Ran away halfway through the program? How many times have we heard that? So many run away, and all are chased. And even in this case, after running away, a short time later given the opportunity to go home she suddenly changed her mind? Very peculiar. I think the fact you stressed that the program was difficult for her and pressuring her constantly, likely without any break for reflection or growth... This is similar to weightlifting where it is proper to give the muscles a break in order to allow them to mend and grow. Constant pressure is not a therapeutic method. Too many of these programs go way to far, far too long and the people cannot go and go nonstop for two full years. The mind simply isn't designed to work constantly with no break and neither are emotions.
I compare these methods to Intensive Foreign Language Courses. The idea in these courses is to learn what would be three years of language in school all in six to eight weeks. It is mentally exhausting after just a few weeks and by the end of the brief course you are usually going somewhere where you will have a chance to be immersed in a community where that language is spoken. You get the basic words and sentence structure, but then you have a long period to use what you learned, no longer pressured. To attempt to learn the language fluently, non-stop in a similar course that ran for months and months, there is no way you could keep up. It would simply be too much information to absorb too quickly. These programs are similar, except that when someone takes one of these courses, it is by choice and they are motivated to succeed to begin with. Whereas in these programs, the teen is usually tossed in to a very foreign and hostile environment, forced to learn a new language (that of the program), and it is not one topic, but an entire life of topics. Childhood, friends, family, bad experiences, all at once, day after day, not for a few hours but endlessly with no break. Which is why these students break.
And it isn't just that it is too much for too long, it isn't really coherent. The teen is left with such a vast mix of varying memories that all arrived so fast, for so long and from a lot of different people. This is what is different from normal therapy with a psychologist. Psychologists see you perhaps two or three times a week at most, the sessions are brief, usually only a half hour to an hour, and like in school, when you return, the previous "lesson" is reviewed. The patient has had some time to reflect, the subject matter was limited and therefore easier to absorb. Imagine going to your psychologist for sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, you had to live in his/her house, you were in fear constantly of being disciplined, and you had to cover an entirely new and deeply emotional segment of your life every other hour, so that by the end of the day you had covered so much material you can barely remember what it all was. And on top of that, it wasn't just one psychologist. Every couple of hours a totally different psychologist came in, took over, had a completely different style, used different words, started from a different part of your life, changed all your focus to something else, and this went on day after day after day for two years...
Your mind would be blank within months once it all ended because you never had a chance to absorb it all. Everything would seem like a dream, where you wake up and try and make sense of it all, but you can't quite describe. It seemed real, you thought something profound had happened while you were sleeping, but there's nothing. It's all a jumble.
Add in that instead of different psychologists who are actually trained and licensed and education in therapy, you had a series of hacks coming in. Each one as incapable as the last from rendering anything of any real and lasting value, all of it made up as they go along. This is how these programs work. One "therapist" is loud and abusive and aggressive, the next is calm, a little strange, says things that are a little hard to understand. The rhythm simply isn't there. It's not like going to the doctor for a sprained ankle where any doctor in the place can probably help you. This is therapy. Developing a one on one relationship is important. Getting one message and not fifty is important. Progressing in a slow and methodical manner is the proper approach.
The brain has to rest, it cannot absorb endless stimuli and not have time to process it all without breaking.
