The Family Throughout the Therapeutic Wilderness Process: Our Stories

This paper is different from the others here, because I am not only a co-author — I am one of the two families whose story it tells. I wrote it with Cynthia Cohen, the educational consultant who helped guide my own family through the hardest years of my adolescence, and who later became my professional mentor and colleague. What follows is a shortened version of what we found, drawn from our own case study and from the research on wilderness therapy that existed at the time.

Why families turn to wilderness

Wilderness therapy combines nature, outdoor living, and psychotherapeutic practice to work with young people who are struggling — with motivation, with substance use, with the slow failure to launch into their own lives. The field has a complicated history: its earlier boot-camp-style reputation gave way, over decades, to relationship-based practice grounded in self-determination theory, attachment theory, and adventure-based programming. By the time our families needed it, the research base — while still young — was showing real, durable results: improvements in depression, in family relationships, in the ability to function under difficult circumstances.

My family's story

My mother, Mindy, describes it as a stressful period before we sent me — a new town, a new school, a fraying of the ordinary structures that had held our family together. I was disconnecting, changing friend groups, using substances, frustrated with school in ways nobody around me fully understood yet. Looking back, I had a skewed idea of what I was walking into — I already loved nature and adventure, so part of me was almost eager for a big trip, even though I badly underestimated how long I would be gone.

My first letters home were hateful — bashing and ranting about how unhappy I was. It helped that my parents had someone to explain why.

It helped my parents to have my therapist explain why I might be writing like that, so their responses stayed considerate instead of reactive. That is one of the quieter lessons of the whole process: the container around the family matters almost as much as the container around the young person. My parents attended a parent seminar, learned a shared language for feeling things without immediately trying to fix them, and slowly, our family found its way back to each other.

What families and clinicians can take from this

Cynthia and I wrote this paper for the clinicians and educational consultants who sit with families at the very beginning of this decision — before anyone has any real idea what a therapeutic wilderness program looks like from the inside. We wanted to be honest about the parts that are hard: the fear of sending a child away, sometimes against their will; the loneliness parents feel; the slow, uneven work of a family relearning how to talk to each other. We also wanted to name what tends to help.

• 01Each young person has to do the internal work themselves — no one else can do it for them.
• 02Parents still have to set limits, even while learning to step back.
• 03Naming a specific success, however small, does more than general encouragement.

It was this experience — living it, and later working alongside Cynthia to help place other families in the right programs — that set the direction of my working life. I went on to spend two decades in youth mental health, but the throughline back to this paper has never left me: families do not need someone to hand them a map. They need someone who has actually walked the terrain, who can hold the fear and the hope at the same time, and who trusts that the young person on the other end of this is already, underneath everything, trying to find their way home.