Jasmin and her three children love the Mission!

“My past has been very complicated. It’s been quite a journey,” Jasmin shared. “I came from a broken home – very toxic, very dysfunctional. I never grew up with my dad and my mom was an alcoholic and a workaholic. She worked and she partied. I was always having to take care of her. There was a lot of abuse.”

Due to the extreme abuse she experienced at the hands of her mother, Jasmin was removed from her care and placed with her father. A man she barely knew.

“He was just a man that came in once a month and dropped off a check,” Jasmin said. “And no one else in his new family knew about me. It was a shock when I showed up at his door.”

Shortly after Jasmin’s arrival, her father sent her to Provo Canyon School, a controversial involuntary psychiatric youth residential treatment center in Utah. “That’s where solitary confinement became my home,” Jasmin said after taking a deep breath. “I was barely allowed to speak. They even made a program just for me.”

Jasmin spent three years at Provo Canyon, where she was heavily medicated, to the extreme of being “completely zoned out” and left locked in a room by herself most of the time. She had so little interaction with another person, a handshake offered would startle her. She would be plagued with nightmares about her experience for years to come.

At 17, Jasmin went back to stay with her mother. There, she reunited with someone she knew as a child – a man 15 years her senior. When Jasmin turned 18, they began a relationship, but he quickly became “controlling and abusive.” It lasted three years and they had two children.

Jasmin enrolled in college, had a third child, and found employment. Unfortunately, during COVID, Jasmin lost her job. During this time, Breaking Code Silence, a social movement created by survivors and activists of institutional child abuse, rose to prominence. “Hearing my story being told from another person, and knowing there are so many other survivors, it was shocking,” Jasmin shared.

The revelation was too much for Jasmin’s body to handle. She experienced “stroke-like symptoms” and lost control of half her body for over a year – a physical manifestation of her trauma.

Once recovered, Jasmin and her three children came to the Mission. “Everyone is so loving and accepting; it’s like I have a family here. It feels so good. God has a lot to play in it because I haven’t been able to do this on my own. There’s something else working and I trust that it’s God.

“I have support, I have people who care about me,” Jasmin said, fighting through tears. “The environment here is much different than it was at home. My mom used to make fun of me, she would laugh at my dreams and goals. I always felt like a failure.”

She’s grateful to the Mission. “To the donors and staff, thank you for the opportunity. I wouldn’t be able to do this without the program. I’m sitting here with hope, with a vision of a better me. I feel empowered, that I am in control, and that I’m capable of achieving so much more.”