The Suppression of Emerging Consciousness: The “Troubled Teen” Industry
In previous articles, I’ve talked about the various ways that dysfunctional social environments perpetuate denial and emerging awareness gets suppressed. A term for this I’ve used is status quo maintenance. This includes the marginalization of people that don’t fit into their environment, that think differently, and/or that are pained by things their environment requires them to tolerate.
This can happen in all kinds of settings including the family, school, and various institutions.
Just to be clear, these things often happen unconsciously. It is not that anyone is necessarily suppressing anyone because they have bad intentions. People are doing what they know to do.
As a recap, here are some of the ways this actually happens:
Adjusting the individual pointing out the problem, rather than looking at the systemic issues driving it.
Focusing on the behavior of the individual to scapegoat them and deny the larger issue. For example, if someone has rage because of the situation they happen to be in, then the problem is the rage, not the underlying issue.
Pathologizing to maintain the status quo. For example, the widespread pathologizing of rebellious behaviors or the diseasing of ADHD behaviors rather than considering potential environmental factors driving them.
Use of propaganda to spin repression as something humane and, even, holistic.
Use of emotional abuse to enforce conformity, prevent independent thought, and limit self-expression.
Selecting for blind obedience.
Encouraging or forcing suppression of gut feelings and difficult emotions.
The (mis)use of healing and “helping” professions for repression.
Paternalism in mental health professionals.
Focusing on individual behavior and ignoring what’s at depth: values, feelings, goals, etc.
Confusing process and substance.
Shaming people for the consequences, particularly mental health ones, of the abuse or dysfunctional situations they’ve endured.
Drowning out people’s inner authority.
Use of institutions and culture to make people tractable.
Use of expert opinion to limit critical thinking and confuse people.
Just to be clear, I don’t intend to judge, blame, or shame anyone with these observations. I’m just reporting.
One of the reasons I have arrived at this perspective is due to dealing with some of these dynamics earlier in my own life and putting in a great deal of work to heal from them.
As a teenager, I experienced a powerful case study in this phenomenon when I was sent to the so-called “troubled teen industry” and got to see a dark corner of American society. I went to a program that was called the “Harvard” of so-called “therapeutic boarding schools”. Among educational consultants, who sell these interventions to vulnerable parents, this program developed a reputation for itself as one of the most humane and holistic institutions of its kind.
This program used, among other things, an extreme form of Skinnerian behavioral modification to manufacture obedient teenagers. If you think regular school is about instilling obedience, this environment was, in my estimation, a few orders of magnitude more extreme in doing so. The logic of the program was that if you aren’t as obedient as your environment requires, then you have “immaturity disease”. This problem, according to the school, can only be solved with extreme authoritarianism, which the program uses. It was primarily focused on using many forms of punishment and threats to control and reshape teenagers. The group and individual therapy components of the program involved forcing you to open up about your vulnerability and, at that point, shaming or attacking you. If you protested any of this, you would receive more punishment or shaming until you gave in. In all of this, you can’t leave the facility or contact the outside world, including your parents.
When we would try to express how we actually felt and discuss what was driving our behavior (looking for understanding, respect, and genuine support) we would be told we were being “manipulative”. This is a common feature of the troubled teen industry: where self-advocacy is characterized as manipulation. In this way, they force you to bury your inner compass and break your self-trust. The staff at these programs see all teenagers in attendance through a lens that they are inherently bad, dangerous, sinful, broken, etc., and that these kids can earn the approval and “love” of these staff through mindless obedience. Both lived experience and common sense would suggest that this is very destructive to a person’s inner life. It teaches you to see yourself through a toxic lens and to be dependent on others’ opinions. In my view, the fact that these staff can’t see that this is toxic conditioning speaks to their own lack of self-awareness and their profound lack of qualification to actually help people.
Now one might say, “Well I understand that it’s coercive and painful, but kids are sent to these places because of their bad behavior and clearly need to be controlled”. The problem is that, at least for some of us, that behavior is the result of a traumatic situation where you’re ‘damned if you do and damned if you don’t’. Where you can either accept being traumatized and lose yourself or try to preserve authenticity in some way. Rebellion can be an attempt to preserve authenticity. When that’s the case, such teenagers certainly do not “deserve” to be sent to these institutions, and it certainly wouldn’t be helpful.
Regardless of why they were sent to the troubled teen industry, these teenagers need the truth of their situation dealt with. Coercion in response to a false premise just creates more harm. What the program that I went to did was, first, manufacture a story that aligns with the parents’ delusions - typically, that the kid is simply a degenerate brat with “immaturity” disease. It then acted as though what the kid needs is forceful denial of their inner experience (despite the programs’ propaganda to the contrary) and various forms of psychological abuse. This intervention serves the denial and dysfunction of the environment, as well as the business model of the institution (because the paying customers are, much of the time, parents that are in denial about their own dysfunction). It does not serve the needs of the kids it claims to be serving. This can be seen, partly, in the true outcomes of the school which include death, suicidality, drug addiction, and PTSD.
The program systematically broke students in a number of ways. One way was that the environment was under extreme, totalistic control on an isolated ranch in remote Montana. Kids were essentially prisoners held captive with no contact with the outside world, hours from the nearest town. There was no free access to communication devices of any kind (and no way to report abuse). Spending a few minutes in civilization became a rare treat. This makes kids much easier to break and is why dangerous cults look similar (In fact, one could easily argue that these “troubled teen” programs are cults. In fact, they were directly influenced by the Synanon cult).
Another way this program broke teenagers was through various forms of punishment. They used social isolation (for days or weeks), humiliation, attack therapy, group shaming, forced confessions, and more. This school also allowed students (ahem, inmates) to earn small joys like eating candy, watching movies, and seeing your parents, and then took them away as punishment to extract a greater degree of submission and passivity. When you are in an institution with most aspects of your identity stripped away, this can be extremely demoralizing.
What’s useful to note here is that it wasn’t the demoralization or feelings of despair that were considered the relevant issues as far as our mental health was concerned. The program considered our needed treatment to be forcing us to bury and deny those feelings and present a false facade, as they systematically generate those feelings in us. In other words, they cause pain and force us to adjust to it. Now as an adult, I know that one of the most important things for my own well-being is to nurture all difficult emotions as they arise. I believe anything that constitutes actual support will assist in that effort.
While social isolation and group shaming are traumatic, perhaps the most painful form of punishment is what was known as “getting dropped”. The program involved 5 different levels you have to go through. At each one, you earn certain privileges including being able to eat candy, listen to music, have a musical instrument, etc. It took months and a lot of work to progress to the next level - work that was basically jumping through the hoops of someone with power over you to demonstrate increasingly reflexive obedience. One of the reasons it took so much work was because it was dependent on the whims and subjective judgment of the staff, who, as you might imagine, were not the most evolved individuals. Their goal was to break us and make us suffer, as they are under the delusion that this is therapeutic. Once you get to another level, there is the omnipresent threat of being “dropped”, meaning you are demoted to a lower level, typically the first one. The lower levels were designed to create an exceptionally miserable experience. Typically, being dropped was combined with other punishments like social isolation, public humiliation, attack therapy, and drudgery (forced labor including shoveling animal feces). Being dropped also means you stay for months longer in a truly miserable place.
All of these punishments were used on kids that were suffering due to issues stemming from the program and/or their family of origin. In fact, punishing kids for their mental health problems (and treating them as character flaws) was a major part of the program, at least when I was there. I recall kids getting depressed or developing severe stress reactions because of their program-generated misery and being severely punished for it. This depression (or anxiety or rage or what have you) would be treated as a choice and a character flaw, not an experience that needed to be treated with genuine compassion, understanding, and curiosity, nor as an organic response to a toxic environment. Kids were forced to present a false appearance and bury their inner experience both to avoid punishment and to move forward in the program (so they could regain their freedom). The staff responded to the teenagers as though this false appearance was real. This was a way that they were able to create a product for the parents, who were paying a fortune (some middle-class parents take out loans to send them to this program because the program staff and educational consultants convince them that if they do not do this, their child will end up “dead or in jail”). What was not acknowledged is that this is hardcore psychological abuse with potentially devastating consequences.
All of these punishments were often given for no reason at all or for unclear, nonsensical reasons. This created an atmosphere of fear which makes people easier to break. One could be extremely compliant and then have any or all of these punishments handed out at any moment. This was done to force the kid to submit to the will of their masters and make an example of them.
The program used kids’ shame, fear, and feelings of unworthiness to manipulate them into being obedient and dependent on others’ opinions. Many of the kids’ issues in their home environment stemmed from these same things. They came from home environments that were manipulative, unattuned, and that used these negative emotions to enforce compliance. So it was assumed that forcing kids to adjust to these painful things is good for them. The deeper assumption made here is that if this kind of toxic environment doesn’t work for you, then there is something wrong with you. This is part of what makes it such a great product for the particular parents that are paying for it. It validates their given awareness and forces kids to adjust to the status quo of the family system (even considering the fact that these programs often pretend to care about family systems issues, using terms like ‘identified patient’).
As a survivor of these programs, one of the things that makes it so difficult to deal with their harm is that, effectively, you have people calling themselves experts who are telling you not to trust yourself. You are expected to be dependent on their judgment. For example, my therapist at this school coerced me into buying into the idea that she knows what is good for me and what my needs are, and that I must defer to her perception at all times. And the reason she supposedly knows this is because of her license and Ph.D. While previously I would have rejected something like this as the actions of a totally illegitimate authority, I did not have the option to do so when held captive at this facility. Similarly, the school’s founders and clinical directors attended prestigious institutions like Harvard, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Yale School of Medicine, and Cambridge. In addition to limiting people’s ability to question their judgment, these credentials encourage relevant parts of the ecosystem surrounding the school (such as educational consultants and mental health professionals) to consider it “the best”, and ignore what actually takes place.
Reality gets warped according to the shared delusions of the members of the ecosystem, which includes the owners of the school, the therapists, educational consultants, and parents. Together, they force this thinking onto the kids. These kids are then forced into a very uncomfortable straight jacket where they are brainwashed to believe that the features of their life are very different than they really are. For example, many survivors of the troubled teen industry (including myself) were brainwashed into thinking that their PTSD from these psychologically abusive programs was an inherent defect in their body chemistry.
Here we get to a predicament. We defer to experts, credentials, and seals of approval because we can’t know everything all by ourselves. At the same time, this creates a power imbalance that can be exploited by an antagonist. In the case of the programs I attended, it was exploited. The economics don’t help the situation. These programs can generate enormous profits. The program I attended had huge profit margins because tuition fees were astronomical and costs were low (staff were paid poorly, little effort made to find high-quality therapists, overhead relatively low, low regulatory costs due to lack of regulation). The incentives are perverted because, as we have seen, what generates the highest profits is often not what is in the interest of the kids attending the school.
Of course, looking back on it through my own eyes, the situation is pretty clear. These experts’ credentials don’t say much about the value that they really offer. What speaks far louder is simply the fact that they are unaware of how what they do might actually impact people. If, for example, someone doesn’t know that breaking a teenager’s will and building them back up with total dependence on the institution is abusive and cult-like, then they are totally unqualified to help people. Their credentials would be irrelevant and quite obviously so. When we elevate these societal constructs to the point that we can’t question the experts’ judgment, then we can’t understand or deal with the substance of what is happening.
Part of the logic of the school’s “maturity” approach is that you should be submissive and obedient regardless of how you’re being treated and that anything less than that is immaturity and evidence of your defective nature (which they communicate both explicitly and implicitly). This allows them to deny your needs of being attuned to, understood, emotionally mirrored, etc. In other words, they force an alienating context onto you and expect you to meet extremely high demands in terms of the facade you show them. This includes performing highly at the tasks expected of you, saying thank you for being psychologically abused, and burying your feelings and true issues (like anxiety, depression, PTSD, etc. and the context in which they arise).
What I wonder is, what does it say about our society more broadly that this “treatment” is considered an acceptable way of dealing with teenagers deemed inconvenient by certain people around them? Why has our system allowed something so harmful to be so normal? The troubled teen industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. Why haven’t we been able to see the truth of it? Here are some possible answers to these questions:
The survivors of these programs are often too brainwashed to tell the truth about them. Because you need to dissociate in order to survive these programs, survivors are cut off from the truth of what happened, are often in denial, and idealize the experience, even believing it was “for their own good”. I personally had to do an enormous amount of inner work just to be able to see my experience more clearly. And it was never a guarantee that I would have found the resources to help me do this.
The people that think these programs would actually be good for someone probably lack awareness of their own depth and traumas. Thus, they don’t have a good sense of what actually hurts and helps people. Similarly, I think the more people work on themselves and heal themselves, the clearer it becomes that these programs are toxic.
This was a corner of society filled with uncomfortable dynamics that all parties would rather be in denial of. The kids that are brainwashed by these programs typically don’t want to talk or even think about them because they believe the lies about themselves that the programs put in their heads. The programs were able to do this because they put the kids under so much pressure that they had no choice. Parents that send their kids to these programs generally don’t want to talk about it because it makes them look like failed parents. And the educational consultants that sell these programs don’t want to look more deeply at them because that would upset the whole equilibrium. If they were to think critically about these places and make a more honest effort to meet the needs of these kids, it would challenge their whole business model. These underlying dynamics that prevented people from thinking critically about the situation, protected programs like the ones I attended. How they program kids with the time they have plays a big role in this. From what I’ve seen and experienced, it typically takes over a decade for survivors to wake up out of the brainwashing of these programs, if that happens at all.
If there’s someone that you feel needs these messages, please consider sending this article their way.
What do you think about this? Is there something I left out? Leave your thoughts in a comment below.
