“Prior to Growing Together, I could see my parents’ concerns. I was at the party stage of my life. I was drinking, smoking weed, and abusing prescription pills. However, I was not any worse off than my two other siblings. I was in my senior year of high school and I was working full time. For some reason, I had my mom come up to my job and she went into my trunk and found a few hundred dollars’ worth of stolen clothes. We got into an argument in the parking lot, and I asked her to let me be emancipated. Later, I got called into the office at school and my parents walked in and said we were going to meet with a lawyer and signed me out of class early. We rode together and got to the building. When I walked in, the doors locked behind me. I knew something was not right and I started trying to open the door. I remember the lady at the front desk just being so nasty to me. Finally, they tell me I am in drug rehab.
I refused to stay, and after begging and pleading with my parents, they were made to leave. I was thrown into a white room with a couple of girls. One of the girls being from the same school as me, so I felt a little more comfortable. However, I was still very weirded out by their uniforms and by their appearance. They would make noises like they had Tourette’s if they made eye contact. I dragged it out for hours until I finally got so tired. I just wanted to go to bed to plan how I would get out of that place in the morning.
The four of us got into a parent’s vehicle late that night and we went to the house. They were reading out of notebooks and giving feedback for hours. I was pretty sure I would never participate in that stuff. We got a snack and went to our room, where there were just mattresses on the floor, baby monitors, and door alarms. I tried talking to the girl I knew, and she would not say anything back—like a zombie. It was like a bad dream that I was sure going to wake up from, so I went to sleep.
The morning routine was just as weird and then we went to the building where we spent the days. They did this weird motivation thing and had us sing children’s songs. I just laid on the floor in the back of the building observing everything. I had two choices: wait until my 18th birthday to get out or get through the program. I was doing whatever I had to get out as quickly as possible. I planned to fake it until August 31st. My goal was to get on Third Phase so I could get my parents alone and tell them how insane this program was.
In the next few days, I started doing everything they were doing and sitting upright, participating in these weird groups, and doing what I needed to do. In my second week there, you were supposed to confess something to your parents during a Friday night meeting. I do not remember if they could respond to you or not but it was just to make them want to keep you and reassure them as to why they put you there. Shortly after, I made Talk and Responsibility. That is when you have another talk with your parents, but you are also in charge of cleaning up after everybody. I do not know how that was supposed to be exciting, but that is what was needed to move up.
I finally got to the Second Phase. I was not going to make those girls follow those stupid rules. At that point, my codependency issues started. I felt like I needed to save those girls. When they would come home with me, I would make them feel as normal as possible. We would stay up all night talking because that was against the rules. The newcomers could not talk, but we all talked about life. I planned to get my own apartment and told them if they heard a certain song playing outside the building it was me helping them escape. These girls became my little sisters. I was older than all these girls and they had been in the program for so much longer than I had.
After I did what I needed to on Phase Two. I put in for Third Phase. I was one vote away from making the phase that I knew it was rigged. I was able to get my parents alone in the hallway and ask them to pull me out, that I was doing everything I needed to be doing, and they still kept me back. At this point, my parents were fostering kids, so they saw firsthand how crazy it was. So, they pulled me. The next morning, they took me to DCF to make a report against Growing Together. Later that evening, a staff member called me and said since I called DCF, she had set everyone back on their phases and I needed to come clean about all the misbehaving everyone was doing.
I told her I did not know anything and ended the conversation. She said they would stay in First Phase until I came clean. At that point, I washed my hands of the place, because I thought all the girls I fought so hard for were going to resent me. They could not go home and see their families because I got pulled. The program destroyed me and my relationship with my parents, so I immediately got my own apartment, which happened to be a couple of miles from the building.
For a few months, when girls would run, they would send the police to my house and ask to search for the girls. This happened until I lost my cool. Everything stopped until the program shut down and a lot of the girls reached out to me. These girls are still some of my best friends to this day. I do not speak to anyone else about Growing Together. My spouse of seven years just knows I was in treatment, but they do not know the extent of it. It is such a taboo, strange place. If I try to explain it, they just look at me with a blank stare. Even in my relationships with the girls from the program, we do not speak about the program. It is just something we all blocked out.”