FINALLY. community built BY former troubled teens FOR former troubled teens.

Written By Hayley Caddes

DRUMROLL 🥁🥁🥁…. Not Therapy is LAUNCHING our COMMUNITY!!

🚨 and we’re looking for thirty founding members 🚨

🌟 The only requirement for joining the Not Therapy community is that you want to improve your own mental wellbeing while helping others do the same 🌟

You can be at any point in your post-treatment journey. You could have a positive or negative experience of treatment or anything in between. You cannot currently be working in a therapeutic program. No other requirements.

The community will be open to everyone later this summer. This is your chance to get in on this early and for free.

We’re a group of former troubled teens who want to improve their own mental health while helping other young people who’ve been in treatment do the same.

“Why don’t you or your friends speak openly about how treatment was helpful for you?”
— Programs, ed consultants, parents, etc.

Because…there’s no safe place on the internet to talk about our treatment experience or what it’s like after. The comments all over my TikTok videos are exhibit one.

For those of us who feel like treatment was traumatizing, made things worse between us and our families, turned us off of therapy, or who had an overall negative experience after treatment - we won’t be saying positive things on the internet. We’re going on troubled teen Reddit and TikTok and trying to find a community of people who share our experiences so that we don’t feel so alone.

Then there are those of us who might have had more positive experiences after treatment. Eventually, we might have been able to accomplish the goals we set for ourselves, build relatively healthy relationships with friends and romantic partners, repair relationships with some of our family members, and not let the experience of going to treatment hold us back.

In this case, we have moved on from going to treatment.

Most of us don’t want to do podcasts about being taken away from our families and friends during our formative years. We don’t want to engage in advocacy work to help our former programs, even if we acknowledge that the experience was overall helpful for us or set us on a different, more productive path than the one we were going down.

Colin, myself, our friends from treatment, and the other people who’ve been to treatment we’ve met out in the wild feel like our programs sent us home with very little support for reestablishing ourselves in the real world.

So there’s absolutely no incentive for us to speak up about a good experience if we are just going to be ripped apart online for being brainwashed or told that we are horrible kids who deserve to be abused (my own experience).

I know programs take issue when I say stuff like, “We didn’t have enough support when we left.” I know there’s more support now than there was when we were in programs.

I’m just saying that even if we can talk to our program therapists somewhat regularly after we leave, even if our program has an online support group for alumni, and even if some of the staff can be transition coaches, we are usually done with anything related to our programs. Plus our home contracts have already gone out the window.

This is when programs might throw their hands up and say:

“Well then there’s nothing we can do that will satisfy you if you’re not going to use the support we give you!”
— some programs, ed consultants, etc.

🌟 THERE IS NOW. We gotchu. 🌟

Our experience is that it would have been helpful if our programs had set us up with outside peer-to-peer mentorship and an outside community of other people who’ve been through the same experiences.

Importantly, these resources can’t be connected to your program. We suggest empowering your team to get a little uncomfortable and trust that we troubled teens have done enough work (through your own programs) to take care of each other afterward.

After spending the first five months of Not Therapy building our peer mentorship and coaching program, Colin and I are building the next thing we both desperately needed when we left treatment—a community of our peers who are trying to grow and move forward and who we can lean on for support.

This is not a space for us to dwell on our time in treatment. Of course, we can talk about that experience as much as it relates to our daily lives. The Not Therapy community is about improving our own mental health while helping our peers do the same.

Really, the only thing that treatment has to do with it is that the community's founding members will have been to some type of therapeutic treatment or program.

This is a positive space for young people to support one another and not have to go through the ups and downs of life alone after leaving treatment.

This isn’t going to be one of those inactive or toxic online communities. We’ve built a customized Discord server with a ton of special features and interactions. We’ll log our moods, answer daily reflection prompts, post our thoughts, and most importantly, keep our IRL identities private. Those of us who want to can eventually attend and lead online audio-only peer support groups.

💚 Before launching the community, we’re looking for the first 30 founding members to join for free 💚

This is only open to people right now who have been in treatment themselves and who don’t currently work at a therapeutic program. This is for young people who are actively looking for support and want to help others who’ve gone through similar experiences.

We’re inviting our friends from our old programs, finding people through social media, and encouraging anyone on this mailing list to send this to someone you think might be interested in joining.

In two weeks, we will hold a kickoff call for the young people who apply to join on June 25.

If you or anyone you know is interested, please send them here before june 25 👇

💬 Here’s a short blurb you can email, text, or DM anyone who might be interested. No other context needed.

Hey! Some young people who were sent to wilderness and treatment centers when they were teens are building this online peer support community for young people who have been to treatment. They’re looking for some founding members to help them build a safe space that any young person leaving treatment can come to for support from their peers so that they don’t have to go through it alone. Thought you might be interested in checking it out! https://nottherapy.me/community

Thanks in advance for sharing - we’re so excited to meet everyone!!

THANKS FOR READING!

If you found this valuable, this is your sign✌️ to send this to parents or young people who can relate to the feelings we’re having this week so we can make sure they know they’re not alone. Sharing is caring 😎

We’re in this to collaborate and support. Please feel free to reach out to us:

  • If you’re a parent who has a child in treatment, we’re happy to answer any of your burning questions and share our experience in treatment and with transitioning out!

  • If you’re passionate about changing the narrative in the therapeutic program industry.

Hayley Caddes
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