Restraint methods allegedly used at Trails Carolina point to link between troubled teen industry, discredited ‘attachment therapy’
LAKE TOXAWAY, N.C. (WGHP) — The mental image of a child strapped down or held in place by multiple adults might conjure the image of an exorcism movie to most.
However, away from Hollywood movie magic, there are real-world cases in which parents tie or hold down children as if they’re possessed and call it discipline or therapy. Therapists and organizations, often without licensure or the backing of trained professionals, sell the idea as a means of helping to heal troubled children, promoting techniques that medical experts deem pseudoscientific at best and abusive at worst.
These tactics have been in the news on and off for the last year after high-profile cases of abuse and death.
NC therapy camp Trails Carolina where 2 have died faces lawsuit over child sexual assault
Last week, a YouTuber named Ruby Franke and her therapist were found guilty of aggravated child abuse in Utah after her son ran to a neighbor’s home with ligature marks on his wrists and ankles.
On Feb. 9, a child died at a “behavioral health” camp in North Carolina after staff said he had a panic attack the night he arrived. Search warrants indicated he was possibly locked in a “bivvy bag,” a weatherproof single-occupant sleeping bag cover used in place of a tent. It reportedly included a kind of alarm system on the zipper that alerted counselors if he tried to open the bag.
The camp, Trails Carolina located in Transylvania County, responded to the child’s death with a statement released to media outlets by Lynn Public Relations, alleging that the sheriff’s office overreached in the wake of the child’s death by illegally removing children from the camp.
“Parents believe the program is safe and do not want their children’s treatment disrupted by the State,” the camp said in the statement.
Campers removed from Trails Carolina after 12-year-old death: NCDHHS
The camp accuses the sheriff’s office of “detaining” the boys and lying to parents about their whereabouts.
“The Sheriff and DHHS likely did not have the evidence to close the program and take its license through appropriate and generally accepted judicial review. Calling and intimidating parents to pick up their children was an attempt to achieve their nefarious goal while avoiding fair and appropriate due process with full factual disclosures.”
Trails Carolina Media Statement Feb. 16, 2024 by Justyn Melrose on Scribd
The camp had been cited by the NCDHHS for forcibly restraining children as a means of behavioral intervention. A lawsuit filed in the wake of the boy’s death alleges that, in 2016, a camper sexually assaulted at least one of her bunkmates and was later bound through the night in what staff called “a burrito.”
A similar federal lawsuit filed against the camp in January of 2023 includes nearly identical allegations of sexual assault and neglect, and court documents show that the camp and the plaintiff settled last week, though the details of that settlement have not been released.
A year before these cases, in Surry County, North Carolina, an adopted boy named Skyler Wilson died of hypoxic brain injuries after his parents allegedly said they “swaddled him.” Warrants state that restraints and recording devices were found in the home and that the boy was duct-taped to the floor. A former foster parent of Wilson alleged that the parents were depriving him and his brother of food and had performed “exorcisms” on both children.
Where does this come from?
The parents in the Skyler Wilson case allegedly told officials that they were following parenting advice from Nancy Thomas, a self-described “professional therapeutic parent” who has no formal licensure in the care of children.
According to a January 2023 archive of Thomas’s website, “Nancy Thomas is not a doctor, psychiatrist or therapist. She is an amazing mom who has, through years of search, study and experience, found solutions to parenting challenging children.”
Thomas learned at the elbow of one of the first true promoters of this therapy style, Dr. Foster Cline, who is regarded as one of the founders of attachment therapy, and CJ Cooil, also known as Connell Watkins, who was imprisoned following the death of North Carolina girl Candace Newmaker during a “rebirthing ceremony” meant to treat the girl’s alleged attachment disorder. Following Cooil’s imprisonment, Thomas thanked her in the acknowledgments of one of her books, writing that Cooil had “retired.”
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Attachment therapy should not be confused with attachment theory, a development psychology theory emphasizing the importance of children having an emotional bond with their caregivers, according to Simply Psychology.
Cline trained and supervised therapists in “holding therapy” at the Attachment Center in Evergreen, formerly known as the Human Development and Research Center of the Colorado Youth Behavior Program, located in Evergreen, Colorado.
A records check showed that Cline was disciplined by the Colorado Medical Board in 1995 at the height of attachment therapy’s power. The board criticized the use of holding therapy and the aggressive tactics he used on children, forbidding him from using some of them.
Cline told The Spokesman-Review in 1996 that he had ended his connection with the Attachment Center in Evergreen.
Today, Cline describes himself on his website as “an internationally renowned child and adult psychiatrist.” He currently has a license to practice medicine in Idaho. His website advertises webinars that teachers and parents can purchase to learn how to parent with “Love and Logic.”
There is still a center promoting attachment therapy in Evergreen, Colorado, the Evergreen Psychotherapy Center, which is run by Terry Levy, another proponent of attachment therapy who co-founded the Association for Treatment and Training in the Attachment of Children, the trade organization for attachment therapists.
Defining ‘attachment disorder’
Many of these figures claim to treat “attachment disorder,” sometimes referring to it as “reactive attachment disorder.”
Reactive attachment disorder is a very rare but real condition that can develop in young children who experience severe neglect. It is characterized in the DSM-5, the standard manual on mental disorders used by mental health professionals in the U.S., as an overly withdrawn child who does not seek out comfort or appropriately respond to distress. This disorder becomes symptomatic in children from 9 months to 5 years.
Proponents of attachment therapy often mischaracterize “reactive attachment disorder” or use the much more vague term “attachment disorder.”
Thomas defines attachment disorder in her book as “the condition in which individuals have difficulty forming lasting relationships. They often show nearly a complete lack of ability to be genuinely affectionate with others. They typically fail to develop a conscience and do not learn to trust. They do not allow people to be in control of them due to this trust issue. They do not think and feel like a normal person.”
Thomas largely uses “reactive attachment disorder” to mean attachment disorder as Cline and others have defined it as opposed to its DSM definition.
She claims in her book that violent historical figures like Adolf Hitler or Ted Bundy had “attachment disorder,” depicting children suffering from this “disorder” as master manipulators, regardless of age and ability, who behave well outside of the home while tormenting parents inside of it. She describes children “manipulating” parents and expressing a need to “be in control.”
Cline’s writings indicate that all behavioral issues from a child he deems as having “attachment disorder” come from a place of rage, and that attachment therapy is meant to tap into that rage and allow it to be expressed.
‘Holding therapy’
It may not be immediately apparent to guardians what attachment therapy involves based solely on the websites and early pages of attachment therapy guides, often marketed towards foster and adoptive parents.
“Holding therapy” involves one or more people physically restraining a child to draw an emotional response from them under the belief that this will make the child more pliable to the parent or therapist.
Cline described holding therapy in his book “Conscienceless Acts,” writing, “This therapy helps them form [attachments] by purposely recapitulating the first-year-of-life experiences. This is not easy for lay people and even professionals to watch, for what the practitioner is doing is actually pushing (provoking) the client to feel helpless and hopeless, like a baby, by holding the client and making him uncomfortable. The result is that the client goes into a rage. However, this rage is not the simple screaming of an infant — the child yells, strikes out, tries to bite, sulks, curses, threatens, struggles, and kicks before finally submitting to the therapist’s authority.”
In her book, Thomas recommends placing alarms on their child’s door so parents know when they’re coming or going in the night. She defines behaviors like mumbling, talking excessively, asking “why” when faced with instruction from a parent, asking “dumb” questions or whining as attachment disorder behaviors that must be trained out of a child.
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“In the beginning, your child should learn to ask for everything. They must ask to go to the bathroom, to get a drink of water, EVERYTHING. When it starts to feel like they must ask to breathe, you are on the right track,” Thomas writes in “When Love Is Not Enough.”
One of Thomas’s online workshops included this warning from the host: “PLEASE NOTE: Some of the strategies outlined in this workshop may be considered inhumane and unethical by many child protective agencies and can result in an investigation and loss of foster care license,” according to Advocates for Children in Therapy, a nonprofit that archives critiques of attachment therapy and its practitioners.
Thomas writes in her book, “Holding therapy has been documented by research to be highly effective,” despite the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children disavowing the practice. APSAC, in a report published in the wake of multiple high-profile cases that involved attachment therapy, went into detail on the spurious nature of attachment therapy and its treatments, saying, “Controversial attachment therapies are viewed by many in the mainstream professional and research communities as presenting a significant physical and psychological risk to children with little evidence of therapeutic benefit.”
Attachment therapy culture
In her writing, Thomas stokes the idea that no one outside of the home will understand, adding an isolating aspect to the process. An almost cultic milieu has emerged around the practices with guidelines for parents who are using attachment therapy techniques on how to handle and avoid “critics.”
Thomas writes that parents who believe their child has attachment issues should not use any therapist who wishes to speak to the child without the parents present, alleging that the child will manipulate the therapist if the parent isn’t there to “tell the truth.” She additionally warns that children with these attachment disorders will falsely accuse their parents of abuse to officials.
She also provides parents and guardians with a form letter to hand out to friends and relatives explaining that they will be out of contact due to this therapy and preemptively defending the tactics that will be used on their child.
Proponents encourage limiting external support to only those immersed in the attachment therapy community or supportive of it. Thomas promotes attachment therapy-friendly therapists on her website, and there are Facebook groups for attachment therapy parents to reassure one another.
The public Facebook group of a North Carolina-based nonprofit posted in the wake of Skyler Wilson’s death, “If they asked me to testify as an expert witness in complex trauma and attachment disorders such as reactive attachment disorder, I would do so for free.” The post concluded, “Before these parents are ‘burned at the cross’ our families want more information.”
In posts on this page, the nonprofit encourages parents to share the difficulties of raising their “RAD” child, and commenters describe children being manipulative, behaving poorly when alone with parents but well outside of the home and doctors prescribing children medicine that the parents do not believe the child needs.
Relevance
In addition to Thomas being cited by name, the acts described in search warrants and the complaint connected to the death of Skyler Wilson matched many of Thomas’s recommendations and practices: restraints, surveillance devices, allegations of food deprivation and even paranormal superstition.
In her book, Thomas states, “Most of the children I have had in my home have shared with me that before they arrived they either did not believe in God, hated Him or worshiped the devil.”
A child psychiatrist wrote in his book “The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog” that holding therapy has connections to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Parents and guardians convinced that their children were recalling repressed memories of Satanic rituals used holding therapy to illicit “disclosures.”
The connection between other recent high-profile cases of abuse and belief in this kind of “attachment disorder” is not always as overt as it is in the Wilson case, but the methods used bear clear similarities.
According to warrants cited by the Associated Press, YouTuber Ruby Franke and her therapist Jodi Hildebrandt said that two of Franke’s children “should never be around other children.” The 14-year-old boy was restrained by ropes or handcuffs, and the resulting wounds were treated with salves of honey and cayenne pepper. A locked room was found in the basement of Hildebrandt’s home.
Hildebrandt is a therapist, but rather than providing services in a clinical setting, her services are packaged more in the way a life coach might, through subscription-based plans and seminars on life topics like parenting and relationships.
The incidents at Trails Carolina, both involving forms of restraint, also bear similarities with these therapies. Citations from the NCDHHS said, “Based on observation, interview and record review, the facility failed to ensure training on alternatives to restrictive interventions.”
“I went out of camp boundaries. … I wanted space and didn’t want people watching me,” a camper said to NCDHHS. Staff allegedly then forced the camper to the ground with their arms pinned to their sides. Another camper showed NCDHHS a bruise they got from being restrained with their arms at painful angles.
According to Chapter 9 of the Child Care Rules, as set forth by the NCDHHS, restraining children is only permissible if the child is a direct physical danger to themselves or others at the childcare facility: “Children shall not be restrained through the use of heavy objects, including a caregiver’s body, or any device such as straps, blankets, car seats, or cribs.”
Additionally, North Carolina passed a law in the wake of Newmaker’s death, which outlaws “rebirthing therapy” and states that “restraint and seclusion” can only be used as part of a “valid” therapeutic treatment and must be rigorously documented.
Warrants indicate that before the victim’s death at Trails Carolina, he was zipped up in a bivvy bag and deputies said they believed that only staff were “allowed” to let him out of the bag. The sexual abuse lawsuit claims that the alleged sexual assailant was restrained in a “burrito” after allegations of assault. Multiple former campers at Trails Carolina also corroborated accusations of the highly restrictive “burrito” punishment to WBTV.
Other young people who have attended similar camps in the past spoke to The Guardian about the experience. One young woman said she was painfully restrained to prevent self-harming behaviors, and camp staff covered her sleeping bag with a tarp that was pinned to the floor with heavy jugs, which is similar to how court documents describe the “burrito” at Trails Carolina.
The lawsuit also claims that “Trails Carolina conditions the children to adhere to the practice of strict obedience of its employees, and encourages an environment of ‘breaking down’ the children, creating an environment of fear and silence.”
“Breaking down” children is a core tenant of some attachment therapy practices, as reported in the ASPAC report. According to the report, “Child maltreatment professionals should be skeptical of treatments that describe children in pejorative terms or that advocate aggressive techniques for breaking down children’s defenses.”
Inside Trails Carolina
The lawsuit describes Trails Carolina as “a for-profit program ran by [Wilderness Training & Consulting, LLC], which is part of an organization of for-profit affiliated businesses that does business as Family Help & Wellness.”
Family Help & Wellness’s website lists “reactive attachment disorder” among the disorders treated in their programs. The Mayo Clinic, however, says it is unclear to medical professionals if reactive attachment disorder persists beyond the age of five, and Trails Carolina and other camps largely work with preteens and teens.
Trails Carolina’s website, now defunct but accessible through an archive, has multiple blog posts about treating teens with “attachment issues,” citing trouble “establishing boundaries” and “attention-seeking behavior” which aligns more with the pseudoscientific definition of attachment disorder used by figures like Cline and Thomas.
Trails Carolina, WTC and Family Help & Wellness largely conform to the template of the “troubled teen” industry, which often involves teens being “gooned” away from home by force and taken to a wilderness camp over behavioral problems ranging from relatively minor issues, such as truancy, to more severe issues, such as sexually disordered behavior.
The lawsuit describes how Trails Carolina allegedly forced the plaintiff to “hike all day” with inadequate food. Meaningless and excessive exercise and food deprivation are used as “therapy tactics” in attachment therapy.
The camp charges up to $715 a day in tuition and a $4,900 fee for children to enroll, a price comparable to other similar programs. Nancy Thomas charges a minimum of $2,000 and requires the rental or use of an RV for her week-long “Healing Hearts Camp,” and Foster Cline sells his “Love and Logic” parenting and teaching packages for hundreds of dollars apiece.
Alternatives
Supporters pitch attachment therapy targeted at younger, vulnerable children and the troubled teen industry as almost a quick fix for behavioral issues, whether those behaviors are a sign of complex trauma, medical conditions or neither.
Rather than placing responsibility on parents or the environment that the child is in, these programs attribute a child’s misbehavior to the idea that something is fundamentally broken within the child. The ASPAC report notes that this sublimation of blame makes attachment therapy attractive to parents, writing “Proponents of this viewpoint may describe the presenting problem as a healthy family with a sick child.”
Thomas writes in the early pages of her book, “My definition of success is a child who is respectful, responsible, and fun to be around.” This definition is repeated throughout, staking the success of these techniques on making children easier to manage for the parent at whatever cost.
Trails Carolina wrote on its website homepage, “Your child can learn to address their unhealthy behaviors, gain valuable personal insights, and learn important lessons.” In another section of the website, the program says, “We support each student through a trauma-informed process of slowly and safely expanding their emotional tolerance” without acknowledgment of the causes of such trauma.
The American Association of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry writes that children suffering from attachment issues “require comprehensive psychiatric evaluation and individualized treatment plans developed by professionals who are experts in the differential diagnosis and treatment of these complex disorders. Treatment usually includes both individual and family interventions.”
The National Youth Rights Association decries the “troubled teen” industry that wilderness camps like Trails Carolina fit into, writing, “An entire industry has developed as a way to push blame on young people, give their parents complete control over their treatment, and subject them to unforgivable abuse.”
“All children are sad, anxious, irritable, or aggressive at times, or they occasionally find it challenging to sit still, pay attention, or interact with others. In most cases, these are just typical developmental phases,” the National Institute for Mental Health writes.
The National Institute for Mental Health encourages any parent who believes their child might need mental health help to visit FindTreatment.gov
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