Last resort school for overweight teens

Four months: Shedding the emotional weight
At AOS, the kids are very good at making it up. The school says the weight is a mask they're hiding behind.

For the actress Allison, being someone else is easy. Being herself is hard. Fears and anxieties usually come out in therapy. But for Allison, that’s been difficult, sharing real feelings is not something she’s comfortable with.

“I’m not doing good in therapy at all,” she says. “Like, I have a problem trusting people, like my therapist, and stuff a lot.  So I haven’t really talked to him that much recently.”

It’s still hard to talk about her childhood. When Allison was a little girl, her dad called her his “Alley-cat.” but her parents divorced and very soon she heard her dad calling his new little girl “Alley-cat.” she’s never forgotten how that felt. Then her mom remarried and the family began to eat out for every single meal. It was fun, but fattening, and Allison’s having trouble confronting this in therapy.

For Molly Carmel, the deputy clinical director, the denial is very important — it's how she's survived this long.

"Any change is good change and any realization is good realization," says Carmel. " It doesn’t have to be 100 percent.  Life’s not about that because if we ask them to be perfect, they would certainly fail,” says Carmel.

At AOS, they say anyone can lose the weight.  But it’s not so easy to change emotional behavior, like using food for comfort. That, they say, requires therapy— twice a week individually and twice a week in a group.

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Cassi, on the other hand, has immersed herself in therapy. The pressure of being perfect had driven her to overeat.  Now she says therapy has unmasked her reluctance to admit problems.

“One of my masks was like perfectionist.  So if I’m doing something wrong, I wouldn’t want to say it. [But now] I’m not like Cassi like perfect—I’m not perfect. And people know that.”

Meanwhile, back in Texas, it slowly began to dawn on Jonny what he had done.  And what he needed to do. And those thoughts so dominated his thinking that he wrote a poem to his family explaining his feelings.

Back home in San Diego, Jonny’s mother, Mona Dallo, was heartbroken and hanging on his every word.

“I must have been reading this poem 30 times a day, and I would cry every time. There wasn’t a day that a minute that passed by that I didn’t think of him,” says his mother.

Jonny’s mother says the decision to send Jonny was not made without deep thought.  She felt it was his last chance and she trusted the professionals at AOS.

As it turned out, Jonny did make it out of the woods of Texas and  back to AOS. A thinner, but more importantly, a calmer, gentler Jonny came back to AOS.

“That was the first time Jonny ever had to really pay consequences for something that he did.  And I think it was a great lesson. You can’t sweet-talk the wilderness,” says his mom.

The kids are usually in therapy with other students but they agreed to have a session with just the four of them so that we could listen in. Molly Carmel led the group, and they shared their realizations with "Dateline."

“I learned I have to realize what it is that’s actually bothering me because at home I’d just be so upset, but I never knew why,” says Shari.

She never knew why she was eating.

It took these kids only a few days here to start losing weight, but it took months to unmask the fact they were all pretending to be people they were not. For Shari, it was acting as though her weight didn’t bother her, for Jonny it was acting as if nothing bothered him.

“I’ve had a feeling for a long time that I hadn’t really experienced before, and that was being lonely. Like, that was something that was not part of my normal, like, life,” he shares.

For Cassi, her mask was acting as if life was perfect and for Allison it was just plain acting.

“I realized that if like I could take on another character, I can become that character and I wouldn’t feel so fat, and I wouldn’t feel so ugly,” says Allison. “That I could become whoever they were and be somebody else.”

Now through therapy, Allison is learning to be herself and prepare for life on the outside, which is always a test.

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