Age 15

My sophomore year of high school was a tumultuous one. It started with a lot of drama regarding the band director and my dad and this big miscommunication. It was marching band season and it was my second year in marching band. I was living with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis and struggled with chronic pain that was unmanaged. What this combination meant was that I had to take breaks during rehearsal and sit out on the sidelines. I also couldn't participate in exercises like push-ups (I wore 2 wrist braces) and running (too strenuous for my knees and ankles). This upset some of the other kids and one day it upset a band parent who was helping with rehearsal. She came over and told me that my best wasn't good enough and that I wasn't trying hard enough. This confrontation upset me, obviously, as I felt I was doing everything I could possibly do within my power despite my limitations. Once my dad found out about this confrontation, he went directly to the band director and had a conversation with him. The conversation eventually led to my dad telling me that the band director said that I was going to "decrease the morale of the band". This took over my mind and bothered me the entire marching band season and when we went to the state festival that year and didn't make it to finals, I blamed myself.
During the trip to the state tournament, I didn't talk to my parents. On the ride back from the state tournament, I got a nasty voicemail from my dad calling me a little s***. I got upset and a band parent came and talked to me. A few weeks later I had hurt my wrist and gone to the doctor. When I texted the director that my wrist was okay, I also asked him if he really thought that I was the reason the band didn't make it to finals. He said he would talk to me the next school day. During that conversation, he told me my dad misconstrued what he had said and that that was not what he had meant. He also asked about what had happened on the bus on the way back from state. I told him it happened all the time and shrugged it off. He told me it was wrong and shouldn't happen all the time. This started the friendship I had with him. Two days later, I texted him and told him I would trust him and open up to him but only if he kept it confidential. He said he would but only if it wasn't something that he had to report. The next day he took the opportunity to talk to me. I opened up about the bus incident and about other things that were going on in my home.  From then on, I began to trust him and started talking with him. I would frequently go to the band room once I finished my assignments in my computer class which I did pretty much every day. It was during this hour that it was his planning hour and he didn't have a class so I would talk to him and I began to open up about things that were going on inside my home, specifically the verbal and emotional abuse. He didn't know what to say or how to respond. He told me one time that he wished he had a magic wand to make it all go away but he didn't. But what he did do was listen and validate my feelings and that was what I was looking for and needed to do at the time. I started opening up to him about my mental health issues and my depression. I told him things my parents said to me and did to me. I asked him for help in dealing with it. He asked me questions and I would answer them. After talking with him for a little while and with a little coaxing, he got me to meet with the school counselor (with whom I was terrified of meeting with). I didn't trust school counselors because of my history with them. Finally, one day we agreed to set a meeting with the school counselor, only on my terms with a close friend and this teacher by my side. I was terrified but I talked. Then entered the school counselor at PHS.
During the first meeting I told her about what was going on in my home and she instantly recognized it as being verbal and emotional abuse but she knew that it couldn't be reported because it couldn't be proven. We talked about some of my struggles and I frequently went back to my support people for assurance. At the end of the meeting, I asked the question "what would happen if you reported physical abuse that ended in the past" and she said that it would depend on how long ago it had ended and I said 3 years and she said that she wasn't sure and she would have to look into it. I know that question left a lot of questions rolling in their minds but they couldn't report it because they didn't know what to report and I was too terrified to speak up. The meeting ended and that was the start of a back and forth relationship between me and the school counselor. A few days after the first meeting, I decided I was going to take the plunge and open up about the realities of the abuse that happened in my home. I sent a 4 page document about it and links to where I had written it online. When the teacher got it, he asked me if I was sure I wanted him to read it. I said yes. So both him and the school counselor read it and shortly after, he pulled me out of my computer class to take me to the school counselor's office. The reporting process began. Thing were put together and a report was put on file about the physical abuse as well as the emotional and verbal abuse that was going on inside my home. Department of Human Services just put the report on file since it had been a few years since it had happened, just in case it started again so that they would know to take action. During the reporting process, the question was asked if I was self-harming.  I had been self-harming for a while at that point and had kept it hidden from everyone. I started with knives that I would keep behind my computer monitor and then moved to disposable razor blades which I carried around in my wallet along with band-aids. When I was asked about it, initially I answered no but then felt guilty about lying so I pulled the teacher into the extra room and told him that I was. He was confused at first but when I showed him, he understood and we immediately marched back to the school counselor's office to tell her what I was doing. She asked me questions about it and talked to the lady at Human Services about it as well. Eventually a plan was come up with and a resource was found where I could go to a therapist's office and see a therapist behind my parents' backs for no charge.
During Christmas break, my friend drove me to the counseling center where I registered and met with a therapist for the first time. I started going to therapy every week as well as frequently meeting with the school counselor and talking with the teacher who often checked up on me and asked me about my self-harming and my depression. Despite being in counseling, my mental health continued to deteriorate. Suicidal thoughts entered the picture in the spring of 2010. One day, I asked the question what would happen if I said I was suicidal. That scared both the teacher and the school counselor and they were not about to play around with that. I told them that I really wasn't, I just wanted to know. It ended up being a big fiasco as they were not sure whether they should follow protocol or not. Protocol was for them to call my parents and I begged them not to because that meant that everything in my life would fall apart again and I would lose everything. I ended up crying in the school counselor's office and I never cried when I was a teenager. Eventually I agreed to a safety agreement and was let go, once a parent who worked in psychiatric care came and cleared up the situation. Soon there after Spring Break came around and I was without school again.
After Spring Break I began to fall apart. The depression was getting stronger and I was having difficulty fighting it and so the self-harm was getting worse again too. Then one afternoon I went to the band room after lunch and had an image pop into my about me trying to kill myself, plan, place and everything. This scared the heck out of me and I had a panic attack. The only way I knew to calm myself down was self-harm so I went and did that and tried to distract myself after that. I went to the teacher and told him I was struggling, but didn't tell him what with and he helped me work through it and suggested I look up band jokes on the computer and that helped me calm down. Over the next week, things didn't get any better, the thoughts and image didn't leave, only got stronger and I confessed what was going on to one of my friends (the same friend from before) a week later through Facebook messenger. He was very concerned and with his mom's help guided me through a conversation trying to decide what we should do. They asked me about calling a crisis line. I told them I would contact a crisis chat online which I did and they told me that I needed to go to a hospital which I then forward on to my friend. My friend wanted me to leave my razor blades at home because they were part of my plan and I told him I couldn't do that. Eventually it was decided that I could remain safe that night and that the next morning he would come pick me up and take me to the town's crisis center. The next morning I got up and got ready for school like normal and drove to school (because I had my permit) with the family friend in the car. I broke off the mirror in my attempt to back out because I was so nervous about getting to school that I wasn't paying well enough attention. When we got to school, I immediate went and sought out the teacher to try and tell him what was going on. I had to do a quick explanation and he was shocked when I told him. Then I went outside the band room door and waited for my friend to come drive around and pick me up. I intercepted one staff member during this and it was really awkward because I was supposed to be in a classroom doing standardized testing with a scribe that we had worked hard getting for me and I had to tell this staff member that I wouldn't be there. Once he picked me up, we went to Starbucks. It was my first time going to Starbucks, I had never been. I got a smoothie because I wasn't big on coffee at that point. Then we drove to the crisis center.
When we arrived at the crisis center, we rang the doorbell and a man walked out. My friend told him that I was having some suicidal thoughts. We immediately went inside and were put into this little room. We sat in this room for a few minutes waiting. Soon after a lady came through and started asking me a bunch of questions. After the questionnaire was over, she told me that she was putting me on what was known in the state as an A1 hold which is not even able to be overturned by a judge. It was a mandatory 72 hour hold at the hospital. She told me that my parents had to agree to sign me in or else DSS would have to take custody of me. She left for a few more minutes and I told my friend that I had the razor blade and ended up giving it to him which he gave to the lady when she returned. The lady then called my mom and explained to her what was going on. My mom immediately turned on the tears and played the victim card like she usually did but agreed to sign me in. From there, I was told I had to say goodbye to my friend. I gave him a hug and I remember him telling me he was proud of me. From there I was taken through the hospital into the intake area. I had requested to not see my parents because I knew they were going to be angry. They began their initial process of taking height and weight and then they had to proceed to do their comprehensive skin check. With their skin check, they make you change clothing and you have to remove everything so they can document any markings you have like cuts, scars, tattoos, etc. I was extremely uncomfortable and having the feeling of wanting to cry but unable to. I changed into scrubs and then was placed in a small room with a packet of paperwork to fill out that had questions on it. I don't remember most of the questions but the questions that I do remember was that it asked if I had been abused and I put yes and wrote both physically and verbally. I finished filling out the packet and gave it to a lady and was instructed to give a urine sample. Once I was done with that a lady came and asked me about the abuse and was briefly interrupted about the urine and apologized, but then continued questioning me. Then she took that information to my parents. At this point, they were livid because the abuse had never come out before to their knowledge (it had been reported to DSS a couple months prior). They completely denied everything saying they never did anything I was saying they did. After an hour or so, a staff member said that my mom was begging to see me and also said that the family friend that was living with us, Paul, wanted to see me. I agreed that I would see him. Paul was so surprised and shocked about what was going on. He told me that I could have come to him with what was going on. I asked him to contact the teacher and gave him the teacher's contact information and asked him to please tell the teacher what was going on and let him know that I'm okay. Paul agreed to do so and then he was escorted out of the room and I was placed back in the day room with the other patients. I was introduced to the only other teenager on the unit who said hi and then walked away. I sat down at a table in the corner of a room with the books they let me bring in with me.

My time in the psychiatric hospital was a living nightmare when it came to dealing with my parents. My parents and I were basically at war the entire time I was there. It was a rule that your parents had to determine who you could talk to on the outside and my parents only limited it to them so I was stuck. The beginning visits only ended with my mom in tears, playing the victim role and me running to the bathroom to end it. Phone calls were always ended because they were deemed "un-therapeutic" because I ended up balling my eyes out after each one. One phone call my dad yelled over the phone "I never touched you", completely denying any of the abuse that had taken place at all. Then I started denying visits which hurt my parents even more. The day before I was released from the hospital for the first time I was forced to have a visit with my parents. They walked in looking like they meant business. The staff let them take me into the seclusion room so we could have a little meeting. My dad got down to business. He immediately told me how he hacked into my computer and got all the information about who I had talked to and how I had talked to the teacher and the school counselor. Then they told me about how they got the school counselor in trouble and how they got the teacher in trouble. They told me how I would never be able to talk to them again. They told me about how they had a meeting with the principal and how the cops were called on them and it was all my fault. They said that I was going to be forced to switch high schools because they were going to file a lawsuit against my high school. My world as I knew it had come crashing down. The staff had sensed the tension building up, especially with my dad's hostile remarks towards me so halfway through visiting hours, they asked my parents and brother to leave. I totally lost it then. I cried so hard that they asked me to go into the seclusion room so I wouldn't disturb the other visitors. I sat in a corner and cried. One of the staff members came and tried to talk to me and when they had to go they said they would come talk to me tomorrow. The next morning they had set me up for discharge and the staff member apologized in passing as she couldn't talk to me.

The hospital had discharged me to an adolescent treatment facility in the same city and my parents were supposed to drive me there. We stopped at a gas station on our way there and picked up drinks and then moved on. I was still having suicidal thoughts when they transferred me to the facility and because it was less secure than the hospital, the facility decided they were going to make me sign a daily contract that I wouldn't try to hurt myself. The facility also determined during the intake process that I couldn't deny any visits from my parents. Their goal was to try to get things worked out in the family again. My dad was still very angry about the whole thing and expressed it openly throughout the intake process. After I was taken back to the unit, I was given a folder which included information about the program, rules and such, and a checklist of assignments I was supposed to complete before the end of my time there. The facility was basically a miniature apartment that had 3 bedrooms with 2 beds in each bedroom. There was one bathroom and a kitchen area where our meals were prepared. There was a general living area that had a TV and a couch and some chairs and a table that we would pull out for meals. There was usually one staff person assigned to be with us each shift. Every morning we would have to have to set a goal for the day. This was part of what determined how many points we got each day. Each day we could earn up to 100 points based on our actions and how involved we were and if we completed our goal or not. If we earned 100 points you got to pick out a prize from the drawer or choose 20 minutes of game time. Throughout the day we would have groups on different topics and time to work on our assignments. We would have free time to go to the gym or to the game room where they had a Wii and a foosball table. Another aspect of the adolescent treatment unit was the level system. They had 4 levels. Each level determined what privileges we had including what time we went to bed and controlling the TV. The last level also gave us the privilege to go off the unit on passes with our family for a couple hours and come back. To go up a level, we had to fill out a paper that explained why you thought you deserved to be leveled up and then you got questioned by two or three people about our answers. It was usually pretty intense. We could also be demoted levels if we acted out. During my time there, I did manage to go up through all the levels and achieve the highest one. Also during my time at the adolescent treatment unit, school work was re-introduced. My parents brought my work from school for me to start working on since I had fallen so far behind. When I was on the higher levels, I stayed up later to work on it to try to catch up and various staff members would try to help me through some of the things that I didn't understand.

The visits at the adolescent treatment unit were all completely awkward and rough. My parents talked about looking into sending me to a different high school and trying to keep me as far away from the teacher I had been talking with as possible. My parents continued to talk about filing a lawsuit against the school and how they were talking to a lawyer about it. They were trying to make me pin myself against the teacher and the school counselor much to my dismay. One visit my mom came in and wanted to pull me aside. The staff let her pull me into a hallway and she told me my dad had had a TIA and that he was okay but that he needed to take it easy for a while. It was a scary situation for me being in a treatment unit. I struggled to express my emotions that night. Visits began to get somewhat better as time went on. With the exception of the big family meeting. This family meeting took place in the intake room and was monitored by staff and had my parents and my brother plus multiple staff members. Things started out okay but that didn't last long. My dad began to bring up the fact that the cops had been called when they were at the high school and how it was all my fault. I got upset so I chose to walk out of the room, listening to my mom crying out "my baby" in the fake show tone I knew. I left the room gathered myself and returned. We finished up the conversation with a plan for when I would return home that would include weekly therapy for me, weekly family therapy through DSS and a case manager checking on us every once in a while. It was a rocky meeting but I looked forward to going home in a way. It was better than being in the treatment unit. At least I got to go back to school.

So after spending 2 weeks in the adolescent treatment unit, after getting to the highest level and going on multiple passes to home and back, I was released. When I was released, it was like I was in a prison. I was not allowed to have my phone or my computer and all my phone calls were monitored by my mom. My parents did allow me to have friends over. We had a small get together after I got home to "celebrate" me coming home and three of my friends came over and had dinner which was fun and one of my friends ended up staying overnight. All of my passwords had been changed and I was locked out of everything. I had been out of school for a month and was very nervous to go back. I had made plans to stay after school every day but I could only stay after school if the teacher agreed to write an email to my parents letting them know that I was in their classroom until a certain time. The class that I was a teacher aide was changed to a study hall so that I could be kept away from the teacher. I was playing catch up for missing a month of school and it was a struggle. My first day back was the hardest though. I tried to go up to the teacher who I had looked to for help for so long and he had no choice but to push me away and that tore me up. I flipped out inside over it. I started writing letters, to the teacher trying to let him know how sorry I was for screwing everything up for him and for how my parents were acting, to the school counselor for messing everything up, and then I started writing goodbye letters because I was suicidal again due to the fact that I felt abandoned by the people I had trusted. It was my parent's fault but the hurt was still there. So I freaked out and started journaling all my thoughts and feelings in a journal I had gotten in the hospital. I had written goodbye letters to my parents and friends. I left it at home when I went to a get together for a group I was in and my mom decided to be nosy and read it and when I came home my parents immediately took me back to the psychiatric hospital.
On the way to the psychiatric hospital, my mom did her normal dramatic thing and said "I can't lose you Kimberly". They signed me in and I was put back in a room that night. That hospitalization was a little different. My parents allowed my friends to be on the call list and on the visitation list so I could talk to them and see them and when visitation came around my parents only came for a short time so my friends could visit. My parents did ask and think about sending me to residential treatment but I told them that I wasn't suicidal anymore (which wasn't entirely true, I just didn't want to be sent to residential treatment) and that it was just a medication reaction. After a few days, I was released and sent back home and my parents and I came up with a plan that I would take classes online during the summer so I could graduate high school a year early and get out of the high school my parents hated so much. I went back to school and got caught up in my classes. I had to do one unit of math over the summer which my friend (the one who had taken me to the crisis center in the beginning) ended up teaching me.
The couple months after I got out of the hospital were rough. We were scheduled to have family therapy once I was discharged but every time it was scheduled, something came up. Either my dad couldn't (well wouldn't) make it or I got sick or so many other excuses. Our caseworker came by multiple times and she was very rude and intrusive about things and demanded I talked to her which I didn't feel comfortable with her, or with anyone so I didn't talk to her. I attended therapy once a week but didn't talk to the therapist because I was afraid of my parents finding out what I would say so it went nowhere and that therapist gave up on me and sent me to someone else. That person moved and didn't tell me when she did and we ended up switching to another therapist who I found out knew my mom so that wasn't going to work. Eventually, I just stopped attending therapy because I wasn't going to trust anyone with anything and wasn't going to get anywhere. I was seeing a psychiatrist once every month or two and those sessions were horrible because they always created problems between my mom and I. The psychiatrist also told me that I was showing signs of Borderline Personality Disorder but that I couldn't be diagnosed until I was 18 so I needed to get help now so I didn't get the full diagnosis. This never happened though, and I was diagnosed with it a couple years later.
Eventually, we stopped going to all treatment providers there. I got my phone and my computer and Facebook back. Life 7 back to normal. My parents went back to verbally and emotionally abusing me just like they had before. I struggled with self-harm off and on for the remainder of my time in high school and my mom caught me occasionally and it created some awkwardness in the family because she wanted me to talk to her and I wouldn't. Things never did get better. Life just went on until I left for college.