If you are here reading my blog, I am assuming you have a child in need. If you only read one book a year this is the one to read. Pozatek can do more for you than I can.
Pozatek starts by explaining what the young person in wilderness therapy will experience, then the purpose behind the strategy. Stripped down to the basic tasks that all humans must do to live—lighting fires, getting water, cooking, making shelters etc, the student will have to confront themself and the issues that brought them into this setting. At the same time, they will be experiencing success: learning to survive in the most basic way. During this process, for all but the most stubborn and troubled, barriers and defenses will crumble. Once this happens, the young person will calm and open up to fresh ideas and possibilities. Having experienced hardship and success they will feel more encouraged to consider ways of being that are likely to work.
A critical point: The majority of these unhappy young adults are very bright, very sensitive and very creative. But. There is at least one issue, be it a learning difference, a mood disorder, a traumatic life experience, or an addiction that is overwhelming their ability to move into full independence. For some the problems begin at home, for others the protections of home mask issues which only become unmanageable upon leaving home. There are so many reasons and so many ways for a young person to give up hope, to give in to whatever seems to soothe their despair but it all adds up to much the same thing: they don’t know what to do and neither do we.
For the remaining to two-thirds of the book Pozatek shifts the focus to the parents and to the choices we have to make. There are only two and both are hard. The first is to stop doing whatever you have been doing to “help” your child because it hasn’t worked and won’t ever work. The second is to turn your gaze on yourself, to discover, accept and work on your own issues among them, accepting that your reactions affect this young person, but not in the way you were hoping they would.
If you are like I was (and sometimes still am) you’re groaning in dismay, “Oh no! Now I have to do what? Accept that my “help” was, however inadvertently, a failure?” and “Heal myself???”
My first essay here reflects how, when we sent our daughter off to wilderness therapy, I was not thinking beyond the enormous relief I felt that others, professionals, would take over the care of my child. My thoughts did not go much beyond the idea that for three months I could relax my vigilance and rest, while my daughter was being “fixed”. I’m a little ashamed to admit that it never occurred to me I was going to have to work on myself as hard as I have had to.
How reluctant we are to probe the hurt places in our hearts and minds. If you have a cavity and avoid the dentist, what happens? Nothing good, so you go to the dentist no matter how excruciating, for, at the dentist a temporary increase in suffering leads to permanent relief! I can think of ten other analogies from roof leaks to splinters, that you wouldn’t let happen to your physical body or your home.
The reasons for avoidance are both deeply personal and cultural. No one has worked harder than you to help this child. You feel like a failure. You feel shame. You feel anger. People judge parents, especially mothers, for anything that goes wrong with our children. Will that ever really change? I have no idea. Maybe if mothers and fathers boldly learn to admit how hard parenting is, how little we know, how often we need help. After all who is ashamed of going to the dentist or getting an expert fix a roof leak? How is this so very different?
A third illuminating point Pozatek makes about the difficulties are the distractions in our lives. In wilderness therapy our children, yanked out of everything familiar and having no other responsibilities or distractions beyond what is right in front of them, are immersed. We, mired in our every day affairs, may have a harder time changing our habitual responses. When are we to find the time to reflect, to actually do the tasks like transparency letters and reading therapy books! Our focus is at best intermittent and episodic, perhaps harder to sustain and implement.
While the responsibilities parents undertake are the much same, the choices we make about how to perform our parental roles and responsibilities vary. While most of us do a mix, we all have a preferred style from being exhorting bootstrappers, kindly enablers or stern lecturers. If we are willing to discover and probe the history that led to believing that this is the “right” way to go, we might be able consider abandoning that choice to try something different.
In almost all cases parents are, at some level, aware of and responding to their child’s problems as best they can with the tools and knowledge they have. One thing I began to realize reading Pozatek is that our child did better than we did at admitting the problem was too big for her or us on our own.
I can now admit that I knew for years that my child was a little different and needed a surprising amount of help, attention, and care than many of the children around her. I had the luxury of being able to offer that help as she is an only child and I work on my own schedule. Perhaps you have other children who have none of this child’s issues, the one in wilderness therapy? I can see how that might lead to feelings of frustration than being, as I am, the parent of an only child. After all, your strategy worked with your other children. On the other hand, maybe I have more of a burden of feeling like a total failure since you have other children who are doing okay. It all evens out.
There is one immense point that Pozatek makes: Why, in order to help our children, do we have to examine our own motives as parents and be willing to change? Because they know. We can’t hide anything from our children. Unconsciously or consciously they know what we are feeling. It doesn’t matter how many insights and skills our young person experiences in wilderness therapy if they come home to the same old same old. If we choose not to do the work, the therapy is less likely to take firm hold, put down roots, and enable our young person to flourish.
In short we need to allow our young people to work on themselves by themselves and in return reciprocate by working hard, not on them but on ourselves. Pozatek doesn’t pretend that our process is going to be easy. What might be if done whole-heartedly is worth it.
Pozatek has worked in wilderness therapy programs for well over a decade and has poured her wisdom and experience into this guide. We must examine our own patterns, be willing to change, and to consider what will come after the wilderness therapy experience. It's not rocket science, but what makes the book extraordinary is that Pozatek never wavers in her goal of reaching us, the parents, and giving us good reasons to throw ourselves fully into the process.
Perhaps you can envision you and your child walking the Appalachian Trail, not together but from opposite ends. You toil northward from Georgia as your child toils southward from Maine. In the beginning you are far far apart but you share a common goal and are both working toward meeting up somewhere in the middle. You’re both going to go through a lot, you will both change and look and sound different to one another when you do meet up.
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