I know many of you have heard or read the stories of my past quite a few times. I have shared a handful of posts on social media talking about the abuse I’ve endured and being put in foster care. What I have not gone into detail about is what happened while I was in foster care. It’s something I rarely talk about. I like to try to forget that it ever happened. But the other day, I was scrolling through Netflix and decided to turn on The Program. I did not know what I was getting myself into. Listening to these people describe the same things I went through as a child made my stomach sink. I had always thought that the place I was in was just some off-the-radar hellhole that slipped through the cracks. I could have never fathomed that this was part of a network of other organizations that followed the same programming. Organizations that are still up and running today. This is why I am going to share my story. To spread awareness.

This will be an ongoing project that I will update as I have time. Rehashing all of this has been difficult. I also want to point out that there is very little evidence that the facility I was housed in even existed. The majority of the things I’ve gathered are just the best of my recollection, information I’ve pulled from letters from back then and a few pieces of paperwork that I still possess.

How I ended up in a TTI facility

A few days before my 16^th birthday, my father molested me for the last time. I told my sister, who told her dad, who told a police officer.

My father was never removed from the home.

Social services got involved and told us that either he could move out or I could. My parents chose to release me into foster care… but not before my mother told me that if I didn’t keep my mouth shut, he would go to prison, someone would kill him, she would be homeless, and it would be all my fault.

They came to get me when I was at my friend’s house down the street. I didn’t know they were there. My mother called and insisted that I come home right now. I walked into my house and was immediately greeted by two strangers who were holding a garbage bag full of some of my things that my mother had collected for them. They did not let me go any further into the house. The large man standing just inside of my house, took me by my arm and physically escorted me to the backseat of the sedan they were driving. I was placed into the backseat with child-locked doors. The trash bag full of my things was put in the trunk.

I sat in the backseat of that car for what felt like forever. I had rarely been outside of a few mile radius of my home for my entire life, so even a 30 minute drive could feel like an eternity to me.

These people brought me to a shelter in Wayne county. It consisted of 3 buildings, 1 for boys, 1 for girls and 1 for administrative staff and pregnant girls. The buildings were fenced in with barbed wire. We didn’t have contact with the outside world in there and it was chaos. I was in there for a few weeks, which felt like eternity. I ended up taking apart a disposable razor and carving “I want to go home” in my leg. A cry for help that I had no way of foreseeing would lead to me entering my “program.”

My social worker told me that I would be difficult to place now, but there was this nice family up north with a lot of kids that would take me. She took me on a 2+ hour-long car ride to the schoolhouse, took all of my belongings with her, and left me there. I don’t think I saw her again until my court date to leave.

It would be a few more months before my lawyer informed that I was there because I need “psychiatric care”.

What life was like at Bridges Assessment Center (BAC):

Before I get into what the experience of being institutionalized was like for me, I want to paint a clear picture of the situation I was living.

Living Situation:

The facility I was in was a 2 story schoolhouse surrounded by farmland. 

This is the inside of the school house to the best of my recollection (and 3D building skills)

Schedule:

• Wake Up
  We were expected to get out of bed at “wake up time,” and if you did not, you would be flipped off of your mattress onto the floor and restrained.
• Make Bed
  We were expected to make our beds perfectly with tight hospital corners.
• Hygiene/Work on program
  We were to sit at the tables and work on our program while we waited for our turn in the bathroom. Each girl had 5 minutes which was timed. This included getting dressed, putting your hair up, brushing your teeth, and using the restroom.
• Work Out
  We did the same work out routine consisting of basic exercises every morning. Arm circles, jumping jacks, sit-ups, push-ups, etc.
• Go upstairs for breakfast/meds
  We got a single-serve box of cereal, a carton of milk, and toast every day for breakfast. Meals were timed.
• School
  On Saturdays this time was used for cleaning the facility. On Sundays I think this was filled with an activity of the staffs choosing.
  A teacher from the public school system came into the facility to teach us. We had a few different teachers who would come on different days. We all learned the same curriculum regardless of our age/grade level.
• Go downstairs for bathroom break
  We were only allowed to use the bathroom at scheduled bathroom breaks. We would line up and tell the staff holding the toilet paper if we had to go #1 or #2. #1 would get you 2 squares of Tp and #2 would earn you 5. We would then line up outside of the bathroom, which had no door and wait for our turn. When we were done we would wait in line, also outside of the bathroom, at the door to go back upstairs.
• Go upstairs for Lunch
  We had a menu that cycled through the same things for lunch each week. Meals were timed.
• School
  See “school notes” above
  On Saturdays & Sundays this was a group activity of the staffs choosing.
• Go downstairs for bathroom break
  See “Bathroom break” notes above
• Group activity of staffs choosing
  There were a handful of activities that the staff would choose from. We had a volleyball court, horse-shoes, croquette, botchee ball and tetherball outside. There were a handful of board games. Depending on the weather we would either do something outside or play a board game.
• Dinner
  We had a menu that cycled through the same things for dinner each week. Meals were timed.
• Work on program/downtime
  This is when we would sit at the tables downstairs and work on program and if we were done with our petitions we could write letters, draw or read.
  Sometimes we had a religious group therapy type of thing during this time.
• Snack
  Anyone on a high enough level who ate all of the food served to them throughout the day would get a snack. I think it was a granola bar.
• Hygiene
  Each girl had 10 minutes to use the bathroom, shower, get dressed and brush their teeth. A staff member stood in the bathroom next to the open shower stall while we showered. Shampoo and conditioner were squeezed directly into your hand. Once a week, if you were on a high enough level, you were allowed to shave the bottom of your legs with a pink lady bic razor. Staff watched as you shaved to make sure you only shaved what was allowed. When you turned off the shower staff would hand you a towel and move from the bathroom to the doorway and watch as you got dressed. They would put toothpaste on your toothbrush and watch you brush your teeth.
  While you waited for your turn you were to sit at the tables and work on program, read or draw.
• Bed
  Once hygiene was done we all had to go to bed. You were not allowed to get out of bed for any reason. There was no talking or purposefully moving allowed. If you were ‘being disruptive’ and it was before shift change staff would flip you off of your bed and restrain you.

Levels & Point System:

We were told the “program” was to teach us to be socially acceptable. The motto was ‘Fake it til you make it’

There were 4 different levels. Technically 5.

To keep your level or advance from one level to the next you must meet specific criteria.

If you break any rules, you get points. The amount of points is decided by the owner when he is notified of the rule you broke. You can get .5-3 points for each infraction. Receiving any points at all disqualifies you from advancing your level. Getting 1 or more points will result in you losing one or more levels. Receiving a .5 was up to the owner on whether or not you lost your level from it.

If you “lose” your level with a major offense (they choose to restrain you for some reason) you are considered to have “lost all of your levels” and are removed from program. When this happens, you are separated from the group. One of the staff members will stay with you on a floor separate from everyone else. The only thing you will be allowed to do during this time is sitting at a table, write petitions to get back on level, take your prescribed meds and eat plain cheese sandwiches for meals. If you refused to participate, you would be forced to sit at the table until you did. If you tried to do anything other than sit at the table, you would be restrained.

Each week, you had to write a petition to the owner, based on a list of core values we were given, that explained how you used that core value this week and how you were going to use the next one on the list next week. If he thought your petition was good enough and you did not get any points, you would either get to keep your level or advance to the next. Each level had an amount of time you had to be on it before you could advance to the next. If you lost your level, you started over from the beginning of the level you are demoted to. If you did not get any points at all, the quickest you could advance to the final level was about 6 months.

(I only got points once or twice, and for minor infractions and it took me 9 months to get out. I was in there for a shorter amount of time than anyone else had ever been in there)

You start at 1.

Level 1 – You are able to participate in the program. You have no extra privileges.

Level 2 – You are able to participate in the program. You get to participate in movie night or extra activities when/if they arise. You get to write with a pen instead of a pencil.

Level 3 – Level 2 privileges. You get to have a 10 minute phone call 1x per week with a person of the owners choosing at the staff desk with staff listening and everyone else at the tables next to you. I think we also had an old computer that we were allowed to play solitaire on for 10 minutes.

Level 4 – Level 2 & 3 privileges. The phone call is replaced with in facility visits with a person of the owners choosing for 1 hour a week, in front of the staff and other girls. If this goes well and you keep your level for long enough, you will then get 24 hr overnight home visits with the person who you are going to be living with. You must successfully complete these 4 times before they will recommend that the court release you. You were expected to follow program rules, including staying within line of sight of your guardian on home visits, and you and the guardian were required to fill out a questionnaire about how the visit went. You were not allowed to bring anything back with you from the visit, and if you were caught trying, they would give you a major infraction and move you back to level 1. If your guardian answered any questions negatively, you would also receive points for that and put back however many levels the owner felt necessary.

Rules:

• No outside belongings are allowed. No exceptions. We were searched upon arrival and our social worker took all of our belongings when we got there.
  Clothing provided: Every new arrival is supplied with 2 plain cotton unisex T-shirts, 2 pairs of jeans, 2 pairs of knee length shorts, 2 pairs of plain pjs, plain white cotton panties, plain white socks, one brown belt, one pair of plain tennis shoes, one pair of brown prison slides, one coat and one hair tie.
  You are supplied with a bar of soap, a soap holder, a toothbrush, a toothbrush holder and a brush. Shampoo, Conditioner, and Toothpaste were community property that was dispensed by staff.
• Hair must be pulled back into a ponytail. Shirt must be tucked in. Belt must be worn. Slides must be worn inside, tennis shoes are only allowed when going outside.
• Must be in line of site of staff at all
• No talking about the ‘outs’(Life before placement, pop culture was okay.)
• No talking about unapproved subjects (drugs, sex, etc)
• No talking outside of ‘social’ times – meals and game time.
• No standing up without permission.
• No touching anyone.
• Do not be disrespectful.
• Do not make assumptions
• No cussing.
• No lying.
• No tattling.
• No one-upping.
• No looking out windows or doors.
• No ‘watching other peoples business’ (If someone is in trouble or being restrained you’re supposed to pretend it’s not happening and continue on with your business)
• May not use the bathroom outside of designated bathroom times.
• No passing gas without asking permission to go stand in the corner.
• No burping.
• No cracking knuckles.
• No skin picking.
• No playing with your hair.
• No chewing on anything.
• Must eat all food served to you.
• Must follow program schedule, even when sick.
  “Rest time” and OTC meds are not permitted. You’re only allowed in bed at bedtime.
• Must appropriately participate in all activities. No sore winners or sore losers in games.
• Must sit up straight with feet on the floor.
• When the group is traveling from one spot to the next, everyone must stand in a perfectly straight, quiet line and walk in an orderly fashion.
• Must take all prescribed meds.
• Clothing and letters must be stored in an orderly fashion in one of the 3 drawers on your side of the bunks.
• Letters must be owner-approved before being sent or received. He would read each letter, and if he decided it was inappropriate, he would dispose of it without saying anything. Letters were only delivered once every 1-2 weeks.
• Girls on their period were only allowed to wear pads.

Extra Facts:

The owner died, his wife who was his business partner is still alive though. They did sell the company sometime before his death though.

This place was in the middle of nowhere. None of us were from the area. We had no way to escape and even if we tried, there was nowhere to go. Someone did escape once and was caught in a cornfield and restrained and brought back beaten up. They also made it clear that this was farmland where people shoot trespassers, especially ones like us.

Most of our social workers did not come see us. Mine didn’t come to check on me. She just ‘had other peoples workers check on me’. Those social workers did not talk to me.

We had a therapist come into the facility. We would go downstairs, away from the group, for therapy. Our therapy was done in a room with a camera that recorded us and gave the owner a live feed.

Bunk mattresses were the plastic prison mats. The bedding was scratchy sheets, one green felt blanket and one thin pillow.

We did not have access to media. No TV, Radio, Internet, etc. We had 1 mix CD of ‘appropriate’ songs that we listened to once a week when we cleaned.

We had a handful of approved VHS tapes, all old or religious, and if you were on a high enough level you could watch a movie on Saturday evenings. I don’t remember if this happened weekly, biweekly or monthly.

We were not allowed to have access to things like magazines or newspapers. One of our teachers did manage to get an approved outing to the library once or twice while I was there. The books we checked out had to be approved.

We did have a bookshelf full of books in the facility. (I read all of them including the encyclopedias and dictionary)

You could be restrained anytime they felt they needed to physically control you. This means if you don’t get up when told to, if you get up without being told to, if you’re picking at your skin or doing something else with your body and don’t stop when being told to, if you get verbally aggressive, etc.

A couple of times in the summer, we went to the owner’s property where his cabin was, and we camped in tents and spent the days cleaning up his property and chopping and hauling wood. We were rewarded with being off camera, decent food and smores.

There was another facility located a few miles away. It was a larger facility. There was a boys side and a girls side and I believe they each had somewhere between 10-15 spots. I only saw the facility once I think.

This organization received it’s funding through public school money, all of the state funding that comes from foster care and charged parents. My parents were charged $80k for the time that I was in there.

My Story

***Writing this has been more difficult than I had first thought it would be. As I find the time/energy I will finish this post, but for now this is what I have been able to come up with.***

The Beginning

I’m not going to get too deep into my background in this post, but I will make other posts in the future about my life leading up to this point. For now I’ll just summarize some important things. Having an understanding of my history is an important piece of the puzzle into understanding how being institutionalized impacted me.

I am the daughter of a (now deceased) evangelical drug addict and a catholic raised pedophile. Both of which I know are ND, though they’ve never been diagnosed.

I’m not sure when my father started molesting me, but my sister and I suspect it was from infancy. Honestly, it wasn’t something that seemed like a big deal in my childhood because it was hidden, unacknowledged and I had “real” dangers to worry about.

My mother was abusive. Physically and mentally. Before she had my sister and me, she was a heroin addict and a sex worker. She got ‘clean’ after an OD in her early 30’s that landed her in an evangelic ‘girls home’.

At 34 she had my sister, her first child. She was with her dad for a couple of years. They divorced, and not too long after, she got knocked up with me while drunk at a 4th of July work party. She convinced my father to marry her because “she was a good Christian woman and she couldn’t have a bastard child”.

While pregnant with me, my mother broke her toe, started taking opiates, and started her new journey of pharmaceutical drug addiction, a journey that would eventually lead to her demise..but not without a long road of destruction first.

I grew up in a very unstable home full of many forms of abuse all disguised in “love”.

I learned from a very young age that it was best to become invisible. If my mother couldn’t see or hear me, I was less likely to be a target. Unfortunately, my sister never got that privilege, so I spent a lot of my childhood watching her get violently beaten.

When I was about 10 my mother kicked my sister out. After that, being invisible was no longer possible. My mother had no other target with my sister gone… She could only target my father so much, as he was the only one paying the bills.

It was also around this time that I had told my mother what my father was doing to me for the first time. I didn’t know it then, but I do now.. She already knew. She told me I was a liar.

I learned how to use the buddy system after that. I didn’t stay at my house alone if I could help it. I always had a friend with me or stayed with a friend. Sometimes even sleeping in the backseat of my sisters car while she worked overnight at 7-11. It worked relatively well to keep me safe from my father. But it did nothing to shield me from my mother’s abuse.

I spend a lot of time living with friends. At 15, I moved in with my boyfriend in his parent’s basement. I had lost my virginity to rape, had made a suicide attempt, become addicted to benzos, and dropped out of high school by this point. I was also a cutter. I’m not sure how long I lived with Ryan, but I know it ended when his parents kicked me out for cutting.

After this happened, I had nowhere to go and ended up back at my parent’s house. My mother was in the hospital getting a hip replacement. I didn’t have any furniture there. I went to sleep in my parent’s bed and woke up to my father assaulting me… And if you read the beginning of this, you know what happened next.

Institutionalization

Being institutionalized was one of the most traumatizing things I’ve experienced in my life. And I say that as someone who did well on the inside. And as someone who has experienced extreme amounts of violence throughout my lifetime.

Before I got to BAC, I had spent about a month in a shelter for foster kids. It was very chaotic, but in a much different way than I had experienced throughout my life. It wasn’t all bad. One of the staff members snuck me some cigarettes and a lighter so I could hide outside and smoke. I made some friends. But I was far away from home.. I didn’t know where I was. For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel like I could just run away. Where would I go? At least here, I had food and somewhere to sleep.

I thought that if I just stuck to not saying anything about my father, they would have to let me leave. But that wasn’t the case. No one even seemed to care about my father… or telling me what was going on. As a last-ditch effort to get someone’s attention, I self-harmed and got sent to BAC.

The feeling of helplessness grew as I got further and further from home. How would I ever escape now?

I was never treated like a person with autonomy. I wasn’t told what was going on. It was months until I was even told why I was there. I was just dropped off, in the middle of nowhere, with no understanding of why or how to get out.

When I initially arrived at the facility, everything was taken from me, and I was given all new clothes. I was instructed to change into an outfit they provided, shirt tucked in, hair pulled back, and they gave my belongings, including the clothes I was wearing, to my social worker.

I somehow managed to slip 2 rings into my sock when I changed without anyone noticing. Those 2 rings in my sock became the only evidence of control I had left.

I very quickly learned how things worked there. Follow the rules. Follow the program. Then maybe you can leave.

I had a plan. I didn’t belong here. I didn’t do anything wrong. I just had to prove to them that I was good… And I had a lot of practice at that.

But my main skill, being invisible, was almost impossible here. We were in line of sight of a staff member 100% of the time, and a camera was watching and recording the majority of our existence as well.

It took me a little while to get the hang of being invisible while being constantly watched. I spent the next 9 months learning how to mask better than I ever had in my life. Of course, I didn’t know what that was at the time; I didn’t even know I was ND.

I think I just disassociated through most of my time there. Not everyone could do so. I spent a lot of time watching other girls get restrained on the floor when they couldn’t take it anymore, broke a rule, or just lost it. Sometimes, those restraints involving girls being punched in the face by grown adults…And then their time got restarted.

Just keep to yourself, prove you’re good.

Don’t tell on your dad so you have somewhere to go.

Convince them you know you were bad, but you’ll be good now.

This was my plan. I have a box of letters between my grandmother and myself. You can see this in the letters: Me talking about how I was going to be so much better now. I was going to change everything if they’d just give me a chance.

It was already apparent that I would not be going home to my parents. So the only other option was my father’s parents…and if my father was convicted, there was no way I could go there.

I spent the whole time doing mental gymnastics, trying to play this chess game to win my freedom. The lack of control, lack of privacy, and lack of humanity was slowly driving me mad, but you would never know it.

I played the part, I worked the system, and within 8 months, I was living with my grandparents.

After BAC

to be continued…