Episode Five

if you had a school

for example and even half of the kids that had gone through the school were coming out with cancer i'd say

that school will be shut down immediately immediately no question you know yeah like this is bad this is hurting people

based on the interviews that we've done way more than half of these kids are coming out of this place with pdc but the schools not being shut down

why do you think we we don't take the psychological illnesses more seriously because they can't be seen

ah from the campus of freedom village usa an international ministry dedicated to reaching the teenagers of the united states and canada

welcome back to ricci

my name is margaret and this is we warn them freedom village and investigative miniseries unpacking what happened at freedom village usa through interviews with the people who experienced at themselves

we will mention different forms of abuse and violence throughout the series so please take care of yourself as you feel necessary

uh

like we mentioned in episode three there is still no national database that keeps track of all the troubled teen programs even the few statistics that do exist are incomplete because they don't include the religious organizations without any record of which programs exists what they're doing and what has

opens to kids after they leave how can we measure the success of these so-called rehabilitation programs what does the longterm aftermath of a troubled teen program look like without statistical data the only way we can answer this question is by listening to the experiences of people who have gone through it and are willing to share

their stories in this episode we'll be hearing some new voices and will also be revisiting some people that we've already met this time we'll be focusing on where they are now in life and hearing in their own words how freedom village has affected them

one of the only new people i want to introduce is caitlin her parents sent her to a psych ward in canada where she grew up and then across the border to freedom village although she only stayed for five months she was then trafficked into more tdi programs one being teen challenge a notorious troubled teen institute with multiple locations

in sixteen states across the us about a year ago i got to have a phone call with her i used to always have the saying if you want to get out of the game alive you have to play the game better than the person who made it and that really affected me a lot because in some ways i didn't really know how to take e bay

in society i had learned how to play this game and i think everybody's playing it and i'm not understanding why other people aren't understanding the rules because they're at freedom village you could take nothing at face value

like graphs kind of stuff that would happen you really couldn't trust anybody you had to read into everything you had to be able to lie really well and know when somebody is saying something but they really need something totally different and sometimes you have

i guess

and you have to call the bluff so when i came into the real world i would be so paranoid about people and what you really mean by that and they're like what do you mean what do i mean i mean what i'm saying like and i would just read way too much into things that weren't even there

but it was almost like i felt like i had to so what made freedom village traumatic i feel like this whole series has kind of been an ode to that question but it's still worth breaking it down we'll be hearing more insight from maggie who's a licensed clinical therapist what is p sd

could you give a definition of swords yeah sure i mean i think first i want to kind of give not a definition of trauma but i just want to say something about like what trauma is because i feel like that's a word that sort of thrown around a lot but you know like it might be good to to say so like defining trauma is hard and you can't really put it in a sentence

don't think but some people would describe it as it's like too much too fast too soon so basically it's an experience that is too overwhelming for you to like effectively process and handle it in that moment but this can look like a lot of different things so some consistent element

nts of trauma our lack of safety right a lack of a sense of security a lack of control any kind of situation where your physical or emotional needs aren't being met

so p t s d is what we call the aftermath of trauma for a lot of people not everyone who has trauma develops btc but the idea is that like in the moment when something traumatic is happening to you you react to it right which could also be considered adapter

to it like the traumas happening it's like survival mode do you have to do it you have to do to survive but then the traumas over and those things that you had to do to survive in that moment don't really stop like your mind or your body kind of get stuck in those reactions and they

continue and that's what we mean when we talk about p t sd i think it's important to note that most of the people i've spoken to attended freedom village between the ages of twelve and sixteen even the ones that stayed into adulthood had first arrived in their early teens and when people are that age their sense of self is

still malleable right it's like it's forming it's evolving it's fluid and it's also vulnerable to influence you know maybe more so than when someone is an adult when you're a teenager you're still forming your idea of who you are and that idea is going to be more informed by how others are true

eating you the messages that you're receiving from the world about what you deserve how you deserve to be treated

things got really bad after i left um

i've got a lot worse

ah

and i think having binned the teen challenge after that just poured even that much more gasoline into the situation

um because when i was inching challenge i started developing a worse eating disorder

which was already happening in freedom village um

and somehow i managed to hide a lot of that

and then my eating disorder got pretty severe when i was out

my head go into treatment i was underway

i started abusing drugs

which is almost ironic because i wasn't using drugs before and then

and it was even harder because nobody knew what happened

you know all of these family members were like oh it's so good you went there and all of us stocks and

as kind of holding that all in and meanwhile

like i said i couldn't live i just hadn't

i felt so guilty for being out of those places knowing

you know it's twelve o'clock there's a bunch of kids in new york right now sitting at the no level table you know worrying about walking the log tonight you know i i felt guilty even just opening the fridge being able to get a glass of orange juice

caitlin told me that she has since been diagnosed with cp tfc the c stands for complex and is used to describe people that have endured recurring traumatic events rather than just one she described to me some of her symptoms including disassociating and forgetting hours in a day once she arrived at a grocery store and had no

no idea how she got there maggie mentioned that p t s d physically changes the body something else that i want to say about the emotional needs part of this is that when speaking about you know physical needs that's pretty easy to understand why that's important i think that sometimes people think our emotional needs are

kind of secondary or not essential you know that this was like okay kind of tough right you had no one to talk to blah blah blah that's life right like i would argue that our emotional needs in a sense are actually biologically based like these needs are hardwired into our bodies

ys and not having them met affects our digestive system it affects our heart it affects our blood flow it affects our immune system it affects the way that our brains grow it literally affects our neurons you know like this is this is really important

and

we are all born needing to have the experience of human connection needing to feel cared for it like that is hardwired into the human species so being a person any person but especially a young person and being alone

and being scared and not being able to have that human connection for weeks months that's really damaging that's really serious

in episode two maggie and i went back upstate with boy wonder to visit his friends from the village brighton and weston despite them all being out of the village for over a year at this point they all mentioned different ways it has continued to affect them bryden who was at the village for a year and one month leaving in two thousand and nineteen tells me about his day

dreams

have nightmares every single night i don't sleep i

i just don't dream well i guess if i dream it's a nightmare but if i don't dream this or if i play it's never a good dream i can never grow something good yeah are your dreams are you at the village in your dreams sometimes sometimes other times it's just mean homes and they're gone

boy wonder who was at the village for a year and seven months tells me about his experience there are moments where like my god like when i slip last night at your house

the reason why you i woke up in that undercover that blanket is because for a second

like i woke up the first time and i woke up in my dorm

right i like it freaked me the fuck out and i just grabbed the link and put it into my head and got into betsy

i still have to channel like and it's trauma that les i wouldn't expect like sometimes if i'm if i'm drunk enough sometimes if i'm walking

in someone's house or always if i'm blank because sometimes i'll blink and i'll see the heart pumping again and it will be the

however the most surprising story came from weston he now lives back in syracuse with his parents and works at home depot

when i'm working like because i work outside the law i'll walk into like a cart girl like i'll push a card so as i turned the cards i look up and it's like the horse barn i look back down and i'm doing the fucking water buckets and i look back up and i'm back at home depot it's like flash seconds ago

it's not a noticeable amount of time just shit like that like this throws my balance off sometimes like if that happens like when that happened i fuckin like felt in the parking lot to the ground because i've lost balance and like

my centering

because i just didn't know what like where i was the flashbacks western described reminded me of what i've heard war veterans experience brighton tells me more and i start to understand the parallels ever like this when i left before i was very emotional person i would cry when i left i didn't even cry when my grandma died

i didn't cry on my i got a call yesterday at lunch my childhood dogs were put down yesterday i didn't cry i didn't even care so you still feel like you don't really feel emotional pain anymore though ever do you feel joy or ah

this is one of the perks after louis takes on you know the options a few weeks ago or when i first got here tanner here and there playing video games i got really ah i started having

owners of the village and about broke down because i missed my buddies you know i miss the pain that we went through together

and it was like i was living at alone

and

i broke down and i opened up to him a little bit and i was in tears reading wiles

and and you were saying you started you said you've got really high and then you started having flashbacks what were those flashbacks like maybe eating okay i say little kid i kid

i went into his room and that

beat the fuck out

and that was what you flashed back to yeah because it's a little last kid he's fucking thirteen i'm sixteen this my fingers over your crying

i got this kid crying

he's over your screaming and everybody can hear it but nobody does a fucking thing because your horse was staff yeah yes nobody gave a shit i would look for somebody to come in and fucking dick the shit out of me but nobody did that's what made it hard

do you feel like you guys were almost like pushing boundaries because you wanted someone to intervene though

i mean i mean i guess maybe like it's a free market view that was curious about like how far can we take things before oh yeah no one will care

well i think they cared about was the rules long as you follow the rules give a fuck what you did

the rules on the book rule on the bug

so what do we take away from the story obviously it's wrong that bryden was beating up kids but the adults who were in charge of them were allowing and perhaps encouraging this behavior their non-action sends the message that violence is okay

this is a dangerous message to be sending how will this impact their view of the world and the people in it the bigger issues are also about like the way it affects your ability to connect with other people so a big part of pgc is having trust issues you know like not being able to trust other people

will not being able to open up to other people in meaningful ways not being able to form deep emotional connections not being able to regulate your own emotions

a lot of people with with trauma kind of feel like there's something wrong with them or like they're broken

or what they have inside of themselves is so

ugly that they don't want anyone else to see it

they don't want anyone else to see them

and i mean obviously you know this effects all aspects of your life it can affect your friendships and affects romantic relationships it affects your relationship with sex your ability to be intimate with people

phil who we first met an episode three had a lot to say about this he was one of the youngest placements at freedom village arriving in nineteen eighty nine at twelve years old he stayed for a year and a half he talks about constantly being neglected at freedom village having multiple adopted teen sponsors but never received

in any of the money or resources i have returned food and stow

um

that's followed me a long time on twelve missions done

um i'm

not a very social person i'm very skeptical of everybody

and that comes from that time definitely in it's i always on guard i'm always and i don't have a lot of friends

i just don't pay

i don't get along it's not an animal if they don't get along along with everybody i just

trustee or you don't it's hard to trust anybody know people that i was supposed to be able to trust them all is just kinda abandoned me

no and left me to rot in some prison like pleasure so many years and even getting back out i still felt like i felt like i was in that prison for a long time

i think a lot of my decision making and you know me questioning

what to do and how to do things all comes from that cause i really overanalyze everything because i felt them and like i feel now is that if you don't overanalyze it i don't look at the whole entire situation and make sure i make things zach great choice that it's it's gonna fall apart

i'll be back in square one and have to start again but that lead to something that i i have to deal with later on with what therapy is i got so used to making things up i started just making things up all the time

and he got to a point where i started not yammering you start not knowing what was real you know i went through a lot of therapy to fix that

cause i tell you ten years fifteen years ago if you're a calmer ten years ago i wanna touch you now i can't talk about it because i wouldn't be able to tell you if i was gonna tell you the truth around wow you've come so kind of disillusioned to what you had physically experience

i just made it all up and it's easier i found on when you just make things up and follow the what they want that's what they want you to do anyway i've got left alone and the lies were coming down in very topic it's cool place was built on one massive lie yeah like the level system like to

to look at life in this like very specific type of way it's hard to let go of that there aren't really is i've spent a lot of years there for you

i'm able to talk about it now

a huge step for range

i've never talked about it she knows a little bit i think she's probably the only other human being on the planet and the i don't know it just felt like it was the time when i know there's other kids out there suffering and hurting and it sucks

and they need help and people like him and their predatory ways has to come to an end

someone has to and and the cycle

fletcher brothers was using christianity as a tool of manipulation to control people and bend them to his will he invoke concepts like purity and obedience teaching people that their worth in spiritual wellbeing were conditional this affects not only how a person views themselves but also

so how they treat other people marry who we met in the last episode and grew up in freedom village leaving at twenty four years old describes what it was like to try to unlearn these concepts

it just like a slippery slope of god's favor that like you could lose it if you cross any of these lines and i can see now that like how i relate to people and how like only in last couple of years i'm starting to be able to actually love people properly

i think like love or even like you guys are people that i just knew like what's my initial go to is like judgment and criticism and like let's figure out what's wrong with this person it's like a mixed that but like you don't have any compassion for people when you're like like then you probably do have tons of prejudice

cause you've never made friends with anybody like you don't get to know a person you're just fixing them or like categorizing them and that's how i was like that is who i was for all that time and this judgment isn't only directed towards other people often the most harm

shh judgment is turned inwards

one of the people i interviewed in the first episode the woman who arrived at freedom village in nineteen eighty four described it was like developing her own sexual identity after leaving freedom village

it's a lot of shame because a lot of shame how so

i think they're all descriptive in learn i mean it took years after i left especially when it came to sex

does a number on your mind

does a number on your mind

like you know the the verse um

even if you saw it is the same as you did it

and say years of believing

perhaps you realised i had to learn that hey

this desire that we have for sex is god given it's natural it's normal

and to shame it and suppress it and

it can be it can turn into something freaky and ugly if it's not embracing something natural if we were taught that if we were taught that it's god given it's natural and to deal with it differently

right when i like i told my boyfriend right when i graduated we continue to date and whatever he wanted we never had sex because i was so scared that god was going to punish me

we never had thanks because i was so scared that god was going to punish me you know our creator god god like take this desire away from me until i get married the sexual issues that i did have right after it would be it was i would have sex with these different guys because it was a buildup you know

you'd be so horny and you get you have sex and then after the deed is done it's like oh my god what did i do you feel disgusted you feel guilty you feel shamed psych what good is x if it's full ashamed and regretful and that was years that was my experience with sex week years

i also talked to jesse from episode three about this he was the one who came to freedom village in nineteen ninety one and was groomed and then raped by one of the adopted teen sponsors who also served as partial staff he describes what it was like living with the conditioning that he had received from fletcher brothers

but he really made me fearful of what why and who i was and letting that manifest and you know becoming who i was and email for years um

i didn't lose my virginity and was like twenty one i didn't essentially doing anything with anyone says about twenty one

the whole time

terrible

talk about a cock block i just clear his face and hearing his voice in my head

oh my god and yeah it was the worst it took a long time to get over that i've been with my partner since two thousand and six we've been together about fifteen years

took me until my thirties to really get out of i live this very secret life go to work come on don't interact it really made me antisocial for most somalis

the mainly fearful of other people

the last person i want to introduce today is a woman named monica she attended freedom village for a total of two years beginning in two thousand and one monica suffered from depression growing up and was diagnosed with h d she describes getting in trouble for typical things like smoking and drinking her parents not knowing how to handle her mental health

behavior ended up putting her in a psych ward until they heard about freedom village she told me that she had been openly gay the whole time she was there one of the consequences was that she never made it past sea level

and this girl had some parents for each other and i had sold the place that was what musicians are against us and i got scared

and i hope it

they told me that i needed to change and i needed love from a woman so to change me they wanted to do like ah

like cuddling to help me through it who who would cuddle with you are the dean of the

gore yeah they recommended that i had an adult woman hold me and cuddle me and give me the love that i was missing that mainly attracted to women i did up once and i know that it was the most uncomfortable feeling in the world yeah

yeah did and did the dean i mean the dean must have believed this too that this was helpful like yeah

i believe her intentions were right like hershey like her intentions were right because we're all being brainwashed by this man

and was this cuddling a common practice of i have absolutely no clue i was the only one i know there was a couple other women in the program that were that were okay but they never said anything i know that i had told me quit being so honest

with them

mending thought that i was crazy for saying that it was gay and and wasn't gonna say anything different because my thing was i was so afraid i got this man i'm afraid of at his people but also i'm afraid he's taught me that god is is judging me and i'm going to hell

help for this but i was afraid to say god changed me because i was afraid to out of spit in god's face and i was gonna get even more punished for it

if that makes any sense if you are dishonest than you then you'd think god would punish you even more

so how should i why would i say that god changed me if he didn't mean me who i am and i'm accepting it i can't say to him no you changed me i'm not this person

right wow

so a lot of moral conflicts to be happening at sixteen weeks yeah

so um your girl at the er girl at that time got kicked out of the program because you guys got caught yes so why didn't you get kicked out of the program um at that time i tried running away there's train tracks down behind freedom though yes i was trying to run away and

there was um security guys which were the other guys on the higher level dad um

pulled me in the dean at the time and i shoved into it bitch and when i got shoved in the ditch i was crunched i was beaten up in this ditch by the staff and yes by the staff i hadn't marched around my neck for more they're grabbing my throat and flex your team downstairs in the dorm and saw

and i think she was so afraid of me leaving and saying something that he kept me there and the saint he was doing me a favor that he could be drawn me out and i would die out there so he was saving my life oh man i was like

kind of like lost in that like oh he is right i'm gonna go out there i'm going to die he did save me not thinking wait a minute as an adult i'm like this is this is a child that got physically abused and you were scared to you're trying to cover it up yeah expecially if i went out there and said

who i like you know why i was beaten she describes to me what it was like right after she left the village i'm old enough i don't have an education

for even a high school no education don't know how to get a job i don't know how to do a resume i don't know how to fill out an application i don't even know how to talk to people without using the word and there's nothing wrong with god and stuff like that but you're so used to scripture and being brainwashed or scripture and memorizing scr

picture like having a conversation with somebody out quote in the bible with ah like the world did not accept that like okay you can't in our you don't know how to interact with people i was always the strange one so going into the world and trying to it was a huge anxiety i didn't know what to wear i didn't know

know what clothes to wear what was going to be appropriate for the world nobody cares but in my mind when i felt like i was sinning i would punish myself okay we'll scrub the floors make sure i made my bed perfect and then questioning that that beds perfect i'm afraid to get in trouble but nobody was behind me saying

monica that's wrong you know what i mean so you're like in this

chaotic mind i got so scared i called them up and begged them to take me back because i had no clue i was doing similarly to lauren from episode four monica ended up going back to freedom village because navigating the outside world had become too confusing for her this is a perfect example of institue

rationalization i don't walk around and then and slot four am because i'm just ashamed of it i still have that problem i get very nervous when i tell people you know like obviously can look at me and seeing the ad on the lesbian and that's fine but i don't go around expressing that i am earning

low self-esteem i'm i felt like i was ugly disgusting

did you feel like did you have trouble getting into relationships afterwards oh yes i don't trust people as far as i could throw them i would self sabotage a lot of relationship not even um on an intimate relationship even our friendship on the very

still true if they are very loner they i'm very thankful for my significant other because she's very patient

asia um because she understands she really takes the time to read about it and she watches a bunch of like coke stuff on tv so she understands the thought process that goes behind it

and part of institutionalizing someone is readjusting their sense of how they deserve to be treated you're cutting down a person's self-esteem and self-worth over an extended period of time this begins to strip them of their sense of humanity dehumanization is another re

really big part of this and that's that's not all there is to it i mean

dehumanization in general is a form of trauma right like being made to feel that your humanity doesn't matter in this moment that you are not deserving of being treated respectfully of being treated

with dignity

i mean it was standard practice here that these kids were forced to talk about their you know their testimonies like these dark humiliating painful stories of things that had happened in their life

life you know like that's not something that comes lightly that's a really intense process of opening yourself up and taking something out that's heavy and it's scary

it was always about him it was never about us

no you would the little kids

just destroy you in front of all your peers he made a man just destroy you we're not just going oh you're you're you're a moron for doing this or whatever we all get that like you would take the dark things that you told him in you know

private room throw that idea from everybody

like a bomb i think when just another thing about

dehumanization is that these kids were aware a lot of them were aware that they were being used essentially as a free source of labor to maintain fletcher brothers personal property

and that in itself that i mean that is slavery that is dehumanizing that's trauma

the whole adopt the team really burns me like i mean

i want to say now it's like i feel like he was human trafficking you're making a profit off me you're selling me to strangers

maybe i didn't go out in you know experience like in their own from stuff like that but you're still talking to people you don't know some emotion comes up on the whole life feel that way so from my language and a lot of it comes down to my significant other saying wow like there is something that right because you're

feeling things and you can't identify with today monica is thirty seven now and this happened to her when she was a teenager i tend to think that similar to a physical wound the injury will naturally heal over time but talking to survivors who have been away from freedom village for years or even decades has shown me that this

isn't necessarily the case

did you see a therapy now what how now i know my poor like me my my doctor like my new like primary right yeah like i remember going to see him all the kids in tow and he's like looking at the kids and then he's just like yeah okay and i'm like

it's just like you know you can see like you can see somebody and i just again i was just conditioned be like no no it's fine i'll just read my bible more like i'm the only tools i thought i had just keep reading the bible keep praying and like that's what's gonna help and it didn't

so yeah i went through a lot of like crosses literally crippling anxiety labour probably needed some medication there like just having these weird phobias like i am car was driving with somebody else driving like i was just completely convinced that we were going to get an accident

every second of every drive and like but i didn't tell anybody that so of course condition just like i'm not express anything and so like suffered through that got to the point where i was having dreams about like joining my kids and like eating yeah like hurting my kids like just terrible and i finally

those who need it it's just again like i forget so much of that period of time in spite of the long lasting impacts of this type of abuse human beings are still driven by the impulse and will to heal themselves monica describes her multiple attempts at different forms of therapy yeah i was diagnosed with p

dfc and i was receiving treatment a couple of years ago through mdr

and they actually had to stop it because i was physically getting sick from it man i'm trying to go through that process on memories being jumbled up with timing light years and stuff like that because it's been a it's been a struggle because i do sometimes i can i can't

remember a lot of things even now when i talk to other survivors and i'm like can this really happen like yeah my ribs it that did happen in our and i you know save those text messages so i can put the pieces together because i was like wait you know i know this happened i know it happen

but it's that that you're so brainwashed to make yourself seem like you're the crazy one there's something wrong with you and it just got worse when i left because my drug abuse had gotten out of control and sober for ten years but i became a worse drug

organic like gavin to drugs more when i left there just because we go out and like you don't know what to do

the circumstances of freedom village are so extreme and strange that a lot of kids leave feeling even more isolated and unable to relate to their peers they don't know how to reach out to other people for support or at least in a healthy way and end up turning their feelings inwards a lot of people don't even feel comfortable telling their

truth about what happened to them

did your mom or dad ever understand like what this place was or only after the fact or even now i would say stuff and they would be like oh you know they meant well and all of the stuff they didn't actually find out and they still don't even fully know what happened but they

i didn't find out that it was like legit abusive until a year ago a year and i'm thirty years old

and it was did you tell them finally

yeah because we got into a huge argument and they're like you don't understand like why you're so this way and i finally was just like look this is the stuff that legit happen because as much as i resented them for sending me there

i love them enough that

i didn't