The spiral

Into the Wilderness: Story 18

Catina went to La Europa Academy, a residential treatment center in Murray, Utah, that uses the arts as an integral part of healing. I never regretted my choice. With Catina’s talent for music and art, this was an ideal fit. Not only did she receive almost nine hours of therapy a week, but also, regular classwork and art electives. For the first time in her life, Catina enjoyed school.

Catina started LEA in September 2018 after completing 91 days in wilderness therapy and 2 days of travel across country. We dropped her off exactly 3 months to the day the journey down our New Jersey mountain began. We were beginning again.

The transition from wilderness to residential treatment was agonizing. After 3 months of wide sky, Catina was living in a permanent shelter, surrounded by order and structure, food prepared on schedule. She mourned wilderness deeply and quickly regressed into a restless depression. Week after week, she showed up to our virtual therapy sessions disheveled and unkempt. Her eyes lost their brightness; her smile dimmed.

Residential treatment picks up on the immersive progress wilderness starts. But it slows it down. Now is the time for the arduous work of true healing. This is when it gets ugly. What brought your child to need this level of care? What mental illnesses or disabilities have to be identified and addressed? What was your role as a parent? What horrible truths need to be spoken for the first time? This work means after immediate wilderness progress, the teen regresses. Old ways of coping emerge. Unhealed wounds ooze. Bad habits show up. If substance abuse is part of the past, cravings intensify. This is the real stuff. And it sucks.

Catina started with rewriting the impact letter she had struggled with through wilderness and that had sat unread in my purse as we trekked from Georgia to Utah. Reading it finally and dissecting it piece by piece with her was torturous. We went through the alcohol and drug inventory. We talked about her brush with the law, an incident I have yet to share. We dove into the abyss of her assault, a bottomless cavern of agony. And then the cruel self-torture she had used as her own punishment. It was a spiral of disequilibrium.

Paulo Freire in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed writes about the learning process as a spiral of disequilibrium. It simply means that learning is a dizzying, unsteady process. As soon as you reach one precipice of knowledge, you slip off the mountain again like an Olympic mogulist needing core strength and rubber knees to seamlessly navigate the bumpy terrain to the bottom. But before you know it, the gondola scoops you back up to haul you to the peak and deposit you alone and terrified looking down the sheer pitch.

I lived in that spiral for more than a year. Every time I thought I had found a smooth descent, another slicing curve rose up. It was an endless spiral, Mel Brooks’ High Anxiety-style, without the laughs.

Catina’s assault was particularly heartbreaking. After the initial incident, she had seen her perpetrator day after day in school. He courted her. He wooed Chuck and me. We thought he was a nice boy flipping pancakes at the annual fundraiser. We had welcomed him into our home, fed him dinner, commented on his good manners. Looking back, we felt swindled.

But sadly, this is how perpetrators work: Abuse and then gaslight the victim until she no longer knows what reality is. For over a year, Catina questioned her reality, wondering why her feelings didn’t match the version being told to her. She resolved the mismatch by cutting her arms because that was pain she could see and feel. The slice and bubbling of blood to the surface- that was real.

The dark months oozed by. Just when we thought we had progressed, we had a set back. Catina engaged in a game of dare with a group of other girls at her RTC- the I-dare-you-to-lap-dance kind of thing- and was pushed back a level. The masking and mirroring nature of girls with ASD led her to try on various ailments and sufferings, which meant she avoided dealing with her own issues. Then her house mother, a gentle and beautiful soul, died unexpectedly. With so much pain needing healing, the flashbacks started, and Catina was lonely and raw.

Catina had not yet earned home passes, so after months apart, we had planned to spend Thanksgiving in Utah. We were so excited. Catina’s sister hadn’t seen her for six months. We had planned out various fun excursions, the first family trip in a long while. Best laid plans. Two nights before our flight, I ended up in the hospital with gallstone-induced pancreatitis and sepsis. I spent Thanksgiving eating ice chips, waiting to be cleared for surgery. It was a blow for Catina who feared for my health after losing her house mom.

For parents with kids in residential treatment, this is the long road. It will feel like forever. You will wonder if your child will ever get better. You will wonder if you will ever stop mourning the loss of a “normal” kid. All around you, friends are shuttling their kids to lessons and football games. Their kids sit at the dinner table and complain about normal kid stuff. The relief against your own life is gut wrenching.

Here’s the best advice I can give: surround yourself with parents sharing your experience. Your RTC likely has parent groups. Make time for them. Join one of the Facebook groups dedicated to situations like yours (PKRT: Parents with Kids in Residential Treatment; Wilderness to Aftercare, run by my dear friend, Cheryl Mignone- and visit her page Parent Support Network for lists of great resources; Parenting Young Adults In/Out Residential Treatment). Reach out to parents you connect with on these pages and talk on the phone, weekly or more if you can. It helps. If not for friends like Cheryl, who I met in one of these groups, I could never have made it through. Those friendships provide an open, nonjudgmental and safe space for shared pain. But most importantly, you will find you are not alone. Your beautiful child’s battle is more common than you think.

You don’t have to be strong. You don’t have to be okay. How can you be when your child is suffering? Cry. Rage. Pound a pillow. But don’t for one nanosecond think you are alone or at fault. You are in the spiral and you will land.

And when you do land, you may even look back and be grateful. For your family, your child, and you will be forever changed.