Team Support Helps Teens Transition After Their SUWS Wilderness Experience

ByJeff Derry, Clinical Director

Most SUWS students undergo profound and meaningful life changes during their brief weeks in the Idaho wilderness. In order to survive and stay comfortable outdoors, a SUWS teen learns to cooperate and form friendships with his team members. They must learn to plan for emergencies, think logically, control her impulses, and come up with daily strategies to keep warm, make meals, and create shelter. Emotional reactions like hostility, anger and withdrawal never work when it is time to build a campfire or to find better supplies for spindles for bow drills. Those SUWS teens with substance abuse problems learn to cope with whatever comes up without their usual props: there are no drugs or alcoholic drinks in the Idaho wilderness.

Somehow these hard-earned lessons must "stick." The life changes that take place in the wilderness must carry over into everyday life once a teen returns to home and school. This means that the transition period from SUWS to the next step in life is a key time for each student. If the student does not learn to apply the new life skills he learned in the wilderness to his routine life, then SUWS becomes just another interesting camping trip.

The whole purpose of taking teens into the desert is to help them understand how solving immediate challenges can lead to insights about core underlying issues that affect their lives, according to Jeff Derry, SUWS Clinical Director. From the very start, the goal of the SUWS program is to transition each participant into a successful life at school and with family. This means that not only the teen but also his family participates every step of the way.

"We work strongly with being an ally to the child and the parent," Derry said. "We help them with decision-making. We give them information, and we work strongly at being a contact to help them find the next program or school for their child."

Parents keep in touch with their children while they enhance their parenting skills and expertise through SUWS resources like Parent IQ and Parent Extranet. Parent IQ offers online courses, books and articles, and a forum where parents discuss mutual concerns with each another. They utilize personal parent coaches or other mentorship programs. Through Extranet, parents receive photos and updates while their child is in the wilderness.

Derry stresses the importance of making progress on family issues through a concerted effort with parents. He believes in involving the whole family system when a child participates in SUWS. If necessary, divorced couples can get special help to find new ways to co-parent their child more effectively and to develop house rules that are more practical for their family. Since the goal of the SUWS program is permanent success for each participant, SUWS offers continued support for families through our focus on aftercare planning. Parents can get help from educational consultants and other professionals to find the best new placement for their child, and a therapist in their area, if further counseling is needed.

The SUWS Program works with each teen during every phase of the program by using a team approach. For example, therapists meet weekly to talk about participants. They may have seven to thirteen people working together and sharing ideas about each case. The staff works inclusively, and not as a hierarchy. Derry said, "The important people are our instructors, the ones who are with the kids twenty-four hours a day. Their input is extremely important." He said they are compassionate people who dedicate their lives to this program, and noted that SUWS has one of the longest retention rates of field staff in the wilderness treatment profession.

Each teen is unique: therefore, the SUWS staff individualizes the program for each participant. With younger adolescents, Derry often uses unconditional positive regard at first, and then strength-based therapy to focus on overall goal setting. With older teens, Dialectical Therapy, which centers on emotional regulation, skills training, and relationship skills, can be effective. A Cognitive Behavioral approach confronts magical or distorted thinking. When they work with adolescents with borderline personality disorders, Derry and his team help them develop therapeutic skills which incorporate logical thinking along with emotional reactions.

The wilderness environment itself plays an important role in the SUWS approach. Many SWUS teens are already savvy and programmed from traditional forms of therapy: the wilderness presents them with a new challenge for personal growth. Students often go from an urban, comfort-laden life to a desert environment where there is heat, wind and coyotes, and no computers, video games or cell phones. Instead of parents and school administrators making their decisions, students must work things out themselves. Students come to see their struggles to make an enjoyable and productive life in the wilderness as similar to their struggle to make a life for themselves in the world of home and family.

Most participants make a smooth transition from SUWS to routine life. In fact, an independent study by the University of Idaho's Wilderness Research Center found that 83% of SUWS participants made "clinically significant improvements," and almost half returned to a normal range on all points of study as a result of treatment. One year later, the vast majority managed to sustain most of their gains.