This episode departs from the show's usual format. There is no roundabout question, no Rapid Fire Gauntlet, just a long, unguarded conversation with Yelizaveta Nex, who introduces herself as Lisa, about the three years she spent at the Academy at Ivy Ridge, a New York behavior modification program recently profiled in the Netflix documentary The Program: Cons, Cults and Kidnapping. She was not featured in the film, but her story mirrors the accounts of many who were.
Nex describes being woken at 4 a.m. on October 13, 2005, at age 14, by her mother and two strangers who restrained her and drove her nine hours to the facility. What followed, she says, was 24 hours a day of enforced silence, a strict military line structure, and a points system that governed every movement, down to asking permission to reach for a tissue. She spent a full year refusing to participate before what she describes as a deliberate breaking-down process took hold. Students were pushed into group sessions where, if they lacked a serious enough infraction to discuss, they were pressured to fabricate one just to perform accountability. Nex says she eventually found religion through a Bible her mother mailed her, then lost that anchor when staff gave her only minutes to grieve her grandmother's death before docking her level for continued crying.
She graduated after three years, a process that took most students roughly one, and describes coming out completely convinced the program had saved her life, only to unravel further once she was back in the real world. A brutal seven-year relationship with a narcissistic ex-husband followed, ending when she fled North Carolina for Florida with her son, now seven. What eventually helped, she says, was a nondual mindfulness practice called inquiry theory, learned at a California treatment center, which taught her to separate a painful thought from the feeling attached to it rather than being controlled by either.
Nex closes with two messages: one for parents, urging them to learn their child's love language before behavioral problems ever start, and one for anyone struggling with suicidal thoughts, encouraging them to reach out for help rather than staying silent, something she says she has done herself in her darkest moments. Roughly 50 of the 300 former Ivy Ridge students she knew personally have since died, many by suicide, a statistic that frames why she chose to share her story publicly for the first time in 20 years.
What you'll take away
- Yelizaveta Nex spent three years, longer than most students, at the Academy at Ivy Ridge after being taken from her home at age 14 under conditions of enforced silence and constant supervision.
- A nondual mindfulness practice called inquiry theory, learned years later at a California treatment center, became the tool that helped her separate painful thoughts from the feelings attached to them.
- She encourages parents to identify their child's love language early, using Gary Chapman's framework, as a preventive step against the kind of crisis that led to her being sent away.
- Roughly 50 of the 300 former Ivy Ridge students she knew personally have since died, many by suicide.
- She now hopes to build a healing method for survivors of program trauma and eventually run retreats for women coming out of similar institutions.
“They break you down, start from the bottom, and then build you back up based on their program's principles.”
“I have to know that that thought and that feeling is not the same thing.”