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 shared 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 experience with me moment by moment.”
— Kaila Kraft
From the Author's Note
There is a third option. It's here now.
In the Author's Note I promised that later this year I would launch a family intervention program built as an alternative to residential treatment — one that treats the whole family, not the “problem child,” as the unit of change.
That program is Outervention, and it's live. Every person in the house answers for themselves, the family gets a map, and when the hard moments come you get three evidence-based ways through — never advice. The first pilot families are being invited now.
“You don't have to choose between doing nothing and sending your child away.”— Am I Changed?, Author's Note
Buy the book on Amazon
Amazon Top New Release · 5.0 ★