Published: Aug 21, 2014

#BreakingCodeSilence #UnitedwithOneVoice #EndInstitutionalAbuse

Captivity By the Sea

A Survivor’s Account of Casa By the Sea Ensenada, Mexico and High Impact Tecate, Mexico 2001 – 2003
By Chelsea F.

It was just before dawn when I was rudely awakened by two burly escorts. I was told: “We can either do this the easy way or the hard way, either way you are coming with us” so I went with them and didn’t make a fuss. I asked if I could put on my bra, but I was told that I wasn’t allowed to take ANY of my belongings, I wasn’t even allowed to change my clothes. I asked where I was going but they refused to tell me until we had crossed the border into Mexico. Somewhere along the Mexican Federal Highway, I learned, I was headed to Casa by the Sea, in sunny, seaside Ensenada.

The only thing I can remember about the drive into Ensenada was that it smelled putrid. I was soon to find out that this is because Mexico has a less than adequate sewer system and more often than we’d like to acknowledge, millions of gallons of our own feces are dumped into the ocean just south of the American border. “Mexico, where entitled rich Americans dump all their unwanted shit.” Or that’s at least what teenage me was thinking at the time. After a short yet beautiful drive, and my boyfriends sweater fully drenched with tears, we arrived at what looked like a fortress, built on some last stand in the fight for territory back in the war. Once inside, you could tell this was once a kind of resort, or perhaps built with that intention before unfortunately falling into the hands of those who currently operated it. It was right on the beach but you wouldn’t know it, 10 ft tall concrete walls surrounded the place giving you only a glimpse of the ocean through a red painted rod iron gate. At sunset the sun would glow orange and bounce off the waves, and sometimes you could even see dolphins or a cruise ship on the horizon. One would have to assume at some point in the past this might have been a place where families would come to stay, touring the local sights, and enjoying the beach below us but sometime between then and February 8^th 2001, this hotel had become my worst nightmare.

When I arrived I saw several lines of what seemed to be female inmates, all wearing blue sweat pants, with their hair in disheveled knots on top of their heads and disillusioned looks on their plain, tired looking faces. They didn’t even bother to look up at me, they just starred, completely despondent at the asphalt beneath them. I remember the reality of this atmosphere was hard to grasp, I could just sense the malcontent oozing from every corner of this place… Call it intuition or just a healthy sense of distrust, but as soon as I walked through those big red gates, I knew I wanted out.

The first staff member I met seemed nice enough, she was portly and spoke enough broken english, that I was able to understand her. She reminded me of someone’s sweet old abuela (grandmother), but she carried a walkie talkie and a clipboard that somehow gave her some authority. She was called the “Shift Leader” and here she was the judge, jury and executioner. “Vamonos Chica” she said. I followed her lead into a room called “The Mama’s Casa (House)”. She introduced herself as “Mama” and told me to undress for a strip search. I wasn’t fond of the idea that I would be naked in front of what was beginning to become a group of people but it didn’t seem like they were giving me much of a choice. They gave me a pair of sweatpants and sweatshirt to wear that even at my meager size of 115 lbs was way too small and they were god awfully ugly to boot. (How such a ridiculous pair of clothing would ever come into existence is really beyond me, but my best guess is to blame it on the 80’s) I believe it was that moment that the reality of this whole absurd ordeal finally hit me. I was officially a prisoner. I just felt mortified, doomed and abandoned and I collapsed to the floor crying.

It wasn’t that I didn’t understand why my mom would feel the need to be worried about me, after all, I was running around with my older boyfriend, smoking cigarettes just trying to act cool like every other angsty teenager. Sure I skipped a class or two, got detention once or twice, but this?… This was just extreme. I thought to myself, there has GOT to be some mistake, my mother would NEVER send me to a place like this… would she? I told the “Mama” that I needed to call my mother, but as I would quickly find out such requests would land you in some trouble. By trouble I mean, pummeled to the floor, physically assaulted and held captive in what seemed to be an old, grimy, unserviced bathroom, but now was just a torture room the likes you’d only see in horror films. This whole thing just felt so surreal, I just couldn’t believe that a place like this would even exist, but it was all too real and I was going to be there a long time. Long enough to miss my first prom and many normal coming of age events, long enough for all my friends to forget about me. Long enough that when I got home, I didn’t even have a home to go home to anymore.

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PRISONER FOR PROFIT

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Only later would I realize that I was a prisoner for the profit of a multi-million dollar industry, fore-fronted by a powerful, well connected, Utah (Mormon) based company. WWASP (World Wide Association of Specialty Programs) an umbrella corporation, that operated multiple facilities in US and abroad that all practiced a “tough love” system that abused kids and conned  desperate parents into spending what equaled an Ivy League education tuition. A system that was carefully designed to manipulate narcissistic parents, playing to their egos and delusions of what good parents they are for making such a sacrifice to send their only begotten children to rot away in some dingy Mexican hotel. Conned into paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to have their kids broken down, beaten and reprogrammed into the perfect Stepford children. Only problem was, the system was faulty, mainly because it was created by a man whose only goal was to cut every corner to make money and only loosely based on an experimental psychology, developed by B.F. Skinner, called “Aversion Therapy”. Aversion Therapy has for decades been considered a volatile psycho-therapy and the practice of such techniques have been a controversial issue of ethics and banned in many states to be used even in a clinical setting, let alone in a “Lord of the Flies meets the Stanford Prison Experiment” (with no one with the sense to shut that shit down) type of experimental environment.

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TREATMENT OR ABUSE?

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In summary, during my time at Casa By the Sea, I experienced an extended period of psychological abuse, forced into “code silence” and long periods of social and physical isolation as well as many, MANY basic human rights violations. I experienced several incidents of physical abuse, namely restraints used for totally unnecessary reasons like, falling asleep in class when I was sick with the flu, or falling asleep in detention, “not following directions” or generally just not wanting to wake up to yet another shitty day at Casa by the Sea. I was never violent or a harm to myself or others, yet I was restrained and sent to R&R (isolation) multiple times, more times than I can remember. Even so, this wasn’t the worst kind of abuse you could experience at Casa By the Sea, at least the physical abuse had an eventual end point. I’d have to say that the psychological abuse was far more detrimental. Firstly, when you arrived at Casa, you were given no end date, no certainty that you would ever get out, and the threat of homelessness if you left on your 18th birthday was all too real. Some girls stayed far beyond their 18th birthday, held by either the program’s and their parents threats to abandon them, or by the courts, when their parents were able to petition for extended custody. This was a real fear that we all had… and one of the reasons kids were willing to do whatever it took to “make it” in the program. The problem with that was that the program essentially pitted us against each other and “making it” in the program meant you had to tear everyone around you down to appear to be working. In “therapy” we were expected to point out every flaw in our fellow sisters and use anything they revealed about their past against them as a weapon of shame and guilt or to somehow prove that they deserved to be there and that they needed to be “broken down to be built back up”. Countless times I heard girls talk about child abuse, rape, and sexual abuse and every time, the whole “family’ would have to give them feedback about how they were accountable for what happened to them. Victim blaming was a huge part of the program, and yet, if you didn’t share about some kind of awful thing that happened in your past, you were held back and accused of “not working” your program. Plenty of us attempted to make things up just to appease them, but then you got called out as a liar and sent back to level 1. This kind of psychological warfare led to an environment that was full of tension and prevented any of us from truly banding together to resist. In the program, this is how they brainwash you, They cut you off from your real family and friends and they reenforce a system of beliefs that for many outsiders would seem wrong, yet when your entire community is led to believe, and forced to conform under duress, it just becomes… normal. It becomes all too easy to forget that we are human and instead, accept things and do and say things we would never do before all in the name of survival.

I believe the program used fear, guilt, peer-persuasion and punishment to condition children into obedience, which in reality was just reciting program jargon like bible verses. Perhaps I couldn’t quite put my finger on it while I was there, but somehow I knew that this program was scamming us all. I just didn’t buy into it, because it all seemed so disingenuous and the people running it were pretty shady characters. Honestly it surprises me some of the things this company was able to convince our parents to do. I consider it pretty alarming that my mother would allow strangers into her home to forcibly remove her daughter from bed in the middle of the night and rush her off in secrecy, essentially trafficking a child into to a foreign country, with no papers, no admissions process, not having told any of her friends, teachers or even her therapist where she was going, or how long she would be gone. On top of all that, you’re not allowed to even speak to your child for any undetermined amount of time. Instead you are to depend on staff members who are NOT actually therapists, have no licenses or qualifications to even be working with your child, to tell you how your child is progressing in a program you really know nothing about! How could a place that would operate in such a way REALLY be legit? The level of ignorance you would have to have in order to not see these red flags is absolutely astounding to me. Parents were actually warned by the staff that we would send letters home claiming to have been abused, and that the conditions were unsanitary but that this was all manipulation in order to get pulled. Our case managers had one simple message for our parents every week, If we didn’t remain in the program until we graduated, we would end up dead, insane or in jail. So of course our ever devoted parents would keep sending those checks every month and write us every week to tell us to “work your program”.

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DEPLORABLE CONDITIONS

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The conditions of the outside facility itself were generally maintained (by us, the students) so that at first glance you’d think it was pretty clean, but the fact that so many girls were held in such small living quarters provided quite a few problems, least of which were the numerous health and fire code violations. Black mold and mushrooms grew all over the walls, yet we were forced to just scrub it off and sleep within inches of them. The trailers we lived in consisted of two long hallways with bunk beds end to end all the way down. If one of us got sick, it was nearly impossible for all of us not to catch it. Proper hygiene was next to impossible when you shared a few sinks and showers with 30 girls and everyone was allowed 8 minutes to shower each. Our access to soap and shampoo was limited and we were expected to ration what we had for weeks if not months before we were allowed to buy more. Many times I ran out and had nothing to use to clean myself other than cold water. Sometimes the hot water would be off for weeks in a row and we suspected that the owner shut it off as punishment for the whole facility. Although, what’s more likely is that the facility was just overcrowded and did not have enough hot water to ever last for everyone. The sewer system at Casa was disastrous. I will NEVER forget the smell. Because of this, we were not allowed to flush any toilet paper and instead had to dispose our used toilet paper and feminine products in bins next to the toilets. Again, due to the sheer numbers of girls using these restrooms, it was all too common to have a literal mountain of poopy/ bloody paper piled up in the trash cans, stuck to the walls and all over the floor. There was no cleaning crew on staff, that was up to us to get done in the morning, so while we were in school, this mess just got worse and worse until someone was allowed to clean it up again the next morning. Also, it’s worth mentioning that no sanitary precautions were taken to ensure that the toilets were disinfected on a regular basis and we did not have access to seat covers. The potential for diseases and infections to be spread via toilet use was extremely high.

The privilege of privacy was not afforded to lower levels at any time, not even in the shower. There were no curtains on the stalls and a staff or upper level was always stationed inside the showers to monitor us while we bathed. We were of course not allowed to “self harm” by touching our private parts too much, and the staff would threaten consequences if they thought you were “washing too much.” We were also basically using the same shower as water from one shower would flow down to the next and the next and the next and this meant that we all had to shower in our sandals to prevent catching athletes foot and other fungi from the showers. I know the boys had a lot more issues with this than we did, as once I was shown a type of flesh eating fungus that was spread around the boys side… and I was forced to give that guy a foot massage in a seminar.

As I mentioned before, these crowded conditions led to several outbreaks of illness, some that carried throughout the entire facility. Once there was an infection of salmonella poisoning that the entire facility got from eating the salad. Given the fact that we were required to eat at least 50% of everything we were served, no one was allowed to escape that fate. Medical services at Casa consisted of quarantining sick people into one trailer for the day, but NOT in their own beds, instead they were instructed to lay in someone else’s bed and potentially make them sick too. We only had one nurse on staff and I can’t exactly speak to her competence because she rarely provided much treatment beyond “drink more water” and Pepto Bismol. If we were sick or injured and complained, we were often told we were faking it and sent back to class. We were not allowed any cold or flu medicine and despite being sick on several occasions, I was never actually allowed to go to Sickbed. The only reason I even knew of it’s existence is because they held me in sickbed for R&R once or twice.
Meds were prescribed by some unknown doctor and dispensed by staff, not nurses. Most of our medications were filled in Mexico and most of us had no idea what it was that we were on. We had no access to a psychiatrist to adjust these meds unless our parents were willing to pay extra to have someone evaluate us… I know I saw someone once, but not again until the end of my program when I was able to argue that I needed to see my doctor in the states for a reevaluation. Even then, I was not allowed to talk to that doctor on my own, a staff member from the program was in the room at all times. Ironically, operating an illegal pharmacy is the official reason why Casa By the Sea was raided and shut down by Mexican Authorities in 2004.

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R&R

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Starting from my first day at the facility, I was kept in a small room called R&R (short for “Restriction Room”) for almost 2 weeks, or at least that was my comprehension of the time I spent facing the yellow tiles in the corner of the room, sitting Indian style with my hands behind my back. The cold tile was almost as numbing as the pins and needles you’d get when your circulation gets cut off, but that only started after the 6 hours was up and they let you stretch your legs. This was the go-to stress position, if you’re lucky, you’d only have to sit like that for 4-6 hours, (But oddly enough, this was much less “stressful” than laying on your stomach with your palms up and chin flat on the floor, I’d like to find out, scientifically, why that hurt so much.)… but I wasn’t lucky, I got at least 10 hours a day. Throughout this stint in R&R I was restrained on numerous occasions for what seemed like any reason at all. Even slightly shifting my weight or moving my fingers and the upper levels would have to report that I was “not following directions” to the staff who left them in charge while they gossiped and drank coffee in the Mama’s Casa. This of course would be reason enough for them to assign me another round of “restraint”, a violent, gut wrenching bout of joint manipulating submissions. I couldn’t resist them and I didn’t even try. All I could do was cry and plead for them to stop, but nothing I could say would make them stop. They would only let up when I was too beaten down to even utter a moan and left lifelessly panting on the floor.

Being restrained felt like a 3 way cage fight with an anaconda and a bear. First the staff would take out your feet and slam you face first to the ground. In this position they would mount you and apply a generous amount of pressure into your spine by pressing their knee into the small of your back, then they would force your arms into a contorted position being pushed far up the middle of your back. Once they had you in a controlled position often with 2 or more staff members sitting on your legs then they would apply the finishing touch to make sure your chin was laying flat on the ground by pulling your hair and grinding your chin into the floor. Despite the violent nature of these acts, and their punitive reasons for inflicting them, they always claimed that these “restraints” were for our own safety.
At some point within the seemingly endless days of pain and isolation, I met a man named Jade Robinson. This man was easily three times my size, all muscle mass and seemed to have a violent streak to match. He didn’t really need a reason, however he had just been told by an upper level student that I was crying, moving and “being defiant” and that was enough. He took it upon himself to administer his own version of restraint which included him twisting my extremities and laying all his weight on top of me until I couldn’t breathe and absolutely thought I was going to die. At some point during my struggle to regain the ability to breathe I supposedly scratched him with a fingernail, (nails of which I have religiously bitten my whole life) which prompted him to declare me a threat to myself and others, thus constituting more restraining, and more time in this tiny, gutted bathroom. When he had had enough fun testing the flexibility of my arm sockets he would move on to my legs twisting my ankles and then bending my legs up and sitting on them, making my knees feel like they were about to snap in two. At some point during one of the various restraining sessions my leg was gashed open by some jagged tile on the floor, I bled profusely for about an hour or 2 before a nurse came to disinfect and wrap my wound… which was funny because she was actually mad at ME because she had to be called in on her day off. I’m pretty sure I could have used stitches, but apparently those kinds of luxuries were not given to prisoners of Casa By the Sea.

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THE PROGRAM

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Eventually I was allowed to join the rest of the girls and was administered into what we called a “family”. I was assigned a “buddy” who would explain the rules and be my personal tattle tale. At first it would seem as though I might have had a hard time adjusting to the “rules” of the program, because it was difficult for me to remember to raise my hand before I spoke, stood or looked out of line, and I frequently got consequences for forgetting my water bottle somewhere, being off task for more than 20 seconds or forgetting I had put my pen in my hair before I walked in the bathroom. These might seem in the real world like arbitrary mistakes, but in CBS, these were violations in which you received “consequences” for and once you got 10 consequences, you got a “trend” and that sent you straight to “worksheets” for a whole 8 hours of listening to cassette tapes and staring at a wall. You were not allowed to do school work, and were not allowed to speak, laugh, sign or communicate in any way to anyone.

CODE SILENCE and no “non-verbal communication” was one of the ways we were punished and kept from developing real friendships in Casa. From your first day you are told there is no talking without permission, you must raise your hand and wait to be called on and given permission to speak. Even when given permission the conversation must be about school or other essential needs. On level 1 you are not allowed to talk to any of your peers unless it’s in group therapy (which was really attack therapy, not a great time to bond) Or unless you have gained enough points and support to “vote up” to upper levels. Level 3’s were given more permission to speak to their peers, but usually that was only about school, we weren’t allowed to talk about “war stories” which could pretty much mean anything that wasn’t directly related to your program. Levels 4, 5 and 6 were considered “upper levels” and operated essentially as staff by monitoring the lower levels and administering consequences. Upper levels were allowed a lot more privileges and pretty much allowed to run the facility unattended as most adult staff members had no interest in being involved with our care and barely spoke english. Upper levels had their own family, student council and politics to navigate through the program, which often led to popularity games, clicks, feuds and dropping back down into lower level families if you fell out of favor with the group. That being said, I never achieved these levels so I never experienced any of that. I’m sure in a way, it was it’s own kind of hell.

As a level 1, I never had the right to speak to anyone unless they spoke to me. Since I had admitted earlier in my program that I was bisexual, it was pretty common for girls to avoid speaking to me, in fear that they would be dropped for associating with me. In fact every single time I did begin to form a friendship with someone in my family, the staff would put us on “separation” and we would no longer be able to speak, for any reason. Since I never really “got” the program, and was often pointing out the bullshit and hypocrisy in that place, I was seen as “persona non grata” and people often referred to me as the cautionary tale of what NOT to do in the program. To say I was pretty lonely was somewhat of an understatement, I felt like an outcast… a freak. I felt totally abandoned by my mother, forgotten by my friends and family and lost in this place where I was always surrounded, yet completely alone. I drew and wrote a lot in my journal, my only escape, and I sang to the family when we were permitted to do so. I tried not to let the sadness break me, I tried to pretend it didn’t affect me… But it did and in a way, it always will.

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SEMINARS

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Seminars were an integral part of the program model of WWASP. All schools under the WWASP umbrella used the same seminars, the same doctrine, the same jargon and required that both the kids and the parents graduated from these seminars in order to progress. The seminars were broken down into 4 initial stages, Discovery (level 1), Focus (level 2), Accountability (level 3) and Keys to Success (level 4+). After graduating the Focus seminars, you then have the opportunity to attend a Parent/Child Seminar (PC1 & PC2) which for many students would be the first time in months, or maybe even years that they would be visiting their parents. As the child and parent both progressed through these seminars, they would then be given the responsibility to staff these seminars.
An outsourced company called Resource Realizations ran the seminars, and they taught mostly program jargon like “there is no right or wrong, just working” and “There is no try, only do” and “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results”. Although the premise of these seminars was for self help, in reality what was weaponized against us were verified mind control techniques that can only be described as brutal psychological attacks. They also used food and sleep deprivation to keep our minds more likely to break and be receptive to the processes without questioning it. The seminars usually lasted 3 days and every day besides the last day we were sent back to the facility to write absurdly long essays… which some of us couldn’t even finish before the next day (and yes, not finishing an essay was grounds to have you kicked out).

Many of the processes used in these seminars will haunt me forever. One processes allowed us all to get into a big group and just yell insults at each other pretending to “run our number” which meant we had to act like ourselves outside of the program. You can imagine how out of hand that got. At some point, after being screamed at and called every name in the book by boys twice my size, I just left the circle to sit with another girl huddled in the corner crying. She looked up and me and said “well, at least I’m finally allowed to say, THIS IS BULLSHIT!” We both got a laugh out of our shared trauma. Another process that was particularly jarring was the process “You Die”. We all lined up in a circle with another circle inside of it, each person directly facing another. We were instructed to look that person in the eye and choose either “You Die” or “You Live” however we each only had 3 votes of “You Live” to give. As you went down the line, you had to give each person their death sentence, and watch the pain in their eyes when you did so. You also had to hear “You Die” about 40 times in a row. At the end the winner of the game was decided by who had the most “You Live” votes… Which really only turned out to be a popularity game until the facilitators flipped the script and asked us how many of us didn’t even think to save a “You Live” vote for ourselves. So, moral of the story, every man for himself? Save yourself, and let everyone else around you die? Either way, that’s kind of a traumatic way to prove a point about not caring enough about yourself. (why that was a lesson we had to learn anyway is beyond me, seems a bit counter productive but that was WWASP for you)

There were a few long drawn out processes like this that were meant to elicit emotional responses and I seem to remember that most of them ended in “feedback” that really just reiterated what terrible kids we were and that we deserved to be in the program. I think for some this was significantly internalized and led to the successful brainwashing and beliefs that without the program they would have been dead. Many of us repeated that phrase with total belief in it’s validity but the reality is that realistically, most of us would have grown up just fine and probably much better off mentally without experiencing all this intentional trauma. I witnessed rape victims being called sluts and whores in order to illustrate what “accountability” meant. I saw boys being accused of being rapists and cowards because they weren’t willing to talk about their previous sexual history. Personally, I remember being screamed at by a 6ft grown man about 2 inches from my face and made to stand up in the middle of a circle of people and brought to tears because he told me that “everyone hates you, but no one hates you more than yourself” They had this way of looking at you and identifying your worst fears and self hate and using it to break you down. Now the point of that was to “break you down to build you back up” but a lot of us either quit or got thrown out before we ever experienced any building back up. If you got “chosen out” of a seminar, you had to wait another month or two before they would hold the next seminar so you could go through that all over again and hopefully get through it that time.
Even when the processes weren’t meant to traumatize you, instead just kind of, confuse you, they were still at the very least nerve wracking. For many kids standing up in front of a crowd of people judging you would be their worst fear… and that was pretty much the first thing a facilitator would do in a seminar. Stand you up, ask you leading questions, judge you, insult you and sit you back down. Queue next victim. For others, just talking about family issues and abuse could be very painful, yet they were required to recite in detail what happened to them in front of people whose job was to pick you apart and blame you for ever feeling like a “victim”. Not to mention that up until this point, we had been completely sequestered from the opposite sex, not even allowed to make eye contact as they crossed our campus to go to the library, so you can probably assume that being stuck in a 3 day, emotionally intensive seminar with the opposite sex might be a little uncomfortable.
Some of the processes were downright humiliating for the very purpose of doing so. This was the theme of the Focus seminar. Now I can’t speak for everyone’s experience because I know that many people would describe their Focus seminar as the most fun they had in the program, but that certainly wasn’t my experience. I’m the type of person that if you give me the floor I am most definitely going to say something stupid, and of course, that’s what I did, every damn time… But, at least I had a sense of humor about it. Throughout the 3 day seminar the staff evaluated us through the processes and on the 3rd day they assigned us a “stretch”. This was a role you would play by creating costumes and props and acting out in a play or by singing a song. The whole day was one big funny performance. Boys dressed like ballerinas and the lost boys from Peter Pan. Shy girls would dress up in beautiful dresses and sing “Lady in Red” or “Butterfly”. Some kids were given thinly veiled insults about aspects of their personalities, or fairly complex stories where kids were left to try to interpret what it meant. One that comes to mind was the Johnathan Livingston Seagull, about an outcast bird who learns to fly and eventually time travel? I don’t know, it wasn’t my stretch so I didn’t get it. However I, was given the stretch of “silent server” (as if I wasn’t forced to be silent enough) This meant that it was my job throughout the process of the stretch performance to “serve” each performer that left the stage with food, drink and a foot rub. We had to dress in sheets and bow our heads like humble peasants. Apparently this was supposed to get us out of our comfort zone of… Not being a slave? (I know, it’s weird, I didn’t get it either) And you know what? I would have been just fine if it had all ended there. However, it didn’t. The last stretch of the seminar was to “give back” to the silent servers. They sat me down in the middle of the big seminar room on a chair and put my feet into a bucket of warm water. Then, in possibly the most cringe-worthy moment in my life, the entire room full of participants (about 60 people, both girls and boys) surrounded me, they were all told to touch and massage me, my feet, my legs (that I hadn’t been allowed to shave in months!), my whole body was smothered in wandering hands as the seminar facilitator spoke over the loud speaker in a gentle but almost sexual tone. Now, maybe it was just me, but I simply was NOT comfortable, not to mention, I’m extremely ticklish and I DO NOT like people touching my feet!! 6 months into a program that forbid us to even look at the opposite sex and here they had a bunch of guys (and girls) feeling me up! I winced and squirmed until I just couldn’t take it anymore… I finally leapt out of that bucket and screamed “Dooooon’t touch my feet!”. Of course, this wasn’t the response the facilitator wanted, but I think he probably realized it was too late to go back and teach us some kind of lesson about what’s wrong with you if you don’t appreciate people molesting you, so we all laughed, hugged and left with the seminar high. To this day, I do NOT like people touching my feet.

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IT WAS ALL IN MY HEAD

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After about 6 months in the program, there wasn’t much improvement. Although I graduated the required seminars with ease, I was still forgetting the minor rules, and receiving trends which sent me to worksheets almost everyday. Because I kept losing my daily points with these trends, I remained on level 1, 0 points. Because I remained on level 1, the entire time I spent in CBS I didn’t get to speak to my mother over the phone even one time, not once. I remember thinking to myself that I wanted to comply, I wanted to get to level 3 so I could finally talk to people, I wanted to “get with the program” but for the life of me, I just couldn’t. Everyday was just a lesson in futility; because of CBS’s irrational rules, and their extreme punishments, I remained on Level 1, 0 points my entire program. Spending about 80% of my whole program in worksheets meant I had very little time in class. Which meant I was not finishing my school work, not able to take tests and ultimately, not earning any credits towards my grade level. By the time I left CBS at the age of 17, I hadn’t passed enough classes to graduate 9th grade.
This lack of progress in the program wasn’t due to any intentional defiance and I was not breaking any other rules besides these little “cat 1’s”. Although, the one rule that ALWAYS got me, was forgetting I had a pen in my hair when I walked into the bathroom. They would usually have an upper level stationed at the door of the bathroom to check for (you guessed it) pens and paper, to prevent us from passing notes. However, every time they didn’t catch the pen in my hair before I walked in, or perhaps they just let me walk in and “caught” me, I’d get a Cat 2 consequence for “note passing” and sent directly to worksheets. A pen in my hair literally cost me my entire high school education.

It hadn’t become clear to me then, but the reason I was struggling at moving up in the levels at CBS was because of my pre-existing conditions, (ADHD and Bipolar II), the symptoms of which, (memory problems, impulsive speech, and being easily distracted) were in direct violation of the rules set forth by WWASP. First and foremost, why would WWASP even have rules like this? Was it because they boasted in their marketing materials that they were equipped to cure kids of their ADHD and in their attempt to control a chemical imbalance their solution was to punish us when we forgot things? Or were those marketing materials simply deceptive because in reality CBS was not properly designed to accommodate the needs and certainly not treat a teenager struggling with these disorders? To any educated mental health professional my struggles with the “rules” at CBS would only further prove that the symptoms of and needs according to my disorder were not compatible with the system in place in the program. Any qualified professional would have recommended my release, or if they had considered my medical records before admission never granted entrance into this program in the first place… This was in fact, something the a psychologist I saw a few times mentioned, however since my mother couldn’t afford the $5000 a month tuition to send me to Cross Creek Manor, another WWASP program, Casa By the Sea was where I was left to rot until I either graduated or turned 18.

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HIGH IMPACT

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It only took 6 months of this “lack of progress” before I was sent to High Impact. High Impact couldn’t really be classified a “wilderness program” as they marketed it, and “boot camp” didn’t really do it justice, I’d have to say the only thing that would come close to defining this place would be a modern day concentration camp. Except they couldn’t exterminate us or they wouldn’t be able to cash our parents checks. Physical, verbal and emotional abuse was just as much a part of this program as was the constant exercise and stress positions we endured for 15 hours a day. If you thought R&R was bad, High Impact was R&R x 99 out in the middle of the desert. This “program” was nothing short of torture, and that was the general idea, that we all for some reason, (because we “got ourselves there”) deserved to be tortured every hour of every day so that we could appreciate what we had at the facility that sent us there. My stay at High Impact lasted 2 months and even in that seemingly short amount of time, I witnessed and endured a lifetime worth of abuse. I was also, very nearly murdered. The memory of which will never stop haunting me. Please see attached testimony “High Impact”

My mother has told me that Jade Robinson had called her himself to recommend that I be sent to High Impact, and oddly enough sited an incident 6 months before when during one of the many violent restraints I was subjected to on my first week, he had supposedly gotten injured (remember the fingernail scratch?) and this was reason enough for me to deserve the stint in H.I.

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SITTING

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I spent a total of 23 months, or what really turned out to be my entire high school career in Casa By the Sea… Even after 2 years I was still kept on level 1, still not allowed to speak to my mother (and most of the other students), I was still getting “cat 1” consequences. I was still spending most of my time in worksheets, and despite multiple talks with my case mangers and the administrator (Both Jade Robinson and Luke Hallows) I was still refused requests to do school work. Apparently an education was another privilege they deemed I did not deserve. During this time however I had started working with a therapist named Jan, I opted to join a few of her support groups, mainly to escape the everyday activities of staring at walls and what-not… but also because when I talked to Jan, she didn’t seem so “programmed”, she actually seemed to get me. She also agreed that CBS was certainly not accurate placement for me, considering my pre-existing conditions. She was the one who taught me a bit about the symptoms of these disorders and how they affected me on a daily basis. It was clear to me, as well as many of the other staff and students, that CBS was not the right place for me, and that I did not deserve the treatment I received simply because I struggled with the little rules. I still believe there isn’t anything any of the kids in CBS did that would constitute the amount of human rights violations and crimes committed against them in these programs, (inmates in max. security prisons are allowed more rights) but in my case, I believe this was especially true. I made multiple attempts to communicate these facts to my mother, but for some reason, it never got through. I even attempted to have a meeting with Jan and my parents after a Parent/ Child seminar but my Mom declined to go and my Dad, who wasn’t necessarily involved with the program had no authority to have me released. In fact, now that I think about it, Jan was probably fired for that.

In a lot of ways, I was made an example out of, I was considered to be “bad” because I was still on level 1, (they called that “sitting”) even though I was never violent, never broke any significant rules and I was never a danger to myself or others. So why was I targeted?… Why was I watched like a hawk by upper levels and given any consequence they could think of giving me? Why was I restrained and sent to R&R for frivolous reasons? Why would they even bother keeping me in this program when by the 23rd month I had still made no progress in their system?… Sadly, the answer was because I was useful to them in a way; they were able to use me as a scapegoat to show the other girls what happens when you don’t fall in line. They were only able to do this because my mother had been so effectively brainwashed. She took quickly to the seminars and before I was even out of High Impact, she was staffing the adult seminars. Despite all the evidence that CBS was not working, and was consequently doing me harm, including telling her to her face about High Impact, and no matter how many other people, including 2 different psychologists (who even worked for the program) told her that CBS was not the right placement for me, my mother chose to stay religiously committed to the program. As long as they could keep cashing her checks, they could do any amount of harm to me that they pleased because they knew the one person who could stop them, wouldn’t.

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BRAINWASHING

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The notion that a person can be brainwashed by these kinds of programs is not an exaggeration, the system was designed with this in mind. The main reason these programs boast so much support from their clients is because in most ways the WWASP program was designed for the parent, to give them relief from their children, and a support group to ease their guilt about sending them away. In turn the program used these parent seminars to gain their loyalty outside the program so that they didn’t have to spend money on treating the children inside the program. The parent seminars were really just a watered down version of the seminars we were required to attend in the program. Considering the emphasis was always on keeping the kids in the program, they had to constantly re-enforce the idea that without the program, we would be dead, insane or in jail and under no circumstances are they to believe a word we said about the program, as this was just manipulation so we could “get back out on the streets” These seminars used some of the same processes as the kids seminars… If the photos I’ve seen of people’s Dad’s in bikinis and tutus were any indication, my guess it that it got pretty intense in there too. From an outside perspective, this seminar would probably seem like a cult meeting, and for many reasons including the roots of Resource Realizations/ LifeSpring and the history of the behavior modification industry, that’s exactly what it was.
The seminars had a further reach into the politics of the social structure in CBS. Namely, the more seminars you passed, the more levels you achieved, the more jargon you spewed, the more programmed you became. With a total lack of legitimate adult supervision, this weird self help cult became more like a game we all played. The phrase I always heard was “fake it till you make it” meaning, as long as you memorized all the jargon from the seminars and used those “isms” in your “feedback” and conversations with your parents the more convincingly you looked to be changing and therefore ready to graduate and go home. It goes without saying that it really didn’t matter if you were genuinely accepting all this B.S. as actual life lessons or if you were just repeating what everyone else was saying, at some point we all learned that’s just what you had to do. Now, the problem with this is that what that reinforcement was truly used for was to make your parents think that the program was actually doing some good, “saving your life” as they claimed they were doing. Producing false testimonials and easing parents fears about what they may have been initially concerned about, or say, if they had read dissenting reviews on the internet. This was their internal marketing, and how they kept the parents heads in the clouds and convinced they were doing the right thing. Meanwhile, if a kid was being abused, or witnessed abuse, attempting to communicate that to your family would be extremely difficult. All phone calls and mail sent out was heavily monitored. The threat of being punished was always a risk, and the consequences for “manipulation” (as they would call reporting abuse to be) would be severe. Upper levels could be dropped back down to level one, points and basic privileges revoked and the threat of spending every waking hour either in worksheets or R&R usually kept us from saying anything that could even remotely be construed as manipulation.

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CODE SILENCE

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There were also consequences for the entire facility when even one person broke a rule, tried to run away or stand up to the staff. The main punishment being Code Silence. Code Silence was either a personal, family or facility wide punishment where we were not allowed to speak, even for necessary reasons for an extended period of time. The onset of this punishment was usually announced by staff and upper levels busting into the classroom yelling “Código Rojo!!” (Code Red) and instructing everyone to get up and face the walls. Our desks would be tipped over and there would be this big commotion made to scare us; papers thrown everywhere, books being slammed, tons of noise and yelling. We would then either be instructed to hold our noses against the wall or sit down in stress positions with our hands being our backs. Without being told why this was happening we would be instructed to hold that position in silence. Code Silence meant that no one in the immediate vicinity would be allowed to speak to anyone without receiving a Cat 4 consequence. Bathroom breaks were not permitted unless it had been scheduled by staff to go in groups, even so, we weren’t allowed to go for hours and told not to ask for the bathroom unless we wanted a consequence for manipulation. This would last for hours, sometimes far past bedtime and then continued the next day, just sitting in stress positions silently suffering for hours. If anyone fell out of structure, they would be restrained and the whole family would get another hour added to our sentence. Even after the R&R phase of this punishment we still remained on Code Silence, sometimes for weeks at a time. We weren’t allowed to do school, we were instructed to copy and write the rule book over and over again, every day. We weren’t allowed to talk to our parents or go to therapy, and anyone who had a scheduled family visit or seminar, got it canceled. This all sounds pretty extreme, and it definitely was, but the most insane part of it was that the reasons for these punishments were never actually explained. I do remember that one of these times was because a lower level girl attempted to run away, I believe it was within her first week (I mean who could blame her for trying right?) I only remember this because what I saw has haunted me for a long time. I didn’t see her trying to escape, but I was told that she tried to scale a wall that had only a very large pit below it. Apparently she made it over but broke her hip in the fall down the pit. What I witnessed was her being dragged back into the facility by two staff members, on her way into the R&R room, screaming in pain with lifeless, paralyzed legs. I’ll never get that image out of my head. And I can tell you with certainty that the pit she fell into was dug by the facility owners in order to prevent runaways, or at least cause debilitating injuries if it was ever attempted.

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INSTITUTIONALIZED

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Just after my 17^th birthday (second birthday in the program), I learned that my mother had committed herself to my graduation, and took the programs advice to offer me an “Exit Plan” as incentive to cooperate. Which meant I would be doomed to spend one more aching, exasperating, disconcerting year, pending my 18th birthday when I would be given a bus ticket to the border, $50 and a certified decree that I would be shunned from my family and abandoned to live on the streets. The “exit plan” sounded good to me, I would have taken that in a heartbeat, but the reality that I was going to spend another year in this hell-hole really just bummed me out. In my depression I wrote a letter to my grandmother, I believe I mentioned the utter abyss of darkness that had smothered the life clean out of me, and much to my surprise, she read between the lines. She got on the phone with the woman who was supposedly in direct charge of my care, who not surprisingly failed to answer any of her questions about me, my needs or my conditions. My grandmother only asked them one simple question… “Are you even qualified to be working with my grand-daughter?” and 24 hours later, my ever-devoted mother was called by the administration who recommended that I be discharged and returned into my mother’s care. In order to understand the significance of this you need to realize that kids NEVER leave the program, unless they graduate or the parents get wind of a scandal that prompts them to pull them out on their own free will. The program NEVER forfeits a paycheck for the sake of a child, it was simply NEVER done. If it weren’t for my grandmother’s common sense to ask an all too basic question… I still shudder to think where I might be today had I been forced to endure the future the program had set up for me and my family.

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CONCLUSION

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In conclusion, I have come to view my time at Casa By the Sea as a sort of cautionary tale, considering the fact that still in this day and age most people are not aware that these places exist. But they do. This industry is still as big as it was when I was sent to Mexico and despite that fact that both Casa By the Sea and High Impact have been closed for decades, there are still programs just like it in the states, in Mexico and hidden away in other foreign countries. Which means that despite all the information out there about these places, there are parents still making the same mistakes my parents made. The same people who ran CBS are still out there conning desperate parents out of their life savings and convincing them that they are saving their sons and daughters lives not knowing that they are setting them up with a lifetime of trauma to process. The scariest part about all this is that there is so much we DON’T know. There is so much that hasn’t even come out yet because survivors are afraid to come forward, afraid that this will follow them forever and they just want to move on and forget. Many rape and sexual abuse survivors have come forward only to be threatened with libel lawsuits by the very men that abused them. Many lawsuits have been filed against WWASP and the directors of these programs. Several staff and directors have been arrested and charged with aggravated assault, child pornography and child endangerment. Most disturbing of all, is how many former staff that have been accused of physical and sexual abuse have served absolutely no justice and continue to work in the industry today. All I can do is hope that someone out there reads my story and changes their mind about sending their kid off to get swallowed up by the Troubled Teen Industry. If putting my story out saves even one kid from enduring what thousands of WWASP Survivors have been through… Then this will all have been worth it.

My name is Chelsea F. and I am Breaking Code Silence.