Recovering from Recovery: How I Recovered My Identity and My Life After Decades in the Troubled Teen Industry and a Fundamentalist 12-Step Group...

In the spring of 1998, at age 12, I was sent to be evaluated by a therapist with supposed expertise in substance use problems after my mom found something written in my diary about drug use and was understandably concerned. I was never told the reason for the evaluation or asked about what I wrote, but rather was interrogated with questions about my drug use and, when I answered honestly, she continued to interrogate me like she thought I was lying.

Feeling so pressured to admit to more, I finally told her that I had tried marijuana and that I had seen cocaine once, neither of which were true. In reality, I had only ever drank alcohol a couple of times and had never even tried any illicit drugs. I had experimented with my dad’s pain pills that he was prescribed after an accident for a short time, which was what I had written about in my journal, but that had ended months prior and never even came up during the evaluation. I had not used any drugs, licit or illicit since.

Despite there being nothing that should’ve warranted it, a short while later, I went to my regular family therapist and was told that I was being sent to a high-end inpatient rehab with a unit for adolescents immediately following that appointment. I couldn’t understand what was happening or why...and I felt completely powerless. I was admitted that day, based solely, as far as I know, on the referral from the therapist and my parents’ signatures and despite again having a negative drug test and, by their own admission, not meeting criteria for any “substance dependence”. However, any consideration for a less restrictive treatment option, such as outpatient counseling, seemed to have been ruled out for no known reason.

To my knowledge, I was the youngest person ever admitted to this rehab at that time. I found out shortly after being admitted that the other therapist who referred me had a daughter who was currently inpatient at that facility at the time she referred me there. Neither she nor the rehab seemed to recognize that this could have clouded her judgement nor could represent a conflict of interest.

Upon admission, I was put on a 5-day “blackout”, where I was not allowed to talk to anyone, even my parents. Once I was allowed to talk to them, it was only under staff supervision. I spent 6 weeks in total there, 4 in Primary Care and 2 in Extended Care. I would’ve spent longer in Extended Care, which the facility recommended for everyone regardless of the severity of their problems, but the insurance company wouldn’t cover it and my parents could only afford 2 weeks at the time.

How the rehab justified the need for inpatient to the insurance company in the first place, which paid for the first 4 weeks, I still do not know. My experience with this rehab overall was that they did not seem to individualize treatment recommendations to the patients at all, but rather had a “one size fits all” approach that seemed to be based on the belief that the more “treatment” a young person gets, the better, regardless of the severity of their issues.

I was regularly “assessed” (aka interrogated) by professionals from various disciplines and the assumption seemed to be that, since I was there, I needed to be there, and they had to find out why. With each assessment and the daily groups and lectures, I felt continually pressured into admitting to more and more drug use that never happened and, to appease the staff and fit in with my older and much “cooler” peers, I did. When I did try to tell the truth, I was not believed or was told that I was “minimizing” or “in denial”.

While there, my parents and I were “educated” about my “chronic, progressive, incurable, fatal disease” and told that I was “a liar and a manipulator” and that anything I said that contradicted the rehab or the 12-Step philosophy was evidence of my “disease”. I was forced to attend 12-Step meetings and to identify with the label of “addict”, which I proceeded to do for the next almost 20 years.

I did not use any drugs after discharge until a little over a year later, when I accidentally overdosed with a friend I’d met at rehab and was in a house fire, resulting in being in critical condition and on a ventilator for several days due to carbon monoxide poisoning and anoxia. I was sent back to the same rehab directly from the hospital for a couple of weeks, where I was severely bullied, ostracized from the community, and told by my peers that I was lying about the fire and staff didn’t intervene or correct them.

I didn’t feel I could tell my parents what was going on because I could never talk to them unsupervised or out of earshot of the other patients. When I was left behind on the unit by myself one day, I ran away out of desperation, but was convinced to return to the facility and discharged shortly thereafter. Upon discharge, I started high school and, based on the rehab’s recommendations for aftercare and a “family contract” which I had agreed to again in order to get out, I was forced to attend an Intensive Outpatient Program (IOP) almost every day after school, to go to additional meetings on a weekly basis, and was not allowed contact outside of school with my friends, even though they had nothing to do with the drug use that preceded my return to treatment.

Feeling overwhelmed, trapped, and like I wasn’t allowed to have a life outside of school or treatment, in addition to not having the time or rest for my brain to heal, I became more and more depressed, angry, and emotional. At that point, at age 14, I was sent to the first of many psychiatric facilities to be evaluated and treated. I was placed on a cocktail of heavy psychiatric drugs, including a neuroleptic, which at the time was only approved for use in adults with psychosis but was illegally marketed for use in children, and which is contraindicated for use in anyone recovering from a brain injury.

Despite the evaluation determining that I did not meet clinical criteria for ANY psychiatric diagnosis at that time (for insurance purposes, I was given a generic diagnosis), I was sent home on all these medications and continued to be medicated on a constantly changing cocktail from then until almost 10 years later, when I finally got off them as an adult. Throughout the following decade, I experienced numerous side effects from the medications, including having tremors so bad I could hardly write, feeling sedated and emotionally numbed, having increased anxiety and more difficulty with impulse control, feeling suicidal, and having huge gaps in my memory.

I also eventually began to develop the early signs of tardive dyskinesia, although thankfully, that was reversible, and have had other as-yet-unexplained neurological side effects, which disappeared after I stopped the medication. Despite that evaluation stating otherwise, I was told that I had a “mental illness” and would likely need medication for the rest of my life.

Over time, everyone involved in my “treatment”, including my own parents and myself, seemed to see all of my thoughts, emotions, and behavior through the lens of “mental illness”, rather than within context. I felt like I ceased to be a person and became instead a collection of symptoms. I was subsequently treated about a year and a half later at two other psychiatric facilities following suicide attempts. At one, I was restrained for the first of many times. I had everything taken from me, including my own dignity.

I was forced to eat with my hands because I wasn’t allowed to have plastic tableware. I couldn’t shower or use the bathroom in private. I was sometimes forced to wear huge, bulky “mittens” because I was scratching my skin due to eczema, but they interpreted that as self-injury. And I couldn’t leave the unit when all the other patients left for physical activities, meals, or school, because of my “history of running” from rehab and the IOP program. At the other, my treating psychiatrist took me off the antipsychotic drug overnight, which threw me into a psychotic episode that I didn’t come out of for another month and a half. I was an adult before I learned that that episode was not proof of my “illness”, but the result of antipsychotic withdrawal.

After being rejected by my best friend at the time that following fall and then thrown out of school for throwing water on a teacher, I felt my life falling apart and my emotions and behavior got more out of control as a result. I was subsequently treated at numerous inpatient and outpatient psychiatric and addiction treatment facilities. During this time, I made the somewhat conscious decision to leave 12-Step programs and to purposefully engage in drug use, partly to find some relief from the feelings of worthlessness and lack of control over my own life and partly to feel I wasn’t living a lie.

I continued to be overmedicated and was repeatedly physically, mechanically, and chemically restrained. I would be strapped down and forcibly injected with a drug that would sedate me. This happened frequently enough that I trained myself to consciously relax my muscles as soon as I saw the needle, so that I could later sit and walk without pain. As things continued to get worse despite -- in fact, as a result of multiple treatments, I was eventually sent against my will to a private, out-of-state Residential Treatment Center on the other side of the country and was a resident there from 06/2002-08/2003 (ages 16-17).

Upon admission, I was restrained, strip searched, and forced to shower with staff watching. While there were some helpful and positive things about my time there, I also experienced verbal, psychological, and physical abuse, and medical neglect. I was completely isolated from the outside world. Phone calls, even with my family, had to be approved, were very limited, and were monitored by staff, and all mail was screened. We didn’t have access to television, radio, internet, or news.

I did not see my parents without supervision for 6 months and, by that time, they had been instructed to disregard anything negative I had to say about the facility. We were regularly forced to do manual labor, mostly without pay, or we would be promised pay for a “work project” only to have it denied upon completion because our work wasn’t up to professional standards.

There was no privacy, no doors on the bedrooms, only saloon doors on the bathrooms, and we had to do absolutely everything “as a group” with our dormmates, the only exception being once a week individual “therapy”. There were rarely even any exceptions or accommodations made for illness or injury since all medical problems were viewed simply as “attention seeking”. I was put in “5-point” prone physical restraints almost every day for months on end, which were primarily used for control and punishment rather than safety. Sometimes I experienced verbal or physical abuse while being restrained. One time, a staff member screamed verbal insults at me while I was restrained. Another time, a male staff member held my arm so hard that I was in tears from the excruciating pain, but when I asked him to just loosen up a little on that arm, he said he wouldn’t until I calmed down. Afterwards, I had no muscle control of that wrist for almost two weeks, although I can’t explain why because I was never allowed to see a doctor about it and thankfully it resolved on its own. The vast majority of the times I was restrained, I was not a danger to myself or others; I simply had the audacity to think that I should retain some bodily autonomy and control of my own life. This “noncompliance” was used to convince me and those around me that I deserved this “treatment” and that I brought it on myself.

The supposed “treatment” itself was based on group confrontation from peers, was mostly focused on compliance and, once again, the blame for all my problems fell on me without any consideration for any external circumstances or people that contributed. I graduated high school there and was discharged a month before I turned 18 directly to the rehab I had been at when I was younger for another 3 months in their Extended Care program. I returned to that rehab once more, voluntarily on my 19th birthday and was admitted into their Adult Relapse unit for a month followed by 3 months in a highly coercive and exploitative out-of-state long-term rehab for adults.

Since then, I have not returned to any inpatient facility in over 17+ years and have been off all psychiatric medication for over 13+ years. While the treatment I received in the Adult Relapse Program was much better and more individualized than the treatment I experienced as an adolescent, I doubt now that I would’ve ever needed it had I not received indoctrination into 12-Step principles and the “disease concept” at such an early age.

In my case, the treatment itself became a self-fulfilling (and arguably self-serving) prophecy. In both the addiction and mental health systems, I was “treated” until I developed whatever condition they were “treating” me for, and then that was used as evidence of the appropriateness of their treatment. I now consider this a form of gaslighting common to many like me who’ve experienced institutional abuse.

As a result of all the treatment in my adolescence, I spent a decade in my adulthood in a highly fundamentalist, cult-like 12-Step group. I was introduced to this group by the man who later became my husband shortly after returning home after a year and a half away and quickly joined, although I was initially a bit put off by what I considered rather extreme beliefs. They used my past to convince me that I was completely powerless over everything, that I had a “spiritual malady” caused by extreme selfishness and self-centeredness, that “all of my problems were of my own making” and that only they had the solution. They told me that if I followed their path, it would fix all my problems.

By this point, I already mostly believed that I was broken, worthless, and that my future was hopeless and since, at the time, they were the only people in my life offering me any hope or seeming to see any value in me, I jumped in.

Some aspects of it did genuinely help me, such as the sense of hope, community, purpose in life, and feeling like a valued part of something greater and like I had something to offer others, but that was mixed in with toxic messages. I was taught that I was “selfish and self-centered to the core” and that I shouldn’t trust myself, my own thoughts, emotions, especially anger, and experiences. We were to constantly monitor ourselves, to never be “selfish”, which equated to never wanting anything or thinking of ourselves at all, to always put others ahead of ourselves regardless of anything, to never be angry, and to essentially give all our power over to the group (they would’ve said it was giving our power over to a Higher Power, but the group served to interpret that for us since we couldn’t trust ourselves).

The control of the group and individual sponsors on its members often went far beyond what they claimed of simply guiding the person through the 12-Steps to being given “suggestions” aka directives on personal matters. One of the more extreme but not uncommon examples of this was when my husband’s sponsors told him he needed to leave me and give up his parental rights to his son from his first marriage (thankfully, neither happened).

I watched people who didn’t follow these “suggestions” be considered “unwilling” and ostracized from the group, which I was terrified of because I truly believed that the group had saved me. In the end, although my external life greatly improved, my internal life deteriorated to the point of feeling suicidal, which is when I began the long process of healing from all the trauma and the internalized messages I’d received, learning to trust myself again, and eventually leaving.

This was a gradual process of developing some support outside of the group and being introduced to ideas which seemed true, but that contradicted what I had been indoctrinated to believe. Just getting the courage to leave in and of itself was monumental, since I had been taught and believed for a long time that if I left, “on my own” I would lose everyone and everything I cared about and destroy my life.

Then began the process of deprogramming and trying to reconstruct my life, identity, beliefs, and relationships. I now have a successful career in advocacy and am still happily married to the same man, who also got out. We had our first child together and bought a house after leaving. I also now drink in moderation and use medical marijuana for the PTSD I got from having been in the system to begin with.

I find that I do not have any issues with either after all and I’m learning to trust my own experiences rather than what others tell me they are. I spent decades blaming myself for everything that happened, believing I deserved it all, that I was “ill” and couldn’t trust my own thoughts, emotions, or experiences. I was gaslighted and abused by the same industry that was supposed to help me.

But I am no longer letting anyone else give me my identity or tell me my story. I have found healing in speaking my own truth and I hope that my story might inspire others to speak theirs.

~Kim