On her sixteenth birthday, TikToker Jacqueline (@heart.at.peacehealing) woke up not to cake, balloons, or birthday texts, but to two people kidnapping her from her bed.
Her parents had hired these people to take her to a wilderness program in the middle of Utah. She was forced to hike for weeks in the snow, eat food out of a can, and use the bathroom outside.
Her clothes were taken away. She had to wear the uniform given to her at the wilderness camp and was expected to comply with strict rules and physical demands.
She was given a tarp and had to set it up with her own two hands. She also had to make fire out of sticks in order to feed herself and stay warm. If she couldn’t figure it out, she didn’t get to eat.
“I was thrown out in the middle of the wilderness on my sixteenth birthday, confused on why my two caregivers were doing that, and I was like, happy birthday to me,” said Jacqueline.
“But you want to know what? That wasn’t even the worst part.”
Six months later, when she finally arrived home, her parents sent her to a second wilderness program. Again, people came to kidnap her from her home.
This time, she went to Arizona in the middle of summer. In this program, she didn’t even get to have a backpack to survive the wilderness with.
This was also not the first time her parents had sent away a child. Jacqueline was their fourth kid, and they had done the same to their older kids.
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Jacqueline is sharing this story as a sign to those who are hesitating over cutting off toxic family members. She no longer speaks to her own parents because of everything they put her through.
Such extreme interventions can have negative long-term impacts on teens. Other TikTok users described similar experiences in the comments section.
“I remember those programs. Knew a girl who got sent to one. She never was the same after she returned home. It was honestly heartbreaking, and we didn’t fully realize the extent of it until we got older and understood better,” commented one user.
“My sister was sent to Paraguay at 13, like my dad just put her on a plane to live with her grandma in the wilderness. This was not a vacation; he just didn’t know how to handle her, so he shipped her off,” shared another.
“An old friend of mine just told me this happened to him when we were kids, and he told me how his parents just watched it all happen and let him go. I can’t believe parents could do that to their children. I know I never could. I’m sorry,” wrote a third.
By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
