My mother made the decision to send me to Spring Creek on an impulse. It took 100+ pages of letters for her to finally believe what I told her happening. 2 months later I was out.
I knew she regretted it all but for some reason she has the idea that saying she's sorry to her kid makes her look week or contradictory. It's been several months but when I mention Spring Creek she will usually walk away from me or pretend like I don't exist. The few times I have got her to talk to me about it she's defended her obvious mistake to the point of absurdity.
I installed a keystroke recorder on the computer we share for an unrelated reason. Instead of finding what I was looking for I saw her replying to an email from a friend she'd lost touch with with months ago.
"Life has been happening. It's been pretty much a tornado since I saw you last. In a nutshell, My first lettters from had suicidal ideation (I reviewed them with the counselor here) and then subsequent ones were definitely suicidal. He cried for the first month he was there. His asthma was at its worst ever. My family started sending me horror websites about the school. I called and talked to a newspaper reporter that had written about the school. 's letters alleged a lot of misconduct by the boys and terrible things about the school. I knew he was manipulating me, but it was hard to know where the truth was. The family Rep did something I asked him not to do, so he lost my trust. I told that if things were happening he needed to report them. After he reported two incidences (one severe bullying/sexual aggression between two boys the other physical/sexual harassment by staff), he was known as a snitch. His letters to me were a cross between apologetic and anger, sensationalizing, and scary. Other kids were verbally threatening him. I was having nightmares and worried about his safety. I flew to Washington , met up with a male friend of many years, and we drove in his car from Washington to Montana to get him."
I hadn't heard anything close to this honest from my mother. After deciding I had no issue with reading just those emails to and from my mother surrounding the 'school' I went ahead and did just that.
I felt extremely disgusted after reading through them all. It started with the initial emails to/from Teen Help, then exchanges with the 'references' given to her by the referrer. Only after I was 'safely' inside the school did my mother tell her own family what she had done. Immediately she started receiving emails as she had said from her mother and sisters linking to the stories by John Adams, ISACCORP, wwaspsinfo, and others.
The emails from the school were full of lingo and lies. I had been told communication with my father who lives overseas could be done by email, and that it would not be read. Of course it was inspected and I knew not to call for help in any explicit way but it angered me just the same when I found a full copy of our correspondence in my mother's 'save' folder.
The school ran into a problem when none of the pictures they sent to my mother had me smiling. For two weeks I was conveniently scheduled to be in therapy during Family pictures. When my mother asked them about it they did their best to give me the greatest day of my internment. My family rep let me and a friend walk around the grounds out of line and with him alone. He talked to us like human beings and had us doing small jobs for him in his office. It was the first time I had been alone with someone I trusted in over a month. I felt safe. At the end of the day our rep came back to his office and told us it was time to go. As we walked out the door he made some joke. The camera was waiting for me there and the moment was captured.
The rest of the emails from the school all stated that I was in some way being deceitful. My therapist suggested that I was not sad at all, the nurses that I was exaggerating my asthma, and my rep especially with his programspeak.
Eventually it all got to her and she changed her mind. She told her friends and family she was going to get me and she did.
I won't ever be able to discuss this with her because of the method I used to gain the information, and that is a little sad, but I don't think I ever would have been given this level of access anyway.
