Ing Says: What a Trauma Informed Response WOULD have Looked Like After Harm Was Done; and Why The Guidance Center in Flagstaff, AZ failed so spectacularly.
What They Could Have Done — And Chose Not To
What trauma-informed care could have looked like after the harm was done.
After my stay at The Guidance Center’s PAC unit, I asked for something simple.
Better training for nursing staff regarding service dogs.
That’s it. That was the opening ask. Not a lawsuit. Not a press release. Not a licensing board complaint. Training. The kind of basic institutional learning that any organization committed to trauma-informed care would have treated as a gift.
I got a vague verbal promise. No follow-up. No documentation. No clarity.
Just silence.
Later that summer, I let leadership know I wasn’t getting better. That what happened had left a mark — the kind that doesn’t fade on its own and doesn’t heal without acknowledgment.
No reply.
By March of 2025 — after a second, legally questionable Title 36 attempt — I reached out again. Formal complaints. Requests for meaningful change. Real training. Accountability. Dialogue.
The response was a wall of silence.
Their complaint process was not a path to resolution. It was a system designed to protect the institution from the people it harmed.
No accountability. No learning. No care.
I was not treated as a person with something valuable to say. I was treated as a problem to manage until I went away.
I did not go away.
What Trauma-Informed Care Could Have Looked Like
What I asked for wasn’t complicated. It wasn’t expensive.
It would have cost a fraction — a rounding error — of the legal defense they are now mounting against AHCCCS complaints, licensing board investigations, the Attorney General, and the growing weight of public and political pressure.
Here is what they could have done. What any trauma-informed system should do when harm has occurred.
Acknowledgment and Accountability
They could have offered a safe, supported space where I could speak directly to the staff who harmed me — alongside their supervisors. Not to attack. To name what happened. To say:
“Before this, I didn’t have flashbacks. Now I do. This mattered. I mattered. And you harmed me.”
And to hear:
“We’re sorry. We didn’t handle this right.”
That moment never came. It still hasn’t.
A Survivor-Informed Training Plan
They could have sat down with me — and with others — and developed a real, concrete roadmap for staff training in trauma-informed care, suicide assessment, and meaningful peer integration into the organization.
They could have asked for feedback. They could have let lived experience shape how they prevent harm in the future.
That is how systems evolve. That is how harm becomes transformation.
They chose not to.
Human Dignity
Above all, they could have treated me like a person.
Not a risk. Not a liability. Not a disruptive client with too many feelings.
A survivor. A participant in my own care. Someone with hard-won insight into what actually helps.
They mistook my pain for confusion. They mistook my lived experience for instability. They mistook their credentials for wisdom.
They were wrong.
The Cost of Refusing to Learn
Instead of engaging, they stonewalled.
Instead of healing, they chose protection.
Instead of modern psychology, they chose the kind of legalistic defensiveness that might have been appropriate in 1981.
Now they are facing multiple investigations — AHCCCS, licensing boards, the Attorney General — alongside escalating public and political pressure that is not going away.
All of it — every single piece of it — could have been avoided with one trauma-informed conversation.
Responsibility Starts at the Top
This is not just about a few individuals. It is about the culture they work in — and the people responsible for building and maintaining that culture.
Those people are:
Devon Forest, CEO
Jon Perez, PhD, Board President
Dr. Stephanie Babbitt, Clinical Director
Dr. Teresa Bertsch, MD
Mary Jo Gregory, RN
And the full Board of Directors
These individuals had multiple opportunities to respond with dignity, transparency, and trauma-informed principles. At every turn, they chose silence over accountability and liability management over care.
And now, having reviewed The Guidance Center’s tax Form 990, I have no remaining doubt about what is driving those choices.
The numbers tell a story. Leadership is extracting significant compensation from an organization that is, by every meaningful measure, failing the people it is supposed to serve. In my opinion — and I want to be clear that this is my opinion, held and stated openly — they are running the nonprofit into the ground while taking everything they can carry out the door. That is not stewardship. That is looting.
They should resign. All of them. Wholesale.
If their degrees and titles have not equipped them to respond as human beings to human harm — if the best they can manage is silence, stonewalling, and legal maneuvers — then they do not belong in this field. And if they will not leave on their own, they should be removed.
Whether through fear, pride, financial self-interest, or simple moral failure, they have chosen the institution over the people inside it.
That choice has consequences. We are the consequences.
And This Isn’t Just About Me
It is about the next person who walks through those doors.
It is about whether this clinic will keep running on fear, ego, and silence — or whether it will finally face what it has done.
I brought them knowledge. I brought insight. I brought 25 years of lived and professional experience with trauma, crisis, and the systems that are supposed to respond to both.
Because I didn’t have a title on the wall or a degree framed above my desk, they assumed I didn’t know what I was talking about.
This wasn’t a missed opportunity.
It was a refusal to learn — from the person who knew best what harm had been done.
I write about trauma-informed care mostly because I’ve survived the kind that wasn’t.
The Guidance Center is why this site exists.
If This Mirrors Your Experience
You are not alone. What happened to you was not inevitable. It was a choice made by a provider or a facility — and choices can be documented, reported, and challenged.
File with your state’s licensing board, the Office of Civil Rights, and the Attorney General. File knowing that these bodies rarely impose meaningful consequences — because the record matters regardless.
And then come to us. Between Trust and Trauma documents what happened, names the providers and facilities responsible, and connects survivors who experienced the same pattern of harm.
One incident is enough. One person harmed is enough. We document it because it happened — not because we need a pattern to justify your pain.
“Nothing About Us Without Us.”
