“My name is Brittany. I went to Copper Canyon Academy, in Arizona, from October of 2009 until December of 2010. I was 16 at the time. CCA was not my first program (it was my third), but it is the one I remember the most.
Seminars are what I remember vividly though. In the first seminar, we were forced to relive all of our trauma out loud with girls we did not know. I remember sitting in front of a mirror for hours in a dark room. We were told to think of all the bad things that had happened in our lives. We were not allowed to do anything else until we had “cried it out.”
Later that day we did an exercise called “Mom and Dad,” where we confronted our parents. We were sitting in a circle, facing outwards. At one point a girl got so upset that she got up, picked up her chair, and threw it. It hit me in the head. I was denied any kind of care because it would disrupt my progress. I had a headache for days after the incident.
In seminar three, later on in my stay at CCA, I remember being down at a river, where all the girls who admitted being gay were “baptized.” I watch a girl get hit with metal hangers because that is how she felt her parents would punish her if she did not do well. As for me, they made me burn some of the few pictures I had with my family. Saying I needed to move on from the past and learn to be better. They made me burn journals that had my sincere feelings in them because they had entries of a boy I had known, which they had found during a room raid. The worst part for me was being forced to burn my favorite book. Books were my safe haven, and they knew that. I was told I would be stuck there for much longer if I did not, so I did.
I was told I had Borderline Personality Disorder, but not until the end of my program. I had been medicated with antipsychotics for over a year, off of the assumption of a psychiatrist who saw me once a month for five minutes. As an adult, I found out I never had or have that disorder.
Ten years later, I have no relationship with my family, and I have an extremely hard time keeping any kind of relationship due to abandonment issues. That is what hurts me the most. After everything and all this time, after doing what I was forced to do, they no longer talk to me because I “faked” a program or I am not the same person they remember.”