Breaking Down Wilderness Therapy Myths and Reality with Trish Ruggles

Trish Ruggles
[00:00:00] Hey Trish, welcome back. Hi to Hope Stream great to have you back. 
Glad to be here. I am really glad that we’re talking today. You and I saw each other just recently at a conference, and of course we emailed back and forth and there’s, what do I want to call it? There’s a topic within the world of treatment that has gotten a lot of wear and tear, I guess.
Mm-hmm. I would say recent, not even recently years mm-hmm. For the last several years about wilderness therapy. Mm-hmm. 
And I’m just going to use the old school phrase, wilderness therapy. I know we talk about how that’s changed, and I know you are a big proponent, as am I, for the right kid in the right situation.Mm-hmm course. So we thought we would just talk that out because it’s one of those things, it’s a treatment modality that I so strongly believe in and it’s breaking my 

[00:01:00] heart to see either family shy away from it or, you know, when I read stuff in the industry, it’s just really hard. I’m very conflicted about it, so thanks for joining me to hash it out. Yeah, just a couple touch points on what you said. I am a big proponent of wilderness. I worked in wilderness for over a decade. It’s how I entered this field 21 years ago as a field guide but I’m also the first person to say it’s not for everybody. It’s not the treatment modality that works the best for everyone. However, I still think it’s a really useful treatment setting for a lot of different people, for different reasons and I actually reached out to you this time, you reached out to me the first time to talk about the continuum of care and I reached out to say, Hey, can we just have a conversation about wilderness?
I’m having more people, more parents ask about it when I do inquiry calls.

[00:02:00] Yeah. Which is so fascinating to me. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, we all said that, right? A couple years ago, we were like, okay, the pendulum is swung all the way this way and we think it’s gonna kind of land somewhere in the middle.Mm-hmm. And maybe that’s what we’re seeing. 
Well, and I think it’s a credit to a lot of the alumnis out there who have had good experience, whose parents have had good experiences and most of the time the families that are asking about wilderness have talked to somebody who actually experienced it.
And they’re curious of the modality you’re saying. It’s interesting ’cause prior to that we had a lot of parents, and clients having a lot of resistance to wilderness and I like to honor that and I don’t get pushy and I had asked you, how did you get introduced to Wilderness, in your treatment journey?
Because I used to see it in introduced as, you’re gonna do this, you’re gonna go on this day, you’re going to go to this program or work with this therapist. There wasn’t a whole lot of choice that consultants gave

[00:03:00] parents. It was very rough, in my opinion, the introduction to wilderness. There wasn’t a lot of space to explain why it was recommended, how it helps, what would even be the difference between residential and wilderness.
Right. Well, we were introduced to it by our ED consultant who we had engaged and been, I feel like we were working with her for maybe a month before, you know, just trying to figure out the lay of the land because you don’t know anything. I mean, literally, like, we just have a, we have a free course now on our website called, um, welcome to Mars, because that’s exactly how it felt. I was like, I don’t even know what language I’m speaking anymore. Right. So she was mostly helping my husband and I get on the same page about  mm-hmm.  The fact that we did need to do something. Mm-hmm. My ex-husband and I, and then he had a fairly dramatic experience and so 

[00:04:00] that was sort of the last straw for me.I was like, mm-hmm there’s no way we’re parenting our way out of this. It, this is so far beyond our parenting skills that we have got to engage some mm-hmm and so we made the decision really fast, but she gave us two options for wilderness therapy and I don’t even remember having a lot of conversation around it. I just knew he would be safe ’cause my guy was the high risk running away disappearing. 
Mm-hmm. Hanging out with the gang members. Mm-hmm. Super high risk guy.  Mm-hmm. If he had been isolating in his room or playing video games in the basement mm-hmm. I don’t know if I would’ve made the same decision. And I know a lot of families in that. Yeah. Yeah. Position. So for us it was more like, I know he’s gonna be safe. I don’t totally understand this thing. Mm-hmm. But it sounds like he’s gonna be outdoors with a really great therapist, sign me up. Like that was literally the degree to which we thought about it. Yeah. And then she was like, and 

[00:05:00] likely he will be going on somewhere after that. Okay. So that was our experience. Okay. Yeah, I do think that it’s interesting that you were like, this is my guy, so that you could color why it was an easier decision and I think that was what Wilderness started as, is a safe container that removed people from their environment and almost put them too far away to get in any more trouble. Mm-hmm. Unless they’re a runner, some of them are really good at that. Yeah and they would put, they started in the desert where, you know, literally if someone ran, you could sit and watch them for miles.  Yes. And always know where they were and so it was even by design that even if you were a crazy runner, like they didn’t have to keep up with you ’cause they could still see you for miles and wilderness was sort of designed as that safe container and more of a vision quest and more of an experience around accountability and responsibility to self and others and that was sort of where it started four
 
[00:06:00] decades, five decades ago. People disagree about when it actually started and who’s responsible and all those things that I don’t really need to get into. Well, I have an episode with Will White who went into Of course, yes. He went through the whole history of wilderness therapy. So I will put a link of the show notes to this, the show. That’s a great one. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Somewhere along the way, who knows whose idea it was, they decided we might need to get some therapists on board. So wilderness didn’t start as therapeutic. It started as an experience and like I just said, a safe space to take people out of their environment. It has come so far from there to where it is today and you said using the old term wilderness therapy, I in fact, am careful. Either I’m introducing it or talking about it with families as outdoor healthcare or outdoor based therapy programs and I’m often, until recently, usually asking them, have they heard of these? Are they okay if we talk about them? 

[00:07:00] Oftentimes in the last several years, parents have been very resistant. It’s very fear invoking for them. Like you said, many of those are the kids that are stuck in their house, so sending them out to a wilderness feels like a huge shift for parents and so most of the last several years I’ve just been bringing it up as an open question mark and offering more information, answering questions, honestly. Oftentimes I’ll ask parents, Hey, can I just put one on your list so you can look at it and talk to people and see a real program? And I’ve never had a family say no. And occasionally I’ve had those families that were really resistant to wilderness actually end up picking the wilderness program. And then in the last six, seven months, more families have been asking me about wilderness before I can bring it up and that’s again why I reached out to you and I think again, it might even be happening in the stream where people are saying, my kid had a great experience, or my kids, you know, compared to other treatment episodes, had a great experience and that’s

[00:08:00] sparking some sort of interest in parents. And so I wanted to sort of take some time with you to describe more in the nuts and bolts because I think there are some really, really common misconceptions. One of the big things I wanna say is that this is not true of all outdoor based programs. There are only a few left and so there are only a few that I’m really referring to when I talk about wilderness therapy. There are gonna be accredited, certified licensed places that have licensed therapists that are gonna be doing great trainings with their staff that follow a pretty strong code of ethics that have very very strong safety policy and procedures. I always say that your kid’s probably safer in a wilderness program than they are taking a snowboarding lesson. A hundred percent. Hundred 
percent or alternatively, and this just came up the other day in the stream, was, you know, they’re often safer in wilderness than they 

[00:09:00] are doing the things that they’re doing at home. A hundred percent. Yeah. When, you know, when Enzo would tell me like well I was doing this and this and this and this, and here I was like, oh, but if I send him to wilderness, he’s gonna be cold ’cause it’s February. And it’s like, yeah, if I had No, no, they have a policy for weather in February. Yes. You know? ‘Cause safety is paramount yes and he’s not, I only worked in, he’s not being shot at. No. I only worked in the Northern wilderness programs. I never worked in the Carolinas, Georgia, Utah. I always worked in the ones that had a truly harsh winter So I encountered safety protocols and I also always joked that the staff are more likely to get injured which is a hundred percent true because they spend so much time worrying about your child that they often fail to worry about themselves.  Hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The safety and just the gear alone. Yep. That they have. I was very impressed 

[00:10:00] because I don’t know if I was just, I think I was just too overwhelmed. I never even thought about that kind of stuff and then it was like, I’m getting this list of like, here’s all the gear he’s gonna have and here’s all our safety things. And I’m like, sweet. That’s amazing. Yeah. Yeah. I think, we’ve moved really far away from the very primitive wilderness.  Mm-hmm. But a lot of the comments around it remain people having to earn a backpack, people having to, if they didn’t start a fire, they wouldn’t have warm dinner. These are true statements. These are things that people experienced in programs a long time ago and I think just like any therapeutic modality, wilderness has evolved as our clients have changed, as new therapeutic techniques have come on board as new, sort of levels of ethical behavior have risen just things have changed and grown And we are dealing with different 

[00:11:00] clients. So like your son was the type of client I started working in wilderness with, right? And they needed a different container than the clients do today and they need a different approach and so what I always start with parents with is wilderness is not meant to be a punishment.
It’s not for the worst kids. It’s not for the bad kids. It’s just a different setting. Safety like we’ve already been discussing is paramount. Lots of my families will say, put my kids not outdoorsy, not a requirement. The outdoor skills are the easiest to teach. We’re not out there making survivor people, but we certainly can easily learn the basic skills of living outside. Usually much faster than we can learn coping skills, for our emotions. I definitely think that a lot of parents assume that wilderness is about the benefits are about being outside and being active, and
 
[00:12:00] yes, that is always gonna be a benefit to every human on the planet. The research is just insurmountable around that, but it doesn’t cure mental health.
It doesn’t make things go away. It creates more lightness, more space in our wellbeing, but it doesn’t fix anything. So that’s not even why it stuck around. I always tell families that we’re like three, four decades into using the outdoors as a therapeutic setting. If we could have replicated it indoors, we would’ve by now a hundred percent. It’s not that, although I think there are some people that are really attached to the modality, but it’s not like we’re clinging to a modality that we like because we wanna be outdoors people. It’s simply that we can’t replicate the benefits indoors and people have tried and it just doesn’t seem to work.
There is something about removing someone from what we would call the front country, which is the world that you and I are sitting in right now, the world that most people

[00:13:00] live in, and putting them in the back country regardless of what that setting looks like. It turns the volume down on the world in a way that putting them in a residential program, which is usually some city adjacent urban area, residential neighborhood, even if you’re not interacting with the community around you, just the four walls that you’re in, is noise in a way, that I don’t think a lot of people recognize that there’s a lot of distraction, even in the comfort of maybe not having to put on real clothes today, just wearing your pajamas and I believe, I can’t remember really if I talked about it in the last podcast that we did of the younger brain, adolescent, young adult brain. It’s not finished yet. It’s not really great at understanding long-term consequences. So, I don’t know if you talk to your son about this, but I know a lot of parents do. Like 

[00:14:00] you’re screwing up high school. You’re not gonna be able to go to college. You’re not gonna be able to take care of yourself. You’re not gonna live, we’re worried you’re gonna die. Unfortunately, their brains aren’t set up to understand that consequence, which is why we all survive if we all knew we could die when we were 12, yeah. We would all just stay inside our cave. Yes and live very short, unfulfilled lives. So it serves a purpose that we don’t understand a lot of these things when we’re young, so we can grow and experiment and take risks and push ourselves and it just sometimes backfires for a lot of people and they’re not reasonable.And then you have these adults whose whole brain looks at 2030, parents are looking at retirement in 40 years when they’re 80, and their brain understands that really, really well. And so you end up having these two brains that for no fault of either of their own, cannot understand each

[00:15:00] other. Right. And when you remain in the real world, all consequences are this intangible, future long-term concept that have nothing to do with right now for most young people, and especially when they’re challenged, by fear, depression, anxiety, inability to perform in school correctly, athletics, all that sort of stuff and they wanna just crawl inside of themselves. They’re living in the moment. They are not thinking about the long-term ramifications of crawling inside of themselves, which is the majority of our clients. There are still some, to keep referencing your child that run out into the world. Mm-hmm to turn that noise down but what wilderness does is it completely changes your environment in a way that is so far removed from society that a lot of that noise is just gone. Yeah. And lots of

[00:16:00] parents, you know, say, well, he’s gotta live in reality. He’s gotta live in society. She’s not gonna learn anything about the real world if she’s living in the woods and I agree. I totally agree and that’s why people don’t remain in the woods. That’s why there’s no long-term care programs in the woods but usually our clients are too critical to be able to do both live in the real world and change and so it’s a short pause on their long life where they are gonna live in a contrived, I’m so honest, this is not real. Right. This is contrived. Right. We are building a completely bizarre and out of the realm of norm reality for clients that live outdoors and that
subtle turning down of the volume on their life suddenly turns the volume up on their internal process. In residential, it’s pretty easy to keep the noise of the world still up and maybe not hear what’s
 
[00:17:00] happening inside of you either by choice, you’re purposely avoiding it or because you would love to hear your internal process.You would love to do the work, but you just can’t regulate. Yeah. And I think the other piece too is that the consequences in the outdoor become natural, logical, and usually immediate so that hey, you’re never gonna graduate high school consequence for a sophomore is light years away. It has nothing to do with not going to school this morning.
I always use the same example to describe this, so if any parent listening has ever talked to me, they’ve probably already heard this one. If you don’t put your boots away in an appropriate, safe way in wilderness, they can get really wet. Staff are always gonna teach you, remind you, even in the beginning when you’re new and all of this is so hard, they’ll do it for you. Your other clients in your group are gonna hit, Hey, remember
 
[00:18:00] your boots? You gotta put’em away. They’re gonna model. You’re gonna see tons of people doing the same thing. And if you don’t do it, your boots are gonna be wet and there, there’s a way to wear wet boots and it’s putting socks on and then plastic bags and then your boots and not fun.
It doesn’t feel as comfortable as you would have if you had just your socks and boots and sometimes boots take a couple of days to dry out if it starts raining, they’re never gonna dry out and it is important to know, you know, the safety procedures that exist in these programs is if it’s dangerous to have wet boots, it’s the staff’s responsibility to say, we gotta make sure that we get Johnny’s boots tonight. He didn’t put them away. But if it’s, you know, above 50 degrees and it’s gonna be above 50 degrees for the rest of the week, I’m just coming up with an arbitrary number. Right. I don’t know what the policies would be.  Yeah. They’re gonna let Johnny’s boots get wet 

[00:19:00] because there’s no Amazon priming them to your door. There’s no dryer to put them in and then my favorite one is there’s no mom or dad to say, here hun, where are my boots? Those are your boots. That was your responsibility. So consequences become natural, logical, and often immediate. And that language is the young person’s language that their brain is fluent in that. Yes. And then they don’t have an easy way out and the thing that everybody told them was gonna happen happened. And that’s one example of probably hundreds that can happen in a young person’s stay in wilderness. Yeah. And again, really gonna mitigate anything that causes safety issues. So like if somebody’s sleeping bag, it’s soaking wet and it’s winter. There’s a staff that their whole job is to just hike stuff out to groups and they’re gonna hike out a new 

[00:20:00] sleeping bag. They’re gonna take that wet one out and they’re gonna keep everybody safe. So that’s super important. But if there is a consequence that can be allowed that that’s gonna happen. Well, yeah. And my son, did not, I think they had some honey or something, I don’t know. They had their fig newtons or something like that and you know, everybody kept telling them to make sure and like wipe everything off and down the sugar sure enough. He didn’t do it and he woke up Yep to a campsite covered in ants.
Yep. And yep. He had to figure out what to do about the ants and it’s kind of funny ’cause it really endeared him to ants. Like he became obsessed with ants. Therapeutic intervention. Even when he got, you’re hitting, you’re hitting my next point. Oh, okay. Everything is therapeutic. Everything is therapeutic.
You know, where in residential treatment can someone attach a metaphor and a concept to their life via

[00:21:00] ants. Right. Right. Like I have another example. I have a client that, one of the programs I worked, they got a couple of packets of tuna in their food rations every week. And this kid would eat tuna. The moment it hit his hands, no matter whether it was lunchtime or afternoon, those were his personal rations. So he was allowed to eat it, there was always, like basic food that could be supplemented if a kid ate all their food, but it was really theirs to figure out how to use it for lunches and he would eat his tuna immediately and it bothered him because he would see all the other kids get to eat it throughout the week.
And he and I came up with an intervention around tuna Tuesdays, like they got their re rations on Wednesdays, right? And he wanted to eat tuna the last day. He wanted to hold onto it, and he himself, not me, said, how the heck am I supposed to abstain from drugs if I can’t even ration

[00:22:00] tuna? So he knew it was an impulsivity piece and he connected it to his behavior and yeah. I mean, keeping your tune until Tuesday doesn’t guarantee you’re gonna be sober, but there’s a neuro pathway being built there, sure and so everything is therapeutic and sure. That’s where the staff come in. That’s where the therapists come in. So many, it’s very rich with metaphors, very rich with connections. So, you know, Johnny’s boots are wet and it’s something that the staff are monitoring and working with him around, giving him different techniques for being more comfortable with wet boots and how to care for them and they’re gonna talk to his therapist about it. Therapist is gonna bring it up, maybe parents are gonna write about it. It’s all gonna be, Hey, how does this remind you of something, right? Mm-hmm and for Johnny, who might be one of those kids who stayed in his room and played video games and smoked weed, it’s gonna be about, well, I’ve never had to take care of anything and I’ve always had my parents do

[00:23:00] for me or fix it for me. And now I’m just really sitting with wet boots and so I find that there’s a pure version of accountability and responsibility that come out of wilderness. ’cause parents, when I was a therapist in wilderness, used to say, what do you guarantee he’ll get? And I said, I don’t know about therapeutically, but no one can graduate any of these programs without demonstrating some ability to take accountability for themselves and some ability to be responsible for themselves and others because that’s the other piece.
Many parents out there think of a kid sitting alone under a tarp, wet and sad and they forget that there’s 6, 7, 8 other clients out there of varying stages of their own therapeutic process demonstrating their experience there as well. And so there’s often a self-reliance piece that happens in wilderness, but then there’s also how do I impact others and how do they impact me? So the other example that many families will hear me talk about is. 

[00:24:00] You know, if Johnny, poor Johnny, I always use Johnny as my hypothetical goal. Johnny’s got, yeah, poor Johnny doesn’t wanna get out of his sleeping bag because you know, lots of clients these days, they’re not big fans of getting up and doing things and doesn’t wanna get up and finally gets up.
And it was his job to cook that day but he also has to pack. The whole group is sitting there being like, man, we’ve been packed up for like an hour. We’re hungry. You know, Jake had to cook breakfast by himself. He got burned. It’s overwhelming. The staff had to help. What the heck? You know? Yeah. And then you can’t block, mute, ignore, you know, walk away from these guys. They are your team and you might have to cook with Jake later that night and he’s gonna be like, are you gonna let me do that all over again, man. Exactly.  And again, the whole cycle repeat staff have, that’s a rich opportunity for them to talk about, Hey, does this remind you of anything at home? Parents have a rich

[00:25:00] opportunity to write about it.Therapist has a rich opportunity to say, Hmm, this sounds a lot like X, Y, or Z that your parents have talked about or this is becoming a pattern, Johnny, like, how do you expect to go about life if you can’t be responsible for waking up and cooking breakfast? 
Yeah. There’s, I think the accountability piece is huge because they are living in such close quarters which sounds funny ’cause they’re outside, but they are in first quarters with each other. And every single movement, whether it’s the cooking or the hiking or the cleanup or whatever is a whole team dynamic. Mm-hmm and they’re not working individually. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.  And also, and maybe you’re getting to this, I think there’s a resilience piece to it also. Mm-hmm. Because even now, my son is 28, he was in wilderness when he was 14. Mm-hmm. No, 16. Sorry. He was 16. So it’s been 12 years. And even today, 

[00:26:00] like I’ll see him eating something really weird. Like, I’m like, Enzo, what? What are you eating? Why are you eating that? And he’s like, mama, I lived on oatmeal and tuna and mustard for like five days because he was the same with his food.He would just eat it all, eat it all. Mm-hmm or whatever and so he got used to, he’s like, if I could do that, I can do anything or Yep. There you go another metaphor, right? It’s like, I did that in wilderness. So if I have to eat one scrambled egg and you know, a slice of Turkey whatever. I can do that.It’s fine. Mm-hmm and also just discovering things like he discovered he likes to cook and he and one of the guys Yeah. So many people do. Yeah. They like so many people do. They get creative, they get excited, they make different meal plans.  Yeah like what can you make out of big Newton’s and oatmeal?So many things. Yeah. So many things. Mustard. I don’t know. Yeah. One of the programs I worked at used to
 
[00:27:00] do a Cookoff and everybody got to, you know, come up with their own meal plan with a certain amount of ingredients. I think it went on to become like a food channel show. It’s the best. Maybe it was born out of wilderness. Who knows? Yeah. I, yeah. I think the grit is profound. Yes. And I think that’s something that we’re really missing from our society. I think on that note, I often encounter, we’ve been using the hypothetical boy and you’ve been talking about your son’s experience. Mm-hmm. I often encounter some extra resistance around sending girls to the outdoors. And I try not to be offended as a girl but I do think that there’s a belief that females are more fragile and if they’re struggling emotionally, then they’re gonna be even more fragile. I have worked cumulatively, I think it was 13 years in wilderness. I’ve never seen a girl that didn’t tap into this primal resiliency. I was never worried about a single girl 

[00:28:00] client I ever encountered and I mean, they certainly tried to convince me to worry about them, but really at the end of the day, there is a deep resiliency that they can turn on and off. There have been a couple of male clients that I did worry about because it just seemed like they couldn’t find that within themselves.
Eventually they did, but I do wanna speak to that about women in the outdoors is that we are innately built for it, society has tried to make us too frail for it, but a lot of the girls get really into it and actually a lot of the boys that I worked with would be like, girls do this too. And I’d be like, yeah. And they’re like, I bet they have lighter itineraries and they would completely be bugged out when I would say, well, they did the same itinerary you did last week, one day faster. And I wasn’t lying. They often thought I was lying. Yeah. And I was not, I wouldn’t, I would not lie about that and I
 
[00:29:00] didn’t need to because the girls groups often did kick the boys’ asses. Yep. And we never scaled back their itineraries if it wasn’t clinically indicated. So that’s another piece is if it’s clinically indicated to be slower or careful in an itinerary or the reverse, if it’s clinically indicated that these kids could really like, benefit from a huge accomplishment and they’re all set up for it, they’re all physically ready for it, we are going to scale based upon the clinical needs of the group. So a goal is basically for each group not to be able to see the place they camped the night before. Right. From their new camp. So that might be a half mile to a mile move but if a group asks for it, they’re interested in it and they’re capable of it, they can be given pretty substantial itineraries and many of them will accomplish some really big amazing outdoor experiences. Big miles, big climbs, big
 
[00:30:00] hikes, big adventures. But that’s never the goal,  right?  The goal is never to be like, this group hiked 50 miles this week. That’s really not it. That’s cool. If that’s something they all wanted to do and that’s their achievement, great. But that’s not what we’re out there trying to do it’s not outward bound. Right. It’s often compared to Yeah. That’s a good distinction and I do hear that, and maybe you hear this from parents too, who say, oh, my kid is in such terrible shape. You know, they’re either so overweight and Yes, you know, stagnant from being in their room, playing games, or they’re so thin they haven’t eaten ’cause they spend all their money on drugs and they’re, you know, terrible physical condition and they worry about sending them to wilderness.’ cause it’s like, yeah, but how would they ever do that? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. What’s the yeah. Deal with all of that, just with the safeties and procedures for clients in the field. There’s safety and procedures 

[00:31:00] for admitting people to the program. So everybody is gonna have a physical ahead of time, either before they arrive or when they arrive. And essentially you get checked on by so many departments in that first couple hours that you’re there if somehow you slipped through and you are not safe to be there. It’s usually because of some medical component very rarely do people need detox, but that might be something I always say to families, we don’t know what we don’t know until we know it.And sometimes we learn it when they enroll in a program, oh yeah by the way, I’ve been doing Xanax every day for the last six months. It’s like, okay, well you can’t detox here. Good to know. That’s super, that is super rare, but it’s more along the lines of, you’ve highlighted it, the weight piece.
Most of the time it’s not the high end weights. I’ve seen 300 pound, 350 pound people start, and we’re also not a weight loss intervention. That’s not what we’re after. Actually most programs will make 

[00:32:00] sure that you have extra food so that you lose at a slower rate. That is a new change that a lot of programs have instituted in wilderness is this crash weight loss that overweight people found as they were getting healthy with mental health in wilderness is really bad for your body. So several of my more recent, in the last couple years, clients that came in that were very overweight were given extra rations of tortillas and peanut butter and things like that, so they would slowly lose weight and those rations were slowly titrated as the medical staff tracked them. Interesting. The folks underweight are definitely a cause for concern because are they struggling with disordered eating? That is a very strong, probably permanent weakness for the outdoor based programs is that they are not the place to get well from disordered eating or eating disorders because you really

[00:33:00] amplify any sort of medical conditions when you go outdoors and not eating is one of the things that really can make being outside very dangerous. So that’s something programs are very careful of in the beginning and yeah, if someone’s underweight because of drug use and they’re probably gonna be very interested in food as they sober up, that’s less of a concern lots of folks are struggling with ARFID and more pure eating disorders these days, and that’s definitely something that programs are very careful of when they have clients come in. I also think there’s a lot of picky eaters out there that have been raised by parents that allow them to be picky to no judgment or shame to parents out there. Wilderness doesn’t allow them to be picky. So it can be a food intervention for sure. Yeah. And just as you know, like my son is deathly allergic to all nuts, not

[00:34:00] just peanuts or not just tree nuts, all nuts and so, yep. That was a concern for me, right? Because I’m like, but I hear they all have peanut butter and I mean some of the things I think of now is just so silly ’cause like here’s this kid who’s out running around running drug deals. I know. Getting shot at taking bars and bars of Xanax and I’m over here like boo-hooing about peanut butter anyway that was crazy. No, I even 21 years ago when I first got into the field, if we had a person come in with a tree nut allergy, we were a nut free program and we took it seriously and there are workarounds, there are other ways to get nut based proteins or, you know, vegetarian based proteins because that’s the big reason why we use a lot of nuts out there is the protein. Yeah. They don’t go bad. Yeah. They’re easy to carry. Yeah. Sunflower butter works great. Yep. And that’s the other piece about food is it’s not a punishment, right? It’s literally what can we carry easily? What has good nutritional value, which most people aren’t thinking about these

[00:35:00] days. They’re certainly not thinking about having to pack in, pack out their food. What is gonna last a long time out there? What are we not gonna risk having go bad? And what are we not gonna crush? So like, crackers are great, but they turn into crumbs, right. You know? Yes. So it’s not meant to be punishment. Right. They’re gonna carry as much fresh vegetables as they can in fruit, but they’re heavy. They go bad quickly, they’re fragile. So that’s, there’s a lot of dynamic things that I think are easy to criticize about wilderness and therefore miss the full color. And I’m not trying to minimize the things that are tough. I’m just trying to color the whole picture for people who are listening. I’m also not trying to force wilderness on anyone. Right. Again, I want you to have all the information to make a decision. Right. And you said that just like so wilderness might not be a good choice for somebody with an eating disorder. Who else would it potentially not be a good choice for? Mm-hmm. 

[00:36:00] I think it’s often not a great environment for people who are very truly suicidal. There’s a lot of things to self harm with as well So someone who is gonna secretly self harm, you’re gonna end up with infections from scratching with sticks or rocks, depending on the use area. There, there are pretty sharp things out there and so. Yeah. That’s a huge thing that they wanna take into consideration when they admit a client is it’s their level of safety.
And there are a lot of people these days who struggle with contemplating suicide or suicidal ideation, and that’s not a rollout. It’s more like if given the opportunity is this person gonna attempt to hurt themselves or end their lives, they’re probably not a good person to have in our very risky environment. Right? Right. They do
 
[00:37:00] have the ability to put a staff member one-on-one with you and do a lot more supervision, but it’s not a sustainable model because the staff are with the students or clients all the time. They live out there usually eight day shifts, sometimes. 14 day shifts. It depends on the program, which breeds consistency and rapport and relationship and a lot of great history keeping, they don’t have to keep downloading each other at the change of every shift. So you have a good rapport and consistency, but they’re also keeping good track of you. Yeah. I think that increasingly aggression is something that’s coming up and the color that wilderness is able to kind of suss around. Is it intentional or people choosing to go after other people violently. Is it planned or is it something that’s 

[00:38:00] happened in a moment where someone’s a cup is full and they chuck something at someone and it accidentally hits them. They didn’t mean to. The nice thing about wilderness is there’s no walls. There’s, you know, nothing to punch, there’s nothing to truly break.
You can chuck a water bottle or kick your backpack or kick a tree or a sage bush, depending again on the use area you’re in. But if someone’s getting really angry, everybody can take 10 steps back and so it is a space that folks that have struggled with fights or aggression inside, they tend to potentially be a good candidate to look at an outdoor base program.
That’s so interesting. I’m trying to think. They, I mean, each program has their little, their little like identified student profile, client profile that they prefer. Right. There are lots of programs now that are doing more hybrid environments. They’re doing some indoors, some outdoors and so those clients have to be able to shift between and do a lot of transition there are lots of

[00:39:00] programs that are doing adventure based therapy, mountain biking, repelling, rock climbing, snowshoeing, stuff like that’s not just throw a backpack on and let’s go hiking and those also provide different risk measures and they’re gonna wanna look at people’s safety and I also think medical conditions are things that are, like I already said, are super great in the wilderness. So are you medically stable to go out there and, yeah, and I think it could go without saying that like most places, if you’re abusing animals, setting fires, like this is not a great place for you if you’re not oriented to time and place and might be dealing with psychosis. This is not the great place for you. Right. I think some of the ones that I haven’t mentioned are pretty easy to logically end up at, but I feel like maybe I should mention them ’cause I could have some wilderness programs screaming at me. Right. Yes. What about sometimes I hear folks talk about adopted kids and they don’t

[00:40:00] wanna send them because of the attachment.Attachment Yes. I love And then also kids on the autism spectrum. Yeah. Yep. I actually started a program many, many, many, many years ago called New Horizons. It was a young women’s program. The founder and owner was adopted. Our clinical director was adopted, so we got, and this was before there really was internet driven referrals Most of it was through consultants. We got just tons of referrals for adoptees. So my very first therapeutic setting was with adoptees primarily. Usually 50, sometimes a hundred percent of our clients were adopted. Wow and so that was my first experience was pretty much almost always having at least a handful of adoptees in the woods. It’s a phenomenal setting for them because of boundaries, consistency, predictability, having an idea of how they impact their
 
[00:41:00] world and their world impacts them back. Identity amongst themselves, amongst others, tons of therapy. Usually a lot of reparative work with their parents and I think unfortunately. If I ask someone, how do you form an attachment? It’s through proximity and that is transported, sort of transferred onto how do you form an attachment with a non-biological child? You keep them as close to you and you make them know that you love them as much as possible. That is one facet. I’m not telling adoptive parents out there to stop doing that. I’m just saying the other piece that is part of attachment and we’re all taught in child development has to do with the ability for a loved one, especially a child, to be able to predict their attachment figure or their parents’ behavior, and that they’re able to have object permanence. The ability to know that even when they’re not there, they’re there. And that happens a lot. Like

[00:42:00] I’m sure with your little kids running around when they were little, there was a moment where you realized they stopped looking for you on the playground. It happens in toddlerhood, sometimes earlier, sometimes later. For more independent or more dependent children. They just know you’re there and they count on you being there. It happens in kindergarten too. They freak out when you leave them. Mm-hmm. But they stop freaking out because guess what? You’re there every day and when you are adopted, it’s harder sometimes for you to believe that people will be there because the first person you met left you, your mom. And probably too in inferred there is your father left you as well, and then you got adopted by these lovely people. And how do these lovely people go about making this attachment? And it’s hard for adopted parents to understand, and I try as carefully as possible to say, attachment isn’t created by proximity. It’s created by 

[00:43:00] boundaries, predictability, consistency, and even sometimes that is through constructive consistency, constructive boundaries that are hard to handle and especially for the clients we’re serving, they’re typically have, they haven’t gotten used to difficult feedback from their attachment figures, and they don’t know how to internalize it. They don’t know how to handle it and it is hard and it’s not like, oh, they go to wilderness and all of the attachment is better. It’s all good. It takes a lot of time. Yeah. It’s a bit of a rub for me that that’s not some part of a, like a, you’re about to adopt a child. Let’s teach you a couple of core principles mm-hmm.
Around attachment but it’s not logical. That’s not what people think attachment is. So I like to try to explain that attachment can be strengthened by having your child go to treatment. Right. It’s just
 
[00:44:00] not easy for lots of people to understand. Well, it seems very counterintuitive. I think you asked.Yes. A hundred percent counterintuitive. Yeah. Just a second type of client who I lost because you asked a great question about adoptees. Yeah. I just don’t remember what the other part was. No, the other one was, people on the autism spectrum. Oh, yes. I would say that folks who are squarely like a SD one, they’re truly set up to thrive in the outdoors.
When you start going up in the twos and threes, that’s where it gets a lot harder. Yeah, because of communication issues, sensory issues, processing issues, how to soothe themselves. But anything under that, like ASD one, the consistency, the logic, the black and white way that some of the outdoor based stuff can be, is a lot easier for their brain to 

[00:45:00] understand than maybe being in a residential environment where it’s group to group to group to group.Typically folks on the spectrum are going to do better where they can learn and experience things their way. Most of the time until recently, we had programs that really specialized and had specialized groups and specialized trained staff and specialized therapists in wilderness for folks on the spectrum, which it’s a bummer that we’ve lost some of those programs and those identified groups. So now most wilderness programs can take on someone who’s barely neurodivergent or maybe one or two per group. It just sort of depends on the group culture. So, the answer is that is definitely not a rule out. It’s something that again, they’ll wanna look at more closely and especially how will they fit the current group culture ’cause we don’t wanna, we don’t wanna just take someone to fill a spot in a group. 

[00:46:00] We wanna make sure that they would be a good fit for that group culture and that is something I would say we’ve lost as, we’ve lost so many wilderness and outdoor based programs in the last three to five years that we’ve lost a lot of the specialty programs that used to have a lot more differentiation between what types of clients should go to which programs.  Yeah. Yeah. That’s really hard and I think that’s a good reminder too, that within a program you want to, and this is why I always say work with a consultant, because you want to know mm-hmm. The groups that are currently in there, what they’re like, ’cause they change just like Yep. Weather changes. Yep. Like this month or this, whatever right now, I mean, you mm-hmm. You know better than I do, but I know that there are differences and also who that therapist is Yep. For that group. Talk a little bit about

 [00:47:00] that.Yep. Yeah, so the nice thing is the programs I work with, so the programs that most consultants would refer any family to, and probably a lot of the programs that are mentioned in the stream that are outdoor based, they’re admission staff I trust implicitly. Some of them are, are founders. 
Yeah. Some of them are clinicians. Some of them have been working in the field for 30 or 40 years, and they really know who fits in their programs and if they don’t, they go to their clinical director. Yeah. And the clinical director knows every single kid’s profile, every therapist strengths, and they’re gonna say, we don’t have a great fit for them right now. You know, the next spot for that group is this day. And yes, consultants also know these things. And what we’re better at is just helping you not waste your time. What I say is, I am the Google you want Google to be. Yes. You type in 

[00:48:00] all of the things that your child is struggling with, and you get legitimate results that can meet their needs. Yes. So there are certain client profiles that I would never call some wilderness programs about, and there are certain client profiles that I would absolutely call a program about and that I would say is the big time saving factor for consultants in choosing to work with a consultant. But I, I trust these programs implicitly to know whether or not they can serve my clients yeah at any given time. They might say, I actually hear this quite often, you know, six months ago. Yeah. That was our kid. Right now, not so much. It’s so interesting. It’s just so fascinating to me that the overall profile has changed so much .And I know that they’re still the hooligans like my guy because I Yeah. ’cause I see, you know, I see their, their moms in the stream Yep. You know, with the same migraines that I had.
 
[00:49:00] But it is very interesting to me that we’re seeing more of the inward. Yeah. Yeah. I would say I, I now have more families than not that would love their kid to steal their car. Right. That would be an exciting day for them to have their kids steal their car and go to a party. That would put them at ease and they would say, oh my gosh, my kid’s okay because their kid hasn’t left the house in three months. Mm-hmm. That’s so hard and so hard. It’s so hard in just a really different way. Yeah. You were worried about your kid ’cause you didn’t know where they were. These parents are worried about their kid. ’cause they always know where their kid is.  Right? Right. Yeah, it’s very true and it’s great that the programs can accommodate those different mm-hmm. Because I know in some groups, obviously they probably wouldn’t put one of my kids, I don’t know, maybe they would, I should ask you, would they put a, you, it depends, an Enzo with one of these kids who is kind of the 

[00:50:00] isolator, usually it’s the age. That’s a big predictor too. Like, if you’re 13 and 17 and you have nothing in common a lot of your differences are gonna be amplified because your age difference. But if your profile of what you’ve been up to is pretty similar then we are gonna fit pretty well. But if you’re 17 and an internalize and have been stuck in your bedroom and you’re 17 and you’ve been running away, there’s a decent chance that you could be in the same group mm-hmm. And actually be able to find a common ground. It often depends ’cause sometimes the people who have been staying in their bedroom are using just as much drugs Oh yeah. As the person who’s running around. So that’s another commonality sometimes that ends up having people be in groups together and I think the other piece too is that they’re all trying to learn how to live by the rules of society for different reasons. 

[00:51:00] One group has been breaking them the rules of society, you know, middle finger to it all. The other has been avoiding them, hiding from ’em, pretending that the rules of society don’t exist. But the middle is the same for everybody, is just to learn how to basically live life and be able to follow structure and routine and typically both kids are learning how to boil water and pack a backpack. Right. You know and transfer some of these skills to home. Yeah. I always say about wilderness, you’re gonna get hydrated, you’re gonna get nutrient rich food, you’re gonna get a ton of sleep. They tend to go to bed when it’s dark and wake up when it’s light. So they’re sleeping a ton. They’re getting regular exercise. If they’re on medications, they’re taking them every day at the time prescribed with the food or without the food, or

 [00:52:00] whenever it’s supposed to be. There’s a hundred different med alarms that are going off in wilderness programs today. You know, that’s true. So. You’re gonna get this, like your body’s gonna be put on a structure and routine, and oftentimes even that is an impact for the clients. And so, yeah, there’s all of the noise around what they’ve been doing out in the real world, but when you get ’em in a group, they’re often just doing the same things. So there is some nuance of clients you probably don’t want together, and then there’s, and they’re close enough.  Mm-hmm. And what about age? I know that you, I mean, my guy was, was a teenager, but what about the 23, 24, 20 5-year-old Yeah. Who hasn’t launched is still in, in the basement playing video games. Yep. What about them?  Yeah, so the outdoor space for the young adult tends to be one of those hybrid based programs. There’s a couple out there that still do the full or outside all the time, but they’re fewer and

 [00:53:00] farther between largely because they’re different creatures than the adolescents. Their brain’s almost cooked. So they can have a little bit more residential treatment, which might keep them plug in to college or allow them to be able to email with their boss or things like that, that you just can’t do if you’re out in the desert 24 7. Yeah and so that’s a little bit more of what they’re up to. Also, if you’re 28 and maybe you’ve never cleaned a bathroom, that is a really great therapeutic skill for a 14-year-old. Yeah. That’d be awesome if they learned that. Right. It’s necessary if you’re 28.  Yeah. And so also having that residential environment provides some young adult life skills that they should have. Right. So they do exist. They’re often gonna look a lot different than the adolescent ones. Just like young adult 

[00:54:00] treatment looks very different residentially than the adolescent ones. For one major reason is that state and federal regulations around the care of minors are just so strict, rightfully so. But the day you turn 18, you become one of the herd and this, the expectations are more basic and so you can do more interesting things in young adult programs. I get excited to work with young adults because you can decide to have them go tour a community college or go to a yoga class in town, or learn how to blow glass. So even the wilderness based programs are doing things like that. They’re adding that to their repertoire. They’re taking clients out into the community to add some more dynamic environment to their treatment, which is really interesting and exciting and the other piece is young adults are at will, 

[00:55:00] right. Many of them will say they are forced into treatment, but it’s typically more like, I won’t pay for college unless you don’t go to treatment. It’s not, I have the right to put you somewhere. Yeah. So it also has to be something they’re willing to do, and very few of them are willing to spend eight to 12 weeks in the high desert of Utah backpacking. Right. I was gonna ask  that in, um, I know I have to let you go, but the kind of, the last thing I’m curious about is mm-hmm. The, what you’re seeing as far as adolescents in particular agreeing to go.  Mm-hmm. Like having a conversation with you, or at least having a conversation with their parents or somebody in the program Yep. Versus getting potentially transported. Yep. Either by a third party or by the parents, sort of unexpectedly. What’s going on in that realm? 
That’s a great question. I always say when I started, almost everybody was transported. Mm-hmm. Also, almost everybody had to have a PI or a skip tracer find them [00:56:00] first. Yes. Most of my clients had run away. Yeah. And their parents had decided to send them to wilderness programs once they were found. Right and then they were transported from wherever they were found.
Right. Obviously a lot has changed and I would say in a given year, I end up having maybe one to two clients transported.  Really? 
Yeah, sometimes it’s just logistics. Like families are international and their kid is moving from one program to another program and I don’t count those. Right. I’m talking about we can’t really tell them what’s happening ’cause we’re so afraid for them.
Yeah. Or we tried to get them to go voluntarily and they’re really dug in and so I don’t know about other consultants really believe even minors, you can get them to agree to go to treatment if you talk to them the right way and you have the confidence 
[00:57:00] in yourself as a parent to do that.Sometimes parents don’t have the confidence in themselves, and that’s another reason why those one to two clients end up getting transported. But I do a risk assessment in my head whenever I do an inquiry with a family and usually if I feel like there’s significant risk, I confirm with them, Hey, if he knew or she knew this was going on, do you think they’d take off?
And if the answer is yes, then we kind of have the conversation around then maybe we should keep this quiet for a while. Mm-hmm. But that is super rare. It’s usually, like I said, you know exactly where they are all day every day. You have very little concern about them going anywhere and what I require families where there’s no risk like that they’re gonna disappear or, you know, go party too hard and overdose. Is that they let them know that they hired me. I just, I can’t make them. I can’t fact check, right? But I want clients to know that I exist. Yeah, one so they can have the opportunity, which many of them don’t do 
[00:58:00] this. They don’t take up the opportunity to talk to me but I want them to know I exist and have the ability to reach out to me with my information or set up something with their parents to talk to me. I want them to know I exist, so they have that avenue to talk to me. But also I find that that’s the first step into showing their parents, showing them that their parents are very serious. Mm-hmm. Oftentimes it’s jarring to hear, we hired someone to help find a treatment program for you and many parents will say, it won’t work. We won’t get ’em there. I have a lot of families try to do transport just out of fear. And I’m just like, I think we can, I think we can get ’em there and more and more. I am always surprised by adolescents. I stop trying to predict their behavior, but it doesn’t mean that they haven’t stopped surprising me. More and more I’m seeing handfuls of clients be like, okay, yeah, that’s fair. Let’s go. That’s my cat. Yeah, those

[00:59:00] couple. Love having a cat in the podcast. Yep. The per cast. So essentially. If that doesn’t work though, we continue to have conversations around. She’s picking programs. Do you wanna talk to her? We’re gonna start calling programs. I always say to families, use forward moving language. Yes. They’re gonna try to say, no, slam the door, scare you enough. I’m gonna kill myself. If you do that, like, okay, then we should go call 9 1 1. Yes. Like we should go to the hospital. Yeah, but instead they’ve learned over the years that if they say those things, their parents stop and it’s like be forward moving Even if it’s forward moving towards emergency services. Right. Forward moving. I disagree with what you’re saying. I’m so concerned we need to keep doing this and typically by the time parents sit down and say, well, we’ve talked to programs and we’d like you to go to this program on this date. They go, they’re not happy about it. Right. But they go, and if they don’t go, parents will say.
 
[01:00:00] Well, if you don’t go, we could hire a transport company and they could take you. I don’t encourage parents to do that if they’re not comfortable to do that. So then in times that they’re not comfortable with transport, we’ll say things are gonna change at home if you don’t go. And usually they’re like, what does that mean? And I love vagueness as an intervention. So my coaching to parents is saying, I don’t know. I don’t wanna think about it. I just want you to go to treatment. 
Right. Vagueness is a really great intervention ’cause their brain starts thinking about all the things that could change at home. Yes. And to be honest, I can’t think of a adolescent that we’ve gotten past the vagueness stage young adults sometimes do play the tape out and they’re like, okay, dad, let’s see what you got. Yeah. Let’s see and it’s okay if you don’t go to treatment tomorrow, I am turning off your cell phone. I’m turning off the WIFI, I’m cutting off the credit cards and talking, turning off the Uber Eats. I am canceling all our subscriptions. Like home is gonna become more boring than treatment essentially. Right and I’ve really, I’ve never had very many people that I can think of that they even 

[01:01:00] had to do the intervention of cutting them off. There’s a few and it notice that I never said kick them out.  Right. Thank you  for saying that. You know, thank you for saying that. It’s a 1950s intervention. Yeah. People aren’t capable of it and our clients are not gonna survive if you kick them so let’s not start there. There are definitely some clients, the, you know, 28-year-old drug and alcohol using clients that are just sucking off of their parents and creating a really unsafe home environment. And, you know, I’ll work with them if they don’t go to treatment that, you know, X, Y, or Z and they’ve gotta move out and those sorts of things. Sure. But it’s not where I start. Where I start is, let’s just make home uncomfortable.  Yes. You know, I have a great friend that taught me that’s a great intervention. His mom told him he could go to wilderness. He was a young adult or not and if he chose not to that she was gonna provide peanut butter and jelly and bread and

[01:02:00] milk, she was gonna turn off all of the internet. She handed him a flip phone. She’d sold his car that day, she’d cut off his car insurance, never ever cut off health insurance. You’ll pay that forever and she’d taken everything outta the house that could be sold and she was ready to live the simple life for as long as he wanted to live it with her and the only way that would change is if he went to treatment. It was like 24 hours later and he was like, fine, I’ll go.
Right. Yeah. I think the, I talk about get them safe and uncomfortable. Yeah. Yep. Safe and uncomfortable because you can, if you’re uncomfortable enough, you’re going to want something to change. Yes. But we don’t want them to be unsafe. No. And so we have a whole course on that. I’m sure you do. It’s, yeah.It’s so important because we don’t really think

[01:03:00] about it that often in that framework of, it’s a whole framework of safety safe and comfortable, uncomfortable. Mm-hmm. And getting them into the, that quadrant that is very uncomfortable. Yeah. And very safe and that is where wilderness is. Mm-hmm. They are. Mm-hmm. Potentially uncomfortable. Mm-hmm. Because like, my guy’s a city guy and now he’s in the middle of the desert in Utah with a backpack like WTF. Yeah. Yeah. But he was hugely safe. Right. And so that is where change can happen because he’s not trying to survive, he’s not in survival mode. He’s got food, he’s got water, he’s got, he’s safer than he’d ever been in my house.  Mm-hmm.  So I think that that’s a super important point is make home uncomfortable because if it’s, yeah. If it’s a great place to be, even if there’s a lot of fighting, if there’s plenty of food and maybe even getting food made for you that you really want  or delivered. Or delivered.  So many of my clients have

[01:04:00] unfettered access to food delivery.  Yeah. Not  wild. Yeah. That is not uncomfortable. It’s not a condition for change. No, no. Yeah, I also think that that makes me think about the really treatment experienced people. The people who have done a lot of residential programming.
They’re gonna be in those programs. They’re gonna be safe and comfortable because they know the ropes. You know, they can wear the pajamas all day long. They can get some feedback here and there and kind of just survive from group to group and meal to meal. And comfort to comfort and that is definitely also a benefit of wilderness is that it’s pretty dynamic and there isn’t too much where you can kind of check out without some sort of, again, immediate, natural, logical consequence happening. Yes. Hard to phone it in wilderness.  Yeah. Yeah. Very hard. Exactly. Exactly. That’s a great point because there
 
[01:05:00] are, you know all more than I do all of these short term 28, 30 day programs mm-hmm. That are now insurance based, that lots of parents are utilizing, and I get it. I understand why.Mm-hmm. Me too. You go through three or four of those and they know the system. They can do it, they can tolerate it, and they’re not, they know how to get kicked out. They know how to get kicked out. There’s probably not a huge amount of therapeutic benefit. And I’m saying that very loosely. That’s not a diss on any, yeah, no, there’s some really great ones out there. They’re really great short term adolescent residential programs. I will say that some of my colleagues won’t, but the kid has to really want to get something out of them. Yeah. Because they are nice and comfortable, and you can stare at a wall throughout the whole group. Right. And if you don’t wanna share, it’s not gonna make a huge difference and wilderness isn’t forcing anybody to

[01:06:00] share. It’s just so much harder to defend yourself and protect yourself from therapeutically engaging. When you are, you’re on all the time and you’re connected all the time and you rely on these people when you’re in treatment programs and residential programs, you don’t really rely on the other clients.
Right. Most of the time you’re being cooked for, like, you don’t have to work together with chores. You might be assigned to do a certain thing like mopping. You don’t have to co-work in that role and maybe if you do, it’s just a little bit a short term. Yeah. Everything you do all day in wilderness impacts the other people around you and vice versa.Yeah. Oh my goodness. This is such a great conversation. I know. I’m glad it’s, it’s gonna just really highlight some, some things to think about for parents. And I would really encourage you to, if you’re listening and you’re
 
[01:07:00] considering this, just talk to somebody who really understand the wilderness milieu because and I’ll put a link in the show notes to Will White’s episode because it is fascinating if you don’t know, Will White is kind of like the Godfather. Mm-hmm. One of the godfathers of the wilderness industry and he gave an entire history. I think I interviewed him back in 2020 or 21. And so if you’re the kind of person who kind of wants to know like what’s the genesis story of this? I’ll put a link to that episode. We’ll also link to Trisha’s other episode because she talks about, and this has come up a lot lately, is how do you know when your child needs the next level of care? Like, how do you know when to engage a out-of-home placement? So that’s super helpful. And then just also, I think you covered the wide range of what options are out there, because that has changed lately as well. Mm-hmm.  Yeah. So thank you so much. This is Of course, you’re welcome. Thank you. This huge enlightening, hugely helpful and we just 

[01:08:00] appreciate it so much and your website is Pathfinder Consulting, is that right? Pathfinder consults.com. Pathfinder consult.com. Consults, consults. Okay. Just go to the show notes. Don’t rely on Brenda, don’t rely on Brenda to give you the right url. Those all were taken.  Exactly. Alright, we’ll get that in there Trisha’s just a fountain of knowledge and we appreciate you being here so much. Thank you. I appreciate you all too.