"2 Lives 1 City" by Aviva Stein-Wotten
by Melissa Cosgrove
Group starts and my therapist asks if I’d like to tell everyone why my graduation date has been taken away, removed from the white board in a single deafening swipe. It’s a command disguised as a question. Andrea’s color contacts, a fake and sickening emerald green, pierce through me like daggers.
“I had a codependent relapse,” I say. I hear Andrea’s words from our individual therapy session fall out of my mouth like kamikaze pilots. This is how the game is played. I had caught on quicker than most, having already logged thirteen months in residential treatment prior to this “refresher course.” During my first Group, a therapist named Jackson with hair like NSYNC in the early years asked me the seemingly simple question, “Why are you here?” Familiar enough with the veracity required by these types of institutions, I told the full story, warts and all.
“I had a codependent relapse,” I say. I hear Andrea’s words from our individual therapy session fall out of my mouth like kamikaze pilots. This is how the game is played. I had caught on quicker than most, having already logged thirteen months in residential treatment prior to this “refresher course.” During my first Group, a therapist named Jackson with hair like NSYNC in the early years asked me the seemingly simple question, “Why are you here?” Familiar enough with the veracity required by these types of institutions, I told the full story, warts and all.
I had fallen in love, I thought, with a girl named Alicia from my previous treatment center. We had obviously hidden our romance from Staff, and the level of neglect there allowed us to date, and even have sex, without anyone ever catching on. We graduated in May, just weeks after my seventeenth birthday, overjoyed to be free at last, but also dreading the time we’d have to spend apart. Alicia spent the summer at a college prep boarding school in bumble-fuck-middle-of-nowhere Utah, about an hour south of our former “home” in Springville, while I sat through make-up classes with freshman at a Christian high school in San Jose.
We fought over Skype all summer long.
That autumn, I spent exactly five days at my new school, where I noticed that most people who loved Jesus didn’t behave very Jesus-like themselves—well, maybe not most, but enough to leave that impression on a sensitive kid with purple hair who stuck out like a sore thumb. There was a lot of food throwing and snickering, but it was an instance of blatant homophobia from a teacher that sent me over the edge. He pulled me aside after class, told me that it was wrong that I was bisexual, and instructed me to never, ever mention my girlfriend in class again. I held my tears in until the walls of my favorite bathroom stall surrounded me, and then I wailed to my mother to come and get me the hell out of this place.
I transferred to Alicia’s boarding school in Mt. Pleasant, Utah, where my dependence on her would grow like a fungus until it suffocated us both. The more I clung to her, the farther she drifted, until one crisp January morning, she finally dumped me. After a split second of world-shattering panic, all my dreams for our future splintering into a thousand tiny shards, my eyes went blank, and a warm blanket of calm fell over me.
I’ll just kill myself, I thought. Easy.
So, I overdosed.
Alicia found me half-conscious on the floor of the closet in my dorm room and forced our dorm mother to take me to the hospital. I only remember bright lights and screaming about the taper missing from my ear. I’d spent months slowly stretching my lobes, and I didn’t want all that pain to have gone to waste.
We fought over Skype all summer long.
That autumn, I spent exactly five days at my new school, where I noticed that most people who loved Jesus didn’t behave very Jesus-like themselves—well, maybe not most, but enough to leave that impression on a sensitive kid with purple hair who stuck out like a sore thumb. There was a lot of food throwing and snickering, but it was an instance of blatant homophobia from a teacher that sent me over the edge. He pulled me aside after class, told me that it was wrong that I was bisexual, and instructed me to never, ever mention my girlfriend in class again. I held my tears in until the walls of my favorite bathroom stall surrounded me, and then I wailed to my mother to come and get me the hell out of this place.
I transferred to Alicia’s boarding school in Mt. Pleasant, Utah, where my dependence on her would grow like a fungus until it suffocated us both. The more I clung to her, the farther she drifted, until one crisp January morning, she finally dumped me. After a split second of world-shattering panic, all my dreams for our future splintering into a thousand tiny shards, my eyes went blank, and a warm blanket of calm fell over me.
I’ll just kill myself, I thought. Easy.
So, I overdosed.
Alicia found me half-conscious on the floor of the closet in my dorm room and forced our dorm mother to take me to the hospital. I only remember bright lights and screaming about the taper missing from my ear. I’d spent months slowly stretching my lobes, and I didn’t want all that pain to have gone to waste.
When I finished the story, my words seemed to settle on the furniture like dust. I held my breath while Jackson’s beady eyes bored into me, unflinching.
“Now, tell us why you’re really here.”
“I don’t understand,” I told him. “I was in a toxic relationship that led to me trying to kill myself. You can ask the hospital. You can ask my mom. That’s everything that happened.”
“Tell us why you’re really here.”
This continued until he resolved to ignore me completely and carry on with Group as if I wasn’t there. Every time I tried to speak, even in response to another girl, he would throw pillows or tissues at me, or even sit on my lap to further emphasize that I did not exist in this room. After forty-five minutes or so, I tuned them out, accepting my exile. I watched a boxelder bug crawl all the way up to the top of the window and fall, legs flailing, before righting itself to crawl to the top once more. Over and over, crawling and falling. What a life, I thought to myself.
“Now, tell us why you’re really here.”
“I don’t understand,” I told him. “I was in a toxic relationship that led to me trying to kill myself. You can ask the hospital. You can ask my mom. That’s everything that happened.”
“Tell us why you’re really here.”
This continued until he resolved to ignore me completely and carry on with Group as if I wasn’t there. Every time I tried to speak, even in response to another girl, he would throw pillows or tissues at me, or even sit on my lap to further emphasize that I did not exist in this room. After forty-five minutes or so, I tuned them out, accepting my exile. I watched a boxelder bug crawl all the way up to the top of the window and fall, legs flailing, before righting itself to crawl to the top once more. Over and over, crawling and falling. What a life, I thought to myself.
These many years later, I have come to find just how dramatic the inconsistency of memory is, especially as it relates to periods of great trauma. I arrived at Vista in January, and yet boxelder bugs do not show themselves until deep into the hotter weeks at spring’s end. I must have been dissociating, focused on some other minute and immaterial thing, waiting for the end of that moment of anguish.
I don’t recall how it came to me that day, but I finally understood how to make it out of Group.
“Jackson, I tried to kill myself because I wanted attention.”
Jackson smiled, but his beady eyes remained expressionless. “Well, look who finally decided to be honest.”
I had successfully found the narrative he had chosen for me.
Three months later, seeing Andrea’s eyes shift in the same way, I know I’ve fallen into a similar trap. I just don’t know what to pretend yet.
I concentrate on keeping my voice steady as I tell the girls about my Home Visit.
I had received permission to see a friend, Jeremy, who’d been deemed a good influence. Though Jeremy attended boarding school with Alicia and I, he was no more aware of our romantic relationship than anyone else. They never would have allowed lesbians to live in a dorm room together, so we hid under the label of best friends, even anointing ourselves with faux boyfriends to throw the faculty off our scent. When Jeremy innocently asked my mother if he could bring Alicia with him to visit, I asked if I could call him to explain why that wouldn’t be the nice surprise he thought it would be. My mother figured, What’s the harm? I told Jeremy that Alicia and I had been in a secret and toxic relationship, so it wasn’t a good idea for me to see her. She was sort of the whole reason I was there.
I spent no more than sixty seconds on the phone with him, but sixty seconds was all it took to earn me three more months behind automatic locking doors.
My error, Andrea said, was that I explained myself when I didn’t need to. I should have just said, “No.”
I don’t recall how it came to me that day, but I finally understood how to make it out of Group.
“Jackson, I tried to kill myself because I wanted attention.”
Jackson smiled, but his beady eyes remained expressionless. “Well, look who finally decided to be honest.”
I had successfully found the narrative he had chosen for me.
Three months later, seeing Andrea’s eyes shift in the same way, I know I’ve fallen into a similar trap. I just don’t know what to pretend yet.
I concentrate on keeping my voice steady as I tell the girls about my Home Visit.
I had received permission to see a friend, Jeremy, who’d been deemed a good influence. Though Jeremy attended boarding school with Alicia and I, he was no more aware of our romantic relationship than anyone else. They never would have allowed lesbians to live in a dorm room together, so we hid under the label of best friends, even anointing ourselves with faux boyfriends to throw the faculty off our scent. When Jeremy innocently asked my mother if he could bring Alicia with him to visit, I asked if I could call him to explain why that wouldn’t be the nice surprise he thought it would be. My mother figured, What’s the harm? I told Jeremy that Alicia and I had been in a secret and toxic relationship, so it wasn’t a good idea for me to see her. She was sort of the whole reason I was there.
I spent no more than sixty seconds on the phone with him, but sixty seconds was all it took to earn me three more months behind automatic locking doors.
My error, Andrea said, was that I explained myself when I didn’t need to. I should have just said, “No.”
The walls close in around me as I speak until I can barely hear myself. I’m on autopilot as the girls berate me for being so stupid and weak, for succumbing to my people-pleasing, anxious ways.
“I know,” I say. “I am stupid and weak.” Andrea occasionally joins in, but mostly she sits back and eggs them on. This is the point of Attack Therapy: humiliate, berate, or “ream” (as the Vista therapists commonly described it) a person until they’re completely worn down and can therefore be “built back up.”
It didn’t seem to bother anyone at Vista that this type of therapy was found to cause psychological damage, all the way back in the early 1970s.
Hell, even we wouldn’t know it didn’t work until we all started dropping dead of drug overdoses and suicides years later.
But we all played the game, because that’s all we could do.
Walking single file out of Group that day, against the very serious rule of never speaking outside of Staff’s earshot, Danielle whispers into the back of my hair, “That was bullshit.”
I give her a half-smile as Anna adds, “I’m so sorry, Piss-a,” her doe eyes swelling with empathy.
No matter what was said in Group under the attack therapist’s gaze, I knew that what we whispered in the small, quiet moments was the real truth--our truth—the only version that counted. We injured each other frequently just trying to claw our way out, but we licked one another’s wounds in the spaces in between.
By bedtime, the tension from Group has evaporated and been replaced by its close relative—unabridged delirium. Excited voices ricochet off the walls, a cacophony of toothbrushing, whooping, pill bottle lid-snapping, laughing, and the infamous tongue out aaaaaahhhhhhh noises that prove we aren’t “cheeking” our meds (think: squirrel).
One of the staff has his back turned to me, and I seize the opportunity.
“Hey Brandon!” I shout. He turns around, but it’s too late. I’ve already pulled the sleeve of my shirt down, so he’s forced to confront a solid two inches of thick, black, Italian armpit hair. I grin triumphantly as he covers his eyes and turns away, screaming something about Wookiees on the loose.
Back in our room, Anna sits cross-legged on the floor in front of the mirror—just as she had the first time I met her—shaving her face with some sort of electric razor.
“Meet the Bearded Lady!” Danielle had declared in the booming voice of a circus ringmaster when I first arrived. I hadn’t been able to hold back my laughter then, despite my brush with death the day before.
I look around the small Girls’ House, at similar bouts of silliness erupting in small plumes all around me. It was true that monsters had built this place, had kept it going, but they couldn’t keep those small trickles of love from leaking through and staining our walls. Our breath and blood coursed over those white walls, which we were made to scrub weekly, casting vibrant color into this hollow place. The Girls’ House came alive with the laughter of a thousand abandoned children.
That night, and every night, right after Staff completed bed checks and moved on to the next room, we would silently descend from our bunks, take three bounding steps to the center of our room, and engage in the most salacious of activities: a group hug. At Vista, there was a strict no-touching rule. Worse than the drug withdrawals, the verbal abuse from therapists, the throbbing homesickness—worse than all those things—was the simple fact that we were touch-starved. We were children growing up without hugs.
If Staff had walked in at the right moment, we would have all been labeled as promiscuous lesbians, assigned different rooms, and reamed for hours in Group about another false narrative thrust upon us because none of these therapists were as smart as they thought. We would have been dropped multiple levels, lost what few privileges we had, and been “kicked off the team.” This was a special non-level on which you were not allowed to speak or wear clothes (ill-fitting scrubs and slippers only) and had to communicate your needs by holding up fingers: one for water, two for bathroom, etc. We would have been stuck here for more time—the cruelest punishment of all—but I had learned the hard way that our choices were an illusion. If the therapists wanted us here longer, if the recipients of our parents’ checks wanted us here longer, we were fucked.
It didn’t really matter what we did.
So, we hugged.
“I know,” I say. “I am stupid and weak.” Andrea occasionally joins in, but mostly she sits back and eggs them on. This is the point of Attack Therapy: humiliate, berate, or “ream” (as the Vista therapists commonly described it) a person until they’re completely worn down and can therefore be “built back up.”
It didn’t seem to bother anyone at Vista that this type of therapy was found to cause psychological damage, all the way back in the early 1970s.
Hell, even we wouldn’t know it didn’t work until we all started dropping dead of drug overdoses and suicides years later.
But we all played the game, because that’s all we could do.
Walking single file out of Group that day, against the very serious rule of never speaking outside of Staff’s earshot, Danielle whispers into the back of my hair, “That was bullshit.”
I give her a half-smile as Anna adds, “I’m so sorry, Piss-a,” her doe eyes swelling with empathy.
No matter what was said in Group under the attack therapist’s gaze, I knew that what we whispered in the small, quiet moments was the real truth--our truth—the only version that counted. We injured each other frequently just trying to claw our way out, but we licked one another’s wounds in the spaces in between.
By bedtime, the tension from Group has evaporated and been replaced by its close relative—unabridged delirium. Excited voices ricochet off the walls, a cacophony of toothbrushing, whooping, pill bottle lid-snapping, laughing, and the infamous tongue out aaaaaahhhhhhh noises that prove we aren’t “cheeking” our meds (think: squirrel).
One of the staff has his back turned to me, and I seize the opportunity.
“Hey Brandon!” I shout. He turns around, but it’s too late. I’ve already pulled the sleeve of my shirt down, so he’s forced to confront a solid two inches of thick, black, Italian armpit hair. I grin triumphantly as he covers his eyes and turns away, screaming something about Wookiees on the loose.
Back in our room, Anna sits cross-legged on the floor in front of the mirror—just as she had the first time I met her—shaving her face with some sort of electric razor.
“Meet the Bearded Lady!” Danielle had declared in the booming voice of a circus ringmaster when I first arrived. I hadn’t been able to hold back my laughter then, despite my brush with death the day before.
I look around the small Girls’ House, at similar bouts of silliness erupting in small plumes all around me. It was true that monsters had built this place, had kept it going, but they couldn’t keep those small trickles of love from leaking through and staining our walls. Our breath and blood coursed over those white walls, which we were made to scrub weekly, casting vibrant color into this hollow place. The Girls’ House came alive with the laughter of a thousand abandoned children.
That night, and every night, right after Staff completed bed checks and moved on to the next room, we would silently descend from our bunks, take three bounding steps to the center of our room, and engage in the most salacious of activities: a group hug. At Vista, there was a strict no-touching rule. Worse than the drug withdrawals, the verbal abuse from therapists, the throbbing homesickness—worse than all those things—was the simple fact that we were touch-starved. We were children growing up without hugs.
If Staff had walked in at the right moment, we would have all been labeled as promiscuous lesbians, assigned different rooms, and reamed for hours in Group about another false narrative thrust upon us because none of these therapists were as smart as they thought. We would have been dropped multiple levels, lost what few privileges we had, and been “kicked off the team.” This was a special non-level on which you were not allowed to speak or wear clothes (ill-fitting scrubs and slippers only) and had to communicate your needs by holding up fingers: one for water, two for bathroom, etc. We would have been stuck here for more time—the cruelest punishment of all—but I had learned the hard way that our choices were an illusion. If the therapists wanted us here longer, if the recipients of our parents’ checks wanted us here longer, we were fucked.
It didn’t really matter what we did.
So, we hugged.
Fourteen years later, I still think about this a lot, how we risked potential months or years of our lives in what was essentially an emotionally-abusive prison for children—all for a hug, a simple moment of human touch. Fourteen years later, I can’t put faces to those group hugs. I can’t remember their names or who they were, but I remember—intensely remember—holding each other, ever so briefly, in the dark.
Names have been changed.
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Melissa Cosgrove (she/they) is a personal essayist and memoirist who focuses their voice on personal growth, trauma, and loss. A former high school English teacher, they use memory to map the web of their life, speaking plainly about the agony of grief and the complexities of rebuilding after personal loss. Instagram @_melissacosgrove
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