Diary posting about ~therapeutic boarding school~

I saw an article about Paris Hilton’s advocacy for legislation to be passed that would regulate the “Troubled Teen Industry,” and that there was a documentary about her in which she talked about her experience and abuse at a troubled teen facility in Utah. As a person who experienced the TTI myself, my interest was piqued.

So yesterday I watched it. It is Not Good, with a dumb thesis of “It’s so hard to be Paris Hilton! She was abused as a teen and that’s why she’s so fucked up.” (There is one great scene, though, where she is fighting with her boyfriend at a festival where she is DJing, saying things like “I have to go on in three minutes! You are ruining my DJ set! Somebody cut off his bracelet!” but yeah generally garbage.)

HOWEVER, at the end, she gets together with other people who went to her facility, which led me to this website dedicated to advocating for people in the troubled teen industry and is somehow affiliated with Paris Hilton.

I was looking at the website and realized I was having a Complex Emotional Reaction, feeling many things at the same time, most of them unpleasant, and recognizing that some of these feelings had been locked in a little box for a while, about my own experiences at a “therapeutic boarding school,” which I wrote about (in a fictionalized way) in Juliet the Maniac.

The two parts of the website that got me were the “Safe TTI Facilities” page, in which they say there are no safe TTI facilities, and then the page where they listed deaths at TTIs. I recognized 3 of these deaths— they were drownings in an icy lake in 1990 —because they had happened at a facility that was operated by the same person, Bobbi Christensen (formerly Bobbi Trott) who ran the school I went to, Crater Lake School.

I only found this out years and years later, when an article was published about Crater Lake School closing down. Apparently, Bobbi had been told she wasn’t permitted to operate another facility, but she decided this meant she wasn’t permitted to operate another facility in California, and therefore it was fine that she changed her name and opened one across the border in Oregon. The linked article about the deaths, which I had never read until yesterday, made me so mad because of how flippant Bobbi was in her quotes, e.g.:

The camp was cited for lack of supervision last December when an inspector discovered that a resident had attempted sexual acts with nine other youths.

“It is evident that the staff were lacking in care and supervision if this one client was able to (attempt to) commit so many acts of sodomy and oral copulation . . .,” the report said.

“We got rid of the kid,” Trott said, adding that it is not feasible to provide a staff member to supervise each child.

I have gone through so many different ways of framing and thinking and feeling about my time at CLS over the years. I think that since I wrote JTM, I’ve framed it as “That was awful but it also saved my life” and tried not to think about it much— as though by writing a book about it I could now put it in the past.

But that’s a lie! It turns out I’m still mad! And it turns out that I needed a documentary about Paris Hilton to realize that! And that feels ridiculous! It also feels ridiculous to still be mad about it! That happened 23 years ago! People have experienced so much worse! get over it!!!!!

Which is not logical, because you can’t rank pain, and pain is still pain, and processing ~trauma~ is a lifelong journey.

It’s also just such a contradictory mess… I truly believe my parents sent me there because they didn’t know what else to do and were terrified I was going to die. I also truly believe that some of the experiences and relationships I had there were exactly what I needed.

One of the most exhausting things about mental illness is the need to pretend to be OK, because that’s what society expects from us. And CLS allowed me to not be OK, to be a mess, and to focus on addressing that mess.

I also think of the various types of therapy I had there that did me good, like the woman who did weird new age therapy on me that helped break something open, or the introduction I had to AA, or the group therapy, or the various backpacking trips we went on that showed me how curative nature can be.

And the relationships… these other teens who also couldn’t be normal, how that gave me a sense of belonging and safety. And how some of the counselors accepted and loved me, and how I didn’t feel that love and acceptance from any adults back at home.

But, you know, part of the reason I didn’t feel love and acceptance from my parents is because Bobbi convinced them that they needed to lie to me to get me at CLS, which led to me feeling rejected and abandoned rather than loved and accepted.

And those adults at CLS who loved me had 0 qualifications, which generally turned out fine, and I’m pretty sure that these adults loved me and accepted me better than somebody with a degree in X could have— but that’s also really dangerous! A limited staff of adults with no formal training, supervising a volatile group of teens in the middle of nowhere.

And then I think about what happened to me at CLS, and how CLS was so much better than so many TTI facilities, and then I think, “Well, there was only one legitimate predator there” (LOL), and “Well, that confrontational therapist guy only lasted a few weeks” (LOL), and “Well, that headmaster who seemed like a true sadist was only there for a few months” (LOL), and “Well, at least they took us to an actual psychiatrist once a month” (LOL), and then it feels like I’m making excuses for what was very expensive abuse.

But the thing that makes me the maddest is that there literally was no alternative. The mental hospital, where I was placed by the state following my suicide attempts, which was run by qualified people, was much worse than CLS— I was not treated like a human there. CLS was damaging and dangerous but at least I was treated like a human being sometimes.

In generations past, I would have been placed at a mental hospital long term, where I would have experienced worse abuse. I needed inpatient, long-term care, and all that our current society provides to us is prohibitively expensive, poorly regulated facilities like CLS. I don’t even know what to do, 23 years in the future, with the anger I feel about this. For all the talk about mental health stigma and access, for all the progress we have made, we are only accepting of mental illness that is relatively polite and easy to deal with. If you have middle-grade anxiety or depression, then it is accepted, it is quirky, and you get an app and a meme for that. If you have severe mental illness, society doesn’t even want to look at you and doesn’t care if there’s anywhere for you to go.

And I feel like I was abused at CLS. I feel it was run in a criminally dangerous way. I feel I was placed in danger by being sent there. I feel that my parents lying to me to get me there was traumatic. I feel like when I was at my most vulnerable, every responsible party failed to protect me.

But I also feel like places like that are necessary. Kids like me need a place to go. Like what was I supposed to do instead? Go to outpatient therapy at that shitty mental hospital? Die? (Kinda seriously feel like society wants teens like me to just go and die.)

And that’s a hard pill to swallow! That the best place for me to go was in an industry that is inherently exploitative and predatory.

Anyway, thanks a lot, Paris Hilton! Thanks for helping me realize I am still fucked up! Thanks for helping me realize that you can write an entire fucking book on a subject and still have unresolved feelings!