Nightmares from my RTC
I was held at Teen Challenge Columbus Girls Academy, or CGA (now rebranding as Heartland) from December of 2012 through March of 2014. This took the second half of my junior year of high school and all of my senior year away from me. I was brought willingly, if you can call it that, under false pretenses just after my 17th birthday by my parents. They told me that it was a private boarding school for girls who also struggled with the things I did, and that it would look good on my college applications to have graduated from there. I knew I was in over my head at home. I had been depressed and self-harming for years, and had recently had my second interaction with law enforcement. The idea of living away from home was enticing.
As a frame of reference, over a decade later I have just recently been diagnosed with ADHD and then with autism, which explains why I was experiencing the world in a way that made me not want to be in it. I entered a large public school system in 7th grade having been nearly exclusively homeschooled in a rural town prior to that. Socializing was hard, kids were mean, and I bored in class.
Upon my intake at CGA, I was informed that I would be taken off my antidepressant cold turkey, which I had been on for years. God would heal me. I don’t recall much of the first week. Very early on though, I realized that this was a very bad place. I remember making the decision to take the things about myself that were not CGA approved, which was essentially everything, and store it in a box in the back of my mind. I planned to play the part of the evangelical young woman they wanted me to be, keep my head down, and make it through my 15-month sentence with no extra time added. After graduation, I would simply take my true self back out of the box, and put the experience behind me. This plan did not work.
It’s hard not to let yourself get brainwashed when the system is built to force compliance. I tried to be the very best CGA student they could ask for. At first it was just a matter of minding my behavior, my speech, and following the many, many arbitrary rules. We used to say “for every rule, there’s a girl”. As I rose in seniority at the center, more was asked of me. I was given privileges (barely basic human decency) in exchange for unquestioning dedication and adherence to my assigned responsibilities. It was my job to turn on the girls I lived with if they misstepped, whether it was intentional or not. I treated my little sisters, newcomers to the program assigned to me for a few weeks to learn the ropes, with the same brutality that mine treated me. To this day I feel guilt over the way I treated my peers, but if I didn’t do it, someone else would and I would be punished in addition. My hand was forced as I tried to minimize my own suffering.
One experience that profoundly impacted me in regard to the hold that CGA had on my mind and body was my first home pass before graduation. A staff member drove me to the airport, handed me a ticket, and I took myself through security and got on the plane. The same went for the return trip. Inside, I was screaming for help, yet I did not ask anybody to use their phone to call for help or even a friend, and I did not tell any security personnel about the abusive situation I was being held in. I was out in public, unattended, and I did not make a run for it. The risk was too high. I could not bear the idea of restarting the entire program, not this far in. The only way out was through.
By the end, I had lost myself. I had been living every waking moment for 15 months in fear for my own safety and that of those around me. And then, just as suddenly as I had been plucked from my friends and support system and dropped at the center, I was plucked from the center and deposited back in my now-unfamiliar home. I couldn’t leave the house because of how high my anxiety was all the time, and there was nobody I could talk with who could relate. My past life had moved on without me, and the world was different. My TV shows were over, I was albums behind for my favorite bands, and social media had changed immensely. I was still mentally bound by the rules of the center.
I tried to take out the box that I had put myself away in, but I couldn’t remember how. That fall I started my freshman year at a Christian University with several other graduates from CGA.
In the early years, I had multiple people tell me that I cried in my sleep. It’s not something I ever noticed. But at some point, I began waking up and realize that yeah, I actually do feel like I was just crying, but I never remembered why. After I got my undergraduate degree. I did start remembering having nightmares. They were always about CGA, and for nine years they only got more intense, although the dreams themselves cycled through only a few select scenarios.
Most of the time I would, in my dream, wake up back in my bunk in the dorm at CGA. My eyes would burst open and my heart would beat too quickly as the morning routine began. The front door opens, the alarm beeps off. Footsteps approach down the hallway. Stomp, jingle, stomp, jingle. It was always Annette with her keychain clipped to her waistband. I’m waiting for it to happen, lying perfectly still. She stands in the doorway for a few minutes, and then the alarm clock goes off, getting one screech out before Annette slams it off and yells that it’s time to get up and we arise in silent unison. Sometimes in this dream I am 17 again, and sometimes I was my real-life age, having never gotten out.
Another recurring variation, usually the worse of the options, was that I was being taken back to the center against my will. The transporters were coming to get me. I would try to get help to keep it from happening, but nobody ever believed me when I tried to explain the severity of what was about to happen. Sometimes I was alone when they would come for me, and I would try to leave a note for a loved one about what had happened, but the ink from the pen would run and become illegible in my panic. Many times in these, the transporters would be within sight and I would only wake up because I chose to end my own life over being taken back to CGA.
As I approached 30, these nightmares were a nightly occurrence, and I would wake up hyperventilating to the point that my partner would have to help reassure me and calm me down. There were days at a time where I would not allow myself to sleep at all, which inevitably led me to burn through all my PTO at work.
Eventually I saw a very specific type of therapist for this, who was trained in accelerated resolution therapy (ART). I cannot express how much this helped ease my suffering. I continue to see a trauma-informed therapist on a weekly basis.
The experiences I endured through my time at Teen Challenge have impacted my life tremendously to this day, and there are so many more topics I could (and I will) write about. The nightmares barely skim the surface.
I want other survivors to feel seen the way I did when I started reading survivor testimonies and memoirs. You are not alone in what you went through, it was real, and I believe you.