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.”