Wilderness Therapy : An Alternative Therapy

Sixty days of carrying 80-pound backpacks, sleeping under a tarp for shelter in the Utah winter – welcome to “wilderness therapy.”

Sometimes, being alone in nature does not always teach us life lessons. Because of how busy we become searching for more connection, we do not get the chance to take in all of what nature has to offer. However, when we go out into nature with another person, experiences become more enriching, and we learn more valuable life lessons. This is also demonstrated in “Her First Elk” by Rick Bass, a story of a girl who went to the woods looking for one thing, and because of her interacted with other humans found so much more. It was simple, Jly had lost her father who used to hunt elk with her.

Change make us feel alive because it is the essence of every living thing. Chris MacCandless and Timothy Treadwell desperately needed a change in their lives in order to escape from their past unpleasant experiences and problems and they found their solution in the wilderness. Leaving the human word of comfortable excesses and surrendering their fates to nature empowered them to gain back a feeling of control over their lives. When your life is under a constant threat and you push yourself to your limits trying to survive in the wild, you start looking at many things differently than in normal circumstances. Wilderness can be a perfect place to find a peace in your mind and help you find your answers, but it is also a dangerous place that you

According to William Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness”, the main concerns with the wilderness term being humanly constructed and lack of concern with the local environments. Cronon emphasize much of the historical and philological meanings of wilderness as a human construct via spiritual and religious perspectives. He desired for people stop putting so much emphasis on the above and beyond that is out of our reach and focus on the present. He pushed this into the idea of one should start putting emphasis and care into one’s own environment rather than just focusing on environments beyond the local one. He believes change should start locally.

Dilemmas can arise when therapy takes place within the four walls of a clinician’s office, but when the office becomes a forest, lake, or mountain or all three of these unique settings, ethical issues are sure to follow. Wilderness Therapy is primarily geared toward adolescents; it is broadly based on using nature as a chronic aspect of the treatment. Practical doctrines are

Humanity needs community and McCandless through many stages of his journey has come to realize that. The trek acted as an enlightenment route for coming into terms with what is important in life. McCandless wanted to be in isolation as “the solitude and total freedom of the wilderness created a perfect setting for either melancholy or exultation” and McCandless wanted to be understand the basics of humanity, and the wilderness lets you express amounts of emotions (127). A book named Wilderness and the American Mind by Roderick Nash, provides readers why humans needs wilderness and our relationship with it. Nash and McCandless shared a similar backstory, both being brought up in big cities, attending prestigious schools, but most importantly, a fascination for the wilderness, providing McCandless with a connection to Nash and what he did. However the prime example of why McCandless needs community the most is found in a note declaring; “S.O.S. I need your help. I am… near death,… too weak to hike out of here. I am all alone… Please save me…” McCandless is all alone, and is needing someone to help him get out of the situation, realizing he needs the help of others to survive (12). As McCandless comes close to death, his reading of Tolstoy’s Family Happiness continues to be an exclamation of what McCandless wants,

Many people that go out and enjoy the wilderness or the outdoors head to those places because they need to get away from the world and relax. The opportunity you have to go out and enjoy these beautiful areas all started with the beginning of this country by many men and their ideas and views of the outdoors. I will conduct a rhetorical analysis of J. Baird Callicott and Priscilla Solis Ybarra’s article, The Puritan Origins of the American Wilderness Movement, and critique there use of rhetorical appeals in order to show that their article was written successfully.

Philmont Scout Ranch wrote the Wilderness pledge to protect the 137,000 acres of land, so that the lucky scouts that get to go and see the beauty of the land see the same thing as the person before them (Philmont). When over one million people have gone through the camp, the Wilderness Pledge that was created had to have helped because the land has not changed much, except of the trail. In the 1960s the US government wanted a plan to protect the environment and came up with Leave No Trace (Marion). The Wilderness Pledge does not seem like it is important to our country, but it help in the creation of Leave No Trace a national movement to protect the environment.

Many postcolonial regions are seen as places which contain therapeutic landscapes. With the rise of medical tourism, countries which already have these therapeutic landscapes are capitalizing on the landscapes by building or modernizing medical facilities to reflect the dominant core’s values, expectations, and infrastructure. Such standards are even being adopted into chains of hospitals in an effort to provide consistent experiences that comfortably meet potential clients’ expectations and assuage any insecurities. Additionally, by adopting strategic essentialism, medical tourism facilities may embrace, “certain stereotypes of exoticness because framing the location in this manner can be an important factor in luring tourists” (Buzinde et

I enjoy going to Red River Gorge with my hammock and just the minimal camping gear. This is my time to get back to earth, my time to find my own peace. The time I spend in the wilderness is the time I relieve my stress. I sit and look upon all of God’s great gifts and creations. At Red River Gorge I can sit in silence all day and ponder over all of its beauty, all of its feelings, and smells. At this time I concentrate on my breath and the feelings my body has. I try to not think of my life’s problems. Instead, I try only live in the moment and be thankful for the time I

The benefits received from participating in challenging and rewarding recreation therapy in the outdoors are astronomical and backed up through women’s personal anecdotes and genuine life changing experiences that have proved to restore, empower, liberate, dismiss gender-roles and provide a recovery sanctuary for the participants. Wilderness therapy needs to be

Consider Transcendentalist quotes as well as game suggestions while you rest at the end of every day.

During history class as a child I grew up learning of the vast amounts of buffalo that roamed the American wilderness. However, as we all came to learn, Buffalo are scarcely seen today due to early settlers choosing human progress over nature’s preservation (Nesheim 2012). I choose wilderness preservation because I’ve never seen a wild buffalo and I don’t want my children to have the same problem with a different species of animal. Nature provides not only value to human sustainment but also value to the human experience.

The overnight camp experience was very impressive and precious to me. I was in group three and we had arrived at the Tiu keng leng Jing Kwok Secondary School. On that day, we did not recognize each other well. According to what we had learnt before, our group should be at the forming and storming stage. We played different warm-up games and communication games so as to build up our team spirit. After playing each game, the teachers debriefed us on the purpose of the game. I also observed some of the characteristics of the game. During the debriefing section, I noticed some of the debriefing skills of the teachers and the tutors. I remembered that the tutor asked us questions like: How do you feel? How did we accomplish the task? After we had answered these questions, the tutor asked us some more questions like: Do you have any findings? How is it possible to apply what you learned in the future? Now, I understand that these questions originate from the Roger Greenway ‘4F’ Model and the ‘4F’ are: fact, feeling, finding and future(The Hong Kong Education Bureau). I will consider this model quite effective during debriefing because it gradually leads the thoughts of the participants from objective part to subjective part. The answers for fact and feeling typed questions are in fact the foundation for more advance finding and future typed questions. Therefore, we should first ask fact and feeling typed questions before asking finding and future typed questions. Later on, each

If you were to ask someone twenty years ago what camping is all about, they would immediately tell you about campfires, sleeping bags, and how the stars shine brightly at night. However, today’s outlook on camping has changed completely. It involves a motor home which includes a kitchen and a modern day shower located on a campground just a few feet away from access to the Internet. Sure it is nice not to have to leave anything behind while on your camping trip, but you’re really not camping. Real camping is dirty, simple, and breathtaking. It involves sleeping on the ground with just a thin layer separating you from the freezing, soft soil filled with insects ready to climb on top of your warm body. Camping is taking hour long walks, exploring the scenery that surrounds you while avoiding the dangers in the forest. To experience real camping, one should work hard for their food, warmth, and comfort. Even though camping in a four wheeled home with all the daily amenities is easier than camping that involves secluding yourself in the middle of the forest, it doesn’t reveal one of camping’s greatest attributes: an escape from the busy society in which we live today.