EMPOWER

At fourteen most people are just beginning their lives. It was at fourteen that I experienced my own funeral. My last day at New Haven RTC, I was led blindfolded into the woods and laid in the snow in the mountains. My family and “care team” stood around me, congratulating me on what they essentially referred to as the death of my old self. They expressed how proud of me they were for putting so much effort into my “new and improved” self. It was supposed to be a time of celebration. After all, I was graduating at the program’s highest level. But my journey with New Haven continued long after I was finally allowed to leave.

I was a struggling kid whose parents had invested so much hope, fear, and money into my treatment. I was sent to New Haven at Hobble Creek, where I lived for 13 months. I was scared and knew I needed help navigating the issues I was experiencing, but with every day at New Haven I began to regret that I had openly sought help. I quickly learned that my honesty and trust was something that would be used against me, to further traumatize me in my most vulnerable moments. I could see my parents’ fears being exploited, and I had to be complicit in my own abuse to avoid even harsher penalties or risk burdening my parents further.

I felt that countless therapy sessions at New Haven were spent analyzing personal aspects of my identity and attempting to tear them down. The program that proudly advertises on their website to help families “get [their] daughter back,” was evidently not the safest place for an openly transgender teenager. Staff members told me I was “going to hell”; a peer wrote me death threats. My therapist even suggested more “intensive therapies” I could try if I continued to “struggle” with being gay.

When I was at New Haven, I was prohibited from using my name and would be punished for doing so. I witnessed staff and students get threatened for addressing me with the correct names and pronouns. It reached a point where I was afraid to say my name out loud and had to encode it in any writing, even my journals. The only time I was allowed to really discuss my name was when it was pathologized in intensive therapy sessions that suggested that my queerness was a “symptom of my illness.” I was never “dropped” a level for engaging in self-harm at New Haven, but I experienced severe consequences for being my authentic self.

The dissection of identity that I faced at New Haven RTC not only pervaded aspects of my identity as a transgender man, but also my interests, spirituality, disability, and relationships. I felt like there was nothing safe from scrutiny. During my most formative years, I watched everything that was once a part of me get disassembled and destroyed. I began to be disgusted by hobbies I once enjoyed, couldn't bring myself to listen to my favorite music, and cut contact with almost all the people I knew before. I was unable to freely critique, freely express, and freely be. I became a shadow, living in the background of my own life. My parents have credited New Haven with saving my life. Looking back years later, I would be hesitant to call that life mine at all.

Logically, I knew I had to “play the part” to ensure my own survival. Yet after all this time, I am still haunted by the extent to which I felt forced to comply with my own abuse and stand by helplessly while my peers endured the same. In order to make it out, I felt I had to surrender any autonomy or have it forcibly taken.

At New Haven, important medications for my numerous disabilities were often forgotten. I have severe long term chronic pain, and I often experienced fainting. New Haven did not have the ability to handle a severe chronic illness. I spent large chunks of time unconscious or in extreme pain that would often be written off as “attention seeking.” Staff would often refer to me as having “a victim mindset” for struggling with symptoms and would force me to engage in strenuous activities despite extreme pain. At New Haven’s most secluded house, my medical needs often went ignored.

Years later when I accessed my records, I was able to see that the treatment team had told staff to ignore my medical needs, even going as far as to accuse me of lying about symptoms of conditions I had been diagnosed with years prior. The Treatment Team had also misdiagnosed me with mental health conditions I did not have and used these diagnoses to discredit me if I spoke out against the way I was being treated.

New Haven used their influence to discredit me and drove a wedge in my family, something that may never fully be repaired. Because I was a child with a history of mental health issues, it was very hard to get anyone to listen to me, much less believe me. My parents were on the other side of the country for most of my stay and unable to see the damage that was being done. They didn’t see the weeks I spent being forced to write negative thoughts on my shirt, being wrapped in packing tape, wearing shaming signs around my neck. They didn’t see a staff grab me by the face to force food in my mouth or the debilitating side effects I was experiencing from all of the medications that I was forced to take. I later found out many of them were unnecessary or caused more harm than good. I was all alone, helpless, and surrounded by people who had earned my family’s trust and used it to harm me.

The further into my stay, the more I could see how much my parents wished for me to “get better”. It was something I wanted too, to heal and to trust those responsible for my care. While I wanted so badly to let myself be “fixed,” I was often left wondering what was broken about me in the first place. To me, the treatment I received at New Haven seemed more focused on editing my existing personality rather than helping me cope with the struggles I was fighting. After leaving, the positive prognosis that New Haven had promised my family seemed to loom over me threateningly. I allowed myself to live as a “New Haven Success Story” for a while, but it began to dawn on me that I was struggling worse than I ever had before. I became severely depressed, but–fearing being sent back–I was afraid to ask for help. I became more secretive, more withdrawn, and desperately tried to censor the authenticity I was punished for at New Haven. I became suicidal and struggled with self-harm more than I had previously. I found myself wishing that that “funeral” had been real.

I started to have nightmares of being trapped in Hobble Creek Canyon. Each night I would relive another horrific event. Since leaving New Haven I have been diagnosed with PTSD and experience frequent Dissociative Seizures that my current care team attributes to my time at New Haven.

After all this time, I have never been able to grieve the childhood I had lost, the formative experiences and education I missed out on, or the person New Haven buried. I still find myself still seeking the freedom and the safety that I had been denied. I was a kid who needed to be protected, who needed to find himself, who needed to be heard.

It is scary to have to rebuild your life after something like that. I’ve worked so hard to get to know the person I was never allowed to be. I am happy to say I am learning to genuinely love who I am when I am not forcing myself to be someone I am not.

I am the person I am today because I am giving myself the voice I had been denied for so long. I am the person I am today because I was able to finally tell my story. I am now in college and studying to one day advocate for underrepresented and/or vulnerable people in the Mental Health field. I owe it to myself, to fellow survivors, and to vulnerable youth currently being victimized by the Troubled Teen Industry to speak up and use my experience to create lasting change.