The Crossroads Program stays with you forever.
The Crossroads Program Survivor: 2016 - 2017
I was in the Crossroads program in Columbia, Missouri from the summer of 2016 to April Fools of 2017. I had known people who went through Crossroads and had really great things to say about it. Intensive outpatient was ideal, because I wanted to continue getting my bachelors degree. I met with the head counselor, who made it immediately seem he understood the way I was feeling. He described how when he was using, he felt as if he had a hole in his heart and the only way he knew how to fill it was with drugs and alcohol. He described it in a way that I immediately identified with. He described exactly how I felt. Once he knew I connected, he described how the program provided a love that could fill it. The program could give me what I needed in order to stop feeling the way I had been feeling, which was miserable. Desperate to not feel the pain I had been feeling and desperate to not die, I willingly agreed to join. The counselor then gave me a hug and said “I love you.” I looked confused and he explained that it was just something they all say to each other to show they care. It’s just what they do. Wanting to feel a part of, I silenced all my uncomfortable feelings about the “love” because I desperately wanted to be accepted.
The next Monday I went on a camping trip until Wednesday. I was told to go off every medication I was on that was “mind changing.” I went off medication that was prescribed to me by my psychiatrist, as well as the various drugs that I was abusing and went to the middle of nowhere to go on a camping trip with over 100 people that I didn’t know. While I was on the trip, I stopped using cold turkey. I was in the middle of the woods with no cellphone service and was not being medically monitored at all during this time. I was irritable, in pain, and depressed as a result of withdrawing not only from the drugs and alcohol I was abusing, but from the medication I was forced to go off of. But it was supposedly going to be worth it. I was going to finally be happy. People were going to actually care about me. I was going to belong.
The longer I stayed in this program, the more and more I was forced to complete tasks on my treatment plans that I was not comfortable with. If I didn’t complete my treatment plan, I would be questioned aggressively about why I didn’t finish, and any answer I gave was always unacceptable. Any answer I gave was my addiction talking. I was told that I can’t trust the way I think about anything and that only the counselors and the group members knew what was best for me. They always told me that my addiction was in the corner doing push ups and if I didn’t do exactly what they said, I would relapse and my addiction would win. If I didn’t do exactly what they said, I was a failure. So afraid or failing, relapsing, and dying, I complied. If my counselor said it was good for me then it must have been good, right? After all, they’re showing me that they love me, right?
Wrong.
There are numerous situations of my time in Crossroads that mirror so many other survivors, and quite honestly recounting them is too painful. Slowly, month by month I started to realize that this place was not actually going to make me better. I realized that I hadn’t been improving my mental health, I was destroying it.
On April 1, 2017 I was interrogated by the head counselor for taking cough medicine in January when I had a very severe case of the flu that was heading towards pneumonia. A few days prior a friend of mine found an almost full bottle of prescription cough medicine in my house while she was babysitting my cat, and called a group member. That person then called the Head Counselor. When I went to the function on April 1 2017, I was pulled aside by the Head Counselor. We went outside to the back of the house. I was then immediately questioned about my sobriety. I was told I was a liar and that I had been getting high the entire time I was part of Crossroads. I was told I was being manipulative and dishonest. When I would try to defend myself I was only met with “I don’t believe you.” This went on in circles for 45 minutes. It was even suggested that I needed to go back to outpatient because I clearly didn’t get anything out of it the first time. My blood was boiling. It was at that moment that I realized that I wasn’t important to this man. He didn’t “love” me. The “love” he expressed was purely conditional and once he saw a window to get me back into treatment and to take more of my money, he took the opportunity. After what felt like the longest 45 minutes of my life I finally got up the courage to simply walk away. I got in my car and went home.
Not long after I got home, I was bombarded with phone calls. I got calls from friends of mine in the program. News had spread about what happened. Soon everyone was calling to tell me to stay in the program and that the interrogation was just the counselor showing his concern. He had a right to confront me and that it wasn’t that bad. I was told by my peers that me wanting to leave was my disease talking. That was my disease trying to gain a way back into my life. I was ridiculed for not discussing this very personal choice with other people first, because I can’t trust my own thinking. I was told that I was being irrational and overemotional. I was consistently told that “it wasn’t that bad” and that “he just loves me.” I refused to listen to them.
I then got a phone call from my mom. I could hear her crying on the other line and my heart immediately dropped. She could barely speak through her tears. She then proceeded to explain to me how the head counselor in St. Louis, where she lived and participated in the Parent Program, had called her not even 10 minutes after I left the function. She told me that he had called her and was told not to trust me. She was told that I was an addict and will always be an addict and that my disease will always try to win. He told her I was lying and was just trying to find a way out so that I can go get high, that I was trying to escape the one thing that had kept me sober and that without them I wouldn’t make it. The counselor told her that my disease was so severe that I was going to overdose and die without them. She was told that if she wanted to save my life, she would convince me to stay. They tried to instill fear into my mother, so that they could keep a hold of me. They wanted to keep controlling my life.
After leaving I was immediately villainized for leaving. I was portrayed as a person who just couldn’t get the program. I was branded as someone who wasn’t a winner, and all of the people that I believed to be my truest and closest friends, cut me off. They no longer wanted to speak with me because I was a hindrance to their program. Even to this day I will see some counselors and former friends of mine from when I was in the program. Any time I see the counselors I am treated like I do not exist. They will make a conscious effort to ignore me and make it a point to make sure that I am aware that they want nothing to do with me.
Most of my time in the Crossroads Program doesn’t seem real. I try not to think about it often but it has become increasingly difficult as time goes on, especially now. Over the 5 years since I left, it has become more difficult to suppress the harmful treatment I experience. The way I function today is a direct result of Crossroads and their toxic, abusive approach to recovery. Some of them I realized immediately, but some I only figured out a week ago (one of them was realized today as I write this).
Today I second guess every move I make and every thought that comes to mind due to the fact that I was told every day, multiple times a day, that my thinking is “fucked up” and that I cannot trust my thoughts.
I no longer trust the people that I meet and often refuse to let people into my life out of fear that they will suddenly disappear, a direct result of being completely cut off as soon as I made the decision to leave the program.
When people offer to pick up around my house, or want to help me clean up after I have people over, I’m overcome with anxiety and panic. I instantly flashback to when people in The Group snooped around my apartment and found medicine and told the head counselor, leading to a one on one interrogation.
I have developed major anxiety around having one on one conversations, making work conversations and meetings extremely difficult, especially when they start with something like “Can we talk for a second?” Throughout my time in Crossroads, counselors would pull me aside in one on one conversations like this and rip me apart. They’d interrogate me or blame me for The Group’s misgivings.
I don’t like to be a passenger in a car because I was often trapped in cars, forced to be emotionally vulnerable with people I barely knew or didn’t trust while the driver drove recklessly.
I have a hard time letting myself relax. I always have to be doing something. For so long I was told that taking time for myself to relax was selfish and that refusing to hang out with people in order to have an hour to relax or wanting to get a good night’s sleep meant that I was not working a program, heading for a relapse, and will probably die.
I over-explain everything, constantly feeling like I have to have a rational, fool proof explanation for every move that I make, every place I go, every call or text I miss. During my time in Crossroads I had to explain my way out of every situation because the counselors were always trying to catch me relapsing so they’d have an excuse to send me to Step 2.
Those are all ways Crossroads has impacted me in my daily life, but the biggest negative impact Crossroads has had on my life is my inability to admit when something is wrong, when I am hurt, or when I need help. I am still so afraid, 5 years later, to admit that something is wrong because while in The Group, I would so frequently ask for help and would receive nothing but shame, negativity, and blame in return. There have been multiple instances in my life after Crossroads where my mental health and physical health have taken a bad turn, and I let it go on for months. Throughout the past 5 years, I have fallen into severe depressive episodes, paired with overwhelming anxiety. I suffer with dermatillomania and trichotillomania, pulling out my hair and eyelashes, and picking at my skin as a response to the intense mental stress I experience. I see a counselor regularly, and have been since leaving Crossroads, and often can’t bring myself to say anything to them because there is still some part of me that believes that if I say anything is wrong, I won’t be met with helpful treatment, I will only be met with harassment and judgment. The things Crossroads counselors still ring loudly in my head. “Why don't you love yourself, why don’t you respect yourself?. People who value themselves don’t do things like that. That behavior is only for people who completely hate themselves.” I was attacked for serious mental health conditions. I was made to feel like I was stupid and incompetent for having these issues. I was made to feel like I was doing it to myself and that I was crazy. I was never given any alternative. I was never asked if I was okay. I was only told the negative and that it was a direct result of my lack of vulnerability and my other character defects. Crossroads did that to me. Crossroads took away my trust in people who consistently show that they actually cared for me. They took away my ability to enjoy my life. I will always carry part of the pain I experienced in Crossroads with me. It’s not something that goes away, it stays with you forever.
The Crossroads Program is a drug and alcohol rehab center providing a treatment program for adolescents, teens and young adults (ages 13-25 ish). With locations in St. Louis and Kansas City, Missouri.
