In that suffocating silence, haunted by a roommate’s restless gaze and the weight of his own mistakes, he confronted the fragile line between punishment and salvation. The experience was a crucible of fear and growth, forging a new understanding of pain, friendship, and the desperate need to escape a past that threatened to consume him.
I’ll (20M) admit I was a shitty tween. I got into alot of fights with my parents, my grades were shit, and I was generally a prick. When I was 13 some friends and I shared a joint one of them had gotten from their sister (It had just been made legal in our state at the time) My parents found out, and they went nuts.
Now I get that weed isn’t for 13 year olds, but they took it way too far. I spent the next three months in an expensive rehab facility for troubled teens. I was by far the youngest and smallest, most of these guys were 16-18.
And they weren’t in there for weed, most of them did hard drugs, and had mental issues on top of that.
My roommate was a 17 year old who was detoxing from meth and pills, who also had unmedicated bipolar. A few nights he’d just stare at me and not sleep. We were in our rooms 18 hours a day, everything else was meals or shitty arts and crafts.
It was hell, but it worked, I was too terrified to have friends, much less do drugs.
I wanted to go NC with my family at 18, but my therapist encouraged me to repair our relationship. We have a rocky one, which is why I moved out, but we’ve been working on healing and it’s been cordial.
I was over there for easter with the whole family, and my mom congradulated me.
She said she was so thankful she had me sent to “get help” as a kid, otherwise I’d just be some junkie. But now I’m a perfectly functioning member of society. I lost it, I called her several things, including c*nt and left.
My sister (18F) said that while she agrees, I’m just hurting myself by holding on to so much anger over what happened.
Conclusion
The original poster (OP) clearly harbors intense, unresolved anger stemming from a severe, disproportionate parental reaction to a minor infraction during adolescence. The central conflict lies between the OP’s deeply held belief that their three-month placement in a drug rehabilitation facility for sharing a single joint was traumatic and excessive, and the mother’s conviction that this extreme action was necessary and ultimately beneficial for his life trajectory.
Given the significant emotional distress caused by the punitive action, was the mother’s celebratory comment at Easter a justifiable expression of relief over the OP’s current sobriety, or was it a profound invalidation of the OP’s adolescent trauma that warrants permanent distance? Should the OP prioritize maintaining a cordial relationship for family peace, or is the need to validate their past suffering more important?
Here’s how people reacted:
Take a huge break from them. Give them nibbles so they know you are safe and aren’t removing yourself from family, but you need space to process, become an adult, and redefine your relationship with them. You need to heal, to learn to trust, and to settle into yourself.
I moved 2000 miles away and made monthly chit chat calls to them while I found me in my 20s away from them. I had to give them less of me to get them to want to know me. Chat about safe topics—weather, TV, neighbors, etc. Take that approach until your heart is closer to being healed. Then, shoot for a 2-day visit, but do not stay with them.
My mom also said similar statements to me about my “boarding-school experience,” but we could finally have a real conversation about it about 15 years later. And she better understood my perspective. It’s not painful to me anymore.
By the way, those places are monetizing the shit out of families with no real outcomes/data. My program billed over $250,000 for one year of intensive psychiatric care based on the referral from one family therapist who got a kick back in the 80s. It’s all bull shit.
Be well. ❤️
NTA.
I wanted to say not TA, but the way you “lost it” at your mom and called her several names (inc c**t) was a tad OTT. I think there were perhaps calmer ways to have gotten your point across. Not at that exact moment maybe, but you could have said nothing, cooled down, and then approached a conversation from a levelheaded place.
BUT… Rehab at *thirteen* for **one** joint… that’s hugely AH territory. I get people who think scaring kids straight is the way to go, I just don’t feel the same way about it. If my son had smoked weed at 13, you can bet your 🍑 he would’ve been grounded, everything taken away from him, etc. But I wouldn’t shove him into rehab. It sounds like a traumatic experience. Hence why you’re less of an AH than your mom, but kind of TA for losing your cool. It’s always better to use your words and try to make your viewpoint. She won’t listen to you screaming at her. But she *might* have listened if you’d tried talking it over.
“Oh wow I’m so proud of myself, I managed to traumatize my kid into behavior that I find suitable”
Yes, some teens are hard, some even end up in bad places. Traumatizing them into “behaving like functioning members of society” is the highway to mental break at 30.
Also it’s high time you find a new therapist. They shouldn’t be encouraging you either way, most definitely not to keep in touch with people who makes you feel bad. Their job should be guilding you to manage your feelings and making your own decisions. If that includes contact with your old folks should be entirely up to you.
It may have helped you get rid of some shitty behaviour, but rehab at that age for just that, is too extreme imo.
Your mother overreacted and exaggerated so I understand why you blew up.
The only advice I will give you, is to perhaps write a letter to your mother about how you felt about what she said. This way, you avoid getting into a yelling match without being able to express how you feel properly.
Whatever she does with it is up to her, but what she does can certainly make or break this relationship.
I’m not a fan of some of those scared straight programs myself, and I know the “troubled teen” industry in the US has a lot of problems. But you *did* see your future, didn’t you?
Unless you’re leaving out a massive amount of detail, I feel like there’s a YTA vote here.
Rehab for having a joint, even if weed at 13 is too young, isn’t a reasonable or appropriate response. An honest conversation and some pu ishment at home would have worked out fine.
You are NTA, your mother is.
So many of my friends parents who took the softly softy approach ended up with loser kids.
Was this one of those for-profit troubled teen facilities?
You weren’t holding on to anger, you were finally expressing it. I don’t know how your sister and your therapist can think you can heal if your mother, who did all this to you, has no idea of all the damage she caused.
Time for a real talk.
And good luck on your journey.
I wonder if you can sue the facility for rooming you with hard-core addicts.
NTA of course.