why we struggle to keep it casual đ
Earlier this month, Colin and I spoke with a group of students who were quickly approaching their graduation from high school and/or treatment. Shout out to MSPA for letting the students be in the room by themselves so they could ask Colin and me anything they wanted to đ
If youâve been to treatment, you know just how big of a deal it is for staff to leave you in a room unsupervised đ It gave us the space to be honest about our experiences since leaving treatment ourselves.
Towards the end of our hour with these students, someone asked our favorite question:
âSo like, how do I actually talk to people my age? I havenât had the same experiences as they have over the last 2 yearsâŚwhat do I even talk to them about? How do I relate to them?â
Weâve previously spoken about how building a community of supportive peers is a pillar of a successful transition into young adulthood, regardless of whether or not youâve been in treatment.
But one of the biggest gaps in understanding between parents and what their children went through in treatment is why we can have such a hard time reconnecting with people our age.
1ď¸âŁ We build relationships with our peers by over-identifying with our pasts.
For the last few years, relationships with our peers have been mostly built upon sharing about our past and trauma.
Imagine if you spent two years building all your relationships exclusively through group therapy.
For those of you who havenât been to group therapy in treatment, itâs not like the typical support groups you see in movies or maybe even have been to in real life.
In treatment, most participants donât want to be in these groups most of the time. I havenât been back to group therapy since I left treatment, and tbh I never want to go again.
At my residential treatment center, we had âcaseload groups.â These were 2-3 hours, twice a week, with the other ten girls with the same therapist, watching each other do deep trauma work.
An example of something we had to do in these groups was something I believe we called âsculpting,â although I canât really remember. I do remember that everyone had to do it a few times throughout your stay.
Essentially, you sat facing an empty chair in the middle of your caseload in a circle around you. You closed your eyes, and you had to imagine that someone who abused you and/or caused you some trauma was sitting in that chair - almost always a parent, step-parent, sibling, or an abusive former friend/bf/gf. Then you had to tell them how you didnât deserve what they did to you, how angry you are at them, how hurt you are, how f*cked up it was for them to do that to you, etc. The goal (I think) was to stand up for that past version of yourself. It always ended in scream-crying. I remember feeling extremely exposed and exhausted afterward.
In theory, it was healing. In practice, it was sometimes performative, or worse, re-traumatizing to feel these intense feelings in front of your peers - some of whom you might not feel safe around. Sharing your trauma by working out suppressed feelings of rage, resentment, and deep, deep hurt in front of a group of people and a therapist with whom you donât feel 100% safe leaves an imprint on your relationships.
I share this because itâs just one of the many ways we built our relationships in treatment through sharing our past trauma. I know treatment centers are not this extreme today, but I share this so that parents can understand how complex relationships with our peers become while weâre in treatment.
To relate to our peers, we over-identified with our past. In addition, we didnât really have any present-day experiences together besides this type of intense therapeutic work and trying to make it out of treatment.
Then, we go out into the world and try to have normal conversations about music, prom, and being annoyed with our teachers. I mean, on the one hand, itâs incredibly relieving. On the other hand, we feel extremely disconnected from our ânormalâ peers after we leave treatment because weâre now used to building relationships by being thrown into the deep end of vulnerability whether we want to or not.
In essence, we struggle to keep it casual.
2ď¸âŁ We can develop trust issues with our peers.
Colin doesnât really share this sentiment with me, but I left treatment with a certain level of trust issues with young women my age.
One reason for this was the feedback groups we constantly did in treatment. Watch the first 15 minutes of episode two of âThe Programâ on Netflix; when they talk about their feedback groups, ours were the same down to the exact script they used in the film.
These groups consisted of either your caseload or sometimes the entire 60-girl community, going in on you and maybe a few other girls for over an hour. Sometimes, we would be genuinely trying to help each other. Quite often, there was some level of performance to it all. You had to be seen giving regular feedback to move up to the next phase and to be seen as a leader in the community.
We had a script we were trained to follow. In theory, this was a helpful way for us to learn how to frame our feedback. In practice, it often led to people saying something like this:
âMy experience of you is that you havenât worked through the trauma of being sexually assaulted by your stepdad because youâre still self-sabotaging by stealing honey packets from the cafeteria and hiding them in your pillowcase. About that I feel frustrated because the rest of us are using precious caseload time to help you process this, and youâre clearly not putting in as much work as the rest of us are when itâs your trauma in the first place. My hope for you in the future is that you take this therapeutic work seriously because your trauma is affecting the entire caseloadâs progress at this point.â
You pretty much just had to take it. Otherwise, you âwerenât taking accountabilityâ and would be penalized for not moving up to the next phase and extending your stay.
Again, sometimes it was helpful. But if you werenât one of the compliant girlies, like myself, you would often be the subject of these feedback groups. Your peers were encouraged to use that as emotional ammunition in calling out your ânon-workingâ behaviors in treatment in the name of helping you grow.
Needless to say, it took me almost a full year after treatment to truly open up and be vulnerable to another young woman my age. I stuck with my much older friends in AA for the first year or two, which was fine. Still, I look back and feel like I missed out on many opportunities to build supportive friendships in early college because I unconsciously had written off my peers as people I could trust to be supportive.
3ď¸âŁ We become better communicators than our peers.
The frequent individual therapy, caseload groups, feedback groups, and the âmilieuâ therapy (which I think just means we work through things in the moment?) do have a lot of positive benefits though.
One of these benefits is that we usually leave treatment with the ability to communicate at a high level of emotional intelligence with our peers and our families. Itâs an amazing tool to have at our disposal, but it can also be a double-edged sword.
It feels harder to communicate with our ânormalâ peers after treatment because weâve been speaking a different, much more therapeutic language for potentially the last few years. We usually havenât been able to have that much interaction with our friends from before treatment until we leave, so talking ânormallyâ to our peers is a muscle we havenât flexed in a while.
During my freshman orientation week, I remember trying to give some guy, who lived in my freshman dorm, feedback about taking his laundry out of the washer in a timely manner by literally using the script I shared above. Needless to say, it did not go over well. And I immediately got a reputation for being a bitch when I was genuinely just trying to help both him and the community! Lmao.
We become much clearer, more direct, and more open in our communication than most of our peers. That means we have to find friends who are okay with that style of communication, which I found to be somewhat difficult to do outside of meeting people in AA. My friends, to this day, communicate the same way I do; it took me a while to find them, and first I had to tone down how I was expressing my thoughts to others.
All this is to say that we speak a different language than our peers after leaving treatment. The younger you are when you leave treatment, the harder it is to find people your age who are on the same wavelength regarding communication and prioritizing personal growth.
So how do we relate to our peers? We canât do it alone.
Honestly, you have to own what youâve been through and embrace the type of person youâve become. Thatâs what it all came down to for me and Colin. Did almost all of our peersâ jaws drop to the floor after we described where we spent the last two years? Yes. So this is not an easy thing for any of us to do right off the bat, especially if you have no one to lean on during this process.
Thereâs just too much shame we risk falling into when we actively try to hide having gone to treatment or pretending like it didnât happen. We put in too much work to grow and change to now revert back to old behaviors just to placate others. It makes us unique, and at the very least, it definitely makes us memorable when meeting new people.
Personally, I 1000% overshared everything I had just been through when I arrived at college, and I scared many people away. A lot of people openly called me âcrack Hayleyâ my whole first semester of college because I overshared about being in AA, going to treatment, etc.
Tbh I decided I did not really care because I was just so excited to be out of treatment. Plus I had been called much worse in high school. I was also on my own program with being sober and in AA. I later found out I was slightly manic that first semester, so to be fair to those students, I did kind of project that energy lol.
That experience, along with openly owning the fact that I had just been in treatment, quickly made me learn to care less about what people say behind my back and care more about finding people who accept me for who I am. My two real friends from college not only didnât call me that â they defended me when other people did. Iâd rather have two real, vulnerable, and supportive friends than fight the losing battle of trying to make everyone like me.
I did learn that I had to manage my expectations of what many other people my age could bring to the table in a friendship at that point in time. While doing that, I could still prioritize being the authentic version of myself that I had grown into during treatment. I had worked too hard to become comfortable in my skin to let that go. Being as transparent, authentic, and kind as possible attracted other authentic, supportive people into my life.
Authenticity and kindness are still the bedrock of the most important relationships in my life. Having a year or two where most of my peers thought I was a total weirdo was well worth it.
However, trying to do this alone without a supportive community and mentor - I had AA and my sponsor to lean on - would not have gone as smoothly as it did.
Colin and I saw this with most of our friends who struggled after leaving treatment. If they didnât feel they could own the fact that they were in treatment and embrace the changes they made even though it made them very different than their peers, then the âold behaviorsâ started to creep back in.
This is true of anyone trying to make a significant change to improve their lives; we will start to be different than the people weâve surrounded ourselves with.
It is paramount to find a new supportive community ASAP and have someone to help guide us. Otherwise, the loneliness of feeling so different from our peers will lead us to reverse the positive changes we have made.
And nowâŚâŚour vibes this weekđŽ
đ What weâre reading
âHigh valueâ dating and the female pick-up artists exchanging their economic freedom for husbands, cosmopolitan
This new program offers a systemic solution to the youth mental health crisis, teen vogue
What do students at elite colleges really want?, nyt
đś What weâre listening to
Saw these two women perform in NYC last year and theyâre still my summer vibe.
đĄ One last thought
THANKS FOR READING!
If you found this valuable, this is your signâď¸ to send this to parents or young people who can relate to the feelings weâre having this week so we can make sure they know theyâre not alone. Sharing is caring đ
Weâre in this to collaborate and support. Please feel free to reach out to us:
If youâre a parent who has a child in treatment, weâre happy to answer any of your burning questions and share our experience in treatment and with transitioning out!
If youâre passionate about changing the narrative in the therapeutic program industry.