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When I was 18, I felt stuck. I had just graduated high school and I knew that as things were, my parents would not support me going to college. I also felt very lonely, had bad self-esteem, and didn't have much hope for the future. Early that summer, my parents told me that they were trying to find somewhere I could go and prove I had the skills to support myself and go to college. They had their eyes on wilderness therapy programs. The impression I got from them was that I could go spend 2-3 weeks camping and hiking while also being in therapy there. I knew that the outdoors and camping could be enjoyable and I recognized that I was in a bad spot with my mental health, so that all seemed good to me. With the help of an "educational consultant", my parents narrowed down possible programs to a choice between two. I called a person representing both and asked them very basic questions. Ultimately I made my choice of one over the other b/c the person representing the one I chose not to go to laughed when I asked if I would be able to read political theory while there, b/c they only allowed reading therapy related materials. It was a small distinction to choose based on but hey, I like reading.
When I got to the entry location of the program, I got the impression that it was more serious than what I saw about them previously. The people there said the program would last at least 8 weeks or so, more than 2-3. I signed a form clearing the program of any liability for if I became injured or died while there. After being outfitting for gear, I was driven over to the location my "team" had set up camp out. I realized a few things early on. All but one of the others on my team (besides the guides - employees who backpacked along with us) were not allowed to talk to me until I was deemed past the stage of accepting that I was in the program and observing how things were done. I thought this was unnecessary but I went along with it. From when I got there, I was put on a "safety watch", b/c they heard I had a history of some self-harm. They said I had to be within 10 feet of a guide at all times (including while going to the restroom). I hated that. Thankfully when I saw a therapist there a few days later, they decided to take me off of the safety watch.
Even apart from the safety watches, there were rules which made us (the people in the program) like we were under constant surveillance. We weren't allowed to speak to others on our team without being in earshot of a staff member. If we went away for a bit to go to the restroom, we had to loudly call our name every few seconds so that the guides could tell we weren't trying to run away or something.
One of the early steps in the program was receiving a letter from our parents and reading it out loud to the rest of the team. This forced everyone into a place of vulnerability. The letters were basically a parent expressing grievances they had with their kid's actions and talking about how it impacted them while also expressing some hope and validation. What the parents wrote wasn't always great. There was some homophobia present in another person's impact letter. Thankfully the rest of us seemed to be opposed to said homophobic. I remember feeling very hurt after reading my mother's letter. She compared me to someone I knew who has been a more dedicated musician than me and criticized me for underachieving and not getting stuff done, something I was already very frustrated with myself about.
While no-one in the program straight-up yelled at us to break us down, it did seem like other elements of the program served the same purpose. Intense hiking could leave people exhausted. If we didn't roll up our pack within the set time frame, we had to unroll it completely and start over again, still timed, a process which was embarrassing and frustrating. The way we obtained fire for cooking food and warmth involved bow-drilling, a physically challenging task. Lacking much privacy doesn't make things any easier. In any case, it didn't take much for me to break down in that time period, b/c I was almost constantly comparing myself to the others and felt socially isolated, a feeling I was very familiar with. However, even when I broke down there or felt uncomfortable about the lack of privacy, I chose to stay. I hated the prospect of returning to my parents' house still feeling little hope for the future.
By the time I left (graduated) the program (after three months) , I had bought into the ideas I was told about why wilderness therapy is effective. My parents had been recommended to bring me directly to a residential treatment facility from there. Part of the rational presented was that completely returning to normal outside life would be overwhelming and it could be easy to slip back into old patterns. That was probably true, but the program created the conditions behind the first problem (removing privacy, sheltering people from general society) and makes sense to me that three months in a program won't by itself fundamentally change behaviors and problems formed over a much longer period of time.
As my parents drove me away from the program, an argument broke out involving my brother and them. I felt overwhelmed. Sure I was instructed on being clearer and more open in trying to resolve conflicts, but it was hard to apply everything outside of the very structured setting of the wilderness therapy program. I turned on my phone for the first time in three months and I saw that I hadn't received any messages outside of promotional ones. I worried that it meant that no-one outside of my family even realized I was gone. My team had a tradition of giving people a list of their contact information when someone "graduated" from the program. No-one gave me a list when I left and I worried that that was intentional but also hoped they just forgot or something. I do want to know how those I went through wilderness therapy alongside are doing. Someone in the residential program I transferred to who went to a different wilderness program beforehand said they saw people that they went through the wilderness with through struggle with mental health and relapsing. Maybe ignorance is bliss, but I also hate the uncertainty of not knowing whether anyone who was on my team is okay or not. Even though it's been a couple of years since I left the program, I still worry about if I was somehow insufferable to those on my team. I'm aware that I became a stickler for the rules in the program near the end, even though looking at some of the rules from an outside point of view now, I don't agree with everything. I think that at some point I may have lost some perspective on what the program did wrong b/c being in it/accepting my life there normalized everything there to me.
Speaking of strange rules or tendencies, sometimes language describing emotions was overpoliced. Like if I say I feel attacked, I think that accurately describes a type of feeling, even if whatever it was a response to is justified or not even much of an attack. But if I said I "felt attacked" while in the program, I could be told I was playing the victim and not to use that word because it implies someone was attacking. Technically the same could be said then of feeling "hurt", but that's definitely accepted as a type of emotion.
Thinking back on the wilderness therapy program I went to, I have a hard time thinking about how much it did or didn't affect me. My first take was that I wasn't sure how much so, but it was probably helpful. I think part of my reasoning was that it was a difficult experience that I must have grown from. Course if the program meant to just be a simple fix to things, it failed at that. Though I learned to force myself to eat food that I disliked the texture of while I was there, I resorted back to being a picky eater shortly after leaving. I was still dealing with a lot of loneliness and some hopelessness when I had left and was staying at the residential program. Off of the top of my head, I could say that good things about the program involve its presence outside, with fresh air and beautiful scenery and I did feel a sense of pride when successfully hiking to peaks with my team, and I was introduced to the concept of cognitive distortions while I was there, which I think has been useful for me. However, I think all of those good aspects could be present outside of wilderness therapy
I know that I'm doing much better now than I was when I enrolled in that initial program, but I think a lot of my progress is more easily traced to the residential place I was sent afterwards. It was there that I gained some more confidence academically when I took some general classes around the area of the facility and the staff helped me through the process of applying to colleges.
When I hear horror stories about some people's experiences and wilderness therapies or similar programs, I don't find them hard to believe. My impression has been that the programs can impose a lot of control over the people there and especially with extremely limited communication, I think that the programs can be very vulnerable to abuse. This may be amplified for adolescents, since they don't have the same ability to sign themselves out as adults do. Additionally I imagine that everything in the programs could be harder to deal with after having been taken there involuntarily.
Recently, I've been thinking about this all. It's hard to discuss with people directly around me since hardly anyone outside of my family is even aware that I was in wilderness therapy a few years ago. So, I decided to type it out in a semi-disorganized way here
I will not claim to represent every person's experiences w/ wilderness therapy. This was just part of mine and various thoughts I have based on them. If you have some different respectful ideas feel free to voice them.
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This is very interesting. Just as school and college and aren't for everyone this therapy isn't for everyone. But if it helps the majority it is worth keeping.
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