Therapy or abuse? Controversial treatments may sink Cascade

"They've broken us," VanBloem says of those who have tried to shut the center down. "We're just barely hanging on."

VanBloem's critics call him a cult leader who brainwashes his clients and the dozens who passionately defend him. They say the strain of therapy he practices can result in death.

In 1999, a 10-year-old Colorado girl who weighed 68 pounds was asphyxiated during a holding therapy session called a "rebirthing" that went too far. The therapy, which is an extreme form of holding therapy, and which VanBloem strongly denies ever using at the Orem center, involves wrapping and holding a child tight in a blanket. Immobility and pressure induce panic from which the child is rescued by the parent.

Proponents believe the act creates an emotional bond that was missing between the two.

In 1997, a Midvale father suffocated his 4-year-old daughter in what he described as a holding therapy session gone wrong. He claims he was trained at the center, but prosecutors say he was using the therapy in an attempt to cover abuse of the child.

VanBloem says few understand what he does because few have seen it. They have heard stories and seen videos of terrified children pinned to the floor by several adults, screaming and pleading for help, but this is not the kind of holding therapy he practices.

"We're labeled as child abusers, and what about the hundreds and hundreds of kids we've served? They all know I'm in trouble; they read the papers. If I had abused them wouldn't they come forward? Instead they're writing letters of thanks," he says. "I'm working with kids who are in a desperate situation. What we do works, and if we don't help these children, who will?"

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It is a cold Wednesday afternoon in late October and the clouds are rolling slowly across Utah Lake, gray and heavy. In Eagle Mountain, elementary school children are walking home from school. Some are still in Halloween costumes.

Cinderellas in red velvet dresses, boys dressed as soldiers and tigers.

Inside the home of Kristi Hutchings, a frizzy-haired girl wearing a powder blue dress is asking for holding therapy. She looks up at VanBloem, her small hands held gently in his, and asks when it will be her turn.

"Not today," he says with a small smile. Then he looks up. "Do these look like terrified kids to you?" he asks.

The house is full of children, and they clamor for the attention of VanBloem, who has taken off his shoes. They tumble into his lap, clutch at his hands, and pull him outside to play. Some are Hutchings' — who has five kids, four of them adopted — and some belong to her neighbor, Charly Risenmay, who has 12 children, 10 adopted.