The Medicine Wheel Journey
“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 He was failing classes and he often seemed withdrawn.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.”