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Going through some old videotapes this week I rediscovered Jake. I went to his graduation last year. He talked about how his parents had given him “the gift of RedCliff.” Pretty odd description of a place where you hike endlessly, make fires using only a bow/drill, and cook your own simple meals. Why did he call it a gift? And what would he do with it? Watch for Jake’s video in the coming weeks on our Videos page.
Judy S. used to pray her son, John, would some day realize drugs were destroying his life. One day she and her husband realized if that prayer were ever answered, they had no idea what they would do to help John get his life back on track.
John was 19 at the time. Judy said they had made what she called a “gut wrenching” decision to order John out of the family home because of his drug abuse.
“When he tested positive for weed we told him he had two days to leave,” she recalls. They changed the alarm code on the house and the cars. Then they started working the phones.
A close friend recommended a psychiatrist at the John Dewey Academy. They called the woman, who recommended a wilderness program. She told the family, “There are a lot of wilderness programs out there but I know for sure RedCliff’s Medicine Wheel is a wonderful program.”
Judy called admissions counselor Cheryl Bennett and talked with her extensively about the program. “I went on the website and read and read,” Judy says. “I knew a program that had been around for a long time was going to be a good one and we had a lot of confidence in the psychiatrist’s recommendation.”
“When we asked John to leave the house, I think that that was really the beginning of his wilderness experience,” Judy says. “That was a very, very difficult decision that my husband and I made. We had written up a contract and said to him, ‘If you do this, you can’t live at home.’”
When the couple left town to visit family, John tried to come home, only to find himself locked out. Police responded to the alarm and the couple refused to allow their son to enter the home. Judy says, “We knew that if we did not follow through our credibility would be compromised. We had some tough times but he knew we were not going to budge.”
When the phone call in the middle of the night came, the Smathers were ready. “You can come home,” John’s parents told him. “We have a plan.”
After he crashed on LSD, John was ready for help. He returned home for a week and went through a detox process to make sure there were no drugs in his system when he arrived in the Utah desert.
John called Chad Balagna, Program Coordinator, to learn for himself about the Medicine Wheel program. “Chad was wonderful,” Judy recalls. “He asked John why he was coming. When John told him it was because his parents said he had to, Chad said, ‘That’s not a good enough reason. Think about it and call me back.’” J
Judy says, “The week he was home he was really aware of the seriousness of the place he was at. We basically said, ‘This is it. We will always love you but we cannot support your lifestyle.’”
A friend of John’s, who had also been through a wilderness program, encouraged the Medicine Wheel move. Judy says John’s friend called it an incredible opportunity, but warned him, “Don’t think you can fool them. You need to put yourself into it.”
And that is what John did. His first letters home were not demands for his parents to come and free him. They were apologies for everything he had put them through.
Judy recalls, “When he was at Medicine Wheel, I could sleep for the first time. It was the year before when I never knew if there was going to be a phone call from the police. He was safe. He was with people who cared about him and knew what they were doing.”
“I can’t speak more highly of anybody than Roger, John’s therapist. Roger got his trust.”
Judy said receiving weekly pictures and updates of their son helped reassure them. “We knew he wasn’t freezing to death,” she says with a laugh. In fact, they were amazed to see how happy and well he looked.
After three months, John was ready for his next therapeutic step. His parents had decided an 18-month program at the John Dewey facility would be a good fit.
“I think he came out of the wilderness with hope. In some ways, as he expressed it, he was broken. I think he came face to face with some issues in his life that were not good – choices that had led him down the wrong path. He needs to rebuild his life on the positive things that he’s learned and experienced,” Judy says.
She continues, “As parents, you always want to believe the best of your children. It’s hard to face when they’re really in trouble. You keep thinking they’re going to outgrow it. The reality is they’re not going to outgrow it unless they get a new perspective. I think that’s what Medicine Wheel gives them. It gives them hope. It gives them a place to achieve and regain their confidence in themselves and in their future.”
Looking back on the day they locked their son out of the family home, Judy says, “My husband and I both cried. The morning he left to go to Medicine Wheel was hard too but we were resolved. We love him too much not to do everything in our power to make it happen. This was an opportunity and we’re grateful we took advantage of it.”
“I’ve probably had at least a dozen kids out here who have Asperger’s,” says RedCliff therapist Roger Nelson.
Asperger’s is part of the autism spectrum of disorders. Roger says it’s often undiagnosed in teens who may exhibit other symptoms like rebelliousness, rigidity, or even a lack of empathy for others.
“People with Asperger’s often struggle picking up on social cues,” Roger explains. “On a social level, they march to their own drummer.”
Roger says symptoms can include struggling to read body language cues, trouble starting or maintaining a conversation, rigidity in schedules or routines, unusual facial expressions or postures, and difficulty understanding figures of speech. These are just a few of more than a dozen behaviors that can indicate Asperger’s.
With so many subtle, and not so subtle, symptoms, Roger says diagnosing Asperger’s can be difficult. “Asperger’s, on a scale, can be profound to extremely subtle. So many students have tiny bits of these behaviors. Some kids will fake control over these behaviors in order to get their parents off their backs and still function in their own little world.”
Roger says other teens simply can’t hide their behaviors. That’s when parents seek help.
“When parents and child are going to a counselor once a week, the counselor doesn’t see the child in a daily living situation. That therapist is going to develop a paradigm of the angry, rebellious child,” Roger explains. “When they see the child they start asking questions that might indicate bi-polar or depression or attention deficit or whatever.”
Roger says a once a week approach to therapy can result in misdiagnosis and even unnecessary medication. He says it’s not uncommon for students entering the RedCliff program to have been through similar scenarios.
But therapy at RedCliff offers an important advantage. “Because staff are with the student 24/7 they pick up on little cues others may missed. It makes treating the child and working with the family so much more effective.”
Ironically, Roger says most students with Asperger’s do not tend to be substance abusers. “If they try it, they usually don’t like it,” he says. “They may even try to fake it but they don’t like the response to feeling out of control.”
While they typically don’t like the feeling substance abuse can create, students with Asperger’s often present with similar behaviors.
Roger tells of a family who was devastated when their son was kicked out of a respected liberal arts school. School officials said the boy would often spend the night pacing outside his dorm. When officials or his parents questioned him about his behaviors he became angry, almost violent. His parents feared a secret drug habit may have been behind the strange behaviors.
After several weeks at RedCliff, Roger was able to piece together the Asperger’s pattern. As he laid out the clues for the student’s family, his parents were astounded. “We really had described their son to a T,” Roger says. “They had never even considered Asperger’s.”
In fact, he says, the rigid behaviors and irrational fears made these parents wonder if their son was schizophrenic.
“This boy was able to open up to his parents and say, ‘I know I have this problem. Sometimes I don’t understand what you’re saying and when I don’t understand, I’m afraid.’”
It was that fear that motivated his strange school behavior. When this student’s roommate would bring a girl to spend the night in their dorm, the student became terrified. Pacing around the building all night seemed to be the only logical course of action. Repeated questioning about his behavior by school officials and his parents only heightened his confusion and anger.
Roger says because Asperger’s does not respond to medication, students must learn to recognize their condition and develop ways to successfully live with it. Communication is a critical tool.
For each of his students with Asperger’s, Roger buys a special journal. He tells the student, “Remember, you have Asperger’s. Write down those times when you don’t understand people or when people don’t understand you.”
He teaches students, and their families, to use clear terminology and to remember that people with Asperger’s often have no sense of permanency. “They may ask to have a cookie on the ride home in the car, once they get in the driveway, and when they walk in the house. They’ll be reaching for the cookie and still want to know, once more, if it’s OK.”
He cautions parents not to be sarcastic because their child may simply be unable to tell the difference between that kind of comment and a clear statement. “A kid without permanency has to be told every time. They may not understand figures of speech because they take everything very literally.”
“Don’t assume anything,” he adds. “Everything has to be clearly spoken. They’re not going to catch subtle eye contact. It’s going to take a little bit of patience and a little bit of frustration – for parents and child – because the child is trying to cram all those subtle nuances that other people just naturally get into his brain.”
There is still no definite answer on what causes Asperger’s. “There seems to be some genetic predisposition,” Roger says, “but there isn’t any one clear predictor.”
In recent years, there has been some suspicion that Asperger’s and autism may be linked to childhood immunizations. “It’s a hotly debated topic right now,” Roger says. “Health professionals say it’s a ridiculous correlation. The only thing we know for sure is there has been a spike in the last 20 years.” He says there are also more people keeping track of Asperger’s cases than before. And therapists are beginning to have a better understanding of the syndrome than ever before, which may also lead to more people being diagnosed.
According to Roger, students with Asperger’s are not doomed to failure and frustration. “It’s not a situation where they can never improve their social workings or their social understanding,” he says.
In fact, he’s seen it first hand at RedCliff. He’s seen students explain, “I have Asperger’s. Sometimes I don’t understand you.”
“Instead of staying away from these students, the rest of the group tends to have compassion,” he says. “It’s really cool to see these students grow so dramatically.”
There are positive sides to this syndrome. Roger says as long as emotional security is provided, students generally do well in school because they tend not to rely so much on the approval of others. “Children with Asperger’s unfairly get a bad wrap as being the ‘dumb’ kids,” Roger notes. “Those children are more likely to have higher I.Q.’s than the average child.”
“They tend to be awesome employees,” he adds. “When you need somebody to do something and get it right, they do a great job every time.”
By the time they reach adulthood, many people with Asperger’s have spent years learning appropriate responses to social situations and their symptoms are often minimal.
“I tell my Asperger’s students everyone has issues,” Roger says. “Let’s just look at what your strengths are. Therapeutically, it might take them a little longer than most but don’t worry. We’re going to get there.”
Additional reading: “Freaks, Geeks, and Asperger’s Syndrome: A User Guide to Adolescence,” by Luke Jackson.
“My life was in the darkest, scariest place I had ever been.”
To hear Brooks tell it, he should have been dead. “I woke up one morning and couldn’t even walk across the room to do drugs. I had to start putting them on the nightstand.”
That morning Brooks knew he was at a crossroads. “You can change your life and do the hard work right now or you can throw your life away. It was a lifestyle I didn’t want any more. I was committed to doing what I needed to do to change it.”
“Alcoholism and addictions don’t happen overnight,” Brooks explains. “I started smoking pot when I was pretty young.” But he kept his grades up and his father didn’t realize his son was starting down a dangerous path.
When he went away to college it was even easier to live a lie. “I was 800 miles away so my dad and step mom didn’t see much of me. I had good grades, a job and a girlfriend. I told my dad I was happy and doing well.”
If his father voiced concerns, Brooks brushed them off and said things were fine. By now his drug habit was costing him almost $200 per day for Ocycotin.
“It was a downward spiral,” he recalls. “I was doing a lot of drugs and drinking. I was in fights and depressed. My life was not on the course I knew it should be on.”
He came home for Christmas vacation. With no money for drugs, withdrawal symptoms began. He didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, and weighed only 130 pounds. By now, there was no more pretending. “My life was in the darkest, scariest place I had ever been.”
Brooks returned to school, determined to change. But two weeks later he was still depressed, still doing drugs.
A phone call from his father changed his life. “My dad said he could tell talking to me that I was sad and sick,” Brooks recalls. “He said it broke his heart.”
Brooks recalled an acquaintance that had completed the Medicine Wheel program two years earlier. “I respected the hard work he’d done and the progress he’d made. I wanted that to be me.” Brooks and his dad talked about whether Medicine Wheel could also help him. “Two days later I was out of school and on a plane,” Brooks says.
The journey toward healing was just beginning. “I got high after I got on the plane,” Brooks remembers. “I don’t think I slept for the first 5-6 days I was there. I remember sitting in the latrine at 2 in the morning, throwing up and in the most pain I’ve ever been in in my life. I was thinking ‘This is the dumbest thing I’ve done.’ I was crying and praying to God and my mom to somehow let me know this was the thing I was supposed to do.”
At that moment, Brooks said the most brilliant shooting star he had ever seen blazed across the desert sky. He felt his mother, who died when he was a child, knew his pain and approved of his plan to change his life.
He spent 84 days in the desert, learning who he was and what he really wanted from life.
“Before Medicine Wheel, I tried to be who I felt people wanted me to be, depending on the situation. I had all these different identities depending on who I was with. They all chipped away at me until I just couldn’t live different lives. I couldn’t differentiate between who I was and who people thought I was.”
“I learned if I continued to mask and change my identity I was never going to be happy. I needed to find out who I was and stand by that – not falter or change depending on situations.”
It’s a lesson Brooks appears to be living. “I would never in a million years have told you I could have gone a year without drinking or drugs,” he says. “I look at Medicine Wheel as the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Brooks is living in the Northwest and going to school. He’s studying environmental science and hopes to one day be able to show the hospitality and restaurant industries how to save environmental resources and still make money.
He’s working as a sales rep for a national chain of gyms and says he has a great relationship with his father and step mother. “I’m really glad that together we did something about my problems.”
“My life is infinitely better than it’s ever been,” Brooks says. “I wouldn’t trade the Medicine Wheel experience for the world.”
“I’ve probably spent more nights outside than inside over the last two years,” Matthew Plank jokes.
Almost three years ago he joined RedCliff after earning a Bachelor’s degree in environmental studies from Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana.
“Ever since I graduated I’ve been living all over the West,” Matt says. He heard about RedCliff while working for a non-profit wilderness foundation in Montana and decided to give it a try. “Being able to work outside is huge for me. That’s where I find my peace and solitude,” Matt says. “It keeps me going.”
But the best part of the job, he says, “is working with some amazing people that seem to all be very passionate about their jobs.”
“Every student, every staff member has a huge impact on how you relate to people,” Matt explains. Although he considered himself a patient person before he got to RedCliff, he says working with the students has increased his ability to let people work through their problems at their own pace. He says you learn to deal with circumstances as they arise. “You’re just there as a guide,” he says, “someone that can help them discover who they really are and what they want to be. Once you put the responsibility back on the student, it makes the job a lot easier.”
According to Matt, winter is definitely the toughest time to be working outdoors. “It’s hard to deal with snow and all the small things just take so much longer.” But he still enjoys it.
RedCliff staff work eight days on and six days off. When he’s not in the field, Matt is busy training for triathalons. He also enjoys fly fishing and climbing.
“I feel at home working at RedCliff,” he says. “I’ve learned what makes me tick.”
Alec Petsikas spent 69 days in the desert, learning how to change his life. Last summer he spent a couple more teaching field staff how to help save lives.
The Detroit native graduated from Medicine Wheel in the summer of 2007. “I was 17 when I went to RedCliff,” he explains. “I’d never been to the desert. It’s very surreal the first week or so.”
Alec says the hardest part was realizing the program does not have a set ending date. Length of stay varies for each student, depending on how they progress through the phase work. “Even if you finish all your phase work and are not emotionally or mentally ready, you stay,” he says.
It took him 21 days and a couple of bows to bust his first fire. During that time he learned a thing or two about himself. “I always thought something else was the problem,” he recalls. “It wasn’t my problem, it was my tools, or it’s everyone else around me that need to change.”
Eventually, he says, “You realize you have a lot of improvement to make and you try. Getting a fire after not having one for so long is like, amazing. It’s the most incredible feeling you could ever have. After that I felt there wasn’t much I couldn’t do.
Bow drill is so significant to how you handle every relationship in your life.”
Alec turned 18 while in the field and chose to remain and complete the Medicine Wheel program. “At that point I was totally doing it for myself,” he says.
In 2008 Alec returned to RedCliff, this time to do a staff training presentation. His job was to help field staff see the RedCliff experience through the student’s perspective.
“It was cool that I got to help,” he recalls. “Being staff is more difficult than I might have thought. I realize now how hard it is to have the patience that you need.”
He says the experience showed him field staff are all trained to respond in a similar manner – keeping the program consistent from group to group. “It was really weird seeing all the reasons they approached kids in certain ways, why they said some of the things they did.”
“I owe my life to RedCliff,” Alec says. “I was going nowhere pretty quickly. RedCliff changed that. It will make you want to turn your life around. It won’t do it for you. But it will make you want to life a more fulfilling and better life.”
Medicine Wheel began nearly seven years ago when RedCliff Ascent admission officers received inquiries into services for young adults 18 and over. RedCliff Ascent had decades of experience serving adolescents. We felt we had something unique to offer young adults as well.
Since that time, our curriculum has been refined to reflect the specific needs of adult students. As Medicine Wheel grew, so did the need for an even more thorough curriculum focused on our adult students complex needs.
Medicine Wheel’s phase work is the result of a team effort from therapists, administration, and staff. We asked students which aspects of the program were most effective and which parts should be enhanced. The list of ideas was overwhelming.
In our minds, a medicine wheel should be a physical manifestation of who we are. It should be a means by which a person could overcome the struggles taking place within and find peace. The medicine wheel should be a map which brings a person’s inner self into harmony with the world around them.
By using the medicine wheel as a symbol of life, it was our hope students could pinpoint areas of strength and weakness within their own lives and find the power to overcome the behaviors that inhibited their development.
With that objective identified, we began incorporating the strengths of our earlier curriculum with the ideas and experience of students and staff. What resulted is a program that recognizes and meets the needs of our students and also disrupts their old behavior patterns.
We’ve adapted the symbol of the medicine wheel to the specific phases of our program. Here is a brief glance at the six phases of Medicine Wheel:
Phase 1 – East / Child. Represents new beginnings, new life, and a rebirth.
Students play games, analyze childhood stories and become acquainted with the rules and structure of the program.
Phase 2 – South / Adolescent. Represents warmth, light, exploration, questioning the world around us. Students examine their creativity and individuality.
Phase 3 - West / Adult. Represents the setting sun, leaving childhood and adolescence, finding inner strength. Assignments focus on thinking critically and communicating effectively with others
Phase 4 - North / Elder. Represents darkness, night, looking at the world from a different point of view. Though not yet elders, students are given opportunities to think about the influential people in their lives. They discover what it means to be a leader and set goals for their future.
Phase 5 – Center / Self. Students participate in a three day solo camp. They complete an assignment designed specifically for them by their therapist. They prepare a recovery maintenance plan and get ready for the Cougar Council.
When phase five is completed, students prepare for a presentation before the Cougar Council. The Council consists of administrators, therapists, staff, and fellow students, who have shared the journey with the presenter. Students share some of the experiences that brought them to Medicine Wheel as well as stories from their journey to recovery. They share their recovery maintenance plan. Following the presentation, council members are free to ask questions or challenge the student’s perception. Once the council is satisfied that the student has made significant progress, phase six is delivered.
Phase 6 – Outer / Others. Students return from their solo and Cougar Council and are senior members of the community. They focus on mentoring others and ensuring that the culture of the community remains intact as they prepare to leave the community.
Since implementing the new phase work, we have seen a positive change in the depth in which our students engage in therapy and interact with their peers. The curriculum helps students to develop increased leadership, improve communication, and build a strong community of support and understanding. As one of our former students stated, the purpose of Medicine Wheel is to “feed your spirit not your ego.”
Now more than ever, we are proud of what we are accomplishing at Medicine Wheel. More importantly, we are proud of the students who demonstrate the courage and determination to participate in, and complete the program.
“The first three mornings were the hardest,” Ben recalls. “When I’d wake up and not be able to have a cigarette and not want to get out of my sleeping bag.” He continues, “But I tried to learn from all the experiences instead of just let it sour.”
A recovering addict, Ben says Medicine Wheel helped him re-discover himself. Before Medicine Wheel, “I was very image based. Very indulgent,” he explains. “I kind of lost site of what truly made me happy.” He’d always enjoyed the outdoors but says he substituted what he loved for “urban bull crap.” “For me it came to a point where I was so hopeless I just started to not care about the consequences of my actions,” Ben says. “Apathy towards life overtook me.”
His parents got him into a detox program and then started talking about Medicine Wheel. “As soon as I figured out it wasn’t a behavior mod camp I was very excited about it. I went in with the opinion that I’m going to get something really, really good out of this. You truly get what you put into it.”
Individual counseling was helpful in breaking the drug addiction. But Ben says what he enjoyed most was the group interaction. “The most therapeutic was hiking and talking,” he says.
“The conversations that we had as a group were positive and enlightening. Because of the sense of community it gave a sense of confidence and security to everybody in the group. Everybody got a sense of true openness which led people to some breakthroughs personally.”
Two students quit the program during Ben’s stay, choosing to walk back to their addictions rather than fight them in the desert.
Watching them leave, Ben says he was never tempted to join them.
“This was the first time I actually really, really wanted to complete something from the onset,” he says. “Many, many endeavors were left unresolved in my life from a lack of commitment or fear of failure. This one was different.”
After 68 days, he graduated from the program. “I feel really proud of myself for completing it,” he says. “I was lucky enough to have a family that supported me.”
Now he’s attending AA meetings and hoping to return to the wilderness as part of a student conservation association. “That kind of positive, constructive outdoor activity will definitely put me in the right state of mind,” he says. He plans on returning to college and possibly studying psychology. Some day he’d like to return to Medicine Wheel as a member of the field staff.
“I’m most happy about being capable of enjoying myself,” Ben says. “I think I was incapable of that before. Now I have energy and a joy in me that I didn’t have before. I’m excited to be alive.”
“The whole thing really began to get intense about a year ago,” John Potter recalls. His son 23-year-old son, Ben, was attending school in Chicago. “He basically told us he was addicted to heroin and needed help,” John says.
John and his wife, Suzi, wasted no time. They brought Ben home to Michigan and enrolled him in a rehab program. “He didn’t make the progress we’d hoped and ended up relapsing in August,” John recalls.
This time the family sought help from Brighton Hospital, a residential treatment center. Suzi and John began looking for options while Ben was going through detox.
Suzi says a therapist she was seeing told her about RedCliff. “She had another client who had a daughter who had gone to RedCliff,” Suzi explains. She and John decided to investigate the program.
“I talked to a father who had sent his daughter there several years ago. I talked to the staff there several times,” Suzi says. “The staff was very forthcoming. They were very enthusiastic and compassionate. The website also gave us a lot of information.”
“We also had friends whose daughter had been a field staff at another wilderness program. I spoke to her and her parents about her experience as a staff member.”
The couple researched other wilderness programs but determined, “RedCliff was by far the better choice for what we needed.”
What they needed was a way to help Ben stop his destructive lifestyle. Suzi suspected drugs when Ben was attending college in Chicago. He was failing classes and he often seemed withdrawn. His physical appearance deteriorated as well.
“I was pretty sure he was doing something,” Suzi recalls. “I thought maybe marijuana or ocycodone.” She also admits, “As a parent, you don’t want to see it. We thought maybe it was depression.”
The couple tried to counsel their son but he evaded their help. “We’ take him to psychologists and psychiatrists. He was very good at manipulating and hiding.”
John and Suzi say local therapists knew little about wilderness therapy but supported the couple’s efforts to help their son. All agreed that returning home after in-patient therapy would not be in Ben’s best interest.
“After about four weeks at Brighton, he started to turn around,” Suzi says. “At that point, he was asking for more help.”
“We needed to get him out of this community and break the loop,” John adds.
The family discussed RedCliff and Ben was excited about the prospect of therapy in a wilderness setting.
“When he was in the throes of addiction, we just kept waiting for the phone to ring,” John recalls. But he never worried once about his son’s safety in the wilderness. “We knew he would be safe because RedCliff is a reputable program,” John explains. “That was a huge issue for us.”
Suzi says conversations before Ben enrolled with Dr. Daniel Sanderson, RedCliff’s clinical director, also helped put her mind at ease.
Ben spent 68 days in the Utah desert.
“It’s not for everybody,” Suzi warns. “As parents, you have to be your own advocate. You have to find the right program for your child.”
And there are no guarantees. “Ben’s going to have a struggle. His issues weren’t just the addiction.”
She adds, “I think RedCliff gave him a good foundation to find his inner strength to deal with his demons. We’re more hopeful than we have been since he was 13-years-old.”
John says, “We just really felt that RedCliff would be something that would be perfect for Ben and it turned out that it was.”
Wednesday is staff change, and more importantly to students food drop. It is amazing how simple life becomes out in the field. It really is a different world to what most of us are use to. I’m sure you students out there will remember the anticipation of which fruit would be delivered, the meat to fat ratio of salt pork, or that first taste of trail mix. Medicine Wheel really is life in a more simple form. As one of our recent graduates noted, everything a person needs to survive can be carried on their back.
When was the last time you got excited about having an orange instead of an apple? Or looked forward to a bag of granola and dried fruit? When was the last time you cheered when you saw cauliflower? Medicine Wheel…real life, just more simple.