A Beaten Retreat: Leaving the Therapeutic Boarding School

 How did I get out, you may ask? I went in six months before I turned 18 and I was still there three months before I would have turned 20. 

There was no such thing as an actual program duration. Parents were told 12-18 months, but so many students had been there 4 or 5 years, with no end in sight.

 The owners enlisted the help of other students to manipulate and convince parents to leave their child in the school, pleading that they would literally die if they left. This worked on a great many families.  

Mine? Not so much. They were a harder sell. Honestly, their issue was the fact that I was aging so rapidly. I was nearly 20, and "if I waited much longer to get out and go away to college, it was going to start to look bad." 

Thank God they felt that way, because that school was hellbent on not letting me out. Ever.

When my parents had contacted them to express their intent to take me out, the owners went into their typical overdrive mode that they went into whenever a student was about to leave. 

First, they began to target me for abuse. At that point, I was disassociated most of the time. I rarely spoke. I scarcely knew I was anywhere. But they began to nitpick at me for anything I did wrong. Even things I wasn't doing. I had begun to attend distance learning community college classes after I finished high school, and I was doing well, carrying an A-B average. This was my ticket out of there, transferring into a four-year college. I kept my head down and focused on my school. 

The day came when I was supposed to go take my final exams. They came in and announced that I wouldn't be allowed, so that I would purposely fail and thereby, I wouldn't be able to transfer to college. They had someone take a paper I had written and mark all over it, making it look like I'd made an F. This was evidence, they gloated, that I was stupid. They began to break me down, tear away from me two things I knew to be true about myself: I was intelligent, and I was a good writer. 

They began to belittle me, torment me every day saying I was stupid, I was too dumb to go to college. I needed to stay there and run their kitchen, because that was all I would ever be capable of doing. They insisted that I was ugly, hideous, and fat, on top of it. They told me that I was a terrible writer. They told me I had no friends. Everything they could to to shred me to pieces was directed at me in a concentrated attack. They told me I was a white trash hillbilly who was going to end up in a trailer park in Appalachia getting beaten up by a piece of shit man. Hillbilly white trash, they called me, over and over. I was an ugly loser, a joke, no one liked me, they insisted, 

Soon, they found a reason to put me in the worst punishment there was: jumpsuit. Yes, they'd make you wear an orange prison jumpsuit, sleep on the floor without a pillow or blanket, and you'd have to "earn back" basic toiletries such as soap and a toothbrush. I'd literally done nothing wrong. Then they had groups of girls waking me up in the middle of the night, threating to assault me / cut me if I didn't tell my parents I needed to stay. And on top of that, the way they mentally broke me down convincing me I was going to die if I left that place. 

All of these actions and words sunk beneath my skin more and more each day until I began to believe them. 

I kept thorough records of all of this going on, in notebooks I had hidden, so I could expose this place once I got out. But the day came when they suddenly put me on a "writing ban" when they discovered these notebooks and had them all destroyed.

This was the same day my parents arrived to take me home. 

And yes, that not being allowed to take my finals did a great deal of damage. Those professors at that community college put in a zero for them, causing me to fail every course I had taken. All my hard work was burnt to the ground. It was very difficult for me to have to explain this whole story, as to what exactly it was that I'd been through, at every college where I applied. 

But I was able to get into the college of my dreams. This is a happy ending as far as this goes. 

However...coming out of this hell and then four months later being packed up and sent away to college wasn't a recipe for success. This is an understatement, to say the least.

Wherever you go, there you are. So it was for me. My struggles came away with me to university, too, and there was a whole lot more suffering and confusion in store for me.