties and early nineties
to like in magazines. They were in Sunset magazine, send
your child here, Like who did that? Who thought that
was a great idea? I mean, it was a different

(20:40):
time when things were like so much more simpler than today,
and it's I really feel like if our parents would
have just been taught to be parents more rather than
in the eighties they were. Really it was more about
partying and like being successful and building up the successful

(21:03):
ladder in It wasn't really family values. The family value
was not really taught to that generation. It was really
skipped and I don't believe it was bad, but it
was um missing. They it was that we can hire somebody, Oh,

(21:26):
we don't need to Oh this is how we were raised. Aaron,
I believe strongly it wasn't needed. Yeah, we could have
had parents, somebody could have Like I could have been
on boarding school. It probably would have been better, because
really I don't have. The only psychological issues I had

(21:47):
today are caused by anxiety. I've had a lot of
mental health testing and I've seen doctors and I've been
diagnosed with extreme social anxiety brought on by childhood trauma.
It's from being brought to pro Volcanian school, dropped off
my parents, and then nothing when I was a teenager.

(22:15):
Going through childhoodhood trauma is such an injustice because then
from the very beginning, you're coping instead of you know,
flourishing or thriving in your life, or having excitement over
which school am I going to go to? Or making
friends or doing these different things that are truly about
character building. Right from the very beginning, you're just kind

(22:35):
of like coping, coping with stress, and that can feel
like a lot to carry, especially as you go, um,
you know, into into your twenties and you're building a life. Um,
And then at least for myself, has felt like I'm
constantly playing catch up. All right, everyone else's ten years
ahead of me and they're you know, all settled down,
and I'm like piecing things together. And I get that feeling, right,

(22:58):
You're like constantly uh, feeling like you're a few steps behind.
But what happens is when you're harmed in a system
like not just people, right that this is a system
that is supposed to protect, and when that system that

(23:18):
is supposed to protect actually harms, the natural response is
going to be to lose faith and to not trust
that system, and that widens out to other systems as well, education, um, medical,
broadly speaking, law enforcement. So when your lived experience is

(23:41):
systems that are supposed to help harm, people live with
that experience. If the months following release we're confusing and tumultuous.

(24:04):
How do these experiences hold up over years? Can survivors
ever really overcome what they went through at provo? Can
the initial rush of being free carry them through the
challenges of building a new life for themselves. You can't
even describe it, like, you can only understand it if
you've lived it, and I've lived it and seeing four
different programs they are all around that the same. It's

(24:25):
just like it was very hard to ever trust people
again after leaving these places because you see what people
can be like and what they can do next time.
Untrapped and Treatment