Its about as useful as a wake up call as me beating Karen with her own medicine was.
TBS is not real therapy, and you dont make people get therapy by abusing them first. Thats unethical, unnecessary, and pretty ineffective. Do you think Karen wants to talk right now? Think she's open right now? Oh, maybe a few weeks of this in my backyard without showers eating MREs and oatmeal might make her more 'open' :rofl:
Hey, is her self esteem high right now? No... i'd imagine its pretty crushed right now!!! How the hell does 'wilderness' or ANYTHING a program, camp, or what I just did help self esteem?
They SAY they do it, but when you get specifics, it sure tells another story, don't you agree?
Scared straight bullshit doesn't work, the APA has already demonstrated that, and just common sense does too.
What Karen is feeling right now and what my son was feeling after 7 weeks in the wilderness are probably
very different on many levels. There were genuine self-esteem boosts my son experienced, related to physical, emotional and task-specific accomplishments. He learned a lot, and by no means was all of it from the program staff or the other participants. He learned a lot just from the experience, from finding out just how capable he really is. This wasn't about getting "scared straight" or about "tough love." This was about spending 7 weeks away from civilization to figure some shit out with a clear head, and having a safety net to make sure he didn't fucking die in the process.
I have a friend who is a bit older than I, who practices what I can only describe as a Native American spirituality or "religion" if you prefer. This guy routinely goes out on his own in the wilderness for weeks at a time on personal "vision quests" and finds them very rewarding. He does crazy shit like fasting for 3 days while hiking endless miles -- stuff a program would never (and should never) be allowed to do, even to consenting adults with properly signed release forms. My son knows him and had many conversations about all that stuff, and about what my son was going through, prior to wilderness. Considering that we had tried
everything with him already, and considering he had already had a few close brushes with death and had begged us for help, I thought that a similar kind of wilderness experience might be more appropriate than a 30-day inpatient detox followed by yet another string of therapists, none of whom were likely to 'click' with him. There were times in his early phases of wilderness where he wished we would've just sent him to inpatient rehab. But by the time he was done, he was feeling very different about it. He was confident, physically and spiritually strong, and genuinely enjoying most aspects of the experience. He also has a newfound knowledge of and respect for the environment, and has become very interested in environmental activism. I can't find fault with any of that.
The most regrettable aspect of the whole thing, for me, was the coercion, which I understand is very un-therapeutic. My son can list a few other regrettable aspects, especially the sucky food, but he understands the coercion. We struggled a lot with that, considering there was a good chance he would agree to go willingly. He says in retrospect, that was probably the only way. He would've asked too many questions on the long trip to Utah and would've been really unhappy about the 7-week duration. Two or three weeks, sure. But 7 weeks was most of his summer vacation.
You were a kid, don't you remember being one?
According to my wife, I'm still a teenager in a middle-aged body. I was definitely what many parents would consider "program material" when I was his age, but I grew out of some of the crazier shit I did back then. I don't wish for my son to be any different than he is -- rebelliousness and all. I don't even wish for him to have a substance-free lifestyle (hell, I don't!). I just didn't want to bury him before he was 18. That's so cliche, and 'program-speak' and all that, but in his case it really was a possibility, and one that we came close to facing more than once.
I can't credit the wilderness program with "saving" him, and I can't really say that he was completely unharmed by it. But he likes who he is today, he is not actively or passively trying to kill himself or putting his body in a state of extreme chemical distress, and he has hopes and plans for the future. Like all of us, he is the sum total of all his experiences, thoughts, ideas and beliefs. For better or worse, his wilderness experience is now a part of what has shaped him into who he is today.
Oddly, he is a lot more "ok" with that than I am.