Stolen from my bed at sixteen, I was dropped off at a residential treatment facility and left in the custody of complete strangers. Already struggling with abandonment, this felt like a betrayal only written about in books, so that’s what I did.

I narrated my journey from arrival to departure in the first-person perspective and present tense, inviting the reader into my heart and soul as I shared my experience. Can you imagine being a teen left in the desert at a Troubled Teen Facility, expected not to return home until you were changed?

A Note from the Author

I wrestled with how to share my story. Would I be brave enough to bear it all? The idea of that level of courage terrified me. Please know that I am doing this, scared.

This book is not for the faint of heart. From the first few pages, I write about deep traumas. It took me some time to trust my gut, be brave, and honestly tell my story of what it felt like to be a teen who was woken up in the middle of the early morning, physically transported, and dropped off at a program.

Writing my story as a memoir means everyone will know who I am deeply, to my core, or at least who I was as a heartbroken teenager searching for love and validation.

Nobody would know I was broken if I wrote it as a fictional story.

Writing my story cloaked as a work of fiction would be easier, but as a therapist, I practice with a narrative approach. Our stories, or at least the ones we tell ourselves, directly impact our view of the world.

“Every day, I woke up at the residential treatment facility, wondering, ‘Is this it? Am I Changed?’ It took me eleven months to graduate, and in those eleven months, I share week-by-week vignettes of vulnerable and intimate stories that stand alone and feel packed with punches but strewn together written in real-time and a first-person narrative; it was my goal to bring the reader along the whole experience with me.”

— Kaila Miller