Second Nature (Wilderness Program)

What you'll realize when you enter the wilderness is that the distractions you've adapted to your lifestyle are not as easily present. The remoteness of the backcountry provides little to hide behind. This will empower you to focus directly on your issues without distraction. Although you may demonstrate high functioning in several areas of your life, the richness of the wilderness environment will evoke the unhealthy patterns of behavior that brought you to this point in your life. Additionally, your group experience facilitates engaging with your peers and field instructors without using familiar escape routes of shutting down, running away, or other responses you may have used to avoid confrontation and accountability. You are provided with a safe and patient environment to confront what you may be avoiding.

Nature is unrelenting; it cannot be negotiated with or manipulated. Parents, teachers and therapists can all be emotionally manipulated. A towering cumulus cloud cannot. There is no negotiating the weather. A mountain will not feel guilty and step aside for a hiker. You will experience the natural lessons that life has to offer by living in the natural environment. Your therapist, Field Instructors and peers will help hold you to appropriate boundaries and create natural and logical consequences that mirror the achievements and challenges in the broader journey of life. Your experience becomes a life lesson of how ineffective past coping strategies were, while equally supporting your insight in adapting your actions into successful and valuable tools.