Amy’s Testimony

I recently finished listening to the podcast with Jordan from Maple Lake Academy and followed along with “Sent Away” several months back as it came out. I think it’s time to share how much these stories resonate with me.

Here are my main conclusions about these programs (i.e., TLDR):

a) As a whole, these programs are not helpful. Yet, in the structures we have established societally and culturally, I’m unsure of better current alternatives. We are in a siloed world, and this is a product of our relational breakdown.

b) I could have had it much worse, and I don’t deny that in ways these places can help people, but there is a lot of needless suffering that occurs in the process and for some, only this.

c) These places do significant damage through dehumanization, degrading treatment, social isolation in extreme forms, and changing social habits, but most importantly through creating immense distrust within oneself. While the big-T Traumas are devastating, the little-t traumas of daily gas-lighting have no less consequence.

d) We are not our behaviors, they are protective. We are not crazy, we need love, compassion, and non-judgment. You won’t find these mindsets in programs.

e) We need to focus on our strengths, not have our simply-human vulnerabilities repeatedly pointed out and often displayed in group settings. We need to have permission to mess up – especially in teen and young adult years – to have gentle guidance and natural consequences for learning rather than punishment and shame.

f) I picked up some very harmful habits being in a hyper-concentrated environment of distraught and mistreated individuals; nobody looked at our real, underlying problems of complex trauma, nor appreciated our understandable desire to cope with this pain with the best skills we had available.

g) I want to do more, I want to speak up, I want to help, I know I’m just one of thousands. I’m grateful to be here with you even if this is how we have convened.

My name is Amy Richards and I spent July 2012-December 2015 (from the age of 14-18) in various forms of treatment across the southwest US, ending up finally in Utah. While one would think forceful hospitalization and treatment stops at 18, please know there are many mechanisms by which you can be forcefully hospitalized (and also made to pay for this care) while an adult. While my contiguous residential and inpatient treatments ended at the turn of 2016, I continued outpatient appointments for years after. And in 2018, at the age of 21, I was coerced and then forcibly re-hospitalized in Utah. I have only recently returned to therapy after a much-needed break. I had been in therapy consistently since I was a young child – individual and family – with no choice.

Back to the beginning, I was born and raised in San Francisco, CA. Two siblings, one older and one younger, and two divorced parents. It was a toxic divorce to say the least, parents constantly in court, non-communicative, and allowing their feelings about one another to be well-known to us kids (extra points if we were on their side!). Us kids each had our way of coping and mine was to mediate, white-lie, and be a perfectionist. I never aced any of those roles but trying felt like the closest thing to hope, protection, nurturance, acceptance, and safety. Until my teen years my primary outlet for “being enough” was competitive gymnastics. But at the end of 8th grade (in 2011), it was decided for me by my father and our family mediator that I needed to stop due to the stress it would impose during high school.

Though the stop was a relief in some ways from the anxiety and constant feedback stream of being worthless, it was also decimation of my life, relationships, and identity in one day with no replacement. Kids can be damn resilient, but when your parents don’t teach you flexibility, adaptiveness, emotional intelligence, or emotional regulation – and in addition you have no community or family behind you to truly hold and support you in the way needed – you don’t know how to cope with this major upheaval. Not only was I young, due to this underdevelopment, but I was also emotionally infantile. I managed for a bit but soon that gymnast identity and body that made me feel special enough and accepted began to slip away. I tried to do all I could to get these back or replace them – it all coming out sideways in the beginnings of various eating disorders, OCD specific to schoolwork, and severe attachment anxiety in the absence of my mom’s presence.

Needless to say, I was terrified of myself, of life, and of others. The spiral downward was quick and destructive, landing myself in a medical hospital and from there the treatment center roller-coaster began as did the fighting with insurance companies for coverage, and my poor parents fighting to keep me alive and to have enough money.

In the course of my treatment years, I had 11 stays in a medical hospital, 3 stays in a psych hospital, 4 stays in an inpatient setting (level between hospital and residential common in eating disorder treatment), 10 stays in a residential/boarding school/group home setting, and 2 periods of PHP/IOP. This doesn’t account for the many years of therapy, psychiatry, dietician visits, and other general doctors’ appointments I attended – few of my own volition. I was mostly “in” for eating disorders, suicidality, anxiety, depression, self-harm, OCD, and running away. What I really should have been seen for was not my behaviors (which were just sources of protection for a very scared girl), but my underlying complex trauma and loneliness born out of an absence of loving and secure relationships from day one. In all of this, I have done some very permanent damage to my body, as did the number of psych medications I was placed on (via manipulation, threat, and force) with very little care for their real effects. PSA: We should be concerned about side effects; our bodies have natural alert systems when messed with for good reason, born of centuries of ingrained bodily wisdom.

I was also completely separated by court from my mother midway into my stays, which was facilitated by a treatment center and my father. While I understood the need for distance from my mother, cutting off all communication in a day’s time when my original attachment wounds underlying my deep-set loneliness and a sense of lack of safety came from precisely this disconnection, was among the biggest mistakes possible. This separation highlights the entire nature of the system, and thus the problem. That’s what stumps me, after thousands of years of trauma and growth, we know humans need love, acceptance, and authentic connection with a variety of people, places, and things such as animals for healing. These are specifically – and often intentionally – stripped from teen programs. We are left with commodified machines pumping kids in and out (adults too!) for profit. This system is simply a symptom of a much larger disjointed and dehumanizing atmosphere in society. These programs entirely miss the source of the underlying pain – familial, cultural, and social environments. Tearing teens out of these environments only to place them back in and/or overlooking these sources while instead pointing fingers at the teens, well this is entirely illogical and shame-inducing.

Here’s what I found out on the other side of these places. They are all very similar, some slightly better than others but they share themes. You aren’t a human. You aren’t a social creature. You aren’t to be trusted in much of anyway and in fact, you shouldn’t trust yourself. You aren’t enough and you caused the destruction of your family. Only you are to blame for your destroyed life. It’s all just your “choice”, if you will yourself to act differently then all will be bright, and if you don’t…have fun with your self-made resting place in jail, on the streets, or down below. The exact names of places I attended I find to be of little relevance, they are all potentially lethal to the soul, if not your mind and body as well. Well through college and even into today the road is still very, very rough and I have had to find my path of healing on my own.

I do not know where I would be specifically without my various treatment stays, but I am certain there was a much faster, less harmful way through my distress than what I am still mopping up. It would have involved genuine compassion, curiosity, non-judgment, trust, respect, and dignity amongst other traits including competence and well-trained professionals that were so few and far between. It was only when I encountered these traits briefly – due to staff who recognized the dehumanization in the system and the human in me – that I found a brief respite for my soul and the love necessary to grow and risk change. So, after all of this, what has actually come to help me?

To sum it up, stop the cycle of self-hatred and replace it with compassion and trust. Think you don’t have some of this and you were in treatment? I really encourage you to think again. Of all the harms, that outranks the others by far. The constant suspicion of yourself you are encouraged to have internally due to the external distrust. In the treatment process for kids and adults alike, inside and outside centers, we are encouraged to only focus on ourselves as we heal. Told it’s a prerequisite for our helping others to heal ourselves first. But humans heal in the community and humans find purpose (a critical element for healing) in serving others. There is no outlet for this in treatment, no genuine understanding of the human condition. I found my greatest growth in treatment not because of anything a program did but because I decided to listen to that intuition and began treating everyone with generosity, dignity, and care. I began lending my experience and help where I could to build others up, of desperate need in such disempowering environments. It is in giving of these things we may also receive them.

When aspects of the centers did help, it was because of staff who took their time to see me, all of me, with compassion and acceptance. Who I wasn’t a number or a nuisance to. Let me be clear, I do believe many staff come in with good intentions (albeit many also with dysregulating and unresolved issues of their own) and have good hearts. But once in this system that teaches them to be suspicious and that we’re only trying to manipulate, you get exactly what has happened in our political arena and other realms of society too – fingers being pointed, dehumanization, and toxic mistrust. Everyone loses, everyone burns out, and hurt is transferred where it could have otherwise been transformed.

I know this has been long, though really is just a brief synopsis of my time; there is so much more to say and share. I would love to continue connecting with others. I know I want to do so much more with this community. I know so much more can and must be done. As of now, there is no place in a society built for us beyond being put away somewhere (I created a video briefly about this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSoupRYobpg), which is a significant problem due to the number of growing teens struggling. Again, I believe these struggles are a symptom born of a, dare I say, unraveling society and so our goal should not be to simply patch over the wound – especially when our patches are tattered and searing at best – but rather to take a hard look at our culture and ways of supporting one another. Perhaps that is what we are here to start; we are a society in deep pain with diminishing resources to heal. Do you see sit too?

Today I’m learning to belong to myself, to listen to my inner compass, and to not people-please. I’m seeking genuine relationships and spaces of hope, vibrance, and joy. I’m making sincere repair of the relationships compromised and embracing healthy humility. None of these were truly available to me in programs, instead I remained a societal misfit, convinced of my fundamental brokenness. I can only wish that you too find your own path to these bright and grounding sources as you heal from both your initial suffering and what may have been added to it.

With love, Amy Richards