A memoir by Kaila Kraft
Am I Changed?
At sixteen, I was taken from my bed in the middle of the night, driven into the desert, and left with strangers whose job was to change me. Eleven months later they sent me home — and the only question anyone asked was the one I couldn’t answer.
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. I wrote those months week by week, in the first person and in real time, so the reader is standing next to me — moment by moment.”
— Kaila Kraft
Inside the book
Kidnapped to be fixed. Kept away to be broken. Returned fragmented.
Nobody could tell me what “changed” was supposed to look like — only that I couldn’t go home until I was. So I wrote it down the only way I could: in the first person, in the present tense, week by week, from the morning they took me to the day I walked out.
The night
Woken in the early morning by people I had never met. Put in a vehicle. Driven away from everything I knew, with no idea where I was going or when I would come back.
The desert
Eleven months inside a residential treatment program for “troubled teens.” Week-by-week vignettes — intimate, vulnerable, each one standing alone — that stack into one story of trying to get better in a place that felt built for me to fail.
The return
What it means to be sent back “fixed” to a life that hasn’t changed, carrying everything that happened — and the question that followed me home: Am I changed?
Who this book is for
I wrote about a teen in trouble — not a troubled teen.
This isn’t a book about a program. It’s a book about what it feels like to be sixteen and told that you are the problem. If any of these are you, it was written with you in mind.
- You were sent away as a teenager and have never found the words for what happened to you.
- You’re a parent who has been told that sending your child away is the only option left.
- You work with teens and families and want to know what treatment feels like from the inside.
- You have ever been treated as a diagnosis instead of a person in pain.
About the author
Kaila Kraft
Kaila Kraft is a writer, a therapist by training, and the founder of Outervention. She holds a Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology from Sofia University and trained as a marriage and family therapist through practicum and associate-level practice.
She started writing in 2020, when everyone joked they would use their spare time to write a book. This one had been boiling up for years. She wrote Am I Changed? from memory, to chronicle her time at a therapeutic treatment program — and to say out loud what it felt like to be a heartbroken teenager searching for love and validation in a place that offered neither.
She shares her stumbles, missteps, and victories in the hope that her vulnerability gives someone else permission to tell their story, too.
Signed copies are hiding along the California coast.
I’ve been leaving signed copies of Am I Changed? in the places I love up and down the coast. If you find one, it’s yours. Read it, then leave it somewhere for the next person who needs it — and tag #friendshipofthetravelingbook so we can follow where it goes.
Found one? I’d love to hear where. Tell me →
From the Author’s Note
There is a third option. It’s here now.
In the Author’s Note I promised 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
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Am I Changed? · A memoir by Kaila Kraft
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